You go to knife a guy from behind. He randomly for no ****ing reason whatsoever decides to move slightly to the left, or a tiny bit to the right, or maybe he gets a wild hair up his ass and moves backwards. If he moves ANY direction at all that doesn't leave his back pointing directly at you - HE WILL KNOW YOU ARE THERE AND MOVE AWAY. This happens ALL. THE. TIME. You wouldn't know this unless you knife. So now, you are stuck trying to turn around and chase him as you have a melee weapon and he has a gun, ammo, and plenty of space between the two of you. It doesn't help that the turning is so slow in this game even with you controls turned up.

But that's not the only problem. If an enemy is running away from you, with his back to you, and you are chasing him - you can't possibly charge your knife and hit him. Once you go to charge, you will start walking, and he will still be running. If you go to jump and close the distance (yes, you can JUMP and charge your knife, but apparently thousands of years from now you can't click a button to charge your knife while RUNNING), you will likely over jump and land in front of him, because scouts jump faster than other players can run - so then he'll know you are there and back up... and fire... as you are turning around... again...

So since you can't charge and hit him, what do you do? Stab wildly in a maniacal attempt to hit him. I have the proto knives, and can tell you - this doesn't work well. Since the Nova knife isn't charged it does barely any damage. So what happens as you swing repeatedly trying to stab them? Well, for one, you start walking again. Meaning you have to close the distance AGAIN. As you are both running and you are swinging away, you will notice how easy it is to miss with the knife. The amount of time and hits it takes to kill someone as they run away from you with an uncharged nova knife is absurd. It's so likely one of his buddies will see you and take you out.

Having a nice knife takes up a lot of CPU. If you have the proto knife you are basically always going to main it, so clearly the developers thought maining a knife was feasible. With the way it is now, it requires too much luck on how the enemy will just so happen decide to move. Knifers shouldn't be cornered into one way death simply because enemies randomly decided to jiggle slightly.


How do we fix this?

There are multiple ways to fix this. Not all need to be utilized, these are just ideas that I feel would help.

1) Ability to charge the knife as you run. (This is at the top of the list because it is my preferred pick. This is the only way to fix this issue without breaking something else)
2) Make Kinetic Catalyzers increase the move speed as well as the sprint speed.
3) Make scouts move a bit faster so it won't be so hard closing distance

I doubt making knives more viable to use will ruin the game, and I also doubt many players will switch to knives. As it stands right now, Knives are just an nonviable, SP sink that you don't realize was a waste until after you've spent so much time earning them. If you all truly want Dust to succeed, you will welcome the possibility of another fun yet challenging playstyle. Thank you.