The Camping problem and how to solve it.
Welcome, my dear friends and excuse my lacking english skills.
Although the devs probably won't read this: Today i want to bring you the solution to the camping problem.
Now, let us start this slowly. Recently, Behaviour admitted that beeing camped is an "unfun situation".
But what exactly is the problem with camping?
To understand this, we need to look at the problems of camping from both point of views.
The first problem is how rewarding camping can turn out to be for the killers, now even more so since the survivors need 10 seconds longer for the generators while a camper still only needs to wait 120 seconds for a sacrifice to be completed.
From a surcicors point of view, there are 2 problems with beeing camped.
First, let us talk about something minor and more easy to fix: The rewarding aspect for the killer. Again.
You see, when you are beeing camped, the biggest problem is that some of your teammates might completely waste the time your struggling buys them. But before we are talking about how to fix this, let us talk about the biggest issue, not necessarily for the majority of expert survivors, but for the game itself:
The feeling of wasting your time for nothing.
You see, the grind was supposed to be reduced, but for me and many others, it was increased. I have one survivor with all perks and when ever i want new perks on said survivor, i buy a new one and level that new survivor to unlock the new perks. Before i only needed to unlock the 3 teachable perks, now i need to get the new survivor into prestige 1. Of course that means that the grind only increased by a little. That is not the problem.
But why is this the biggest problem?
Well, for this game to survive, it needs the same thing all games need: New players.
A new player still needs millions and millions of bloodpoints to unlock the perks he or she desires but when a new player get's camped, there is not only a lot of frustration about the complete loss of control over their game, but also the problem that they get roughly 10k Bloodpoints for that game. They get the feeling of completely wasting their time while playing this game. No progress in Bloodpoints or skill available.
So how can we fix this? Of course, it is not an easy task. Otherwise Behaviour would have done it already.
Let us go over the solutions step by step for every single problem.
We will start with the most critical problem when it comes to new players, as it will also help us with the other problems. In that sense we will start with identifying campers.
As the game has many stats it can keep track of, this will be easy. Staying too close to the hook (for example 32 meters) for 15 seconds without another survivor beeing around or keeping a direct line of sight to the hook for a long time withhout moving around.
Either way, as soon as the game realizes that you are beeing camped, you will recieve additional bloodpoints unrelated to the current categories for every second the killer continues to camp you. That way, the bitter taste of wasted time will be lessened. Of course we are talking about a good amount here. Enough to make you stay instead of just killing yourself on hook.
Now let is talk about the juicy stuff. How will we balance the ingame mechanics so that camping isn't worth?
Well in short, camping is only a possibility. Sometime, is isn't even intended as survivors may loop you around the hook. What we need is not some sort of base mechanic against camping, but a possibility to counter it if you happen to encounter it.
For that, there are 2 things we need: A perk for the case that you are beeing camped and a perk for the case that your teammate is beeing camped.
The perk for the case that you are beeing camped is already there. It is called kinship and pauses your wiggle timer by 34 seconds. As you may have realised, that is too little. The perk should pause your wiggle timer by alot more.
Why?
Because what we want is this: The killer seeing that you have that perk and than he will decide: Alright, not gonna camp that guy, that would loose me the game.
For that purpose the time that kinship buys you should be 60 seconds. Yes, exactly 1 additional hookstage.
Keep in mind, a buddy of yours needs to stop repairing a generator and come to you to activate the perk and than run back to the generator. It still may sound overpowered at first, but will end up useless as long as the killer doesn't camp you.
The second thing we need is a perk that would allow you to do something if your teammate is camped.
"Visionary" or "Situational Awerness" are perks that could get a rework.
Something along the lines of:
Your bond to the other survivors let's you feel when they are under constant pressure.
When the killer is camping another survivor, you recieve a bonus to repairspeed that increases over time when the killer stays near the hook.
Trough implementing perks against camping we give the possibility to punish camping whithout implementing new mechanics that have the risk of being used against a non camping killers.
This way, if you are getting camped alot or happen to have mates that are camped alot, you are able to equip yourself with countermeasures.
I do apologize for my lacking skills in english and text formation. Honestly, this website bamboozeled me with that quite alot...
Have a nice day.
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