Quick Fix: Hook Camping
Hello. In this post I'll be going over hook camping, what it is, and what can be done about it.
Setting up Camp
Hook camping is the act of hooking a survivor and choosing to stay within a tight radius of them to prevent their teammates from being rescuing them. It essentially results in one of two things; A) The survivor's teammates come and either the one who was hooked gets down again and immediately hooked once more, drastically speeding up the time they die, or 
The survivor's teammates do not come and try to punish the camper by breezing through generators while the camper camps.
In both scenarios the person hooked has essentially been taken out of the game, immediately they have lost, and in both scenarios no one is having fun nor is the game playing out as the gameplay would intend for. While the best option currently is to simply rush generators it doesn't come with the terror of being found, but rather immense frustration of not being able to help your teammate nor actually play the game, generator simulator is nice and all but it's the fear of being caught that keeps people active.
Possible Fixes
The first and most simple solution is to add an increasing debuff to the killer that punishes them for camping. For instance, if they are within a 25m radius for longer than 10s of a hooked survivor, for every second they remain the Entity becomes more displeased and adds a stack of "Contempt" to the killer. Contempt reduces points earned by 4% per stack and each stack lasts for 4 seconds. This means that if the killer stands within the radius for 25 seconds they will gain no points for any action they do. Furthermore, if the maximum stack of Contempt were something like 45 this would create a buffer of time in which the killer would obtain no points even after leaving the area if they camped a survivor till death. To eliminate Contempt they must simply leave the hooked survivor and do their job. The total time stacks of Contempt would remain, if at 45 stacks, would be 180 seconds, 80 seconds of which would be a 100% point reduction. The initial radius countdown timer should also build and decay as the killer enters and leaves the 25m radius to prevent them from simply stepping out of it then reentering without any penalty. As with all things these numbers are subject to change with testing.
Edit: A friend brought up a good notion, what if someone is looping near the survivor, and as for that the answer is rather simple, if the killer is in a chase they'll be exempt from the debuff being added on (But not from it being active if they had been camping). This means that if the killer is chasing someone and end up running past/to a hooked survivor, that's on the survivor's team not on the killer.
A second fix would be to allow the survivor to struggle more and give them an opportunity to free themselves from a camping killer. If the value of freeing themselves was reduced from 4% to 1% but they were allowed to attempt freeing themselves with no penalty (their hp would simply decay over time like usual) this would give the survivor a sense of activity and allow them to still participate in the game. As it stands attempting to free yourself might as well be renamed "######### faster". Additionally, this would give luck offerings much more viability and desirability as increasing your chance by even 1% would be much more meaningful. As for the second hook, the mash space bar to live one, giving players two extremely hard skill checks at random points over their struggle (the second occurring around the 80% mark) wherein they must complete both of them to set themselves free would be a very difficult but rewarding feat to pull off. Perhaps the success zone could increase with more luck. The primary mouse click could be the button with which to accomplish these skill checks, all while mashing the space bar, which in all honesty is something even I doubt I'd be able to pull off.
This second fix is obviously a rather controversial thing as it'd give the survivors a much more viable chance to freeing themselves than they have now, but with the right balancing the chance could still be roughly the same as it is now and importantly would give survivors something to do while stuck up there, especially if they're being camped.
Finally, a small notion that isn't a fix but more of a quality of life, allowing survivors to communicate with their pointing and beckoning even while hooked would allow for much more solid tactics, even though it already exists in the form of fake struggling to denote that the killer is still present and just hanging still to denote it's safe, that's something players made up and not everyone knows what it means.
Thank you for reading.
Comments
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I like your ideas and they’re similar to my own in a different way, if that makes sense. The numbers may need tweaking but it doesn’t seem unreasonable. And btw I didn’t know this until recently, but if you see a hooked Survivor flapping their arms but not actually trying to escape the hook it’s a signal that they’re being camped 🤷🏻♂️ Check out my thread if you get a chance, let me know what you think. I’ve also got ideas on looping, feel free to poke holes in my logic lol0
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Punishing the Killer for being near the hook does not work. It simply forces Killers to give free unhooks, which is absurd.
Giving Survivors "unlimited", 1% attempts to get off the hook would result in a whopping 39.5% chance of unhooking yourself if you made use of all 50 attempts, which is about three and a half times what it currently is (11.5% if you make use of all 3 attempts, up to 62.7% if everyone is using Up The Ante and Vigo's Jar Of Salty Lips). With your numbers, it'd be a virtual guarantee (>99.9999%) of getting off the hook by yourself if everyone was using Up The Ante and Vigo's Jar Of Salty Lips.
For the chances to be the same, you'd have to seriously decrease the chance of getting off the hook and nerf the luck offerings and Up The Ante to the point of oblivion.6 -
Giving free hooks isn't the intent behind the fix, and an error of thinking was pointed out to me so I amended the idea, but I for one believe that the goal of the killer is to seek out and kill all survivors, camping is not conducive to this goal and it makes the game less fun overall.
Interesting, I didn't realize the numbers worked out that way, I never took probability though I would have liked to, what is the formula involved in that calculation? And even if they would have to be nerfed into oblivion that doesn't mean the idea itself is poor, it just means that the numbers would be much smaller, there's nothing wrong with that. The base chance to catch a shiny pokemon is 1/8192 but that doesn't mean it's absurd because it's a super tiny number, sometimes numbers are well into the decimals, that's pretty normal.
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@Aerys said:
Giving free hooks isn't the intent behind the fix, and an error of thinking was pointed out to me so I amended the idea, but I for one believe that the goal of the killer is to seek out and kill all survivors, camping is not conducive to this goal and it makes the game less fun overall.Interesting, I didn't realize the numbers worked out that way, I never took probability though I would have liked to, what is the formula involved in that calculation? And even if they would have to be nerfed into oblivion that doesn't mean the idea itself is poor, it just means that the numbers would be much smaller, there's nothing wrong with that. The base chance to catch a shiny pokemon is 1/8192 but that doesn't mean it's absurd because it's a super tiny number, sometimes numbers are well into the decimals, that's pretty normal.
It may not be the intent, but that's what "punish the Killer for being near the hook" suggestions result in. Either that or hooking a Survivor becomes actively detrimental to the Killer, because not only are they "prohibited" from protecting their kill, but they're actively punished for trying to do so.
It's a simple binomial distribution taking into account the cumulative result P(X>=1). Just google "stat trek binomial calculator" and do the math yourself.
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Again, this would only punish them if they're by a hooked survivor for no reason, and just by going out of a short range you can decrease the timer back to zero and reenter for X time without penalty, and it also takes a rather large amount of time for the penalty to stack up so walking by isn't that huge an issue and any penalty for doing so would be minimal and fade off quick if the killer isn't camping. Regardless, if you think this isn't a good idea please offer one that is better and addresses the issue, constructive criticism is welcome, even rude criticism is, but destructive criticism isn't.
As for the unhooking aspect, the animation time in which they try to escape could be increased until a reasonable time is acquired. If we want the probability to stay the exact same we only need to increase the animation time of each escape attempt from 1.2s to 5s for a total of 12 escape attempts. This would align exactly with the current probability and would alleviate the inherent issue, though it would still allow for luck items and perks to be a bit stronger (which I'm all for personally as at the moment there's almost no reason to use them).
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Better solutions have been offered before, but the underlying issue here is that camping is a Survivor-created problem with a Survivor-side solution. If Survivors didn't feed campers 9 times out of 10, camping wouldn't have become the problem it is today. It makes zero sense to punish Killers in any way, shape or form, for a problem that Survivors created.
I already showed you mathematically why luck perks and offerings are already very powerful. You have a 62.7% chance to unhook yourself if everyone uses the perk and offering I mentioned previously. You may think there's no reason to use them, but the mathematics do not support your case at all.
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Dude, you're looking at it all wrong.
They've been trying to punish killers. Killers don't care. They'll camp just to spite you for the punishment.
All you're doing is demanding that you get free unhooks.
Killer players won't get on board with you trying to force them to lose.
We need to reward the killer for spilling more blood. The rewards need to outweigh securing the kill, the need to see an annoying, possibly toxic survivor dead, etc.
Until they do, camping is going to happen.
Seriously, what's in it for them to let a survivor go? Either way, they may lose a ton of points, or otherwise get screwed over by your survivor leaning system.
A lot of killers don't want to be high rank, and if you squeeze too hard, they're going to bail. It's going to be the reverse of the Halloween event, with a lot of killers migrating to survivors.
If they even keep playing.
Killer players are people too. They need to be happy, too.
P.s. spread the word, there's already a sign hooked survivors are being camped. It's when they raise their arms starting, but not finishing their escape attempts.
Run kindred, and you show a lot of info, too.0 -
I mentioned the flailing method of notification in my post, but it's not a built in system it's something players have to know of, if I hadn't watched a let's play of the game I would've had no idea.
And perhaps you're right, rewarding the killer for doing their job is indeed a good approach toward incentivizing them to leave the hooked survivor and hunt more, but at the same time, as you said, people will still camp regardless. The people that straight up camp deserve to be penalized, and if done properly like I've explained to others it can be done in such a way that prevents camping but doesn't hurt killers actually doing a proper job. Perhaps it's on me to edit my original post with all updated info on that though.
Also, if this system were to be used perhaps they could tweak other values such as the time it takes to unhook a survivor. If they increased that while giving you the notification that someone has started to unhook someone, there wouldn't be a huge problem, and if someone is in the process of being unhooked the debuff wouldn't apply either (obviously the unhook time would still be small, from the 2 to 3 seconds that it is now to maybe 4 or 5).
Once again I have to ask that instead of bashing my ideas you either give constructive criticism and help develop the ideas in conversation without being offensive, or you give your own ideas as to what could fix the situation and expand on those. If neither of those options are appealing to you then just let the post be buried and die off rather than bumping it.
@Orion Yes, if everyone popped the best luck item in the game that shares with one another that might happen, but what is the chance of that happening then? Do you think that's an every game occurrence? Obviously not, and obviously we're talking about the standard game not the extreme cases.
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@Aerys said:
Giving free hooks isn't the intent behind the fix, and an error of thinking was pointed out to me so I amended the idea, but I for one believe that the goal of the killer is to seek out and kill all survivors, camping is not conducive to this goal and it makes the game less fun overall.Mathieu cote say hello (edit since the video don't where it is supposed to, skip to 41 second)
https://youtu.be/SS3DvvOQI04?t=41I wanted to also insert a clip of Mathieu Cote hard camping with trapper or wraith but I don't manage to find any someone feel free to post it if you have it
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@Dragonredking Well, the video was over two and a half years ago at this point, and in it the guy is at least on a ledge further away from the hook, not just standing on top of it. Perhaps what he meant by it was that you should aim to get their friends once they show up, which is at least more fair than tunneling on one survivor.
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Like I say I don't have clip of him anymore
He used to camp with trapper with a trap under the hook back when it was possible
And when it wasn't a thing anymore he camped still
He also tunneled people
So no
That's not what he meant0 -
Killers only real way to progress the match is to secure eliminations.
It is what they do. It is their only objective.
The hook was, from the game's conception, intended to be a fair survivor negative experience. When playing a game, there will be scenarios you don't consider fun. That is necessary for a game to work. In game design terms, it is described thusly: if there is no negotiated consequence (IE: Some bad result that can happen to you) then it is literally definitionally not a game, it is a toy, simulation, or tool. You can't lose at blocks, or dolls, or a physics simulator. You can, however, lose in poker, chutes and ladders, or chess.
Not only that, incremental advantages or disadvantages need to be part of a game. Losing all at once makes a bad game because it results in a lack of many player interactions, so states where you are at a severe disadvantage are generally preferable precursors to a loss. For example, in a fighting game, being at low health, in a corner, at low meter, while waking up from being knocked down is a common state to enter if an opponent does well that dramatically limits your options, increases your opponent's options, and makes it extremely likely for you to lose.
This is fair. This is common in every game design. You did not end up on the hook by some magical random chance: You made mistakes, you got outplayed, and now you are down your queen and two rooks. You are cornered with no meter. You are out of cash to buy anything but pistols going up against AWPs. You fed 5 kills to your lane opponent and they now have 2 items on you. You had to mortage baltic avenue to avoid going bankrupt. Ect, ect, ect.
In team games, it gets more interesting, because the design allows you to create scenarios where the entire team is disadvantaged at different levels but as a whole is made weaker. In team games, you need to view the entire team as a player. In DBD, the person on the hook is significantly more disadvantaged than the person free to run. However, it is the same scenario. Despite ONE player being unable to do anything to escape a loss state, the entire team is able to continue and win, with or without that player.
The trick is to make sure the single player is not put in that loss state instantly. Because losing without having any recourse isn't fun.
Luckily... DEAD BY DAYLIGHT OBVIOUSLY DOES THIS. You, in fact, have earned your soft lost state once your on the hook. You had to be seen, meaning you F###ed up hiding! You needed to then lose a chase, which requires over a minimum of 30 seconds of time to extend your own life you F###ed up messing up the killer's visual tracking, F###ed up getting to a loop or other safe spot, F###ed up exiting the chase, and F###ed up jukes... TWICE.
You had to screw all of this up twice.
Good survivors don't go on the hook basically ever. Like its so trivially easy to avoid, even at high ranks. I literally can't remember the last time I was hooked, it has been so darn long, and any time it happens I feel embarrassed because it was my game to lose.
At that point, the game's design dictates you exist to advantage the killer's game state. IE: you are bait. You MIGHT get back into the game, but it isn't an assurance. It wasn't even likely at the dawn of the game, saves were considered comically unlikely. You now exist to advance the killer's tempo, with the possibility of parole.
Hooks are kinda screwed up though. Not in that they are unfair to survivors, but to killers. The tempo advantage they are meant to represent sort of is all screwed up because hooking is actually a massive time sink and hooks are generally 'not worth it' unless you can get another chase off the hook either via camping or just someone being reckless thinking your camping.
Furthermore, they are screwed up in that the decision to camp or not camp biases comically towards camping. This is not due to any potential downside of camping not being strong enough, but the downsides of leaving the hook being comically huge. If you leave the hook, any time you invested in that stage of the hook is wasted, and because hooking takes such a big time investment vs good survivors, its rare for it to end well for the killer if they can't get multiple stages out of one hooking (Either by instant rehooking or blocking unhooks) a few times per game.
You want to fix camping? You need to dramatically increase the tempo gain a hook grants even on an unhook. Something like a permanent massive repair speed decrease per hook stage lost. As is, the hook is already comically fair for survivors, and actually biases towards them as a mechanic.
The killer, at high ranks, would literally be better off if the survivors each had 3 lives and took 30 seconds to respawn once they were downed because then they would at least not have to invest time in the hook. You are literally better off as a survivor for the hook existing and forcing the killer to invest time into defending it. Don't ask for killers to be punished for doing what the design literally forces them to.
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See, that makes sense. So then the question is, how do we make hooks more of a valid thing to leave alone for a killer without ruining their gameplay. I'm fairly convinced from what everyone has said that putting a higher unhook time and triggering a warning to the killer (The Entity basically saying "Hey they're stealing my food") would be the best case scenario as it would allow the killer to roam more without worrying about his prey getting down and healing up immediately. Maybe if it took 15 seconds with skill check possibilities to unhook someone it'd be more viable and give the killer more time to jog back and defend its prey? Of course, if a killer were to camp them with that in consideration then the survivor then loses completely, but if what you say is true and getting caught is the definition of losing for a survivor, then they might as well die there.
All that said, it doesn't feel like punishing survivors is going to go over well especially for people new to the game. I think when someone said that killers should be rewarded for leaving to go get more blood it makes sense. What if, upon hooking someone, the killer gained a 90s advanced version of Bloodlust that gave the base 0.2m/s speed increase as well as 50% point gain in hunting/deviousness/destruction? That way they'd absolutely want to run wild and free as they maim survivors rather than camping?
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I've proposed the following, among others:
- Increased progression the further the Killer is from the hook, past a certain radius, with an immediate double progression speed if the Killer enters a chase. This would both make hook rushing detrimental and reward the Killer for leaving the hook.
- Broken status for all Survivors who have been hooked. This would make hooks relevant in the long-term.
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The intent is right, but its no different than what we have now. A killer that is trying to rank and actually play limit themselves to as little camping as possible. It curves killer intent back to the hunt or at least to patrol. Unfortunately it does not and never will stop a true camper. These are people that don't care about the points, it was never about the points to begin with. They will keep it up because they're salt miners and love it. Don't punish a strategy that will occasionally get used by an average player with reason, cause the troll will ignore the punishment and continue to enjoy his salt fueled rubdown.0
