Should the hook timer freeze within a certain range?
I’m interested to know peoples opinion on this, after posting a discussion around if DS should be basekit to try and punish tunnelling.
Someone suggested that within, say 10 or so metres, of a hooked survivor and NOT in a chase, the hook timer either freezes or is halved in its speed, thus eliminating campers.
it’s an interesting concept and I’d like to hear some opinions about it.
Comments
I spend my time playing, not spamming forums. I've already spent more time on this obviously bad idea that's bad than I'd like. You're clearly a bad faith debater- you know that exploit as a noun is different than exploit as a verb (or maybe you don't, but it's not my job to teach you parts of speech). If you're just going to toxic survivor all over the place, feel free to scream into the void. I'll just hope I never encounter you in game and not bother with you anymore here. Way to take a fun ribbing of OP's suggestion and turn it into two days of irritation and disgust.
Increase hook time by 10 seconds or maybe to make hook time a little bit more interesting they could implement hook skill checks that will reward you with a little bit more time if done properly?
Not unless they remove mashing to struggle. My hands hurt enough already.
Valid points from someone who put thought into their response rather than dismissing the idea completely. I agree with these points, they are quite fair and compromising.
That last bit is something that gets ignored in a lot of these discussions. For the person being camped, it sucks. Not just because you're gonna die and it's boring, but you finally got into a match and your time was wasted and you're gonna get [BAD WORD] all for bloodpoints.
Here's the other thing significant. The real trouble with campers isn't normal killers trying to guard a hook from a bunch of nutcase SWFs, it's the killers who play with malicious intent, and camping is their chosen method to ruin the game for others. The Insidious Basement Bubbas. You're right that Insidious is the key, here. I pretty much always run Kindred because of them now. That's how often I've encountered them between ranks thirteen and four. Some of them are red rank and probably stay there by playing other killers, because there's no way they don't depip when they sit in the basement all match. For me, they're the problem to solve. Removing their ability to camp effectively removes their ability to disrupt an entire match. Not only will the (most likely) two people they catch and camp be screwed, the two survivors out there desperately banging out gens before the other two die will. You don't get points for playing gen jockey all match. You just maybe get to live.
Unfortunately, taking out the trash would, in this case, harm normal killers. Ain't that a [BAD WORD].
I would also say taking out the trash here is pretty disproportionate to the real scope of the problem. Getting 'policy facecamped' for no reason first hook of the match sucks, but is in a super tiny fraction of games outside of garbage ranks because it has to be.
That said, if you want to remove the possibility of that happening, you need to 'make room' by increasing the power of hooking in other ways which I think survivors would find even worse, because many targeted solutions just won't work. For example, disabling it when survivors are in a range of a hook will result in an extreme power asymmetry that doesn't solve anything because it would be trivial for survivors to sit just outside and force the killer to leave the area resulting in a free unhook.
To actually solve this issue with any sort of negative reinforcement would require baking so much positive reinforcement into the act of unhooking that you end up with a scenario where rescuing... sorta doesn't help that much? Like I am sure the average killer would be enthused if hooked survivors permanently lost gen repair speed (Sorta... fractionally killing them for pressure purposes) in exchange for having to do all their hooks like Pyramid Head (But worse because they have to take the time to pick up and carry the survivor for longer than it takes a single survivor to unhook them, meaning a big tempo loss) where they just expect an instant unhook, but that would make tri-gens even stronger and sloooow doooooown the game, rather than resulting in survivor 4ks tending to end via snowball, which is kinda what you actually want.
Like hook defense, slugging, ect, have a lot of meta effects that are good, such as how it dramatically benefits the pace of the game. You can try to argue the killer 'is ruining it for their fellow players' but its a competitive game and its no more ruining it for their fellow survivors than trying to corner OTK someone with Hondo from Street Fighter, or using counters to punish players for trying to do long combos. That isn't 'stopping them from playing the game.' Part of MOST competitive games is that if you make a mistake you gotta sit down and just watch.
If the killer was encouraged to actually 12 hook, that drags out the losing phase for survivors in a way they probably actually don't want. Like strategically getting 12 hooked is ideal, but what it actually does is encourage the killer to tunnel down one survivor because they can't pressure multiple survivors at the hook, meaning more tunneling, and then once someone is gone the game gets pretty glacial as they play super defensively, rapidly eliminating someone else and then using the fact 2 survivors don't repair faster than a killer can regress generally to make the game last 20 minutes. You do not want this.
"I am upset with hook camping" is the ultimate example of what game designers talk about when they say that players do not know what they want. Survivors 'wanted' vacuum pallets too because getting hit despite using a pallet feels bad in the moment, but what it actually does for the game is make it so survivors have to care about the killer being close even if they have a pallet and thus makes it so pallets don't auto-reset chases to a certain distance just for existing. Chases not auto-resetting out in distance constantly means chases actually require you to have a clue, and mean good killers can by earning a few meters from a mindgame down you. This in turn affects gen repair, because the starting distance of a chase now matters again because even the weakest pallet isn't an immunity zone, and that actually did stuff like indirectly buff bad killers.
So much stuff can break when making seemingly reasonable changes to core systems that exist for a reason just because you don't like how they feel. Hooking is probably the most integral mechanic to mess with because of how the entire pace of a match is based around it. You take a swing and miss? You make a Deathgarden scenario where literally everyone is unhappy and the game dies.
Again, the devs have been hearing complaints about camping for 4 years, and their conclusion was 'It really isn't as big a problem as you think we are literally tracking hook proximity and finding the killer only tends to stay if survivors aren't doing gens,' and 'Any fix we make at this point will actively break the game and we already lost a lot of money on Deathgarden trying to do just this and it failed primarily because, as it turns out, the killer being unable to camp ######### sucks and makes the game bad for everyone.'