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Please killer's hook counter
Yes, we already know there is a hook counter. We also know that it doesn't help.
I would like the killer to be able to see the individual hook counts for each survivor, just like the survivors got in 4.5.0.
I'm remember the developer answering about this, I mean from Q&A 2021/2/5.
Q.Why is the hook counter on the killer less informative than the hook counter on the survivor?
A.We were concerned that it would facilitate the tunneling of the killer. Also, the killer's task is to remember the survivor's hook count.
I am still not satisfied with this answer.
First, I think it is a big mistake to say that hook counters promote tunneling. Just because you can see hook counters for each individual, killers who tunnel will tunnel and killers who do not tunnel will not tunnel. Regardless of who is hooked and how many times they are hooked, they need to find that survivor and make the chase in order to tunnel. It is the killer who plays to tunnel, hook counter or no hook counter, that does it.
I tunnel or don't tunnel depending on my mood; while doing the 8-hook-0-kill challenge, I'm thinking in my head, "0-0-1-0.... .0-1-1-0.... .0-1-2-0... .0-1-2-1..." Isn't it silly?
And it's funny that memorizing the number of hooks in Survivor is a killer challenge. When you play Survivor, you don't have the memory, so you need to be told how many hooks your allies have, and the Killer needs to do it because it's his assignment. Why is it that when you play survivor your memory disappears and when you play killer you need memory?
I think this was sophistry on the part of the developer. The presence or absence of a hook counter does not affect tunneling. A tunneling killer will tunnel with or without a hook counter.
Then in 4.5.0, at the same time that the survivor hook counter was implemented to help survivors with no memory, the now nonsensical killer hook counter was implemented. It seems as if the development was a tacked-on damage control to giving hook counters only to survivors.
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Yeah I wish they add that I sometimes kill survivors accidentally not knowing they were on death hook or they did get 2nd stage on first hook. Counter would help getting 6-8 hooks before killing anyone.
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Anyone who is tunneling knows exactly who they are targeting and their hook states. They don't need to worry about anyone else, until they become the next target. Those of us who don't tunnel however, have to keep track of the hook states of all four survivors at all times. This often leads to tunneling accidently.
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At the very least, an indicator when someone is on death hook when they're in the dying state would be handy. Like a flashing skull over their portrait.
I usually avoid tunnelling as much as I can, and try for 8 hooks before anyone dies, but I often accidentally hook the wrong person, either because they've confused me, by playing the same survivors, or I've simply lost count of hooks, maybe because someone got to 2nd stage and I didn't notice.
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A killer who is tunneling is gonna tunnel regardless of the hook count
Having a hook count will allow me to let survivors go when multiple BPS are used without me having to risk feeling bad if I inadvertently take one down. I do my best to make sure I don't but it's easy to lose track of which Dwight I've hooked twice and which one I hooked once and a pain in the butt having to look at the counter and figuring out how many hook states are left when I'm unsure sucks.
I've never heard a good reason why killers don't get that info while survivors do.
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I still think the excuse of "we can't give killers individual hook counters because it would facilitate tunneling" was one of the lamest excuses ever pulled in DBD balance history. If someone wants to tunnel, they are going to tunnel. Hook counter be damned. All reserving the individual counter does is make life more painful for people who want to 12-hook or otherwise want to avoid tunneling because then I have to keep track of everyone's hook states to make dang sure I'm not tunneling—and even then that doesn't work because they're all playing Claire and I can't tell them apart anyways.
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Lol at "it's the killer's job to keep track of the hook states". This is a great snapshot into the mindset of the balance team. The killers have to remember all the survivors' perks, have to guess if they have Unbreakable, wait out a Dead Hard that doesn't exist that could get the survivor enough distance to reach a pallet, etc etc. While for the survivors, they get spoonfed exactly what perks the killer has constantly. Undying notifies you when your aura is visible, Dissolution notifies the survivors when it's active, Huntress Lullaby tells the survivor when it's in play immediately, NOED totem is revealed very quickly. Lol. Everything in this game is hand holding for the survivors
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I'd love a hook counter. I've been doing BP farming/tanking my mmr the last couple days and I keep accidentally sacrificing players because i lose track of hooks.
Plus it'd be nice to know when playing those troll teams that all take the same character and skin.
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For me, I mostly keep tabs of the survivors in my head. But if things turn sour and I need to tunnel one out, the hook counter is probably the last thing I am looking for.
Quite the contrary hooks mostly matter when I try to not kill some survivors and just maximise hooks without anyone dying or wanting 8 hooks before I kill und first one orf .. its then that accidents happen and my goldfish brain either miscounted, I mix the survivors up or I didn't notice someone slipping into hook stage 2 earlier.
I fully believe that a true hook counter for killers would save more lifes then would end.
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From a balance perspective it was not fair to give one side knowledge of how many times everyone has been hooked and to deny that information to the other side.
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This is a pretty biased post, but sadly it rings true.
I wouldn't say that everything is spoon-fed to the survivors, especially with most if them still being soloQ and unable to communicate with one another, but the information discrepancy between the two roles is staggering.
What really irks me is that survivors basically have more knowledge about the killers power then the other way around. I know its done in the name of "preventing tunneling", but really, with the exception of Plague all progressing killer powers only give binary information to the killer, ie "this suevivor is infected/cursed/bleeding" or "they are fully infected/cursed/now dying", where as survivors have all the granular information in between.
This really feels like it's backwards then how it should be, ie a power should add a certain uncertainty to the survivors, an "oh damn,I'm infected, can I finish this gen or will this be too tight?", but survivors have the full information and knowledge of everyone involved, leaving he killer completely guessing at the progress of their own powers.
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I find that the lack of a hook counter has lead to more accidental tunneling than has prevented it entirely. A person who tunnels will always know what hook state their victim is at, but it is way harder to keep track of hooks as the game goes on if you are not trying to tunnel.
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Totally agree. This was another one of those super lame excuses that we always get from the devs when they just don’t want to do something that the community is asking for
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Just happened again. Tried to spread my hooks out but had two Claudette's. I thought I had hooked each of them twice, because I was at 7 hooks after hooking a Claudette who was at 2nd stage, and I was sure I'd only hooked Steve once. I hook Steve again and he's dead. Nope, must have gone to 2nd stage on his first hook and one of the Claudette's was only hooked once.
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To be fair, a lot of that is to equalise the amount of info solo and SWF have access to. Withholding that info would hurt solo survivors a lot more than SWF.
And knowing if a survivor has certain second chance perks basically invalidates those perks anyway. Imagine if every "pick yourself up" perk announced itself like No Mither. You'd never get to use it.
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Would be nice to see hook stages on a killer side, but since I am able to change survs names to default character names -- I always remember how much of each got. Unique names however were making it much more difficult.
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Ghostface and Dredge provide more info to the killer about their power than survivors. You know if someone is 99'd on their stalk meter, or if Nightfall is about to start. Also Myers and Oni to an extent, and you could argue that the ammo gauge gives Huntress/Trickster info the survivors don't have, though that's starting to stretch it a little and next after that is 'Spirit knows when her power is recharged but survivors don't', so it's definitely a scale of 'how relevant is the information'.
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It makes no sense anyways.
I can play Hostage Doc and drag the game out to 59 minutes just to mori everybody at the end and I still pip. I get rewarded by playing the absolute most braindead and boring build the game could possibly offer. Tunneling is only a problem because too many people haven't found out that Doc is the real SSS Tier killer.
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I would rather they remove hook counters entirely, for both survivor and killer, than give killers this information.
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What's the downside to giving killers this information?
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It's just more handholding and will 100% be used by people to make decisions on when to hook or slug, tunnel or not. There have been plenty of times I've played killer and thought "oh good, I can get this Dwight out of the game now" so I focus on him then hook him and realize I was mistaken because I wasn't paying enough attention. With hook counters under each survivor I can just shut my brain right off and let the game do the thinking for me.
Same thing applies for survivors and knowing "oh he's dead on hook, I should absolutely stop working on this gen and do everything in my power to stop the killer from getting him" or in end game "damn, that survivor is on last hook, might as well just go out the exit to avoid a possible Blood Warden play." I don't need to think about that anymore, the game tells me.
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YAS!
I need this so bad. I killed a poor Feng, who was a cutie pie the other day, by accident. Her dumb team let her get to second hook when I was planning to let them all live since I'm only doing challenges. Needless to say, I got mad when I saw her soul fly up into the sky and moried (devour hope) her teammates for letting her get to second stage on first hook.
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Yes please!
If I can two hook everyone I am happy... The problem is I am really dumb and can never keep track of who has been hooked and who hasn't.
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The killer manually hooks every survivor. The survivor portraits tell you exactly who has been hooked. All an accurate counter shows you is a short-hand, so you don't have to remember the events of 1-2 minutes ago.
This quality of life feature is seen as helpful and right for survivors, who all get this information at through the old system.
This quality of life feature is denied to killers because of the tunneling strawman. If a killer is going to tunnel, they're going to remember the survivor or at least the spot on the list of which one has been hooked already.
The disparity is a simple representation of an underlying design philosophy: the power role is expected to struggle with as many in-game elements as possible to take the pressure off of the team side. Trivial things like the hook counter are just one layer. Memorizing which breakable doors are traps (they actually make loops BETTER for survivors if broken), letting survivors use the same character model with identical skins to obfuscate the intended target, scratch marks not changing for better contrast on bright maps despite their original design for 100% dark maps... these are all gameplay choices that are made specifically to make the game feel worse for killer players.
And this philosophy carries through to the macro level. Look no further than modern killer power design. Virtually everything is Hard or Very Hard these days. The belief appears to be: if a power is easy or fun to use, it is a design failure. That killer powers must be a challenge to overcome for the killer, or else they must be objectively bad (poor controls, very slow wind-ups, insane cooldowns, etc). And even when they ARE hard to master and punishing to use, the survivors must be granted as much or more information than killers get on the powers (knight's patrol path, Pyramid Head's warning beam).
It sucks.
It's a crummy philosophy to say "one side must fight against the game itself as much or more than they get challenged by the other side."
Post edited by Adjatha on6 -
Wow, you just hit the nail square on the head and drove it home like there was no tomorrow. Cudos.
I already said my piece, so I'll just add a small addition to the last part of your comment: I remember seeing all this content creator's videos and streams of Wesker, how plain fun it was to just charge around the map and smack survivors into things or yeet them into the scenery. It was beyond awesome.
And after the PTB he feels just sluggish and cumbersome. Yes, smashing and flinging is still fun, but it's also hard and at release his hitbox was impossible small. Now it somehow is okay-ish, but he is a far shot from the beer-and-pretzel smash-and-grab playstyle:(
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Enjoy Wesker while he lasts because they are going to nerf the hell out of him and make him clunkier and unfun as hell like Pyramid Head and Deathslinger
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It would absolutely promote tunnelling and with the current condition of the game in solo queue that would be disastrous...
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I've said this exact thing before. I agree let the killer see the hook counter. I do the same counting thing in my head lmao. The 0-1-1-0 stuff lol. It is completely wrong to think that not seeing hook states will prevent tunneling. If I want to tunnel someone out I dont need a counter to do that. However if I am stomping and want to give them a bit of a break then I'll seek the 12 hooks. So not having the counter just makes "nice" killers accidently tunnel when they arnt keeping track.
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Anyone who thinks an easy-to-read hook counter would provoke more tunneling doesn't understand what it's like to play a killer.
You make the call to yourself what you need to do, what you're capable of doing, and what the survivor team is likely to allow you to do. Having a quick-reference for numbers you ALREADY KNOW do not factor into any part of that decision.
If you want to reduce or eliminate tunneling, you need to make systemic changes to the game because guess what: the best path to victory is making the game 1v3 as quickly as you can. Full stop. And that means: hunt the weakest player as fast as you can. It's why real life predators go for the sick, old, young, and feeble. If the intended goal was to spread out hooks as much as possible, the game would look MUCH different than it is today.
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I agree with everyone. When they say that having a hook count would facilitate tunneling, I think they really mean it would facilitate strategically choosing the best person to target in endgame or something, but the point of sharing that info with survivors was to facilitate strategically protecting that person -- shouldn't both sides have access to the same strategic info?
All players have equal opportunity to know who's been hooked, so they should also have equal opportunity to use a tool that helps them remember, IMO.
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I wanna take your advise to heart, but I am also a Pyramid Head main and have mastered his clunky ways. To me, he is the hight of killer fun and hitting a Feng with a blind shot through the shack wall and getting accused of hacking is balm on my t-bag-ravaged killer heart.
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This topic is starting to infuriate me in how it always gets dismissed. Would an individual hook counter for killer help with tunneling? Sure. But killers can tunnel without that counter as well; it's a quality of life thing that we pretty much deserve at this point. The devs and community are extremely biased and hypocritical in this. "The killer's job is to memorize the survivor's they've hooked. It's not that difficult." *Smokes their Sherlock Holmes pipe* But if you try to apply the same logic to the survivor hook counter, which they have, "It's a necessary qol change that's been needed for years!" The absence of this hook counter for killers hurts mostly players like me, who mean to get someone out, and would win if we could do that, but we accidentally play like a saint and hook everyone twice before we get another out. It's not only demoralizing that you can't win that way, and instead have to tunnel someone out, but you just think about how it all could have been avoided if you would have had that hook counter. Survivor never should have been exclusively given that information. It's unfair. It should have been given to both sides.
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Glad to see so many positive responses. (My post has been edited by the developer, and I apologize if some of my wording was not good.)
In fact, I presented this idea in a Japanese forum. It was right around the time the hook counter was announced at the same time as that really bad UI.
(By the way, the Japanese forum has been shut down indefinitely, so I am here to play on the English version of the forum, which is the English version of the forum. I love you all)
Now, my argument is the consideration that the current killer hook counter is pointless and that the possibility of choosing tunneling would be the same with or without a personalized hook counter. And I wanted to have an individualized hook counter for the killer.
If I could make one additional criticism of the current hook counter, it would be that the current hook counter is nothing more than a hook progress meter.
I am anxious to see how this statement is translated.
The term hook counter gives the impression that it counts the number of times you hook. But now the hook counter increases as the hook progresses; if there is a survivor who DC'd, the counter goes up by 3. Why do you call this a hook counter?
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Im not really pro killer hook count so I can't really say much. I'm fien without having it.
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Survivors should know who on what stage... they are the ones saving and getting hooked
And the Killer shouldn't know whos on what stage cause they need to be doing other things... Kicking Gens, chasing other Survivors, remembering who brought what, how to capitalize on what perks they brought, whos injured, whos healthy (so yea they need it more then Survivors do at this point)
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I'm pretty sure you're the only one who doesn't like this my guy
Real tunnelers don't need hook counters to know to tunnel that ash out the game
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Tunnelers will tunnel regardless of a hook counter or not, the only thing this would effect is killers who go for 8 hooks without killing anyone
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Seriously I get so mad when this happens I slug the teammates who were ignoring and doing gens, and bring them to the hook they died at so they know why they are getting slugged to death
Toxic maybe but can't just let that slide. 1 slip up changes the whole game
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I agree. Killer hook counter wouldn't make a difference to killers who tunnel, but it WOULD make a difference to killers who specifically try to AVOID tunneling.
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Ok👍
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The counter on the hook for killers is a good idea because it would allow killers who want it not to tunnel by accident, period.
You've done thousands of lines but this is the only viable answer in the end.
We know that the counter will help the killers who basically want to be nice to the survivors.
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OMG I accidentally tunnel people out of the game all the time, especially when there's 2 of the same survivor in similar outfits. I'm just not good at keeping track of everyone's hook states while playing killer. I genuinely try my best to not tunnel basically all the time, but because I can't see who is on death hook I definitely knock people out early sometimes.
If I had a hook counter on killer it would be super helpful to prevent accidental tunneling, not promote tunneling.
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Just today I got a DC and tried to hook everyone else twice before letting them "off the hook" (;D). The last one was a coin toss because I couldn`t remember if that Kate got hooked once or twice ... well, she got lucky and survived the experience, but that could so easily have gone wrong.
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(And the devout emblem is still bugged...)
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