Seriously need to penalize killers for hook camping
I've been playing since 2016, and I understand that some might see this as a valid strategy, and against a 4 squad, it'll likely only result in a loss for the killer. But, I play mostly solo queue and it just ruins the match when a killer does this. Yes, the added 2 seconds of borrowed time when unhooking is helpful, but then you're just trading downs. There should be some penalty for the killer when they're hook camping. For one, you could easily measure how long they are near a hook and if they're in a certain radius of the hook for X seconds, you should get a penalty to your movement speed, or whatever Behavior comes up with that they think is fair. It's just ridiculous that there's no detriment to this sort of behavior (no pun intended).
Am I wrong in thinking this?
I play as killer all the time, and I always strive to make the experience fun for everyone.
Comments
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Pretty much every punishment style method proposed usually fails when it comes to considering the general flaws in dbd and the history of such features being tested only to be weaponized against ALL players rather than bad actors.
A player who is hard facecamping from the start of the game is unlikely to care about such a punishment mechanic. They are already losing bp by doing and they don't care. So anything else won't really change how they play unless you make impossible to do outright. What ultimately happens based on historical precedent of testing in ptbs is that groups of survivors will take a mechanic like that and use against all killers. It usually just ends up as no win scenarios that generally make people trying to play the game normally not have fun. Though what has been tested is stopping and extending the hook timers.
People have floated the ideas of disabling killer powers, teleporting the hooked survivor to a cross map hook, and bunch of other highly punitive ideas. Obviously these sorts of ideas are extremely flawed. The only true fix to camping is to change the entire system of hooks, but that is highly unlikely happen. Outside of that like there isn't a lot of ideas that don't end up being highly discouraging from people using a legitimate tactic vs some a jerk.
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The game already does "penalize" killers for hook camping. It's just that it does so by deducting points toward your Chaser emblem. And let's face it, if you're facecamping, you probably don't care too much about your Chaser emblem. It's something that feels really bad for Survivors and lets the killer feel like they have a chance. Do they need to do it? Usually no, but Surivors also don't have to efficency the fun out of the game by tunneling the gens so hard that 3 gens are done at the end of the first chase and the gates are powered at the end of the second.
Striving to make the experience fun for everyone is admirable. If that's how you have fun, by all means, keep doing it. Personally, my favorite games are when I 4k-without-killing-anyone by 2 hooking everyone, bringing each to the their death hook, smaking it and then droping them. But tell me this; how often are Survivors told that they should make sure to give the killer a kill when they 4 man out so the killer can have fun too? Why is it only the killers job to make sure everyone has a good time? They seem to have more power over it, but I'd advocate that if killers are supposed to make sure the survivors have fun, the survivors should also make sure the killer has fun. Is it fun for the killer to watch all 4 survivors teabag their way out the gates?
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Lol, reducing movement speed only increase the usage of bubba.
Nothing but a fundamental change can fix camping, I hope it to happen but I don't think it will.
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Why does it always have to be about punishing?
The healthier route is just to make camping less of an appealing option.
If we constantly try to punish players for doing things that inconvenience the other side then the game will just push everyone to play the same way and the overall game will be less forgiving and more frustrating.
Saying killers should be punished for camping is like saying survivors should be punished for body blocking in a chase. Or completing a gen too fast.
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you arent entirely wrong
the issue is theres a stage in the game where theres nothing to do but secure a kill
so by penalising the only thing left to do - whats the point?
and camping early game kinda just loses you the game, you might get a kill, but thats pretty much it
and camping mid game is really ineffective, unless the survivors do something stupid that makes camping the best thing you can do
so penalising camping isnt the way to go. adding an incentive to leave hooks might be a good idea? but in endgame that incentive might not do enough, early game the person is camping to troll and wont care of an incentive, mid game that incentive likely wont be enough to get people to leave hook unless it was DRASTIC
a mix of penalty and incentive might be good, but again late game that only kicks killers while theyre down, doesnt effect facecamping bubbas much (if they pause hook timer, slow movement by 115%, whatever they do, bubba isnt effected), and it rewards survivors for bad plays, while punishing killers for good plays when it happens in the mid game
camping kinda just needs to be left alone for a long while. the game might get to a stage where camping needs to be addressed, but addressing it right now will likely do no good
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Funnily you point about the last survivor giving a pity kill is also pushing this forced empathy on the last survivor. Its not fair for that one too. We gotta adress the individual survivor, not just the team. Because there would be survivors who'd just let all other survivors be the "nice and fair" all the times.
If survivors were asked to play like they want killers to, all games would need to end in a 4k because survivors should be happy with doing 1-2 generators, maybe a chest and then just stop trying to escape and give the killer the kill.
If the last paragraph sounds stupid then it only shows what survivors are demanding also is.
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Punishing players for playing your game is probably the worst idea if you want to keep a healthy playerbase in the future.
Thats why i think It would be better to give Survivors proper counterplay to a Facecamp or tunneling situation, instead of telling them to "just do gens" it would be way more fun to try a daring rescue. But that would require a situation where Survivors could do something about the Killer facecamping.
My sugestion is giving survivors a tackle, which they can only use in facecamp scenario for instance.
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The 'proper' counterplay to camping, is to do gens, and for the hooked survivor to hang on. The problem is that these aren't effective enough, so ideally two things could and should happen.
- The hooked survivor should gain something for remaining in the game while being camped, to give their team mates time to repair gens. Bloodpoint scores in the form of 'distraction' points while the killer is within x meters of the hook, for whenever a gen is completed or another survivor is healed, in the Objective and Altruism categories respectively.
- A boost to repair speeds, and/or a suspension of gen regression, while the killer is within x meters of the hook. Buffs to survivors generally don't work with a "within x meters of the hook" because they can be abused by survivor teams who bait the killer into camping. However I don't believe this is an issues with repair/regression speeds, providing it's subtle enough. Something like +5% repair speeds for every 20 seconds camping up to 3 stacks max for +15% would be ideal, because you would need to camp for 20 seconds to activate it to begin with, which means it would be much harder to be 'baited' into doing so. This wouldn't be of a benefit of survivors to force the killer to camp, because the time spent 'baiting' the killer to camping, would be less efficient than simply slamming gens.
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Well, it won't matter whether or not they care about said punishment. Like I said, I'm not talking about punishing them personally at the account level which is what reducing their BP does. I'm talking about implementing gameplay mechanics the same way that Exhaustion or any other temporary effect would be applied. So Firstly, it's not permanent, and secondly, it's simply something that is applied to stop them from being able to hook camp and then just instantly down anyone else who comes to help the person on the hook. I'm actually an Unreal developer so I'm thinking about this from a game mechanics perspective. So you create a sphere collision around the hooks with a radius of something like 5 meters around the hook and you store the exact moment the killer hooks a player. If they are still inside the sphere collision X seconds (let's say 15 seconds to give them enough time to be designated as hook camping rather than just going after another player who is being aggressive) after the player is hooked, then they suffer a movement speed penalty. Or whatever gameplay penalty that Behavior deems fair and results in a solve for hook camping during testing.
I don't see how something like this would be ineffective or detrimental to the community at large or could somehow be abused.
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Yeah fair. I simply said punishment because I'm trying to think of a way of penalizing jerk killers, but you could also go about it by encouraging them to do other things. However, the reason why "it always has to be about punishing" is because if you're using positive reinforcement then players who don't give AF and want to just be jerks, will simply ignore the positive reinforcement, whereas a punishment is something they can't ignore. Read my detailed solution above.
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If they are sitting right in front of a hook, nobody is stopping the Survivors from doing Generators.
Is it annoying? Definitely. But I just move onto the next match, since it does not matter that much to me.
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I agree entirely that the onus shouldn't only be on the killer to make the game fun. I'm simply talking about one specific issue here which was @hole killers who camp hooks :P
I'm sure there are a million ways they should be balancing the game to make it less annoying for the killer.
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Yes, this is very true too. So maybe they should disable the anti-camping feature during the end-game collapse. Or maybe after a certain duration of the match - like 7 minutes in. It's probably a very good idea not to penalize hook camping for the entirety of the match. I disagree that camping early game will lose you the match. This is true with squads, but not when you solo queue with a bunch of randos. I started this post because yesterday my first two matches were against hook campers and even though our team rallied around the person being hooked, we were quite powerless to do anything to stop it due to the lack of communication and we all ended up dead in both matches. Especially since they started spawning the hatch near where the last person was hooked. That was a bonehead decision if you ask me because now the killer has a way better chance of finding it first.
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I agree with your idea of giving the survivors something they could do to counter hook camping totally. But I think that would require a lot more drastic change to the game. What I was suggesting was something more subtle. A speed debuff or maybe make the killer go blind or something lol. Like if you camp hook for 15 seconds, you go blind like you were hit with a flashlight until you fumble out of the hook radius. lol
What you're proposing would probably be much more awesome, but it would require a fundamental re-design.
And I also agree with xni6_'s suggestion that the anti-camping measure shouldn't be for the duration of the entire match. Just the opening half would be enough.
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Actually, maybe that is exactly the answer. If the killer is hook camping then it stops your hook progression. That's actually a perfect and brilliant solution. Seraphor, you're a genius! Give every hook camped survivor Camaraderie (Steve Harrington's slowed-down hook progression). Then you're both punishing hook camping while also encouraging the killer to do something else because you're not directly punishing them with a debuff of any kind. The gen buffs are probably unnecessary because you don't really want to make gens faster for the survivors, you just want to discourage hook camping so if you make it pointless then killers won't do it.
Seriously BEHAVIOR - THIS IS THE ANSWER! Stop hook progression any time the killer is X distance from someone on a hook! There's really no downside to that implementation if you balance it correctly. And it doesn't have to stop hook progression forever, just for 30 seconds max. Then hook camping is still a strategy, but a less effective/risky one.
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Actually, stopping hook progression is exactly what they tried, and that was abused by survivors baiting the killer into camping, so that the hooked survivor was never sacrificed. It's essentially unlimited Reassurance.
Increasing gen speeds however cannot be abused, because any attempt to bait the killer into camping would be less effective on gen speed than just repairing the gens when the killer is camping, and the killer can easily avoid it by not camping, AND it doesn't do anything when killers are most justified to camp, when all gens have been repaired.
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Wait what? When did they stop hook progression during hook camping? I never noticed that.
And how would speeding up gens not be abused? You bait a killer into hook camping and then you finish all the gens faster. I don't see how it would be any less abused.
Also, I'm not staying stop progression entirely. I'm saying give them a perk like Comradarie where your progression is slowed but you don't need another survivor nearby. Like how they gave us 2 seconds of borrowed time when you get unhooked.
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WTH the forum just deleted my reply after I edited it.
When did they implement hook progressing pausing during camping? I never noticed that.
I don't understand how speeding up gens would not be abused? You would just bait the killer into camping and then finish all the gens faster. It could be abused just as easily.
Maybe they shouldn't stop hook progression entirely when someone is hook camping. They should just make hook progression go at 0.5x when the killer is nearby. Similar to how we all get Borrowed time for 2 seconds after being unhooked.
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IMO campers/tunnelers are just bad at the game. I went against a wraith the other day who hooked each survivor once then hooked us all again without ever repeating a survivor. That wraith 4Kd. IMO people who camp or tunnel will never get better at the game because they don't take the time to actually try and learn. You're never gonna get better at chasing survivors if you stand in front of a hook all game... and yes i consider leaving and coming right back as soon as that survivor is unhooked camping as well. It doesn't change anything if you walk 50 yards away only to turn around and come back. Personally, when I play killer I prefer that they heal up because thats even LESS time they spend on a gen. Most of the campers I see these days only get one kill at most. Had a camping Trapper about an hour ago and he got one kill. I had a camping nemesis and he got zero kills be cause we were all able to get out of the basement. He even had 2 of us on basement hooks right before the other 2 valiantly pulled us off hooks and we all escaped.
You're never gonna be good at anything if you don't try. Camping is just gonna keep you bad at the game.
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One survivor on the hook, so up to three free to work on gens.
It would be more efficient to have all three survivors repairing gens, than to give up one survivor to bait the killer into camping, in order to get a 5-15% buff for the remaining two on gens.
3 > 2+15%
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They tested pausing the hook timer indefinitely at base kit twice iirc.
The first time was all the way back in the early days of the games. During that test instead of using the mechanic as intended they would do two man hook swarms to keep the killer basically "stuck" in camping range of the hooked survivor while the last survivor would just do gens solo. So you ended having weird non games where the killer was forced to make a decision that ultimately was a no win situation. The hooked survivor was perpetually stuck on hook until the end of the game where they still might not even get out because often that survivor was being sandbagged by partial swfs. It was strategically more advantageous to for them to screw another survivor over and then just play the most non committal cat and mouse game near their hook.
Some years later they tried again with basically the exactly same result. At the perk level stopping the timer is gated so that it helps with the camping issue without giving too much room to be weaponized. Problem is survivors tend to not use the perk for some reason. There is argument if the situation would have been as toxic as it was because in testing which is notorious for people being ultra sweaty on purpose. Survivor sentiment from what I have seen leans towards no overall, but the game ruining potential demonstrated during testing was something that seems hard to balance out.
Post edited by ReikoMori on1 -
Ah yes. We need to punish Killers for winning in ways Survivors don't like.
Of course, no one likes to lose, so first it will be 'punish hook camping'. Then 'punish slugging.' Then 'punish tunneling'. Then 'Punish the Killer for even trying to win'. Then 'You know what? Just don't let the Killer win. Survivors consider Killer players NPCs.'
The Killer deserves to secure wins, and 'But, but, but, but a PLAYER is REMOVED from the game!' is not a valid excuse to force the Killer to play sub-optimally. Don't play a PvP game if you can't handle being removed form the match when you lose.
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Did they just have a really huge radius for what they consider camping? Cause that doesn't make sense to me. Are you just saying that survivors would loop the killer inside the radius of the hook to force them to be camping? That doesn't sound like a winning strategy, but the simple condition you could add is survivor on hook has their progression go to half speed if the killer is inside the radius, unless another survivor is also inside the radius. Problem solved.
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It's got nothing to do with not losing. It's got to do with making the game boring AF to play. If they're allowing tactics that make the matches boring then people are going to stop playing the game. I could care less if I die or not, but I want to have a fun time while playing. Arguing to not fix one problem because there are a half dozen other issues is just senseless. I'm also not complaining about more than one thing that I see as a persistent issue. As I said, I play killer as much as I play survivor.
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My problem with camping and tunneling is that they're just cheap ways to beat disorganized solo players. If you're up againt a strong SWF with no weak links then they can just say "Just do the gens" while the killer tunnels one person. Camping can be easily countered by a coordinated rescue. SWFs also tend to bring strong perks that make tunneling/camping significantly more difficult. In solo your entire team might bodyblock for you which does absolutely nothing but slightly delay your innevitable death. There's no guarantee that your teammates have perks to counter tunneling/camping either. That's why killers immediately zero in on the guy with 150 hours because they know he has no way to fight back. The real reason killers don't want to play against SWFs is because they're the only teams that can consistently counter this type of gameplay. That's why SWFs get 7-8 lobby dodges before a killer actually stays. A lot of killers don't think the game is fair unless they can bully solo players who aren't capable of communicating with each other. A very large number of medicore killers are hard carried by these tactics along with terrible matchmaking that make them easier to use successfully.
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I don't remember the exact numbers, but it couldn't have been more than I want to say 16 meters was the range they took into account.
As for the strategies there were a few, one was to just try and loop near the hooked survivor. The more effective and common way things played out was that rather than engage in a full chase, two people would go to make the save. Yet, instead of actually attempting to save they just wanted to force the killer into permanent defensive posture. Most players will defend their hooks against poorly thoughtout sudden saves, but what if the survivors never intended to save and just ran away? Not run completely away, but just enough to be on the bare edge of the radius. When the killer would start moving the other survivor would pretend to come in and draw the killer's attention to them faking a save only to retreat before getting into an actual chase. The survivors would keep doing this back and forth and the only way to break it was to completely give up the hook with basically no contest.
Now that sounds like a good thing because effectively camping ends, but the hooked survivor is more valuable to the team by staying on the hook rather than getting off the hook. As long as the killer was kept in that no win situation state, the hooked survivor couldn't die and the last remaining person was free to do gens uncontested. So the game experience became psychological cruddy for the killer because being outplayed is one thing, but basically having the game tell you "your only option is to submit to the whims of your opponent" is another. As for the unfortunate survivor, they would spend as long as it takes for a single player to repair all the remaining gens on the hook which sucks in an of itself. This was then compounded by the fact there was no guarantee that you would be actually saved by your teammates. It wasn't uncommon at the time to have teammates sandbag a person into getting hooked and then just escaping without them. So you spend however long it took on the hook with no definite endpoint because there was no such thing as EGC then.
It just wasn't healthy or enjoyable. A solution shouldn't be functionally worse than the problem and keep in mind the devs have stated many times that while they want to mitigate the strength of tunneling and camping they aren't trying to remove it entirely because for as much as people do hate it they are valid ways of playing the game. Punitive measures that players suggest often are so heavy handed that they are worse than taking the two minute wait. Also just so folks don't read this see it as only dredging up old survivor hate, killers didn't respect or use the system as intended either. People who camped just to grief survivors loved the infinite pause because it allowed them to legally hold someone hostage pretty much until they got ready for them to die or dc. It simply didn't work to discourage anyone other than players who used it as a normal gameplay strat which usually were people newer to the game.
New players who start with killer rather than survivor often default to camping because they haven't really learned how to deal with juggling survivors, looping, traversing maps, etc. on top of learning their powers. It hurt players like that, but didn't do anything for people who camped out of spite.
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Well yeah, then the flaw in that system is that they made it so the survivor has no progress. What they need to do is lower the progress speed to half of what it normally is, and problem solved. There's no reason for players to try to bait the killer because they're just gonna kill the person on the hook, and no need for the killer to camp because the person on hook is gonna die more slowly and more gens get popped. Then once there's 3 gens popped, turn off the effect entirely and "all's fair" at that point because the game is almost over. Camping is only irritating in the opening of a match.
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This is another thing they apparently tested and ultimately didn't implement.
My guess according to what I've read about it is that it still didn't solve the problem, but punished people who used proxy camping strats. That's sort of the issue where base game design sort of subverts the intended goal. Camping by the design isn't inherently an invalid way to use the system as it sits and proxy camping is valid strategy that some players use and fits well into stealth killers who aren't really design to thrive in basic chase play. To completely discourage and disallow the more griefing inspired camping they need to change how sacrifices work on a more fundamental level. Which almost instantly sort of snowballs into a lot of other very granular considerations and changes. People who just want to grief other will naturally just find another way, but for anyone who is just playing the game and favor these strategies as fallbacks or compensators for character deficiencies in certain killers are going to find themselves worse off.
I'm not saying it's impossible mind you, but like those of us who've been playing since launch have been asking for solutions that will magically work against human behaviors without making any fundamental changes to game. That in hindsight don't make much sense because ultimately the game does need a substantial change if folks want camping completely off the table. It can't just be a punitive measure it also needs to address how people are able to engage with the game. There is a generally a strong dislike of killers playing defensive in way, shape, or form at any time. So if you change how hooks work in a way that gets rid of camping, which they probably should ultimately, they need to be ready to give killers things that help them in other aspects of the game or risk flattening out killer gameplay into having only one or two "prescribed" playstyles that are viable.
It's a complex issue that will require a complex solution.
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Yeah fair. All valid points. You could always make the hook progress penalty into a stat that changes with each killer rather than a global value. So as you say, killers who aren't as good at chases aren't overly penalized.
I still love DBD, but I think it's about time Behavior looks at maybe implementing a new game mode. I think they got a lot of requests from players wanting to be able to make custom maps for DBD and that might be why they decided to make Meet your Maker which is a fun game in its own right, but not what the community was asking for. That could be my on bias talking, but they really do need to do something to mix things up with DBD as it is getting a little stale. I can't think of any other multiplayer games that have lasted this long with a single game mode and just over a dozen maps. Even Counter-Strike had alternate game modes.
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I really don't understand why the developers seem to have such difficulty balancing the game. There are so many different approaches they could take to solve these types of issues.
Also, do the developers actually ever read these posts or are we just shouting into the void so to speak?
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Would be easier if they make Kindred basekit and this will help solo queue players.
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One of the issues I'm starting to find as a new player breaking into silver level survivor and killer... is this game is actually pretty damned hard... it takes a LOT of skill and more importantly knowledge...
One minor mistake as either role can snowball into BIG problems really fast if the other side doesn't make any mistakes... this is usually dealt with by bringing powerful perks and using cheaper tactics to lower your roles respective difficulty... and that's the ssme for both sides, the game is hard and punishes any form of mistake really hard... so you're always trying to lower the difficulty for yourself... and unfortunately that usually means if enemies have the right set up... then you're in for a hard time 😅
Solo Q players tend to make more mistakes, myself included... such as all rushing the hook no matter what. As survivor I've almost started ignoring hooks completely and leaving my teammates to do it, because at my level very few people sit doing gens when they really should... if you're dead on hook, wounded and I'm full health with no downs, you shouldn't be going anywhere near that hook...
I think the problem with dealing with camping is, high level survivors punish it hard... low level survivors flock like lambs to the slaughter 😅
My point is, it'll be interesting to see how the meta shifts. The anti camp/tunnel changes are needed so high level play isn't stale, and to remove how crushing it is at low level without the perks you need to even try and deal with it... but then mechanics can be explored to give high level killers more opportunity to prevent gen rushing and getting spun around for days SWFs, snd low level killers some way of staying relevant now they can't camp effectively.
Post edited by UndeddJester on0 -
well here’s somethings I do to reduce the camping and tunneling and i t bag a lot too as survivor
- loop better
- preserve pallets
- Don’t go for saves while injured what I like to do at times is 99 my health and run DM and resilience to have faster unhook speed then 1 tap and if I can’t I fully heal
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Kindred doesn't slow hook progression though. It just shows people where the killer is. I don't think that's the right solution, because as someone else pointed out, it's a valid strategy at some point in the game.
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So basically, GET GUD!
I don't mean to be rude, but this is a useless comment. I'm trying to have a legitimate discussion about what I see as a part of the gameplay that is quite broken.
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We seriously need to penalize survivors who gen rush. Gen rushing puts a ton of stress on the killer and it forces the Killer to resort to tunneling and camping to remove survivors from the match to put pressure on the remaining survivors and make it harder for them to complete generators.
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