You will never win as killer if you're not tunneling at high level play

U dont have to directly tunnel someone out, but should have someone as your primary target, if you focus on only one survivor at all time the other 3 wont have any pressure on them and work on gens with an ease

Survivors are receiving defenses to that. Eventually, you won’t be able to do it at all. Cuz one thing about DBD—survivor mains will shut this game down. Long queue times are not fun.

I think BHVR defined a win for survivors as escaping through the exit gates. Interestingly, this awards survivors the most bloodpoints during a match.

Things are different for killers…

OP is right though.

Even in tournament play, killers are consistently tunneling, also camping the hook quite commonly. Just watch this game:

In the first 4 games of this tournament every time the killer would try very hard to tunnel only one person. And the only game where they didn't manage to tunnel was a 4-man escape:

1. Game 1 : straight up facecamp, then tunneling despite DS, teammates body blocking, and even using For the People on Nea. Nea gets hooked 3 times in a row with only one person getting hooked in between. Result: 4 kills
2. Game 2: straight up tunneling, Jake gets hooked 3 times in a row before anybody else gets hooked once. Result: 4K
3. Game 3 : killer downs Adam but decides not to tunnel him for no apparent reason. Then decides to tunnel Claudette, who gets hooked 3 times in a row despite DS. Result: 2K
4. Game 4 : No tunneling. Result: 0K

I didn't watch the other games but I imagine the trend doesn't change.

Keep in mind, this is not against random solo queue players who don't know how to counter tunneling, this is a SWF who all run DS and try to protect the tunneled person by body blocking / hiding him / even using For the People.

There's also money to be won in the tournaments. I'd play dirty to get some nice cash, no problem.

Literally nobody plays tournaments for fun.

You said that high-level killers need to tunnel based on RNG. Which is total nonsense as tournament players do it consistently even against organized SWFs who use DS / body block / For the People etc.

Sorry for not addressing the rest of your message where you claim essentially that OP is a low-level scrub, I thought that was condescending and off-topic

And I argue that you don't have to see tournament level survivors to be beaten; just good enough survivors will do. Gen speed, arbitrary time waste at loops, and second chance perks stop the killer from killing the survivors on time. Their skill isn't enough to win, so they have to turn to strategies and perk/add-on loadouts to maybe see a chance of winning. Even if the survivors do go down quick or make multiple misplays, there's not much room to punish them. You're on a strict curfew, and spending just 20 seconds chasing 1 person can be game-losing. Why else would killer players pick the strongest killers, perks, and playstyles even at the cost of ceasing to learn their killer?

You're not listening. In other games, being skilled is what causes you to win, but that also includes using the best strategies available, which would be that game's equivalent of camping or tunneling.

I can see where this is going, and I'm not interested in having yet another "You should play in a way that causes you to lose because it's more fun" type of conversation, so I'm gonna end it here.

Because killer perks literally require them to play more skillfully to get use out of them, whereas survivor perks are kind of just there, and the more powerful ones can be used offensively despite being defensive perks. For example Ruin, Pop, and Pain Res got called OP and nerfed even though they only reward killers who left hook and went for multiple chases. The people who say killers got carried by those perks despite camping are wrong; it's their bad play, allowing the killer to get off multiple uses of those perks while they're supposedly camping, that caused them to lose. We've seen time and again that even with 4 gen defence perks and whether the killer camped or was always being in chase, killers aside from Nurse and Blight couldn't have won, because the survivors were too efficient on gens.

That's why killers camp and tunnel: the race against time. Survivors don't have an option to do gens in a skillful way. They just do them, although it's their decision to be efficient or not. On the killer side, being efficient and playing skillfully are considered polar opposites, because the skill is all in the chase. If the killer camps or tunnels, they have to do less chases which is them being efficient on their time. Going for multiple chases, you can end chases very quickly, but it's inefficient unless it immediately results in a survivor being sacrificed. That's why it's hard to play like that and still win, because while you're wasting time displaying skill instead of being efficient, survivors have no reason to not be efficient on gens, and they almost always beat you to the punch.

I for one want to see Reassurance in action, and I'm hoping it will be as good as I'm predicting it will be. I want to see if it stops camping and, if so, I want to see how well killers do by not camping. That doesn't mean that I'm optimistic about how killers are gonna perform though. What I like about Reassurance, and Kinship, is that it's for a survivor who's on the hook, not a survivor who's off the hook.

Anti-tunnel perks are the problematic ones, because just about every time they've been strong or buffed, they've been used offensively. DS, Mettle Of Man, BT, Off The Record, base Endurance, the works. Those are constantly used to protect the unhooker, who everyone thinks the killer is obligated to go for. Unless we want to talk about the game having some sort of body blocking detection system, we're admitting that these defensive perks become problematic when their uses exceed just making unhooked survivors safer. That's why they're crutch, because the unhooker didn't do anything to evade the killer in that interaction. Some random other survivor, since they could afford to take a hit or 2 because of their perks, jumped in the way and extended the chase for the person being chased when they should have been downed.

The killer main message that says that survivors win because they're OP, and killers win because the survivors are bad is mostly true. Survivors have enough tools, time, and killer weaknesses to exploit so that they can beat the killer on pretty much any given map. But I want to focus on that second part, that bad survivors is what allow killers to win. It's true for all killers except maybe Nurse and Blight, because they are so strong that they can play catch-up with the survivors having a lead on their objective. I don't care how creative your traps are as Trapper or how good your curving is as Hillbilly, how smart your snare placement is as Freddy or how good your reactions are with Deathslinger, you're not beating good survivors with that stuff. Their gen speed will be too quick to manage and they'll have too many second chance perks. You can beat bad survivors with that, because they take unnecessary risks and think that they can't be organized just because they don't have comms. They also don't seem to want to run strong perks or even items, but then they're the ones complaining about the strong stuff killers have?

Skill is considered a factor for killers. It's not included in a lot of discussions even though it should, but it's absolutely tied to game balance. The killer has to down really fast to get the best use out of perks like Pop and Pain Res, but to down fast you have to end chases fast, and that takes skill. Some loops you're forced to brute force until the pallet is down, like shack, because you'll waste an equal or greater amount of time trying to mindgame there. You can mindgame a survivor at a place like that, and that's skill, but the survivor had to make the mistake to allow your skill to matter. But assume the survivor doesn't get mindgamed there. That's still your skill you were trying to use but couldn't do anything with, similar to survivors being camped to death. Camping a survivor doesn't take much skill, but it saves you the pain of going through 1-2 more of those chases where you have to waste an arbitrary amount of time, and where your skill didn't matter that much, only for the survivors to win in the end. I think what most people who hate camping do is they say, "It takes no skill" and call it a day, and don't really go into why killers do it, or they do and they say, "Yeah, but the killer still shouldn't do it." Killers find places to use their skill when they can, but when they can't, you see what they do instead.

I don't think former survivor players switching to killer is because of a want to win; more so because they do not enjoy playing survivor again (which could be because of several reasons : having to re-learn other playstyles if their perks of choice got nerfed, the cheater wave, the camping and tunneling fashion of the moment, which regardless of their legitimacy ruins the fun when you're survivor, etc.).

Plus, if the whole point of DbD is to get as many bloodpoints as you can, then it's more practical to play killer, as they get consistently more bloodpoints than survivors (a bad game as killer will award you as much as a medium game as survivor)... Yet another reason why people are switching to killer currently as the prestige rework means a lot of people have to grind a lot.

Thankfully, this aspect will get better with the incentives and the bloodweb prices rework.

You have just the same ability as OP to determine whether you are in "high level play" or "the killer is bad and using a crutch". which is zero. lmao

I do not base it off of my own ability but rather, people who are considered to be good at the game.

I've had the opportunity to play against a couple of those people. People with 7K+ hours who stream the game for a living. Like I said in my original comment, I do not get to play against them consistently, I imagine the matchmaking system is too funky for that. However, I was able to keep pace with them while they were, at the very least, trying a little bit.

I'm confident enough that I'm perfectly willing to say that I don't get real high-level teams often, which is something at least.

Correct answer, honestly. That's about how I see my games too. It really depends on the time of day and how many people are in each queue. All we can do is look at hours of teammates, the odd streamer in our game, or how many bug abusing blights, etc