[2022] Knife Feedback

With the knife update being released I thought I'd put together some thoughts on it. Overall, I like knives, I think they add a lot of unpredictability to the game when you're going full non-lethal (especially on raid), it's pretty fun.

Obviously I'm not privy to the implementation behind the scenes, but the impression I get from what I've played is that there are a set number of knives possible to be drawn on a map, and they're just pooled among all the suspects. My evidence for this was during a raid, we had one guy repeatedly fake surrender and draw a knife 4 or 5 times til we finally killed him and then never saw another on the rest of the map (we didn't finish though, we died). We also mostly saw knives at the start of runs, and very rarely towards the end. I think if this is actually how knives are implemented, each time a suspect draws a knife, the probability of them drawing another should be significantly reduced so that there is still a possibility of multiple knives on a single suspect but it's not taken to the point of ridiculousness. Whatever the case, it does seem to me like there shouldn't be a guy fake surrendering over and over 4 or 5 times in a row within just a minute or two.

Another problem I ran into was when suspects drew a knife out of a surrender position, it seemed like it wasn't possible to interrupt their attack with a beanbag. Maybe that's just a bug though or maybe I just missed my shots.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I think to avoid the map using up all the knives at the start, likelihood of suspects drawing knives should be significantly reduced in general. But since that would probably mean lethal players would never see knives, maybe it would work to have a certain number of the enemies starting with relatively low morale have a very high chance of drawing a knife after surrendering.