The Sun and Wind Explain : How to stop Tunneling
The Sun and Wind have a bet about who can remove a man's coat. The sun being wiser and older lets the wind go first. The wind huffs up and blows with all his might attempting to tear off the man's coat. But no matter how hard the Wind blows the man clenches his coat tighter as the cold air reaches him. Finally the Wind gives up and gives the Sun its turn.
The sun simply smiles and radiates warmth down on the chilly man. After a while the man grows warm by the sun and loosens his coat. In time he grows hot so he throws it over his shoulder and continues on his way.
Moral of the story : The sun wins the bet because he encourages an outcome that the man wants.
First let's ask: what reward does a killer get for tunneling one player out of the game?
The short answer is -25% gen reduction speed (forever).
Therefore hooking multiple different survivors needs to give a bonus that is better than -25% gen reduction speed without using a perk slot. Any bonus less than this will be inefficient compared to tunneling one person out of the game. Also fundamentally speaking one person dead is a huge advantage for the killer because it means if one person is down or on the hook that even though three people are alive it is very easy to have 25% out of 100% possible survivor actions going towards escape.
In other words Having one person dead means you get -25% to gen speeds but interrupting anyone else likely means that the gens are actually -50% or -75% progress if anyone : is hooked, downed, or injured. The more likely two players are hooked downed or injured pushes the game towards survivors having -75% progress instead of -25% progress.
The bottom line then is that the first three hooks the killer gets should give -25% generator speed as long as they are not on the same person (in which they already claimed the bonus).
When we look at good streamers and good players we see a huge problem with DBD. One person gets hooked and then two to three generators get completed. The hooked survivor is likely half way to stage two at this point. The killer then should stay and try to force that survivor to reach stage two. Then they should tunnel that player out of the game.
How do we prevent that scenario? We need to realize that punishing the killer with perks attempting to stop tunneling are not likely to work. Overall generator speeds need to go down and time for a single player to die needs to go up. The goal would be to make it so that more players are alive for more of the game and more of the game is happening while most of the generators are not completed so the killer can have some fun too. How do we do that?
1) Make Deadlock a base kit perk that lasts 30 seconds. Implement a "rollback protection" feature so that you can't 99% two generators and force a 0% generator to be locked. Make the Deadlock perk extend the base protection by 30 seconds (meaning generators get locked for 60 seconds if you also use the perk).
This will prevent the killer from feeling they must remove one player because they have traded 1/12 or 1/6th of their objective for 2/5 or 3/5 of the survivor objective.
2) Implement a -8% hook penalty upon hooking a survivor for the first time. This penalty would affect only that survivor, last the entire game and applies to: generators, healing, unhooks, totems, chests, doors, etc.
The penalty would only be available if you hook someone for the first time before eliminating another player.
3) Along with this implement the ability for survivors to "reclaim" some of the repair speed from a tunneled ally. If any survivor was not hooked before a player was killed then they can either reclaim 8% repair speed from the dead player by going to the hook where the player died and interacting with it. This action should take like ~10 seconds and the action repairs the destroyed hook.
Interacting with a dead survivor like this will give one survvior a "shimmery glow" similar to Christmas or other events to indicate that you have increased interaction speed.
4) Rework Dying light to not give any buffs to the survivor and just be a perk that says : upon hooking a survivor that was not the last survivor you hooked - every survivor gains -4% action speed to everything other than movement for the rest of the game.
5) Put me on your dev team because you don't seem to have the answers your players are looking for to keep the game exciting and fun for the next six years.
Comments
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Wow. TLDR
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Just make it so if the killer is too close to a hooked survivor, their death timer goes slower. That will make camping a much more unviable strategy.
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We think your forgetting the human variable in all this. If they want to tunnel, they gonna tunnel.
Also point 1 would make it easier to tunnel or camp as rushing those gens is the best way to escape a tunnel vision killer or camping bubba before everything gets used.
Point 2 is a much better solution, but again, people do as they will.
Point 3 we feel would just give a target to tunnel
Point 4 we like but we don't think it solves anything.
5 is a no.
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They tried that and survivors abused it so the dev's couldn't make it work.
You're missing the point. If there is a built in way that rewards chases more than tunneling then tunneling will sharply decline.
Rushing generators is what leads to tunneling in the first place; so if the deaths AND the generators all get slowed down then the game lasts longer and everyone gets to play more. Everyone gets to have a feeling they can win the game without outcome of the game swinging to one side very early.
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In response to rushing gens leading to tunneling we got a question. Which came first the chicken or egg?
Back to the point at hand, it would need to be a extremely good carrot to get the sharp decline you want. Removing a survivor removes a good chunk of things killers have to worry about. Tunneling is the quickest way to this. Your suggestions just give killers specific patterns for tunneling and could make it easier. That extra time for deadlock give either camping or tunneling alot of time making it MORE attractive instead of hooking everyone for 8 percent each.
Maybe we're wrong but our faith that humans won't take an easy path is pretty reasonable.
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Chases got buffed in 6.1. yet tunneling is on it's peak.
While we are at it make survivors need to fix 20 gens. That will give every killer enough time to exhaust all resources in the map and make looping totally pointless. Or playing survivor (and ultimatelly also killer) as well. Again killers already got buffed so that they have about 60% kill rate instead of balanced 50%. Your suggestion would make it just 90%, but at minimum it won't go under 80%. Also there's no reason to not "claim" all bonuses (hook everyone once and then tunnel them out). Additionally given current strength of regression, this suggestion would make 3-gens so safe, that even 5 hook states would not make it. Maybe if the game would become 5v1 this might maybe work. But I am not sure of even that. Also tunneling 1 survivor gives at minimum 33% regression if killer is not afk (you always chase someone), but realistically around 50% (people need to heal, do boons or destroy bones, do chests, move around the map, prepare for saves, etc).
Also if you care about first 3 gens, bring corrupt. I do that every game and it's rare that 1 gen pops by the time I down 1st person (it sure happens, but usually only after I am in chase with second person).
Also given your ideas. Super hard no to point 5,
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"Chases got buffed in 6.1. yet tunneling is on it's peak."
Only in low middle tiers where you likely play because you think this is true.
Otz became more frustrated with DBD as a killer main after the 6.0 patch. High tier play got easier for survivors due to the 10 second BT and crazy gen rush perks like Hyperfocus.
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Well let's think why. Maybe it's because people bring violet medkits every game now? Maybe most survivors didn't feel the need to bring ANY item at and before 6.0? Maybe BNP and proofthyself suddenly became something that survivors now bring to every game? Even if they did not change at all? Maybe survivors didn't genrush so much before 6.1? Maybe Otz still brings at most yellow offering where everyone else brings violet or pink stuff only now? Maybe you could try to ask Otz if patch 6.1 was survivor buff or nerf.
Also as I said before. The game is too much stress as survivor right now. So I barely play survivor. It's just today that I finished iri 1 as survivor while on killer I have it for 2 weaks already. Because survivor experience got that much worse. But you would understand if you actually cared to play both sides.
Also I am pretty sure the only reason why you are "high MMR" are 6.1 buffs and your camping+tunneling. You are the only person I have even heart of that considers 6.1 patch survivor buff
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You can look at how killers behave round to round and people say things like : why did the killer tunnel at 5 generators?
The answer is likely because of how their previous game went. Or maybe they tunnel at 5 gens because they are on Garden of Joy/Eyrie of Crows.
Playing killer is more difficult, more stressful and less fun overall. If this were not true then we would have way more people playing killer all the time.
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-You are the only person I have even heart of that considers 6.1 patch survivor buff
The perks before 6.0 were suited way more for dealing with SWF groups. Pop on average gave me 6-9 events that pushed the generators back two to three minutes. You don't get that with the current gen regression.
The 6.0 rework made solo more difficult but SWF easier (perks like eruption showcase this). Ideally the patch would have made solo play easier and swf less efficient.
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I think reducing the reward you get by tunelling is a better strategy.
Take away 1 hook state from each survivor.
Add it to a pool of 4 hook states shared by the whole team.
The 4 shared hook states will be used for hte first 4 hook stages of the match after which it starts using personal hook states.
Failed kobe will consume your personal hook state and you will be unable to kobe anymore.
Now there is no value to tunneling early on because you're only losing pressure on all the others for 0 benefit.
After your first 4 hooks you can get some benefits to tunneling someone out, but by that point the survivors have likely progressed to a point where they can be smart about it and still win
Everytime I suggest this the primary feedback is that people don't want to lose hook states because of 1 bad team mate but that's basically already happening in a much worse way. Imagine you have a bad team mate get tunneled out in the current state of the game.
They are horrible. They get hit in 6 seconds every time and are dead within the first minute of the match.
They only took 3 of your team's total hook states with them, sure, but it doesn't matter. Once they are dead, you have no hope of winning as a survivor unless you are already close to winning, which you won't be because it's only been 1 minute. You don't even have a single gen done.
Now lets look in this theoretical new system. The killer tunnels them, and they have taken 6 of your team's total hook states which took the killer twice as long. Sure they are terrible and you're still probably going to lose, but the point at which you lost the match was the point they died, and in the new system it took twice as long for you to lose the match so even though YOU have less hook states because of them, your team will be likely to perform better overall.
It is a team game after all. Look at like this. If BHVR added the ability to "donate" your hook states to another player. 99% of the time it would be the optimal play for survivors who havent been hooked to donate a state to a survivor on death hook, no matter how bad they are.
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"I think reducing the reward you get by tunelling is a better strategy."
Punishment behavior has been shown to be ineffective.
Your solution does not address the root cause of tunneling : Killers feel they need to tunnel to catch up to gen speed completion.
Your idea might work if the game had some kind of basekit lockout where if a "free hook" got used up then one gen stayed locked until that survivor were freed (only one at a time).
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False. People will camp & tunnel as long as it's best strategy to win. Even if killers would have 95% win rate, people will still camp and tunnel. Because people like to win. You are prime example, because aparently for you ~60% kill rate is still not enough.
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Punishment would be slowing down a hook or removing killer BP if they stay too close to a hook too long.
This solution changes the core game so that camping and tunneling is no longer the most efficient strategy to win. Core game changes imo, are the only way to resolve the problem.
Changing gen times do absolutely nothing to deter tunneling and camping, as we saw in 6.0. You could add 4 minutes per gen and it would reward camping hooks, and making gens any faster means killers will 'tunnel because they have no choice'.
The only solution to gen speeds, is to severely limit items. Survivor items should provide no more than 10% increased speed, regardless of add-ons. Ideally, both gen progress and regression should have a hard cap that can't be overcome even if you stack every perk for it.
But even limiting gen speeds won't change the fact that tunneling is the most efficient way to win. It always will be, until something like shared hooks is implemented too.
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Blanket win rates do not give good information.
If I play four really good players with strong medkits/toolboxes in a swf it is likely I will get 1-0 kills. Otz had this very same issue on his stream recently.
If I play four good players playing alone with no items I might get 4 kills on a fair map.
If I lose 0-4 the first game and win 4-0 the second game is that a fun/balanced experience? No. I don't think that's what we want.
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"Survivor items should provide no more than 10% increased speed, regardless of add-ons. Ideally, both gen progress and regression should have a hard cap that can't be overcome even if you stack every perk for it."
Otz made a really good video on that and I hope the devs notice.
"limiting gen speeds won't change the fact that tunneling is the most efficient way to win"
As long as the game rules stay as they are now- yes. Which is why I am suggesting a base rule change to make the killer not want to tunnel and reward them for not doing so with with a bonus EQUAL to tunneling.
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And yet you say nothing that will not combine this bonus with tunneling. There's no reason to not tunnel. The best thing you can do to deter tunneling is make it hard. There used to be 1 thing that did pretty good job at that. But unfortunatelly they nerfed it, because killer players did not like this and survivors used it offensively. As DS is now 3s instead of 5s, no killer is afraid of it which means no killer is afraid to tunnel. OTR did awful job in replacing DS so there's no reason why tunnel should not be 1st choise (that goes even if devs implemented your solution)
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This suggestion changes the game so that tunneling is no longer the most efficient way to win.
With shared hooks, if you tunnel your first survivor, that person will need to be either hooked 6 times, or camped on hook for 6 minutes before they are out of the game. That is a losing game every time. The mechanic encourages killers to play differently in order to win without telling them how to play explicitly.
Killers can still camp and tunnel as much as they want. They'll just lose the game for doing so at 5 gens. As a matter of fact, once you burn through the 4 shared hooks, it's technically easier to camp and tunnel late game... as long as you have used up all of the shared hooks already.
The tradeoff with his suggestion is that a strategy of tunneling early gains you literally nothing. You lose gen pressure (and gens) because you're only keeping one survivor busy, and you don't even get that survivor out of the game easily doing so. By the time that first person is dead, the other three are out the exit gate. Tunneling stops being an "always, all the time, winning strategy", which by definition means it's "harder" to pull off.
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That's your suggestion. I agree with that.
It would still make tunneling best strategy, but it would work very differently with different goal (find weakest link, hook him 6 times because he's easier then other survivors). From personal's POW it would be a bit sad that someone would "burn" your hook state and there's nothing for you to do about it, but tunneling would definitely get hard nerf by it.
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Reducing the reward granted by tunelling and punishment are not the same. Punishment would be things like DS and OTR.
Making hook states shared by the team is not punishing tunelling its a total redesign of a system that makes it so the reward that was previously there is no longer there (early elimination)
People tunnel because the system, as it is, encourages it. You don't need to take some roundabout way to "punish tunellers" you just need to redesign the system, so it is not rewarded to do at least early in the match (the only time its a problem)
and my system absolutely addresses that problem. Simply remove the benefit of tunelling. If there is no early elimination, there is no reason to tunnel. The only reason one might tunnel is to exploit a weak link, but that's pretty much the definition of a skill issue.
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If you don't address gen rushing but stop tunneling then the game will break. Tunneling is the only answer to the gen rushing problem.
Survivors push gens so they finish 2-3 by the end of the first hook so killers try to make that first hook cost that survivor two health states. Overall the state of efficient play is not fun for anyone.
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Okay, if it's a problem you can nerf gens again. The game should not be balanced around Early Elimination.
Remove the early elimination, see how it shakes out. If necessary, buff killers/nerf survivors. If the game is a little survivor sided for a while it will be fine. As is the kill rate currently stands at around 60% and the game is doing just fine. The kill rate could drop to 40% for a while and the game would still be fine.
Remember this game used to be incredibly survivor sided and guess what the game was fine because most people simply do not play optimally.
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Yes...killers couldn't have possibly tunneled at 5 gens just because they wanted to...there must be a reason other than they wanted to just because.
We're abit sorry for being a sarcastic [beep] but since we've personally been tunneled and camped just for our user name, we're firmly in the "they do what they want" camp. Even if their previous game went bad, the killer CHOOSES to do these things. We are aware that killer is the harder role (as for stressful and less fun, thats opinion based as we find it less stressful and more fun aside from the occasional swat squad or competent bully squad) but the killer decides how they play.
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-"Okay, if it's a problem you can nerf gens again. The game should not be balanced around Early Elimination."
Does that same line of thought extend to the killer's generators? Again : if we had base corrupt or Deadlock it would largely prevent the thought process : I am behind and need to tunnel to catch up.
Kills do not tell the whole story in terms of balance. We have been saying this for years. When do the hooks happen? When do the gens finish? What was the order of survivors getting hooked? When do the kills happen between those events?
Without those answers the # of kills in a vacuum is meaningless.
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I sincerely doubt that nerfing survivors will do anything to stop tunneling or camping.
People do not tunnel and camp because they feel like they have to they tunnel and camp but because like water people are going to follow the path of least resistance. That is the path of least resistance.
That was the entire point of nerfing ruin and pop and pain res while increasing gen times to 90 seconds, and decreasing the distance gained on hit. Making killers not need to play as brutally to win. Guess what. The best way to play is still to put on 4 slowdowns and get your first kill at 5 hooks or fewer.
Deadlock is probably the worst perk you can make basekit. That is THE go-to slowdown perk for early elimination based strategy. Camping someone out as Bubba? Put on deadlock to buy more time to get em dead before all the gens are done. It is totally passive slowdown that works even when the killer isn't doing anything at all to pressure survivors other than the one they're trying to eliminate early.
Kills not telling the whole story is the exact reason some of the hooks should be made to a team pool. It reduces the difference between completely optimal play and mr nice guy 12 hooks plays dramatically. Mr nice guy play will give you first kill at 9 hooks, optimal play gives your first kill at as low as 3.
Taking away 1 personal hook state from each survivor and making them team shared now makes the difference between mr nice guy and optimal 9-6 rather than 9-3.
By brining those 2 numbers closer together, it's much easier to balance the game in a way that accommodates both people.
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You keep thinking in the mindset that the only way to win a match is to get a 4K.
Why not shift the definition of a Win?
What about making a Mori the ultimate "reward" for a Killer, lore-wise?
Dress it up as being the ultimate goal of the match: Reach the condition you need to be able to Mori a Survivor, all else is just excess.
Make it so that Hooking Survivors actively corrupts the area, engorging The Entity on the Survivors Emotions, and after canvasing the Realm with Entity Stuff, the Killer is able to Mori Survivors (and likely initiating End-game collapse immediately, powering the gates regardless of the number of remaining generators).
The main problem here is that the only Win condition that many Killers think of is a 4K. And the game isn't being balanced around Killers getting 4Ks on average. (Nor should it).
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Patrick told us that since DBD is like Hockey - Kills are everything. They can't be bothered to reward good play behavior so winning is binary as survivor. Did you escape? If no then you lost and you deserve to lose MMR.
I rather liked DBD when you could go for chases. Jump back to 2016 before Haddonfield had been released. If people were not infinite looping you could have nice games where you chainsaw'd from gen to gen with billy. Saw within 5 feet of people and then start a chase. Depending on map/rng you could do this on infinite cheese maps too.
A lot of people hate Truetalent for some reason but he wanted the game to be about chases and hooks. As my post mentions above Patrick said nope it's kills or go home. Killers got the message and now go for the best way to get kills. The best way to do that is punish gens before friends. But do you know what a hook pool strategy would do? SWF duos or trios would leave randy on the hook while they blast out the last 3-4 gens and then leave. The hook pool thing would only work if it were a perk that survivors choose to take in the match.
"Deadlock is probably the worst perk you can make basekit"
-Deadlock prevents you from losing 3 gens in the first chase. If I lose 3 gens in the first chase then as a trade I want the survivor on the hook to lose two hook stages so that I can just follow them off the hook and kill them immediately. When the survivors get 3/5th of their objective and the killer gets 1/12 of his that is a huge problem. Deadlock prevents that better than any other perk. The game is winnable on most maps if I have 1/4 survivors dead and two generators left if I have a three/four gen.
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DBD is like Hokey.
One side is the Killerz. one side is the Survivorz.
Each side passes the puck of absolution between each other for each generator/Hook made, dictating the eventual outcome.
If the Killer Hooks enough Survivors, the Killer wins, and the outcome is that they can kill in their own realm.
If the Survivors power enough generators they can escape in a last ditch effort and subvert death.
If the Killer hooks enough survivors and the Survivors power enough generators, it's a flip of the coin for survivors for who will fall across the path of the Killer, and be Moried in the EGC.
With any analogy you can literally twist it to whatever you want. find what works for the greatest number of people while still retaining enough of an identity to maintain the product as a standalone experience different from others.
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Your post was literally empty - full of sound and fury with no purpose.
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Going for the 4K has no purpose either. It just feels the best. Make a new condition that feels better that isn't relegated behind a 4K.
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The way I see it is this:
Any change to tunneling is going to be a punishment for Killer because the only significant milestone a Killer Player has at the moment, is Killing all four Survivors.
Killing one is nothing special, since there are three more to go.
If you make it take longer to kill a Survivor, you increase the time it takes the Killer Player to gain any satisfaction from Trial progression.
You may say that your suggestions should work as an incentive for the Killer to strive for so they have more time to get the 4K, but MMR is designed around making it so that matches are balanced towards a 2-3K
Your change will inevitably just do nothing but make it take more effort to get the same reward.
Introduce a new reward for playing "by the books". One that people will gravitate towards as thinking as the new "win condition", that isn't just a 4K.
Similar in impact to when the Exit Gates are Powered, but for Killer.
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"You may say that your suggestions should work as an incentive for the Killer to strive for so they have more time to get the 4K"
Where do I say : killers deserve 4k? If I play one game and I get juiced by a 40k hour survivor team and then I smash the next team in 4 hooks - do you think that is a fun /balanced experience ? The numbers don't lie and that is a 2k average (unless the person arranging them make them lie).
It's not rewarding to lose 2 gens before your first down or when you get your first hook. That needs to change and until it does the killer mindset will be two gens lost = need two hook states from one person.
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If you didn't kill anyone with 3 hooks then the meta would change to 4 min bleedout.
You would be surprised how effective it can be. There are games where I have one person almost dead from bleedout and I dont hook them because the slugging is faster. That's the sad reality of this game.
"What about making a Mori the ultimate "reward" for a Killer, lore-wise?"
Almost all of the mori animations are stupid and lost all potency when they were effectively removed from the game. Meanwhile we still have BNPs. Imagine if you could only apply a BNP for the last 90% of a generator's progress. That would be dumb right? That is what happened to the Mori.
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Why would the Killer play around with not tunneling if it doesn't help them get a 4K?
Chases are not a reward in of themselves for everyone.
It does suck when 2 Gens pop before you get a down in the early-game. None of your suggestions address that apart from penalizing survivor actions post start-of-trial downtime. Basekit deadlock doesn't even remove gen progress, it just has Survivors twiddling their thumbs constantly.
Why not think about how you would implement some generators needing components to be found first from Chests. Fewer Gens that ca be worked at the start means there is less of an ability for Survivors to start early, especially if they spawn close together rather than being spawned all over the Trial.
People like the spectacle. It also gives a flourish to an otherwise mundane death on a Hook. It feels more like a milestone.
The Mori system has been gutted, for sure. And the Finisher Mori proposed a while back missed the mark because the best way to get it was to min-max the Killers playstyle in as many ways as possible. Rather than being something for "playing fair" with a significant BP boon.
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4 mins is a very long time to bleed someone out. That gives a lot of possibilities for other survivors to actually do all gens. I would be totally fine with that. No need for any basekit UB or any other shenanigans. I still want to enjoy my twins (yes I play twins quite a lot).
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