Players holding the game hostage: DbD NEEDS a match timer
NOTE: Repost because I posted in the wrong category.
I just came out of a game as killer where the survivors hid the entire match and never did a single gen, so obviously they all got sacrificed. However, to get the win, I had to play a game that was very boring and over an hour long with only a "brutal killer" ranking to show for it. If I wanted to leave the match and move on, I would have been given a DC penalty. How cruel. (although, without DC penalties, matches have a problem of being ruined every other game)
This is far from the only time this has happened to me, and it happens as survivor too. The killer first kills two or three people. Then, repeatedly downs the last survivor(s) and picks them up and drops them until they are no longer downed, then downs them again. This is so the three minute bleed-out time lasts much, MUCH longer than three minutes.
Matches in DbD are usually 10 to 15 minutes, with the rare lengthy match being about 20 minutes. Endgame Collapse was an amazing step in the right direction (and is what got me back into DbD after a multi-year hiatus due to matches being 2+ hours without it), but we need a timer before then to prevent matches from being 30 minutes long.
My suggestion is that after the 30 minutes are up, the match simply ends, and no players in the match get bloodpoints and everyone de-pips and is given a matchmaking penalty. There is no way to tell who is doing the hostage taking, so scorched earth makes sense (even though I am fully aware it is HIGHLY abusable). In addition, players should be banned for repeatedly drawing matches out to 30 minutes and can be unbanned via manual review. This way, if people that are often targeted by harassment, like Twitch streamers, are repeatedly held hostage, they can appeal to BHVR and get unbanned.
Although, a less foolish option would to remove any and all DC penalties after a certain length of time passes. For example, in addition to the match ending at 30 minutes, you can DC at 20 minutes and keep bloodpoints and items you earned that match. Again, highly abusable, but better than the nothing we have right now. I just want to play the game, not run in circles for literal hours waiting for the 4 Claudettes to do a single gen.
Besides dribbling unskilled survivors and hiding all game, there's an enormous amount of ways to hold a game hostage. There's bodyblocking the last survivor in a corner as killer, survivors blocking exit gates vs AFK killers, survivors that far outclass the killer in skill and refuse to do gens (endless chases and no one dies)... and so on. The game needs a match timer to prevent abuse.
Comments
Spamming the same bad idea over and over again doesn't suddenly make it a good idea