Chase Times
I feel like we regularly see a disconnect between how long people think chases "should" last to be considered fair and how long chases "need" to last for the killer to have a chance at winning.
IE I think the average chase time most people want is unrealistic for how fast gens currently are.
Can we find a middle ground where chase lengths feel fair for both sides?
What do you think is a fair average chase time?
Comments
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less 25 seconds for killer. a long chase for killer would be something 60-90 seconds.
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I think a fair chase time depends on the players, for example if a survivor who doesnt know how to loop gets downed in 10 seconds then it was a fair chase because the killer knew how to play and the survivor didn't. Same goes the other way, if a killer gets looped for 5 gens because they were not able to down the survivor then it is a fair chase time because the survivor was better than the killer. It should be fair that the best player gets rewarded while the worst one gets punished.
Now on thr topic of how much a chase needs to last for it to be viable for the killer, it is also variable, because killer can snowball. For example I can have a horrendous chase (+60 seconds) and still if I slug or the team messes up a lot I can still win.
However if we are talking about the 12 hook ideal that people have, with the killer purposely not punishing mistakes aka "playing fair", chases should be around 30 seconds in order for you to win.
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I mean you could argue that by looking at bloodlust, that kinda tells you how long the game thinks you should go before getting a hit, if you hit bloodlust 1 twice in a chase, then that chase lasted a little over 30 seconds, 50 seconds for bloodlust 2, and 70 for bloodlust 3.
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Which I would interpret as by the time bloodlust kicks in they think the chase needs to be ending soon.
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This is confusing. If you hit bloodlust once in chase you mean, it was a 30 second chase?
Why would I hit bloodlust 1 twice instead of just going to tier 2?
Although this is good to keep in mind if I can make sense of what you mean
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If you hit bloodlust 1 twice in chase it means it took you anywhere between 15 and 25 seconds per hit, for convenience reasons I just said the base amount per bloodlust level
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Yeah I would say anything longer than 25 seconds for a chase is losing the killer the game. Which, generally you're spending almost half that entire max time just holding w to catch up in order to start attempting to play a loop. This is before we even get into Exhaustion perks, pre drops, body blocks, DS, loops with forced pallet breaks ect.
Would you say the average survivor thinks 25 seconds max is a good/fair chase time? I would say most would say not, which is where the issue I feel lies. What they typically want isn't realistic.
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I agree. I think 25 second chase is average. Anything past 30 seconds is decent. 40+ is good.
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Ahhh okay gotcha. I feel like if I am hitting bloodlust it’s because the game thinks the chase lasting too long so it’s trying to help you end it
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I agree. Most people are too hard on themselves. If you can prevent the hit for at least 30 seconds+ that's a good run for your team. If most peoples chases are that long y'all are probably winning unless they threw somewhere hard.
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When do you try to leave chase?
With Sadako I leave chase if I don’t take a resource, hit or condemn stack in 10-15 seconds. I make them come to me.
When I play plague though. Different story. I love her but I suck at her lol0 -
Yes in my experience its okay to hit bloodlust 1 but you shouldn't hit it often and hitting 2 is bad and level 3 is you are throwing the game
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I'd say about the same on Sadako. I tend to try and make most my hits be post teleport TV hits from catching them out of position. Rarely will I just chase as an m1 unless they are out positioned or at an unsafe loop. It's more often hit, teleport, hit, teleport. Unless I get a 3+ condemn ping then it's teleport, teleport, teleport. Or I'll prematurely break chase if I can see someone going for a tape drop off/pick up and I want to cut if off.
Most Sadakos I see don't teleport enough and generally are just using it to get around the map. That's a mistake.
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Yeah I agree with this. BL 1 a couple times can be okay but generally if someone’s playing properly they shouldn’t be getting this often at all. Especially not BL 2 or 3 though. I think anyone getting 2 or 3 is making serious misplays and probably throwing the game.
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I agree. This is how I play. 🥰
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i think about 80% of chases should be around 20-25 seconds but current average is around 45-50 second average.
Which, generally you're spending almost half that entire max time just holding w to catch up in order to start attempting to play a loop.
I agree. I think biggest imbalance right between weaker killer and strong killer is pre-running & the value of health-state. Like if you take an average killer like Demo, a smart survivor player can just pre-run for like 20 seconds before chase even begins and then when you do hit them, you get another 20 seconds of just hold-w. throw in a exhaustion perk or a safe pallet here and there and every chase is too long.
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There is no one-size-fits-all solution here.
Length of chase is variable based on Killer being played, perks being used, the map and it’s available resources, as well as the strategy the Killer seeks to employ during the match.
I’ve seen Killers 4k after 3+ minute long chases, and I’ve seen Survivors 4 escape after multiple 10 second chases.4 -
Yeah I agree. Most averages being around 45-50 seconds is why tunneling is prevalent since there's an extreme disparity in objective times from chases being way longer than they should. If the average chase was 20-25 seconds I think we'd actually see way less tunneling.
I feel like when we look at tiles that most survivors think are fair and what they think most maps should have they are the exact tiles that are too safe and lead to 45-50 second chases. The "bad" tiles they complain about are generally the tiles needed to reach 20-25 second chases.
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Let's not kid ourselves.
Tunneling would either increase or remain the same since it would be easier with chases designed to last 25 seconds.
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No, no it would not. If they made chase times appropriate we could implement significantly more blockers for tunneling into the base game.
There's no point in this conversation, we already know we disagree on this topic. You think they do it for easier matches, I think they do it more often out of necessity and poor game balance. We've had this talk many times, it's not going anywhere.
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thats actually a thing that showes me how skewed the matchmaking is.
in some games i hit bl 1 a couple of times but in most of my games i hit bl 1 every chase except the surv is heavyly misplaying and i hit bl 2 more then just a couple times. im cool with not being good thats no problem for me but when you guys say hitting bl 2 or 3 often is throwing then there must be a problem with the survivor i face or am i wrong with that
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I mean if you are consistently hitting bloodlust 2 and 3 like you are saying you do, are all the gens finished after about 3 chases? If they aren't then the survivors you are playing against clearly aren't optimizing their time, for me personally if I hit bloodlust 3 in more than one chase all the gens are completed
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Yeah I can't even remember the last time I hit BL 2, much less 3. Do you have any of these matches recorded by chance? I could watch them and see what's going on.
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i would say i typicaly dont have more then 4 - 5 chases on averrage then the gens are done. most of my games end with one kill if i really work for it and then its after the gates are already open and the other let the surv hang and leave. i only get more then one kill when one survivor is way to over altruistic. i onlly get a 4k when the survivor are very obviously way worse then me or are goofing around
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nah sadly i dont have any records
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Yeah that just sounds like mmr letting you down tbh
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You didn't suggest any changes to tunneling in your post, only that chase times should be shorter to the degree of 20 seconds
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To me they're separate topics. You view them as one topic because of the aforementioned viewpoints we disagree on.
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There are a ton of variables to the question, a few that cross my mind.
1: Which chase of the game is it? A quick chase early in the game swings the game massively in the killers favor, a long chase after a survivor is eliminated is not that hurtful.
2: How many pallets does the survivor burn? If a survivor has a long chase to start the game, but burns all the good pallets, it can balance out. I'd say this is one of the biggest variables because I've been in plenty of games that have looked survivor sided and turned in the late mid game because the killer was hitting/downing survivors so quickly the survivors had no time to do gens.
3: What did the survivor bring? Survivors who have chase specific builds should expect longer chases. If all survivors have chase builds this isn't necessarily a problem for the killer, the danger for the killer is if they target the survivor who brought a chase build and the rest have gen focused builds.
4: How is the killer playing? Defending, spreading hits, using slowdown, all change up the equation.
5: What exactly are we balancing toward? I think tunneling out the first survivor that is found is a problem, but also think its unrealistic to balance the game around the idea that in an even match the killer can go for two hooking everyone before going for an elimination and still have a good chance of winning.
6: How much time do we have between chases? This would be survivors playing stealth or dragging the killer to the other side of the map.
All that said, probably 30 to 50 seconds is the mid range for chases.
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Clearly, they are intrinsically linked, even to you.
You wouldn't, I hope, drop chase times to 20 seconds without addressing tunneling. We also wouldn't want to totally kill off tunneling without addressing chase times, in some manner.
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Because I think tunneling would drop off drastically if we were balanced that way to be much less of an issue. Of course I know you disagree with this. Regardless this is arguing semantics. If average chases were that short I'd make tunneling extremely difficult if not nearly impossible, which is the main point.
Idealistically though I'd rather have chases on the longer side as they are mostly now since this is significantly more fun for survivors. The problem is that length of chases isn't viable for the killer. So I'd prefer slowing the game down at base to allow survivors to have their long chases without it costing the killer the entire game. Then we could also very heavily nerf all gen perks and heavily nerf the ability to tunnel/make it nearly impossible. This is the perfect scenario at least to me.
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Some people just want others to have a bad time. Some people want to win so bad they don't care if others are having a bad time.
Killers have received a plethora of buffs over the years, and camping and tunneling has continued to rise alongside it.
The only solution to camping and tunneling is to remove it as a viable strategy completely.
Post edited by EQWashu on3 -
People playing at different skill brackets have different experiences.
You're also ignoring many, many buffs to survivors and nerfs to killer over those same years as well as the fact that so many years ago survivor was wildly over powered. Something that overpowered can get nerfed and still be simply over powered, even if it's no longer as extreme an amount of overpowered.
Don't get me wrong, I want tunneling/camping removed as well, I just think you're not seeing the games true balance as well.
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Care to explain why camping and tunneling is so much more prevalent today when Survivors were exponentially more powerful 5 years ago?
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I actually don't think I agree with your premise. There was significantly high amounts of camping and tunneling back then, honestly probably even more than today.
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Guess I just imagined it then…
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Yeah I actually think tunneling/camping has gone down progressively year after year. Tunneling/camping actually isn't that common these days. Most people call things tunneling that aren't actually tunneling.
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From what I have see I would agree, old gameplay, videos, friends playing years ago, also wasn’t BT not a thing back then as a base kit. If that’s true tunneling would be that much easier especially since the anti camp mechanic also isn’t in place.
I wasn’t around at that time of course so I am not sure but that’s what’s going through my head when I think about this.
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This is also true… to be fair. Chase one survivor, hook them, chase another survivor hook them, go back to the survivor that you know is healing under the hook 🪝 “he’s tunneling me!”
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If that’s true tunneling would be that much easier especially since the anti camp mechanic also isn’t in place.
You would think, but tunneling was less effective 5 years ago than it is today.
Camping and tunneling are absolutely more prevalent today than they were years ago, and I know why. I was just curious to hear Blueberry's explanation.
Over 70 Survivor perks have been released since Laurie Strode. With each new Survivor release, the odds of a survivor using Decisive Strike, or Borrowed Time, or Unbreakable, or [insert meta perk] goes down. Years ago, a Killer could reasonably assume that a survivor was running one of the aformentioned perks, and that alone was enough of a deterent to prevent would-be campers and tunnelers from throwing their game away.
Camping and tunneling used to be throwing, because Survivors were well equipped to combat it. Even if they didn't have DS or BT or UB (I never ran them), the loops were so broken that they could run any Killer for 3 minutes immediately off hook.
Today, not enough people are running anti-tunneling perks and the loops are no longer as strong as they used to be. Tunneling is incredibly rewarding because it very rarely backfires.
Why do people camp and tunnel? Because it works.
Thats why the only solution is to make it stop working.
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