Chests

I'm so glad you pointed out some ideas I need to clarify; I made this post somewhat in a rush, so I'm not surprised I overlooked some things 😅. I usually open a chest every survivor game too (in fact, I tend to run Pharmacy for free medkits when I escape), but chests tend to be underwhelming when the item isn't a functioning key. I originally designed this rework to address the scenario where an injured survivor needs a way to heal before going back to work on gens or start a chase with the killer, but the rework ended up being something much broader than that. Whenever I'm in that injured survivor scenario (without Pharmacy), I start looking for chests, but what usually happens to me is A. I get the wrong item and B. the item is of worse rarity than the item I'm holding already, so the chest search was a waste of time. I wanted to make chests more reliable and helpful to survivors so that decisions could be better made on whether to search or not search a chest in a situation. Survivors would be able to spot a common medkit chest and decide to search that one over the rare toolbox and very rare map chests.

From there, I thought that this would be a great way to fix the key economy issue that some killers complain about; I could label each chest with the type of item is inside and just have the chest decide rarity. That way, killers could know if a key was going to be in play before it would ever become an issue. Additionally, through the way the rework is designed, burning coin offerings visibly affects the likelihood of a key in a match. If not survivor burn a coin and the killer burns any coin offering, there is a guarantee that no keys will be pulled from chests that trial. Rather than directly addressing the key-hatch interaction, the changes promote usage of offerings to sway the outcome of the match. From my understanding, it's the RNG that killers most dislike about keys found during the match, and this rework minimizes that (I should probably make the key numbers more impactful to further reduce randomness, that is: raise the numbers with more chests and lower it to zero with less).

I'm not convinced on chests re-rolling their loots myself, but I thought I'd tentatively include something in there. In the best scenario, it would causes survivors to loot more chests more often, decreasing the pressure on the killer for kills while not giving any significant advantage to the survivors (preying on the gambling mentality). In the worst case scenario, it just gives more opportunities for items given for free to the survivors. I would love to see it in a PTB before anything went live.

I've always thought that it was silly that I could pull a completely unused Ranger's Medkit from a chest and heal myself twice with it. I included the damage to items to reduce the impact pulling any item from a chest has on a match. My desire for items not to have full charges when pulled from chests arises from my annoyance at pristine items emerging from chests and from the knowledge that pulling several (e.g.) toolboxes from chests can have a significant impact on the outcome of the match, especially if the killer is trying to three-gen.

Why this improves the game

The proposed changes serve to reduce the randomness of chest loot and minimize the impact that they can have on the match. The changes also serve to give killers more information on survivor items and allows survivors to make more decisive choices, and both of these effects grant players to perform informed decision making and give more weight to planning and forethought in trials. In addition to promoting more offering usage, the changes will hopefully also change player mentality when it comes to viewing keys from chests.