Discouraging Trajectory (Serious Discussion)
I'll start this post off by saying that I play both survivor and killer. Please, before you comment anything negative or nasty, read the entirety of the post.
Edit: Also, 10/10 love the game. Would buy it again if I had a use for a second copy.
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It was recently mentioned that in a future update, further support for Survive With Friends will be integrated. That's great, I personally hated having to recreate a lobby after every match. It didn't take long, but it became a hassle to do. Personally, my friends and I play for fun - making silly plays, throwing insults at each other for making horribly wrong decisions, trying weird builds and helping each other to try to make them work, and so on.
During my time playing killer, I have gotten to the point that I will wait upwards of thirty minutes for a match without any more than two people that are friends. I despise playing against people in a lobby together. I realize that they aren't all bad, seeing as how my friends and I don't take it all that seriously while we are together, but the large majority seem to. Survivors who play together can completely undermine a good portion of the killers' powers and perks. Survivors can tell each other when it is safe to hop on a generator, where the killer is at (at almost any point in the match), when it is safe to unhook, when it is safe to bait a killer in another direction, when it is safe to start breaking the hex totem, and plenty of other scenarios.
Killers already have a hard enough time keeping up with generator progression. While one survivor is being chased (and mind you, any decent survivor can keep up a chase for a solid 15-30 seconds - even upwards of a couple of minutes if a good chunk of pallets are thrown), the rest should either be working on generators or making their way to position themselves for an unhooking.
Generally, you can expect at least one generator to be finished after every one to two survivors are downed. This is at the very least. Plenty of times I have had multiple generators pop before my first down, simply because the survivor I chased took the optimal route and there was nothing I could do about it. You may say, "Well stop chasing the survivor and apply pressure elsewhere." To that I respond, "I could, but then the last minute and a half I spent chasing this survivor has been wasted as they run off to heal and start on a generator elsewhere."
You see, survivors who put down killers for using the perks given to them (such as Hex: No One Escapes Death or Hex: Ruin) don't understand that we aren't doing so out of spite, or because they are powerful. It is absolutely a requirement to slow down generator progression, otherwise we have little chance. Hex: No One Escapes Death is terrible for growing your skills. It rewards undeserved kills. But if it keeps us from de-pipping due to the unavoidable gen rush (I hate using that term by the way - it isn't even the survivors' fault, they are just doing their objectives), then we'll take it.
Some survivors go as far as to condemn certain killers because they are "too good." More often than not, it is the killer's add-ons and the player's skill that make the killer as powerful as they believe them to be. Not a single killer as of now is in "too good" of a spot, but there are definitely killers that are better than others and absolutely killers that are in "too bad" of a spot.
Killers, in order to do well against survivors, can only do so by capitalizing on their mistakes. Sometimes survivors make them themselves, and other times we have to pressure them into making mistakes. The statement still stands - we cannot do well if survivors do not make mistakes. The overarching path a match takes is decided by survivors, not killers. It really is demoralizing to play as a killer and have such inconsistent games. Whether it is your hex totem being broken within the first couple minutes of a match and being rendered a useless perk slot, generators being finished faster than you can down your first survivor, survivors having such optimal pathing as to even last that long so often, or even having survivors communicating everything against you.
If you play survivor often, please - think about your past matches that you feel went well. Not your past escapes necessarily, but your past matches in which you felt your team did "win" (however you define "win" is up to you - maybe it is having at least two escapes, or maybe scoring above a particular score). How many of those wins were because the killer played that poorly? How many of those wins were because the survivors didn't make many mistakes? How many of those wins were because the killer, despite trying their best and not necessarily making poor decisions, was flat-out unable to gain a foothold on the survivors? I would bet that most of those "wins" were not because the killer actually played that poorly, but because they never had a large enough chance to gain ground.
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This post touched on a few topics. I'll try to summarize it and a few other issues the best I can in the following list:
- In even somewhat efficient teams, generators can go by far too quickly for the killer to keep up. This isn't a rare occurrence, it happens often. Generators don't need to be made longer and survivors shouldn't need to do more generators. Honestly, generators aren't exactly fun to do - it's sitting in one spot, occasionally tapping your space bar. First, make generators a little more active - adding an additional one or two zones to tap during a skill check, or at every fourth interval, providing a series of five difficult skill checks similar to Snap Out of It (without the downside of notifying the killer for failed checks, but still forcing them to be completed to further progress the generator).
- The killers needs to be balanced in such a way that they can gain ground on the survivors a little more reliably, rather than relying on them to make poor decisions and hoping that they can carry it on. This could be done inadvertently through the other points on this list. One suggestion is to make generators regress a bit faster, as it all it takes is half a second for a survivor to stop one from doing so.
- Killers' add-ons need to be looked at across the board for balancing issues. I understand that higher rarities of add-ons should be better, but there are some that feel completely unfair. Whether or not the killer can "win" by using them is still up to the survivors and killer, but large in part, they feel very cheap to use. The Nurse comes to mind as one culprit - her add-ons are extremely powerful, and just a VERY SLIGHT nerf to them would bring her back to realistic. The Iridescent Head is still far too powerful as well, as it is often ran with another add-on to increase the number of hatchets that can be carried. Spirit's Prayer Beads are used more often than her ultra rare add-ons are, and provide hardly any counter-play other than very close attention to killer location at all times. Killers should be INHERENTLY powerful, not relying on add-ons quite as much for power as much as they should for variation. The Hag is a great example of variation from add-ons.
- There are a few killers that are almost impossible to play well at higher ranks. You can say that content creators often post gameplay doing well with them, but they will often do multiple takes to get a game that is suitable for posting. Killers that need to see some buffs or reworks are Wraith, Legion, Clown, Pig, Plague, and Doctor. I understand that a couple of these killers aren't necessarily that bad, such as Plague or Pig, but for a large part they very easily fall behind with a competent team. Just keep in mind that killers are very volatile when it comes to buffs and nerfs. A great place to start would be to consider applying one of their add-ons into their base kit. For example, Wraith is severely underpowered and is one of the most "bullyable" killers in the game. A nice place to start with him would be to add the Bone Clapper or The Ghost add-on into his base kit. For Legion, this wouldn't be quite as easy. His potential for tracking and first-hit are great, but otherwise, he suffers from a huge inability to apply potent pressure or even down survivors efficiently.
- Rework hex totems to be a little more reliable, even if it means simply preventing them from appearing as lit until a certain point in the match or giving them a chance to be transferred to another totem. Honestly, this is low priority compared to the other items on this list.
- Give killers an advantage when facing survivors that join in groups. Faster bloodlust, faster generator regression, or something else.
- I'm pretty sure it was mentioned to be in the process, but please rework points for survivors to make them more appealing to play for bloodpoints. Also, on the same topic, allow for survivors to gain pips through specific play styles rather than being forced to play from every angle.
- Like the survivor issue, make pips a little more forgiving for killers. At the moment, even for games where you played very well, it is possible to not pip.
- Could we please have the ability to block players from joining our lobbies / block the match making system from putting us in lobbies with specific players? At higher ranks this would be especially useful.
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Apologies for the long post. Hopefully I've reached some of the big concerns of both sides. I realize this post may seem biased toward killer, and it somewhat is in terms of how much of the content speaks of them. Killers are, in theory, really fun to play with their unique powers and strategies and such. I'd like to be able to keep playing them from time to time, but it's really discouraging to play them when I see how easy it is to play as a survivor. Have a good one my dudes. Hopefully this isn't immediately buried.