Letting Survivors Leave, Forcing Killers to Stay: What a Perfectly Fair System
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Starting to think my take wasn't so hot after all, huh.
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Pushing survivors out isn't any more agency than hatch standoffs were.
Sure, but I don't see how that's relevant. We're discussing the agency between a survivor on the floor and a killer when survivors are in the exit gate, base kit. Ignoring that some killers can actually get kills in the exit gate, a killer has the agency to force the survivors to leave under threat of being hooked. In comparison, the survivor base kit cannot do anything except crawl. My point against OP's was this - survivors get the abandon feature because there is nothing they can do if the opponent wants to waste their time. Conversely, the killer can attack the survivors to force them to stop wasting theirs.
And if its not over yet, then why is it ok for survivor abandon to ignore so many perks and mechanics that can be used to prolong the game for them?
The real answer is because BHVR is lazy and didn't want to program a system that would check every single edge case to make sure survivors didn't have a way to come back. If it were up to me, those edge cases would be included in the system, but it's not up to me.
I will never understand the selective nature people use regarding what they consider player agency, as they never seem to reconcile between sides.
I mean, maybe this is just a difference of opinion. Agency is the player's ability to influence happenings within the game. When a survivor is slugged base kit and the killer wants them to bleed out, that survivor has zero agency in the situation. Crawling and recovering are their only options, neither of which will change the outcome of waiting 4 minutes. Killers in EGC have plenty of agency though; ignoring the possibility of kills basekit and assuming a killer like trapper, I can still prevent a 2 minute time waste. Now, if you mean agency as in "the killer has to watch the opponents teabag or waste 2 minutes", then yeah, there's nothing you can really do about that. But I don't think being teabagged (or WS'd by the killer) is enough to warrant an abandon in any situation where that can be the outcome.
This is something that absolutely needed addressing, which is why it always baffles me what the line is for people when comparing the roles. Is it the duration? Because killers can absolutely have more than 4 minutes of their time wasted through things like excessive hiding. They can do it for up to 10 IIRC. The lack of movement? If survivors could zoom around at sprint burst speed on the ground but were unable to escape or interact toward their objective in any way until the match ends, would that somehow be better? How about if they could actively grovel for the same amount of time it takes to swat multiple survivors out? We should have a better solution that addresses the unified issue of
one side being able to stall victory to waste their opponent's timerather than multiple smaller ones between mechanics like abandons and self pickups that very clearly favor one side in consideration.Again, it's the agency that comes from this being an asymmetrical game. Because of the way killer works, they have agency in any time wasting situation survivors will never have by way of always being able to injure, down, and hook them. An equivalent situation for killer would be one of the old exploits where you could sit below a drop and the killer drop and then would be stuck on top of your head, unable to do anything and completely at mercy of the survivor below them until the server times out or they move.
In lieu of that, they could at least try something like (off the top of my head) allowing the killer to close a gate and auto eject any survivors in it out of the match if, say, 50% of remaining survivors are in it. That way if its just one, smack em, but if its a matter of lingering in the safe zone, pushing out can be done more efficiently. It could even lead to situations where any remaining survivors who get left behind form a "second round" to endgame. Maybe adjust the EGC timer or show any remaining survivors the gate switch auras for a few seconds when it closes to give them a chance to come up with a gameplan. Ideas like that obviously take testing and ironing out, but again, not even on the radar.
I wouldn't mind something like this heading to PTB. Would be interesting to see.
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I guess it is a hot take because almost everyone seems to utilize it. It's rare in a killer match that I win that someone doesn't abandon. I recently tracked my stats and 21% of my opponenets abandoned. That was likely almost everyone who the option even showed up for.
When they first announced a surrender option, I thought it would be an in-game thing, like I could run up to the killer and stab myself in the throat or use a spell to summon the Entity for an end game timeout-style death. But just leaving the match sucks, and it deleting the loss from your stats sucks even more.
Even in valid scenarios I rarely touch it. I got humped by a Ghostface for over three minutes recently and just tolerated it. Also had a Twins slug me for the 4k and leave me that way until seconds were left. I'd much rather an in-game reaction to crap like that instead of a match-deletion option.
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I don't think an abandon option is warranted when the killer can push the survivors out, that's my opinion. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
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I don't agree with that abandon condition either, but the way I understand it, it's meant to be a "this survivor has been downed 3 times, if the killer was hooking they would be dead" as a form of preventing time wasting via 4 man slugging until bleed out. But we already have an abandon if everyone is downed and your team can still help you, so not sure why that feature is here. It has ruined so many easily winnable games.
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The survivor can skip the mori because the survivor already had the abandon option for a long time already. Mechanically speaking, its quite hard to disable the abandon ability. It's not suddenly the survivor gaining the abandon feature. And to be fair, so what? The game is literally going to end the same way for you at that point. Either way you will have the mori, the only difference is that the survivor isnt watching the mori with you (in which case, why do you care that the other player has to watch your mori?)
For killers, the moment survivors are able to unhook a teammate in the case the killer is camping his 1k, they are going to abandon, despite it being possible to still turn the situation around and gain a kill (survivors dont always pick the best pathing, I've seen many people die after we managed to unhook someone and were in a situation to basically guarantee a 4 man out, yet someone decided dropping a weak pallet and vaulting it twice was a good idea, they cant abandon when the other 3 survivors escape normally).
So at what point do you introduce the abandon feature for killers without effectively removing 10-20% of the game? With survivors, most abandon options dont matter. You would always pick them up for hooks anyway, or you would always bleed them out. You would always have to mori. And even in the few other cases where abandon appears when IMO it shouldnt but because there are edge cases, the survivor gets replaced with a bot and you still get to play and none of the gameplay gets removed or impacted much untill 2+ survivors were able to abandon (in fact, the bots can be harder to deal with than the real players)
I can understand survivors camping in the exitgate, but then at what point do you introduce it? They could be healing inside the exitgate for a multitude of reasons, perhaps going back to rescue their teammate on a hook, but you're a killer who does have the capability to down survivors if they are slightly too far removed from the exitgate. And even if they do manage to implement that, the same survivors who now edgecamp the exitgate, would just slightly stand outside the exitgate so you cant abandon.
It is functionally impossible to add in an abandon feature for the killer on top of the current ones, because the killer always has agency. All survivor abandon options are because they remove player agency. Even the slugging 3 times exists, because basekit endurance doesnt exist on pickup.0 -
So then survivors shouldn't be able to abandon then.
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And to be fair, so what? The game is literally going to end the same way for you at that point. Either way you will have the mori, the only difference is that the survivor isnt watching the mori with you
They aren't just skipping an animation though. It makes a difference internally. When you abandon, you don't get a death on your personal stats despite losing. As far as anyone can tell (based on the limited info we've been given) you also don't lose MMR, and the killer doesn't gain any from you. You've basically removed yourself from the match entirely and left a blank void behind. The function is quietly throwing matchmaking and data out of whack.
All survivor abandon options are because they remove player agency.
This isn't always true. I've had bots use Deliverance to hop off the hook or use Unbreakable to get up before I could hook them. Some people just can't be bothered to keep trying even when there are still options.
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At no point should killers be forced to have to force out survivors who refuse to leave without bming the killer. Having an abandon option for this situation is fine. Otherwise there would be no point in adding the abandon system for all survivors slugged, because survivors could always just waited out the 4 minute dying state timer.
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Foreward: Some of the wording might have come off a little annoyed, but I couldn't really think of a way to retread some of the stuff from earlier and its been a long day. Its not intentional, so apologies if anything comes off as such. A lot of it seems to stem from our definitions of agency itself, so that makes both arguments more subjective.
Sure, but I don't see how that's relevant. We're discussing the agency between a survivor on the floor and a killer when survivors are in the exit gate, base kit. Ignoring that some killers can actually get kills in the exit gate, a killer has the agency to force the survivors to leave under threat of being hooked. In comparison, the survivor base kit cannot do anything except crawl. My point against OP's was this - survivors get the abandon feature because there is nothing they can do if the opponent wants to waste their time. Conversely, the killer can attack the survivors to force them to stop wasting theirs.I entirely disagree on that based on agency as a concept. See my previous posts in the topic about it, because I even gave examples of how the way killer "agency" works would look on survivor. You're too focused on the asymmetry that you're missing the commonalities, and if I'm understanding you correctly, your concept of agency is limited to
your character does things when you press the buttons, maybe tertiary bonuses like BPmore thanyour character can make meaningful progress without relying on their opponent actively allowing it.I've already gone into my stance on agency in this topic a bit earlier, as well as explained how checkmate scenarios exist for killers, but think of it kinda like this: If someone in an FPS takes the lead and then glitches out of bounds so their opponent cannot kill them, that doesn't stop the opponent from having any of their mobility, actions, or even have input be taken from them. It simply removes their objective from being possible in that scenario, creating a dead man walking loss. Kinda like in an old point and click adventure if you forgot a key item back in chapter 2, but the game didn't have the decency to just finish you so you could reload and not waste time. Both sides have the ability to have their agency taken away in both micro and macro play, but as soon as it is taken for the remainder of the match, only one side gets to leave while the other gets to balance patience and potential humiliation.
The real answer is because BHVR is lazy and didn't want to program a system that would check every single edge case to make sure survivors didn't have a way to come back. If it were up to me, those edge cases would be included in the system, but it's not up to me.If its lazy, unfortunately that doesn't make it justifiable. Half baked plastifixes solve one problem to cause 4 more down the line. They could easily have exceptions for the mechanic based on portions of a loadout, even if they were as lazy as to just disable it in the presence of specific perks on a per survivor basis. But again, zero effort, zero thought, and zero announcement of planning.
I mean, maybe this is just a difference of opinion. Agency is the player's ability to influence happenings within the game.I think that would be better described as input. Using the TF2 example, you can do pretty much everything except shoot (even stuff like double jumps iirc) and it removes any and all effective impact you have on the game. By your definition, your agency would be being able to run into the enemy to get killed faster, or attempt to hide and get found instantly 90% of the time. Just like how swatting out at the gates could lead to a hook or kill, but that is a fringe case that, past a certain point, specifically requires the survivor to allow it to happen. I specify that because as my posts point out, I would only really be ok with killer's getting the ability to specifically abandon in checkmate scenarios, not checks like the survivors currently can.
When a survivor is slugged base kit and the killer wants them to bleed out, that survivor has zero agency in the situation.Haven't been able to play for a bit, but did the anti slug get scrapped as well? I know they were tinkering with it and making it even better, but haven't been keeping up with how much gets kept and how much gets thrown out lately. If not, then no, that would be a check as long as there are means to be picked up (teammates are basekit) and would require any and all ability to be picked up to be a check mate (even all 4 down is still technically a check, though it could be a checkmate if zero survivors had any means through perks to pick themselves up) as even a single perk like UB or Conviction across the whole team (always remember, survivors are the shared agency role) would be enough to keep reasonable potential for a reset. Hell self unhooking would as well, and while something like the AFC version probably wouldn't do anything, deliverance or wicked could lead to a reset. Then you add perks like resurgence to give the reset and even better chance.
My point is a real checkmate would be all 4 survivors in the exit gate, positioned so they will fall past the exit gate when downed, and there is no basekit solution to that for killer. There isn't even really a perk IIRC, just specific killer powers and addons if memory serves. This absolutely can reach those levels on the survivor side, but that type of checkmate is far more strict than how the disconnect system works.
Crawling and recovering are their only options, neither of which will change the outcome of waiting 4 minutes.And if two survivors decide to forever hide, at any point in the game, they can delay the game for up to 10 minutes per remaining gen and/or regression event. Killer gets bored after 9 minutes and decides to kick a gen to flex their "agency?" Just added another 10 minutes to the timer. People seem to think killers can never have checkmates because they carry a weapon, when survivors have an objective that doesn't even rely on one.
Killers in EGC have plenty of agency though; ignoring the possibility of kills basekit and assuming a killer like trapper, I can still prevent a 2 minute time waste.We have differing opinions on what constitutes agency, so I can understand your reasoning. However, the thing about your definition is that it ignores concepts like checks and checkmates entirely, as well as all the examples I've given in the topic. If you are playing something like a fighting game and you got touch of death combo perfected every single round, how much agency did you have? How about if you get spawncamped the entire game in an FPS? You start with agency until it is robbed from you, its not just your inputs moving a character onscreen, nor is it purposely walking to your doom to speed up your your loss of the match, which is why I've brought up TF2 so many times.
Now, if you mean agency as in "the killer has to watch the opponents teabag or waste 2 minutes", then yeah, there's nothing you can really do about that. But I don't think being teabagged (or WS'd by the killer) is enough to warrant an abandon in any situation where that can be the outcome.What I mean by agency is that the player has zero realistic ability to have their personal input influence the game in their favor, most notably toward their objective. If a survivor can't use any action commands on gens or other survivors, they would have limited agency since they would still be able to interact with the killer and resources. If they lost that as well, and could only move, they would still have the ability to sandbag themselves but would have zero agency. The only possibility they would have of a positive outcome would require their teammates to use their agency to compensate for the lack, as they would be unable to physically advance their goal and the only impact they could have would involve the killer willfully giving it to them (chasing them and ignoring the rest of the team enough for gens to be finished, or being ignored and having a shot at hatch.)
Again, it's the agency that comes from this being an asymmetrical game. Because of the way killer works, they have agency in any time wasting situation survivors will never have by way of always being able to injure, down, and hook them. An equivalent situation for killer would be one of the old exploits where you could sit below a drop and the killer drop and then would be stuck on top of your head, unable to do anything and completely at mercy of the survivor below them until the server times out or they move.Basically, the main source of our disagreement is about the application of the concept of agency to the game. The interesting thing is that this was exactly why the anti-tunneling mechanic bombed as bad as it did, that type of baseline couldn't be established by the community nor the devs (even though they apparently know a third way to tunnel, but just trust them bro.) Also, now that survivors can abandon in so many non-checkmate situations, it kinda kills this argument. And can you not think of a single situation where a killer cannot "injure, down, and hook them?" People have known how to position themselves to fall out of the exit gate for years, its basekit, only specific killers can do anything about it, and it makes it impossible to ever hook or even pick them up. Thats nowhere near as extreme as things like OOB, locker clipping, or immobilization exploits (which are pretty much all gone, thankfully.)
Again, I feel like the main source of the schism is coming from your definition of agency. You keep switching around on whether even simple mobility and input recognition is what determines it, yet survivors still have that when crawling. They only lose that during animation locks (like the killer pickup animation) but they are always able to relocate as well as crawl through the hatch if it has spawned and they find it. The latter of which straight up nullifies both the loss and the win for their opponent, so while niche, I would argue it's technically still more agency than swatting out at the exit. At least you have luck as a potential to see your goal rather than having to rely specifically on your opponent willingly giving it to you.
Just think of it this way, the more variety a game offers you, the more agency you have. Multiple endings, multiple characters, weapons, all of those extrapolations allow the player to have more direct control over how the game plays out for them. Your literal button input is much smaller than your overall input into games themselves, and it goes beyond the mechanical. Agency is essentially choice.
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When they first announced a surrender option, I thought it would be an in-game thing, like I could run up to the killer and stab myself in the throat or use a spell to summon the Entity for an end game timeout-style deathI always thought it would be cool, if any kind of proper concede option was introduced for killers, that it would be something like chanting at a shrine to the entity in the basement or something. That would actually go kinda sick with any kind of idea that would do something like reclosing doors or ejecting survivors. But I like that idea, any type of surrender option goes best with an animation, even if they're just something goofy.
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Yeah just something engaging that's part of the game. I'd really like more magic in the game as well. I love hex/blessed totems and invocations, even if I rarely engage with them myself. I want more like that.
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what alternatives do you think would be fair to cut down on the varying degrees of hopelessness for killers in situations where they would want to abandon?So this is always a tricky question because it gets into what I would do vs what would be an equivalent for the killer based on what the survivors have.
My opinion - I don't have a huge problem with surrenders (if they are marked as loses and not BHVR's weird process), and actively support them in a game with a design like DbD. I think a surrender option that is way too early can destroy a game, but if the killer had the option to abandon when the survivors where in the gate I'd have no problem with it.
Fairness - I think the survivors being in the exit gate would be equivalent to the survivors on the ground, but I don't know if it would be worth BHVR's time to code if the end result is a survivor just sits outside the exit gate with sprint burst and the whole system becomes moot.
I just really want to know how people define agency. I've seen it defined a few different ways, but I've always attributed it to An individual's ability to impact the outcome of the game they are playing in a meaningful way,That's a good definition, meaningful can of course be a little subjective, but any definition will have that.
I suppose someone could define it more in terms of what you as the player can do. So a slugged survivor can't actually engage with much, while a killer can still do all the killer things even as the survivors stand in the exit gate.
I should add: agency is the not primary reason I support the abandon system, though I get caught up in that argument based on the 'if BHVR did X for Y then they need to do X for Z' points. Mine is that once a game has become pointless, i.e. the chance that one side or the other can come back is astronomically slim, then unless the ending of the game is almost immediate after that, people should be able to end it.
That's a fair point. Though it would be weird/funny if killers ended up getting nerfed because tbagging survivors were so frequent they increased the kill rate.
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