As we reported yesterday, Friday the 13th: The Game has a serious, and growing, problem with team killing. That is to say, counselors killing each other instead of waiting for Jason to do it. There are XP deductions for killing follow counselors, but as an increasing number of dedicated players reach the game’s level 50 cap, penalties have lost their teeth and team killing is getting out of control.
Well, thankfully, Friday the 13th publisher Gun Media vowed to make things right in a recent Reddit post:
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“The biggest thing we’ve heard from our community with the game are issues pertaining to rampant team-killing that has unfortunately been abused by players on all platforms. While the mechanic’s intent is designed to promote life-or-death experiences into each and every game you play, the reality has turned into more of a Battle Royale scenario to a point our team feels a change needs to be made.
In the next patch, Public Games will no longer allow counselor team killing with weapons. The shotgun, machete, and other assorted weapons will no longer have any effect on friendly players. There remain a couple dangers. The biggest one is that the car will remain as-is. A car can and will be able to run you over and kill you. We decided on this as the alternative was abused during our beta where users would simply stand in front of the car, effectively blocking it from moving. Counselor-placed bear-traps will also still cause damage to other counselors that walk over them, however a resulting death will no longer incur an XP Penalty. To that we say — pay attention to placed traps.
Our team still believes that the ability to hurt other counselors is something that this game should have as it adds tension and requires players to make tough calls. However, we do not believe this should be a mechanic that is abused by players. We will include this mechanic in private matches for now, with the hope of better options in the future.”
Sounds like this was a reluctant change, but one that undoubtedly had to be made. Of course, as I mentioned before, another solution would be to add more content to Friday the 13th so players don’t start killing each other out of boredom. For now, I suppose simply banning the practice will have to do.
The next Friday the 13th: The Game update doesn’t yet have a specific release date, but expect it for PC, Xbox One, and PS4 soon. You can check out all WWG’s coverage of the game, right here.