Should killers tunnel out the first survivor in 4 man sfw matches ?

depends on what you want ... sweat or chill , i tried both few months ago i wanted to sweat so i tunneled a lot and got my mmr at high level like you seems to be atm , now i tend to do more chill games at lower mmr and take my time to kill them ( depends on survivors i face, if they want to play i try to give them harder games and if i see some potatoes i try to be smarter)

i consider i win at 7 Hooks .

Obviously if you have the choice between hooking someone you've already hooked and someone you haven't you should hook the person who's closer to dying.

However like various people said above if you focus too much on a single target you're just letting the other three survivors do gens freely. So you do need to be able to juggle the survivors initially to keep them all busy healing each other and being chased rather than doing the gens in order to have time to secure your downs and carries to hooks. Also the beginning of the match is when you hopefully are able to remove pallets in the main section of the map you're aiming to defend later on, so you do have that as an important goal initially as well. Which means ultimately you shouldn't be as concerned at hard chasing one target early on as you should taking your best targets of opportunity, landing hits and downs if possible, and also when you can't get a hit forcing the pallet drops to weaken tiles. Once you've got some injuries and someone on a hook developed then you can maintain that pressure and, as opportunity presents itself, target one or two survivors for elimination.

Depends what you're trying to get out of a game.

Bloodpoints? A challenge or daily ritual? Pips for your rank? Or do you want to 'win'?

You can usually accomplish all of those things without a 4K, unless you specifically count a 4K as a 'win'.

When I'm feeling generous, which to be fair is most of the time, I can let everyone escape and still get 35K+ BP and maybe complete a challenge or daily ritual. That's enough of a win for most of my games, and can sometimes orchestrate it so that the game progresses at an even pace and the survivors legitimately get the exits open as I get my 8 hooks. I balance it out with a few games where the survivors just aren't good enough to get the gens done, so I have to kill them all, or three and a hatch, to get the match over with.

I'd rather get 8 hooks and 1 or even 0 kills, than get a 3/4K with less than 8 hooks.

Play the way you want. Sometimes its worth it, sometimes its not.

While I agree 100% about sweating being a bad idea because you're just going to get less enjoyable games and worse results, tunneling a player is often extremely useful against SWF because the players are more often than not going to try and save each other. It's a fantastic way to get players throwing themselves at you for free, because in a SWF, the players actually care about each other and are outraged that one of their members is being singled out.

While some teams are going to tell each other to do gens, you can't discount altruism in a team setting and how much it plays into the killer's hands. It's entirely the reason camping is as effective as it is and it's a fair portion of why tunneling works so well, too. When tunneling fails - from what I've observed, it's usually when the player being targeted is extremely good at evading the killer, and that's way more important than if the other survivors were making good use of their time.

Split pressure only works if the survivors don't have a good way of healing themselves - between medkits, CoH, and common healing perks like Botany, smacking a bunch of different people at the start is rarely effective compared to securing a down and then going for a chase on an already injured person. A 3v1 tips the balance of whether or not killers can keep up with generator progress and I find it difficult to accept that it's not empirically the most effective way to win.

I care more about having a good time than a 4k, but from where I'm standing, the pressing incentive to remove a survivor ASAP always looked like a pretty core flaw in game design. Is there any kind of documented data on tunneling and kill rates?

Its kinda of weird seeing a sanctioned response both acknowledging the efficiency cap dilemma and suggesting a killer to sandbag themselves in order to not get put into higher MMR (and thus avoid more limiting playstyles.) Those are both issues that can and should be addressed by the balance team, and yet the time-to-first-kill is even more important than it was before the meta shakeup and a similar acknowledgement.

Edit: To add to what he was saying, though, strategies like tunneling require high efficiency to offset the factors that were mentioned. If you try to tunnel a bad player you will secure the 1v3 before too much damage has been done, but if you make the wrong choice then it loses you the game as posited.

The question about tunneling is how much time does it take. If you get to a generator and there are two survivors on it, one with 2 hooks, one with none, going after the one with 2 hooks (presuming they are equal loopers) is the "right" play. If the survivors on the other hand are using this time to break a three gen, spread out the map, trade hits, etc. it's not going to be effective.

Removing a survivor is a big advantage. It doesn't mean it is the only thing that you have to consider.

"I've been playing with Freddy recently"

Well uh, if u decide to play one of the weakest killers in the game then you will probably have a rough time even against trios and probably even duos, unless you have very good game sense, mechanics, make good plays back to back etc.

Tunneling to make the game a 1v3 early is not the worst idea, but it can easily backfire if:

the survivor u try to tunnel is a decent looper

if the SWF u face are efficent on gens

if the survivor u chase is not a good looper but know how to path pallet to pallet while their team tank hits for them.

We also need to take in the factor of:

your loadout

their loadout

your playstyle

their playstyle

the map

and so on, cause not every match is the same

I somewhat disagree, since most games have their efficiency be focused more on being intuitive and less on abusing as many advantages as possible. I know its a difficult beast to balance in an asymmetrical system, but the higher you climb the more the game becomes about stacking as many odds in your favor as you can, which means that it creates a very distinct natural growth cap. While I agree that they are separate aims to play casually vs trying to climb, the natural state of climbing while ignoring what makes the top in fact "the top" causes a very harsh unknown in terms of what to expect from any given match, and very little time or ability to adjust to the game around you. Its a big part of why the first few minutes of any given match set so much of the pace of the rest of the match, as well as why its that much harder to play reactive to the quality or strategies of your opponent, especially as the results are extremely outcome biased toward kills and escapes.

Its a race that blatantly favors sprinting far more than stamina. People can go into that knowingly conserving energy at the start, but they are actively decreasing their chances of success (or even competition) if they choose to ignore such a stipulation. The two don't necessarily have to be at odds with one another, just separate philosophies and prioritization.

I know I said it before that it should be switched back to how the old rank system was, but knowing that's never going to happen I just play fair. That way I know the MMR won't get high and I can still enjoy my killer games.

The way MMR is never made any sense it's like 2 people at a job working all day the one gets the job done while the other sits around and does nothing.

The one that sits around is reward and moves up and the other one that works gets nothing.

Or better yet standing at the corner all day looking for handouts is more rewarding then getting a job and making a earning.

It's mind blowing

Want to win? Yes 3 people are easy to beat than 4.

Want to have fun? No, play as you like.