Scott+Otz discuss tunneling (video)
I largely agree with Scott's points here. A mechanical solution to tunneling is bound to create more problems than it solves. And tunneling does create a false feedback loop for killers who rely on it. Killer is nowhere near difficult enough to warrant hard tunneling every game, unless I happen to exist on the same magical server that Scott does.
My opinion: tunneling is a matchmaking issue at its core. It's risky in a well-made match. You stand to lose 4 gens minimum tunneling players of equal skill, especially at a high level. The problem is that this game rarely makes a balanced match. There are almost always 1 or 2 extremely weak links relative to the killer. They'll go down 3 times in the span of 1 or 2 gens. Barring tile RNG, that's a matchmaking issue, not a tunneling mechanic issue. They're not having good chases or their teammates are doing nothing, which again points to matchmaking.
He goes on to talk about overly sweaty playstyles in public matches. I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but again, I feel like it's a matchmaking issue. I retired from comp over a year ago but I would love to play against those 4 man comp squads instead of sleepwalking through usual matches. But I get rounded down to the soft cap, the comp squad is rounded down to the soft cap, and we both get relative babies in our games. This isn't to say I sweat like it's a tourney in pubs, but there's zero reason to even make some of these matches. What enjoyment is a 500 hr survivor going to have against a 4k hr comp player, and vice versa? They don't want anyone to wait for a game, and the quality of matches suffers a lot.
I don't think the sweat will ever really go away. That doesn't seem realistic with a playerbase of this scale. It can be managed a bit through matchmaking or some quasi-rank system where SR was added and also used. But a lot of people just like winning and they don't care how.
(As an aside: scrims absolutely suck to set up. A lot of times it takes 20+ minutes to work through the language barrier and get the lobby to actually load everyone in. And then the survivors immediately quit because they're shocked about 220+ ping even though you clearly said you were NA and they're RU)
Comments
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I can agree with that assessment...
I barely Tunneled when I played cause I didn't care for the game to tell me that I "got gud" then suffer through the better Survivors
Also where abouts in NA (if you don't mind answering)... cause I also live in NA and I kinda want to experience a Comp player play the game
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Tunneling is a problem of Unhookers pulling Survivors off too fast, they do this all the time, I take three steps away and they have unhooked. I have no incentive to hunt the unhooker, he has 2 health states and dead hard probably. The unhooked has 1 health state and dead hard probably. bHVR needs to increase safe unhook score event to until healed or 1min to prevent other Survivors farming each other for unhook points and causing tunneling. Let the Killers be big baddies, the problem is with your teammates.
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Not entirely true. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I've been in games where the killer hooks my teammate, gets into a chase with me relatively, spaciously, distant from the hook and the moment they get the unhook notif, they drop the chase immediately, turn right around to go tunnel.
At that point, the killer should just face camp in my opinion.
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Are you joking? i see killers come back to the hook, eat free downs from surivvors trying to protect the hardcore tunnel and he leaves them slugged for free pressure to keep tunneling on 5 gens, huge skills issues on this game today.
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Killers coming back to the hook doesn’t exist I guess.
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I disagree, there are plenty of solutions that can actually make tunneling impossible. They just need to do it.
Tunneling is effective because it removes someone from the game, so make that simply impossible. What if survivors 1st hook state was shared as a team, so even if you tunnel the same survivor, you have to hook them 4 times (to get through the teams shared hooks) then 2 more times, to get through their own states. This could be a way to do it for example. Obviously it has other implications, but the reality is that it is possible to fix it. But the fix to it is not to incentivize killers to do other things, or to disincentivize tunneling, its to make it literally impossible to do, then balance the game around that thing being impossible.
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It doesnt work. It will be always better to tunnel an injured from off hooked survivor through 4 hooks, than chasing other 3 healthy survivors.
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you enjoy matches where 3 gens pop in a single chase despite you did well? you enjoy being forced to tunnel in order to get a kill so more pressure on survivors? you enjoy the constant spam of broken stuff and meta perks every game? you enjoy playing only 2 killers in the entire roster in order to keep up the pace with the survivor's effectiviness? REALLY?
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a pity that devs gave a free BT for countering the best strategy that killer have (not to mention the DS that despite being nerfed is still good, adding another health state, paired with dead hard and you have to hit a survivor 4 times before getting a down), without mentioning that survivors use it to bodyblock instead of escaping from the killer, FORCING you to tunnel, while survivors can still do their optimal gameplay without being penalized for it... i would gladly see camping and tunneling gone for good, but if you dispose of those tactics, then you should do something also for the optimal gameplay for the survivors/exploiting their perks
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I agree with him about tunnelling, I never tunnel off hook yet I still win the vast majority of my killer matches and I don't consider myself a highly skilled killer either. Sure, some matches I get absolutely stomped by survivors and that never feels good but this is the exception not the rule. Claiming you need to tunnel is an excuse for not getting better at the game
I also believe Scott is right in that the community needs to change here as BHVR can only do so much. This is why I believe the DC penalty should be removed and replace DC'd survivors with bots (for killer it isn't going to be viable for now). So if someone insists on tunnelling someone out at 5 gens the chances are they are only ever going to play with bots as the community will not tolerate it. They will have to adjust their behaviour
Penalise those who excessively DC with random waves of temp bans at unannounced intervals to keep some level of fear of consequences and also quietly queue those with excessive DC's with others who DC excessively to help correct that behaviour with its obvious consequences.
The fact is if you tunnel someone out, you deny them the ability to earn points, to play as part of a team and to pip up (if they care) and it is a miserable experience being tunnelled out so I am 100% behind trying anything to discourage this insidious tactic
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I do agree I really think it's a matchmaking issue overall more than anything. The cap for mmr imo is set way to low and the range is set to wide. I know they don't want players waiting for matches but pairing weak opponents against strong opponents is a recipe for disaster bc it leads to this type of stuff imo. Killers feel they have to tunnel bc they sometimes or lot of times get pair up with much better survivors(swf also) and they become extremely stressed when gens start popping left and right. I know I do.
I have 900hrs in this mostly killer and I can tell when I'm against a swf or much better survivors than I. When I do get one of these matches as any killer (I play all of them) and 2 or 3 gens pop during my first chase I get extremely stressed out and tbh unmotivated to even to continue the rest of the match. As someone who doesn't like tunneling i usually just give up bc I don't want to win by tunneling someone out or camping. It's not fun to be stomped on either side. It's made worse when you add the toxicity into the mix. Can't tell you how many times I get teabags at the gates or in loops then have to see "gg baby killer" in the end game chat. Don't care what ppl say this community has a large toxic group who takes enjoyment embarrassing the other side.
That said I have tunneled ppl out of the game before but it only happens when the unhooked survivor gets in between me and the unhooker. They use their anti tunnel perks and basekit BT in a offence way that makes me tunnel them.
Also want to add you and Scott may not be on a magical server but you are by far not a normal player of DBD. You admitted yourself you are a ex comp player who has 4k+ hours in the game just like Scott or Otzs who makes a living off playing this game every day. Because how mmr works I bet a lot of your matches are against less skilled players so of course it feels really easy for you and Scott to get wins as killer. Not everyone has the time or the drive to complete with high skill players. ALOT just want to play few hours a day and relax. Anyway I do agree with you about the matchmaking part.
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It's true that there really is no way to 'fix' tunnelling with how the game currently is. It would require a complete redesign of how the hook mechanic and hook-states work, which I can't see BHVR ever doing. They may add some more anti-tunnelling perks to help punish tunnelling but even then, even with OTR, DS, BT, whatever it is, it's almost always better to eat through all that and tunnel, than it is to spread hooks, and nothing will ever change that without some massive overhaul of hooks.
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"Killer is nowhere near difficult enough to warrant hard tunneling every game"
This is a strawman. No one actually says this or thinks this so it's easy to argue against.
What people are saying is that when it's very good vs very good players you have to tunnel if you want to win. Those are very different statements. When it's bad or even average players which is most matches in dbd tunneling isn't necessary. At higher mmr you run into mostly swf groups, very rarely are they full solos, so that ups the amount of matches needing tunneling drastically as well to make up for that unbalanced efficiency.
Even when I solo queue at higher mmr the killer is rarely winning without doing any tunneling and I don't blame them, they need to. They aren't beating us going for a 12 hook game unless we are playing like trash. Hopefully one day that's not the case in high level matches, but that's not today unfortunately.
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and i think that you COMPLETELY missunderstood my message... using the basekit bt/BT/OTR to bodyblock on purpose IS EXPLOITING a game mechanic/perk since you are using it for a different purpose. i wasn't talking about dead hard in that circumstance, but since you have mentioned it then yes, i'm aganist the nature of that perk... In this game you don't have the luxury to waste much time as killer and this perk is one of the many reasons why killer will tunnel: better hitting again a unhooked survivor already injured (denying his DH since he will be already in the deep wound state) and with only 2 possible health state, or better go for a new one, without being hooked once, with 3 possible health state? logic is simple... those that you have mentioned are both 2 valid strategies currently indeed, but they aren't fun to verse, just frustrating to face and as i said previously, they should be looked at.
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A mechanical solution to tunneling is bound to create more problems than it solves.
I disagree with this for the reason brought up in the video: We had a solution, and then it was removed.
DS was an almost perfectly tailored solution to tunnelling with how focused it was on its own purpose. Once the EGC disable came in, it would've been perfect. But then it also got slapped with a 40% nerf on top of that to facilitate a 'shift in meta' from DS to OTR, and that's where everything went downhill.
Everything DS got right, OTR got wrong. DS is way harder to use offensively because the punishment for trying to use it offensively is much higher. OTR, meanwhile, does not stack with the baseline BT that survivors got, and thus does not work against killers that tunnel hard enough. The result is that the situation got worse for everyone: Killers are more likely to get bullied by aggressive use of OTR, while survivors are more likely to get tunnelled because OTR is a worse deterrent.
While a complete, 100% solution to tunnelling is pretty close to impossible, we KNOW that DS works. So just bring that back. Finetune it a bit more.
6.1. was just a disaster.
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the point of what i meant to say was that is FAIR to dispose and disincentivize camping and tunneling, but you must also find a way to balance the game with those 2 mechanics gone (and if you'll be honest you'll recognize that this game isn't balanced for that type of gameplay currently IF YOU WANT WIN, or at least if you aim to kill survivors)
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Thsnks for the summary, I can't watch right now.
I largely agree with Scott's points here. A mechanical solution to tunneling is bound to create more problems than it solves.
And I largely disagree with this, instead. Solutions can't be found if they aren't tested. Plenty of proposals have been made through the years. BHVR simply ignored the problem that they band-aided with perks, until they had to do at least something because they were going to nerf those perks that were meta for a reason. Then they ignored it again, despite compounding it through strenghtening camping via longer gens and slowdowns.
A very simple and relatively gradual option would be to make the post unhook endurance to work as MoM's, for example. It would still be on a timer and conditional on conspicous actions, BUT it won't put you in deep wound. Now, if you want to hard tunnel, you will have to contend with that and a possible (just one) subsequent instance of endurance from OTR, DH, etc. instead of circumventing the issue altogether by simply hitting inmediately after the unhook.
As it is now, post unhook is just there to keep non-tunnelers honest, while it's a mild inconvenience for determined tunnelers who know they can just hit immediately and chase down, which is better value in 90% of cases unless somehow you happen to be on a map with deadzones for miles around the hook.
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People don't tunnel because they have to, they tunnel because it's easy.
It's easy if it works and if it doesn't, they can complain about Survivors body-blocking and how OP it is.
There are some matches where, yes, you do need to tunnel someone out to win. Those are not the majority of matches and anyone who says they are is putting a lot of faith in an MMR system we know doesn't work. Players will always optimize the fun out of a game and take the easiest path to victory.
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People wanting to win is perfectly valid.
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Tunnelling is not a problem. It's a basic gameplay element to remove survivors from the game. For some reason the community has created this idea that you are BAD WRONG for not hooking survivors round-robin style.
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YOU think that i'm looking only for a single side when i stated that BOTH types of gameplay should be changed/deleted in order to have a better experience.
i want to make a couple of examples:
- as killer you just hooked someone and went for another guy, who run toward the hook and save the hooked survivor. you are still chasing that guy, but the hooked survivor will block the only passage to use in order to keep the chase with his savior, at this point you are FORCED to tunnel said survivor since you are unable to keep alive the chase with the other survivor and you have already started another chase with the unhooked survivor (at that point without the possibility to use a possible dead hard since you have a free hit).
- as survivor: you see a camping bubba, best thing you can do is doing gens and get out asap. a killer that will tunnel? bodyblock whenever you can and slam gens
Again i'm not saying that bodyblocking is an exploit: it is only when you are using perks that are supposed to help you in certain situations for a different purpose (BT was thinked for helping you to escape from the killer's grasp and incentivize the killer to go for another survivor, NOT FOR TANKING HITS unlike mettle of man who has that purpose)... if people kept do those things then in my book they CAN'T COMPLAIN about being camped/tunneled.
As i said i want a better game for everyone, but we both know that at this point this will never happen because the game mechanics aren't funny (hold m1 on gens and abusing of every possible 2nd chance/map loadout for survivors and tunneling/slugging/camping for killers)
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It feels terrible losing in this game as killer. You're being judged and BMed by 4 people if you do poorly. You play nice and lose, enjoy getting teabagged at the exit gates and told gg ez baby killer or told to unalive yourself or worse. If you're gonna get have awful things said and thought about you either way, you might as well do what gives you a better chance to win
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Tunneling is a strategy. Maybe not a good or fair one, at least for the player that is tunneled.
Dbd by design starts with the killer in a somewhat hefty disadvantage (otzdarva talked in one of his videos about that). On top of that comes the Gen rushing which might be an additional issue that provokes tunneling even more. The killer can take one player out of the equation and bind maybe even more players from doing gens (cuz they go for the unhook). I don't say it is a good thing but I can understand why. Managing 3 survivors is just easier and most humans tend to the easiest or least stressful path, even in games.
Maybe a good way to incentive anti-tuneling is to reward the killer more for injuring and/or hooking more/other players?
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I gave the first hook in 40 seconds and got -3 generators, please tell me what I did wrong and how I need to do 11 more hooks in the remaining minute
The killers simply have no choice, you either camp / tunnel or get -5 gene and tbag on the gate 3 minutes after the start of the matchwell, or you need to play only as a nurse
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You shouldn't be losing 3 gens in 40 seconds.
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You aren't understanding the flow of matches here.
I pretty much always lose at least 2 gens for my first hook but what you need to remember is that once you get that first hook you have pressure. Now someone has to come off gens to unhook so with that one hook you have now halved gen progress, let alone if you had Jolt/Pain Res etc to further slow gens on top of that.
Now you have two survivors left on gens so if you start pursuing one of them you now have only one survivor pressuring gens. If you know the location of that last survivor and get a quick down you can slug and push that last survivor off the gen so at that point you have zero on gens.
You gain pressure by hooking and interrupting gens... Don't chase where there are no gens, don't sit around hooks where there are no gens as survivors being rescued and coming for the rescue are not progressing the game and try to hook in inconvenient locations if you can. You don't NEED to camp/tunnel, you just choose to as an easy way out
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look at different streamers, etc. or play as a killer, if there are no bots against you, in the first minute you will receive -2/3 of the generator
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there is a mistake in your equation while you are chasing 1, another survivor will repair the generator + already rescued from the hook and again returns to the situation 1 runs, 3 repairs, only now there are 2 generators left
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I'm probably the biggest Killer main you'll ever meet.
You shouldn't lose 3 gens in 40 seconds.
You could lose two gens for your first chase but that's honestly normal.
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Right off the bat "Most killer sided meta we have" yeah, IF you're running Eruption + Call Of Brine + Overcharge + Nowhere To Hide. If you're not that boring, good luck.
This regression meta is so strong, that survivors are ready for this full regression meta, so if you're not running this meta then you're severely handicapped, and so killers tunnel.
As a killer who isn't so boring, I don't run this meta or camp/tunnel, and it's not a walk in the park.
I do think the most OP killers could do with nerfs, so it could open the door to those 'killer incentive' solutions. Nurse and Blight could have their power completely reset and go on cooldown in the event of a stun. This way, a good Nurse/Blight can still play well by avoiding stuns, it raises that skill ceiling even higher for a 'good' Nurse or Blight, while making average Nurses and Blights more manageable for good survivors who can secure stuns, particularly via DS.
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"I win almost every of my matches without tunneling".
Tell it to D-Tier-Killer-Players.
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Problem with tunneling comes from doing it offhook because the unhooked is extremely vulnerable, you remove camping or proxy camping and tunneling becomes a minor issue because the victim has time to heal and start the next chase on a better position, thus making it harder to down them again.
If they take care of camping/proxy camping tunneling takes care of itself.
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There's a difference in want or NEED to tunnel. Why do you think killers with thousands of hours still do it?
Do they also need to get better? Like "tournament" players, who lit do the same when the rules allows it?
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This is absolutely true, and one of the main reasons why I think the changes to BBQ & Chilli were a big contributing factor to the increase in tunnelling.
I often opt to run info perks over regression perks as killer, which enables me to effectively pressure survivors away from the hook after I've made one. This just removes the opportunity to tunnel, because I'm not by the hook when a rescue is made.
It's also why I run We'll Make It as a survivor, because rapidly healing the unhooked survivor before the killer gets back is far more effective than trying to run off to a corner before the killer latches on to them again.
Post edited by Seraphor on2 -
This is entirely subjective and is 100% dependent on *who* you are choosing to watch stream the game. Most people are naturally going to default to watching players who match their play style, and only focus on game play that they themselves use in game.
On the extreme end, some people just watch one person religiously, use their commentary as a feedback loop to reinforce their own frustrations with the game, and angrily post on Reddit and the forums that the game is either killer- or survivor- sided, depending on their personal opinion.
In the games I play, I use corrupt and/or lethal to pressure survivors immediately. Because survivors will always prioritize gens unless I give them something else to do or worry about.
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If the Killer decides you are too difficult to chase, why should he not look for a better target?
Why are you unhooking against a proxy camper? I dont get that at all.
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Why are you unhooking against a proxy camper? I dont get that at all.
Because you don't have enough time to do all the gens before the person on hook dies and the killer is free to get their second kill and confirm a tie at minimum.
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Scott has the right take on it. Tunneling is a cheesy tactic used by bad killers who are incapable of chasing good players. Tunneling killers don't know how to properly run different tiles and can't mind game well. The entire strategy of tunneling is completely reliant on there being a bad/inexperienced survivor in the match. I know this from my own experience. Killers who hard tunnel off the hook completely collapse when they actually get matched with four good survivors. Then they come on here and complain about how they got gen rushed even though they applied zero pressure to the gens over the course of the game. It's why people are so desperate to get SWFs removed/nerfed. People just want easy games where they don't actually play against four people of equal skill. They want that one bad player who makes the game easy for them.
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Unless they're all bringing tool kits with the best add-ons (and if they are I don't see why you wouldn't dodge that lobby) It takes 90 seconds for a single survivor to do a generator. It's quite simply not possible for this to happen - even if they team up yes you'll lose a gen in the first minute but then that can only be one - maybe two under optimal conditions, not three. The majority of matches I play as a survivor there is hardly ever even one gen done within the first minute.
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you have 2min use reassurance then you have 3min or distract the killer
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Reassurance is 30 seconds, not 60, and you have to give up your own time to use it. And even then you can't always use it because the killer might be defending the hook.
'Distract the killer' - If they stop camping because they go into a chase with another survivor, they're not camping.
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Who actually uses OTR, though?
I can only recall one game in recent memory where OTR was used "offensively" against me, and that's a bit of a strong word since the survivor in question must have waited 45 seconds to pop out in front of me, probably hurting his team more than he helped.
I'm not sure how much I see it in general since, as you said, hard tunnelers are unlikely to notice it.
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I was watching a popular streamer play survivor the other night, and every time they got a 3-gen kick meta killer (which sadly was often) they'd immediately set out, and succeed, in breaking the 3 gen at the beginning of the game. The killer would then start chasing finally out of necessity, but I'd say 8/10 were really bad at it. Whether it's because they've been coasting on the meta build and not getting proper chase practice in, or because having 4 regression perks means they have no perks to assist with chase, I dunno. But they had no choice but to tunnel once their primary strat was gone. It was really sad to watch and honestly I'm hoping that's not indicative of the future of this game. 3 gen or bust is not a good way to approach a game.
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I miss old BBQ. It actually gave a reason to not tunnel. And some other goal in a game aside from killing people as fast as possible.
I really don't get the attitude of "well you probably don't need to tunnel, so why are you doing it?" Like... what is with the constant refrain of "you should play in a way that makes it harder for yourself just to be nice"? Nobody's being nice to me on the other side. <_>
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want to discuss this with Zaka from Team Eternal?
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I disagree with tunneling being a matchmaking issue. Because how would you balance the matchmaking?
As long as a killer doesnt get a 4k in a match, he will try to improve to get it. And the easiest way to do that is tunneling.
So, unless you balance matchmaking around a 4k anyway, some killers will still tunnel, because matchmaking being balanced around a 2k gives the killer this room to "improve" theirs stats.
And even if you balance around a 4k, only some of the killers will stop tunneling, some will do it anyway.
Thus, i belive it is not a matchmaking issue.
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The problem is you rarely ever get equal skilled players in your matches since mmr sucks and has to low of a soft cap. Can't tell how times my matches are just completely one sided. I either get bunch of newish survivors who run around the map like chickens or a group of much higher skill survivors who sends me to a survivor sided maps(garden of pain or eeire of crows), use the best items and then loop me around so much I end up at best 2 hooks. I don't think I'm bad killer either, I have around 900hr and can preform pretty decent on all killers other than billy and trapper. Either way in my case in most of my matches I don't learn anything or get better bc I'm either over preformed or get completely out played and don't get the chance to play. If this game actually had a working mmr system that actually measured skill I don't think we would have this much of issues but since they don't want ppl waiting long times in queue we never really going to get that. Imo I wouldn't mind waiting 5+ mins in a queue if I knew most of my matches will be pretty even and fun to play. Shoot I wait 30+ min to do a dungeon in final fantasy 14 as a DPS main.
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The started reason for removing the BP bonus for BBQ was to not have BP incentives tied to perks, but I don't think anyone at all would complain with making that BP bonus for hooking unique survivors base kit.
Imo, that would be one of the few changes they could make that would be largely uncontroversial but incentivise not tunneling.
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I've literally had killers come from across the map just to attempt to tunnel me. Let's not
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I'm actually completely in love with this idea.
I was typing a reply to it, but started to become longer than OP's post and started getting completely off-topic. Do you mind if I post something talking about this in Feedback and Suggestions?
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