Being Constructive: What We Can Learn From This Disappointing News
For those who missed it, in the most recent community stream, BHVR announced scrapping the anti-tunnel entirely, replacing it instead with a very unhealthy and unhelpful extra five seconds on the normal Haste and Endurance.
While this is of course massively disappointing, I do think there's room to be constructive about this whole affair. What can we learn from this?
If anything, I think what we can learn is that - at least right now, at least with the current direction - BHVR are too skittish about implementing changes that directly interrupt gameplay when killers try to tunnel.
This is a problem, because tunnelling is a problem. BHVR's stated future goals - reworking new player onboarding and adjusting MMR - are potentially fine in general, but obviously aren't going to stop tunnelling in any meaningful way whatsoever.
Teaching a new player how to engage with the game properly is still good, but as soon as they either realise from their own games or learn from a third party how strong tunnelling is, they're still gonna swap to that because it's still gonna be the easiest, fastest, least answerable path to victory.
Similarly, if the MMR changes are geared towards ensuring tunnelling players don't progress in the ladder as fast, that's a double incentive- you'll win the matches you play easier, and you won't get harder matches for it down the line. As anti-tunnel it's backwards, it incentivises what it sets out to reduce, but the matchmaker is flawed right now anyway so it's worth looking at for its own sake.
I do want to hit that part again before I continue because this was something I found concerning about the stream. There's a lot of language used there about tunnelling being a frustrating situation, which it certainly is, but I'm concerned BHVR aren't acknowledging internally that tunnelling is also unbalanced. A player who gets tunnelled and does not get frustrated is still on the receiving end of a massively unbalanced cheese strat, one that obviously still needs direct changes no matter what angle you take on the matter.
Obviously softening how it's talked about to the community (and especially highlighting player experience over dry balance) for PR purposes is fine and dandy, I'd expect nothing less, but I'd hope it's just language choice for communication and not an actual unwillingness to acknowledge the balance issue.
So, all that said, how do we stitch this together into something constructive? I would say what BHVR should look at are less disruptive methods of weakening tunnelling.
If we can't make chasing someone off hook easier, then what we should do is try to make doing that less desirable through other methods.
I have this post up detailing a method of anti tunnel that aims to make progressing your objective through tunnelling much slower, while still allowing killers to target recently unhooked survivors for any other benefits they might get from doing so— it doesn't have to be that specifically, but it's a good direction to look. Something in the back end that you don't have to care about as a casual player, and that you can play around as a more serious/competitive/experienced player to still make sure you can answer aggressive players and slow the match down via gameplay.
Hypothetically, if a solution like this were pursued, everyone wins- survivors aren't taken out of the match too early via a glaring basekit balance problem, killers still get the freedom and agency to target whoever makes most sense in the moment, and the game can be balanced around a healthier baseline with tunnelling no longer looming over everything.
In addition, I think encouraging killers not to tunnel (while still weakening that strategy, that part is important- it's not one or the other, both must be done in tandem) via basekit incentives is still within the less disruptive vision. The Bloodlust after a hook was a neat idea, fresh hook BP bonuses are a good idea, and there are a few other things to look at to.
What should be prioritised here though is active buffs you only benefit from if you keep up pressure, not passive free slowdown like a basekit Pain Res. Information, movement speed, break speed, stealth, these are all potentially worthwhile areas to look- just not direct gen slowdown. Encourage killers away from the hook and towards other survivors, so everyone gets to participate properly.
In short, I'm disappointed that anti-tunnel was scrapped entirely from this PTB when it was only a few tweaks away from being very serviceable, but accepting that BHVR need to prioritise other things as well so we won't see another go at anti-tunnel for a while, I think that can be spun into an opportunity to return to the drawing board with a change in vision and try again.
Tunnelling is a problem and does need to be fixed. We can learn from this attempt instead of it just being a disappointment.
Comments
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I mainly fail to understand who thought it's good idea to combine so many changes at once.
- pallet density
- anti-tunneling
- anti-slugging
- anti-camping
- killer incentives
Like if they just focused on anti-tunneling / killer incentives and see how it will affect the balance, it might work. But trying to do everything at once simply could not end well. They are simply not capable of such big changes.
They should have just use that time for more bug fixes…
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The post is more about what we can learn regarding realistic anti tunnel specifically, not what the major problem with the PTB was.
Though, honestly, I don't think that the number of changes was necessarily a problem, nothing wrong with an ambitious patch.
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