Stop adding Hatch Tome Challenges
With changes to the hatch mechanic there are just way too many things that have to go in your favor for you to complete hatch challenges.
As survivor unless you're in a 4SWF that can coordinate everyone leaving so you can find the hatch you instead have randoms that can prevent you from getting the hatch challenge done. It only takes one random to prevent you from getting the challenge done, they can just not leave until the EGC timer is almost at an end. If the random is also running this challenge then both of you will be standing around waiting for the other to leave and hoping it's in time for you to find the hatch. The only sure way as survivor is to wait for your teammates to die before gens are completed so you have more time to search or as swf make sure the randoms get killed so you can coordinate without them interfering - both not great solutions.
As killer before you could atleast find the hatch and stand over it until survivors left, now you will definitely have to slug the last survivor to find it - this just creates extremely unfun gameplay.
Hatch challenges just should not be added as rift challenges anymore. Really any future rift challenges should take into account changes BHVR has made to game mechanics as well as the fact what may work fine for a 4swf will not work for solos.
Comments
Alternatively, undo the hatch nerfs.
Please. Trying to get hatch in solo queue is hell because survivors love to wait at the gates until the end of the collapse, either because they want to spite the killer, they want to spite you, or because they mistakenly want to help you and end up getting you killed. Used to be you'd just die on the hatch, now you straight up don't have enough time to look for it when people will only leave with 15 seconds left in the game.
It is easier to get hatch by means of a chill killer when you all die than it is to get it in a game where you could have escaped out the gates. That's how stupid it is.
That's the thing, not only do you need to wait for everyone else to leave but you also need to find it. Before you could bring a key and leave during EGC if people decided to hang back until time runs out but now that isn't even an option. In 4SWF you can coordinate leaving but 3SWF/2SWF/Solo you can have just 1 survivor staying back that prevents you from completing the challenge.
People HATE the challenge of "have others escape while you're still alive" because it's basically the same thing - you need the randoms to just leave but alot of times they just hang back.
I don't know if console players can chat in the lobby before game as I am a PC player but if you're on PC and have cross-play off you can just use the lobby chat to ask people to leave so you can find Hatch. It's not a perfect solution but it helps somewhat. Another option is as you said going S.W.F. and if you lack people to do that with again, use a lobby chat if you can or messaging on console, asking the people you just played with to team-up to try and help out.
But I do agree, with the changes to Hatch spawning any such Challenges are indeed much harder to do. As Killer I've seen several Hatch escapes and as Survivor I've gotten two myself and seen a few more but they are not as easy as they once were.
Not undo, but change. There NEEDED to be a change to Hatch and slash or Keys, they were WAY too powerful before. The change I WANTED to see done was "Hatch only spawns when five generators are fully repaired", none of that "(gens done) = (live Survivors +1)" math. The main problem a lot of Killer players had was with two or three people managing to escape via the Hatch without having to finish the last one or two gens, making any sort of three-gen useless. Remove the Hatch math and you remove that problem. The devs just went a bit too far in the other direction is all.
Console doesn't have chat, even if it did it would take the entire time of 1 minute in lobby to type out anything with a controller. Same goes for typing out a message to anyone - and that's if they don't have their profile set to private to avoid the toxic messages that come with this game. Like I said before a 4SWF can coordinate for this challenge to work, all the others just need 1 random to prevent them from getting hatch - that's not OK.
I know hatch is possible, I'm not saying it's not. I've gotten hatch by pure luck of it opening next to me when killer has slugged for 4k. The problem is how you now need multiple things outside your control to now escape through the hatch. You need to be the last one in the match so either your whole team dies before last gen finishes (which would be best way outside a 4SWF to find hatch) or hope your team leaves before the EGC timer runs out (and hope none of the randoms are also running the same challenge and waiting for people to leave). If you had to wait for team to leave during EGC timer you need to hope you can find the hatch before the timer runs out.
This challenge also does not help your MMR - you could die trying which will lower your MMR or you escape through hatch and your MMR doesn't go up because hatch escapes don't count towards MMR.
I agree with you that because of the Hatch change Challenges that involve it are not fair. I'm just trying to give some suggestions on how to help make it easier because we've got Hatch Challenges and will get more Hatch Challenges, it's just how the devs work.
And to each their own, I could not care less about my MMR, because it is a number I can't see and having high MMR means I have less fun games. I am very willing to tank my MMR as Survivor and the only reason I'm not already doing so is because I'm trying to reach Rank 1 for the Achievement. I understand that other people care about their MMR and that it is a factor in these Challenges but it's not a major factor.
Really your best bet would be to find three other people to SWF with. If you lack friends (like myself) there are a lot of recourses to find them. Make a thread on the forums here looking for a group, or join Twitch streamer Discord and pair up with them when you can. You don't HAVE to do these things solo, and until you can try them with SWF do others.
It doesn't fix the problem, but with this game and the devs working on it we kind of just have to learn to deal with stuff like this because if it ever gets fixed it'll take years and then it might be "fixed".
The hatch and keys really were fine as they were. The only issue was - and to an extent still can be - hatch offerings. Those should have never been created, or only available to killers. And it’s hilarious they were introduced in a period hatch complaints were rampant on these forums.
Killers don’t need to have blowout matches every trial.
Again, I know that getting a 4SWF together would be the easiest way - I have acknowledged that in my original post as well as in comments. I know there are sections here in the forums and on discord to find people to play with. The problem is that the challenges shouldn't be forcing people into a 4SWF in the first place. This is an issue in many parts of DBD, the devs keep forgetting there are players that are solo that are being left behind in balance because they only think of 4SWF. Now not only is it balance but it's Tome challenges as well and that's not OK.
Changing a Tome challenge to not involve a hatch would not be something that "takes years to fix", on first archive they changed challenges involving EGC while that rift was still open. All they have to do is change this challenge to do something that would actually make Alert useful like dropping pallets/working on gens and then make a note to not add anymore hatch challenges in future Tomes.
Disagree. Hatch/key nerfs went too far, but 3 survivors being able to nope out at one gen left was a major problem.
It put killers in an impossible situation. Guard the 3-gen, everyone leaves through the hatch. Guard the hatch, everyone does the gen. Patrol, they'll slip out through the hatch when you're not looking. It didn't matter that much if a hatch offering was used; it'd speed up the exit strategy, but the team still has infinite time to find the hatch unless it happened to spawn in the middle of the 3-gen. And even then, survivors could just zerg rush you because there was no unlock time. The closest equivalent I can think of is NOED, when you do everything right to win the game and suddenly the other side whips out a 'lol you thought' card... but NOED can be dealt with in a number of ways (and not even the 'do bones' way, that's the least efficient means of handling it.) Keys were just a lose/lose and a very uninteractive mechanic.
I'd have been happy with a change like 'one key equals one hatch escape', or hatch only spawning when all gens are done, but they took the mori nerf route again. Current keys are useless and current hatch is not a mechanic worth involving in archive challenges.
Wait, I just saw you made a post (https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/299164/please-stop-asking-us-to-break-pallets#latest) asking for them to stop adding breaking pallet challenges because it's out of the control of the killer if a survivor drops a pallet and for it to be easier you need to play friendly. Then you came in here saying "we just have to learn to deal with this stuff" when I said hatch challenges should no longer be added since the change in mechanic because they require too much out of your control to complete and are only easier for 4SWF that can coordinate. You also said you don't care if you drop MMR in this post because you get easier matches, so wouldn't dropping MMR to get survivors to drop pallets be OK?
I'm sorry but the fact you argued against my points as survivor in here only to use same points as killer in different post is pretty ridiculous.
As if breaking pallets is anywhere near the difficulty of anything pertaining to the hatch these days, lol!!!
Oh, I know, I wasn't even going to get into that. 😂
As @Laluzi said the previous Hatch and Key mechanics were really bad, as there was very little to nothing a Killer could do to stop three people getting out at one gen after Killing the first person. You play a perfect game as Killer, being fair, spreading out hooks and not camping or tunneling anyone, setting up a great three-gen and just after that ninth hook everyone else escapes. It was a really bad feeling and extremely unfair to the Killer.
But the change the devs made was too far in the other direction and now Hatch is near useless unless VERY lucky. It never should have been only "one Survivor left" because that means you either have to wait for your teammates to die or for them to leave, and it's already been covered while the second one isn't a good thing to be waiting on.
The devs just don't really understand how people actually play their game most of the time and design with their perfect ideal of how the game flows. In their minds as soon as the gens are done and a gate opened everyone automatically leaves and if someone is waiting for Hatch they can now go look for it. But that's not what most people actually do in the game, they wait at the Gate for any number of reasons.
I want to make this clear: I agree with you. You should not be forced to play in a SWF with comms to have a chance at a Challenge. And while you can still do Hatch Challenges outside of a SWF it is just very difficult to do so now because of the changes. I'm just trying to make suggestions on how you can try and deal with it for now until we get a change, IF we ever do.
As for them changing things during a Rift that was because those Challenges were straight up not working at all, you couldn't gain progress in them. It wasn't that they were hard to do, it was that they literally could not be done at all. That's why I see it taking the devs a really long time, if ever, to stop adding or change the Hatch Challenges; because they can still be done, it is just way harder than it needs to be.
Quoting you twice to cover these two topics separately.
I use different logic in the two topics because they are different topics.
As Survivor the Hatch WILL spawn no matter what you do, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to make use of it. If everyone else is hanging around the Exit Gate while the timer ticks down and just won't leave while you're running around the map looking for Hatch (if you were not aware there is a bug in the game where even if Hatch is not visible it still has collision, so if you run over it as Survivor or Killer your character will be 'standing on the air' so you CAN find it this way and wait for it to open) even if you never find it and get killed because of time-out the Hatch did spawn somewhere after everyone else left. Same goes for if everyone else is dead and the Killer found it first; it spawned and you just lost your chance to use it.
My problem with a "break pallets" challenge is that through normal gameplay a Killer can not drop pallets to break them. There are ways of making it more likely they will get dropped, yes, but in the end it is up to the Survivors to drop them for you to break. You can "go friendly" and make it clear you want them dropped, but that isn't normal gameplay.
Killers still "have to deal" with it just like Survivors "have to deal" with how hard Hatch is now. And just like you asked there to be no more Hatch Challenges because of how hard it is to get I was asking there to be no more "break pallet" Challenges because of how annoying they are to get. Same concept, slightly different logic.
The EGC challenges they changed were not broken, you could complete them. I completed the survivor "unhook 2 survivors safely during EGC" challenge before it was changed to just 1 thanks to my swf teammate basically sacrificing himself. People complained about this challenge until it was changed during that tome because of how difficult it was, especially for solo, and because it was causing players to pretty much throw matches not because it wouldn't progress.
Since the patch to fix the collision of the hatch when not visible I have not found the hatch like I could prior to this change. I have literally run over the spot multiple times in a match because it was in front of a pallet I looped and when last person died while I was slugged it appeared.
Even if I did find the hatch collision if players wait until the very last second to leave it would be the same as the old hatch where I still could not use it - there's not enough time for it to open and give me prompt to enter, I don't just lose my chance I don't have a chance. The hatch spawning in game before it becomes visible means nothing to getting the challenge completed - I can't use it until it is visible. Having no chance to escape through the hatch due to all the variables needing to go my way for it to be visible AND find it is the problem.
Just as the EGC challenge was changed (and since then they've made those challenges basically non-existent on both sides, thankfully) because the mechanic required too much to go in your favor to complete (and on killer side basically throw the game) the hatch challenges should be treated the same - it's a mechanic that can cause you to throw the game either by waiting on people to leave in time or hide all match for hatch.
A game mechanic that has too many variables needed to complete and pushes players to throw games (like hatch and EGC challenges) should not have challenges associated with them. Removing challenges because they're "annoying" would just leave no challenges because everyone will find a challenge they just don't like annoying - like survivors saying cleanse x totems challenges are annoying.