No player elimination concept

RpTheHotrod

A lot of the common complaints always revolve around getting eliminated from the match. It's less fun to sit around while you're buddies keep playing, and if someone gets eliminated in a party, it's not uncommon to see their still alive friends throw the game so the match can conclude and they move onto the next. Despite the popular view of the contrary, and the end of the day, this is a party\casual game - and the devs clearly don't balance the game at the competitive levels.

With that being said, what if we threw out the whole concept of player elimination? Now hear me out. First, let me get this out of the way - I play BOTH sides, but I primarily play killer (as most of my friends don't play DBD).

I'd suggest we distance ourselves from the concept that every survivor is out for themselves and not acting as a team (while many actually agree with this, the devs have stated on multiple occasions that it is NOT a killer vs survivor team but the killer vs 4 individual survivors). The idea is that survivors will entirely lose their hook stages. That's right - but again, hear me out. The goal of the survivors is as it is now - to power the exit gates and escape. However, the killer's goal is to get a certain amount of hooks - let's say 9 hooks, but could be higher if need be. Every time a survivor is hooked, the survivor team loses a "life". As the hook count increases, the map becomes more and more "Entity'd" like how the map looks once the endgame collapse starts. As more hook stages are gained, the match gets more and more intense looking. If the killer is able to secure 9 hooks, then the entity is satisfied, and the entity takes any remaining survivors and the match comes to a close. HOWEVER, there's some obvious downsides to this with how unhooking works at the moment - namely tunneling off hook or just focusing on the weakest link. To combat this, once a survivor is unhooked, they are essentially sent to the void temporarily for 30 seconds (think halloween event but no "treats" there). Afterwards, they are ejected out and appear back into the match again in a place distant from the killer. This makes it impossible to keep tunneling someone right off of hook. It also gives enough time for the killer to swap his focus to other targets as opposed to continuing to target the person who was just hooked. During the endgame collapse, everything is on the line. If anyone is hooked during the endgame collapse, they are immediately sacrificed. Yes, that's player elimination, but it's literally at the final moments of the match, so there's no sitting around waiting for your friend.

The downside that remains, I welcome some discussion on. Since the team wins or loses together, avoiding hooks will be important. That makes going for unhooks risky, as trading would actually be a really bad thing. Should the unhooker have some sort of protection after an unhook, themselves? Additionally, I have not made considerations on extended slugging plays (ie leaving people slugged for minutes on end).

If kills are no longer a thing except during the EGC, and instead the game entirely focuses on hooks, the killer would feel less compelled to just focus on one person constantly - especially with them being entirely out of reach for 30 seconds after getting unhooked - and even after that, would have to find them. Instead, the killer would quickly just go after another survivor. Targeting the same person over and over just wouldn't be realistic anymore.

ALTERNATIVE - You could also do where once the killer reaches a set amount of hook states, then everyone becomes on death hook - the next time you're hooked, you're sacrificed. However, that essentially can bring back mid-match eliminations when otherwise the match would have ended with the original idea.

I'm not saying this is a great idea, but an idea I'm pitching out to get away from so much chaotic balance decisions being around tunneling people out of the match. Thoughts?