People can currently choose to not rank up (and that's a problem IMO)

Jukantos

Hey there,

i wanted to address something that is a particular pet peave of mine on both the live server and the PTB - the survivor option to choose not to rank up.

You're probably questioning wether or not this is a real thing, but unfortunately it is. We've all known the problematic situation about unhooking people right in the killers face for a massive chunk of bloodpoints for a long time, but while the emblem system took a solid jab at solving this, it failed due to not accounting for certain niche perks.

Currently there are three major perks that influence "the unhook farm experience".

• We're gonna live forever. Simple, you get to drown in bloodpoints for repeatedly unhooking people. Can be applied to either version of the problematic "strategy", most of the time is used while intentionally maintaining a weaker rank
• Borrowed Time. Since becoming reusable, borrowed time has obtained a massive infleucen on the Emblem system. It may no longer protect its user, however, when farming a survivor right in the killers face, if they take the protected hit and do not take a second hit within 10 seconds to fully go down, the unhook will be considered a "safe" unhook and award the unhooking player 30 benevolent points (even though they've effectively condemned their teammate to at best run away from the killer for 25 seconds before dropping as borrowed time ends). This is a massive problem, as it allows players to farm others off hooks in a real toxic way while maintain their rank or even ranking up - it's stupidly easy to get iridescent benevolent by actually fully intentionally selling out your teammates (effectively killing them), if you're running this perk. Combine it with a Silver unbroken and viola, you can not depip even though you contributed nothing but farmed 3-4 people off hooks right in the killers face. I somehow doubt this was what you intended its use to be.
  -We'll make it
  This perk also influences the aforementioned situation. If all you care about is ranking up, you can attach yourself to the survivor in a healing animation even if it's totally impossible to get a full heal off on them before the killer arrives and knocks them into borrowed time. The sheer amount of the healing bar which will be completed in 2-3 seconds is yet another massive boost to the Benevolent Emblem and makes reaching Iridescent almost guaranteed, even pre-PTB.

Overall i think we need to adapt the Benevolent Emblem in a few ways to account for this.

• A penalty for survivors being knocked into borrowed time, perhaps 15 points (half the unsafe unhook penalty).
• If the borrowed time results in the player collapsing and being hooked, the full -30 point penalty is given.
• If they are healed before bleeding out, for example because you distracted the killer and they got away, you are awarded the 30 points back, as you did accomplish a safe rescue.
• If they collapse but get back up (be it via perk or via healing) you receive a slightly decreased amount (i.E. anything between 15 and 25, for a semi-safe unhook, plus obviously the regular points if you were the one healing them up)

Additionally i think we need to LARGELY improve recognition for picking up slugged players. Currently healing a slugged player for the final few percent awards neither lots of bloodpoints, nor good emblem points, despite it being one of the potentially most crucial actions in a match (if 2 players are slugged and a third one is being chased, that fourth player picking up the two slugs is LITERALLY a game changer).

• i suggest adding a 500 bloodpoints bonus for healing a dying survivor back into the injured state. It is simply too crucial of an action to be completely unawarded
• i would also suggest awarding a reasonable reward of ~10 additional points to the Benevolent Emblem for this action, as, again, it is a crucial, often game defining altruistic action (compared against i.E. searching for the hatch)

Overall, i do not think the perks are the problem. They have their legitimate uses and i don't think they need to be changed (okay MAYBE We're gonna live forever should not award a stack if the unhooked survivor takes a hit within 10 seconds, similar to the unsafe unhook penalty, as you're not actually protecting them, but that's an idea for another time)

My suggestions:

• Change the influence of "safe" borrowed time unhooks on the Benevolent emblem as explained above
• Award bonus bloodpoints and Benevolent points for saving slugged players as its own score event

Thank you for reading my wall of text and for making a great game. I hope i can nudge you into a direction where it feels even better. Not gonna lie, after getting farmed off hooks for points in four consecutive games to my death with only bronze emblems and no way to participate in the match outside of one long chase until my death was really quite frustrating. The fact my "teammates" got actively ranked up for it is the real stinger though.

Master

Everyone can choose not to rank up by simply DCing a few games or going afk in the basement/locker
Why do people do that? The answer simply is because they dont want to play compettively in an unbalaned game.

In ANY competitve game, there MUST be a casual and a ranked mode, everything else is pointless and will result into a mess at low ranks. And btw. SWF shouldnt be allowed in ranked and there should be anh option for the killer to choose SWF or solo queue, in SWF queue they could get more BP e.g.

And yeah I agree, if you equip BT, then you basically are granted a pip now

Runiver

This thread is weird.
The title talks about rank issues.
The body talks about unhooking issues.

Do you mean people use the fact that they can sandbag not to rank up on purpose ? Because I doubt so. In general, people do wanna pip, but they want BP/to use their perk anyway, even if it costs the hooked his life.

About your suggested changes however, it could be decent to prevent some random unhook just to farm survivors on the hook for sure. I'm not sure the -30 punishment is appropriate tho, since borrowed time is kinda designed to be used in some ways, and it's usually up not only to the rescuer to allow the rescued to escape, but also the killer, if he camps.

Devs probably considered many times a feature to prevent the unhooking from a hooked survivor perspective, but it brings its own issues, sadly.

At the moment, even if the sandbagging is still a thing at times, I feel like the game is in an okay state, and way less risky saves are made overall. Most of the time, the BT usage is made when you don't have much choice, like against a basement camping killer for example. I'm not sure that punishing these attempts of rescue to be a solution, especially since they are taking a lot of risks and commitments already.

In any case, sandbagging will, seemingly, always be an issue in this game.
The bonus BP for getting someone healed after BT is really nice tho. But it is already applied in a sense since you heal one health state which is worth 10 points already.

SnakeSound222

This has been an issue for while now. Some Survivors and Killers don't want to actually try for their wins so they purposefully depip in order to find games against players who aren't as good as them. It could easily be fixed by not deranking people as much during rank reset. An example could be that players in red ranks should only be brought down to either low purple (7-8) or high green ranks (9-10).

I thought BT was bugged and putting a Survivor into the BT state still subtracted the 30 Benevolent points from everybody, even though it wasn't a down.

ThePloopz

I definitely don’t think you should get penalized for someone getting put in the bt state after you unhook them. That would defeat the entire purpose of having BT in the first place because you would want to only unhook people when it’s completely safe.At that point you might as well just never run BT and run we’ll make it instead.  Also this would punish survivors who save their teammates from hooks in front of the exit gate at the end of a match so you’d essentially be punishing people for being the reason their teammate survived. And then there’s basement camps

Jukantos

@ThePloopz said:
I definitely don’t think you should get penalized for someone getting put in the bt state after you unhook them. That would defeat the entire purpose of having BT in the first place because you would want to only unhook people when it’s completely safe.At that point you might as well just never run BT and run we’ll make it instead.  Also this would punish survivors who save their teammates from hooks in front of the exit gate at the end of a match so you’d essentially be punishing people for being the reason their teammate survived. And then there’s basement camps

Actually the way i suggested it, saving somebody at the end would still grant you an effective boost of 40 points (because they would go from the BT state to the escaped state and on top of that you'd be re-granted the 10 points you lose because of them being hooked to begin with)

Funny enough, aggressively farming people off hooks previously caused you to often not rank up, as you wouldnt get many bloodpoints if you quickly became the last player alive on your team (it just led to a flood of hatch standoffs with the toxic players needing the hatch if they wanted to rank up)

The main problem i see is that your perk choices can literally mean you choose wether or not you wanna rank up, because the action of BT unhooking is wrongfully classified in the context of the game. Unhooking someone 3 seconds after they've been hooked, even if it's with borrowed time, is a massive detriment to the team and is currently definitely weighted wrongly by the emblem system.

Blood point farm unhooking has been a problem for a long time and won't change unless other actions (such as picking up slugs or a penalty on unsafe unhooks) bloodpoint rewards aren't altered. But at least we could do something about people intentionally staying at low ranks while spamming S tier perks against low level / low experience killers just to get to jack people off hooks without actually trying to win the game for anyone but themselves.

Master

@SnakeSound222 said:
This has been an issue for while now. Some Survivors and Killers don't want to actually try for their wins so they purposefully depip in order to find games against players who aren't as good as them. It could easily be fixed by not deranking people as much during rank reset. An example could be that players in red ranks should only be brought down to either low purple (7-8) or high green ranks (9-10).

I thought BT was bugged and putting a Survivor into the BT state still subtracted the 30 Benevolent points from everybody, even though it wasn't a down.

You can hover at the same rank all season if you want to
Dont try to treat the symptons, cure the disease (unbalance and no incentive to rank up)

ThePloopz

@Jukantos ok I’m still a little bit confused here because you say “your perk choices can literally mean you choose whether you wanna rank up” What do you mean by that? You can use no perks and rank up and the best perks and not rank up even if you’re trying to rank up. Also would I be punished for getting a teammate off the hook they get hit and then get hit again and go down in front of the exit gate. And when they get picked up we bodyblock for them or they get flashlight saved then escape because they would’ve never had that chance of escaping if I didn’t bt them, they’d still be on the hook. I think that’s what it comes down to for a lot of people is they’d rather have the chance of escaping then their team not even trying for them because their afraid to lose points.

I know I personally have played in games where the scenario above has happened or I’d be on the hook in the basement get taken off get hit use that speed burst and lithe a window to get away then go down in a random area on the map because I didn’t have self care but then a teammate comes and picks me up. I wouldn’t never got away if wasn’t for the BT so I don’t think they should be punished for that at all. Sometimes there is no such thing as a safe unhook (especially facing the nurse or billy)

White_Owl

I'm not sure about the BT changes, for the reasons others have already expressed, but I agree on rewarding more healing slugged survivors.

Wolf74

@Master said:
Everyone can choose not to rank up by simply DCing a few games or going afk in the basement/locker
Why do people do that? The answer simply is because they dont want to play compettively in an unbalaned game.

In ANY competitve game, there MUST be a casual and a ranked mode, everything else is pointless and will result into a mess at low ranks. And btw. SWF shouldnt be allowed in ranked and there should be anh option for the killer to choose SWF or solo queue, in SWF queue they could get more BP e.g.

And yeah I agree, if you equip BT, then you basically are granted a pip now

+1 this
Ranked mode - only solo player (optional: some sort of reward for ranking up each season)
Unranked mode - SWF allowed and solo player get a bloodpoint boost

Atm mostly survivor stay at low rank and troll casual playing killer.