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Tunneling: Why Killers do it.
Tunneling (Which I will define as: The Killer going out of their way to hook the same survivor consecutively until they are dead) is a very common strategy for Killers, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you that it's not fun for the Survivors. I think it's best to go over the factors that encourage Killers to tunnel, despite so many anti-tunnel mechanics already being in the game. Why do Killers prefer to brute-force their way through BT, Off the Record, and Decisive Strike instead of just chasing someone else?
1) There is no inherent advantage to hooking a different Survivor. If you hook the same Survivor multiple times in a row, that brings you much closer to your actual win condition (A 3-4k), not just because you need to get kills to win, but because successfully sacrificing a Survivor cripples the rest of the team's efficiency for the rest of the match. All other factors being equal, when given the choice between a Survivor that you've already hooked once and a Survivor who hasn't been hooked, there is no incentive whatsoever to go after the Survivor who hasn't been hooked.
Solution: Give Killers a basekit incentive to spread their hooks around. For example, Scourge Hook: Gift of Pain rewards the Killer for not tunneling; if you leave the freshly-unhooked Survivor alone, their ability to heal and repair gens is reduced significantly. I think if an effect similar to Gift of Pain was basekit, you'd see less tunneling, because the Killer knows that if they leave the unhooked Survivor alone, they won't work as efficiently as the others. And if they hook everyone to apply the effect to all 4 Survivors, their efficiency will be reduced considerably even if they're all still alive.
2) The Killer doesn't know where anyone else is. Often, the Killer can't find anyone after patrolling the nearest generators to the hook, so the unhook notification is the only place they can go where they know they'll find survivors. And the freshly-unhooked one is often the most conspicuous target after they've arrived back at the hook.
Solution: More emphasis on info perks? BBQ and Chili basekit? BBQ and Chili helped with this for a while, but it also wasn't the most useful perk on Killers that can't travel across the map quickly, and BHVR evidently doesn't like having a mandatory bloodpoints perk.
3) It often takes longer to down a healthy Survivor than it does to down a freshly-unhooked one. Even if Off the Record is in play and even if the Killer can find a healthy Survivor immediately, it still takes longer on average to down the healthy survivor than it does to down the unhooked one. Especially if the whole team is running Dead Hard; DH effectively gives a healthy Survivor three possible health states, whereas an unhooked Survivor has two at the most before going down.
Solution: Nerf Dead Hard, so the meta shifts toward Sprint Burst/Lithe. Sprint Burst and Lithe are both much more effective on a Survivor that's just been unhooked; they both give you a massive amount of distance, potentially enough to lose the Killer before they even make it back to the hook.
4) If the Killer goes back to the hook, they're guaranteed to interrupt multiple Survivors. This is a big one. Experienced Killer players know that finding multiple Survivors at once is always advantageous; at the very least, it forces the others to waste time getting out of your way and/or moving to a safe area while you chase one of them. Best-case scenario, they get careless and give you free hits. And if you go back to the hook after an unhook, there will always be two survivors at least.
Solution: I can't think of one. It seems like changing this would require reworking the entire Hook system, which probably isn't feasible.
Now, I'm aware that most of my proposed solutions are Killer buffs, and I'd be happy to accept some Killer nerfs/Survivor buffs in exchange, especially solo queue buffs; I've seen the kill rates. I don't especially like tunneling; in fact, I usually enjoy matches more when I feel like I don't have to pay attention to who's been hooked at all. But I (And many other Killer players) also generally prefer to use the correct strategy to win, so I think the best solution is to design the game in such a way that tunneling is NOT the correct strategy to win.
And given how many mechanics we've introduced over the years that punish tunneling, I think it's important that we add more mechanics that push from the other direction, by rewarding the Killer for doing the opposite and spreading their hooks around.
TL;DR: Make Gift of Pain basekit.
Comments
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your last solution highlights the main issue " It seems like changing this would require reworking the entire Hook system, which probably isn't feasible." the core design goal of the killers and survivors is what makes tunneling so sadly effective. It would require a overhaul of the core gameplay loop of dbd, something that the devs have never done. I don't believe that incentives and the encouragement of random rewards will reduce tunneling in a meaningful way. This also doesn't include that killers may tunnel not because it's effective but because they want to BM the survivors.
If you want to reduce tunneling then survivors need the threat of heavy handed anti tunnel perks or core mechanics redesigned in a way that makes tunneling not as rewarding as it is. The simplest change would be just to revert DS back to 5 second, since i doubt we're gonna be getting sweeping gameplay changes anytime soon.
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Bear in mind that Killers tunneled through 5 second DS all the same. And we've only gotten more anti-tunneling perks since then.
We've spent years using the stick to try and curb tunneling. It's time to use the carrot.
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Why is there any carrot needed? By tunneling you get an easy win. If you want to win your game with no challenge at all, you will stick to that playstyle and no carrot will change that - unless the carrot makes winning even easier than tunneling.
And there is the problem. There are 2 types of tunneling killers:
- The ones who do it out of necessety (like 3 Gens done and and no deathhook) and tbh, as much i hate it being the guy who is tunneled out then it is "okay"
- The average blight/nurse throwing a McMillan offering, getting Shelter Woods and just tunneling out of pure will to take the fun out of the game for the survivors at 0/1 gen done. This type of player will ignore any carrot unless the carrot is more rewarding than tunneling and as Otz said it in a recent video: Any incentive would buff already strong (or broken) killers.
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Tunneling is only "easy" against bad survivors. The narrative falls apart once there arw actually good survivors involved.
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To prevent killers from tunneling, i can see some solutions:
- Give survivors gen repair speed bonus for each killed teammate.
- Remove perma death untill end of the game.
- All of the above.
Of course this would require balancing gen repair speed and killer powers to account for inability to remove one person from the trial.
Tho i believe this would be a good change.
Post edited by Archael on0 -
1) Making gift of pain base kit would likely result in the follwing:
Survivors would refuse to heal, basically turning every game into a match against Plague or Legion. In order for this to be a large enough incentive for the killers to not tunnel the percentage of gen speed reduction would have to be fairly substantial, otherwise it would still be more beneficial to tunnel survivors out of the game. If you give the killers the free ability to reduce survivor generator speeds by any amount, let alone a substantial amount, all that does is cause more frustration for the survivors. Then you have the obvious problem that this would simply result in a "Meta" where the correct play for survivors is to simply not heal. This would result in a higher usage rate for Resilience and Dead Hard, two perks that already see a ton of play (so not really something you'd want to do). I am not sure how For The People works with Gift of Pain but that might be the only "safe" way to counter this effect, which isn't really a good thing.
Overall this wouldn't result in less tunneling unless the numbers were substantial enough, in which case it would be way to much of a buff for the side that already has a significantly higher win rate (60% is HUGE when talking about PvP games).
2) Giving the killer base kit detection
If we are talking about base kit BBQ this isn't a great idea for a few reasons, one of the main ones being that BBQ is already one of the more commonly used perks. Giving this perk to killers for free would only result in killers swapping out this perk for other things. Do you really want a 5 perk nurse/blight/spirit in your game? I don't think so. There are already a TON of different detection perks in the game (personally I think there are too many and its almost impossible to play around all of them as a survivor but that is my own subjective opinion). There are perks that give detection on the following events: Downing a survivor, picking up a survivor, hooking a survivor, unhooking a survivor from specific hooks, healing a survivor, survivors letting go of generators, survivors completing generators, survivors opening chests, survivors going into the basement, survivors working on totems, survivors fast vaulting through windows, opening any locker, generators regressing, crows flying because they were disturbed by a survivor, being within 32 meters of a survivor at any given time (whispers). Honestly pretty much anything and everything a survivor can interact with there is a detection perk to help find them. There is no reason to give killers more detection for free with no repercussions.
3) Nerfing Dead Hard
They did that already. Thrice. Once by changing how the perk functioned (you have to be sprinting to activate it), once by changing it to an endurance effect instead of i-frames with a dash, and once by changing how the Endurance state functioned. I am not really sure how you could possibly nerf dead hard any further without removing it from the game or giving it extremely strict usage conditions that would make it utterly useless as an exhaustion perk. On the other hand I am not sure how you could buff the other exhaustion perks to make them more desirable without changing how the exhausted status effect works or greatly extending the sprint timer on the other perks (even extending it by 1 second is an additional 33% duration, which is massive). Dead Hard is also in an unfortunate place where it is simultaneously extremely strong and also needed to counter certain things.
Side note, your solution to tunneling is to Nerf one of the survivors anti-tunneling perks? That is kind of strange to me.
4) The basic game knowledge that recuing someone from the hook requires 2 survivors to be in the same place (except for deliverance) and you get a notification of where that is.
I can spit ball a few solutions to this problem really quick:
Give survivors a way to "silently" recue other players from the hook, even if this required a perk slot with a cool down to do so. This isn't the best solution as it might result in more camping than already exists due to killers not wanting to be blindsided about survivors escaping their hooks, but then again maybe not. This wouldn't remove the HUD changing from "hooked" to "injured", nor would it remove the fact that you can physically see their aura suddenly vanishing. My only concern with something like this is that it likely wouldn't see a lot of play from survivors unless it has some other additional benefit due to the lack of value that stealth perks have these days (there are too many detection perks to consistently stealth in solo queue).
incentivize the killer to go so far away from the hook that it isn't feasible to get back to the hook in time after an unhook. I am not sure exactly how you would do this. Devour Hope comes close but the range on its activate isn't long enough to prevent tunneling, or even camping with some killers (Huntress, Blight, Nurse ect.).
Buff and/or rework Borrowed Time (the perk, not base kit) in one (or more?) of the following ways:
- Have Borrowed Time apply a sort of "healing received" buff to the unhooked player. This results in giving the player who did the unhooking more incentive to take protection hits, or even go down, for the player who got unhooked knowing that they will have an easier time getting healed which is a net positive in relation to just having the unhooked player go down again.
- Revert it back to its original state where it gives both the unhooker, and the unhooked survivor endurance. With the last meta shakeup the changes to how fast killers can recover from hitting a survivor made it nearly impossible to unhook near a killer without going down yourself. The killer will hit you, wipe the blood off their weapon, and then hit you again all before you can unhook the survivor and make any distance, you can't even use dead hard in this situation because dead hard now requires you to be moving.
- Increase the timer by 30 or 40 seconds instead of just 10. 10 seconds (on top of base kit) is simply not enough value for the perk to see play in the games current state. This additional time could even just be for the haste effect and not the endurance effect.
I want to be clear that these changes are not massive buffs to the survivor side and are strictly ways to prevent tunneling. Borrowed time, on its own, is somewhat lacking. The additional 10 seconds is nice but often times isn't enough to matter on its own. These are also just ideas that I came up with off the top of my head, I am sure I could come up with better ideas given more time.
To truly understand the problem with tunneling here is what you have to do. Think about any other team based player vs player game and then try and think of a legitimate situation where completely removing someone from the enemy team doesn't give your team a distinct advantage. That is the problem with DBD. It is a PvP Team based game (killer just happens to have a team size of 1) where one side has the ability to remove teammates from the other side.
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1) Well, yes, I don't think Gift of Pain should be replicated exactly as it is, tbh. To clarify, here's what I think should be basekit:
After being unhooked for the first time, your repair and healing speeds are reduced by 16% for the rest of the trial.
Now, this probably wouldn't be enough on its own to stop tunneling entirely (In which case, number changes may be needed), but it would encourage the Killers more to just go chase someone else if the unhooked survivor has made chasing them inconvenient.
And yes, I'm aware that Killers have a high winrate. But it's worth noting that last I checked, there's a 15% difference in winrate between solos and SWFs, meaning the winrate for Killers flips to less than 45% against SWFs. So I think solo queue buffs are needed more than anything else to address the high killrates. Because I can tell you right now, against a coordinated SWF, Dead by Daylight becomes a fun-packed, family-friendly adventure where one innocent Killer gets viciously harassed by four sadistic bullies.
2) The benefit of BBQ and Chili is that it gives the Killer a reason to immediately go far away from the hook. And Nurse/Blight are a whole different conversation that I don't really wanna get into right now.
3) Well, you're right. To be honest, I think Dead Hard is a fundamentally bad design, and there's no saving it. Imagine playing a shooter where you have to wait a couple seconds before you shoot, in every single fight. In fact, Halo actually did that once with Armor Lock, and the playerbase predictably hated it.
I don't see how Dead Hard is an anti-tunneling perk. It comes into play every single chase whether you're being tunneled or not, and it doesn't even stack with Off the Record. It's one reason I think twice about switching targets, because if I go chase someone else, they'll definitely have Dead Hard to try and make me regret it.
4) Yes, not knowing when an unhook has happened would definitely encourage either proxy camping, or use of perks like Floods of Rage to know when an unhook has happened anyway. Not knowing when an unhook has happened means the Killer can't take their eyes off the hook.
Your Borrowed Time solutions all come with some pretty significant problems: Survivors can use them in ways other than the intended purpose of preventing tunneling. This is something that already happens to some extent with basekit BT and Off the Record; freshly-unhooked survivors will bodyblock the Killer going "Ooh, smack me, smack me, waste your time!". They don't use it as an insurance policy against tunneling, they just use it as a third health state. Which makes the Killer want to tunnel them more after getting a free hit on them.
Your second solution (Giving Endurance to the unhooker) is especially bad; it actively encourages tunneling. It means the Killer has to go through three health states minimum to down the unhooker (Who presumably hasn't been hooked), but only needs to go through two to down the unhooked. In fact, Borrowed Time used to work that way, and predictably, it didn't discourage tunneling at all. Trading for a hook is bad for the Survivors, but it's not tunneling.
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So bad survivors should be prevented from having fun i guess. Not everyone wants to play in super sweaty-tournament mode. As i said, from my observation there are two types of killers and the latter one does not even try to observe if survivors are good or bad. And if they are bad, why do they need to tunnel then besides to make the game miserable for the other side by choice?
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I tunnel because every time I don’t, 3 or 4 survivors t-bag at the gates.
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the survivors can fix all the generators in less than two minutes and the shift w chase takes 30 seconds hmm let's think about why the killers are camping
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Even 4man max genrush survivors with 4 BNP's and EVERYTHING made for the quickest escape possible (with best survivors in game) were not able to get below 3:34. So no. You are dead wrong. Your timing is the same thing as saying killer can hook survivor in 4s because instadown exists and hook animation and swipe animations take ~4s.
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4 survivors need less than 3 minutes to make 5 generators, in the first 90 seconds -4, and then all 4 survivors make 1 generator and this is without perks and tubloks that significantly reduce time
I saw a video where people were able to escape through the gate in 2:50
so they can
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Even in normal games, 1 hook is always -2/3 of the generator (of course, if you are not playing against people who launched the game for the first time in their life)
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Tunnelers are gonna tunnel no matter what.
killers tunneling because they’re losing is very situational and doesn’t happen as much as doing at 5 gens because they don’t care about fun, they care about winning no matter what. Giving those perks as base kit is just gonna make tunneling more efficient. You know how many killers are abusing about camping 3gens and running eruption, so giving gift of pain and bbq as base kit is not a good idea, I mean, I’ve seen killers camping and tunneling with devour hope and make your choice.
A solution is not making stuffs as base kit, a solution is actual punishing that kind of play style
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Because the current game forces them into and its the most effective strategy, as u mentioned.
Solution: Reward killers for leaving the hook and for mixed hooks.
Oh, and most important: Do not argue with "but then Nurse and Blight".
FCK this killers and nerf these two! I say this as Killer-Main, its so annoying everything good like Pop, Deadmans, Thana etc. gets butchered for low tiers because Nurse is there...
If everything needs to be considered with "how will Nurse/Blight then do", you cannot balance anything.
Thes broken killers need massive nerfs, while others need massive buffs. The goal must be all killers come more together.
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This is the most killer-sided state of the game we ever had and tunneling became a much bigger problem since DS was nerfed into oblivion. I really don't see what the "current" game forces killers into tunneling compared to the state before July 21. Tunneling is more rewarding than ever. Get 1 out, camp the second, use Deadlock and in 80-90% of the games you have an easy time. The game should not be balanced around 12k hours Super-SWF where tunneling and camping might be the only way to have a chance. But in the large majority of games there is zero reason to tunnel at 0 or 1 gen.
One idea i had was to at least grant the MoM-special endurance after unhooking but in exchange getting exhausted. By that killers get punished for tunneling if you use off the record (and to prevent massive abuse of DH afterwards). Tunneling killers will simply hit you directly after getting unhooked and depending on the map and the killer there is no "safe" loop nearby so at least they have to invest more time here as off the record can't prevent someone from tunneling if the killer decides to just swing after getting unhooked.
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Is simple, survivors are doing gens at extreme fast speed. Having 4 survivors on a 3 gen situation is bad no matter the state they are in, and with 2 gens left is almost a game lost unless they start to piling off mistakes and you have some good regression perks (i.e. Eruption + CoB). The only way to avoid this is to get out a survivor ASAP. Hence, tunneling everytime you have the chance.
And yes, the game should be balance around how "Super-SWF" play and killers counter it because they are playing the game in the most efficient and competitive way. If you balance the game for the people that "play for fun", then those who play to win would destroy the other side, and this go for survivors and killers. It's like wanting to ban dunks and triples for some teams in the NBA because there are people that can't do them.
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So, this occurs if the killer is literally AFK and perkless?
At best, you saw this once in a custom game or a baby killer's first game ever who got lost exploring RPD. That's the only way all 4 survivors can spend nearly 3 minutes working on gens with zero pressure to do anything else.
Corrupt intervention alone blocks this imaginary scenario, and that's even with the killer being literally afk.
I had a game where the killer walked into a corner and went afk on coldwind at the start, never did a single thing, and they got 200 BP at the end. Even that game, our solo q group paused gens to try and figure out ######### the killer was doing.
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