From a purely mechanical standpoint, tunneling is the most effective strategy. Please discuss.
If you are playing to win, which I am, tunneling makes sense. By removing a link, you are making the rest of the survivors do more work, which makes patrolling gens more succesful. By tunneling someone out of the match you are making mid to late game much easier. I don't think it's the nicest strategy, but if you play to win that isn't an issue. I guarantee that person you refused to tunnel isn't going to care if you have fun, they want to win as well. It's a free for all. That's why I'm ok with scummy tactics on both sides. And I never play survivor. If you want to bodyblock, flashlight spam, or the like go ahead. We're all trying to win in the end.
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That's pretty much the problem with how the core mechanics are designed. When you're chasing 1 survivor, 3 others are potentially working on gens. Hooking each survivor twice before killing any of them is not a good strategy as killer, but it's the most fun for survivors.
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Something like that, yeah. If not focusing survivors wasn't a certain way to lose a game, many killers would reconsider their choices and strategies, but as of now, focusing your attention on one of the survivors and hooking him as often as possible is the smartest thing you can do.
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you're not entirely wrong, and that's an issue. Killers don't have the choice of playing "fair" as it usually stops their momentum. The more I play killer, the more i understand this.
Survivor perks can bring things in line to stop tunneling, but why would a killer not want to do what gives them the best advantage?
I really hope BHVR comes up with some mechanical incentive so that killers can play in other ways while still maintaining pressure to push for a win.
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This is the exact point I try to get across to survivors and none of them accept it. People STILL think that hooking everyone 3 times is the most efficient strat.
It's also why camaraderie is one of the most underrated perks in the game as if you're trying to get someone out quickly it delays that for a short time.
EDIT: I could go into how DS just denies the most efficient way of playing with no skill involved, but that's a different discussion.
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I understand the concept of tunnelling and how it can make a game easier, it’s just not something I’d personally do. But I play both sides and I know how annoying it is to be tunnelled. I can win without tunnelling, so I don’t see any reason for me to do it, other than to be a dick.
Being able to 4K without resorting to any ‘scummy’ tactics are the most rewarding games for me.
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Of course. 3 survivors are easy to deal with than 4 after all.
It's just a shame is asymmetrical so the best strategy for one side will often infuriate the other.
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I mean, sometimes a killer has to play "dirty" - even though it's only really dirty by survivor standards. You shouldn't feel bad for it.
I don't go into a game of killer OR survivor thinking "Man, how can I make this fun for everyone?". I go into it thinking "Man, how can I maximize the fun factor for myself". You could call it selfish, but at the end of the day, killer or survivor, you paid for the game, to have fun. As did everyone else. It's not your job to provide them with a fun experience. You're not a babysitter. You have an objective, and you do it to the best of your ability, in any way you see fit within THE GAMES rules, the ones set by the devs. Not the imaginary book of spewed horse ######### written by the players.
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I don't get why this is even an argument of course you're going to take a chance to kill the weakest link first. Doesn't matter if they're a bad or good player if they're in a spot to be taken out and you realistically want to do well you take it. There's no being nice because being nice as killer loses games. There's literally no time to be nice and give second chances unless the survivors are bad or keep throwing games.
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That really depends on who youre tunneling and how good or bad the survivors are. You tunnel the wrong person youre #########. TARGETING and juggeling can be effective, but thats very different from hard tunneling.
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Exactly.
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And lose three gens because the survivor you're tunneling is good at the game.
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Yes, that is exactly my point. Remove the strong survivor and, well, no more strong survivor.
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It is only viable when it benefits you, tunneling and losing gens is a horrible way to do it
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Yeah and then you'll get ran for 5 gens and just get a 1K. You're usually better off patrolling gens than tunneling.
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Well let's put it like this. Tunneling how most people view it in a real scenario is when you have a choice between a fresh hook and a death hook after playing normally. Chances are you're going to take the death hook just to relieve map pressure to enable you more chances to hook other survivors. Some situations could call for other actions though but that is the most favorable outcome.
Most of us know that just doubling back to hook each time someone is unhooked usually loses you the game.
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Getting ran for five gens is not the point. Hooking multiple people has no benefit. I'm not talking about camping. Once I hook a survivor I'm off pressuring gens again.
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Agreed
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You really gonna complain about DS when tunneling is the cheapest way to win. Tunneling is stupid it's one thing if a survivor is constantly hovering around you or there the only one you can find but to go out of your way to find one guy is ineffecient and just scummy.
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Like I said it is scummy but scummy plays are optimal in a competitive game.
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DBD isn't a competitive game, though. It's literally 2 steps away from being a full fledged party game, lol
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But they're not if you actively only try to find one survivor and purposely ignore the others if they are good survivors you're gonna lose rather quickly. The other 3 will just split and do gens and by the time you finally kill the survivor all gens will be complete. So in a competitive game it will literally be why you lose.
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Depends on your definition of tunneling. Hard tunneling from the start tends to only hand out Ls if the survivors run meta perks and are decent. Going after a survivor because you know they’re on death hook and the other survivor near them isn’t isn’t tunneling. That’s just playing smart.
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Kolonite summed up what I meant.
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If you aren’t going for someone off hook you aren’t tunneling. You could hook everyone 3 times and some people will still call you a tunneler.
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That's entirely dependent on the map. If you have either a pallet dead zone or they're hooked in your 3 gen, you have no reason not to proxy camp/tunnel.
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"If you hook me at all you are tunneling."
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From a purely mechanical standpoint, spawn camping in Halo is the best strategy
thats not why people play videogames
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It really depends on how one defines 'winning'.
Some feel that 4K is winning, others feel that earning more BP is more viable.
I prefer the latter. The more BP, the better in my opinion.
Tunneling can end the game faster, but nets you less BP on average.
Tunneling, camping, etc. Is pretty much useless if you want more BP.
Slugging helps though (survivors can complain all they want, but being slugged is STILL better than getting hooked in most cases). It can extend that length of the match and create more opportunities to get BP.
I usually average 50K+ per match as killer. Even if a survivor escapes.
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I camp and tunnel if necessary to win the game and that's what i am interested in. Survivors will even complain, if you played by their rolebook so i don't care about their fun. The game is just not made that both sides have always fun, somebody will have a bad time.
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Honestly I dont think tunneling is the way to go for "winning". If you are up against a good team they will punish you the same way as they punish camping. The only reason why tunneling is working is survivors unexperience. With tunneling you cant build up pressure until your victim of choice is dead. Slugging is way more efficient as you split pressure, get survs off gens, save time by not hooking etc etc.
Tunneling is tbh just scummy and works against less ecperienced players. Do what you want but dont promote a bad strategy.
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Some people are competitive and play to win while others play for fun, when competitive vs fun meets there will be arguments. The problem is "play for fun" players who gets angry at the competitive players because they don't play by the fun "rules", but you can't expect that because there is no fun mode in the game.
So the problem is people that complain about how others play the game. They don't understand the game at all.
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This, 100%.
Tunnelling relies on the Survivors to suck.
And sure; it can work and it can work often, because nobody who plays this game is a god; even 7k hour players can and will mess up.
But if we're talking the best strategies from a mechanical standpoint, slugging is FAR better.
Even one slug pressures at least 3 people (unless it's a SWF using Unbreakable) AND it punishes Survivors who don't heal, encouraging them to take time off gens to heal.
As long as you're smart about when you slug, it will never let you down and can sometimes net you a quick 4k.
With tunnelling, even if you do kill one guy early, you can still easily lose to the 3 remaining people as long as they don't 3 gen themselves.
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I can't really argue with you, since you're mostly right. I play in a SWF and we all get killed just for a simple fact:
We want to unhook and heal our teammate. Some SWF (or regular games) just sees how the game goes and uses the hook time for doing objectives, which leades to a genrush (slowed one, but genrush if got at time).
Tunneling usually deals to take off one or two survivors and making the game more easy for the killer sometimes. Not a strategy that i use a lot, but you're right that works.
That makes me think from a match i got yesterday versus a Myers. He got me into the ground and not picked me up, got the power almost ready (you can tell from how the game went) and when people tried to pick me up, lv. 3 and down.
I got like 5k points (a totem and the chase). Myers got 14k since he didn't hook us. 4 generators left.
Sadly, this works kinda well.
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Of course tunneling is effective. But it is extremly frustrating getting tunneled the whole game, especially when getting camped / proxycamped with no real chance to do anything against that. Unfortunatly with the upcoming MMR System, this will be the way to go for many.
"Scummy tactics" dont really exist on survivor side. How is bodyblocking a hook ruining the game for the killer? Unlike you, i play both sides and all survivors are able is to be a bit annoying with their flashlights. Tunneling/camping on the other hand is just ruining the whole round.
I also want to win, but i do it with style (and fairplay)
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Killing a survivor is the same as repairing a generator. But strangely nobody cares if you do the latter in a single sitting.
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Nah, no thanks. I am working on 4k hours in this game and I have never needed to play that way. Tunnelling survivors takes no skill and is boring for both sides. I enjoy beating 4 people at once. Crippling my opponent before the match really starts feels petty and cheap. If you have to win that way then you are just bad at killer since you need a crutch every match.
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If you have 2 gens left and see two survivors at equal distance, one on death hook and the other has only been hook once then by all means o for the death hook guy. It sucks when that happens but its understandable for most players.
People just hate when the killer goes out of their way i.e proxy camping the hook to chase the survivor down the moment they’re unhooked, or seeing two survivors like above but the guy on a 1st hook is right next to you, the one on death hook is in an incredibly safe area and you just walk past all other survivors and ignore them to commit to a 3 minute chase just to try and get one guy out.
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I sometimes use a process which I call soft tunnelling. If I go after the person who was just hooked I will slug them but NOT hook them. I let them get healed, this keeps them in the game yet gives me all the slowdown that slugging offers. As for tunneling, its super effective yet annoying for survivors. Targeting the weak or vulnerable is an evolutionary predatory strategy.
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And this thread here is the reason why DS, BT etc. exist and should stay the way they are.
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There are a lot of factors that you have to omit from your statement for this narrative to fit. Here are ways to counter that statement:
- Healing directly off hook
- Running perks such as Borrowed Time and Decisive Strike
- Bodyblocking the target
- Rushing generators as that's what KILLERS SAY TO DO
So, yes targeting the injured one is an efficient way of removing them, and if you also go by the clearly outdated notion of 4k for a win. I personally prefer the idea of the current Pip system indicating how well a killer has performed, and my personal preference of killer main also leans me towards balancing out the Hook states of all the survivors and having a drawn-out game in order to be very highly rewarded.
If you do "need" to target this individual, then I do highly recommend what @SMitchell8 has commented above, and that is to slug this target as they are still in the game and able to have some semblance of enjoyment and it also wastes a lot of time (or even an Unbreakable) rather than making 4/5 players hate the other 1/5 for one of their actions and all run perks like Decisive Strike. Imagine how horrible it would be if that perk were to appear in loads of games.
Oh wait.
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Already mentioned by several people, but want to agree on "depends on the definition of tunneling".
Tunneling does not give you less BP. It also does not give you an auto lose. If you wait for unhooks, don't pressure gens in the meantime and stuff like that, THEN you lose BP and eventually the game. But that is more the camping part, not the tunneling part. You can still chase other survivors while your "target" is on the hook or kick gens. As soon as you have the possibility to go for your hooked target without throwing or ignoring other things, it is efficient tunneling. It doesn't matter if you chase survivor A or B, both grant you the same points, both grant you another hook after the chase. If survivor A is closer to death hook, it is just better for the killer to go for him.
Ignoring the 90% gen right next to you while chasing your tunnel target or refusing to spread damage among the team to get the tunnel down and get struck by DS is the inefficient part of tunneling you can discuss about, but that is not automatically the case when people talk about tunneling. As many survivors basically just throw the word in any scenario they had no fun with.
Possibe solution
Do not have each survivor count 3 hooks individually, but count hooks overall, to feed the entity. Maybe give a 2% action speed debuff per hook as some kind of stalling progression and reward for hooking. And then just the sum of hooks starts killing people. Whoever gets the 9th hook dies. So does the 10th, 11th and 12th. Maybe, as almost no game really has 12 hooks, start with first kill on 8th hook.
And then rework moris, to either be able to reduce the amount of hooks needed for kills by 1,2,3 or you can only kill survivors that got hooked twice. Still allows you to kill survivors faster than without the mori, but you still have to end a bunch of chases before you can do so.
Another incite might be to give the killer another bonus once every survivor got hooked at least once. Like 5% regression on kicking gens. Because the pain got the whole team, entity is thrilled and the killer can feel the entity getting satisfied.
Something like this.
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It is, it is. Devs dont care to add rewards for changing targets. Tunnel survivors one by one. :^)
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It's not wrong but not right either. If ots a SWF sure. If not then this is not necessary at all. You can have respect for the other side and provide a fun experience while still achieving that 4k if you wish. If you still tunnel or face camp a non SWF you need to admit to yourself that you are using these tactics as a crutch and you need to stop relying on them.
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It's not wrong but not right either. If ots a SWF sure. If not then this is not necessary at all. You can have respect for the other side and provide a fun experience while still achieving that 4k if you wish. If you still tunnel or face camp a non SWF you need to admit to yourself that you are using these tactics as a crutch and you need to stop relying on them.
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It's not the thread being the reason... the thread shows the reason
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More bad game design.
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Tunneling works against inexperienced survivors. They often don't know how to handle it, or they don't have the perks to handle it. (Lemme just pour 1 million BP into Bill real quick to get Borrowed Time... then hope the survivor I actually want to play gets it in the bloodweb sometime soon...) But against experienced survivors, you'll find it doesn't work that well. I mean you're free to play however you want. But if you tunnel, then don't complain about DS or BT or any of the second chance perks survivors have to mitigate your strategy. Don't complain that a survivor hopped in a locker after you tunnel them off hook.
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Yes tunneling and camping are both very effective strategies to win the game. I play killer and survivor. I personally do not tunnel or face camp to me its just no fun. I'll be honest I talk smack when I'm playing survivor and I run into a killer that camps/tunnels. As someone who plays as a killer I feel camping/tunneling shows a lack of that players skill as a killer. i personally never have to use those kind of tactics to get kills and I win plenty of games.
On the other hand if survivors loose to you while using these tactics that shows their llack of skill as well. It is their own fault if they loose because they aren't doing gens which is the best way to counter that play style.
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Sure it's the most efficient but it's not satisfying, fun, and since I have a moral compass and play survivor I try my best to not do it. I'd much rather get 1k by playing as "fair" as possible than get a 4k by being a #########.
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Well a very straightforward way to solve the mathematical problem would be to make lives be shared among ALL survivors. For example, if hooked, so long as your team hasn't exhausted all its lives, you will have a hook struggle. To prevent hook camping, running out of a timer on a hook uses up a life and you keep struggling. Hooking a different survivor each subsequent time could also have a bonus effect of draining 2 lives instead of just one.
But some rebalance would need to be done as it would make the survivor team much stronger.
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