It makes the game more challenging, if you don't like it you can play on lower difficulties where their rage spawn rate is lower or even 0%.
It does make it more frustrating, that's for sure. Now about the "hard" part...
You see, there's a lot of ways to make any game hard. For example, make the damage of all zeds such that a player dies from 1 single hit. Or just make all players die upon spawn. How do you counter that? It's super hard, haha. Why then no game designer ever does it? Because such a game will not be popular. A good game, while being hard, should still leave a narrow path to victory only the skillful can navigate. This introduces the concept of player agency. Which postulates that the matter of win or loss should be under full control of a player. If a player practiced a lot and knows the game well -- he wins. If he doesn't -- he loses. The game doesn't punish the player blindly by, say, just killing the player through the use of enemies which cannot be dealt with. The game punishes the player ONLY for making mistakes. That's the key here -- only mistakes are punished.
Now let's apply this to the spawnrage mechanic. Whoever was behind the design of it in the KF mod and KF1 understood it well. A team has 11-15 seconds to conduct a flawless FP takedown without any damage taken as long as the line of sight is maintained. This is a close to perfect design -- it makes a superdangerous enemy capable of killing a player quickly from 100 to 0, BUT, a player has to make a mistake by either 1) maintaining unnecessarily the LoS or 2) attacking it with enough power/precision to enrage it, but not enough to kill it. This puts the game into player's hands 100%, it's a perfect example of the player's agency determining the outcome. Morons have to die, skillful are rewarded with a win.
It went downhill from KF1 to KF2, as the company grows, it hires people who have no business making game design decisions and they do it. In KF2 breaking LoS with a fleshpound does nothing to reset the rage timer. In KF2 baiting a calm FP into a swing does nothing to reset the timer. All this makes the game technically harder, but not in a good way, because it REDUCES the player's agency. There's no amount of skill of, say, playing hide and seek by breaking the LoS, or by skillful baiting without taking a hit would warrant you a win over an FP. Needless to say, this is bad.
Moreover, they introduced the spawnrage. It violates the important principle of the players agency, which postulates that a player is punished ONLY for mistakes and ALWAYS provides a player with a narrow path to victory, if a player is skillful enough to navigate it. All that goes out the window because a spawnraged FP means receiving guaranteed near-deadly damage at no player's fault. Yes, it makes the game harder, but again, in a wrong way, similar to just killing a player for no reason after some random amount of seconds into the match. How entertaining is that? Not at all. It's just a bad game design.
Now IF we wanted to make the game harder, YET never reducing the players agency, there are plenty of ways to do it without things like spawnrage. Just spawn 2 fleshpounds at once, which makes all the aforementioned plays significantly harder -- 1) it's harder to play hide and seek 2) it's harder to keep baiting into a swing 2 fps in parallel 3) it's harder to conduct 2 flawless takedowns in parallel. But POSSIBLE. If the player is skillful enough. This gives the player all the agency.
Parrying saved me a tremendous amount of time against QPs/FPs with any perks
Wishful thinking. Note how you don't supplement your opinion with any numbers. Because if you did, you would have realized that it helps in so narrow share of cases that it's borderline useless and warranted to use maybe once per 100-200 fleshpound takedowns without spawnrage, with a spawnrage and/or situations when a team's hesitance lead them to timerage it's maybe in the vicinity of 50-70 fleshpounds. It's borderline useless and for sure very far from "parry saved me more than anything else" as you say, as there are multiple things that are more useful, such as: 1) jumping to get bumped farther and avoid follow ups 2) bashing right after getting hit to avoid follow ups (an opportunity you have to give up if you pull a knife as you can't put it back fast enough to both parry/block and immediately bash if the FP rolls the follow up punch -- but you didn't seem to know that, did you?) 3) unless it's certain that one doesn't have enough time, just shooting it in the head is much more useful as in a much higher share of cases it can be disposed of quicker than it can hit a player. As an example, in your last video on Filths Cross you feature exactly 0 parries.
Also, note how you ignored the parry/bash question.
everything is on my YouTube channel
I'm subscribed to your channel and watched all your videos.
1) they are almost all solo (= 50 HP syringe, 50% less damage from big zeds, etc).
2) only a few of them are long 10 wave games.
3) there are no CD or anything harder than HoE games.
4) even though these are regular HoE games "stand your ground" zones are almost never defended.
5) lots of unwarranted running (to make it easier, no doubt).
6) even up to this day you haven't learned to 1-shot clots and oftentimes shoot 2-3 rounds from 9mm or SMGs in hopes that one hits, what's your typical HS accuracy? Can you match top players in this game HS accuracy of 75%+ (e.g. fanta, nashtyx, kore, fatcat)?
You have a long road ahead to match their performance, if you wish. But while on it, have you checked their opinions on the issue? Do you know their arguments? Have you ever played the CD mod?
It's just it may worth to learn first what the top players and CD community in general think about these issues and learn their arguments, so at the very least your proposals take all this history into account? Posting unpolished opinions here can be dangerous, as TWI lost their vision long time ago and now cannot tell good suggestion from bad and may just go ahead and implement some nonsense that isn't thought through well enough.
EDARs do not make the game harder but makes it much easier.
They make the game more annoying for most players, that's for sure.
They also can't make it easier, as EMP grenades, on balance, make things harder for precision perks, not easier. Hilariously, the only moment in your last Filth's Cross video, when you struggled to dispose of EDARs quickly, it was exactly because one of them EMPed the rest and you couldn't hit the weak spot as they wandered around so you had to resort to body shoot one of them to death, lmao.
