What player agency is left?

There are always improvements which can be made to both killer and survivor. But often times the things the devs decide to focus on are strange. For instance, why did they nerf Billy into oblivion, but yet Blight's addons have remained OP for so long. I feel instead of adding new features they really need to do quality of life updates.

Making the maps more balanced would go a long way to help. With re-balanced maps they could check back in and get a much better feel for what changes actually need to be made.

Other QoL adjustments could be:

• Change DS stun time back to 5 seconds. Most everyone agrees 3 seconds is too short. I mostly play killer, and to be honest I don't really care much about a 3 second stun.
• Fix flashlights. It is very frustrating to get blinded while I am staring at a wall. Just make it so the survivors need to be in the FOV to make a stun.
• Rollback the healing nerfs. Again, I am killer main and I think those nerfs were too much.
• Fix pallet stun vacuum sucks. Survivors now stun can make the stun while on the same side of the pallet as the killer and it shoves the killer all the way over to the other side.
• Make boons and hexes worth playing. They are supposed to be high risk high reward. Right now, neither type is worth running. Revert boon healing, just don't make it so fast. And make it so a boon can't be added to the same totem twice. For hexes, put a timer on them so they can't be cleansed within the first minute of the game.
• I think the new camping counter could work well. But having it turn off only during end game is an issue. Once all gens are done you should be able to camp because there is no counter for a 99 percent gate. This could be fixed by still having the anit-camping active, but then have the gate regress to 90 percent. Again, every survivor team is going to 99 a gate after all gens are done, so adding a small regression to the gate is something that should be added so the killer also has a chance.
• Why remove hook grabs. They were already rare, but they did add some spice to the game.
• Map balance.
• Map balance.
• Map balance.

When did I say that I camp and tunnel every game to win?

I don't need to do that every game. I go for as many hooks as possible in my games. I have 2000h on pig and I know when I have to tunnel and camp and when I dont have to. Don't make me some kind of devil that wants to ruin others fun. I'm not.

All I say is that there are situations, mainly the ones where survivors do very little mistakes, that killer have to tunnel and camp to have a chance at winning.

That's it. And I think that's common sense.

What?

No, my point is that you never have to facecamp or immediately hard tunnel someone. I think you're conflating two separate parts of the message there, the only time I bring up slugging is in response to this idea that killers are being forced to go for 12 hooks, which is a claim with zero evidence.

Also, what do you mean by nerfing the hooks?

Not really? None of those things actually affect the strength of a hook, which is that it immobilises one survivor and requires another survivor to come and save- except for the self-unhook, but that's only when you're camping, which is when you aren't getting proper value from hooks anyway.

It's only less appealing if you want to force someone to progress hook stages without being unhooked, or if you want to put someone back on the hook immediately to chew through hook stages. Neither of those are the main strength of hooks, so the changes aren't actually nerfing them.

When you get a hook, one survivor is immobilised. -25% generator efficiency while they're there, assuming all survivors are still alive.

If you get into a chase while that first survivor is still hooked, two survivors are occupied. -50% generator efficiency.

Because you aren't by the hook (and so a save is possible), and there's a timer before hook stages progress, a third survivor has to go rescue their hooked teammate. -75% generator efficiency.

Hooks aren't just the way you achieve your overall win condition, they're also your basekit slowdown. It's temporary, but your goal as killer is to repeat it as often as possible, and that requires not camping and not tunnelling by default. None of the changes we've received to hooks have changed this, and in fact they've been largely aimed at the ways people try to circumvent using hooks this way in favour of tactics that require less effort - by standing directly in front of a hooked survivor, and/or trying to immediately down them as soon as they're unhooked.

I apologize I didn't mean to make it sound like you do it all the time. There are situations where it is the better option especially in endgame. I may have overreacted a little with what I said. I don't think anyone has to do it every game. There are people who do but that's probably just more because they either don't know how to play better yet or they want to ruin someone's game.

It's interesting that you say 'not tunneling out someone immediately' isn't the most efficient method. Are you suggesting that tunneling someone out later in the game is more efficient?

I'm failing to see how eliminating a survivor after three chases is less efficient than doing so after (for example) five. In both approaches, the number of survivors being in chase / on hook is the same. The only difference is that one less survivor is doing gens during two of the chases if the first sacrifice happens on the third hook.

When I say immediately, I mean more in the sense of that being your only goal. It's where the term comes from- tunnel vision. If you ignore macro play entirely in favour of trying to tunnel someone out immediately, and those chases aren't exceedingly fast, all you've done is gift the survivor team a lot of uncontested generator time. It's at best a gamble with a razor's edge, because if you do it poorly, you practically lose by default.

This obviously goes quadruple for facecamping, but you aren't arguing in favour of that here so I won't belabour that point.

What I'm getting at is that macro play is very important and the actual strength of hooks is a big part of why. You don't need to eliminate someone in three chases if the way you're playing occupies multiple survivors at once to drag them off generators.

I absolutely agree. Tunneling and camping are NOT always the best option a killer has to win the game, but they are sometimes the necessary evil to turn the tides around.