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A solution to camping and tunneling: Alternative Hook States
Original idea from @Reinami
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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I fell in love with this idea the moment I saw it, because it solves a massive amount of problems in one go (while unfortunately also creating some new ones). Here's a parsed-out version that is a little more clear:
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Hook states as survivor lives
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The survivors no longer have three hook states before they die, rather the team has 8 lives before players die when they go on the hook (meaning it will always take 12 hooks to kill all four survivors). This would mean that tunneling or camping one player out of the game would simply take too long for it to be a viable strategy.
So survivors would share a life pool of 8 lives and once it's out, people die when they are hooked.
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What are the real implications of this?
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Firstly, players are no longer subject to early elimination. This means every game of Dead by Daylight will be a full length match. Early 3v1s will be a thing of the past, barring DC's.
4%'ing off hook, or Kobe'ing, would need to be removed in tandem with this system going live to prevent griefing on the part of survivors burning through their team's lives.
Perks related to being on the hook or getting off the hook like Deliverance, Comraderie, Second Wind, Resurgence, Breakdown, Kindred, ect, would become stronger since you can be hooked more than three times.
Killer strategies related to camping and tunneling become less effective since the benefit from these strategies is removing an individual survivor from the game early. Strategies revolving around downing and hooking survivors quickly will be far more beneficial.
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Disconnects
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A simple solution to DC's is that a player selfishly disconnecting doesn't remove lives from the life pool, giving the remaining survivors a fighting chance by having more time than they would without this system.
This means that in the event of a DC, instead of four survivors with 8 lives, it is now three survivors with 8 lives. This is still more difficult than a normal match, but it is more possible to win than it would be if each survivor had only three hook states to work with.
There may be events of "tactical disconnects," but the situations where disconnecting to leave extra lives in the pool is beneficial are very small. If there are lives to be saved, you will benefit your team more by staying in the match. Otherwise, if you are DC'ing with zero lives in the pool, there is no real benefit since you will die either way.
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Camping
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You might be thinking, "Couldn't the killer just camp someone to death anyway?" The answer is, "Technically yes, but it will be a horrible idea and they probably wouldn't do it anymore."
To remedy camping in this new system, if there are still available lives in the pool when a survivor advances a hook state, either due to negligent teammates or a Bubba using the pinnacle of tactical genius, they take a life from the pool and reset the timer of their current hook state.
So instead of going second state after one minute, you take a life and reset your timer.
This would mean camping someone out of the game right at the start would take a whopping NINE minutes. More than enough time for the other survivors to finish the gens, open the gates, and leave.
Boring for the guy getting camped since he's just chilling and doing nothing for a long time, but at least the killer gets mostly nothing out of it instead of a practically free win.
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Tunneling
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For tunneling, the only scary part is that a killer could potentially just chase the worst survivor and hook them 8 times... but that also means that the other 3 survivors have very little pressure on them and can safely do gens for 8 full chases.
Since it would take so long to get tunneled out of the game, the issue of "early 3v1" is gone.
However, a new problem arises:
It's already frustrating to get chased for three hook states back to back, but how frustrating would it be to get chases EIGHT hook states back to back? This would be an extreme fringe case, but still a potential situation either way.
I personally don't think it would be a major issue, since there are so many strong anti-tunnel tools available to survivor and they would be able to use them up to 8 times in this system.
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How will hook states work now?
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For the first 4 lives, survivors are on first stage when they get thrown on hook, even if they have been on hook once already. They can still Kobe if they want to throw the game, but I personally think 4%'ing should be removed in tandem with the addition of the life system to avoid the immense griefing potential.
For lives 5-8, survivors are on second stage once they are put on the hook, complete with skill checks and associated perks.
After the 8th life has been used up, survivors die when they are hooked because there are no more lives in the life pool.
For clarification, the 8th survivor hooked does not die and can be unhooked, but the 9th survivor hooked will instantly die on hook.
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Major Benefits
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Camping and tunneling will become very poor strategies, so players will use them less.
Playing killer will become much more chase-centric, since they need to win many chases quickly to start killing survivors.
Survivor gameplay will be less reliant on having high teamwork, since there are less scenarios that require high levels of coordination and communication (less unhooking vs a face camper, less bodyblocking vs a tunneling killer).
Survivors no longer have to worry about getting removed from a match early on, and instead will always be able to play a full match.
Chase-oriented survivors are no longer punished for playing the game how they want, and can instead take many chases back to back without losing the game for their team.
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Potential Major Issues, and Ramblings
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Survivors may feel like it is unfair that they lose lives because their teammates are performing poorly. This change means lone wolf players will feel as if they are forced into playing into the game's team mechanics, which may be unpleasant for them.
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Matches will generally take longer, and killer will generally feel more difficult. Since this is a direct nerf to some of the strongest strategies available to a killer, playing killer will become harder with this system in place.
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Weaker killers will feel less viable since they can no longer quickly remove a survivor from the game. However, strong chasing killers will feel more or less the same.
This is more a problem with the fact that weak killers are TOO weak, and strong killers are TOO strong, than with camping and tunneling. Strong killers can still use these tactics, but they don't need to and never needed to. Weaker killers rely on them to get any kind of edge over the survivors.
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Killers will rely more on controlling generators and 3 gens since their options for playstyle have been changed from "camp, tunnel, control gens, go for short chases" to "control gens, go for short chases."
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Camping and tunneling are no longer effective strategies for winning, but are still just as unpleasant to play against. The rate of seeing players camp or tunnel will go way down, but it will generally feel much worse when it does actually happen simply because of how long and drawn out using these strategies have become.
This begs the question, "Is camping and tunneling a problem not because it's easy win with them, but because it's unfun to play against? Would making camping and tunneling into guaranteed losses change anything at all in terms of how it feels to be camped or tunneled?"
These are difficult design questions, and I think they can really only be answered in testing.
Would I be less annoyed at being camped or tunneled if I knew it meant the killer was throwing the game? Yes, probably.
Would I still be annoyed? Yes, probably.
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End
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Questions? Comments? Concerns?
I'm interested to see what people think of this, and what holes can be poked in it. As well as the general opinions of the community.
Comments
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I do think this is a good idea and it would negate camping completely and tunneling mostly. Now what I am about to say probably has major problems in relation to time/efficiency. What if since we are going with lives, there is no unhooking and you just die and respawn at least half the map away from the killer after a set amount of time. Then there is literally no chance for tunneling, just so some super weak chaser doesn't throw lives away every time they get off the hook. It would be hard to implement because no one has to go for saves any more and depending on the time the survivor is on hook before being able to control their character again the game would slow down either in the killer or survivors favor.
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An interesting concept I wouldn't mind testing. Although, doesn't this just give more time to Survivors to complete their objective in general - that is even when the Killer is not camping/tunnelling? I mean, currently when you see a team mate got hooked, someone needs to stop doing whatever they're doing and go help because if you don't, the person will advance to the 2nd stage and if left on the hook even longer, they die. Each scenario puts the team into a disadvantage. So the team is time-pressured to attempt to unhook the person.
If you know the person can stay on the hook and burn through 3-5 "lives" in exchange for relatively safely doing, an probably finishing severeal, gens in the mean time, isn't that going to be the main strategy? Even if you're repairing a gen and see one person getting chased (Killer occupied, time to safely do gens), then hooked (Killer still occupied), you keep repairing because there's no time pressure, the Killer doesn't camp and starts looking for another Survivor (Killer occupied), finds someone and starts chasing another player (Killer still occupied, even more time on the gen), downs them, puts them on a hook...I immagine by this time you can have easily 4 gens done and still "lives" left, so now you can go unhook them.
It would require some more changes to actually push survivors to go unhook, rather than sitting on the gens all the time.
As I said - interesting concept but I think it would require so many follow-up changes that the Devs won't even consider it.
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This is unbelievably busted and abusable. No. The solution to tunneling/camping/etc isn’t making them harder. It’s making it more rewarding to not do so.
There’s two types of players. The first type will tunnel or camp or whatever no matter what just cause they can. You will never ever stop this type from doing so. The second type does so because it’s a situationally efficient strategy. You can change this by making other strategies more rewarding.
For example, giving mechanical buffs to aid in going after other survivors or reward going after other survivors instead of the unhooked one, rewarding leaving and staying out of the hook proximity unless you’re in chase, etc. Then naturally, the strategies to tunnel/camp/etc will decrease, because not doing so is more rewarding.
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Sorry i havnt read everything from this post. I want to stop You on the idea of shared hook states.
If hook states are shared between survivors, then it does not matter who is hooked, whole team loses their states. And because resqued survivor is easiest target - killer know where they are, its easier to down them - this change will make tunneling even more rewarding -> tunneling one person will not only takes one surv as fast as possible but ALSO will eat all hook stages from all other survivors.
this is my suggestion
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/360072/what-about-change-in-sacrifices
I believe its better at prevent tunneling.
Post edited by Archael on0 -
That's pretty much exactly why this would never actually happen. It's an insanely massive buff to survivor, and most of the killer cast's chase potential is simply not high enough to have 12 hooks be a victory condition. You would see a lot of 2 man out and 3 man out even if the killer practically dominated. Players would feel like they are losing despite the fact that they completed 85% of their objective. So you would need to buff killers or make gens longer for the killer population to be satiated.
The goal was more or less "let's create a hypothetical scenario where removing players from the match early is impossible" and then work from there.
Not being able to delete players from the game is a step in the right direction, and there's no workable solution to that problem without either shared lives or teleporting to a distant hook in certain situations (neither of which seem liked by the community... probably because it makes killer require skill in chase).
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The benefit of deleting a player from the game just by running back to hook after a short time and standing still is obscenely strong. This is why solving camping and tunneling is so hard, and is a completely fascinating design problem. You need to make the boring plays weak, and the fun plays strong. But what could possibly be stronger than being able to just remove 25% of the enemy team in one move?
The benefit of NOT tunneling/camping needs to be equally as strong or significantly stronger than camping and tunneling, so that it's a viable option. This means you would need to nerf camping and tunneling into being sub-optimal (which is what the survivor lives system does), and make getting a variety of hooks on multiple survivors highly beneficial.
Something like getting a mini bloodlust at the start of your next chase after hooking two different survivors back to back, or some other boost to chase. So you can chain hooks very quickly. Maybe make a different kind of basekit BBQ: after hooking a survivor, the auras of all survivors that have never been hooked are revealed to you for a brief time. This gives the killer a new target if they just so happen to only be camping because they can't start a new chase (one of the main reasons why I personally camp people to second stage or to death).
It's a difficult problem to solve without breaking a lot of different things at once, so just spitballing ideas until we find something that works is a viable strategy.
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You would have to down and hook the weak link 9 times before someone dies for the first time.
If they have even one anti-tunnel perk like Off the Record (which the weak link will generally have, because they know who they are), that is going to take a long time and would pretty much make the main benefit of removing someone early via tunneling/camping simply a non-thing. There is no way to get 9 hooks early without winning 9 chases, and there is obviously no early 10 minute camp.
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Yes, i agree, but there is also one factor that you ignored even that you have quoted it:
Its easier to find unhooked survivor, and they are weaker than healthy ones. Even with anti tunnel perk its easier to find, and thus chase the unhooked survivor rather than find and chase a new one. With hook stages being general, this means that tunneling is now not only removing one player (takes longer time, but still removes 25% of survs power) AND remoe hook stages from other survivors without needing to find and chase them.
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Completely terrible idea and the reason why is..why do survivors need to be babysat even more?
Some games survivors will be punished for bad unhooks and taken out of the early. Some won't. There isn't any problem being solved, but making survivors even more invincible.
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I feel like the whole "3v1" argumentation is disengenious. Everyone's treating a removed survivor like the game started as a 3v1, which indeed would be inbalanced. But before getting removed from the game, they already did some stuff or had the possibility to do so. Cant be a 3v1 if the 4th had influenced the trial already, even if its just wasting the killers time by getting chased and killed.
The argument of "too weak and too strong killers" is the same too, because on the survivor side we only get "too weak", and "just right as all survivors should be", atleast according to our community.
Now, I probably should add something less disliked by the survivor community to my reply: This kinda Idea of a Live-Pool was atleast 1 nail in the coffin of Deathgarden. well, the Scavengers instantly respawned instead of crawling around for the whole duration of "X lives", or dangling on a hook like in this proposal. Still, this idea killed the scavenger-scavenger interaction of rescuing from the "hook", making them only focus on doing collecting blood. Translated into DBD, this will make it so survivors will only rush gens till chased themselves even more.
While I won't say the devs will never consider this, Deathgardens development should be taken as an example why this "might" not work.
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You are not in your right mind
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