Shoulder the Burden PTB -> Live Feedback
Tried to post this on reddit, however automod nuked it because my account was too new (wish this was eased up during the transition from the forum over to there, but alas). Hoping this forum is still checked until it's fully closed!
👋 Hi devs! Hope this isn't too late to grab some eyes- I wanted to give some hopefully constructive feedback amidst the wave of everything stemming from the StB change.
While I am appreciative that the Shoulder the Burden change isn't getting to Live for solo-queue and anti-weaklink reasons, it feels so close to perfect and that makes it extremely sad to see it entirely reverted instead of adjusted. Myself and presumably most players would've much preferred seeing the troublesome downside changed, rather than outright scrapped. Given that, I'm extremely hopeful this simply couldn't happen in time for live, and that we're going to see a different downside added in hotfix 1 or 2 to get STB across the finish line.
Specifically, it'd be really nice to see it only be usable on players who are on their 2nd Hook Stage, and not be usable on players who've already used Shoulder themselves. These changes should be fast and straightforward to implement, maintain the viability of bringing it solo, prevent coordinated groups from "chaining" shoulders to force an even "4-fresh" hook split, maintain its usability as an anti-weaklink perk, and provide killers a guaranteed form of counterplay to the killer. If the killer is able to safely go after the player who used Shoulder the Burden, they no longer have the threat of further shoulders looming over them, and the player who uses Shoulder the Burden is fully vulnerable to the tunnel-out they've signed up for.
I will say I'm definitely someone that falls closer to the high end in terms of survivor players. I have around 5000 hours on Survivor, typically floating around the 70-80% escape rate area give or take. I frequently bump into well known winstreakers and comp players in my matches. While I'm not ending thousand game winstreaks, I do hold my own against/alongside both of these categories of players in public matches. With that said...
The thing about the STB change that saddened me the most was it eliminating the perks anti-weaklink capability. I absolutely ADORE STB as an anti-weaklink perk. It's genuinely the only reason I'm willing to queue in a duo/trio format, rather than exclusively in 4-stacks. It's for that reason that the day this perk stops excelling at preventing weaklinking, my playtime will weekly playtime will likely half. This is because when playing in an incomplete party, the poor solo-queue player naturally becomes the weaklink:
They're the only one deprived of realtime pinpoint information, they're the only one we can't dynamically help out of a bad situation with protection hits/etc, and they're the only one we can't coordinate with to ensure their unhook gives them the best shot at escaping. They're also naturally the biggest wild-card in terms of actual skill, due to partied players slowly learning from one another, gradually normalizing their skill over time. As well as players wanting to play with people of a similar-or-higher skill level. These combined will always be able to yield more accurate groups of survivors than an automated system will when it comes to sorting the top-end of players.
Thank you for your time!
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