Why isn't "Shoulder the Burden" announced in any way?

We should be expecting perk loadout displays in lobby by 2029, only a couple more years to wait!!

I think the bigger question with those types of perks is "Why can't people play with the assumption something could be in play, and adapt to whether or not it is." Its the foundation of so many elements of the game for both sides, and especially in their interactions between each other, but it seems to be a mindset that vanishes whenever faced with an unknown about teammates for a lot of people.

The game used to be designed around knowing pretty much nothing about your teammates besides their health state, you didn't even know what survivor they were or what they were doing outside of visual confirmation, and people managed just fine. The HUD updates over time have given a tremendous amount of information that can be used to deduce even more than it tells, but it feels like we need to have everyone's loadout and cooldown timers visible next to their portrait before people stop asking for more. And that might sound hyperbolic but honestly, it could go even further.

When you have a game balanced by chaotic averages, where strengths and weaknesses can vary wildly depending on circumstance in the game around them, having too much information is like seeing a puzzle's solution while attempting it. Those unknowns are what create emergent gameplay, making it so there isn't a set solution to every situation but rather a series of viable ones that each player adapts to given what they know and what they estimate. The reason the game feels so "solved" now is because people have been able to put efficiency over those types of considerations, so changes that boost efficiency for either side, directly or indirectly, only serve to make the game more stale.

I get people want all of the benefits of SWF without having to participate in it, but parity between the two isn't supposed to just be one side pulling the other up to its level. Like with the variance in killer tiers, they should be normalized to have their strengths and weaknesses addressed evenly rather than pulling either one up or down directly. If perks like WoO weren't yellow paint in perk form, people might actually have 4 slots instead of just 3, and perks like Kindred or Empathy that bridge the gap substantially might actually get more use in being able to do so. I still stand by my claim that the abandon feature did major damage to the viability of perks like unbreakable and deliverance simply by actively discouraging their best case usage scenarios, while people instead focus on "How could I know they were in play before hitting abandon" instead of actually playing the match out and finding out.

Excuse me, but with this in mind, why do killers see each other's auras in 2vs8 mode?

Because many tenants of 2v8 mode break the game's foundations as well, for both sides. The problem with design changes that deviate from the game's foundations is that they opejn the gate for a slew of whataboutism like that exact example. 2v8 was always intended to be a mode for fun and has been as prominent as it has due to popularity more than anything. That doesn't mean it respects any of the design choices of the main 1v4 mode, and shouldn't be used as justification for forcing its ideas retroactively.

The point of my stance is that the more things get dumbed down in that manner, the more they detract from the variety of the game. The fact that the meta has always been as rigid as it has will always be proof that people will optimize the game itself out of DBD if you let them.

Bringing something like healing shouldn't be centered around "I can't bring it in case its a Plague" or "I may never be in a position where I can utilize it" but more "I'm bringing it because it can be the difference in being able to self heal or healing someone quickly if needed." There's always so much focus on the possibility of lack of value more than the potential of it, which is why everyone refuses to move away from the safest options possible. Its a self perpetuating problem because people can't deal with something not going their way or facing an unexpected scenario.

There's a difference between the "right" thing and the "only" thing, which was my point. Having risk/reward in your build isn't inherently a wrong choice, but it gets treated as one for so many people. Meanwhile hexes can still spawn in plain sight of someone's camera pan while they load in and its considered perfectly acceptable. Not knowing whether you'll get value from something like a teamwork perk is not the same as claiming it is an objectively bad choice without that information, as "All Cretans are liars" and whatnot (actually learned that one here, its a great paradox for this game.)

That said, since Empathy was mentioned, curious that Kindred wasn't. Its pick rate should be higher than anything with how much this type of concern gets brought up with comparison to SWF, yet its never even in the top 10 on nightlight or official channels. It is the defacto solo queue perk, and only one out of 4 even needs to run it to get guaranteed value for at least someone on the (if not the entire) team, yet it sits low on usage lists. sure they can use STB but you wont get much value from it. is the reason, because its not about "might not" but a focus on "will not" regardless of whether that actually comes to pass or not. Its self perpetuating defeatism more than it is an objectively incorrect choice, as people don't allow room for anything other than plans to go exactly as they intend. Its such a boring way to play, and an even more frustrating one when you can't prepare for not getting optimal value from things (or even the game itself.)

kindred isnt used much because people are slowly seeing soloq as not a team. Why bring a perk that helps a team thats not willing to help you? Great we can all see eachother when someone else is on the hook…. lets ignore that, leave them on the hook while we do gens. There is no value from knowing the killer is near the hook now either due to having anti camp meter visible to all which says the exact same info.

The difference in success and failure isn't hard work, but hard work and opportunity. If you don't put in the effort, you cannot utilize the opportunity. If you operate on a fear of failure (in this case, most of the defeatism in this point) then you remove the potential for the value, which has been my point the whole time. You ask why bother, I say to break that very cycle. Kindred provides plenty of personal value on the whereabouts of your team regardless of whether you are the one hooked or not, with the benefit to the team coming from you being the one hooked specifically. That change was made specifically so that you would always get value helpful to bridging the gap between solo and swf specifically, yet points like your own focus on the potential failings of them rather than the benefit you gain in spite of them. Its the exact focus I'm talking about. Its not about bridging the gap in facets like information, you don't want your agency to have any dependency on theirs.

look at nightlights top survivors perks, almost every single one is for the individual not the for team.

I actually went into a pretty indepth analysis about that in another topic recently, in how solved the meta is due to their focuses on both sides. Survivors favor supplementing (to the point of replacing in some cases like WoO) skill and decision making to last as long as possible in chase with a secondary focus on gen speed (which is most likely due to how highly prioritized slowing gens is for killers in the same meta) and the fact that they are more focused on being selfish than helpful kinda proves my point. I'm saying it shouldn't be that way and that decisions in the game are what have been pushing the game in that direction, while you're kind of… admitting it is what it is? The herd mentality doesn't mean the individual needs to adhere to it, so I don't know if I understand beyond seeking validation.

Hex perks means the survivor has to waste time cleansing the totem so even if its discovered right at the start, there is still value to be had especially if combined with other hex perks.

And 4 flashlights means the killer needs to use a perk slot on something like franklins or lightborn, which then make those flashlights lose value immensely. There is a give and take with risk/reward, which has kind of been my point. If you bring a teamwork perk and can get great value from proper use of it, that isn't the same as saying its pointless to bring because you might not. You can argue about the value of the individual perks on that matter, but my point is that wanting to have that kind of information is wanting to keep the reward while trying to remove the risk in its design. Its a point that gets fought vehemently whenever the risk being too high for hex perks as a concept comes up, and it applies to a lot of things in the game (especially invocations and even boons, let alone perk choices or powers that can be situationally nullified entirely.)

Its not always a bad choice to bring an oddball perk that you might get value from but when its a case of most cases you get no value from it and you lose then yes its a bad choice to bring a perk you MIGHT get value from instead of a perk you WILL get value from.

There's that focus on the risk again, this time the goalposts have moved to "most cases." If thats how you feel, you shouldn't be considering anything that relies on risk reward ratios at all, and most don't, which is why the meta is as self centered and consistently safe as you saw on nightlight. The community has been trying to out-efficiency each other as hard as humanly possible for a while now, and its why 90% of the perks in the game are considered useless clutter to so many people.

Just need to use logic and experience to judge what most commonly happens in matches and plan for it, not plan for the minority situations.

I agree completely, but the key factor missing from that statement is being able to adapt to when things don't go according to plan, i.e not getting value from those preparations. Its something that has been a standard in the game since its inception, but for some reason there has been a growing insistence in many players that it should apply to everyone but themselves because of a lack of temperment when things don't work out how they hope.

The point of mentioning early DBD is because its talking about the base foundations of what DBD is. It sounds simple to say its just an icon, but think about what impact removing procedural generation on tiles would do to the game: The more free information that players get spoonfed to them instead of needing to at least use critical thinking with context, it removes degrees of the game's design. Thats why something like the Hud Update worked, because the information it spells out is only half of the info it allow you to deduce by applying it to context around it. You're talking about removing a large chunk of the risk of the perk despite how strong being able to delay a killer removing a survivor from the game is to its actual structure, which is most of the reason its a desirable strategy in the first place.

I also extremely disagree with the concept of making DBD harder for SoloQ, which is another reason I mentioned early DBD and the foundation of the game. If you focus on the differences in killer designs or what has been removed, you ignore what has been gained and how strongly those things have changed the core gameplay loop for the positive. Nurse has always been strong and used to be even stronger, despite the fact that Kaneki and Blight weren't always there. We're out of the OverBrine meta, and Chess Merchant died ages ago. Those types of sentiments focusing on one side but ignoring the other is refusing to look at the whole picture.

The devs have literally said that they don't cater to a stealth playstyle anymore because the community evolved away from it in favor of chases. It is all about design philosophy and nothing to do with foundations if the devs are completely comfortable in removing old foundations from the game in favor of a new design philosophy.

Whether you want to admit it or not, this game requires coordinated play (or at least very good macro knowledge from soloq survivors) for the survivor team to have a chance at winning. Gone are the days where you can just stroll through a match with nothing but self care and iron will and have a good chance at surviving through the exit gate.

I'm not sure if you're being willfully dishonest and pedantic with your apples and oranges comment, but after 10 years, any live service game will only have very few core similarities of what it once was. Dbd is no different.

The devs have literally said that they don't cater to a stealth playstyle anymore because the community evolved away from it in favor of chases.

This is true, and ties back to my comments about the community maximizing efficiency over time. Stealth has always been a less efficient playstyle in the majority of cases it gets used, which is why perks like Distortion had the changes they did to promote it as more of a situational ebb and flow and less an avoidance of interaction altogether. I don't necessarily agree with where they landed on it, but their reasoning was tied to the fact that interacting with the killer has always been a core aspect of the game's design, and complaints about the inefficiency of Urban Evaders goes back ages.

It is all about design philosophy and nothing to do with foundations if the devs are completely comfortable in removing old foundations from the game in favor of a new design philosophy.

The fact that the devs are as willing to remove foundations is, again, why we have so much instability and whataboutism on so many topics. The first case was the incorporation of SWF. Yes, I know it was always planned, you can stop typing that response, but it was a necessary evil that contradicted most of the game's design which was focused about obscuring as much information and communication as possible. Ever since, every justification for breaking those design foundations has gone back to "but SWF get that info" or "they get to maximize X perk" which is what has led to the dichotomy between the two to as much of a degree as it has. It becomes a design limitation the same way that the Nurse did, between limiting the potential effects of them (but Nurse can do X with Y perk!) to the point that she needed to have her teleport basic attack be considered a special attack because of stuff like backpack builds. To say that removing a foundation is necessary to evolve a game, you're admitting that either the foundation was faulty or the ideas contradict the game itself, both of which cause further instability with every contradiction.

The reason I praise the HUD update is because it tied into other game foundations when trying to address the dichotomy. Instead of just giving everyone aura at all times, it gave contextual info that allows players to use game sense to deduce more information than it told. Many perks get used in similar ways, in fact the best use of Empathy used to be to track killer movements based on the aura of the injured player: If they're fast vaulting and throwing pallets, you knew the killer is right on them before having the hud give you that information. If they were curled up, someone else was already healing them. That type of meta information is how game sense is used to take information not given to the player and make educated and informed decisions based on what the information you're not told explicitly. By contrast, WoO is an amazing perk for learning layouts, planning tile chaining, and managing existing resources without visual confirmation: Unfortunately, it is so direct and blatant that it has a "Why would I not run it?" effect that builds dependance, which then devolves it into a yellow paint perk. The more things are given over on a platter, the less people feel the need to develop the skills that it replaces when it should be only supplementing. The end result is that people don't embrace those foundations, they become willing to pay a cost to remove them outright then turn around and lament what it costs them to do so.

Whether you want to admit it or not, this game requires coordinated play (or at least very good macro knowledge from soloq survivors) for the survivor team to have a chance at winning.

I wholeheartedly disagree, at least to the degree you imply. As someone who only rarely played swf at all back in the days between spirit and slinger, there is more ability to silently coordinate off of other players without the need for direct coordination with them. The distinction is that reactive play is a skill that gets developed and cultured through game sense: If someone is chasing you off hook to try to heal you immediately, you can make an educated guess on the presence of a perk like We'll Make it being in play. There is a massive assumption in the community that every other player is dumber than oneself, so there is never any attempt to understand that many players do things for reasons. Its why the arm flailing on hook to denote camping fell apart, the understanding was that it was to denote the camp, but some people were ignorant to it while others assumed it was just one of those people spamming a button out of needing stimulus. The lack of faith in other players, regardless of how justified they felt it was, caused it to become a less effective signaling tactic.

The people who want more info handed to them and the people who refuse to fill in blanks are one in the same. It creates a dependency on information instead of allowing oneself to embrace the incomplete nature of decision making. Thats why I compare it to having the solution to a puzzle while doing it, as those types of unknowns have always been a foundational aspect of the game. Its why you can't see the killer in lobby, its why tiles and resources are procedurally generated, many core aspects of the game loop were built on unknown unknowns. In fact, its why map offerings needed to be nerfed, as they allowed people to maximize builds specifically around the presence of things like a slew of drop points (and related design flaws) on old Haddonfield. That adds variety to gameplay and makes it less formulaic, and is a type of emergent gameplay design that entices people to PVP games in the first place. The more you erode those foundations, the more formulaic gameplay gets: Instead of adapting to situations as presented, it becomes a series of "if x, then y" statements outside of the human element of your opponent. When people talk about the game being in between competitive and a party game, that foundation is exactly what they're talking about, its not counter strike or league of legends and its not fall guys, it bridges the gap between the two to put an equal focus on variety and skill expression on more than a superficial level.

 Gone are the days where you can just stroll through a match with nothing but self care and iron will and have a good chance at surviving through the exit gate.

You still can, and people still do, but it becomes more circumstantial than it was in the past for multiple reasons. Aside from more tools being given to the opposition (power scaling in this regard will always be an arms race,) the opposite is also true. Gone are the days where people needed to permalock BT to their build because it isn't even needed anymore. Gone are the days of relying on using DH as a "push button to teleport to pallet" days, as are the "run Overbrine to have hours to defend gens" days. People build reliance due to refusing to engage with aspects of the game, which is why that becomes dangerous when it relates to foundational aspects. Its easy to understand that people barely memorize phone numbers due to having contact lists in their phones, but they should still be memorizing emergency contacts despite that convenience. If you don't have access to the phone and need to make an emergency call like that, if you don't memorize the number you are not able to, which is why overreliance on a convenience can be detrimental to that type of consideration. Essentially, once that type of redundancy affects core gameplay foundations, it inhibits the player from being able to develop those abilities unless they actively attempt to in spite of them, which is why so many people feel so many things are necessary to function within the game. This is something that applies to both roles very much, regardless of how justified people feel it is based on conditions of the game around it. Absence can make things more difficult, but it is never impossible outside of game breaking scenarios/exploits.

I'm not sure if you're being willfully dishonest and pedantic with your apples and oranges comment

Pot, kettle, etc. This is why I actively don't like engaging in your posts, so please miss me with that. Ghandi's answer to "An eye for an eye" was simply to continue "leaves the world blind." You wanted to force a dismissal, I answered it with a perspective supporting open mindedness.

This community continues to frustrate with the insistence that kicking every gen on cooldown or tunneling the first thing that moves is supposed to be "genius tactical strategy" that should never be inhibited or changed in any way, yet also the idea of "I should let the person with we'll make it unhook instead" is somehow a ticket to impossible games and shouldn't be allowed for people to even consider as an option. Come on.

You might be less frustrated if you didn't boil down everyone who disagrees with you as being a hive mind that is perpetually illogical while everyone who agrees with you is a bastion of Vulcan virtuosity. The most frustrating thing about trying to maintain neutral stances that focus on game health is constantly being lumped into strawmen instead of people trying to understand a position they might not agree with, but this entire sentiment is just a derailment about meta tribalism.

As to the last part, there is a massive difference between being psychic to get value and having the game sense to allow someone to use their perk in a situational way, and I'm sorry your faith in your teammates is that low that you feel that way, regardless of how justified it may feel based on the disappointments that have led to it. People honestly don't realize how burnt out on this game they actually are half the time.

I run no mither almost exclusively no joke, and the built in iron will buff was one of the greatest things ever.

You might be less frustrated if you didn't boil down everyone who disagrees with you as being a hive mind that is perpetually illogical while everyone who agrees with you is a bastion of Vulcan virtuosity.

There is literally a statement in this thread that giving survivors information would cause them to "win more games and create frustration". While the reality is that it would generally give a minor quality of life improvement that only changes gameplay if the survivor uses that information correctly.

It wouldn't be a huge massive swing in balance. It would, at best, be barely noticeable and likely not even impact perk pick rates, let alone kill rates.

As to the last part, there is a massive difference between being psychic to get value and having the game sense to allow someone to use their perk in a situational way, and I'm sorry your faith in your teammates is that low that you feel that way,

There's no game sense here, there's just a lack of information. I don't know if Meg has the perk, or not, or just a challenge to unhook people.

In most multiplayer PVP games I could communicate that. Playing with StB on one survivor, we'll make it or even deliverance on another, for example, there would be different situations where those would each be the better option. But I can't strategize that or coordinate, certainly not in the moment. And if they're on console I have literally no way to know even if I ask in the lobby.

And I don't think it's reasonable to expect other people to know why I'm pushing for an unhook, if there's zero way to know that these perks are even in play. It's actually just expecting that either I am, or my teammates are able to divine the correct play based on information that isn't available in game and can't be communicated through game.

That seems like an easy fix. Yet here we are, with people claiming the sky will fall if you do so. It's not "fighting a hive mind", it's simply fighting this mindset that only a few people seem to have that if you give survivors even one inch of space it will destroy the game with catastrophic consequences. And that's not just me being hyperbolic, it's some of the responses in this thread.

If you read my whole post and that's still your opinion, then I don't even know what you're arguing anymore. I talked about your second paragraph at length in my post.

If that is the case, then your whole point of argument is all over the place. You're bringing up urban evasion, distortion, etc. as if they meant anything to what the original post was about. All OP asked was for a way to see if people were running shoulder the burden, and you're talking about how "back in my day, SWF wasn't in the game" or "back in my day, people complained about urban!" or "I thought the changes to distortion were fine!" You keep typing paragraphs for things wholly unrelated to the topic, and then tell people they're not "discussing in good faith" when they don't engage with your paragraphs-long trip down memory lane.

You misrepresent my points and then go off attacking your flawed premise of them. Why would I continue to engage in that from someone who projected that onto me right before? It only seems all over the place because you purposely refuse to see the connections between, or you can't understand them. Either way, like I said, there's nothing more to discuss. Feel free to get the last word in if you want, I'm not making this post to try to rob you of that, but I'm absolutely tired of dealing with the constant dismissal and misdirection attempts.

Game sense isn't about what you know, its about what you can figure out. So yes, if someone is exhibiting behavior that would be consistent with them running a situational perk, you use game sense to decide whether to accommodate that assumption or not like in my We'll Make It example. Its the same principle behind the mindgame a killer makes every time a downed survivor crawls under a pallet, especially if they've been sitting underneith of it: Everything from someone waiting around a corner to a power struggle play become possibilities to consider without having any form of certainty in the decision. Thats why I keep talking about emergent gameplay.

You shouldn't have to deduce what your team is running in a team game. Also, correlation is not causation. Just because someone sprints at a hook doesn't mean they have shoulder the burden. People still want their pips for their monthly grade, people still want to use their healing perks, of which there are many. There are a plethora of reasons as to why someone would stop what they're doing to get an unhook, and it just so happens that only ONE out of that long list includes shoulder the burden. How is anyone supposed to reasonably deduce that they are running a perk, especially when survivors cannot see the aura of someone. So for your "deduction" situation to be even remotely accurate, a survivor MUST assume 1) a survivor who is not currently doing anything on the hud is indeed going for a hook (remember auras are not shown to other unhooked survivors unless specific perks are brought), 2) they are doing so because it is shoulder the burden instead of any other reason mentioned for getting an unhook.

I understand your point. If a killer player prioritizes kicking a gen below 50% over chasing, or they walk past 3 hooks to get to an out of the way hook; yes you can reasonably assume they have pop and pain res respectively. But for something that requires 0 deviation from normal, optimal gameplay, without said perks in play such as shoulder the burden? How is anyone supposed to correctly guess that within even a coin flip's chance of being correct? And that STILL ignores the whole point of: why on earth do I have to deduce my teammate's perks in a team game intentionally designed around team play? The argument that "well 1.0 dbd you had to." 1.0 dbd had one tenth the perks as current dbd, and almost every perk had an obvious tell because their effect either gave a buff icon or you could see the effect immediately. Urban? Obvious. Sprint burst? Obvious. Iron will? Obvious. Leader? Obvious. Self care? Obvious. How does shoulder the burden do that? It doesn't. You don't know it's in play unless the person with shoulder the burden beats the Sable player trying to get her pip to the hook and you see it on the hud. For any other perk, maybe I would agree with you, but for a TEAM BASED perk like shoulder the burden, it should show to the team that it's an option and who has it.

This option, to me, is about on par with making shadowing an fov slider. (Another change I was pushing for for years before they did it.)

It's it technically a buff? Sure. Will it change some minor aspects of the gameplay? Yeah.

Is it a common sense change that will improve overall player quality of life? Absolutely.

And it should be on the devs radar to implement it in some way in the near future.

Those are examples of deductive reasoning, since you have the information available and can use game knowledge to fill in the gaps.

And my point is that being given an icon that spells something out doesn't leave any gaps. Going off of behavior and making educated guesses, and having context that enforces a hypothesis without spelling it out is what makes it deductive reasoning. Going to be honest, I never see the perk anymore, so I completely forgot they even added an icon for We'll Make it to the rescued survivors hud ages ago, so that was a bad example on my part. I guess a better example would be something like Solidarity how the only real possible feedback you could get would be them suddenly popping to full health after finishing healing you, but wouldn't know before hand. If that was a point of confusion, I own that, but the idea was that the perk doesn't announce itself and instead you have to rely on the behavior of the survivor to apply deductive reasoning to fill in the gap without having a direct notification of its presence in play. Your examples about screams and noed regarding filling in the gaps are correct and consistent with what I've been trying to convey.

But survivors are skins. I can't guess which of the combinations of perks Meg is running ahead of time, but I can piece together with information that's given during the match to some degree.

Which is by design. Its why loadouts aren't visible, and why there is next to nothing you can see about another survivor directly that the killer cannot. It has been an intentional foundation for the game to not have that information about other survivors, and is part of what the horribly worded infamous "1v1v1v1v1" comment was supposed to be conveying. The survivors are supposed to be united by a common goal, each bringing their own unique abilities to the table, but without unified coordination. Thats why I keep saying that SWF was the first major crack in that foundation, because it created a double standard that the rest of the game has been trying to reconcile and adapt to, and necessitating all design choices to have to fall between coordination requirement and potential strength caused by said coordination. If that design foundation was never split, it would be much easier to be able to maintain balance in the strength due to consistency, but the lack thereof means that many later unrelated elements are then bound by the split foundation that was previously caused. And I say this as someone who doesn't think SWF should be abolished or even blanket punished, just as someone who recognizes that changes that contradict core game design lead to splintering circumstances subsequently.

If that information is not available in any way, it's not really reasonable to expect players to guess. This is also a game where, 10 years later, something as simple as "waving your arms on hook" is still ambiguous to mean either "safe to unhook" or "not safe to unhook". So even clear and obvious attempts at communication are not clear between players.

I actually already explained why I feel that happened, because the fear of being incorrect outweighs the willingness to chance it. In fighting games there is a common scenario where players can be unwilling to even press a button out of fear of being punished for it, which can be managed reasonably (neutral/footsies) or unreasonably (turtling/staredowns.) With emergent gameplay, the idea is that you are always operating on a large number of unknowns, and the main focus is on your ability to adapt to each time you are right or wrong. You are constantly taking risks, minimizing them sure, not not actively avoiding or removing them entirely. The idea of needing to guarantee value from a perk choice is the same as never pressing a button and constantly guarding, allowing that risk aversion to turn into full on avoidance due to over prioritization.

There is nothing to stop a player from always treating arm flailing as it used to be agreed upon, the reason people question it is because of their lack of faith in the flailing survivor actually applying it for its intended purpose. Similarly, when it comes to perks like StB, if you're on death hook and you see a survivor following you outside of the TR, you can make a judgement call that they might be trying to get you both far enough away from the killer to use StB while mitigating their own risk in using the perk. Having a direct notification that they were trying to do that would basically just be telling you to run as far away from the killer as possible to use the perk, instead of requiring any degree of game sense to fill in the blanks and figure that out yourself. Just like with the arm flailing on hook, there is nothing stopping you from taking those elements and assuming that was the intent behind them following you, and at worst, they would just heal you anyway. The only risk is in sacrificing potential efficiency, which is why I always bring up the absolute laser focus the game's meta has become in regards to efficiency as a concept for both sides.

The game has also evolved. The gameplay used to also be hide and seek and they even marketed the game as "horror hide and seek" at one point, yet they put out an "anti hiding" patch last year.

Stealth wasn't removed from the game, it has been changed. Even despite perks like nowhere to hide affecting it particularly strongly, there are times where slowly circling a rock out of sight can objectively waste a surprising amount of time when the situation is correct for it. That said, the addition of perks like that create more levels of deductive reasoning in themselves, by creating similar scenarios like the Noed one you mentioned earlier where you take pieces of data and combine them to figure out the presence of the perk in the first place. The game doesn't give you an icon that your aura is visible, though something like losing a stack of Distortion could make it easier to fill in that blank. All of these things are based on the concept of unknowns and recognizing and adapting to them, which is different than being told outright.

If the solution to StB was something more akin to a subtle tell, that would be more consistent with the game's design than it just being spelled out entirely, which is why I brought up the way the Hud update gave additional information without going against the game's foundation. Many changes over the game's life have been done with that level of nuance and consideration for the nucleus of the game's DNA, while many have been more hamfisted. I'm merely stating the former is more preferable to the latter, as it reduces the liklihood of dumbing down or creating unforseen design limitations after the fact. When it comes to superficial things that don't affect the core game loop (example, the color of scratch marks) that is fine, but when it affects the core game loop that level of care is important (example, the luminosity of blood puddles)

What's funny, is that I said similar things about showing killers the hook markings. Those are absolutely game sense, and more so even just memory since the killer not only can see the hooks as they occur (existing game information) but was also personally present for each hook and actively, personally took action each time. And yet they added this as a qol feature regardless.

Exactly. The hook counters were a long requested feature because they had less to do with the core gameplay loop then they did the concept of mental stack. As the killer is always present for that information beforehand, it does nothing to impact their ability to have to discern that information beyond sheer memory, so it doesn't tie into the core game design. If the killer could not see who they were hooking as part of that foundation, it would be a much different story. Its a good example of why those nuances are important to consider, as it maintains the divide between gameplay advantage and QoL compared to something like having that information be visible overtop of the survivor's head at a distance. You at least need to apply concepts like their skins (and in the case of duplicates, other context like the chase indicator) instead of seeing a few pixels of a survivor in the distance through a corn field and instantly going after them based on their hook count. The information is just restrictive enough to prevent things like that.

So if we can give this kind of information out, then I'm that light your "you should just have game sense" doesn't hold water whatsoever. Even on top of the fact that you have vastly less information about your teammates perks and motivations than killers did regarding hook stages.

The reason I don't like generalizations about opposing arguments is because this post is a good example of how middlegrounds can potentially be reached when nuances and considerations are evenly recognized. I thought it was clear by my examples that it wasn't about the information itself so much as the degree with which people want it spelled out, which was why I kept using the examples I was and talking about game sense in the first place. But maybe it wasn't. I am always for more tools to help people make more intuitive decisions, my opposition comes from making those deductions for the player directly by oversharing information.

*For those who plan to leave a comment in a month's time: To make the most of the "Shoulder The Burden" perk, survivors' "waiting to be rescued" plays an important role. To improve the accuracy of "waiting to be rescued," use "Empathy." *Please be aware that some rescuers may be careless, so please be especially careful and courteous when rescuing. *Stealth is also important. It's pointless if you're discovered first. This is also an opportunity to learn "stealth." *Even if you use "Shoulder The Burden," if you yourself are executed early, you will instantly become a burden to survivors. *Please fully understand this point. *This applies if the game you are playing has the concept of "waiting to be rescued."

*Please continue enjoying the game

Just in case I'm one of those people, I probably wanted the the anti-tunneling initiative to go through more than most of the people who complain it didn't (in a correct way, rather than the one they wasted months of manpower on.) I also changed my stance from wanting killers to be able to abandon as freely as survivors to instead wanting the reasons of why they would want to abandon addressed instead. There's a difference between wanting something and wanting it the correct way, and that applies evenly to either side, regardless of how much people want to put each other in opposing classifications.