Fast Track, what were you thinking with this perk?

Isn't it a fundamental problem that a single perk can negate all efforts? It is completely unreasonable for a killer's hard work to vanish in a second just because of a mechanic that undoes the damaged state of the game

Yes, and now we are getting punished for it. That is the problem that I and many others have with the new Fast Track. Why is that so hard to understand?

This is true for any perk in the game. Fast track isn't different, the math is just more obvious.

If a survivor chase perk gets buffed/new perk introduced that increases the average chase time by 5 seconds, and the killer elects to not tunnel and ends up doing 8 chases before an elimination instead of 3, the buff to the chase perk has given the survivors 25 seconds of extra time, which could be 75 seconds of gen progress.

Or another example, a buff to any gen perk is a 'punishment' for not tunneling, because the longer the survivors are in play, the more they can get out of the perk.

Fast Track is more straightforward, we don't have to get into averages or potential, but that doesn't mean those concepts don't apply. It's why a lot of people are pointing out how the perk is weaker than the alternatives, because its easier to access but not by any means stronger.

Basically, anytime a player (on either side) plays in a non-optimal way, any boost to the other side will just be more exacerbated for the non-optimal way of play (and sadly the strategy element of DbD has been tending in the 'obvious' direction).

Also why is is it that its okay for a survivor to "want to win" meaning escape, but it's not okay for a killer to "want to win" which means kill? Why do survivors get to play to win but killers are not allowed to?

There's two different ways people in the community approach this.

1: Players should play fair. Most people who I've seen argue this make it a both sides issue. Killers shouldn't engage in broken stuff and SWFs shouldn't stack broken builds either (i.e. play with something like comp rules on the survivor side).

The differences is that for ~85-90% of the survivor player base they have an inherent factor that limits their ability to engage in optimal play, some element of soloq. It doesn't make the issue of 'fair play' different, it just makes it a more frequent and easier to abuse thing on the killer side.

2: Designing around 'good intentions' shouldn't even be part of the discussion. So trying to 'encourage' killers to not tunnel is a bad way to do game development (or survivors to not gen rush). People should play to win, designers should make a game that is healthy for both sides based around players trying to win.

Fast Track would seem to fall into this argument, except the concept shouldn't be killers playing 'nice' by not tunneling. It should just be one of the pros/cons of possible play styles.

I'm more in this camp, but the argument went out the window with the utter death of the anti-tunnel approach they had.

Oh some of us did, especially many long time Myers mains hate his rework.

The problem is none of the perks you mentioned are permanent for doing your objective. New Fast Track would be more akin to killer getting permanent charges on each gen every time they get a hook, or permanent hindered for every down.

Edit: MOST of the perks you mentioned aren't permanent. And even still, only Fire Up is afaik and let's be real, anyone who thinks Fire Up = Fast Track, you need to play more killer.

I didn't see those two listed, that's fine, but you CANNOT claim those two perks are as strong.

Heck, Batteries Included has a range. Fire Up is…. Well, Fire Up.

Yes, because Deadlock permanently blocks generators.

I never claimed strength. You said none of them were permanent, and I added fire up, since they did mention batteries.

Although, I didn't make the rules here, and 3% move speed was determined to break every loop in the game. So 5% move speed, permanently, should surely break the fabric of space time.

Now, i would argue that no matter where you stand on this, batteries and fast track are equivalently powerful. Personally I think they're both somewhere between "not great" and "decent", and they both suffer from RNG (either map and gen placement, or skill checks and who is found/tunneled first).

But for those who screamed about MFT being "giga broken" and fast track being "insane", it would also be consistent to say that batteries and fast track are overpowered. But I'm not seeing that personally, nor am I seeing anyone agree with the batteries part.

But a healthy way for this perk would be that you get the tokens by the amount of Survivors sacrificed not for each hook.

Not healthy at all, because the perk would need to weighted so heavily that killers would complain about that, too. A perk requiring a teammate to be sacrificed would practically require an instant gen completion to be worth running and that's never going to fly.

High investment, high reward perks simply won't be accepted by the community.

My point is, that Deadlock and Fast Track are not comparable. Deadlock only blocks generators for a short time, whereas Fast Track, no matter how much or how little time it removes, is PERMANENT PROGRESS. Once Fast Track has been used on a generator, there is NOTHING a killer can do beyond a certain point. Deadlock? Hide near the generator for a bit until it unlocks or go cleanse a hex totem or something.

However, I no longer care. I am now using and loving Fast Track, especially in the Blood Moon Event, and I know that's going to make some survivors foam at the mouth, but I I know how to use it to my advantage and the killer's disadvantage, even in the Blood Moon Event.

Apparently you're also not willing to debate batteries being effectively equivalent to fast track.

Which was my point, that you have chosen to ignore twice now. And that I said was true regardless of how you viewed balance in the past.

Thank you for making sense of this. This is what I keep saying, the perk is far too punishing for spreading hooks, something I THOUGHT everyone here wanted.

But clearly the votes are wrong, we don't want spreading hooks?

That's the entire reason it's too strong.

Again, the perk design itself is the issue. I even agree with people that this could easily be retooled to be an anti-tunnel perk, but you get the max value due to spreading hooks.

I've been constantly running this perk, and the only time I haven't won is when I get tunneled. That's not a coincidence.

fast track is overrated. It's capped at 9 and you're not guaranteed to proc the great skill check when you need to. If your team is being turbo killed and you're somehow not using them, doesn't matter then.

i play both roles 50/50

I'm not assuming killers are spreading hooks. I'm saying that when we discuss perk strength + balance, then we should assume killers are spreading hooks for the purposes of that discussion.

It's not that we want killers to spread hooks, it's that spreading hooks is the video game and ways of avoiding it are balance problems. It at best just muddies the conversation to bring up things like tunnelling here, it's not undesirable gameplay we're trying to encourage players away from, it's a balance problem that needs to be fixed.

As for the last part, fair enough. I consider that part of the perk's specific strength and implementation over the general design, but that's clearly personal preference so fair dos.

The problem with discussing how it affects tunnelling is that it can lead to the road of going "well if survivors have [x] I'll just tunnel", which isn't exactly helpful or constructive.

It also can lead to asking why the devs would design a perk that encourages tunnelling, which has happened a few times in this thread. This is a misread - the devs designed a perk around the entire game, not around one specific balance problem they've actively been trying to fix - that comes from including tunnelling in the conversation when it doesn't really have a place there.

It's just redundant to say that the massively unbalanced issue of tunnelling is less affected by Fast Track, or any perk for that matter. Of course it is, it's massively unbalanced. That doesn't mean tunnelling is actually relevant to this specific perk more than any other, though, there's nothing to be gained from including it in the discussion beyond acknowledging that, like with many other scenarios, tunnelling also excels here.

It's not that the perk is at its strongest when you spread hooks, though.

It's that the perk is weaker when the killer employs the game's biggest balance problem against it.

Framing it like that is I think helpful because it illustrates how redundant this is— of course tunnelling beats it, tunnelling is a huge problem. Tunnelling beats most things. There are completely legitimate and healthy tools that are beaten by tunnelling, that are also at their strongest when the killer spreads hooks by extension, which don't get talked about in this way.

The issue isn't that Fast Track is at its strongest when the killer isn't doing one specific thing, the issue would be that the perk is just too strong at its strongest. That's why comparing it to things like Fire Up and Batteries Included is important- the major important distinction between them is that Fire Up and Batteries Included aren't particularly incredible, and Fast Track is (as far as I can tell) a lot stronger.

Stronger than it should be for its activation requirement, maybe. That seems like a fair discussion to have, I think, but it isn't relevant to that discussion that it's weaker when the killer tunnels. At least in my opinion, anyway.

Those two sentences are linked. I think it's the wrong way around to say it's strongest when spreading hooks.

I think phrasing it that it's weaker when the killer tunnels is more appropriate. That puts it in line with most survivor perks, which is appropriate because it correctly identifies tunnelling as the source of the difference. Tunnelling is a problem, and part of how that problem manifests is that it invalidates or harshly weakens a lot of survivor options.

What's relevant to Fast Track in particular is how strong that stronger situation is, not that tunnelling weakens it. Tunnelling weakens most things.