Bots spawn far too close to the player in survival mode. A lot of the time they will spawn less than maybe 60m from the player in plain sight and, after you wait through their spawn protection (sidenote: why do bots have 3 full seconds of spawn protection?! Make it 0.5s), to kill them the next bot will instantly appear where the last one spawned. On that note, I think adding at least 5-10 full seconds of spawn protection for players would also be smart as it is really dumb to spawn and walk out the door only to get blown up by an IED instantly and have to wait a another objective to spawn. Be generous with the spawn protection for players and drastically lower the bots protection, it's a coop game mode so there is no reason not to favor the players and give them the best experience possible. There have been many instances where for whatever reason bots stay bunched up after a point has just been taken and then proceed to become a firing squad for players just spawning back into the point when exiting. I think also preventing the bots from spawning inside a certain radius from the player would also be reasonable, but I understand that can be situationally difficult when you need to keep bots engaging with the players. I like the way the bots tend to swarm the player in Survival mode and I think if you increase the distance they spawn from the player but increased how aggressively they hunt down the players (to offset the new distance) that would really be a great thing. Also it might be fun to add a chance of a counterattack (low, maybe 10%) when taking a objective in survival mode. I have also observed something hinky going on with IED bot behavior in how they trigger their explosion. I have seen times where the bots trigger their explosion to detonate well before it would have been possible for them to have seen a player. For example, if you had just entered a room and the bot will trigger its explosion on the other side of the wall and then run inside despite never have seen the player before. This problem is hard to pinpoint but it must exist in how the IED bots are detecting players and when they choose to trigger their bombs. Additionally they also seem to be able to know the exact radius kill radius of their bombs, moreso whether or not a player will be effected, before triggering. I have been killed while behind walls and other objects that any reasonable person would think would have provided protection but the bot already knew that the bomb damage would somehow go right through. I don't think it's fun when they have ESP for players locations and trigger their explosions to coincide with the exact second they will be in range of the explosion and know exactly what the damage to the player will be, all while giving the players no chance to respond whatsoever. I will throw in that I prefer the original Insurgency IED bots where you had to shoot them in the head or they would still explode (you did have slightly longer to kill them before they detonated as they would only trigger the IED countdown within a close distance to the player), but I also understand that it could make them too hard for most people to contend with.

Survival mode is fantastic and I am very excited for it be be released and play it on the live game! I was generally impressed with the way the cache system works in the mode, apart from receiving simply awful weapon setups that are just part of the RNG. I would also like to see ammo boxes added back into the game because sometimes when you get the right weapon for the map in survival it would be a fun option to try to keep using it and finding ammo for it (rather than just scavenging from bots alone). I think this is shaping up to be quite an excellent update!

Proposed Changes for Survival:

• Bots spawn protection changed to 0.5s

• Player spawn protection changed to 5-10s

• Bot spawn radius from player increased to 75m and out of LOS (implementation difficult, I understand)

• Bots are now even more aggressive and ruthless in hunting players down

• Objective captures in survival now have a low chance (10%) to trigger a short counterattack

• Shotgun ammo received when picking up a cache shotgun for the first time in survival increased by 80

• IED bots omniscience removed

• Ammo boxes added sparsely throughout the maps

• All weapons picked up from caches with optics greater than 2X by default start on the lowest optical magnification when first picked up

• Point X (the final point) on Hideout Survival's cap point extends upstairs and throughout most of the stairs but not the middle landing between levels (Ask me how I know... painful...).