Why The Black Banquet was a good thing
I know I've been in the vocal minority championing the event but it did several things that were good for the game, things that people have been asking for:
It changed the gameplay loop.
I have a lot of killer matches where survivors just sit on gens with Stake Out and Hyperfocus then pre-run when they see me coming. It's not exactly thrilling. This event had survivors in my face all match, pretty much every match. I had one match with probably the most M1s I've ever landed in one go. Some people don't like those aggressive plays, and it took me a couple days to stop being fustrated and adjust my own gameplay to it, but I realized I really like how much more interactive this was. The only variant that was anti-interactive was the portal one.
It gave survivors the secondary objective players keep asking for, and one they actually wanted to interact with.
Other events often have little encouragement to interact with the event elements aside from Quests. The Void during Halloween can be a death trap and the crystals often aren't worth the trouble. The haunts aren't amazing either. The winter event has some fun snowball fights but is otherwise fairly bland. Chaos Shuffle just does what it does. There's not really any choices to be made there, especially with many people not being living dbd encyclopedias and not knowing what their randomly assigned perks even do. But the banquet actually had survivors engaging with its elements more than I've ever seen, which shows that if the elements feel valuable or interesting enough, players will use them.
And it's something people keep asking for, yet many didn't like it. A secondary objective shouldn't necessarily be passive and boring, with survivors just gathering generator parts or something similar. A rewarding and interesting element allows survivors to want to do it, instead of feeling obligated. And these little buffs from morsels were not hard to play around once killers learned them, so using them right could be game changing, and using them wrong could get them killed.
It got people to play different killers.
The problem with this part is people were choosing killers who cheesed well with the poison. But the idea is good. If an event can make low and mid tier killers—or even just less popular strong ones—more played, that's a good thing. I haven't played anyone but my main for months now but I didn't like how he was in the event so I went back to a couple killers I hadn't played in awhile. It forced me to shake it up, in a good way.
How it could change:
My only real complaint is that posion is all killers got. Poison was obviously very strong but not very interesting. If I were to change it, I'd add something else for chase and have the poison be used only on objects, making it more of a randomized surprise or strategic trap-like element instead of an I-win-this-chase button. I'd also like the global effect (the table setting) to be a little harder to achieve, or to have a cooldown. Most of us who've been playing awhile have gone against cheaters who remote heal teammates. The constant table heals in chase feel like that and that's not really what anyone wants to be reminded of. Such a powerful effect could use some toning down, and maybe a downside. Maybe injuring the person who puts down the last plate and making them temporarily broken, like a mini invocation, or making them go down after a certain time period, like Conviction.
Comments
Really I have never heard a survivor say they want more objectives. The Blood Generators were annoying and people only did them for the points. The game is built around the normal generators - you repair them while carefully watching and listening what is going on elsewhere. Moving around to do something else is more distracting, puts you at more risk of being seen/caught and slows the progress of the match.
As others have said, the banquet tables were worth doing because of the strong benefit for the entire team.
That's because an additional survivor objective that has zero benefit is being purposed just to nerf survivors lol.
I've heard that, though. Largely people complaining that the game lacks variety for the survivor side because so much of it is gluing to a generator. It's not necessarily a complaint I have but I'm also not 5k hours deep yet. Given my survivor hours outpace my killer hours, would I not count?
I'm not referring to a secondary objective on top of the five generators, such as Pig's power. I'm talking about something in lieu. Events could/should be the testing ground for this.