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Is it just me or do survivors not bother looping anymore?
It's possible it's just my games and not an indication of a wider pattern but I feel like this game currently is just hold W simulator while predropping every pallet and survivors don't bother looping anymore. This isn't a one side is strong and the other is weak thread it's just this feels like very boring gameplay regardless of whether I do well or not as killer especially if you're an m1 killer.
Are other people experiencing this and if you are what do you think is causing it and how can it be fixed?
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I wish. Mine know the strong loops, and they always run to them as soon as they hear or see me. But, and I know you didn't want to go here, I don't think survivors have been pushed to actually get good at the game in quite a while now. That's why they're not even bothering to loop, because they either can win without doing it, or they never learned. If you remember that patch from a year or 2 ago with like 60 reworked perks or something crazy, killer kept almost none of those buffs. And I've just been noticing again and again in my matches that killer's problem is that it's crazy slow. Bar obvious stuff like Hillbilly, Spirit, Blight, it takes forever to actually walk anywhere, which is also what you have to do to chase. I've tried to "fix" killer with Rapid Brutality, Superior Anatomy, and Unbound, and it seems to work, but then sometimes it just doesn't because survivors are so fast or have such a lead that none of that stuff makes a difference. Others have used STBFL, Coup, Machine Learning, Furtive Chase, PWYF, but they get about the same results.
While there are plenty of survivors who will always default to looping, and won't take advantage of holding W, the math of the game supports that play style as viable. And again, only a handful of super fast killers can even change that. I've even felt myself playing safer, pre-dropping, and/or holding W as survivor. All I need is my team to be somewhat efficient, and it'll be a 2+ gen chase. So it's reasonable to assume we'll see more of this in mid and high level matches.
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My games still consist of people trying to loop (failing usually). If people are looping less then that's a good sign imo. Spent a long time going anti loop killers and making sure the scooby doo loops are ineffective in the hope that people will loop less. I dunno about others but I find looping and being looped very boring. Can but hope people learn new tactics instead of the 1 trick ponies that think looping is all a survivor can do.
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I feel like i get both sides. People who loop and greed pallets and people who press W drop pallet press W drop pallet.
I think the loopers are more experienced players they know the loops and how to loop . Many W players crutch on windows and just run from pallet to pallet and i personally feel like these are less experienced survivors and i tend to use them to clean out the map :D
There are some killers prepalleting works the best against but i never leave the loop until the pallet is broken i try to loop around the dropped pallet.
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If you are the first person being chased or you are on death hook, you should try to be a lot more liberal with your use of pallets. Don't immediately throw them down, that is not what I am saying. But the first chase is when the killer has the least pressure, and denying their first hook is so important.
Likewise, if you are at risk of dying on hook, there is no reason not to play safe with pallets. If the killer is trying to get you out of the game, then every moment you are still in the game is time that your team can do gens. I see way too many survivors on death hook just be super greedy trying to mind game when I am chasing them.0 -
Kind of depends for me. Just because something can be looped doesn't mean it's always best to loop it in any given situation. Am I ok holding the killer in that area? Is it early or late game? Do I need this chase to go for X amount of time? Do I risk getting zoned if I loop this? Perhaps the biggest factor: am I throwing the game I go down right now, or do we need a pressure relief in the form of a longer chase?
I'm usually a bit more loopy at 5 gens when I haven't been hooked. Once I've been hooked, or we get to mid/late game, there's less upside in looping and more value in wasting time at all costs. If someone is getting rescued, they're resetting, and the killer is chasing me, the worst possible thing I can do as a survivor is go down instantly and let the killer keep up pressure.
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people dont loop because most killers are designed to make looping unsafe because being looped is not fun and less people play such killers.
survivors only play tiles either when they feel like it's safe to loop or when they have no other choice. it's not necessarily bad, but that's just how it is.
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Given that the current philosophy of map design is a giant dead zone with a single pallet held up by two telephone poles, I'm curious what you think people should be looping?
You get more value running circles around the thicker trees lately, since actual "tiles" like jungle gyms appear to be a thing of the past.
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With how spread out tiles are becoming and how unsafe pallets are also becoming it's almost better to Shift W as much as possible.
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This will be an unpopular post, but with the December 2023 stats showing a 32% usage for Windows of Opportunity, Nightlight showing a 35% usage rate recently... are we surprised no one really loops anything anymore?
This might be a hot take, but I'm really starting to suspect WoO is the reason every map and tile is getting gutted.
Windows and pallets are survivor safety, and effectively reaching them consistently makes it so that survivors perform better on average... which means maps need to be balanced around how frequently survivors manage to reach safety. If they keep doing too well, guess what? Remove pallets, remove windows... hello Haddonfield rework! Maybe WoO is fine at high level, but at low and mid (where the bulk of the playerbase is), WoO is busted good because it allows players to totally subvert skillful play at loops... so the maps are getting gutted to compensate.
I mean think about it, if you didn't have WoO up at all times, you wouldn't know for sure where the next safety is exactly unless you already scouted it. If you don't know where safety is, you're more likely to stick to what you do currently know and actually try and loop a tile. I know I've taken plenty of hits after running out of options, turning into a loop hoping for the right pallet spawn and nope, it's the other one, or it's used. With WoO, no issue, I didn't even have to learn/know the structure of the tile at all, I just see everything.
With WoO, why stick to a tile and bother looping anything when you always know where the next tile to chain to is? Loop so far as to put the killer on the wrong side of the pallet, throw it, and run to next.
Thus every new killer has some kinda built in anti-loop, every old killer is getting buffed to be better at loops, and cutting off survivors... why? Because throw pallet and follow the yellow brick road is effective.
However whenever anyone brings up WoO everyone says "it's just an aura perk". Yeah, an aura perk that enforces lazy and bad habits, and facilitates chases becoming an uninteractive auto pilot game. I've said for months now it's not that WoO is too strong, it just facilitates this lazy playstyle that totally removes any need from the survivor to do any scouting or map surveyance at all... and what's the result of that? Rush gens and don't bother to loop.
I've only been playing about 16 months, I'm a relatively new player, and even I REFUSE to use WoO because it actively makes me bad at the game. It does help new players win, it does not help new players learn the game.
I honestly genuinely suspect the reason maps are being gutted is largely because of the prevalent use of WoO to prethrow, hold W and trivialise/subvert all loop gameplay in low-mid MMR.
Post edited by UndeddJester on3 -
What pains me the most isn't people that are god loopers, although that sucks to play against. What really sucks is people that prerun the moment they hear your terror radius. When a whole lobby of players do this, you have to waste an astronomical amount of time to get a down. I can see why Blight and Nurse are so common at high MMR.
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Just you
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Tbf, I think up to ~500-1000 hours that's the only thing survivors even can do… so no wonder it sticks. Why is it the only the survs can do? A whole host of killers has various anti-loop strategies; different from killer to killer and oftentimes influences by addons. There are almost 40 killers in this game at this point and at least two dozen addons and a dozen perks that influence what can and can't be hit at which tile. People play this game for fun, there's no "B.A. of DBD" with lectures like "The Strength and weaknesses of [insert killer] in chase: A review of the most successful strategies employed by players" accompanied by a practical seminar where these things are trained. — And taking that kind of appraoch should absolutely not be a prerequisite.
So what does work against all killers - sometimes better and sometimes worse but always to a sufficient degree - regardless of their builds? Leaving upon hearing the TR (especially when there's no active chase) and making the killer use time to even start the chase - and then trying to keep as much distance as possible for as long as possible, aka dropping out-of-range whatever makes the killer waste time and gives you distance.
The below is a little thought experiment guesstimating some numbers. The bottom line is: To be able to actually loop the killer roster well and not get screwed by their power/addons/builds all the time it takes literal thousands of hours. Trying to properly loop a killer learning-by-doing-style (the way most people play video games, I dare say) isn't feasible in dbd, so players do what is feasible.
I don't like it - neither as killer nor as survivor. But I ain't gonna go to dbd university or the shack 1v1 bootcamp just to play the friggin game. - Getting killers down learning-by-doing-style takes… quite a lot of time. How much exposure to (good) chase do you need to know how to deal with a killer and all the possible builds? - About… 5 hours straight chase with the different builds on the different maps to get all the stuff down sound about right? Say, since this won't happen in one day, or even a month, an extra hour cause sometimes there's so much time inbetween seeing that killer that you might as well start from scratch/have to get the hang of certain things all over again. Given how long chases are supposed to last you probably get one minute of chase on average per match. To fill six hours that way you need to play 360 matches per killer. One match lasts about 13 minutes on average, iirc. Let's go for 10 since you won't always make it to the end. That comes out at 2220 hours. And that is the minimum; chances are you won't see as many wraiths as you see weskers and not as mana sadakos as you see wraiths and not as many hags as you see sadakos.
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i highly disagree with that. between 2016 and 2018, maps were becoming weaker before WoO was ever a popular perk or the perk ever existed. it is known fact that survivor loops were always too strong. they were too strong in 2016 with infinities everywhere and they're too strong now where safe loops = pallet break → repeat 10x over in a match.
it is not survivor don't loop. it is that survivor are not required to loop to win because gen speed is overly strong. that is what it feels like when playing vs swf. they do one good loop and the game is over. in soloq, it varies how many 90 second chases you need to win. bad team = 3 good chases, mediocre team = 2 good chases, super strong soloq high mmr team = 1 chase required.
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Maybe you're just getting low MMR survivors in your matches. Sometimes matchmaking just can't find the right players for a match. Strong survivors will milk every loop for as long as they can.
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I wish. Whenever I play an M1 killer I always seem to get the same survivors:
"Hey mister killer look at me! Come over here look at this safe pallet! Follow me mister killer watch how many times I can run around this pallet and not drop it. Hey why are you leaving me mister killer? Don't you want to run around in circles for 5 minutes straight?"
It's downright impossible to respect pallets anymore because you absolutely have to devote 30 seconds to gradually catching up to the survivor until they smack you in the face and you finally get a chance to delete one pallet, before moving to the next.
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I always run dissolution just to prevent this as a m1 killer, they get so shocked when they dont see me break it and just die..
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Tiles are unsafe these days, better to just hold w.
Not fun either side tbh.
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Windows became more prevalent after a few map reworks, which have essentially just made maps more killer sided. Windows isn’t the reason for map reworks; people complaining about map size and tile strength and pallet density are why maps are being reworked. More players running windows is a consequence of that, not a cause.
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From my personal experience (when I play survivor), I have recently removed WoO from my build and I have found it forced me actually try to loop way more.
Survivors with WoO see yellow color and simply run as long they get away with it, because they simply don't need to risk and try to loop killer.
So I will probably use WoO only when new maps are released.
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I mean if ever pallet and window vault the walls are so short Ii legit a loss most time to even attempt looping because a t1 and t2 bl they can lunge around the entire loop if u in t3 good luck to yea sir u must have 30 ping
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I can only speak from my own experience, but I don't DC or let go on hook during unpleasant games, or games that are clearly lost, or against killers I dislike... but I will do a pretty half-assed job in chase in those situations because I have no motivation and am completely fine with being sacrificed. I'll put in a bit of effort but my heart's not in it, you know? I mention this purely because I've noticed a particular sense of apathy amongst the general survivor base in recent months and that could be a contributing factor to what you're seeing.
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You do see the negative feedback loop right?
Maps get weaker, more people use windows, survivors (who aren't actually capable of surviving without the WoO yellow brick road) aren't getting caught, maps get made even weaker, to the point anyone who isn't running WoO with the intent of actually learning the game just keeps finding themselves in bigger and bigger deadzones.
Sure gens are fast, but you do understand that having WoO eliminates any need to survey the area at all right? You can blindly jump on a gen in full knowledge that WoO will guide you.
See the negative feedback loop above.
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I mean the playstyle you should use comes down to how the game is going. If your team is extremely gen efficient then you should comp drop everything on the map. Why would you not? It's by far the safest way to play in this situation. Greeding on the other hand is extremely risky. The main reason you should greed and preserve pallets is due to inefficient teammates who don't do gens. People who think comp dropping by itself makes someone unskilled have no understanding of how survivor gameplay actually works. It might be "boring" but it is absolutely the right call in a lot of cases.
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Yeah I despise this, the millisecond people heat am once of terror radius they run corner map and pre drop everything, went against his as Michael a few weeks back it was a painful experience.
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There is nothing to loop in the modern DBD era.
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I don’t see a feedback loop. I believe maps have been rebalanced in a way to support a 60/40 kills-vs-escape split. WoO isn’t problematic, but in any event there has to be some impetus to keep survivors playing the game. If BHVR is committed to that 60/40 win ratio, they’ll continue to exercise caution with balance changes.
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I mean depends on the killer and palette, most people won't loop those new palette...gyms? Whatever they are on coldwin for long, I myself just try to stun the killer if possible and then run to a connected loop or try to waste as much time as possible with missdirections. Yesterday I played against a Vecna on father campbell's chapel and it was most of the time just more effective to run around a palette with him a few times without dropping it and let him waste his power and then run away to the main-windows or a L-T wall, there was no reason to actually loop palettes in this case.
Most people actually use loops in my games as long as my killer allows it and the map isn't too bad.
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That's a strategy used in comp DBD
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but you don't need survey area if your skilled enough to recognize all loops in the game. that's training wheel use of the perk. Like i already know what all tiles are on like 95% of the maps. just about every survivor that is high MMR has same knowledge.
the people that are high mmr that use WoO use it for its ability to track pallet drops. they remove guessing part of "was my teammate looping here or not in chase 1/2/3?". "is the pallet broken?". your claim is that map are being weakened from WoO but maps were always being weakened since 2016 because… spoiler alert, bvhr doesn't know how to make balance loop designs that aren't just safe pallets/god loops everywhere or infinity windows.
their track record for killer balance is about as bad as their map balance because they keep having to "buff killers" because they're constantly undershoot the killer's power. this is obviously linked closely to map balance.
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Yeah but again you are talking from the perspective of someone with thousands upon thousands of hours... not the perspective of your average player of DBD. Most players have to at least look at the tile as they move towards gens to work out the spawn, and I'd guess even more players havent learned the tile at all yet to even know the spawns. With a lot of hours sure, maybe you have the experience to be able to run the tile regardless of the spawn, but the vast majority of the average playerbase can't do that.
Yes, maps have been getting made weaker since 2016, but we know BHVR do a lot of their decision making off of stats. Because of this, I dont have any proof, just a suspicion that WoO is adversely affecting maps... I base this off the fact that WoO is an extremely popular perk, so it is a perk that is a regular player in stats tracking.
You're right. In high MMR it is used to determine spawns at tiles and check for used assets... at low MMR, it is used to pre throw and hold W. Majority of players are NOT high MMR, most players dont have thousands of hours under their belt. They are using WoO to supplement their lack of map knowledge, and more often not, they use it to hold W and run pallet to pallet.
If BHVR is using stats to track survivor performance when assessing/balancing maps (and I see no reason to assume they aren't), and a significant portion of the player base is using WoO this way, I don't think it's far fetched to attribute at least some of excessive map tile gutting to WoO.
I'm not stating this as objective fact, and its not the sole contributor, but I do have a suspicion WoO is having an not insignificant effect in regards to map balance.
Training wheels perk is a good analogy actually. Training wheels prevent you from learning how to ride a bike, you don't learn to ride a bike until the training wheels come off.
WoO is not healthy in its current state. It doesn't help new players learn the game, it hinders their ability to learn the game.
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I like this response.
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This paired with the high amount of hyper mobility killers, like there is no logic behind it lmao.
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at low MMR, it is used to pre throw and hold W. Majority of players are NOT high MMR.
for reference, pre throw and hold-w is common enough at high MMR. Not saying that this is always best play but in a lot of cases, it is relatively effective if you understand when to do it and how to do it.
They are using WoO to supplement their lack of map knowledge, and more often not, they use it to hold W and run pallet to pallet.
Is that not purpose of WoO? the purpose of the perk is facilitate and make up for a player's weakness. WoO happens do that extremely well.
If BHVR is using stats to track survivor performance when assessing/balancing maps (and I see no reason to assume they aren't), and a significant portion of the player base is using WoO this way, I don't think it's far fetched to attribute at least some of excessive map tile gutting to WoO.
I highly doubt it. Those map tiles were imbalanced with or without WoO. For example, Haddonfield houses were strong regardless of whether had WoO equipped or not. I don't think WoO has any impact on haddonfield houses becoming weaker. As a whole, I do not believe that WoO has any impact on map balance.
WoO is not healthy in its current state. It does help new players learn the game, it hinders their ability to learn the game.
this is incorrect assessment. WoO skips the process of learning map generation for new player. It does not necessary hinder their play besides making them attached to using the perk.
Training wheels perk is a good analogy actually. Training wheels prevent you from learning how to ride a bike, you don't learn to ride a bike until the training wheels come off.
The learning process is entirely subjective on the individual. the individual needs want to improve at a certain skill in order to improve on said skill. motivation is required. Since no one can stop a player from equipping a perk, the player can choose to never improve on map generation as they do not see a reason to improve upon said skill.
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for reference, pre throw and hold-w is common enough at high MMR. Not saying that this is always best play but in a lot of cases, it is relatively effective if you understand when to do it and how to do it.
Is that not purpose of WoO? the purpose of the perk is facilitate and make up for a player's weakness. WoO happens do that extremely well.
This is fair, and I agree, knowing when to run and hold W is a skill to learn. The frustration is that this becomes the standard gameplay with WoO, it's got kinda a Distortion thing where you can often tell who has it by the way they play. With a number of killers it can be quite annoying that you have to say to yourself "yep, hold W again, do I drop chase or do I bloodlust them down?". It's not that it's too strong too face, it's just boring.
I highly doubt it. Those map tiles were imbalanced with or without WoO. For example, Haddonfield houses were strong regardless of whether had WoO equipped or not. I don't think WoO has any impact on haddonfield houses becoming weaker. As a whole, I do not believe that WoO has any impact on map balance.
Well, maybe I'm overplaying WoOs effect, I can admit that, but it's not having 0 effect. It's such a common perk, it's probably having some kind of effect. Like Decimated Borgo is a hard map to see what you're doing even as killer... and it's very difficult to loop effectively as survivor… but if you have WoO it's almost like cheating cause it's so effective, so WoO creates a big difference in survivor performance on this map.
It's like prior to Pain Res and Pop being nerfed, it would be reasonable to say a map being reworked and made stronger for survivors during this time would be accounting for the strength of Pain Res and Pop. How much of an effect it has is debatable, but it is a factor.
this is incorrect assessment. WoO skips the process of learning map generation for new player. It does not necessary hinder their play besides making them attached to using the perk.
I think we're actually agreeing on the effect, but not the values. I totally agree that WoO improves people's effectiveness at survivor, just in my experience as a newer player, it generally makes survivor interactions much more boring... as I say you either need to keep dropping chase or bloodlust someone down.
I'm not overly passionate about WoO, it's like Distortion. It creates a playstyle that sucks to play against. It's not that it's too hard to deal with, it's just uninteractive boring.
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I think we're actually agreeing on the effect, but not the values. I totally agree that WoO improves people's effectiveness at survivor, just in my experience as a newer player, it generally makes survivor interactions much more boring... as I say you either need to keep dropping chase or bloodlust someone down.
that is true for any good looper. you'll always be in strongest positions as survivor and only risk element is you being bloodlusted down. sounds like your complaining about efficient looping which WoO does make worse loopers into better loopers. I do not see this as a problem because killer are suppose have chase capabilities to outplay said loops with killer skill from power or base-kit. leaving chases in my opinion is somewhat of a scapegoat to poor killer chase balance in which this game has long history of killer adapting to that.
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well to be fair W keying is very easy and effective and if done right wastes a lot more time and is much more efficient than looping. Overcome, Vigil, Fixated, and WoO is (in my option) a very good hold W build.
Of course I mainly do it because I’m not very good at looping as I play in the console wasteland (switch 🫠) and W keying is just way easier for me 😁
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Fair point, and that tracks and makes sense, the fact you can do this strategy with WoO obviously means you can do it without WoO, it just takes a lot more map knowledge and experience to do it.
I'm not really complaining about efficient looping, there is an argument to say that as a killer learning to play effectively, having low level players using WoO to play this way means you have effectively a boot camp where you are learning to deal with it right from the word go. I actually have a bulld on Pig centered around Game Afoot that is specifically crafted to counter this style of play... So in that regard I guess it's good thing for killer.
If I really think about it, I think what annoys me about WoO is more the fact I can't use it as survivor when crafting builds.
Therr have been plenty of times I'd have liked to use WoO in certain builds (I have fun trying to make different builds work), but as we've already discussed, WoO in my opinion makes you lazy and overly reliant on the perk, and for me it makes it very hard to resist developing bad habits... thus making it an perk I must ignore at all times. 😒
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let's not forget how useless these pallets become in the age of vecnas and draculas who can just down you with power if you drop, prevent the drop or hold power so you don't drop and just m1 you anyway
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There are many Killers that punish being at loops, and because they were way more common for a time, that's how people got used to playing.
Then they get a Ghostface or Myers who know what they are doing, a Trapper with 5000 hours on the character, or a single Wraith who is effective with their cloak and they fall apart because W-keying away from loops into dead zones helps ALL those Killers get some sort of benefit.
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