Is this HUD outrage real?

Im assuming it's real. Im exclusively killer and have noticed a pretty big difference in the difficulty of my games. Game times are down, surv efficiency is up, and I'm personally securing less wins post HUDdate.

That being said i think its a good change for the game, but can definitely understand there being salt.

It used to be that very efficient survs were also pretty skilled in other areas and certainly had quite some game knowledge. There were hardly any lost headless chickens or survs running into dead zones by accident etc.

Since the HUD update I noticed that suvivors overall have become more efficient. - And survs being forgotten on hook and going second stage or even dying has become a rarity. Which in turns affects how matches feel overall. The killer getting a lucky kill and snowballing from there cause the surv team is completely uncoordinated kinda doesn't happen anymore. - Which is a good thing.

That being said tho, I don't know if I like the current race for efficiency (genrushing vs either efficient tunneling or efficient gen stalling/regression) - but it seems to be what we're headed for.

its just your typical "the other side received more attention than mine this patch" over-reaction. The complaints will more than likely die down pretty soon

it depends on if the players that are survivors know how to use the information. this community is super casual for the most part.

to be honest it's a good feature to add assuming that survivors are going to be nerfed slightly.

it's just that in a game where a match is often decided by a matter of seconds knowing who's being chased, who's repairing generators, who's being healed etc. is insanely important.

let's say you spawn in - see two players start working gens immediately and their progression rises at the same time - you know as a survivor that they're on the same gen. let's say you see that you're the obsession so you want to potentially use that to your advantage - you choose to engage the killer (meyers perks make it so killing the obsession is bad) you see another player is in a chase (indicated by the pulsing spider legs) so you start sprinting around the map looking for the player being chased knowing that the other two are doing gens.

this kind of information is way more than before without comms or aura reading perks/items.

same as with the down and recovery meters.

when a player is downed you'll see how much progress they have till they're able to be revived with the new recovery meter indicator. and you can see if someone is healing the downed player or if the killer is in a chase.

it takes a brain, but it does provide an advantage.

All the killer players I know still win almost every single match pretty decisively. It really hasn't changed much at all. I haven't played a ton of killer recently myself, but in the rounds that I did play I also haven't noticed a big difference.

The idea that the HUD changes would have bumped "solo" to "SWF" play couldn't be sillier. For starters, the issue with inefficiency in random groups has always come down to randoms just being pretty bad and... unclever at the game. Like, the concept of "touching generators" isn't novel, you don't need a HUD icon to realize that doing the one singular objective in the game is probably a good idea. And yet randoms almost never do with any dilligence or let alone efficiency. The HUD info doesn't change this, most of the time it if anything just makes solo feel even more hopeless because you can instantly see just how useless people are.

And that's just with regards to the simplest, most obvious aspect of the game. The icons really don't help survivors navigate much more difficult scenarios, such as hook camp and gen control scenarios. The amount of coordination an SWF group on voice comms can have in these and a thousand other scenarios is worlds removed from whatever the icons can provide. Preemptively deciding who goes for the unhook and when and from where they may best approach in relation to the killer location, calling out killer perks, add-ons, whereabouts, behaviour patterns, used pallets, locations of gens that are being worked on so as to avoid taking the chase over there, gate locations, attacking specific gens together, coordinating the use of perks, and so on and so forth. There's a sheer endless amount of crucial information that teams can share at a moment's notice, as well as countless ways in which they can coordinate plays, that random groups will simply never even be able to dream of.

Anything short of actual base-game voice comms means the gap between solo and SWF remains gigantic. And even with voice comms there would still be a significant divide, because SWF groups are premade, and therefore not only bypass the horrendous matchmaking system that has an MMR cap so low that it basically doesn't matter past a certain, wholly inadequate point, but also get to coordinate their builds down to the last slot. Premades will also usually play together frequently, develop strategies, natural coordination, "roles", call-out systems, and such. And even just being on the same page about using voice comms at all would still separate premades from randoms.

Solo and SWF are just completely different games altogether and will always be. And I think it's actually a good thing, the solo experience is much more chaotic, much closer to an actual "horror" theme, thrown into unknown and uncertain circumstances and having to make do with whatever you get and whatever happens, needing to rely much more on intuition, game sense and coordination skills with strangers. Whereas SWF is much more strategic and competitive, can make for an actually competitively compelling format. That of course doesn't mean the situation can't be improved however, solo is much too often much too weak, and SWF can be much too strong.

Matchmaking improvements are the first thing that would help the solo experience. The MMR cap is too low, the matchmaker not strict enough. Camping and tunnelling are the bane of solo matches, and nerfs to them (compensated for with buffs to other aspects of killer gameplay) would improve the game overall. Hook grabs should be removed for one very important thing, as not only are they a bullshit mechanic in general, but they necessitate there being at least 2 survivors for a somewhat safe unhook in camping scenarios, which spells trouble for solos. If basekit Kindred is too much (which I do think it may be, not least because it will take a good bit of the aforementioned "horror" aspects out of the playing experience), perhaps use the icons to better inform survivors of what's happening around a hook. For example with a killer icon on the hooked survivor if the killer is within 16m of the hook, and a hook icon on any survivor coming within 32m of a hooked survivor. Show healing and gate opening progress on the icons. Show survivor loadouts to other survivors in the lobby, or at the very least on the loading screen or match info overlay. Implement more perks notifications that actually allow fellow survivors to utilize them (e. g. if a survivor is hooked for the first time and has an active Deliverance, notify all other survivors of this fact).

For SWF, loadout restrictions would be a good way to lower the power ceiling, especially because it would also lead to more loadout diversity.

I've had no issues post patch that I haven't pre-patch. Killers are by far the bigger group of whiners on these forums. Some of it is legit, but it's mostly exaggerated to an amazing degree. Is the outrage "real". Sure. Killers are always outraged on these forums. Is the outrage based on logical conclusions drawn after real data and experimentation? No. No it's not.

The HUD improvements are really nice but for sure not nearly comperable to SWF in level of information. However I do see this as a good change but not on a level where we should start to panic that killer is now impossible.

To see the real effects we need to wait a bit more. There are just too many players that don't play this game for 10+ hours or more per week and therefore need time to adapt and learn what they can make out of this info.

To me it looks like the first benefits are that survivors stay a bit longer on gens in the edges of the terror radius if they see another one is beeing chased and more important less ppl kill themselfes on hook when someone isn't running immediately to save them as they see that e.g. a gen is nearly done and know they will likely be rescued a bit later once the gen is done.

I also don't bring kindred any more and even though it doesn't work as well as with it, it definitely is not as bad as when I didn't bring it before the HUD patch.

As of now I'd say we are somewhere in a balance between survivor and killer with a lot of broken stuff on both sides that leads to unfun extremes. Would be nice to get rid of some of those extremes tho.

The matches do feel different playing killer. My matches have been very fast paced for a while but now I keep on losing to people that can barely stand 30s in chase simply because they progress their objective much faster than I could ever hope to. This has increased drastically when the HUD changes were implemented, so I guess this is at least partially why.

That being said though: It might hit harder in my case because I don't run slowdown and I don't tunnel / camp.

As long as the game is going to have SWF (which will be always), the HUD updates are necessary. If we were talking about a hypothetical without that it would be a different story.

The things I find it changes as survivor:

1: Just knowing at the start whether the other survivors are taking the game seriously.

2: It really helps with the last gen. If you see someone has a gen half done then finding them and trying to help them finish is a good idea. In the past I might jump on an unstarted gen just because I didn't know another was being worked on (though there are still reasons to spread out).

As other people have mentioned, if you see the final gen is almost done you can head for the exit gates.

It doesn't change the game that much though. Looping skills and killer strategy are still the biggest factors.

My opinion. The update is a lot of info that helped average players a ton. It doesn’t help high level players. . . Because they basically know what is going on. The weak players don’t know what to make of the information.

I have noticed a significant increase in the average difficulty of my games. My load times for killer are much faster than survivor (even when the survivors are in the bonus). I’m not a “top MMR” player, but I have enough hours to be reasonably proficient.

I actually think the HUD update is likely a good direction for the game as it will help newer players get decent games, but it is a lot of information to survivors they haven’t had before. It is a buff, and there will be some killer buff. . Eventually.