The second iteration of 2v8 is now LIVE - find out more information here: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/kb/articles/480-2v8-developer-update

Two basic questions around tunnelling

Recently a friend of mine started streaming DBD. We will occasionally duo together in survivor. She has TTV in her username and I can say anecdotally she definitely gets targeted more in games. Not always outright tunnelling, but it does happen fairly often that it led to me thinking about two issues/questions I’d like to pose the community.

Question 1- should the ability to hook the same survivor twice in a row, without any other survivor being hooked, be taken away from the killer? So you don’t have to go A-B-C-D-A in regards to hooking fairly, but you can’t just go A-A-A.

Question 2- Following on, should a survivor be able to be eliminated from the game without any other survivor being hooked or should some sort of minimum amount of hooks/other game state (number of gens done as an example) be required before a survivor is killed?

Now in the essence of transparency my friend is not the best player. So I’m aware one of the responses to these issues could be “if you don’t want to be tunnelled, git gud”. But there isn’t much incentive or opportunity to get better if you’re tunnelled out in a lot of your games. Also, I know putting TTV in your name (and being live) is like putting a target on your back, but for discussions sake let’s agree this doesn’t warrant being tunnelled.

My own thoughts are that I’ve always been wary of taking away a killer’s agency when it comes to managing hook states and kills. If you force a killer to hook in a certain way, killers could end up losing the game due to being forced to chase very good loopers whilst leaving the weaker ones alone- and weaker loopers can still do gens.

However, I am starting to lean towards the idea that a survivor should not be eliminated by being hooked three times in a row without any other survivors being hooked (or camped from hook one) at any point in the game. I know some people will say “but gens fly, sometimes you have to camp someone or eliminate them to get some momentum”, - I personally don’t agree with this- but I’m aware that I’m not as competitive as some other people when I play killer and that’s fine.

Now if this was made a thing, that a survivor couldn’t be eliminated up until a certain point, I know this would create other issues for the balance of the game. But could it be healthier to balance around such a thing? People have said in the past that killers have been incentivised either through perks or some nerfs on the survivor side to spread hooks but these changes still result in tunnelling. I would suggest that these incentives were never as rewarding as tunnelling so the solution is to remove the possibility of tunnelling entirely and then give incentives around that.

But I’m just spitballing here. I want to hear the community’s thoughts.

Comments

  • HugTheHag
    HugTheHag Member Posts: 3,140

    I don't think tunneling is in itself bad manners, but I do think you shouldn't be able to yeet a player out of the game so fast. I think that some more anti-tunneling should be basekit.

    I'd like to see 3s DS basekit and the perk being a bigger stun like 5 or 6 second. That would put a real damper on tunneling. Killers could still down the survivor if the occasion calls for it (survivors using it "agressively", whathever this may mean), it's still pressure on the team, but to slow down how fast you can hook the same survivor again.

    I don't think tunneling is necessary to win most games, nor that it should be.

    The players who mostly tunnel would need some time adapting, their mmr would need to lower to their overall skill level in response, and this could be accompanied by removing/reworking BNP, nerfing toolboxes and putting a cap on gen speed to prevent "tunneling gens" on the survivor side.

  • mustdogen
    mustdogen Member Posts: 373

    I don't know..,...

    Like.....why people would think take one player out of game in early state is a bad thing.

    For killer it is the most effective way to win.

    For solo players,they can just easily move to next game.

    So the problem seems to happen only in SWF which player need to wait their teammates.

    So the new question comes .

    Should we really do some changes for SWF game experience?

    Umm... I don't.....know.

    Maybe......if the changes would not hurt other players?

    I think giving reward for hooking different survivor might help?

    Like giving debuff for those being hooked may help it? Let killer has no neeed to tunnel?

  • HauntedKnight
    HauntedKnight Member Posts: 388

    Because what’s effective and what’s fun should be as close as possible to put the game in the best state it can be.

    Being tunnelled sucks. The idea that solo players will continually shrug their shoulders and say “well onto the next one” rather than just stopping playing altogether is naive.

  • HauntedKnight
    HauntedKnight Member Posts: 388

    These are good suggestions. Like I said in my OP removing a killers agency on who they can hook/killer makes me slightly uneasy, but basekit DS would at least give a player a fighting chance to maybe get healed if the killer does still down them. Too many killers can chew through the base kit BT right now, it does feel like there needs to be something else.

  • wydyadoit
    wydyadoit Member Posts: 1,145

    to question 1 - no. it should not work like that.

    to question 2 - if you're asking "should survivors die after being hooked 3 times in a row" my answer is yes, they should.

    going away from the questions and discussing the meat of the issue:

    "my friend self identifies as a TTV player and is bad at the game. How do I convince her it's worth the harassment?"

    you don't. that's for her to decide. you're peer pressuring her to play a game if you try to make her when she isn't enjoying it. just be glad she's not playing F13 or the new texas chainsaw massacre game where you die as soon as jason or the family touches you.

    The game shouldn't be changed for the sake of one person and if you ignore the argument of "skill" and "branding" then you're sticking your head in the sand to the entire issue.

    if you want a solution to it then here's one - just for devils advocate. are you familiar with the dying state bar? it's referred to as bleeding out when you die this way. being on a hook has a similar bar called the hook progression bar.

    combine the two and treat it as a death timer. when it empties you die. if you're on the ground the killer can mori you. if you're on the hook you're instantly sacrificed, but no longer does hooking reduce the bar by phases. it's just there to keep you from crawling around.

    in this version of the game hooks don't matter. it's all about preserving your life by not sitting on hooks or laying on the ground. then you can no longer complain about being hooked three times back to back. instead you can only complain about how much it sucks to be bad at hiding.

  • Phasmamain
    Phasmamain Member Posts: 11,534

    It’s a hard problem to fix without major gameplay overhauls. Realistically DS should be basekit with 3 seconds to discourage it as a strategy

    It could also disable killer powers for 5-8 seconds so killers like blight and nurse can’t just ignore it completely

  • HauntedKnight
    HauntedKnight Member Posts: 388

    I don’t disagree that gens flying sucks. The discussion and potential solution however needs to be more than “I tunnel because of Gen rush and that’s that”.

  • HauntedKnight
    HauntedKnight Member Posts: 388

    You seem overly fixated on the example I used. I am clearly not suggesting the entire game be changed because of one person. If you don’t think the questions I posed have any merit or are worth discussing then fine.

  • Kedasa
    Kedasa Member Posts: 42

    To both of your questions i can give a answer within one word: No

    I don't know how good you both are, but with the new hud, the antigen-perks nerf and the rng of most maps the genspeed is already way to fast. If i play surv or killer, it is most of the time the same outcome: Killer gets first hook -> 1 - 3 gens are done or at least barely done.

    Also i don't understand this complaining about tunneling. It is the objective to kill the survs as the killer. Why does a killer have to be nice and look for a new surv, getting a down on him and hokking him? So the survs can have the most fun? Sry but since when i have to think about something like that?

    If i play CS:go and i notice someone who is weaker than the others and i can tell, where the person is going, i'll use this and get this person out for my own advantage.

    If i play CoD and i am demolishing the enemy team, i won't stop, just because they could have less fun this game.

    If i play Lol, i won't stop killing my enemy, just because he got ganked often and killed 15 times, not having a great game.

    Do you see my point? Why do i have to care in Dbd, but in other games it is just normal to play for my own advantage.

    Of course it can be annoying get tunneled out, i get tunneled out often as well, but i try at least to buy as much time as possible, so i am maybe the only one he is killing.

  • HauntedKnight
    HauntedKnight Member Posts: 388
    edited April 2023

    I just want to repeat my last paragraph here because I know the post was fairly long winded:

    “Now if this was made a thing, that a survivor couldn’t be eliminated up until a certain point, I know this would create other issues for the balance of the game. But could it be healthier to balance around such a thing? People have said in the past that killers have been incentivised either through perks or some nerfs on the survivor side to spread hooks but these changes still result in tunnelling. I would suggest that these incentives were never as rewarding as tunnelling so the solution is to remove the possibility of tunnelling entirely and then give incentives around that.”

    I am fully aware that survivors should not just be made invincible for a prolonged period of time when they’re unhooked. And that anti-tunnelling gameplay changes would need to come with quite significant changes to the overall game which incentivise spreading hooks/chase and also possibly give buffs to killer in other areas (and finally some map changes).

  • Rulebreaker
    Rulebreaker Member Posts: 2,060

    1: no. It would end up in a similar situation to older DS and unbreakable. Survivors would abuse the immunity and the killer would resort to slugs to keep them down.

    2: no but admittedly this is a more biased reason. The killer should always be a threat to the survivors survival. While it would be nice in theory, we don't want the killer threat effectively dead till a certain point.

    We think tunneling has become out of hand in recent months, but we agree with the above in that more anti tunneling should be incorporated instead of killers being restricted or straight up unable to do things.

  • pseudechis
    pseudechis Member Posts: 3,904
    edited April 2023

    The problem with your proposal is it provides immunity to elimination.

    So 3x players do gens and are safe from elimination. 4th survivor hides all game with no interaction with the killer.

    Killer can't kill anyone without leaving the other survivors alone to do their objective and finding the hiding player. Kind of a bad idea.

    Lets try and eliminate the problem people have with getting eliminated then...

    So lets propose survivors respawn and win/loss is based on an endgame score. No one ever gets eliminated and the number points scored by hooks/time taken to escape dictates who wins by endgame score.

    Game becomes dull and repetitive because the only thing interesting about DBD is avoiding the threat of elimination. The mechanics themselves are actually pretty dull without that threat. So also not a good idea.

    The very thing that makes DBD interesting is the ever present threat of elimination. Anything that heavily attenuates that threat invariably dilutes the game experience.

    So yes you may get targeted and eliminated early and that may be more prevalent if you have TTV in your name because people have a bad opinion of TTV's given the extremely bad behaviour of a lot of TTV's. I'm not justifying targeting another play but it is a reality of having TTV in your name.

    Attenuating the core threat of the game so streamers feel better about playing is frankly a terrible idea for game health.

    The only real solution to this is to put 1000's of hours into the game get really good at it and then be a quality player who can be an entertaining streamer. See online streaming like anything takes a ######### ton of effort to be a valuable endeavor beyond just some silly hobby.

    Additionally given that streaming is open to basically anyone with a computer and a camera, being a streamer means you are just another Joe Blow in a sea of 10'000'000 other Joe Blows with a computer and a camera, no talent needed.

    So to make streaming a worthwhile experience, given the costs that come with it, you need to input a heap of time and effort... and attenuating the core threat of the game to minimize that time and effort for the sake of streamers is a really bad idea game wise, no matter how good the intentions might be.

  • DBDVulture
    DBDVulture Member Posts: 2,437

    -"Question 1- should the ability to hook the same survivor twice in a row, without any other survivor being hooked, be taken away from the killer? So you don’t have to go A-B-C-D-A in regards to hooking fairly, but you can’t just go A-A-A."

    Are you aware that the killer's objective is longer than the survivor objective? In other words it's far easier to finish 5 generators before the killer has 6 hooks on 2 different players. Most people want the killer to do 2 hooks on everyone before there are 3 hooks on anyone. The problem is that in order to do this we would need to make generators longer and remove all the gen rush perks.


    You can point to content creator XYZ and say well this person does not tunnel so what's the problem? I guarantee you if we get 5 content creators who can all play well on both killer and survivor you will find that the killer will regularly get stomped with 3-4 escapes.

    Why does this happen? DBD is not a competitive game. As an example : Doctor has lesser maximum abilities than Nurse/Blight and the difference is massive but they are treated equally by the game. A more balanced system would say Doctor you kinda suck so you get +2 perks.


    I have a Question for you :

    What penalty do the survivors get if they finish a generator and there are no hooks? Do all generators immediately get blocked?

    You didn't think that far ahead did you?


    "should a survivor be able to be eliminated from the game without any other survivor being hooked or should some sort of minimum amount of hooks/other game state (number of gens done as an example) be required before a survivor is killed?"


    I'll answer your questions in a way to make you realize that what you asked is not well thought out.


    I'll stop tunneling survivors the second that the survivor team I play against must always get every generator to 33% progress before any generator can get to 66% progress. And before any generator can get to 99% progress all generators must reach 66% progress.


    Since survivors are unwilling to abide by my unreasonable demands I will tunnel them out.

  • Dogma_loki
    Dogma_loki Member Posts: 436

    There is a lot of issues with these statements. For clarity sake and not typing a manifesto in response all of those PVP games you mentioned, its a level playing field- you can just as easily die as kill someone.

    That is not the case in DBD. Survivors can not simply just choose to tunnel and face/proxy camp because they're "LEGIT STRATEGIES" and not in the "POWER ROLE" and remove 1 player from the match for whatever reason they want, unlike killers. It's a blatant double standard and part of the issues withe the game that the devs have 0 interest in even addressing.

  • pseudechis
    pseudechis Member Posts: 3,904

    No but survivors can choose to split up on gens spreading the pressure of their objective, they can choose to focus a particular gen down. They can leverage their goals optimally too.

    Now people see less impact of this because when leveraging a survivor goal nobody is eliminated, but elimination and avoiding elimination are the core elements of the game.

    The rigid rules for goal setting you are applying to the killer player would have to be applied to the survivor player also, so now gens are numbered 1-2-3-4-5 and you can only fix them in order. You can't start working on gen 2 if gen 1 isn't complete. Greatly limiting your ability to apply pressure toward your objective.

    Elimination is part of the game, you may get eliminated early you may get eliminated late but it is the entire killer objective, you can't remove the ability to apply pressure via early elimination without drastically breaking the game.

    If you feel elimination is somehow mean and not fair, then maybe DBD isn't the game for you because it is an elimination game and the killer player can use every legitimate tool in their arsenal to try and eliminate you, that's allowed, its their goal, just as you the survivor can use every tool in your own arsenal to complete the gens and avoid elimination.

  • Sylhiri
    Sylhiri Member Posts: 178

    Funny thing, there is one version of DBD that the killer cannot tunnel a survivor out of the game and is greatly incentivized to hook each different player.

    The board game.