Is it Time to Remove the Killer’s Red Stain?

No.

As others said before the red stain is a really good thing since it gives you the ability to mindgame with it, also removing it would make ghostfaces power less usefull, since it does not exist no anyway. Also different gameplay mechanics for different kind of players sounds terrible, you would not need to bother learning red stain mindgames anymore.

As for bloodlust I think the mechanic should go, as it rewards players for playing terrible, also getting bloodlusted at a rather safe tile for a minute does not really feel good, the killer does not really deserve the hit/down if she just follows you for almost a minute around a tile until he is fast enough for you to not be able to loop it anymore, just a terrible mechanic overall. If you cannot get a hit at a tile with your skill and current movementspeed you kick the pallet and move on. It also hinders players from getting better since they don't need to evaluate how long it would take them to get a hit and if it is worth continuing a chase or kicking the pallet and leaving since they are guaranteed a hit after xy time anyway.

I don’t think you’re intention was positive. I think you just got rolled by a survivor group, and you want to change the game to make it easier for you.

Not only is hiding your red stain a part of mindgaming, showing your red stain can also be used as a mindgame to bait a vault

No , why ? because the game will be even more Unbalanced, Red Stain Is the base of Gameplay

opposite, it would buff killers at high-level play but do nothing for low-level. a 5 hour survivor is not going to know how to use red glow to there advantage while 5000 hours survivor pays close attention to red glow and uses it to loop. Another one of those hand-holding survivor mechanics.

I could see them making a self-aware type perk but for red stains.

Should scratch marks go?

I dunno on what level I play. I do know I play mostly against a mixture of competent and very skilled survivors who know all the basics and some more.

My red stain has allowed me to win more than a few mind games against very good players. The knowledge of it existence brings double mind games to the table. When I have undetectable, skilled survivors tend to wait on the safe spots until they can see me, which makes chases longer overall.

Newbie players, as you state don't usually understand or attempt mindgames related to the stain, so the survivor simply gauges the killer distance and movement direction with it. Remove and they will get bamboozled in low visibility loops and get ambushed or camp the pallet like dummies. Which is why undetectable is very strong against new Survivors.

"like you can already hide your red stain by moonwalking"

Most loops have no way to hide the information either because the killer is too tall or because the loop has nowhere you can hide the light. Show me on an autohaven tile set where you can do it. Ok how about corn maps? Nope.

But WHY should the killer need to do an extra step and hide their light? As an observer looking at the game for the first time it makes DBD look like you're watching a Scooby Doo chase scene montage.

Seeing the red light is a level of free information that is on the level with :aura reading.

-"Punishing somebody for playing your game a lot doesn't seem like a good idea"

Do you understand the concept of training wheels? The red light mechanic is 100% a hand holding aspect of the game that should "go away" with the option to keep it on - if you still need it.

Looping as a survivor is mostly a joke because you always have this gleaming red light ( that some player abuse but I'm not allowed to elaborate due to moderation) to tell you exactly what to do.

-"So if it goes it should go completely and that would be harder for newer players who already have it rough against killers and barely make a difference against experienced players as they go against killer who know how to hide their red stain"

Low level players dont understand what it means to be that close to the killer nor do they look behind them when looping or throwing pallets.

Again I say: Keep the red light as an option that is always available as a generic level three perk. If you still need the training wheels red light perk bring it - but in so doing you give up a perk slot forever.

That would be fair to the killer.

As a thought experiment consider what would happen if there were no red light. What would happen? Which part of the player base would be most affected by it?

The best players would lose the ability to loop as well as they do now and would probably lose 20 or seconds of chase time. The bad players would still loop poorly but be caught a few seconds faster.

What would that do to the game? It would allow you to "standardize" chase time. The game is a complete mess in terms of balance because some people can loop for a minute and some people can loop for 20 seconds before getting hit. Gens are however standardized. The lack of chase standardization is one of the things that holds this game back.

Why would that matter? It would allow you to fine balance chases because you know the best players can only loop for X time. If you still don't understand why this would be good for the game then you need to "sit out".

I don't think it will be worth the effort

The kind of survivors killers struggle against are the kind that are used to killers hiding their red stain and don't rely on it. Removing it will do nothing for killers in those matchups

And the survivors that do rely on the killers red stain are the ones who most killers pubstomp anyway

It won't be fair to the killer cause it won't be helping them where they need help

"I don't think the red light is training wheels... The red light really does not reach that far so I simply don't understand the issue you have with this mechanic."

So then it won't matter if we remove it. I'm glad you agree. You can't have your argument go both ways - lol.

"Also it would also affect killers in a negative way, by showing or not showing your red light around a TL wall you can make the survivor vault or not vault when pulled off properly, by removing the option you removed an option for the killer to influence survivors behaviour, why would you want that?"

This is incorrect and it is telling that you don't understand this. Survivors have the ability via perfect positioning on blind loops to avoid a hit by standing in the correct place and waiting. Removing the red light would delete these safe zones.

You know how a Huntress can zone you at a T/L? Well now all killers would be able to do that because you dont have omniscience about where they are coming from.

Overall the killer would be much less predictable which would raise your adrenaline levels while being chased to something that you might not have felt back since your first month as survivor.

Your argument makes zero sense.

Removing the red light vs bad players wont' do much - ok this is correct.

Removing the red light vs good players wont do anything. This is wrong because most skilled survivors depend on the light mechanic to know where to go in a chase. You would have to 50/50 guess every time. That's the problem with DBD in that you never really have to guess at most 50/50 events which is why survivors can loop for 40-60 seconds without getting hit which breaks the game at high levels of play.

There is a paradox in DBD that you're supposed to get caught making mistakes when the killer forces you into a 50/50 event. The red light prevents you from making the wrong choice. A perfect example is the killer shack. Everyone knows how to loop it because they can see the red light. Remove the gaps and remove the red light and suddenly that building becomes a blind 50/50 event.

The devs were laughing with their faces when they said : just do a mind game. This was because they knew that their game design didn't really allow for killers to perform a "fair" 50/50 mind game at most loops.

Let's look at the sequence of the discussion.

1. You said you can just moonwalk.
2. I said that doesn't work on most of the game tiles
3. You said that doesn't matter and suddenly flip flopped. I called you out for flipping and then:
4. You wanted to pull a reverse as if I changed my position when in fact I have the same position.
5. You are the one who suddenly suggested the right light "isn't a big deal" but were adamant enough about not wanting it to be changed that you made a post to state your opinion against the idea.

The red light gives a ton of free information that should be turned into a perk. This would make the best survivors "lose one perk" or make them weaker in loops. It would not hurt low/middle skill players. That's exactly what DBD needs to make killers like Trapper viable (along with that you nerf Nurse/blight because they are too good and SWF too).

Using my quote against me doesn't really work. I said the red light gives a ton of free information : which is far better than most of the aura reading perks in terms of information. You're trying to say that it isn't a big deal so we shouldn't bother changing anything.

-"That is a really stupid explanation... Yes survivor players of different skill levels loop the same killer for a different lenght of time... Artificially making better players worse to fit them in a box with worse players is a terrible idea"

Most games do this to the top 10% of players who are in some cases 50% to 100% better than everyone else. They level out the top possible skill so the best player are still the best but they make them only roughly 20-40% better than everyone else. World of Tanks is a perfect example (remember DBD follow the FTP model too). Good players turned their tanks in response to enemy barrel movements to make enemy shots bounce. It was very common for good players to only get hit about 20% of the time when in 1v1 combat with lesser skilled players. Meanwhile 80% of their shots would hurt the enemy. The result was that you regularly had "unicorn" players who killed 5 tanks per battle. This completely broke the game in terms of the business model because these highly skilled players actually could play for free. They were almost unbeatable by another unicorn and made the game really unfun for the average player.

Back to DBD : why should you ever play trapper IF you want to win games and complete challenges since Blight Nurse exist - Assuming you can play all three very well? There is a very real problem with DBD in that most of the killers have a skill cap that is surpassed by survivors who have more play time and are better players. Nurse and Blight are free of that restriction. If you want to flip a magic switch and turn that off post the idea. Blow my mind. Otherwise the very simple fix is : turn off the red light "for free" information and let people keep it if they think it is worth a perk slot.

Alternatively we could just make the rule : Every killer except the best two killers has no red stain as incentive to make people want to play those killers instead.

"If you really wanted to standardize things how about we start with maps and take out some RNG of them? How is cowshed in the same game as shelter woods? How are some maps completely hit or miss when it comes to the map generation and others like cowshed or RPD or the Game are always broken in the same way."

This is a coherent argument and a very good point (on which I agree). DBD should not have maps that are designed to be unfair to most of the killers unless we are also willing to have maps that are also unfair to survivors. Did you know for example that the original shelter woods had a 76% kill rate? Even in the era of "infinite windows" it was a death trap because there were very few pallets (almost all were unsafe) and there were very few windows to attempt a window infinite.

Ah yes survivor was "buffed" so much relative to killer last patch that Otz decided to "take the gloves off" because he was more frustrated than ever at the state of play. Remember this is a 9k hour player who is no longer playing "nice" due to recent game changes because if he does he will lose/have extremely frustrating games.

Overall lower tier players and mid tier players have a better experience with the 6.0 changes but the game is definitely worse for killer at the upper end of play (and got even worse by the 6.4 patch that nerfed Wesker/MM/Legion by proxy and by that time introduced a perk to finish generators in 40-50 seconds).

That has nothing to do with killer or survivor, cutting down base game mechanics to re introduce them as perks is just plain stupid.

Red light for scratchmarks. Same reasoning. Same stuff applies. Why should killer get training wheels and free info? Oh no. Scratches should stay, because they provide free info to killer side... Because 60% kill rate is just not enough for some entitled killers. Because my side deserves 4K every game...

No red light should stay. It provides skill interactions on both sides. I would much rather have interesting interactions to do over flipping a coin. Go play windows mines if you want to be able to win every game. Go play rock paper scissors if you want the outcome of the game be random.