http://dbd.game/killswitch
"Tunneling is the only way to consistently win"
…is an argument to nerf tunneling. You're not meant to consistently win games, you're meant to win some and lose some; to be inconsistent.
edit: a lot of people here seem to incorrectly think i'm arguing against a point i didn't say, instead of the one i said.
Comments
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Tunneling is not a guarantee. The argument is it's the most viable. Whether or not that's true is debatable.
Against really good survivors, getting one out fast increases the odds of winning. But really good surivors will waste a lot of yoir time while teammates pop gens.
Disrupting the the survivors flow by injuring and slugging may be the better option than focusing on one survivor in a group.
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Yeah, this is something Killers don't want to understand or accept. The devs are going for the 60% kill rate, not 100%.
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let's put it the other way: tunnelling (and by extension camping, slugging, any other macro strategy) is the only way to win against roughly equally skilled opponents because the game's math is not supposed to give killer TIME for 6+ normal chases when FOUR PEOPLE are ALIVE and THREE can constantly do gens.
obviously you can stomp bad and most importantly MUCH WORSE players without resorting to strategies to optimize pressure because every chase is a 2 tap while they don't do 3 gens at once and just waste time.
you cant do that when this isnt the case and it's very clear from what we've heard from the developers they are going to change MMR system to accomplish exactly that.
I dont mind when people handicap themselves or ask developers to handicap other players when the game BY DESIGN puts them against WEAKER opponents so they can have Fun™.
And if we are doing that nonetheless, then where are same limits for survivors that get carried beyond their skill level? we shouldnt act like killers are the only ones, according to Mandy, who get "carried by abusing strategies". Survivors do that as well. If we act like you need to be "Good™" in chase that should also apply to survivors.
Safe trading resources while splitting gens because the game's math allows a free win anytime you do that against a fair play killer is not being "Good™" at the game.
I dont mind things either way, but I would like less hypocrisy in here.
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If tunneling was guarantee then everybody would tunnel like you see in turnaments, it valid strategy to apply preasure same as proxy to secure second stage or kill thats all like heal tech, bodyblocking, genrushing etc.
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If we are currently at 60% and tunneling has always been a thing. Then either 40% of the player base doesn't tunnel and only gets 0-1k or tunneling isn't as omnipotent as some make it out to be.
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The game's maths assume that the killer is taking actions that stop all three survivors from being on generators at once.
Yes, at the start you have nothing to stop them, but as soon as you get your first hook, the amount of survivors doing gens at once will shift unless you just stick by that hook and do nothing.
Tunnelling is not the only way to win. It's the easiest, because it requires the least skill to perform and a massively disproportionate amount of skill (+ preparation ahead of time in most cases) to beat, but it's not the only way to win.
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you are describing current dbd. dbd where matchmaking doesnt work to eliminate skill gaps properly. where boosted players are a default state of things. where the game is attempted to be balanced around an idea that survivors are bad and killers arent.
see, here's where this stops working when we eliminate the "major skill gap" factor.
survivors can be already at the hook stealthing. if I dont proxy camp, I get instapull and they double the gen where I just left. Or spread around on other gens.
survivors can have healing perks so they dont spend time resetting under hook and giving me pressure. That is a massive issue in itself btw, we are somehow trying to have the game balanced around no tunnelling but then we have obscene amount of ways to eliminate all other kinds of pressure killer can hope to get.
then I have to FIND another survivor, spend time walking there and win another full chase while by the time I even get to that point on most killers two supposedly pressured survivors are already back on gens. Or I can just proxy hook, especially if it's near a nearly done gen and wait for the pull to trade / tunnel and not risk losing gen while im busy chasing people on gens I am not keeping anyway.
and that assuming I do it without missing a beat, consistently find a survivor, consistently win a chase and do it fast enough to keep up. Every time. Anytime I fail, boop, game over, you lost, git gut. It takes disproportionate amount of effort and consistency to do compared to just doing gens and playing chases whenever killer finds you.
Yeah, I would guess on someone like blight most people could do that when they learn him, but I think you dont want to make a case that only blight-like S tiers should be viable for an average player. Right now people can still play blight and get easy wins but people can also play way worse killers and stand a chance against survivors of their skill level because they have leverages like tunnelling or other macro pressure strategies to snowball the match off their mistakes.
and there are many such cases. "just playing for chases" is not viable to win games on equal skill level. that is the whole premise you dont consider. macro pressure and snowballing is essential to the game and tunnelling is part of it.
the fact that it takes disproportionate amount of skill to counter is a wild statement. it doesnt. you counter tunnelling by either bringing perks that autopilot it for you and/or by not instapulling and staying where killer can easily find you. That is what I was talking about as well when I talked about boosted survivors.
It doesnt take much thought to tunnel and it doesnt take much thought to counter it either. You dont insta unhook and trade in last 10 seconds and use all that time survivor spends on hook to do gens.
If you constantly get into matches where killers are good enough to tunnel through all the mechanics devs added and you or your team are unable to implement these strategies that require basic common sense, maybe you should ask yourself if you or your teammates actually belong in that lobby or if you actually deserve to win.
so yeah, as I said, I dont mind anti tunnelling and other anti mechanics. If we werent changing matchmaking to get rid of the skill difference in lobbies. Sooo yeah. Pick one.
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No, what Jester said applies even when SBMM was stricter and everyone complained about constant sweat.
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I'm gonna format my post with some numbered bullet points just for ease of understanding, I know that can look fairly aggressive sometimes so I'm trying to soften that ahead of time lol. Leaping in-
1: I am describing current DBD, but not for the reasons you're saying. It's not an expectation that survivors will be bad, because survivors don't need to be bad for the basic fundamentals to work against them. Sure, it's a lot easier if they're bad, but that's not what either of us are talking about here.
2: If survivors are near enough the hook to instasave… they weren't on generators. It can be annoying, sure, but it comes with an upside from the killer perspective. Adapting to how your opponents play is important, but you can also minimise this risk a lot with the next bullet point.
3: If you find that you have to spend a lot of time searching for survivors and that you're often wasting time doing so, that's a flaw in your gameplan. That's not an insult- that's advice. On top of making a point to try and keep where survivors are in your head at any given moment, there's a wealth of information perks you can bring that bolster your gameplan considerably in this area, depending on your killer.
There's no shame in using them. In the current state of the game I'd honestly argue they're stronger overall than slowdown perks.
Ideally, you should know where you're going ahead of time. That's hard to do consistently, but it's part of getting better at killer.
3a: You also don't lose instantly if you flub one instance of spreading pressure, the game's not that tightly balanced. It can make things much harder depending on context, but it's exceptionally rare that it'll lose you the game outright.
4: This works on every killer, it isn't S-tier specific. It's just how this game works. I also want to make a point that this is not "just playing for chases"— people in discussions like these have a common habit, I've noticed, of acting like not tunnelling is equivalent to playing aimlessly or directionlessly, and that's not the case. There's a clear and important intent behind this principle and it's pretty malleable to all kinds of strategies and playstyles.
5: On the topic of countering tunnelling, you're falling into a rhetorical trap I've seen a few others fall into. You're not wrong that you can counter the killer tunnelling your teammate that way, but if you're in solo queue and the killer's tunnelling you, it takes considerable skill and preparation (which, for the record, is what I meant when you say bringing perks, that's preparation) to counter because the killer gets a much easier chase for free.
The fact that tunnelling can be somewhat reasonably countered if you're in a full team means the state of things is better than before (when not bringing one specific perk meant tunnelling had absolutely zero counterplay), but because of how free and without any kind of drawback or setup tunnelling is for the killer, it's going to be unbalanced until the individual being tunnelled is also capable of countering it.
6: I feel I should mention this but all of this is from the killer perspective, not the survivor perspective. I do play both, but when I talk about the game's fundamentals for killer, it's from the killer perspective.
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I wouldn't call it hypocrisy because DBD is asymmetrical. The killer role and the survivor role are different, they approach the game in different ways with different strategies.
And, in the current DBD, survivors simply do not have an equivalent to tunneling, it doesn't exist. A survivor strategy that was generally frowned upon was gen-rushing, and by that I mean the pre-nerf toolboxes version of gen-rushing, which is no longer possible to do in the exact same way.
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are you saying both sides must have equivalent strategies even though you stated both roles are different?
If there must be then wouldn't focusing on one gen be similar? Actualy no, because being on three gens is more efficient. If a killer tunnels one survivor and three gens pop, which side is in debt?
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We already have a statement that MMR system will be fixed. So, we either admit that maybe tunnelling/etc is already okay as is because if you WANT to counter that, you bring perks that accomplish the counterplay more than enough or we dont and we have to acknowledge survivors will be having it way too easy and that needs to change. I dont like that MY role is treated as easy and low effort by developers themselves because the other role has been handheld for so long they lost motivation to improve and try.
Current/old MMR worked around the idea that you can play chill and be intentionally matched against "worse" opponents because you make up for that by skill difference in chases. New matchmaking is aimed at eliminated that factor as well. I can no longer play for 12 hooks, lose more games than I would playing without limitation and get easy survivors I can keep 12 hooking with 50% winrate. Before you had a choice - play as well and sweaty as you can and have survivors match it or limit yourself and get easier opponents because you are limiting yourself. Did it work or not is not so relevant, but this was the mindset and the idea devs clearly moved on from and this causes this hypocrisy because they did not change their mindset on other things that are the way they are BECAUSE of this mindset.
Now to your points.
1)But we are..? the game will always fundamentally work against survivors for as long they need to buy enough time to do gens. There is always a threshold they need to accomplish with good enough chase time. The problem, as I said, in equal skill matches these very fundamentals are not balanced nor designed for the chases killers are expected to get because if chases get just long enough (Which is also not difficult to accomplish) with current easily achievable gen efficiency, then killer has to resort to punishing every mistake or losing if they dont succeed.
2) I dont find it reasonable nor fair to talk about things when we assume major skill gaps to be considered while also suggesting to fix mmr. My singularity 90% killrate throughout 1500+ games was not done by hardcore 3 gen camping, tunnelling and slugging in every game, I was doing it in the exact moderation the devs supposedly want killers to play, even more, frankly, but this was only possible because my singularity is incomparably better. I could not play like this even remotely if I faced FAIR opponents like high tier competitive teams I used to defeat in unanimously agreed balanced setting of various tournaments.
2)Or they were on the generator and I just hooked near one as I examplified. If Im staying to look around or deny free pull it's camping which is another thing devs want to further discourage or punish. They dont have to cross the entire maps for the rotation. And of course, they could've already finished their generator because we arent just talking about the first chase.
3)I dont have to spend a lot of time, Im simply stating the fact that if I dont immediately find the survivor, the game where I dont efficiently utilize strategies to create pressure through alternative means that winning chases, then Im losing the momentum at inadequate rate. Sure, one slip up may not inevitably lose the game but it takes inadequate amount of mistakes to get things out of control. Especially on killers that are severely punished for them in either macro or micro. Like missing a window to hit and getting +30 seconds to chase because the killer I am playing is not designed to catch up to survivor fast. Or getting a wrong guess on which gen to pressure and finding nothing and losing that. The game hinges on too many high risk low reward (get to keep up) moments when you are not optimizing them away to be even remotely fair.
4)And the more you level the game into orienting it away from macro strategies / skill expression (which is not done just by "anti mechanics", aforementioned healing perks are pretty much irrelevant if I slap on 4 slowdowns and play any killer that can chain chases fast, but they pretty much win the game for survivors anytime I would dare to play hit&run playstyle) the more "Only S tiers" will rise above everyone else.
5)I guess I didnt make it clear, but I am not saying that if you don't tunnel, you must play for 12 hooks. Taking away player's ability of using every survivor's mistake to attempt to snowball the game to the best of your ability while they will be trying just that is not fair, especially when no reasonable compromise is being offered.
Again, I dont care if they patch tunnelling, I would win in any circumstances for as long as the game is giving me viable options and fair agency as a player of the side that takes way more effort and focus to play, I simply ask the same treatment for survivors - limit low effort strategies from them, especially when we're having a hypocritical rhetoric of "killers boosted to mmr they dont deserve".
6)"But if you are in a solo q", again, why are we assuming players are inherently bad and killer is inherently good?
I played survivor for roughly 1/3rd of my playtime if stats are to be believed and most of that is solo q. Countering tunnelling is not a matter of playing in SWF, it's a matter of having people that understand what to do.
If they dont while you do, something is wrong with the matchmaking or you simply deserve to lose on the ground of killer being better because not only they understand they can tunnel, they are also good enough to win the chases against the tunnelled survivor (successfully recognizing and exploiting a macro mistake and a weak link to get an early kill while survivors fail to uphold a long enough chase, protect the president or pop gens). I've seen countless cases with myself included when this "low effort strategy" just did not work because we weren't bad at the game.
And of course, there is also an element of rock-paper-scissors. If I tunnel and survivors brough anti perks, I am losing the game if they are on my level or getting a draw a best. If I camp and survivors use anti camping perks, same happens. If I play hit&run vs reset perks, I lose. However, if i tunnel vs reset perks, I win because they didnt have anti tunnel perks. If I hit&run vs anti tunnel perks, I win because they dont have perks for my playstyle.
Adding more and more basekit "solutions" to meta playstyles killers have without giving alternative viable options just means you make it way easier for survivors to build a reliable and consistent meta which, in current balance of perks, trivializes the game even more on top of basekit math.
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see, there are A LOT OF WAYS you can apply "assymetry" excuse for.
effort, for example. survivors take roughly four times less effort to play because they engage in the actual "pvp" interaction four times less as its split between them.
however what this excuse is NOT applicable for is SKILL WHEN YOU SAY YOU ARE MAKING MATCHMAKING ACCOUNT FOR IT. If you ever, at any moment, begin to balance around the idea that "one side is inherently unable to play well" while also claiming that you are going to make matchmaking system work the way people "want it" aka measure player's skill rather than final result, you are failing.
You can either have balance for skill issues or functional matchmaking. The choice has been clearly made.
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No, I am saying they don't have equivalent strategies.
That is why I personally don't think it would by hypocritical to, in the current state of the game, address problematic strategies in the killer side without discussing survivors.
To be fair, the MMR / SBMM system has been so flawed since it was added to the game that it barely even matters what the system is or isn't tracking.
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splitting gens is their equivalent strategy.
having perks that rival or surpass killer perks is their equivalent strategy.
shift+w / predrop is their equivalent strategy.
the list can go on and on but I can name a plenty of things that take way less skill than tunnelling.
I dont think the game would be unbalanced for blight-like high tiers like ghoul for example, But Im sure as hell that playing on anyone who cant beat aforementioned things will take disproportionate amount of skill than it takes utilizing that.
The SBMM's flaw was in the fundamental design - only kills escapes matter. They explicitly said they intend it to give you easier matches if you play "fair".
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Problematic strategies can mean anything that's effective. Anything outside chasing one survivor for two hits and hook could be viewed as problematic if it gives the slightest advantage to the killer.
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Why are yall still calling it problematic after all this time? You get tunneled because your the weakest player on the team. Its a natural part of the way the game is played. What you want killers to chase the strongest survivors and ignore the weaker ones, wasting more time and giving the survivors even more of a leg up?
Getting tunneled in like over 90% of cases is a skill issue that is being blamed on the killer because heaven forbid people actually take some responsibility.-16 -
"I can't win without tunneling, therefore, I must rationalize my choice."
It is absolutely wild that you think tunneling is a skill issue on the Survivors part. Maybe on the Killer end, but the amount of skill needed to tunnel vs avoid a tunnel is a MASSIVE disparity.
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- Reading the various comments I noticed one thing, many take the competitive of DBD as a reference as "standard" and would like to apply it in "everyday" games. In this way it is like comparing the games played in the school basketball court with an NBA final... it is simply not the same thing. Yes it is the same game, but the skills (and mentality) of the players are completely different
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While you're taking an absolutist approach out of jest, survivor is not the 1 in the 1v4. It is how the team responds that is key. Tunneling is not a 1st hook problem. In order to tunnel effectively you also need to camp or stay near the hook. These actions should stand out to other survivors how to approach the save.
Now lets switch the blame a bit. What if right after the killer hooks a survivor an overzealous flashlight memeing survivor decides to loop the killer around the hook area. Is it the responsibility of the killer to abandon the chase to remove themselves from the hook area? How about if another survivor unhooks in their face and the fresh unhook blocks the path to chase them? Is the killer free to down that survivor again even though it could be consider tunneling?
This is to assume that "tunneling" is bad. Sometimes getting one out with two gens remaining is needed when faced with two survivors and one is death hook.
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If tunnel goes wrong it can actually make you lost pretty fast.
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I wouldn't tunnel if it was a guarantee (it is a guarantee in like 99% of matches tbh but that's besides the point)
I play games because i want to play the game, not just because I want to have the result screen saying I won
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Do you mean tunneling at 5 gens, tunneling in egc, tunneling at any time in the match, or something in between?
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To be honest, I don't think any of those are equivalent to tunneling. Tunneling literally prevents you from playing the game, you are just targeted in quick succession until you die.
And it really does not matter how much skill it takes to do, what matters is whether or not they are a problem for the game. Blight's so called techs, for instance, couldn't be performed by every single Blight player out there, but they were still unintended and unfair exploits that had to be removed. Tunneling is just a strategy, but one that causes far too much harm to the game.
I think SBMM biggest flaw is the fact that it exists, tbh.
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Yet we constantly get complaints from survivor-only players on this forum about how killers and killer strategies need to be nerfed, even though on average survivors are escaping 40% of the time and even more than that if they’re in coordinated SWF teams. Funny how that works.
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Your first sentence is already false. Noone ever could proove this right.
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What killer players are advocating for higher kill rates? Please show me where killer players are asking for this.
You’re absolutely right that the kill rates are right where the devs are targeting. So why are there still so many demands to nerf killers and strategies that they use? The 60% kill rate includes all the matches where tunneling occurs, too. So if tunneling is nerfed, kill rates will go down without other compensating adjustments to buff killers to get back up to 60%. I’d be totally fine with that approach as long as we don’t nerf killers to reduce tunneling with nothing to to compensate and keep kill rates consistent with target levels.-3 -
Because the 60% KR creates a bad experience for survivors, my friend.
In my opinion this is one of the many decisions in DBD's history that shouldn't have been made. The survivor experience has deteriorated ever since this whole process started. The situation for survivors need to be fixed, it can't be left the way it is.
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In the past they have already increased tunneling many times by implementing systems that penalize the killer without thinking about the consequences. They will do the same thing again, and as expected the consequences will be dire. Slugging is likely to become meta again, and when it gets adressed too, killers won't stop wanting to win by any means necessary. Because telling killers not to be efficient is like asking them to give up.
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Out of curiosity, how would you go about dealing with the problematic strategies of tunnelling and excessive slugging while encouraging killers to actually play efficient by spreading pressure?
It's a tricky situation to fix in my view because the pieces are already there. You can't blanket buff killers because their tools and the benefits from using those tools are already good- how do you push players towards using them in addition to nerfing the egregious stuff? It's not a problem I know how to solve personally.
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I already talked about it in another topic, I don't think it has a solution. The current objetives need to change, gens vs hooks is simply outdated.
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what point are you trying to make here
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Or… We don't purposely avoid balancing the game, and bring the killrate down a little bit if it produces overall better gameplay.
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As a person who tends to make posts that are way too long, I have great admiration for posts like that this that can be both poignant and succinct.
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I would not say it is the only way to consistently win.
However some games are impossible to win without it.
That's why I have a problem with just nerfing tunneling into the ground and giving nothing in return, as much as people want that to happen.
Because if you nerf the only strategy that makes certain games possible to win, then those games become impossible to win. It doesn't matter if those games are just 10% of all matches, that leaves a sour feeling in the killer's mind. You should always have a chance in every match you play.-10 -
But that's only true for killers that can end another chase by the time the survivor on hook has been rescued and healed. So… A tier killers or better.
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It's not, no.
You don't need to always have someone on the hook, you just need to be rotating people on the hook to harry survivors away from consistent gen repair. Faster chases are generally better within that framework, but as long as there isn't too much downtime between the save/heal and the next hook, you're still doing fine.
Doing it this way makes the generators take longer, so by the same token you have more time to get the next hook to get yourself more time, etc etc.
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so you need 20 second chases
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Which is why I swapped from Trapper to Spirit.
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Not really, especially not after you get going.
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well now is the time to switch to A-S tier killers only because they are the only ones who can afford to play in the way that these forum intellectuals want you to play
think I might just main nurse0 -
ok so what do you need
-2 -
Wildly depends on the situation, the perks, the Survivors, the map, the Killer you play and a whole host of other components.
Shorter chases will always be better, true enough. You don't necessarily need short chases to win though.
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yeah, sure, thats why Im saying there should be a viable alternative. Again, it's just not about tunnelling, it's about multiple core pressure strategies you can't just repeatedly "anti" without compensation.
And of course, the compensation obviously cannot be just another "+10 seconds to gens". It should be another strategy made viable or created to be viable. Killer role is progressively losing skill expression in macro and is forced into playing inefficiently and making up for that with unreasonable skill performance in chases. This is not good.
Or, as I said, we can just do the same for survivors. If we want the game to be about chases and low maintenance macro, make it about chases and low maintenance macro. It's hypocritical to limit killers everywhere and let survivors keep all the low effort ways they can cheese wins in games anytime killer is not better enough to 2 tap.
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well im bad at the game so can you list a few things you need to win as killers a tier and below
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and that would be why? ig it's easier to just dismiss what people said and hide your head in the sand
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hope survivors play badly and at least dont abuse strategies to shut you down one-way i/e actually let you play out tiles with your power instead of playing for distance.
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In what context? Nothing will guarantee a win, even as an S-tier or a god-squad 4-man comp SWF.
Do you just want general tips and tricks? Because I can provide that. I can even do VOD reviews, if you'd like.
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You can see quite plainly I said the opposite of that in my post, friend.
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just pressure generators
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