So, camping. An idea to chew on.
Just tossing this out there to see what people think.
Every survivor gets two hooks guaranteed. Your teammates can rescue you early, but if they don't, the entity swallows you and you travel to a spawnpoint (random placement on the map, invisible to the killer, no auras for anybody - think demo's upside-down travel) where you choose to spawn, injured but alive and healable. After your second unhook/spawn, you are permanently broken and cannot heal to uninjured (for a total of three strikes with increasing difficulty). If you are downed in this state, the killer moris instead of death hooking for the sacrifice. Final survivor hook state timers are decreased by 50%.
I think this would reduce the value of a hooked survivor for a killer while also reducing the pressure on survivors to unhook - the two main factors that promote camping (and tunneling). To compensate for the increased survivor safety on hook rescues/spawns you introduce the vulnerability after the second strike, further encouraging killer roaming and hunting behavior, while also introducing some variable game states for survivors to influence decision-making over the course of a match.
Plus I feel like killers feel scarier when they actually get to, you know, kill you.
Psst BHVR... you could even make microtransaction non-default mori animations if they were actually part of the core game mechanic and not a scummy cheese item. I'm just saying.
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This is an interesting concept, it is a pretty big game changer. Point alottment would have to change as well but it would definately change the camp/tunnel culture that is so rampant currently and I love the idea that 3rd down is a mori not a death hook. Both scarier and more fun.
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Yeah this is a suggestion made outside of bloodpoint considerations, which is just a spreadsheet decision more than a game balance one. You'd also want to tweak hook and repair timers too, as now their function would be to remove a survivor from gen repair rather than to provide a window for rescue.
It'd also severely reduce the value of unhook perks for survivors, but I don't think that's a bad thing as that meta is pretty stale.
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Than bubba will be completely useless. Buff bubba first lol
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Okay but there's a glaring issue: attempting escape decreases your hook timer meaning you can just attempt escape to get teleported within seconds of being hooked the first time so the Killer immediately loses said pressure.
Then during the Struggle phase what happens if you stop struggling? do you just die? do you get teleported early again? if the latter that's even more pressure the Killer just loses.
Final survivor hook state timers are decreased by 50%.
Also whatever this exactly means, going to go with Struggle Phase because death hook has no timer meaning you only have to wait 30 seconds to get teleported your second time.
So no, unhooking would have zero benefit when they are just guaranteed to get off the hook and possibly allowed to do so within seconds.
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@Nurgling7 Well, ideally you would free the killer to apply pressure more directly to the gens since they wouldn't need to be concerned about hook rescues as much. No pressure to proxy, no time wasted running back to an unhook location.
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This is why the idea would fail. Another idea was to have the first sacrifice stage last indefinitely, which removed all pressure to unhook and forced the killer to roam. It was a ######### show, with survivors having zero incentive to unhook, and thus could rush gens without a care in the world.
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@Golden_spider Yeah I'm envisioning no self-unhook attempts or death struggles. Final survivor timer refers to the last one not needing to wait the full minute with no rescue possible, but also giving the killer time to stalk to likely spawn choices.
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That's a very good point, but I do think it's addressable - and needs to be anyway as a committed gen rush is already a giant problem in terms of overall game balance. Hook pressure is more of a bandaid than a solution, and just encourage the exact kind of killer play nobody really enjoys.
I personally think Hex: Ruin 1 should be the default generator state and a weaker Pop should just be base kit. If virtually every killer needs to run gen slowdown perks as a default that's probably a sign that gen slowdown mechanics ought to be a default.
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Sure but then you have another issue of Luck and Deliverance not allowed to work because you can't attempt, or keep it in and have already presented issue of getting teleported within seconds. (Lesser issue of perks like Breakdown and Slippery Meat also becoming MUCH less useful)
Also thank you for clarifying, but still no.
Your the last Survivor and got hooked, the game is over and doesn't need to keep going into "go immersive and find the hatch/open a gate/wait out the EGC because spite"
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You can't damage gens that are already regressing. That also wouldn't solve the issue, which was well summarized by @Nurgling7.
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Right. Okay. I don't mean literal Ruin and literal Pop. I mean the way it should work is that gens should automatically regress just as a normal thing and you should be able to kick a gen after a hook and make it worse whether it's already regressing or not. However you want to word it I think killers should have more tools to injure generators as part of their base kit, so that it would require more commitment to specific generators from survivors and less viable to just spread out and work as many as possible at once.
And the idea is to reduce the occasions where it is 1 hook, no chase, 1-3 gens, 1-3 save, cause that's where the game fouls up. In an increasing number of games it feels like either survivors get mad because they can't unhook under a hovering killer or a killer gets mad because the gens are done before they can do much of anything. If it was consistently 1/1/1/1 we wouldn't have camping/tunneling or genrush issues, but the hook mechanics don't actually encourage that as there is so much value placed on the vulnerable, static survivor on the hook and gen progress is relatively permanent until 3-gen.
Brainstorming - what if a pre-spawn hook rescue returned a healthy survivor, even after second hook? The mori on third down I think is still a pretty good way to incentivize healing states, and spawning injured and/or broken would be a less preferable outcome.
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If you want to solve camping, you need to do two things:
- Make it more rewarding for the killer not to camp than it is for the killer to camp, keeping in mind that survivors rewarding camping by not working on gens is what makes it worthwhile for the killer.
- Keep the pressure on survivors to unhook.
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An interesting idea but as said above removing the pressure hooks create just makes killer have a harder time keeping gens at bay..even the top tier killers would suffer massively if hook pressure was taken
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@Orion I do want to make it clear that I am approaching this not as an argument but a conversation - game design thought experiments are fun for me and I do appreciate the back and forth. This isn't an "I disagree hear me internet roar" sort of thing.
In fact, I do see exactly where you are coming from and it presents a challenge. However, I don't agree entirely with your two steps.
The most rewarding thing for a killer, period, is to have a survivor dead - not just for seratonin and adrenaline release, but also because a dead survivor can't work on gens. That's not likely to change no matter what our fantasy DbD looks like, as it's a horror game and the killer's going to need to want to kill at the end of the day.
The easiest way to get a dead survivor is to hit one who is already injured. The easiest injured survivors to hit are the ones who are standing still. The easiest injured survivors who are standing still are the ones who are standing still in a place you know about. That's what the hook mechanic currently is. Now, a smart killer knows that just pulling survivors off of gens to rescue is valuable - but only because it buys him time for more hooks (more death pressure). Hook pressure is great, a 3v1 or 2v1 is worlds better. A less smart killer (which is probably the vast majority of players) is going to overvalue the snowball a death creates and feel far more pressure to at least hang around the hook. Even your top-tier guys will often slow-foot it away from a hook.
What I would like to try and figure is how to make that death pressure move away from the hook. The more you pressure survivors to unhook, without doing that, the more you increase the pressure for the killer to stay nearby - at least half the survivors are there and at least one of them is going to be vulnerable. You can't make anything else more rewarding than that. You can bandaid it with protection hits and second chance perks but that only does two things: one, it makes the killer frustrated because he's getting punished for doing what the game essentially is telling him to do by putting such an obvious scenario in front of him, and two it puts the survivors in the same place as killers as far as gen slowdown is concerned. What's the point of having so many perks if the meta is objectively so much better than anything else? It stagnates the gameplay.
I think to fix that core gameplay loop you need to accomplish the same things as your two steps but with a slightly different perspective:
- You need to move the most vulnerable survivors to where the killer needs to hunt for them, while maintaining reasonable vulnerability (in other words, don't make it so easy for them to be at 100% as if they were never hooked)
- Survivors still need a good reason to choose not to repair gens. Because you (and others) are absolutely right. When survivors have nothing to do but repair gens, they just win.
So to modify the idea based on your feedback we mix in current mechanics:
Survivors don't unhook, instead they place an offering to the Entity that takes the same time and location as unhooking currently does. The rescuer stays at the hook. The hooked survivor then travels to a random spawn location of their choice (similar to demigorgon upside-down travel). If they are rescued in first state, they spawn healthy but broken. A rescue on second state leaves them injured but broken. On third down the killer moris as a sacrifice to the Entity. If the survivor is not rescued the Entity takes them as currently set up.
This would make slightly less hook pressure as the unhook zips safely away, but would still require a teammate to activate. It would create more death pressure map-wide, however, as each hook makes incremental progress in the killer's ability to down the next, so he is hunting for the snowball instead of waiting for it (whether by camping/tunneling or outlasting gen repair).
Post edited by JustCats on0 -
Thats not how any of this works. When you hook a survivor and go chase snother survivor, a third survivor has to come off the gen to unhook. Youre pressuring 3 survivors at once when you either hook or slug. Thats why camping is a bad idea, because when you face camp 1 survivir youre only pressuring 1 survivor. This idea screws good killers
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Yup, you're right, and why I posted for discussion as I was thinking a bit too narrowly. We probably posted at the same time-ish.
Modified the idea to require a teammate to rescue, but keeping the spawn away mechanic. To compensate for that element of immediate safety, they spawn broken and increasingly injured/vulnerable.
As I mentioned to Orion, I am legitimately interested in the discussion and don't take offense to criticism so I am curious if you think that would make things better. It would still change the meta approach for killers and survivors, but I think it would make the game more frantic and tense for everybody while reducing the incentive to camp/tunnel.
And I am 100% a killer main and not looking to make the game harder or more frustrating than it already is for killers, lol - I personally don't think camping is a huge problem as it's basically a killer forfeit unless the survivors play into it and I also don't believe "tunneling" is a thing as going after injured survivors is exactly what a killer should prioritize. I do, however, see the point that both of these things can be incredibly unpleasant for survivors so I am just brainstorming (for fun, I don't think too much attention is really paid to these kinds of posts) how the mechanics could be tweaked to make things better for everybody.
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I think if you do that you kind of screw the unhooked survivor. As theyre now left in the middle of no where with no way to be healed.
As far as camping/tunneling is concerned im not sure theres much you can do about it as there are situations where those strats are legit and even necessary.
Tge only thing i can think of that would be fair is if you reduced tge number of hooks everyone needs down to 2 instead of 3 and then force a failed state if the killer is with 24 meters of the hooked survivor for more than 15 seconds. But even then youre kind of screwing the pooch because what if the nearest hook is right in the middle of the 3 gen?
I think the best approach is for people to stop seeing the game as a 1v1 and start seeing it as a 4v1 as it is. I had a baby wraith camping a teammate a couple of games ago, hed been camping the whole game so i traded hooks with the guy and once there was room suicided so they would leave (doors were open) and not risk giving him a 3k. Ive been tunneled numerous times today, never once did I get tilted about it. Its part of the game and as long as my team is doing gens the killer is getting punished for it.
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Right, you trade the current danger of being unhooked where you are injured and the killer knows exactly where you are for the future danger of having increasingly less margin for error in your next encounter with the killer, but it's on fairer terms.
It also gets you in a position to get back to work on gens faster as a tradeoff for being less safe in general.
I'm not sure it necessarily favors one side or the other.
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