Should killers be rewarded for not camping?
Rewarded for not camping? What madness is this. Ok, just hear me out whilst I play devil’s advocate.
The new perk reassurance exists to directly counter camping. Regardless of context- face camping at 5 gens, proxy camping in a 3 gen or camping at end game- the perk exists to massively disincentivise camping and punish the killer for doing so by stalling their primary objective. So if we were to examine this perk from the perspective of a “carrot or stick” approach to the issue of camping, this is very much the stick. So where is the carrot? And should there actually be a carrot?
I’m sure people will argue that the latest update and the killer buffs should have been enough of a carrot for killers to not have to camp/tunnel/run four slowdown perks etc etc. And some killers still did these things, so there was no choice left for the devs but to come up with something like reassurance.
But for the sake of discussion, should there be a carrot? And what could the incentive be? Restoring BBQ and Chilli to its former glory? Restoring the PR notification? Maybe granting a small haste effect after hooking a survivor for the first time? Maybe actually standardising map sizes? I’m sure there’s other ideas but you get the gist.
Curious to hear anyone’s thoughts on this! Personally I think carrot AND stick is healthier for the game but I’m sure some people don’t think that’s right.
Comments
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There actually already are carrots in the game not to facecamp
- Generally speaking literal face camping is a suboptimal strategy, the better strategy is to more proactively find and chase and pressure other survivors while you have someone else hooked or slugged. That forces survivors into the position of having only one person at most on the generators at a time which significantly slows their progress and gives you that much more time to focus on getting three hooks on one or two specific targets to get into the 3v1 scenario with more time left on the gens when it happens.
- Also note that there are three killer perks that further reward being 24 meters from a hook (Devour Hope, Make Your Choice and Monstrous Shrine). So killers who want an additional reward for not being near the hooked survivors can supplement their game with those.
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They already are, you get substantially more points hooking multiple other survivors and killing more players.
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I've often thought they should get the circling crows if they're 16 meters or less from the hook without insidious, even if they're moving. Same noise notification or something similar. The other idea I saw a long time ago on Reddit I think was having point deductions after a certain amount of time.
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just add kindred to survivor base kit. I feel like that would solve so many issues. swf already know if they are camping... solo queue needs help. its rough out there.
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I'm with ya, but just a note on the new perk in regards to a 3-gen. For me, at least, the perk does almost nothing in this situation. I'm proxy camping the gens, not so much the hooked survivor. I'll take a shot at downing an unhooker, but otherwise I'm just glad that the person on the hook is one less person I have to track to keep off the gens. They can stay up there for as long as it takes for me to get their teammates. Keeping the last gen from popping >>> keeping someone on hook until they die.
I'd say the one thing it does do, is keep that hook occupied so I can't just keep trading survivors on it and advancing their hook states until one dies. I have to slug and that creates more opportunities for the survivors to get someone back up.
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Rewards only make sense when they are denied when the Killer is camping. This was not the case with BBQ, so it was a bad incentive.
If you can come up with a good incentive which is only awarded if the Killer is not camping, go for it. I just think there is none.
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No, it shouldn't be rewarded. It should be punished. For the basic reason: IT IS A GAME, and a GAME is supposed to be MAXIMUM FUN.
When some abusive action is making game unfun for 4 people of 5, devs (yes, devs, not players) should make that abusive tactic unviable. Like it is not exist at all. For the sake of gameplay.
No one shocked that if you hack person with a huge axe, he is still alive, and if you impale him on a huge hook, ripping ribs and making heavy internal bleeding, that person could still run, repair and vault over windows. It's just a gameplay convention, and so should be lack of camping, just make it so it doesn't exist. Period.
Reassurance is great start, but I would definetely make it basekit.
P.S. Doing gens is also not very fun, but it's so in the core so nothing will change (I have some ideas like gathering parts or finding blueprints, but still)
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Based on the other comments I'm beating an already dead horse, but killers are already rewarded for not camping as them physically being doing something else is spreading pressure among the gens. They're rewarded by simply being efficient in their game play.
If you've hooked a survivor just to spend most of your time sitting there, waiting for someone to come for the hook, then you've already handicapped yourself allowing gens to pop.
The whole idea is to down someone before the other is unhooked, or very soon after. A survivor hooked can't do gens nor can the person trying to unhook them. That's already two survivors not doing gens thus slowing down the game. While they're healing up, the killer should already be in or trying to find another chase. That's optimal and efficient game play a killer can't achieve if they refuse to even leave the hook because they also refuse to actually learn the game or their character
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Like I said in my OP, I’m mostly playing devil’s advocate here. I just think, based on what I’ve read since reassurance’s introduction, that the consensus has now moved from “camping is fine in certain situations” to “camping is always terrible”.
The example scenario you’ve provided seems mostly aimed at early game camping, which is of course both incredibly un-fun and inefficient. However making a decision to proxy camp with one Gen left and a player on second stage? I think it becomes more nuanced. You use the word optimal in your post- is camping really never optimal? Or as other posters have alluded to is it worth sacrificing optimal for fun in regards to the health of the game?
I suppose you could say my original question should be phrased more along the lines of “should camping ever be acceptable?”. But balancing around that is probably much harder and more murky, and on balance reassurance is probably going to be much better for the health of the game. It’s a case of removing some killer agency for a better overall experience.
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The problem is, at least in my experience, is that most campers don't care about points or pipping, they measure success by the number of kills they get. If they manage to face camp two or three people to death they see it as a win because its a 3k even if they come out with miserable points.
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Admittedly I've only provided the best case scenario for killers or at the least the mindset they should have going into a game, but of course nothing ever goes as planned.
To answer your rephrased question, it is simply a matter of intent and context. The why of everything. Why is a killer camping and what caused them to camp? This obviously varies a LOT from scenario to scenario. Applied to your question, the answer will sometimes be yes, no and maybe. To make things short, yes there are situations where camping is the best option for the killer to an acceptable degree, and there's other situations where it simply isn't. Sometimes it becomes questionable even.
That's why it's so hard for the devs to create a solution for this. You can't punish a player for doing what's necessary because another decided to do the same thing out malicious or spiteful intent. It's not two sides of the same coin, it's every side of the 32 sided dice.
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Sure, I'll bite. Give them some sort of BP Bonus for hooking a different survivor. 500 BP in whichever category it best fits. Give it a lore reason like it excites the entity when the killer torments the survivors or something.
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Instant saves counter all 3
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MYC only incentivizes leaving the hook, it also incentivizes returning the second someone gets unhooked, and even then its effectiveness depends heavily on the mobility of the killer. Most killers who use it either have some type of teleport or movement ability, or hover just outside of its range limit until it procs. Devour hope is similar, except it doesn't necessarily require a similar immediate return to the hook.... but it can also last random number of seconds/minutes so its not even guaranteed to get any value before being cleansed. Not only that, but a lot of perks that incentivized leaving the hook asap by giving you actual direction on where to go.... keep getting nerfed. Or have massive counterplay like bbq. Things like points don't matter in regards to getting the first out, minimizing early game pressure is far more important due to the efficiency cap scale.
Just remember, every time people complained "the killer keeps finding me because of pain resonance" or "flat 25% regression was too oppressive, even with a shorter time limit" or even the classic "how is BBQ allowed to be so OP?" they were asking for exactly this. The numbers game tremendously rewards getting one out asap, and survivors will always start very strong and over time end up very weak. because they will never address the efficiency cap, so early game for killer will continue to be damage controlling until the speed of the match is in their favor. The only incentive that will disrupt camping and tunnelling is if the killer's pressure for not doing so is as strong as it is to force the efficiency cap as soon as possible. And the only way to balance that is to tighten the gap between survivor efficiency caps with each death. Anything less will have zero universal effect on the situation.
Also, facecamping can be suboptimal. But in situations like, for example if 2-3 people are hovering around the hook not doing gens, its literally the only thing to do. Sometimes survivors aren't as sneaky as they think, or they just assume the killer will ignore them and wander to the other side of the map. Its all the more reason Kindred puts in so much work in solo. If the killer knows you're there and you're just crouching around a corner hoping they'll leave, you're creating the situation even more than they are.
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I reward a non camping Bubba by not beelining to the closest window whenever I hear the faintest heartbeat :)
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Reacting to two people hovering around the hook isn’t “face camping”. Face camping is standing at the hook even when nobody is coming to it. And I would argue that actual face camping (which isn’t simply being at the hook when survivors happen to be there) is often a bad strategy, not just a “sometimes” bad strategy.
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Most survivors beg to differ. They will accuse you of face camping all day if you are camping and your face can see the hooked survivor's face. Many would argue the nuance of the situation, while many will bemoan it. That said, if you limit the scope of facecamping to just ignoring the entire match except the person on the hook, that would generally be a bad strategy with how bad being entirely on what the other survivors do to capitalize on that. If none of them work on gens or commit to the save, it ends up being an extremely good strategy, even if technically by accident. More often its smarter to proxy camp the hook and then return as soon as you know someone is going to attempt the save, or if the hook timer is about to switch stages. Still camping and still not fair to the hooked survivor, but the longer there are 4 survivors in the game, the more damage each second wasted can do.
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Sore losing survivors say all sorts of dumb things after a match. I had one complain I was “tunneling and camping” in a pre-buffed Legion game where I had 12 hooks and 32,000 points. I also had someone complain one time I was “camping the generators” (even the other survivors called that guy an idiot.)
And yeah, being on a hook all game or being eliminated early sucks, I agree. That’s part and parcel with this game having mid-match player elimination which is generally speaking not a mechanism I’m fond of. The DbD official boardgame for example did away with that by having the killer collect ritual tokens whenever they hook a survivor and whenever a survivor is left unrescued too long and then the killer wins if they collect 8 tokens. If the video game worked that way you would have basically zero complaints about camping and tunneling because there would be no real incentive at all to do either. Unfortunately that ship sailed a long, long time ago so we’re kind of stuck with what we’ve got.
Reassurance probably will put a dent in hard core camping, I don’t think it will make as much a difference for simple zone defense though and it won’t stop trolls who don’t care if they lose from camping hooks either. I think aside from needing a minor tweak to mitigate abuse it’s a decent perk, and actually similar to a suggestion I made for base kit a while back of slowing or stopping the timer when the killer is in range of a hooked target.
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the problem with it is, like usual, it has a disproportionate effect once coordination comes into play. if you have two survivors with the perk on comms, they can keep alternating within range to trigger it to force the killer to hit one of them, giving the other enough time to make a save while easily denying a hook trade. Its ability to stall the game has far too few limitations, especially considering its potential to force lose/lose situations. The idea is there, but they always overlook too many variables and people find those variables every time. That said, any time a perk forces a lose/lose decision on the other side and stalls them in the process until they commit is an extremely bad idea design wise. We already have enough instances of that in the game, and they're even trying to reduce some of them apparently (like the conspicuous action and EGC activation changes to some perks, stuff like ruin/corrupt deactivating early automatically, etc.)
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For sure swfs will make better use of it, that’s nothing new. I don’t think it’ll be “easy” to avoid a trade though if the killer is right there, if a survivor takes a hit not much is necessarily preventing the killer from just following up and downing that survivor afterward if they want. And if two survivors are bouncing around the hook they both get injured and then one gets followed up on and downed and meanwhile the survivors only have one person on gens the entire time this is happening. Plus the two survivors doing this presumably both have Reassurance as a perk which means they don’t have something else so it’s not entirely a free benefit either.
Don’t get me wrong, this perk sounds solid, I’m betting it’ll be a new meta perk. But I don’t see it really hurting me personally, for instance.
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The issue with those types of scenarios is the amount of things that can stack. With the amount of bodyblocking and endurance that can come into play between three people in close proximity, there's room for shenanigans. A lot of the more broken stuff in the game isn't an issue *until that one time it really is* after all.
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The way I see it, if you can properly make not-camping the ideal, rewarding, strategically advantageous strategy, you can then nerf camping into the ground.
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The whole base is wrong. Them clinging on onto the whole "The Killer kills" analogy destroys the whole game. Everyone likes to get chased, the survivors like it and the killer does. But it's not an efficient thing to do as a killer, making them (so called) 'camp and tunnel'. It's not fun for anyone. But indeed, its a Killer (who kills) and not a Chaser (who chases). So we are stuck with dead boring matches getting 'tunneled' and 'camped' over and over. While the devs are constantly scrambling to plasterfix it
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Have you ever checked the emblems scoring?
There lies your answer.
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They are
With more BP and a better chance to win
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I mean, do people who camp and tunnel care about emblems?
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“Better chance to win” is a fluctuating state though right? Or does camping never grant the killer a better chance to win in the correct circumstances?
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Yeah, I mean when I think camping I think of the version of like, 5 gens left and theres not another Survivor in sight yet the killer still decides to pitch a tent
There are many scenarios where its in the killers best interest to stay near a hooked Survivor
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I think you misread the title there bud
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Sadly there's survivors who believe that a killer not letting survivors get a free unhook is camping.
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Any amount of rewards or penalties will not appropriately deter players from behaving in a particular way if they have already made up their mind that they want to do a particular thing.
No amount of nerfs to sniper rifles will stop a sniping player from climbing a water tower and clicking on heads, no amount of extra bloodpoints or loss of bloodpoints will stop Insidious Bubba from doing his thing.
The only way to prevent the behavior is to make it impossible; a sniper cannot snipe if you remove sniper rifles from the game, and a camper cannot camp if you make camping somehow impossible such as teleporting the survivor to a different hook.
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There's also survivors who would say you're camping when they are all around the hook and not leaving it when you start chasing them
Legit had that happen even though I let the others go and rescue the person like the closest hook is the one that just opened up that's not camping that's you and your group giving me no reason to go far away from the hook
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Camping only rewards killers against bad survs, weak survs that are afraid of gens and allergic to kindred
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BBQ were a thing until today.
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Yeah, Im well aware of that. Only thing they can do at that point is educate themselves.
I used to be one of those Survivors, realized I might be in the wrong and started playing killer. That was back in 2018, good times.
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This is similar to my thoughts on tunneling. Most killers tunnel because it is the most efficient strategy to win (and it's easier than chasing 4 different people). If that were to change, then tunneling would either happen less frequently or become weak enough of a strategy that it doesn't matter.
However, simply nerfing the effectiveness of something tends to leave a bad taste in people's mouths, and at the moment, going for 8 hooks on everyone just isn't a viable enough strategy to leave unchanged. So, if you were to incentivize leaving the hook and going for 8 hooks on all 4 survivors while de-incentivizing camping and tunneling, then I think it would help shift the game in a healthier direction.
The problem is figuring out how to go about this.
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That is most of them, bro.
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As much as I'd like to agree with you, this is not true.
1. Even if the survivors do gens, the killer can easily camp the first hook out. If the survivors did not 100% focus on gens then there is a significant likelihood the killer gets a second survivor on the hook. From here it is a wide variety of events. If the survivors are very organized and lucky to find the NOED totem we all know will spawn, they might get 3 of them out. In the vast majority of cases, the 2nd hooked survivor lures at least one of the two remaining survivors in for the rescue. NOED gives the killer a third victim and the 4th flees.
In most cases, especially vs solo que, the face camper gets 3k.
Face camping is wildly optimal vs pressuring gens, especially considering the number of slow moving M1 killers who can't typically keep up with optimized SWF groups.
Personally, I don't camp or tunnel. Not because of the BS Survivor Rulebook, but because I find it boring. Survivors are not going to play nice with their SWF groups and Meta builds, so why would I follow their rulebook? Luckily, I find camping to be boring and enjoy the challenge of chases and matches as a whole.
But, my style of play is far from optimal, especially since I main Trapper.
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Case in point, yesterday I hook one survivor. One was already dead and the two others were circling around before I even finished hooking. (SWF4) It was a safe area for them (Badham sucks so much) so my options were to wait for their move or lose. (They had some pretty strong builds based on flip flop, MoM, ... so I didn't even have a choice were to hook them)
The situation would have lasted forever with that perk.
Talk about lose lose.
They were pretty salty about it in the chat.
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That situation is why I fundamentally don't believe reassurance should be able to indefinitely keep a hooked survivor alive. If survivors can't get gens or get the unhook after extending the hook duration, the hooked survivor should be sacrifice because the survivors misplayed.
As for what a reasonable limit should be on the perk I'm unsure, but one should exist.
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I have a proposal to use time-on-gen to arm it, on the PTB feedback. It needs to be fleshed out though.
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But why not simply EQUIP kindred, when you are playing soloQ? This perk is pretty good, no way denying that, so why do so many soloQ players seem to have such an allergy to it?
My most successful survivor build is nearly all information: Bond+Kindred+OpenHanded+Borrowed Time. Its so good that I even run it sometimes when surviving with friends, as the difference between hearing what someone is doing and SEEING were exactly what is happening is staggering. But of course, many SWFs will opt out of a build like this for more "fun" or "flashy" builds.
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The aura reading was the incentive part, I personally found wonders of it on doc
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But what about their game result? Does it improve at all by not camping?
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To add to this, I use Kindred+Windows for very similar reasons, also with a lot of success as well for being able to route chases much more efficiently when knowing what resources are available where. People want this stuff basekit yet they're not willing to use a perk slot or two to see how valuable that stuff actually can be.
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Yep, I think the problem becomes balancing the “fun” of the game versus allowing players to play optimally in order to win. If we accept that camping is sometimes actually the correct play, is it fair to punish killers for doing it in those instances? Or is the reality that in order to make the game healthier, the devs have no choice but to combat all forms of what is considered camping?
If that’s the case then the game would essentially be forcing people to play less optimally for the sake of what is perceived to be “fun”. So it could be argued that anytime you want to negate a very effective winning strategy and take away a players agency surely you need to make it fun for both sides? Hence my original question about should killers be given more incentive/rewards not to camp.
Especially as you allude to, if the devs were to keep going further and really try and force an 8 hook or even 12 hook game then the last update would not be enough to make that fair for killers IMO.
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