The 'Basekit' Narrative
Lately, I've been seeing a lot of people (various platforms) stating that since tunneling/camping are basekit options for killers, survivors should have basekit counters.
What are YOUR thoughts and opinions on this statement/line of thinking?
Pretty interesting that it's blowing up so close to the anniversary stream.
Comments
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I agree with it wholeheartedly.
I wouldn't necessarily say that the basekit counter should be as potent as the perk equivalents (EG, I don't think the answer is literally just the effects of Borrowed Time verbatim made basekit), but I think that the logical continuation of "tunnelling and camping are legitimate strategies" is "so there should be legitimate answers to them which aren't gated behind perks".
The only exception imo is slugging. I think having the answers to that be behind perks is fine, since there's more of a capacity for your teammates to help you when you're slugged without the need for perks, less so for when you're tunnelled.
It goes without saying that I'm talking about actual tunnelling here, as in, being downed after just a few seconds passed from your being unhooked. If the killer happens to find you again after chasing someone else and travelling half the map, that's not tunnelling, that's just bad luck.
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I agree tunneling and camping isn’t fun for survivors and that warrants a change, but I think a straight buff to survivors to deal with it wouldn’t be the right thing to do. A lot of times when playing as killer, I feel more like I’m playing against the game design rather than against the survivors and that feels REALLY bad. Some kind of anti-tunnel/camp survivor basekit buff would just add to that.
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It’s not meant to have a hard counter, that would be bad design for a strategy. The counter already exists. It’s called splitting up and doing gens efficiently since the other survivors aren’t being pressured.
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I wish they devised a way to get rid of camping all together except after the Exit Gates are powered.
Tunneling itself is not that bad unless its paired with camping or proxy camping, when you pair the two unless BT and/or DS the tunneled person almost always gets downed again in less than 20 seconds, if you remove camping from the equation the tunneled still has time to hide or heal and a proper chance at getting chased again and ditching the Killer.
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Referring to Tunneling/Camping as basekit is a really weird sounding phrase to me. Basekit implies feature, while tunneling and camping are more a result of core game mechanics.
Camping, sure, I can get on board for some basekit counters to that, since it's not particularly fun for either side and doesn't take any skill to do, especially if you're playing a killer like Bubba or Hag.
Tunneling, I have a harder time agreeing counters to it should be basekit. Survivor is a team-based role, and being able to identify a weak link in that team and pick them off could be categorized as a skill. If a killer lacks that skill and tries to tunnel someone anyways, what will probably happen is all gens will fly by uncontested and the killer will probably only get one kill at most
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Just remember that damaging a generator was once not even an option for killers. So yes, basekit anti-camping and anti-tunneling measures should definitely be added to the game. If we want survivors to be able to have fun and not run meta perks all the time (which I thought was what people want.. not to always see the same perks).
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Anti-camping counter is rushing gens.
I'm not sure how you can counter tunneling without a perk or an item though.
As for basekit techniques in general, survivors also have 360's, various pallet techs, and disappearing around a corner that they can see around (third person camera) but you can't.
After all, camping and tunneling aren't features, they're behaviors.
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Tunneling or camping is just survivors not doing gens fast enough to negate the killers performance.
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The best anti-tunnel change they could implement, at least that I can think of, is a few seconds of no collision when someone's unhooked. It wouldn't be abusable in any way I could see, and survivors could only use it to make distance and give themselves a fighting chance at outplaying the killer's attempts at tunnelling - and on the other side, killers can wait it out without worrying about bodyblocking or anything.
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Tunneling / Camping are strategies the Killers can use.
And, as is the case with all other strategies, there are counterstrategies the Survivors can use to punish this behavior.
If the Killer is camping, do generators. They willingly dropped all map pressure for a good 2 minutes, so abuse that.
If the Killer is tunneling, first of all, don't save in their face. Should they still ignore you, you can sandbag them when they try to search for the unhooked Survivor by making scratch marks of your own or bodyblocking doorways to force a hit on you instead. That way you can stall the Killer and it might just be enough to allow the other person to get away from them / at least find a good chase spot. There is no way for you to reliably shut down tunneling, if the Killer decides they want someone dead and only goes for them, you can't change anything about that - but you can punish it by making sure they lose tremendous amounts of time on this one person, so the Killer, once again, drops all their map pressure.
Those are all "basekit options" the Survivors have to deal with this.
We can improve on those - for example by using a ping system that allows a currently camped player to tell their team to do gens instead of trying to save them, but ultimately Survivors already have a way to deal with those things.
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Some kind of change is going to be necessary if you really want to help discourage it. Perks are never going to completely put a stop to it unless they’re made even stronger than they are now, and even if they were, that’s still a bandaid solution.
I would argue that there are multiple baseline changes both sides could receive to overall make the game better, and for survivors this is one of them.
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I agree with this, it's something I've suggested in the past.
Being unhooked should award the same non-collision as getting injured.
It would benefit both survivors and killers. Survivors wouldn't be unhooked just to go down instantly after being farmed off the hook, and killers won't be cheated out of a hit to the unhooker by a BT bodyblock.
But that's a very niche example of tunneling, which could still occur aftranother couple seconds, and would still require BT to counter.
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- I think "Tunneling" is a useless buzzword, there's no consensus on what it even means let alone why it would be a problem and the great majority of people I see complain about tunneling after a match are simply sore losers upset they got eliminated early or got downed twice in a row or that I ignored a bodyblocker, etc. At this point I just ignore any complaints about "tunneling" as meaningless.
- "Face camping" is actually a bit of an issue that the devs have acknowledged in that, if players feel (rightly or wrongly) that standing around a hook defending it is the most effective strategy then it leads to an unengaging gameplay scenario where the killer stands around doing nothing for two minutes, the survivor on the hook is stuck for two minutes before being eliminated, and the other survivors' best strategy is to just sit at gens for a little less than two minutes and then try for a hook trade. They've said they've experimented with game mechanics that could possibly steer killers away from face camping but haven't found one they like yet which both does that job but doesn't break something else in the process. It's possible, for instance, that the way they set up Pyramid Head's Cages to teleport away from him if he's nearby was a backdoor experiment to see if something similar might work for hooks as well but that they decided it wasn't a good idea for those.
- Beyond face camping, though, so called "proxy camping" isn't a real issue. Proxy Camping is literally just zone defense where you guard 1/4 or 1/3 of the map rather than the entire thing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it in terms of balance or fairness or sportsmanship, etc.
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The issue I have with stuff like basekit BT and so on is how much it would penalise killers who only resort to camping/tunnelling when they feel like they will lose if they don't do it/they feel like its the best play at the time
There are people who go into matches aiming to tunnel and camp from the start but many killers don't do that but will do so if they feel it's what they need to do to win.
There's also instances where the Killer is forced to camp, I.E someone being hooked inbetween a 3 gen. You are actively throwing the game if you don't camp that hook if you see what I mean
I will say though, in many of my recent matches I've noticed a lot more Killer players are punishing survivors if they don't unhook quickly. If survivors don't go for the save because the Killer is close, then they are way more likely to just force stage 2 or force a trade and while coordinated teams will take the trade, solo Q teams are usually not up to the task
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I think Borrowed Time should be natural mechanic. If you're freshly unhooked, put priority on chasing the unhooking survivor instead.
I think if a Killer hooks someone and just stands there next to the hook without any survivors within a reasonable range of the hook they should suffer a stacking debuff that continuously reduces their movement speed capping out and just flat out making them completely immobile and unable to attack for 30 seconds with a visual and auditory notification to the survivors to let them know this has happened.
Survivors would need a visual cue to let them know they are too close to the hook to trigger this debuff, because you can't blame a killer for hanging around the hook if survivors are literally just a few feet away being stupid.
Easier said than done though, because hiding close to a hook and waiting for the killer to leave is perfectly fine, and the activation of this debuff or not basically just gives away if someone is that close to the hook or not. Perhaps if a chase is actually initiated then it can start.
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I disagree being strategies a side can use doesnt mean something has to exist, hiding on the edges of the map as release Claudette hoping the Killer got bored and he DCd was a strategy Survivors could use and not a very engaging, fun and constructive one for anyone involved so it had to go, same for full sabo builds when hooks didnt respawn, body blocking the hook so it was impossible to even get the "unhook" prompt, abusing infinite loops and an insane long list of design flaws that were prunned entirely and the game only got better.
Something being in the game doesnt mean it has to stay that way, there are plenty of strategies that got axed because they were horrid to deal with and the definition of frustrating.
Maybe they could rework BT, give a lessened endurance as base kit and make BT give the unhooked no collision and/or a speed increase similar to Sprint Burst after being unhooked (maybe without exhaustion or with a reduced exhaustion penalty).
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Devs have tested this type of stuff and survivors abused the mechanic to lock killers in a situation where they are punished either way.
Survivos love to rush the hook and if they can penalize the killer by doing it, devs have shown that they will.
Negating any attempt to fix the problem because survivors create another problem.
Cameraderie is the perk version of it, as if survs had anything more they would abuse it entirely.
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This doesn't follow because in my example rushing the hook does not punish the killer.
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I don't get it.
Both Survivors and Killers can play as efficiently as possible without Perks, why isn't it fine for Killers to do as such?
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Speaking as a killer main myself, I agree that some changes need to be made to lessen tunneling and camping, but the devs would have to be very careful with how they implement it. Survivors have so many second chances as is, giving them even more/making existing second chances stronger would skew the game a little too heavily in the side of survivors, especially when they're coordinated.
I wouldn't agree with Borrowed Time being basekit in its current form - something like 5 seconds of i-frames after being unhooked sounds good. That's enough time to make a bit of distance, and then they can use dead hard/some other exhaustion perk to make more distance, resulting in another chase as opposed to a near instant down after being unhooked. Borrowed Time would then give endurance after those i-frames, but preferably not for too long that we end up with pre-nerf Borrowed Time.
Something like Decisive Strike should not be basekit. It's a good anti-tunneling tool for sure, but having to slug someone for a full minute or just leave them alone entirely is not a great choice when people with Decisive Strike will often bodyblock for their teammates even when injured because they know they can stun the killer, and that stun can lead into a chain flashlight/flashbang stun, etc. Having something that can potentially waste so much of the killer's time be basekit instead of a perk would be too powerful and would be used and abused to its limits in no time at all, especially because they would then have room in their perks for more ways to chain stun killers or more second chances or straight up just more ways to BM. And god forbid we end up with pre-nerf Decisive Strike again in the current meta.
As for camping, giving out higher bp penalties to the killer for camping is all I can really think of at the moment. Camping is an ineffective strategy as is, because if you camp one person on hook, everyone else will heal and get gens done and get out of the trial ASAP. It's a strategy only employed by those who are bad at general killer gameplay to get even a single kill, or by most killers of all skill levels during the endgame collapse when you're trying to ensure a kill. But to be fair, during endgame collapse, anything goes for both sides.
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Campers don't give a ######### about BP to begin with so I don't think penalties would matter.
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Then the killer will moan about being gen rushed.
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Ah but gen rushing is the killer not applying enough pressure on survs.
Ya see, I play both sides and can critique both, and often do.
Gen rushing is no longer a thing, that term was from before BNPs were nerfed, and Prove Thyself was busted.
Gen rushing means killer didnt apply pressure.
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hiding on the edges of the map as release Claudette hoping the Killer got bored and he DCd was a strategy Survivors could use
No, this is called "holding the game hostage", not a strategy. First of all, it is, technically speaking, still a thing and secondly, it is bannable, because it forces the match to a standstill of undefined length.
This does not apply to camping nor tunneling, as both are legitimate ways the Killer can progress their side of the objective.
And whether you like it or not, tunneling has become a necessity at this point. You are absolutely right, its boring, uninteractive and unfun for everyone involved, but not doing it comes close to throwing the game as Killer. Heck, I literally quit this game because i didnt want to be forced to camp and tunnel out all my matches!
But here is the harsh reality: you can not fix those issues. Camping and tunneling will always be a thing. What are you planning to do about a Killer not leaving the area of a hooked Survivor? And what about a Killer focussing one guy over the others? Whats the solution here, ban them? You'd have to fundamentally redesign how Killers progress their objective for this, remove hooks alltogether and do something entirely different that the Killer can't just camp or tunnel off, but you don't fix this by giving Survivors BT basekit.
But this isn't really what my comment was about. Not at all, actually. What I said was, that Survivors have clear counterstrategies to those Killer strategies already and acting like they didn't is plain out wrong.
And like I said, I don't mind improving on them either, a ping system for example would do wonders against campers! Make it less enticing of a strategy to use and people will stop using it (yes there are going to be those poeple that will use it no matter what, but they are a clear minority), but right now, it is the best way for Killers to try and win in this game.
Before we buff Survivors again maybe we should stop for a second and think about why Killers use these strategies so much.
Fix the root of the issue, not the symptoms.
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4 toolboxes with BnP would still be Gen rushing imo. That aside it wouldn't matter if they didn't apply enough pressure. The Gen rushing complaints would still be flying. Hell we see them all the time on here, and you can bet most of those games nobody had a single toolbox.
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If any basekit were to be added it shouldn't change anything so drastically. Probably shouldn't even give them a basekit BT.
Somehow it would need to differentiate the actual situation happening.
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This is true, but generally, people who want to play like a total jerk for their own amusement will do so regardless of how they get punished. After all, it's an unviable strategy, will almost always lose you the match, but people still do it because they get a kick out of it.
It's difficult to think of a solution that discourages camping without punishing killers who happen to be nearby during an unhooking because they chased a survivor there or were busy using pop on a gen and someone went for an immediate unhook, you know?
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The Claudette hiding is not exactly holding the game hostage because the Killer could find and kill her but sure I concede, it doesnt count as strategy but is still an example of something that sucked and got changed for the better (the rest of the examples are still valid tho).
Onto the tunneling, you can always make a system similar to Pyramid Head cages or something like Home Sweet Home Survive where you could pick the soul of a fallen teammate and revive them at a safe location (or so I think, I watched some videos and it was something like that), there is ways to try to get rid of camping or at least mitigate it so its not that profitable, my biggest concern is a full camping oriented Killer right now usually gets at least 2 kills without doing much and while you are right it may never go away it could be changed to a way the Killer rarely gets anything else than 1 kill, right now if someone gets a down before there is at least 100% gen progression around the map (1 gen at 50%, 2 at 25% for example) with a full camping build+NOED the Killer is getting 2 kills almost always, there is just not enough time to fix everything in 150 seconds.
Also on a sidenote, if camping gets reworked into a less powerful tool I expect certain things for Survivors would change like how the gens are progressed, right now you cant increase the time it takes to fix a gen (either the raw time "holding m1 for 90-100 seconds instead of 80" or the "pick a spare to jumpstart the gen first") because then camping becomes unstoppable, and this is just an example of stuff that could be changed or tweaked but right now is hard because how fragile the balance on the game is, a fix for A needs also a fix for B.
"Before we buff Survivors again maybe we should stop for a second and think about why Killers use these strategies so much."
This is going to be a very unpopular opinion, because a lot of them are bad and camping is very profitable against Solos, I remember this streamer who sucks, we are talking about "Mariana's Trench MMR" levels of suck like the guy could get to BL3 on a safe pallet and still take 60 extra seconds to land a hit, he manages to get all his 3k and 4k against Solos while camping hard, thats why he camps, because otherwise he wouldnt even land a kill but not because the game is broken or Survivors OP but because he is god awful at this. I play Killer, I play Myers, Jigsaw and other technically weak Killers, I never camped except on EGC situations and I honestly never felt the need to camp to win a game, I do slug if I think it can add more pressure than a hook at the moment tho.
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I don't see why survivors need "basekit" anti tunnel or anti camping mechanics.
On tunneling: survivors can already body block for each other and have tools like sabo to help deny hooks. If the Killer is able to quickly remove a survivor out of the game, the survivor team already failed to protect them.
On camping: sometimes you get games where you hook someone and the multiple people are "hiding" nearby to go for the save. So of course the killer has no inxentive to leave the hook area. Any anti-camping mechanic is just going to lead to free unhooks which I don't see being healthy. There are times as a killer where you have to force a survivor on hook to transition to the next hook state.
Then I had a killer game in recent memory where I hooked a survivor in a corner of the map between the last 3 gens. I had zero reason to leave the area and "camped" the hooked survivor because it was the only play that made sense.
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Hey 4 BNPs is illegal ok?
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While I don't think tunneling someone out early is exactly a "necessity", it can damn well feel like it when you're up against incredibly good survivors, and I agree that it skews the game heavily in the killer's favour if done correctly, and this is an inherent flaw with the game's design.
The more survivors there are, the more you have to worry that whatever you're doing might be costing you the game, the more you have to worry that the one or two survivors you haven't seen in a while are about to finish a gen. By the time one survivor dies, this pressure is immediately alleviated, and keeping track of three survivors at once is a lot easier. By the second death, the killer can breathe a sigh of relief, as even if they lose the last two survivors somehow, it's still at least a "tie" - and pressuring two people at once, regardless of the map or what items and perks they bring, is a cakewalk if you know what you're doing.
It's very difficult to balance an asymmetrical multiplayer game of course, but it often feels like four survivors exhude more pressure over the killer than the killer does on them, especially knowing that any strong play against one of them could be denied by a second chance perk. With three survivors left, it can either feel more balanced or in the killer's favour, depending on how good the team is + coordination + comms. With two survivors left, the killer is definitely at an advantage regardless of the individual survivors' skill level.
This is exactly why doing well as a killer can feel so rewarding, especially when you don't have to resort to tunneling and the like. Outsmarting and outplaying four different people at once, despite all of their second chances and coordination and everything they had going for them, is exactly why I main killer. But I'd rather not resort to picking one person out to kill off at 4 gens remaining in every match just to get consistent results. It feels cheap, and it doesn't feel like it's helping me improve at all.
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If you want players to camp / tunnel less, then you got to look at the reason why they do it and then address that.
Here is what I came to realize by doing this exact thing:
Why do people camp / tunnel? - because they want to eliminate one player as quickly as possible. Why do they want to eliminate one player as quickly as possible? - because the game is heavily tilted against them to the point where not doing this comes close to throwing the match. Why is that? - because the Devs keep balancing the game around individual 1v1 interactions, despite the fact that this is a 4v1 game and the Killer should be the one crushing Survivors in 1v1s. And why would they do that? - because chases are the only fun thing about this game.
And there it is, the root of the issue. THIS needs to be addressed before we can even start talking about addressing the symptoms that followed, such as the amount of camping and tunneling Killers.
Not to mention that tunneling is quite literally unfixable. If the Killer wants to choose one player over the rest, then they can do that. Whoever they chase / not chase is ultimately their decision and there is no realistic scenario in which you could change that.
If you want them to stop, then give them an incentive not to do it. What really did not help here is, that the MMR system actively rewards both of these playstyles. According to the MMR system, hardcamping someone and using Perks such as Deadlocked, No Way Out and NOED in the end to secure another Kill is the best way to play this game, because you secure kills with it - and those are, of course, the only thing that matters, just like in hockey. Because DbD is a hockey game, since those also only look at the amount of kills everyone got at the end of the match.
If you want to reduce the amounf of campers / tunnelers, give Killers more good reasons not to do it. Make it so not doing it is a viable option for them, reward them for not doing it. You can not get rid of these strategies, as discussed before, so give them a reason to not to use them instead.
And you're right, solos suffer from camping more than SWFs do. Like I said in my previous two comments, this is something that should be addressed. A ping system would work wonders here.
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It's pretty mean for sure.
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The reason killers face-camp and tunnel-off-hook-till-dead is because it is a tactic that is game-winning. If you can face-camp or tunnel-off-hook-till-dead a survivor before the other survivors get 3 gens done, you've pretty much won the game. A tactic that every killer has from level 1 and is so crazy powerful it allows you to win the game should have a basekit counter.
It's not because the game is heavily tilted against killers.
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Think about it from a killer perspective. Killer 1 can play killer without face-camping and tunneling-off-hook-till-dead, just regular play. Killer 1 can remove one survivor from the game before 3 gens are done but it requires constantly patrolling gens, breaking off chases at powerful loops, skillful mind-games and being extremely efficient with my time.
Now compare that to Killer 2, that face-camps or tunnels-off-hook-till-dead. They down the first survivor they see, like Killer 1, but decide to tunnel the survivor off hook. So they move a slight bit away from the hook, wait and then when that survivor is unhooked, they chase and quickly down that survivor and rehook them, rinse-and-repeat. Suddenly Killer 2 has 3 survivors left, just like Killer 1. However, Killer 2 didn't have to patrol gens, or break off chases, or mind-game or even worry about being effiecient with their time.
Why does Killer 2 get rewarded for lazy gameplay when Killer 1 has been playing at much higher skill level.
The skill it takes to face-camps or tunnels-off-hook-till-dead does not justify the rewards.
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I would like to know what those Survivors have been doing in both of your Killer examples when you get a kill in with no more than 2 gens popped.
You're not really drawing a picture of the Killers here, you are just describing some horribly inefficient Survivors - which you are right, you don't need those strategies against.
Thing is, when you face an actually efficient team as Killer it is not uncommon to have 2 to 3 gens completed by the time you get your first hook in. And your suggestion of a "good Killer" just leaving the hook to go and patrol a gen on the other side of the map is a gamelosing decision here.
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Solo queue needs serious buffs. Full stop. Forget about SWF, they already have a million advantages, I can't play solo queue in this game anymore for over 2 years now. It's unbearable and it shouldn't be that way.
Basekit perks like Kindred and the former "Camaradery" perk with the BT perk basekit would be a good start.
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The killer who is face-camping and tunneling-off-hook-till-dead is using much-much less skills than the one that isn't.
If a strategy is easy to pull off, then that strategy shouldn't get as good of a reward as the strategy that is harder to pull off.
Face-camping and tunneling-off-hook-till-dead is brain-dead easy to pull off and every killer can do it and on top of that, survivors can't counter it basekit.
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The killer who is face-camping and tunneling-off-hook-till-dead is using much-much less skills than the one that isn't.
And the Killer who is camping and tunneling is the one winning the match, while the other one isn't.
This results in the other Killer strating to camp and tunnel too, because they have to in order to win.
Which brings us back to my original comment: the huge amount of campers and tunnelers is a direct result of this games imbalances.
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Killers moving at top speed is basekit so survivors should have Sprint Burst as base.
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I think that the killer shouldn't have the power to just say "screw you in particular, you don't get to play."
Maybe something like PH's cages getting moved would be enough? (on a longer timer)
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