Is it just me or do survivors not bother looping anymore?

I feel like i get both sides. People who loop and greed pallets and people who press W drop pallet press W drop pallet.

I think the loopers are more experienced players they know the loops and how to loop . Many W players crutch on windows and just run from pallet to pallet and i personally feel like these are less experienced survivors and i tend to use them to clean out the map :D

There are some killers prepalleting works the best against but i never leave the loop until the pallet is broken i try to loop around the dropped pallet.

Kind of depends for me. Just because something can be looped doesn't mean it's always best to loop it in any given situation. Am I ok holding the killer in that area? Is it early or late game? Do I need this chase to go for X amount of time? Do I risk getting zoned if I loop this? Perhaps the biggest factor: am I throwing the game I go down right now, or do we need a pressure relief in the form of a longer chase?

I'm usually a bit more loopy at 5 gens when I haven't been hooked. Once I've been hooked, or we get to mid/late game, there's less upside in looping and more value in wasting time at all costs. If someone is getting rescued, they're resetting, and the killer is chasing me, the worst possible thing I can do as a survivor is go down instantly and let the killer keep up pressure.

This will be an unpopular post, but with the December 2023 stats showing a 32% usage for Windows of Opportunity, Nightlight showing a 35% usage rate recently... are we surprised no one really loops anything anymore?

This might be a hot take, but I'm really starting to suspect WoO is the reason every map and tile is getting gutted.

Windows and pallets are survivor safety, and effectively reaching them consistently makes it so that survivors perform better on average... which means maps need to be balanced around how frequently survivors manage to reach safety. If they keep doing too well, guess what? Remove pallets, remove windows... hello Haddonfield rework! Maybe WoO is fine at high level, but at low and mid (where the bulk of the playerbase is), WoO is busted good because it allows players to totally subvert skillful play at loops... so the maps are getting gutted to compensate.

I mean think about it, if you didn't have WoO up at all times, you wouldn't know for sure where the next safety is exactly unless you already scouted it. If you don't know where safety is, you're more likely to stick to what you do currently know and actually try and loop a tile. I know I've taken plenty of hits after running out of options, turning into a loop hoping for the right pallet spawn and nope, it's the other one, or it's used. With WoO, no issue, I didn't even have to learn/know the structure of the tile at all, I just see everything.

With WoO, why stick to a tile and bother looping anything when you always know where the next tile to chain to is? Loop so far as to put the killer on the wrong side of the pallet, throw it, and run to next.

Thus every new killer has some kinda built in anti-loop, every old killer is getting buffed to be better at loops, and cutting off survivors... why? Because throw pallet and follow the yellow brick road is effective.

However whenever anyone brings up WoO everyone says "it's just an aura perk". Yeah, an aura perk that enforces lazy and bad habits, and facilitates chases becoming an uninteractive auto pilot game. I've said for months now it's not that WoO is too strong, it just facilitates this lazy playstyle that totally removes any need from the survivor to do any scouting or map surveyance at all... and what's the result of that? Rush gens and don't bother to loop.

I've only been playing about 16 months, I'm a relatively new player, and even I REFUSE to use WoO because it actively makes me bad at the game. It does help new players win, it does not help new players learn the game.

I honestly genuinely suspect the reason maps are being gutted is largely because of the prevalent use of WoO to prethrow, hold W and trivialise/subvert all loop gameplay in low-mid MMR.

Just you

i highly disagree with that. between 2016 and 2018, maps were becoming weaker before WoO was ever a popular perk or the perk ever existed. it is known fact that survivor loops were always too strong. they were too strong in 2016 with infinities everywhere and they're too strong now where safe loops = pallet break → repeat 10x over in a match.

it is not survivor don't loop. it is that survivor are not required to loop to win because gen speed is overly strong. that is what it feels like when playing vs swf. they do one good loop and the game is over. in soloq, it varies how many 90 second chases you need to win. bad team = 3 good chases, mediocre team = 2 good chases, super strong soloq high mmr team = 1 chase required.

I wish. Whenever I play an M1 killer I always seem to get the same survivors:

"Hey mister killer look at me! Come over here look at this safe pallet! Follow me mister killer watch how many times I can run around this pallet and not drop it. Hey why are you leaving me mister killer? Don't you want to run around in circles for 5 minutes straight?"

It's downright impossible to respect pallets anymore because you absolutely have to devote 30 seconds to gradually catching up to the survivor until they smack you in the face and you finally get a chance to delete one pallet, before moving to the next.

Tiles are unsafe these days, better to just hold w.

Not fun either side tbh.

I can only speak from my own experience, but I don't DC or let go on hook during unpleasant games, or games that are clearly lost, or against killers I dislike... but I will do a pretty half-assed job in chase in those situations because I have no motivation and am completely fine with being sacrificed. I'll put in a bit of effort but my heart's not in it, you know? I mention this purely because I've noticed a particular sense of apathy amongst the general survivor base in recent months and that could be a contributing factor to what you're seeing.

I mean the playstyle you should use comes down to how the game is going. If your team is extremely gen efficient then you should comp drop everything on the map. Why would you not? It's by far the safest way to play in this situation. Greeding on the other hand is extremely risky. The main reason you should greed and preserve pallets is due to inefficient teammates who don't do gens. People who think comp dropping by itself makes someone unskilled have no understanding of how survivor gameplay actually works. It might be "boring" but it is absolutely the right call in a lot of cases.

There is nothing to loop in the modern DBD era.

I mean depends on the killer and palette, most people won't loop those new palette...gyms? Whatever they are on coldwin for long, I myself just try to stun the killer if possible and then run to a connected loop or try to waste as much time as possible with missdirections. Yesterday I played against a Vecna on father campbell's chapel and it was most of the time just more effective to run around a palette with him a few times without dropping it and let him waste his power and then run away to the main-windows or a L-T wall, there was no reason to actually loop palettes in this case.

Most people actually use loops in my games as long as my killer allows it and the map isn't too bad.

but you don't need survey area if your skilled enough to recognize all loops in the game. that's training wheel use of the perk. Like i already know what all tiles are on like 95% of the maps. just about every survivor that is high MMR has same knowledge.

the people that are high mmr that use WoO use it for its ability to track pallet drops. they remove guessing part of "was my teammate looping here or not in chase 1/2/3?". "is the pallet broken?". your claim is that map are being weakened from WoO but maps were always being weakened since 2016 because… spoiler alert, bvhr doesn't know how to make balance loop designs that aren't just safe pallets/god loops everywhere or infinity windows.

their track record for killer balance is about as bad as their map balance because they keep having to "buff killers" because they're constantly undershoot the killer's power. this is obviously linked closely to map balance.

I like this response.

at low MMR, it is used to pre throw and hold W. Majority of players are NOT high MMR.

for reference, pre throw and hold-w is common enough at high MMR. Not saying that this is always best play but in a lot of cases, it is relatively effective if you understand when to do it and how to do it.

They are using WoO to supplement their lack of map knowledge, and more often not, they use it to hold W and run pallet to pallet.

Is that not purpose of WoO? the purpose of the perk is facilitate and make up for a player's weakness. WoO happens do that extremely well.

If BHVR is using stats to track survivor performance when assessing/balancing maps (and I see no reason to assume they aren't), and a significant portion of the player base is using WoO this way, I don't think it's far fetched to attribute at least some of excessive map tile gutting to WoO.

I highly doubt it. Those map tiles were imbalanced with or without WoO. For example, Haddonfield houses were strong regardless of whether had WoO equipped or not. I don't think WoO has any impact on haddonfield houses becoming weaker. As a whole, I do not believe that WoO has any impact on map balance.

WoO is not healthy in its current state. It does help new players learn the game, it hinders their ability to learn the game.

this is incorrect assessment. WoO skips the process of learning map generation for new player. It does not necessary hinder their play besides making them attached to using the perk.

Training wheels perk is a good analogy actually. Training wheels prevent you from learning how to ride a bike, you don't learn to ride a bike until the training wheels come off.

The learning process is entirely subjective on the individual. the individual needs want to improve at a certain skill in order to improve on said skill. motivation is required. Since no one can stop a player from equipping a perk, the player can choose to never improve on map generation as they do not see a reason to improve upon said skill.

I think we're actually agreeing on the effect, but not the values. I totally agree that WoO improves people's effectiveness at survivor, just in my experience as a newer player, it generally makes survivor interactions much more boring... as I say you either need to keep dropping chase or bloodlust someone down.

that is true for any good looper. you'll always be in strongest positions as survivor and only risk element is you being bloodlusted down. sounds like your complaining about efficient looping which WoO does make worse loopers into better loopers. I do not see this as a problem because killer are suppose have chase capabilities to outplay said loops with killer skill from power or base-kit. leaving chases in my opinion is somewhat of a scapegoat to poor killer chase balance in which this game has long history of killer adapting to that.

Fair point, and that tracks and makes sense, the fact you can do this strategy with WoO obviously means you can do it without WoO, it just takes a lot more map knowledge and experience to do it.

I'm not really complaining about efficient looping, there is an argument to say that as a killer learning to play effectively, having low level players using WoO to play this way means you have effectively a boot camp where you are learning to deal with it right from the word go. I actually have a bulld on Pig centered around Game Afoot that is specifically crafted to counter this style of play... So in that regard I guess it's good thing for killer.

If I really think about it, I think what annoys me about WoO is more the fact I can't use it as survivor when crafting builds.

Therr have been plenty of times I'd have liked to use WoO in certain builds (I have fun trying to make different builds work), but as we've already discussed, WoO in my opinion makes you lazy and overly reliant on the perk, and for me it makes it very hard to resist developing bad habits... thus making it an perk I must ignore at all times. 😒