Camera placement, survivor movement, and an additional mechanic/resource

LunarBerserkers

    Forgive me, please, if the issues I bring forth have already been discussed. I've not been dedicated to the game for very long, so I haven't been part of the game for its entirety, but I DID play a little bit on much older builds, and the game really has been survivor tilted for most of its lifespan. That said, the issues I'm discussing here have been prevalent, to my knowledge, since the game was released, and deserve their own attention. 

Survivor Cameras

The Problem

        I think that the efforts put forth to balance perks and pallets and windows are admirable, as there is an obvious and widely understood issue with loopers and animation abuse. However, as I see it, one of the main tools that allows the most egregious loopers to abuse the game's mechanics is their camera. When kneeling behind a three foot barrier, the survivors have, by my estimate, somewhere between five and seven feet on either side of this barrier of unobstructed vision. Given that the killers, though normally a little bit taller than the survivors, play with a first person, fairly narrow field of view, the God's Eye camera style for survivors places them at a monumental meta advantage before perks and attachments even hit the table. Such extreme camera angles allow survivors to see things that they should not reasonably be able to perceive, and allow them to act on things the killers do before the killer has a chance to know that they're being shadowed. This is especially frustrating against skilled survivors running Nea Karlson's "Streetwise" perk, sneaking around behind large objects in ways that the killer cannot see or hear.

The Solution

        By no means would I presume to say that I know more about coding or game balance than other people. This suggestion is merely my own view point, and I hope it will be taken into consideration. I propose that the suvivors have their cameras pulled down to within two to three feet of the backs of their skulls. In this way, the game can be made to feel more isolated and claustrophobic, and the ratio of information the survivors and the killer receive is far more balanced. In addition, this means that survivors will have to choose which side of a large object they get to peek around to spy on the killer, giving the killer a much more fair window of opportunity to realize they are being stalked. Another way to handle this is to disallow survivors from spinning their cameras completely around to look over their shoulders as they run, or, perhaps, to stop survivors from being able to run at full speed while looking over their shoulders. 

Survivor Movement

The Problem

        This issue is mostly on PC, or with survivors that manage to run keyboard controls on the consoles, if such is an option. Bear with me, as I have not played the console version of DbD, and have seen very little game play on that sphere. The survivors in Dead by Daylight enjoy an extremely lenient movement system, combining a free orbiting God's Eye camera with jerky, exceedingly precise W A S D movement keys. While the killer also has such options available to them, pertaining to the W A S D movement, the camera controls that the killer operates under force them to look forward at any given moment, and make changing directions something of a challenge, when facing the much more nimble survivors. In no way am I suggesting that survivors should NOT be more nimble than the killer. I did, however, notice that many of the survivor mechanics used to bully and harass killers depend somewhat heavily on their ability to change direction and speed at the drop of a pin.

The Solution

        As I see it, there are a couple of ways that the survivors could be hampered in this field, without inherently breaking the game. Giving survivors a short delay when they change directions would force survivors to play and move more naturally, allowing the killer a chance to at the very least track their movements in a way that would be more conducive to balanced play. Another issue that could be addressed here is that survivors can sprint and reach maximum speed from the off, allowing them to juke killers in ways that the killer cannot always respond to. 

        My suggested solution to this would be to either force survivors to go a few steps before reaching maximum speed _(unless they have sprint burst)_, or by introducing a stamina bar to the game. If the stamina bar is handled correctly, this would force survivors to try to use tactics or clever plays, instead of outright forcing the killer to chase them all over the map for several minutes. The stamina bar could be hindered when survivors are injured, forcing them to operate under a significant penalty, other than simply making noise and bleeding a little. Their stamina could also be disallowed from truly maxing back out, after healing, promoting safer game play on the end of survivors, and reinforcing good plays on the end of the killers. I'm not suggesting anything egregious, either. Leaving the survivors with ten percent less maximum stamina per injury, up to a maximum of three times, would give them plenty of room to maneuver, if they played carefully.

        On a final note, stamina costs could be applied to fast actions, forcing survivors to take a breath, and encouraging them to hide in lockers to rest for a bit, while the killer hunts them down. Stamina bar replenishment could happen faster while survivors are holding still, in a locker, crouching, or simply not sprinting. There are, of course, any number of ways to balance out the different rates of stamina regeneration, and I don't believe myself well-schooled enough to discuss them in this forum as of yet. However, I think that such mechanics would provide the game with a much needed x-factor that forces survivors to play with some element of real risk, without making the game overly balanced towards the killers.

        Note here, if you will, that I've not said that ANY of these changes need be made in addition to the re-balance of perks or add-ons. These changes would serve the game just fine without changing much, if any of the perks, and would still leave survivors with a plethora of pallet tricks, window shenanigans, and bad manners play. The changes I suggest here would simply encourage better player behavior in game, and provide a more tactical element to how and when a survivor is spotted by the killer.

LunarBerserkers

No, I don't know why the damn thing posted like a Notepad document.