Survivors abusing interactions
I've got a few things to bring up that I'm not sure why still exist in the game (I'm sorry if this comes across as ranting, I'm still a little upset from recent experiences, as I image most people are when they come around to post here). And reporting them as issues to the Devs simply gets me a automatically generated: We are sorry this happened, we cannot tell you what we will do.
I understand that these might not be the biggest issues right now, and that there are worst problems in the game, but I feel like these are pretty big issues when they DO come up, and I also feel like a few of these (if not all) have fairly simple solutions. But most importantly (to me), I feel like these issues break the flow of the game in ways that absolutely destroys the moral of players engaged on the receiving end.
I understand we can be detached when we play games, but that doesn't mean we can't fix obvious problems.
I'm sure some of you will point out worst things in the game, and others will explain to me counter-plays that I either know or don't know to these problems, but the point I'm trying to make is that no one should HAVE to experience these things and figure a way around it. Especially since some of these seem easily fixable. These things all feel (at least to me) like abuses or issues that can be fixed without changing the flow of how DBD plays as a whole and with fairly limited risk (if any).
TLDR edition (Because I know I make wall of texts):
- Some survivors just want to see the world burn and body block other survivors in corners just for funsies. Please let survivors either clip through (as if they lost their hitbox from a killer hit) or push other survivors when they have a crow above their heard.
- It is still possible to abuse flashlight and lockers together, please make killers immune to flashlight when they pick up a survivor in the animation of entering/exiting a locker. It would also be a good addition for killers to have the option pick up a survivor rather than open a locker when a survivor is close to one and facing the locker (If it's possible I don't know how, I tried to change the controls to no avail, either way this should be default).
- Maybe the Survivors can abuse hook spawns to make themselves essentially impossible to hook with often minimal effort. This is mostly a problem when a hook broke from the death of one of the survivors. Have the wiggle timer paused or slowed down considerably when the killer carries a survivor close to a "Hook broken by another survivor death", or if possible consider making hooks that are on the edge of the map unbreakable.
This is going to end up as a wall of text, I hope that's not too much of a problem. I'll do my best to trim it down. But I feel like some of these issues need to be explained thoroughly.
- It is possible for survivors to body block other survivors for very long periods to be absolute infants. I've had games where a random survivor finds me or my friends breaking a totem, and they just decide to place their character right next to us, and stay there for the rest of the game (or as long as the killer allows it, sometimes until the entity claims them after the end-game timer), they stand there just nodding their heads as we can't escape. Most of the time they just get 3 crows and eventually the killer just comes around and kills both them and me or my friend. This feels like an OBVIOUS problem. Couldn't we just make it so a Survivor that has at least 1 Crow can be pushed around? At least they wouldn't be able to hold another survivor for the whole game. Or better yet, simply allow other players to clip through players with crows. I've even had this problem ONCE where a blight body blocked a window in Salloon after I had gotten inside (we all know which one), and he just waited there for the other survivors to finish generators (which incidentally they didn't, because they found it funny) until the entity claimed me. So it might be worthwhile to make a survivor with crow able to clip through killer hitbox as well.
- It is still possible for survivors to abuse lockers with friends and flashlights. There was a patch fairly recently that made the killer immune to flashlight when grabbing from a locker, however all survivors do now is: Rush enter the locker, and then either slow exit, or spam the rush enter and exit. If a survivor is grabbed during any of those animations, the killer is not immune to the flashlight. Frankly this ends up in an extremely weird situation to play that feels very much like "Going around game mechanics or abusing them". I understand that the "counterplay" (big quotation marks), to this, is to LUNGE at the survivor that is messing with the locker. However, when you see someone entering a locker, the obvious response is to go up to it to open it and grab him (this is especially true if you know that he has friends with flashlights about and you want to avoid that), however, once they see you approaching, they start either spamming the locker rush actions or slow exiting, doing ANY kind of attack at this point will result in a grab. Even if you hold the attack button to lunge, the game detects the attack (and the close-by, grabable survivor) and treats it a regular attack, and grabs him. The only ways to avoid this, is to sort of jerk your camera around without looking at the survivor, swing an attack, and drag back your camera to the survivor to hit with the lingering lunge animation, or otherwise back up once you've established the pattern and lunge in for swing (which survivors can recognize and then just stay in the locker until you get close). This feels 100% like the kind of weird (frankly bad) interactions of an old game. And even if you DO end up getting that hit with the lunge, it doesn't stop there. If luck isn't with you, you still have to deal with the fact that you can't pick up the survivor immediately. The only way you could pick up the survivor safely from the flashlight would be to look at the wall, which you can't do, because there is a locker, meaning all you'll end up doing is opening the locker. If you end up picking up the survivor, his friends will likely blind you. Now you have to try to get those friends. Obviously all of this can be much worst if the survivors are committed to this kind of thing (add a map offering, boon exponential, add unbreakables, what have you). But my point here is that this ENTIRE segment of event feels extremely awkward and frustrating. Are lockers SUPPOSED to be something that survivors can ACTIVELY use to be extremely grating (as least for as long as the battery lasts)? Because they can, and they do. Sure some killers (characters) might not be bothered all that much by this, but quite a few of them are. AN ENTIRE problem, which would be fixed by simply making the killer immune to flashlight while picking up from lockers (I understand that survivors can do this at Gens or other spots too, but those aren't nearly as problematic, you can much more easily lunge at someone on a gen, and there are several gens that are close enough to walls so that the pick up is fairly safe to be done, the problem here is specifically lockers).
- This issue might be harder to fix, but it's also the one I've experienced the most often in this list (and frankly I'm not exempt from telling my less experiences how to do this when they struggle against particularly nasty killers) I've had several instances where survivors have realized (or forced a map to get) that a certain corner of the map is devoid of hooks except for just the 1 within carrying distance. Now obviously I could bring up Sabotage, Flip flop, map offerings to have such maps more often, etc. But let's skip that.When they approach their deaths (last hook), they purposely run to said corner, so that after the first death, they all become impossible to hook. It feels like an abuse of "game rules", since they essentially become impossible to hook after the first death. Those survivors tend to often run unbreakable, meaning that not only after several (possibly lengthy) chases are they downed in a spot where you can't hook them, but they are guaranteed at least 1 free "getting back up" mechanic, during which their (likely partied) friends KNOW they don't have to do a single thing about it, and can just keep doing gens or whatever objectives is important at that time. Depending on your options (which are likely bad at that point), you often find yourself patrolling the survivor until he bleeds out and try to prevent his friends from saving him (or them if multiple), in which case they just finish the generators in most cases. I've had a particular instance where the survivor that did this was with friends, and right before the last gen was finished, used unbreakable to get back up, and then got adrenaline. Considering I had no Mori, that means he managed to put himself in a spot where he was completely invincible at that point in the game, there was NOTHING I could've done at that time to prevent him from escaping that situation, despite the fact that I managed to catch him in chase, and bring him down. I was literally PUNISHED for my efforts and for playing the game. Frankly I'm not completely sure why hooks break when someone dies on them, I'm not sure how that's a good game mechanic, it feels like all it does is create abusing situations for the survivors. But in the event that there IS a good reason for it (which is entirely possible), I feel like a few of the following implementations would still fix the issue. SUGGESTION A - One of the most straight forward but likely difficult or tricky implementation-wise would be to have hooks that are on the edge of the map unbreakable. SUGGESTION B - Another possibility would be to have the wiggle timer paused or slowed down considerably when the killer carries a survivor close to a hook that was SPECIFICALLY broken by the death of another survivor (that slow down or pause can only last for a fix amount of seconds per carry and per death-induced-broken-hooks so as to prevent killers from holding a survivor hostage. SUGGESTION C - Make it possible for the killer carrying a survivor to interact with said "death-induced-broken-hook" to reset his wiggle timer (only once per carry and per hook, again to prevent holding hostage). The killer would still be slowed down from just hooking normally but this would at least prevent survivors from being in a sort of "un-hookable-corner-state", this could even allow other survivors to try and take hits to prevent the killer from resetting his timer.
I understand that the developers likely have their own plans and ideas to fix this in the future, but I feel like some of these fixes (for instance the one with the crows) are easily 1 patch away from getting severely mitigated for player experience. Solutions like these often feel like they take months or years before being implemented, and they feel like they could severely improve the state of the game if just done quickly/right now.
I apologize again for all of this. I'll be honest, my previous contacts with the BHVR team have left me a little glazed. I understand that they are likely over-worked and cannot take precious time to answer and talk with everyone and explain their "likely still work in progress" ideas for various problems. But this is just sort of my last ditch effort to at least have issues that result in an EXTREMELY frustrating experience for players that either enjoy the game or at in the process of discovering it hopefully addressed.
I also understand that for some of these problems (such as the 1st one), we can report those players, but frankly I don't think these players care if you report them nor the consequences. And these feels like problems that HAVE a solution. Also reporting other players (cheating or griefing) simply to receive the same seemingly automated response that always requests from a video clip even for issues that are frankly easy to imagine/picture and NEVER getting feedback on how they plan on changing things makes this extremely difficult for me to reach out.