One Method to Alleviate Face Camp Distress

I've camped (as a new player, less than a month in this game) because it felt like my only option when I didn't understand the game, the maps, strategies, etc, very well at all. I grew frustrated with hooking players only to have a survivor speed by and unhook them, leading me on another annoying loop chase. So yeah, I'd stick around until they died.

Now after more time in the game, more perks, and more experience in general, I'm happy to roam. Camping got boring pretty quickly, so I moved on from it. Since then, as a survivor, I've can only count 1 game I had someone actual facecamp me on a hook, and it was also a new player. So, I wonder, is facecamping really that much of a common occurrence? Or just something new players feel forced to do because they have no perks, ability or know-how to counter survivors?

If it's really a common thing, then yeah I'm not against some sort of penalty - pausing or slowing the sacrifice timer sounds like a reasonable idea to me - but if it's just something new players feel forced into doing, then the devs need to work on something to help new players out instead and push them towards learning how to play differently.

At the end of the day, I don't really care. Camping is a crappy strategy but, I feel it is pretty easily countered by survivors.

As mid-rank survivor, I can say that yes, it is a big issue and not just amount the lesser ranks. Camping and slugging are both HUGE issues in the game. I don't go more than two games, easy, where I'm not either camped or slugged. It's obnoxious. This is why I cut my playtime to only a few nights a week ( 2/3) because I was getting so frustrated. It would be nice for some bonus...

rewards are better than punishment.

Attack the person going for the unhook of course and nothing I suggested earlier conflicts with that

Camping, tunnelling, and slugging is not the issue. The issue is the mentality of entitled survivors.

This game is not always fun, most of the time it's frustrating.

Hardcore guilt tripping killers on forums is toxic.

Just leave killers alone.

The real issue is, survivors think they deserve 3 hooks per game. Than it's 'fair'. Otherwise it's toxic.

Too many ppl play dbd w their emotions. And get their feelings hurt. And that right there, is the real problem.

"If I lead the killer on a decent chase and get face camped to death from that from the very start of the game, that killer prevented me literally from playing the game past that first chase."

Yea. That's how it is.... U totally deserve to die. U might of been having fun, imagine the frustration the killer went thru. Why do u gotta piss the killer off like that? Just stand still and get hit. If not, ur gonna get facecamped. Why are u so entitled?

"Quite literally, the survivor has 0 chance to PLAY the game."

If u are in the game, even if ur slugged, on hook, working on gens, running around for no reason, u are still "playing" the game. There is no such thing as ZERO chance of playing the game.

"not necessarily that impact gameplay, but that punish the survivor less for a situation completely beyond their control."

By ur definition of being punished. Everyone who plays dbd is being punished. Whatever ur trying to do here, will impact gameplay. U say ur not, but ur goal is to change the way, someone else plays the game.

Better way to look at it is, nobody is being punished. Ppl are just playing the game. There is no fair or unfair. There is no, I am not playing becuz I'm slugged, or being facecamped.

The game doesn't owe u anything. Game does not guarantee to give u "fun". And it will never be "fun" for everyone.

Death, is not an escape ....

While I think the natural counter to face camping is to just do gens and ignore the person on the hook, thus making the killer get very little value (and hopefully teaching them naturally that it's not an effective strategy), this sadly doesn't seem to be viable as many survivor players are just as bad as the face camper, and will gleefully rush in to their own death, falling for the most basic of altruism traps.

So I was thinking of making something akin to a weaker version of BBQ basekit. Not the BP gains, but maybe a few seconds of killer instinct instead of auras of everyone a certain distance from the hook, something to lead killers away from the hook and to something more interesting. Although I guess since killer instinct can trigger through lockers, this might actually be more powerful than BBQ, so... maybe just like a split second of aura or something after the killer is back in control so they don't miss it?

I know a lot of people don't think BBQ helps killers camp less, but in reality a lack of information most likely contributes significantly to camping. If you have no idea where to go, do you just wander and hope someone's at the first gen you walk up? Remember, campers tend to be at yellow/green and maybe purple ranks, it gets more rare (though is absolutely still not unheard of, obviously) at red ranks. So I'd say a large number of those killers simply don't have access to good information perks, or know how to use them.

It's a tough problem to solve. You don't want to heavily punish camping, because there are plenty of scenarios where it's by far the only smart play, but beyond that if you punish the killer for camping rather than reward them for seeking out more survivors, you're opening it up to abuse, where survivors might find the optimal strategy to all go hang around near the hook so the killer doesn't leave or some nonsense like that.

At that point, if they can't down, they should break chase and go find another survivor. I have personally lead killers on long loop chases that have allowed the others to complete several gens.

Well that's YOU. Other ppl want to play differently.

I feel like this is the wrong attitude to have about PvP. PvP is not about making your opponents life miserable: That's toxic.

The inherent appeal of PvP is about competition. If you win a competition, you're better than someone else (Although it's debateable if this applies to DBD, due to how intentionally out of control victory/defeat can be for you, especially as a Survivor) which makes you feel great. Losing feels humiliating, but due to the forgiving nature of video games you can always try again to chase the rush of victory.

"Making ur opponents life miserable" does not come into that at all. That's just pure toxicity and I think you should clarify yourself, because right now you sound like you go into games only to troll people??

Anything that punishes the killer for camping is highly abusable by having one survivor 'force' the killer to camp and is acutally a great example of reasonable choices leading to horrible perverse incentives: suddenly your extremely rewarded not even just for an overt hook rescue, but for overtly threatening it without doing it in a way that gives the survivors who are repairing an 40% speed buff overall to the gen repair rate. This would be crusbing and break the entire game.

The punishment for 'overcamping' is already as high as it can be. The devs have tested multople hook proximity penalties and going further than the slowed death rate and chase points penalty just gives survivors way too much power and turns hooks into arguably a bad thing for the killer. Any further and the optimal way to kill would be omni slug.

We seriously are at the point where survivors just have to deal with the killer having power over them when they are hooked. The hook, low key, is already a situation where survivors have more power than the killer, but this 'emotional magic trick' conceals it. The killer needs pretty broad discursion to defend the hook, and a core concept of DBD is that the killer is able to prevent objectives from being done in a area around them, but lacks map coverage. Any mechanic that prevents the killer from defending an objective efficiently despite being there is a bad one, which is why pretty much every 'power dynamic reversal' mechanic that allows survivors to act extremely crassly in front of the killer has been nerfed.

When they test things of this nature, the game just falls apart. This is why killer mains can be so salty. It isn't actually super unbalanced against them at the moment but killer gameplay is RIDICULOUSLY tempo based and even threats to their ability to pace the game's tempo are pretty... not well received.

And, finally, your super not obligated to get off the hook after getting hooked. If you were, again, we would be using Pyramid Head's cages for all hooks. A huge part of the hook's design is you lose all power over the game and thus 'tactically getting hooked' to do something like save a critical pallet or after a long chase where you eventually run out of resources is important. Every hook needs the potential to be your last one to make hiding and subtle play a valid playstyle and to prevent 'I am just gunna loop a M1 killer for 10 minutes' from being a guaranteed pip. And these 'emotional mechanisms' being a bit obscure is important because survivors and killers alike should not be acting 100% rationally around the hook.

You want (need even) the best players to sometimes mess up interactions, and the current hook does this for both sides of the game. If an interaction is too safe it kinda becomes a rote mechanical interaction that isn't determined by player skill at all, which kinda sucks. But hooks are an amazing skill testing tool and literally are one of the mechanics in DBD. They are a great place to start learning about game design because there is so much right about them. They are a example of how a negative event in the game feeling bad can be vital to how a game functions, they are a good example of how to make good players feel amazing with how satisfying a slick hook rescue is for survivors, the relationship between the free survivors, killer, and hooked survivor are SUPREMELY interesting, ect. Hooks are probably the last thing that needs to be messed with in DBD.

Its sorta like how once vacuum pallets were added, because people didn't like how pallets didn't protect them, suddenly all the emotion in the rest of the game died because it was so safe to start a chase late you weren't on edge or anticipating your next chase at all because it was too trivial to 'reset' chases, so survivor gameplay became 'M1 at gen' simulator. Sometimes an aspect of the game feeling bad and being something you avoid actually makes the rest of the game better. Like how getting cornered in a fighting game sucks but is extremely important to give stakes to positioning overall and its actually extremely fair that some characters can take out half your health if your in the corner even if it doesn't feel great in the moment. Removing the negativity of being hooked flattens out the spikes of positive emotion in the game of getting out of a nasty chase or the killer walking right by you when you hide because it makes the thing your excited to avoid sorta... not matter, and ultimately DBD is, low key, not a great game without the emotional intensity aspect, which isn't a dig against it so much as a complement for how much excitement they managed to wring out of relatively simple and uninteresting mechanics like 'running around in circles' simply by framing it well and making the consequences of actions matter a lot.

That's not what the word "miserable" means. Challenging someone is not the same as making them miserable. You are misusing the word and that's why I'm confused by you.

Miserable: (of a person) wretchedly unhappy or uncomfortable.

If you feel that word is accurately describing your emotions when you're stymied/challenged in DBD, that's probably not what most people feel. "Making their game difficult" as you said is a much better way of putting it. "Making their life miserable" means you're being toxic.

One way that will help: Stop trying to get Undying/Ruin nerfed.

You do realize that combo literally does nothing for a killer who face camps? It's literally only effective if the killer is pressuring gens and not camping.

That goes away, Killers will have little to no choice but to facecamp games they're behind on and hope Survivors make blunders - since this combo is about the only way killers are currently able to pressure gens vs. good survivors.

...are you okay?

You can define things anyway you want. However, game designers actively use emotional peaks and valleys (in fact they literally draw graphs of them in more linear games!) in order to make the experience work. Sometimes that includes things that are in the moment extremely negative. You try to create a healthy curve of tension that doesn't swing about too much and creates a nice thrill, rather than super huge spikes or it remaining the same all the time. This is why the glut of overly tutorialized games in the late 2000's early 2010s all feel samey and bad: They sand off the edges so much and never have any peaks and valleys, and part of why Darksouls became such a smash hit is because it was this big high budget released that re-introduced good emotional pacing back into the game industry. Heck, actually anyone who designs or writes media uses them! Its integral to how a 3 act structure works in film!

Having a game that tries to make you never feel negative is like having a roller coaster that never goes up. It isn't possible, if you literally don't have an aversion to any outcome the game can't motivate you emotionally in any real way. This is the key to how games engage you, and its why games without hard game-overs or consequences for failure other than checkpoints or a swift respawn like CoD tend to not leave much of an emotional impact through gameplay: It just... doesn't matter what you do.

Now, I agree you shouldn't make someone unhappy for its own sake, and being classy is important (which is why Teabagging is somewhat poor form but is tollerated in basically every competitive scene as a valid tactic, and toxic chat SHOULD just get you flat out banned), but facecamping is absolutely part of the mental strategy of the game. The only way the killer can win at all is to make the survivors uncomfortable, feel unsafe, panic, angry, ect. That is just... how killer is played. Being defensive at the hook to encourage a misplay through anxiety or frustration is as valid a way to force a misplay as forcing the killer to misplay by getting a good flashslight save and trying to keep them in a rage chase after for the rest of the game.

The devs talked about this design a lot leading up to the game's launch. They wanted hook rescues to be this thing that could happen but were a bad idea most of the time, and for good survivors to be really ruthless about if they wanted to hook rescue or not. Before SWF was added, they wanted survivors to evaluate if cooperation was worthwhile or if they should just try to unlock the requirements for the hatch to spawn and be in it for themselves, with most games having a bit of a mix. They added a lot of tools to punish 'over-alturism.' Its part of the game's design, deep in its DNA, just as the killer panicking due to time pressure or over-tunneling and blowing the game for themselves is. It is literally the main way to reach loss condition of survivors, and removing that pressure which helps killers reach a point where no one is working on gens... breaks DBD because it forces killers to, again, slug, which is LITERALLY WHAT HAPPENED any time they tried to make camping worse than it is now.

I can't stress this enough, defending the hook is super vital to DBD working, and attempting to make it worse is a very selfish thing to advocate for. Your SPECIFIC displeasure at being hooked being removed is not worth sacrificing the GENERAL tension of DBD and turning the game into an M1 simulator again. We JUST got out of M1 simulator territory after over a year of a change based around breaking all tension in the game to avoid letting the survivors have an even minorly negative experience at any point in time, lets not go back.

The game will only feel good if your allowed to get WRECKED, and the killer has that power to WRECK you, because that makes your power to stop it and your ability to do so actually feel good! Every chase with the killer needs to feel like it COULD be the one that ends the game if you misplay it and do something like get hooked near a critical gen, or lead the killer to someone else right as you go down, or all sorts of things. You need to CARE about the consequences of going down, and that means you can't be entitled to get back up. And, indirectly, the killer needs to use that negativity generated by a survivor going down to pressure the other players.

AGAIN, if it was not intentional for the killer to utilize their knowledge of the survivor's location and ability to stop unhooks against the other survivors to pressure them, we would just have Pyramid Head's cage system on every killer. But we don't. There is a reason for that. Its because killers are supposed to be able to exploit the survivors altruism if they notice it, and there are already SO MANY tools to punish killers for sloppy defenses. The mechanic is designed to get you emotional and sloppy, its doing its job and advocating for that aspect to go away is hurting the core gameplay loop of DBD.

And obviously the game isn't at a place anymore where the survivors having NO tools to rescue when the hook is being defended works. SWF, despite warping the design a lot, was a good idea, and Borrowed Time (post nerf) is a really good design. But hook camping is at the weakest it can be before we go to slugmania. And at a certain point, its on the survivors to accept they literally CANNOT achieve things if the killer refuses to allow it and will sacrifice literally everything else to ensure it. Hook camping not being possible basically renders the killer entirely powerless and destroys their agency, turning them into almost a toy for the survivors rather than a player making choices in their own right, because it removes one of the ways killers can punish survivors if they correctly anticipate their behavior.

Teabagging and toxic chat is not gameplay. That's online harrassment mostly survivors do.

Facecamping is a strategic gameplay. The Devs have defended this very clearly. Why do u think insidious is a perk?

Again, it's salty survivors trying to guilt trip

the killers to play a certain way.

A invisible "rulebook" made up by survivors.

Everyone knows this. U keep spinning and spinning w the same argument that's been debunked.

Facecamping is a terrible experience for the survivor on the hook that disproportionately negatively affects solo queue survivors who cannot communicate they're being facecamped and increases the odds of survivors suiciding on hooks so they can actually play the game instead of just being on the hook and getting no BP. it's absolutely horrible for the same

And you don't get to say "killers like to play a certain way, don't guilt trip them" well that's not fair for the survivor: Because they don't get to play the game. the killer can just say "nope, you're never getting off this hook, no chance for you to earn BP" and that's unfair. Anything a survivor does does not permanently prevent the killer from playing the game, but facecamping is basically like dying, except you have to waste a few extra minutes while mashing spacebar. it sucks and you should be able to admit it's bad design if you cared about what both players are experiencing.

"Distraction" points for the hooked survivor sounds good actually. And make both struggling phases a little longer.

Suuure. Let's fix all game balance issues with perks, we have unlimited perk slots, right? In DBD perks are not supposed to be run just for fun. I want an FPS boost perk. When I run it, I get +20 fps, so I don't have to play on low gfx to get smooth skillchecks.

I'd say : (1) take a pause; (2) play another role; (3) remember you can't control what other people do; (4) Watch this video with tips about how not to get tilted in dbd:

Pretty good suggestions from Otz.