How would you define 'counterplay'?
Thinking about this for a while now, but how would you define good counterplay?
To me good counterplay does the following:
- While it takes away time from the survivors, it also takes away time from the killer.
- Can give either side an advantage if the counterplay is not used or used wrong, respectively the ability is used wrong or not used.
examples:
Trapper: Survivors can disarm the traps. This alerts Trapper to their location, but also forces him (usually) to pick up/reset the trap, giving survivors time to heal up/do their objectives.
If trapper does not go to pick up the traps, he loses control over where they are.
Hag: Like trapper she has a limited number of traps, which can be removed or be 'ignored' by crouching to them, potentially depriving her of her traps. While this is a bit more survivor friendly counterplay, it still is counterplay, as it's only a disadvantage to hag if the player got excessive with trapping a hook/totem.
Pig: One interestingly good counterplay to her is 99ing gens while someone's got a rtb on, and only popping them when the rtb is off. it kinda balances out the time survivors need to get rid off the rtb, as pig has to go round checking the gens (theoretically and often seen in practice when this gameplay happened), thus buying people some time.
and so forth. So to me 'counterplay' isn't how well can you run a killer, but can you use their ability and speed against them.
Comments
To me counterplay is an ability to do something against something to prevent it.
For example you can prevent being reeled by deathslinger by having an obstacle between you.
Counterplay could be consistent/inconsistent, complete or incomplete.
Consistent/Inconsistent is whether it works 100% of time of doesn't.
Complete/Incomplete is whether the counterplay completely negates something or only partially.
Obviously complete and consistent or vica-versa counterplay is an example of bad balance. It should either be consistent and incomplete or incosistent or complete.
So for example Spirit's counterplay is both inconsistent and incomplete. You can try doing something, but this won't work all the time or make you completely safe from being attacked. I can't say Spirit cannot be counterplayed or she has no counterplay, it just so happens that counterplaying her isn't as efficient as counterplaying other killers as you can do anything, but spirit can always guess or hear your direction and position to attack correctly.
On the other hand we have consistent and complete counterplay. This is pallet looping against M1 killers, implying your mistakes aren't major enough to be punished. No matter how good the killer is, if the survivor is at least on his level, M1 killer WILL waste unacceptable amount of time trying to get that survivor in loops.
Good counterplay to me requires interaction from both sides. Where either side has the chance to "outplay" the other. A good example of really well designed counterplay is Blight's rush. Survivors need to know where blight can use his rush to avoid it, while blight has to predict survivor pathing to land it.
Technically, the best "static" counterplay to killer is to gen rush every game. And the best counterplay to survivor is to tunnel and camp with NOED every game. But both requires no interaction so to me it's not good counterplay.