Things Survivors Need
Hello, I'd like to make this post for BHVR specifically. This post comes after a long string of changes that have been going on for the course of the past 4 years. These changes have had me reach a point where I feel the need to speak up to encourage change for the health of the game before there is a mass survivor exodus. This is not to say that all changes have been harmful. Removing FTP+Buckle Up, the first nerf of dead hard, nerfing made for this, many of the map nerfs, and the recent perk buffs on both sides have been great for the game! Even so, I want to encourage a change in ~3 main areas:
- Killer Designs
- Map Designs
- Survivor Needs
Starting with #1, let's talk about killer designs. I have been playing this game for over 4 years now, and in that time I have seen killer powers become less interactive in both 1v1 and sometimes in 4v1 as well. The main thing I'll be focusing on for today is the 1v1 aspect, as that keeps things specific and addresses what survivors are likely more bothered by. Let's define a couple things:
1v1= chasing and how these powers interact with pallets, windows, and long walls.interactive= how much input both players have in determining how a chase will go. more interactive=a chase can be longer or shorter depending on what both do, and less interactive would mean one side holds all the power in a chase to determine the length(not accounting for map factors). In this instance, I will be suggesting that anything not interactive is going in the favor of the killer. 4v1=gen control, camping, moving around the map quickly such as with teleports, and so on. This will not be the focus of today's post.
In order to first know what may not be working, it could be helpful to see what a more interactive chase power looks like. In this case I will be using the Demogorgon. Why is Demo interactive? Well, he takes a moment to charge his power and slows greatly while charging it, he has a fairly large cooldown for missing, and the survivor can crouch to avoid being hit. This all sounds pretty unfair for the Demogorgon, but when we consider that survivors can't safely just predrop every pallet against him because of how quickly he can recover from shredding them, and his lunge goes very far so they can't just hold safe positions against him on many loops, and Demo can turn while in his lunge to hit the survivor even if they crouch, we can see that there is a lot of potential for disruption on both ends.
Now I want to discuss a killer that is not yet that talked about but I believe he will be soon: Chucky. Chucky can stand in a pallet and win the mindgame of which side the survivor goes around the loop quite easily because he can curve his dash. This is also true of many pallets the survivor sits at if the pallet is dropped because of his speed and ping. There is little penalty to missing as he recovers quickly and can often even M1 survivors whom he misses. You can't leave the loop because he can just follow you and hit you, and even if you could leave the loop, the maps often don't allow you to make it to another resource in most spots now. So there really isn't counterplay besides dropping an incredibly safe pallet and running to another one and dropping that right away. If you don't have one, you die.
Unfortunately, this post isn't about just Chucky. It's about many many many other killers now. Some of them are the strongest killers like Nurse, but some are weaker such as the Skull Merchant. If you find it is helpful, I could make a post about each killer that may be an issue individually, but I believe roughly half the killers in the game are in a largely or partly un-interactive state. This is a sentiment many other survivors feel and when it is compared to older iterations of the game it is something that feels saddening.
To be clear, I am not saying killers can't be powerful in chase. Killers such as Unknown and Wesker are quite quick at getting downs in skilled hands but they also have reasonable counterplay on the survivor side in many instances. This is about allowing survivors to do something in chase that rewards time spent learning and understanding killers and loops and maps. This can be fun for killers too! Killers who can outplay survivors when the survivors have counterplay can feel BETTER about every down they get because they got to have a back and forth with the opponent and that extra satisfaction can go a long way for many who want to put more time into this game at least, although I believe newer killers may enjoy this as well based on their preferences. The downs feel earned in other words.
There is so much to say on this point, but I'll move from here to #2: Map Designs. The most recent Coldwind Farm tiles largely were a tipping point for this topic but there is a larger discussion to be had.
Maps are at their best when they have enough resources to last a whole game, when there is a variety in strength of resources individually and in collective places on the map, when the size is neither too large nor too small, when it has lots of visibility(with some line of sight blockers), without insanely close gen spawns, and with looping resources near generators. Obviously some of these may have more wiggle room than others, and attempts to break the mold like with Greenville Square have been interesting because they tweak one value one way while moving another in the opposite direction. However I want to focus on a map that does things well and compare it with another or two which does not to help explain some concerns.
For a map that does a lot well, I'd like to compliment Blood Lodge. It has a fair amount of resources but it can also have some dead zones, it has an okay main building but not an overly abusable one. It has some stronger and weaker and medium loops. It has tiles such as long and short wall jungle gyms which can be fun to play for both sides, but with a pallet to use vs more oppressive powers right away. It is decently sized but it also can have some closer 3 gens, and the loops are spread relatively evenly around the map despite what I mentioned earlier about dead zones, meaning there is no special extra place to run to when you get hit to hold the killer longer but instead lots of varied places to take chase that could be decent.
Compare that to Rancid Abbatoir. Smallish size, close gen locks on each side of the barn usually. Very few resources and most of the ones that are there are pallets such as very very short loop with the sandbags on one end and the teepee(sp?) on the other. There can be many dead zones that exist, the harvester isn't worth much without having the perk Balanced Landing equipped despite all the space it takes up, and the main building isn't loopable at all despite all the space it occupies. Now you can add onto that the new tiles which can now replace jungle gyms with much much weaker pallet and window combinations, and the map can become even more desolate. While it was undoubtedly unfair to have most killers load into the old fractured cowshed, it currently feels like an auto-loss to spawn in on maps such as the current Rancid Abbatoir or Haddonfield.
Why were the new tiles added and made much weaker? Why can't tiles have more strength if they will be weighted so much and resources will be more sparse? I'm not saying make it totally unfair for the killer either, but in a realm which has been repeatedly nerfed, it seems worthwhile to consider moving the needle the other way a bit.
Haddonfield suffers from similar issues. Incredibly small, no windows can be used in any of the main buildings for anything besides adding around 2 seconds at most to a chase, some of the weakest pallets in the game around the edge of the map, and because of its small size it means lots and lots of close gen locks. Gen locks which have no resources to help stall for time while you try to break them.
I will say though, if you for some reason WANT to keep making tiny maps, then looking to making them more like Wreckers Yard will make more people happy. More interconnected loops with tiles and somewhat spread out gens for how tiny the map is can be something that both sides can appreciate. I personally find wreckers yard to be a bit too excessively small(much like how maps like disturbed ward are too large now even if you made it barren), but it's perhaps something to consider when designing maps in the future. I understand you don't want to make all maps the same though but maybe there is some way to incorporate these ideas to make more people happy.
Anyway the basic idea is that maps have gotten too resource-thin and too small to compete with the increasingly uninteractive and mobile killers that are being played on them. That doesn't mean that some maps aren't problems the other way around, there are. But I believe that we are at the point where the maps that are problematic toward the killer are likely passing the number of problematic maps for survivor. Additionally, I feel as though it's getting harder to warrant nerfing survivor maps when so many maps and killers are changing to benefit them. Which leads me to….
The basic idea of what changing maps and killers have been doing all this time: nerfing survivor in chase. You either need to make maps weaker or make killers stronger in chase if you want to change chase dynamics, but to buff BOTH for killer feels incredibly hopeless for survivors who no longer have as helpful of chase perks to compensate for these changes. It removes a core part of the game that is fun, and is often why many hardcore players can be upset with any changes to the auto haven/macmillan/sort of Coldwind realms. Fixing these things will make players much happier than something like a 10 second extension on hook states, but in the end the hook state timer is much easier to fix and can be a stopgap measure of sorts until other changes are made if you wish to look at it that way. Consider that survivor players often start to play and continue playing the game for the chase aspect as evidenced by most of the popular perks. Making chase more fun = happy survivors.
And finally for #3: Survivor Needs. This is sort of a grab-bag of things that the role has needed for a while now but I'm going to try and keep this cohesive.
A. Bleedouts. I imagine this is being discussed in some form already, but when we added endgame collapse years ago to "prevent survivors from holding the game hostage" it does feel pretty bad when killers can just do that for so long now, especially when the game is clearly over. I understand slugging is a legitimate strategy, but malicious slugging is not something to allow in the game. I want to spend more time on this but I imagine it's already known so I'll just leave it here for now.
B. Dedicated Server/Ping Hits. This has been a CONSTANT in the 4.5 years I have been playing. There was a brief experimentation with rollback netcode a couple years ago, but outside of that I have not seen anything to alleviate this issue. It feels so demoralizing to outplay a killer(already difficult as outlined above) but still get hit anyway because of something beyond your control. Because the interaction is also decided specifically on the Killers' end, there isn't much survivor players can do to improve their situation besides using outside resources to lower their ping marginally.
Some solutions to consider may be:
-allowing whoever has the lower ping to be the priority for hit detection in the interaction
-allowing the server itself to validate instead of the killer side
-rollback netcode
-updating existing netcode if possible
C. Lobbies. Lot to say about these guys but I think lobbies could be more fun for everyone. Currently it's very simple and quiet and that's fine especially for new players because there's so much to think about, but even for them it may be good to have more options. Such as:
-allowing players to play on a test map to practice vaults or learn rng or do challenges or minigames
-play with different perks to see what they're like
-maybe even the survivors and killer could do things together! could be looping, 1v1s, or it could be something silly like prop hunt.
This would make long lobbies more bearable and it could also relax matchmaking time requirements because you'd have something to do during longer queues. Speaking of….
D. Matchmaking. This is my number one issue with the game as a primarily solo queue survivor player. Even during survivor incentives I can't be guaranteed teammates that are not hiding or know how to pressure gens or loop semi effectively. This would be fine if we consistently got killers that these survivors could somewhat handle, but it's usually a blowout. This has NOTHING to do with giving up or the hud and everything to do with how things go before those factors can even be involved. A player would be less likely to give up if they could loop a little before going down in my experience, so solving map+killer designs as well as improving matchmaking will make giving up a lot less common I believe.
I suspect there may be more at play here than is publicly known which is why stricter mmr was only briefly tested and not implemented, but something must be done.
E. Hud. I kind of want to do a whole post on Solo Queue Issues, so if that feels needed I could do it but I'll be brief here:
Please add healing/mending and gate progression to the hud. Please add perks for each survivor and their active status to the hud/match details menu in game(I know why you don't want perks shown in lobby and that's fine).
Okay, this is probably enough for now. I am hoping that this can be considered reasonably and thoroughly by BHVR because there is something I DO think is very special about the way this game approaches interactions and gameplay, but I just want it to be the best version of itself it can be! If you have any questions or concerns I'd be more than happy to elaborate!
Also for the killer players reading this: I know a lot of this may be upsetting, but please keep in mind that I am talking primarily about what survivors need here. I do think bridging the gap between stronger and weaker killers would be good, removing toolbox skill checks and the hyperfocus+stakeout combo would be healthy because it makes gens way too fast, and many other things that you may also believe! However, I also feel that killer voices are represented quite well and often quite eloquently on this forum, whereas I have yet to see the same done for survivors. This is my attempt to balance that out.
Thank you all for reading, and I hope this can lead to some thoughtful consideration if nothing else.