How about KF3 is more like KF1 and not more like KF2?

[Em1lic0]

got almos 2k hours on Steam, and I've been playing since 2017 KF2 and previously 2010 KF1.
Seen the decline and lowered quality of content in KF2 since the time they made Elysium as official map.
Hope that KF3 is nothing like KF2
The cheap difficulty tactics that KF2 employs make the game more of a chore, than a game than can be enjoyed, many times Tripwire did balances and patches to punish players who kite around the map, well, first of all, if Tripwire wasnt a fan of spawning zeds on top of your head, under your feet or around the corner in a blind spot then players would hold in a spot.
Plyers kite because they are forced to do it, since whenever you decide to holdout in a spot the game has a prefference of spawning Zeds around the nearest corner, each map is riddled with narrow useless corridors with the sole purpose of creating the most corners possible to make the most zed spawns around the corner o teleportations behind a wall. Also narrow corridors are like that because Tripwire loves to teleport Bloats, Rioters, Husks or Gorefiend to block your way, the purpose to desing a map just to prevent players from navigating around it without any nuisance, on the contrary, not only the corridors are narrow but they are also riddled with props like boxes and other useless stuff to block your way, especially usefull to cover Crawlers or Stalkers, even reducing player vision and scaling to the Zed side.
If narrow corridors with many corners that spawn zeds at blind spots, with props that try to block player's path making some sort of prop-zed barricade, the Developers also had the amazing idea to add zed spawns on the floor and on the roofs, on the last map, Castle Volter, zeds burst from the floor and there is no visual information that tells the player that is a spawn, I also dont understand what is the fixation on adding so many spawns on floor for slasher,clots and cysts, spawns on walls for crawlers, and holes in the ceiling for stalkers, if they are also fans of spawning zeds from the nearest corners, here is a tip, just dont spawn zeds from around the corner, it is really cheap, and spawn points can be less toxic, there is a reason why people create mods like "Controlled Difficulty" to make the game fair and Zeds not spawning down your feet, or falling on top of your head.
I really hope KF3 is nowhere near like KF2 because KF2 looks like it was made by people who hate to see the players having fun honestly, and it is frustrating to experience constantly a game that conspires against the player with cheap tactics and call it "difficulty". Even the mod community seem to know more about the game, give those guys a job, contract the players who created Controlled Difficulty, get rid of zed spawning in the nearest corner, make a safe-zone around the player where zeds cannot spawn, and you will se your game will be a success.

 

[OnionBubs]

I mean, most experienced players--especially the CD players--already know that parking the bus and forming a wall of either bullets or zerk/med/spam is the best way to ensure you win (and the latter formation means you don't really have to aim when doing so). It's just on the team to be able to pull that off and not die. Zerkwalling has been a thing since the Incinerate n Detonate patch.

Understand that without the close spawns, the game would have nothing to punish infinite kites. The whole game would play out like Elysium's giant open-area hub map. And this game, honestly, already doesn't do enough to punish kites.
Or rather, it does, but it only applies that extremely selectively to certain perks. A Commando trying to run most HoE maps in circles is in for a less fun time, whereas a Berserker or Medic doing so has to pull a really dumb stunt to die in the process.

 

[Foxhound3857]

A Commando trying to run most HoE maps in circles is in for a less fun time, whereas a Berserker or Medic doing so has to pull a really dumb stunt to die in the process.

Not if the Commando is rocking the HM501. Those medic nades are unbelieveably strong in Commando hands, both for the healing and the offense they provide. They are the perfect answer to a Commandos vulnerability in being swarmed/boxed in.

One thing I really hope that KF3 brings back, and keeps, is auto-frustratiion for the last few enemies in a wave. Nothing was more exciting than whittling Wave 7 down to the last five mobs, all of them being Scrakes or Fleshpounds, and they all perma-enrage and you either gun them down quickly or die trying.

Discouraged players from simply kiting Scrakes the entire wave and leaving them as the last thing to deal with. Made them a serious, even lethal threat if they were ignored for too long.

 

[OnionBubs]

I've always said the 501 is dumb but that's because Medic grenades are extremely OP in general, though, not so much because the 501 is good on Commando. (And for the record, I complained when the Medic got the 501 because Medic grenades are supposed to be limited for a reason. Giving players 10 extra "just because" was a stupid design choice.)
In a good team a Commando shouldn't be using the 501, but as with a lot of weapons, it gets more appealing the worse players are otherwise doing.

One thing I really hope that KF3 brings back, and keeps, is auto-frustratiion for the last few enemies in a wave.

Nothing was more exciting than whittling Wave 7 down to the last five mobs, all of them being Scrakes or Fleshpounds, and they all perma-enrage and you either gun them down quickly or die trying.

Discouraged players from simply kiting Scrakes the entire wave and leaving them as the last thing to deal with. Made them a serious, even lethal threat if they were ignored for too long.

Pass.

That "last 5 permarage" was removed from Scrakes/FPs very quickly after for good reason: when it was introduced, it was an unbelievably frustrating mechanic that absolutely binned pub win rates and nearly ended pub games in their entirety. I'm certain TWI introduced it as a means of trying to speed up the game and not have players endlessly kiting rounds, but like a lot of their post-launch ideas with some good intentions, they executed it terribly.

An idea like that could maybe work with a metric ton of stipulations, but just as a starter list for how it was botched:

• Nothing about it was communicated to players unless you read the v1009 patch notes; you just had to intuit that it was a thing that happens otherwise. There is no warning given by the game that the mechanic was about to kick in: no on-screen text, no warning klaxons, no trader chatter letting you know "hey, the Zeds are about to make a last stand when five of them are left." Nothing. That's kind of important when you're literally about to execute the team and throw previous strategies out the window, which leads me to my next point:
• It went against intended and ingrained player strategies to a fault. In almost all cases the threat of a large Zed is not usually the Zed by itself, but the sadistic choice of having to deal with both a large Zed and any number of friends accompanying it. So the intended design was for players to remove the trash and deal with the large Zed later (as you do in horde games). This much is evident in their designs.
  • Scrakes only permarage after taking enough damage, they don't spawn that way
    • Then again, this was also back when Scrakes moved much faster and their chainsaw hitbox was about three times as long as it currently is
    • Also before the insane prevalence of incaps
  • Fleshpounds don't ever permarage because they can also block their heads while sprinting and they become immune to almost all incaps; the point of them doing so is as a temporary punishment for a failed takedown so the players can theoretically try again in a bit after taking a hit, assuming the player doesn't die. Having a Fleshpound permarage without even being hit completely warps their design and effectively makes them deadlier than most bosses.
• Coming from the above point, the last five permarage effectively cheated players by changing the rules with how large Zeds work on the fly. Trash can already spawn raged and move quickly by design in HoE. No large Zeds did that (until they brought back in prerage spawning, which was also a stupid design decision as I have mentioned before), and with good reason.
  • Trash Zeds don't do ~70 damage in a single hit
  • Trash Zeds don't take nearly as much damage to bring down, headshots or otherwise
  • Trash Zeds don't ever gain immunity to incaps outside of incap cooldowns
• So having a game mechanic that suddenly turns everything you're encouragedto do by the game's flow suddenly turn on its head and actively punish you for playing the game as intended is really bad, because what it amounts to in most pub games is players doing their thing as normal only for the game to apparently decide "you lose" and activate the heavy punish mechanics even though you didn't hit any of the five Zeds that are now running a train on you.
  • The end result feels a lot like a Left 4 Dead server mod getting mad that they're losing and turning on hacks for the Tank they're now controlling.
• It punished all other perks except for Berseker and Medic because (*sigh*) their tankiness and speed allowed them to keep pace with the raged large Zeds and survive hits from raged large Zeds that would devastate other players
  • (BERSERKER AND MEDIC RANT EXPUNGED)

You know what would've been a better way to stop players from having as easy a time with Scrakes? Buff the Scrakes. Just return their runspeed to the really early period of EA and you've solved most of the problem with Scrakes, which is that anyone can outrun them even when they're raged because of sprinting.
If the goal is to stop end-of-round to stop dragging on forever, why not put a time limit on the waves that will eventually kill players to stop sloppy 40-minute Berserker katana duels?

But just completely elimating the dance players are encouraged to do with the Zeds is just about the worst idea for a game that rewards and demands consistency in execution. It's lazy.

 

[Foxhound3857]

That "last 5 permarage" was removed from Scrakes/FPs very quickly after for good reason: when it was introduced, it was an unbelievably frustrating mechanic that absolutely binned pub win rates and nearly ended pub games in their entirety. I'm certain TWI introduced it as a means of trying to speed up the game and not have players endlessly kiting rounds, but like a lot of their post-launch ideas with some good intentions, they executed it terribly.

Have to disagree then. The overwhelming majority of games I see end prematurely these days is more or less identical to what killed games prematurely in the past, a tight-knit team being wiped out at the beginning of the wave because of an immediate surplus of big zeds. You say auto-enrage is one of TWI's worst implementations. I think the game being able to spawn three Fleshpounds at once is even dumber than that. SO many good teams I've seen get completely decimated at the start of Wave 7 because a Triple Patty Squad kicks the door down and flays everyone alive before the team even realizes what is going on or can begin to fight back.

Should've been a maximum of two Fleshpounds on the map at any time. More can be waiting in the wings when those are dispatched, but no more than two in the fray before that. Three is sheer overkill and a very serious threat to even the most coordinated teams.

 

[OnionBubs]

You say auto-enrage is one of TWI's worst implementations. I think the game being able to spawn three Fleshpounds at once is even dumber than that. SO many good teams I've seen get completely decimated at the start of Wave 7 because a Triple Patty Squad kicks the door down and flays everyone alive before the team even realizes what is going on or can begin to fight back.

If anything, it would be easier to deal with three Fleshpounds at the start of a round when everyone is topped off from visiting the trader, has all the health/ammo they need, etc. as opposed to the end of the round when players might be wounded, have less ammo from using it on all the other Zeds, and so forth.

Three calm Fleshpounds? Plenty doable if the team is good. The game has more than enough means of disabling or outright killing them assuming the team is diversified with appropriate anti-HVT units, has the coordination to not rage them all at once, and actually commits to the takedowns. One Sharpshooter with a freeze grenade can render that pack completely helpless for the team to fight back.

Three spawnraged Fleshpounds or 2 FP/6 QP combos, most of which spawn in raged? That's another matter because of spawnrage being a terrible idea as well. But a Zerk/Medic combo (especially if a Bone Crusher is in play) can at least derage them all without anybody dying, and once deraged they can be killed like normal.

The reason the game spawns that many Fleshpounds to begin with? Compensation for the fact that they are objectively less lethal than in KF1; they cannot instakill players even in HoE with one attack. So the game creates its own need for spam because of that design choice (and the fact that players can no longer systematically handle them in the same manner as KF1).
The spawnrage is implemented as a countermeasure to players running glass cannon precision teams in order to nudge them towards running more Berserkers, Medics, and Demos. Which is why I don't like it, but there you go.

What I'm confused on is how permanently raging Fleshpound crowds at the end of the round is in any way preferable to stuff that has actual counterplay. Once the last 5 permarage kicked in for large Zeds, there was no real consistent counterplay, and that's why it was complained about and eventually removed.

 

[Foxhound3857]

What I'm confused on is how permanently raging Fleshpound crowds at the end of the round is in any way preferable to stuff that has actual counterplay. Once the last 5 permarage kicked in for large Zeds, there was no real consistent counterplay, and that's why it was complained about and eventually removed.

It felt like a good mechanic to me because, once it was known, it was in almost all cases a preventable situation. If the team commits to dealing with Scrakes/Fleshpounds immediately and not stringing them out to the very end, they won't have to deal with the auto-enrage. Since the last of the ZEDS spawn in at around the 20 count or so, players had no one to blame for a wipe to auto-enrage except themselves, because they chose to kite Scrakes the entire wave instead of dealing with them when they needed to be dealt with and let them get out of control deliberately.

 

[Aleflippy]

Disregarding all your points (although they're very interesting and should OBVIOUSLY be considered to shape up KF3's playstyle and game feel), I'm personally standing with the idea that KF3 should go overboard with either of these designs.

Either go back to KF1 and make movement pretty damn sluggish and realistic. You cannot just endlessly kite monsters until you manage to find the ONE ammo box that's gonna be enough. Rather, you really have to work your best to avoid getting boxed in. Zeds are pretty harmless at range, except for a few exceptions (bosses, husks etc.), but become near-impossible to defeat once they're in front of your face. I don't believe we should just take a Delorean back to 2009 however, as I believe that camping one or two specific spots on each map would grow boring pretty quickly. Instead, I'd like if you needed to always be on the move... But with the need to stop from time to time to deal with the zed's assaults. This would naturally mean some great feats of map designs, as no places should be 100% zed-proof, even with a very good team. Maybe players could have less reserve ammo, forcing them to scavenge for ammo boxes more often (which, in turn, could spawn a tad more often... or in more places). Maybe maps could be more cramped, making getaways more risky. Or the opposite : they could be more open, making escapes easier... But allowing zeds to pour in from far more places at once. This would definitely be my favorite option.

OR, we could go and improve zeds significantly to get rid of the annoying insta-rage or teleporting mechanics. Kiting would still be possible, but it wouldn't be an easy way out, as zeds would be smarter and more cunning. Again, maybe players could be less resourceful, and more fragile, in order to make kiting not just a cheap trick to unsure easy victory... but a much-needed strategy to avoid getting mauled. I don't know if I'd like Killing Floor 3 to be faster though... Nor do I think I'd like more zeds to have ranged attacks. But if anything, I do believe that if KF2's core design is to be kept, sprinting and all, it shouldn't be as lenient towards players. Although, I believe that if KF2's perks kept their core designs, with their weaknesses in mind most of all, I wouldn't even need to consider the bat**** crazy powercreep we've had since... I don't even know how many years by that point.