DBD Ping System for Survivors
For a long time I tried to think of ways to give survivors a way to communicate past pointing and waving, without giving them direct in game comms like voice and text chat. I'm a survivor main and can say without a doubt that the hard job of killer would only become harder if survivors were able to communicate without using discord or other third-party communication platforms. I was gonna just give up on giving any time to it, when it hit me.
My favorite battle royale at the moment, Apex Legends, has a beautiful ping system. Hold down a ping button, and a wheel comes up with 8 options to tell someone if you're defending, watching, or pushing a location, where you want to go, where you see enemies. You don't need to say a word to your teammates to accurately convey what you want to.
Something like this in DBD would be perfect. Being able to use pings to give bits of info to your teammates would be awesome. I can already think up a bunch of ways this could be used by survivors:
- Pinging something would give a small audio queue to teammates, and pop up with an icon relating to what was pinged at that location.
- Pinging a gen would get options like "help" or "working" or "almost done", and that would be conveyed by an icon visible to all survivors at that location with a waving hand, a wrench, or a thumbs up depending on which action I chose, as well as somewhere for a text box to go somewhere discrete on screen that would say "Rakk is working on this generator." or "Rakk needs help on this gen."
- Pinging a totem would come up with options like "totem here" or "cleansing totem".
- Pinging a location would come up with options like "heading here" or "watching here" or "hiding here" to let people know what positions you're watching in case the killer comes by, or where you're hidden.
- Pinging the killer would give a more distinct noise, and would show a distinct icon to let everyone know the killer's position at the time of the ping. It would also be cool if the killer was notified of this, so that they know if they've been compromised by someone (especially useful for killers like trapper and hag, who are plagued with having to set up).
- People could also ping killer-specific items, like Jigsaw Boxes, Plague Fountains, Trapper Traps, Pyramidhead Trails, etc.
- Pinging other pings could allow for responses like "Siri is heading to help Rakk with this gen" or just general confirmations of pings so people know the info they're providing is being acknowledged.
- aybe people could also ping items in case they find some goodies that they wanna share with their team.
- These icons would be distinct, but small and unintuitive enough where they won't be blocking your sight of the killer in a chase, or majorly taking up space when looking around the map.
- Obviously, pinging itself, especially pinging the killer, would have a cooldown to prevent spamming and second-by-second information streaming from every player. Maybe a 10-15 second cooldown on pings, 30 seconds on the killer's location so that a killer would have a whole half minute to reposition at any given time if they were pinged.
A system like this would give survivors the ability to thoroughly and pretty effortlessly communicate basic information that could apply to any killer to one another, while keeping the killer itself, and their perks, a mystery to other survivors until they come across them in game. I didn't spend a whole day or anything coming up with these pings, so there are probably some flaws, obvious and not, that I'm not seeing with this system. But I would absolutely love a system like this in DBD. I've attached a screenshot from Apex to give a rough idea on what it might look like in game. Feedback is appreciated!
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Idk if it's just me but the image isn't showing up... oh well.
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