(Please read this devs) my early thoughts on PTB 9.2.0

Honestly, with so many actions that incur penalties, I think new players trying out the Killer role will get overwhelmed and quit before they even understand what's happening. Even after eight years of playing, I can picture myself facing a Morel army of identical skins mid-match, getting crushed by the system: "Hey! You knocked down the same survivor twice in a row! Hooking them consecutively incurs penalties, and leaving them be means they'll get up. Which will it be?"

I don't think we can create opportunities for new players or returning players to learn complex mechanics beyond tutorials that reward BP upon completion and creating sections for each feature like tunnels or crawling. When we buffed Sabotage with that mysterious logic, we should have just made a proper tutorial.

Yes, let's worry about baby killers to the exclusion of baby SURVIVORS when the queue times demonstrably prove which one needs more attention.

On a newbie killer, you can basically just walk around, M1 people, and win. You're going against baby survs who don't even know what the TR is. You don't even need your power or perks until you've gotten several 4Ks in a row and your MMR starts to rise.

It baffles me that people can look at 20+ minute queue times and think, "Not only is this fine, but if someone even SUGGESTS a solution… even if you leave the raw values blank so we have room to adjust… we'll push back harder than any patch in history."

The devs have to worry about the game, guys. If you win too much, and everyone starts to bail, they're not just going to let the game die to preserve your winrate. Sorry.

Meanwhile, the kick bonus is probably going to be at best 10% lol

But the bonus is supposed to make up for the lost slowdown that you can't get from slugging or tunneling anymore, right? Or am I missing something?

I mean… the dev notes literally say:

DEV NOTE: It’s no secret that tunneling can be seen as an efficient way to play for Killers. While this can be true, it’s also true that the results of this can be frustrating for Survivors, leading to Trials ending too quickly for some, while leaving others to fend for themselves in a match that is now much more difficult.

The intention here is for both roles to feel the benefits and incentives that come from spreading hook states. On the one end, Survivors have better opportunities to evade and reset after unhooks, while also limiting those tough situations where losing a Survivor too quickly causes things to go south quickly and snowball. On the other end, Killers are able to apply more map pressure to push back against efficient teams, covering ground post-hook and strengthening gen regression.

I mean… 10% kick bonus isn't going to do diddly squat when it comes to "pushing back efficient teams." It would need to be at least 30% to even START making up the difference between a 4v1 and a 3v1 against survivors that aren't complete potatoes.

Then it's absolutely useless.

Reducing the delay to 5 or 4 seconds would still give the survivors plenty of time to go somewhere and reset while also not leaving the killer completely in the dark on information.

I expected the things people would say about the slug mechanic and generally agree with them, and I was expecting people to have issues with the anti-tunnel mechanic though I'd disagree, but when I saw the hiding unhooks my reaction was: 'obviously, why wasn't that done before?'

Basically, why should the killer have this information? It's powerful, obviously, but it takes out a giant element of game sense just to say 'here be two survivors' or 'here were two survivors recently'.

First I want to talk about Gen regression and blocking being removed once you tunnel some one out I think it’s overkill keep in mind that survivors will also get a repair speed bonus when this happens.

I think they should just tie the penalties together and stagger them on when the first elimination occurs, but to trigger both a killer was probably hard tunneling. Sure maybe the killer hooks survivor A, then B, then C three times in a row, but it would be an unusual game for it to occur like that (and I'm not worried about survivor C suicide rushing the killer, losing a survivor is always going to be devastating).

Giving a haste bonus like this does not benefit these killers in the slightest and because of this

Yes, the haste benefit will have an unequal impact, but we're going a bit far saying 'no benefit'. What killer doesn't need to move away from the hook and the faster they do it, the better?

But yeah, in short, this speed boost and the gen damage increase, even if it’s getting Nerf for the stronger more Chase incentive killers, in the end it’s gonna benefit them a lot more than it is going to benefit the much more passive set-up killers.

So just reiterate before I go farther that the benefits being unequal will happen. I think that's inevitable, though I'm not expecting any massive change in the KRs.

But I feel like a set up killer benefits more from the free information a basekit BBQ is given than is being let on. You can get a general, or perhaps specific, idea of where all the survivors are, thus letting you know where to prioritize your setup.

fourth is mainly about how this is going to affects newer players and that is the fact that after this all goes through the killer is going to be under a lot info after they hook their first survivor

In terms of all the things new players have to experience, which is a problem, I don't worry about this.

BHVR is giving the mechanics to play without running into the downsides. You get a hook, you see where the other survivors are, you go chase one.

Once the 90 seconds is met and they get up, if they get slugged again, they still have to go through the 32 second recovery process again. At least that's been the understanding I've seen. All of this is still kinda vague. And It'll remain a nuisance to be slugged over and over. I'm also assuming there will still be bleedout cause why wouldn't there be.

I think it will turn out to be fairly minor overall. I do like that they've basically left us to scream at the sun and rip each other's throats out with almost no clarifications or updated info. It's kind of hilarious.

Now that we can already just bail out of any match where a killers trying to toxic slug everyone none of these slug changes are necessary at all imo. Just overkill.