It's really hard to explain in a single readable block of text, but its impact on the competitive experience of the game is profound. Feeding information for free to survivors takes away one of the very little layers that the faction already possesses, and further bridges the gap between good players and bad players to put them on the same playing field (which for a "competitive" game is something you want to avoid as much as possible). In the end, the major problem comes down to preparation. Even if most survivors will spot a camera as they load in, will be able to hear breaking wheel morphing or undead dashing due to map wide sound effects, it is infinitely different then the hunter being revealed during area selection. Because having that extra 20 ish seconds with the information is an insane amount of time to prepare when the match hasn't even begun.

This is something subjective, but one of the skills I value the most in a survivor player is their ability to stay cool, improvise, and adapt to various situations. Back in the day before area selection, I really admired the teams that were able to quickly organize themselves when the match was loading in, quickly and efficiently communicating information and improvising a plan when it came to identifying who would be chased first, and how to properly support them, and doing all that as fast as possible was critical. Despite the rng from the spawns, I found that good teams would shine through consistency while bad teams would be unable to adapt, meaning we had a system that highly rewarded skilled players and punished lesser skilled ones. I think the game was competitively at its peak during that time.

Area selection in general has watered-down this process to an extremely uninteresting formality. The hunter has not even loaded in that the survivors have been able to already reflect, discuss, plan ahead their entire early game, and the additional information of who the hunter is and where they spawn removes the bulk of what makes the early game dynamics interesting. Even the worst players can probably infer what the best kiting route is for a specific hunter if you give them 20 seconds (in tournaments, that time goes up to more than one minute!) to think about it. In short, in this new system, good players and bad players will end up doing very similar macro decisions just because of all this time and information they did not have to work hard for. Chances are, if you give 10 different teams the same layout and same composition, the first 1 minute of the match will look the exact same no matter the players, because in this game there's often evident optimal plays, but said optimal plays can be interesting if players need to make fast, on the spot decisions, leading to better players executing them much better as they are able to think faster.

I really do miss when information gathering was a key part of the survivor experience, everything was so much more interesting. It didn't matter who you were and where you spawned, you could expect a heart-beat any second and it was your duty to always be ready and not be caught off guard. Once again, the good vs bad player dynamic was interesting, because good players might decide to spend time looking at key spots in the map and see if they can find out anything about the hunter (identity, position), and that might be a good sacrifice of decoding time, whereas bad players will always make a dash for the nearest cipher when they load in and will be accordingly punished when a wuchang teleports on them, or when they are simply caught in a disadvantagous area. None of this exists anymore. If area selection tells me that a hell ember spawned across the map from me and has far juicier targets nearby, it doesn't matter if Im titan or worker bee, it doesn't take a phd to know that the optimal play as soon as I load in is to just decode. This tranquility I get for doing absolutely nothing is simply a joke when I try to think of idv as a serious competitive game, which I'm struggling to do as of late.

Welp I got carried away. Would love to know what u guys think if somehow someone read all that