An Analysis of the "Tunnel-Problem" (from a killer main)
Tunneling and (soft-) camping have always been discussed, frowned upon or even hated by survivor players. Whilst I totally get why it is not „fun“ to play against, I feel that there are several factors in the game basically pushing players in that direction. These are:
Effectiveness
- Truth is, tunneling one person out of the game (or even sometimes only getting them to 2nd hookstate to enforce caution) is without the shadow of a doubt the most effective way of controling and winning a game.
- Thats why it’s often the main goal in tournament games.
- An early kill decreases survivor efficiency exponentially.
- If survivors think tunneling or camping a person is way too fast, their team is probably doing badly at generators. If surivors lose a member to this with more than 2 gens to go, they misplayed pretty hard.
Very little real incentive to not tunnel:
- With the current meta, you would assume that tunneling after unhook is harder than downing someone else. From my experience, it is not. Sure you will need one more hit – but you will need that one also if you chase another target.
- They main reason for that is also that – unless you run a very funky build – everybody will constantly be healed super quick and there won’t be any wounded targets unless the suvivor team plays super inefficent .
- The game offers basically 0 reward for hooking different people. You neither get a buff nor anything for it whilst survivors get to operate at peak efficiency.
„Anti-Tunnel“ perks and mechanics DOMINATE lategame:
- The game has several mechanics and perks that are meant for making tunneling hard (baseline BT, Dead Hard, Off the Record etc.)
- These perks are some of the very best in the game and are used almost by every single survivor that wants to win or bully. They are great in every single game you use them.
- Here comes the catch: whilst these perks and mechanics counteract tunneling early in the game to some degree, they are simply FANTASTIC at securing escapes during the lategame. If 2-3 people go for a late save during the collapse and have these, good survivors are almost guaranteed a save and escape against most killers.
- As a result of this anti-tunnel perks punish non-tunneling killers worse than tunnelers. They make sure that if you did not get kills early, you damn sure dont’t get to secure them late.
- Ironically, this encourages early tunneling. If you do not tunnel and kill early, anti-tunnel-mechanics will hit you like a truck during the lategame.
Effectiveness against Soloqueue
Whilst even halfway decent SWF groups will 90% of the game know where the killer is, soloqueue-players will mostly not (maybe this will change to some degree with the next patch). This makes tunneling/camping a lot more effective because they will often not know if you camp or not. They will often abandon gens too early even when the killer camps – which is a straight up misplay that stops gen-progression and makes the game longer.
Survivor Psychology
Now this is mostly a survivor player fault not balance but still worth mentioning as it is an incentive for killers.
- Tunneling and (soft-)camping causes frustration and confusion. Often to a degree that it will mentally weaken survivor players and cause them to either make mistakes be reckless or even dc – all of which make the game substantially easier to win.
Killer Psychology
Now this is a killer fault not a balance issue but also worth mentioning.
- In basically 90%+ of my games that do not go well, at least some survivors will run ultra-meta builds with addons and aggressively bully and teabag every single chance they get utlizing every good spot on the map.
- This even happens when you play weaker killers, non-meta builds and also when you play totally nice.
- This can make such games uniquely frustrating experiences. Now I don’t get to frustrated quickly by games but sometimes it’s really annoying and I expect it to be like that for other killer players as well.
- This can results in a perticular killer mindsets:
- You might change your mind and go back to tunneling
- You will go in the next game guns blazing full meta and maximum efficiency (it’s what they do after all) – if they do everything they can, why should you bring a knife to a machine gun fight?
Rulebook written by survivors?
- It is kind of baffling for me when playing killer, that people expect me to kill by an unwritten rulebook in which survivors decide how I should play or not?
- In over 1000 hours of this game I have almost never seen survivors follow any rule to play nice. And I have never expected them to do so – as is the nature of competitive games. (Just one example: do you think it was „fun“ to play against 4 DS,DH,BT every single game for months when they were in their peak ?)
- Does it mean that killers should tell survivors how to play the game? Should we for example find spots that well mannered survivors are not supposed to loop because they are good and unfun for killers? Is it already bad manner to use map offerings that take you to some of t most unfair maps?
- You get where this is going: an unwritten player-rulebook will only result in hate and frustration - either the game needs to change or we need to take these rules behind the barn and shoot them.
Now as I said in the beginning, tunneling is not the most fun part oft he game. I hope managed to show why people do it - even If they do not want to be mean. In my opinion the problem here is that so many core-aspects of the game make it effective that I do not know how to change it without completely changing the game and it‘s balance. Most ideas I came across had impacts far beyong attacking tunneling that would upset any balance. And I personally think the balance is at least better than it has ever been before. Still, here are some ideas:
Suggestions:
- Perks good at counteracting tunneling could be buffed early but have to stop working during the endgame or after 4 different survivor hooks. (This would still be a substantial nerf to killers in tournament settings!)
- There should be some significant reward for not tunneling or at least for hooking 4 different survivors before one is dead - sth. like BP-bonus, ability to kill the next one, reactivating a generator, slowdown for each different person that has been hooked (this would need good testing to not get too bad for survivors)
- Do you have any other ideas?
Comments
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Any solution basically has to give people a good reason to not tunnel or camp. Considering that the absolute best strategy as Killer is to get a 3v1 ASAP, that incentive would need to be MASSIVE.
There is no incentive that will convince the majority of the playerbase. They tunnel and camp because it's easy and effective. The only thing that would get them to stop is by making it no longer the easiest nor most effective strategy, which would require you to basically fundamentally re-balance the game.
Post edited by Pulsar on2 -
Do you have any other ideas?
Some of the best anti-tunnel mechanics are in fact killer perks.
Old BBQ was one of them, as it not only took you away form the hook with it's info (so you didn't have the opportunity to tunnel) but it also encouraged hooking all survivors at least once before the end of the game. You could theoretically still tunnel and claim this, but without a 4K being a foregone conclusion, tunnelling could result in you losing a stack.
Additionally, perks like Gift of Pain, Make Your Choice, etc. also either dissuade against tunnelling or flat out don't work if you do.
More perks like this, particularly if they're strong enough to be considered meta, would result in a decrease in tunnelling. Of course they wouldn't eliminate it entirely, what if a killer doesn't want to run these perks? But some, maybe many, will, and those killers won't tunnel.
One perk format idea I have is:
- Hooking a survivor for the first time grants one token.
- Sacrificing or killing a survivor removes one token.
You then grant a powerful effect for these tokens such as:
- Each token increases your movement speed by 1% (this would be like permanent Bloodlust Tier 1 if you hook all survivors but don't kill any)
- Each token increases regression when kicking a gen by 2% (you regress a gen by 10.5% when kicking a gen if all four survivors are hooked and alive)
- When this perk has 4 tokens, you see the auras of any survivors within 8 meters. (all or nothing, hook all survivors for wall hacks until one is eliminated)
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You can't 'fix' tunnelling with how hooks and hook states work right now.
If you buff recently-unhooked survivors more, either through perks or basekit buffs, they'll just use it aggressively to bodyblock and harass the killer.
If you 'incentivise' killers to not tunnel, you'd need the incentive to be as good or better than removing someone from the game early, which it never will be, so people will just ignore the incentive. No, old BBQ did not do a great job at this because you could tunnel someone out, -then- just hook everyone else.
DS could be buffed back up to 5 seconds, since it's pretty weak at the moment, but other than that I don't think anything more can be done. 10 seconds of endurance and 10% haste is already enough to give the tunnelled survivor a chance to get to a loop. If they can't use that loop well, that's not the killer's fault.
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"you'd need the incentive to be as good or better than removing someone from the game early"
Not at all. Most killers don't want to tunnel, it's not fun gameplay. It just needs to be enough of a benefit that "not tunnelling" isn't a lost cause.
I already don't tunnel, because I tend to run things like Make Your Choice.
Either way, even if these incentives aren't massive, it will decrease the amount of tunnelling on average. There's no harm in implementing them. It doesn't need to completely remove tunnelling to be worth adding to the game.
If a survivor only gets tunnelled out 1 in every 6 games instead of 1 in every 4 games, it's an improvement.
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Teleporting survivors to different hooks on hook even basement hooks and not notifying the killer of where they are OR when they are unhooked would help immensely (including on the interface which would have a delay). In addition to hiding their grunts of pain, blood, scratch marks etc. for a short period after that. I try play nice as killer and I have to sometimes go out of my way to avoid finding a weakened survivor fresh off hook I get so many gimmes. Grunts of pain, a massive unhook sound, scratch marks if I return to that location. Please.
Obviously this can’t be done in a vacuum because certain killer perks would have to be changed as to not notify them of the unhook for a delayed period not to mention that it would significantly buff survivors which means this will never happen because it doesn’t magically fix everything in one go and leaves a few issues even if this will significantly help a long standing issue and could be good in the long run.
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If you already don't tunnel then you're not really the kind of killer any proposed changes are aimed at.
Sure, adding more incentives may help somewhat, but if a killer feels like they need to tunnel to win, they're still gonna do it, and perks like Make Your Choice already existing and not being very popular prove the incentive needs to be pretty damn strong to make much difference.
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I already run Make Your Choice so as to not tunnel, and this change would prevent me from capitalising on Make Your Choice, and thereby prevent my own anti-tunnel mechanism...
Not least, sometimes camping or tunnelling is simply the correct play, particularly at or near endgame where it's not something that ruins the game for survivors. As such, camping and tunnelling should always be a choice the killer can make. That choice just has to be sufficiently costly, and not free.
Another idea for counter tunnelling specifically, could be a chase perk that triggers after you've been unhooked. Something like "For 60s after being unhooked, your next Exhaustion status only lasts for 5 seconds." Which would give freshly tunnelled survivors the opportunity to double up on Exhaustion perk use in that chase and make it cost the killer more time.
Alternatively, you idea could be a survivor perk. This way the survivor is spending a resource to use this counter. Something like "You are unable to unhook yourself, attempting to do so will instead move you to another random hook and hide the aura of that hook from the killer for 30 seconds."
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But I don't tunnel because I'm able to utilise perks that help me to not tunnel. If I had nothing like MYC available, I'd be shooting myself in the foot in the current state of the game.
MYC is particularly niche because it only really benefits high mobility killers, or requires the use of specific info perks like Floods of Rage, and because it's not a regression perk.
Using the token perk example I posted above with the regression option, would be a very popular perk in the current state of the game.
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I mention perks that work on unhooking needing to be reevaluated and I also mentioned that because there are one or two issues with this that could be dealt with in time it won’t happen. For make your choice I’d give a delay of 10 seconds and then the survivor screams and you get aura reading on them for 3/4/5 seconds or something as well as the 60 seconds expose time. And yes, I’d want to entirely change what scourge hook floods of rage does but people hate long detailed posts. Make your choice should be changed from in some situations being better at tier 1 anyway. Unless they want to make it so you can select lower tier versions of a perk.
My hope is low for anything like this to actually happen. Still let’s try to suggest things that will actually fix this and not do more bandaid survivor perks that survivors almost never use because the situation where they are relevant doesn’t come up in most games which makes the perk feel useless so they don’t run them. Hi reassurance.
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Ironically BBQ was good for the game, cause it encouraged people to leave to the hook. But the call to destroy the meta made BBQ not required, I suggest buffing bbq and making more perks that keep the game going like bbq.
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The problem stems from base Gen regression being .25 charges per second and base Gen progression being 1.0 to 2.2 charges per second
So at base it takes 4-8 seconds to equal 1 second
Gen spawns, Totem spawns, Loop spawns... basically maps in general
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The solutions are very simple, but they will never be done. Make camping and tunneling impossible. Hooks get teleported randomly to another place and the killer gets no knowledge of where. Can even make it invisible to him. Unhooked people... Cannot be damaged and have no collision until fully healed or perform a conspicuous action. Bam. You cannot camp or tunnel anyone ever again.
Now balance the rest of the game on the fact that you expect to have all 4 survivors in the game almost the entire time.
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Make camping and tunnelling impossible.
Assuming that camping and tunnelling should be illegal tactics and aren't in fact intended to be a choice the killer can make. They should be a costly choice, but a choice nonetheless.
Unhooked people... Cannot be damaged and have no collision until fully healed or perform a conspicuous action.
Permanent invulnerability!
Even without collision, can you imagine how insane this would be? Imaging spotting an injured survivor, so you chase them as the easy target they rightfully are. You spend 60 seconds in chase, then you go to hit them, and you phase right through them. That's right, that clicky flashlight neon Feng was a dupe!
Always the same from survivor mains.
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That's not even close to what they are suggesting.
They are saying that if we remove camping and tunneling, we can balance the game around having 4 Survivors alive for the majority of the game, ie, making Killers more powerful.
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You're talking about an entirely different game then.
Maybe ideas for DBD2.
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That....is basically what I said in my comment, yes.
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It's such a tricky one.
On one hand - yeah, it sucks to get tunneled and camped out of the game. Especially with how Kafka points/emblems can be.
On the other hand - against a strong team, you're not going to win if you don't get rid of one person ASAP. And you won't know it's a strong team until you've pretty much already lost.
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Things that completely ruin one person's match should definitely be removed from the game. Other ideas: shared hook states. No one dies until there's a 9th hook. There are plenty of ways to make the game not absolutely unbearable for one person each match. And that goes for things like bully squads. How about stun resistance? Can't be stunned within 5 seconds of just ending a stun? No more chain headons. Same with blinds. There are plenty of things that negatively affect the players behind the screen that we can and should work to get rid of for the sake of everyone.
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I started to believe that BHVR wanted camping after the perk rework. Thana, a perk that relies on hitting multiple survivors got nerfed into the ground very quickly (yes I know it was over-tuned but they didn't have to destroy the perk). Ruin, a perk that encourages chasing multiple survivors off of gens got nerfed into the ground. I've started running perks like SH:GoP to give myself a reason not to camp and tunnel but survivors will still complain since I'm a twins player.
BHVR have destroyed hit and run with B:CoH and I've seen it in 32/37 of my games this week which baffles me, a lot of survivors say that they're getting tunnelled every game and all anyone does is tunnelling but B:CoH doesn't help being tunnelled. If anything it gives the killer more reason to tunnel as they're not going to want to hit another survivor if they're just going to heal up 20 seconds later.
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Camping or tunneling after 4-5 gens have been completed is not ruining a survivors game, it can be the only way for the killer to make any progress in some cases where not doing so would be throwing the game.
They need to be possible choices, but they need to cost the killer enough that doing them early in the game puts them at a disadvantage.
If camping and tunnelling were impossible, however the mechanism, you'd get cases where survivors are under no threat once 4-5 gens are completed. They won't even fear getting hooked, because they know they'll be rescued because camping is forbidden, and they know they'll escape because tunneling is forbidden. It'll be BT bodyblocking and old DS turned up to 11. Survivors not on death hook will be able to throw themselves at the killer in the endgame completely safe, as not even getting hooked will lose them the game.
"Just disable the anti-camping/tunneling mechanics at endgame"?
Then survivors just 99 gates or 99 the last gen.
Shared hook states are suggested on a weekly basis and swiftly shot down as the terrible idea they are.
They won't discourage tunneling. If anything they'll promote it. If you need to make 8 hooks before you can eliminate anyone, why wouldn't you target the weak link to ensure you get those 8 hooks as quick as possible?
Now you're not being tunneled for 3 hooks, you're being tunneled for 8 hooks.
Now that potato survivor getting themselves downed all the time is consuming your hook states so when you are eventually caught, you die instantly on your first hook.
Post edited by Seraphor on1 -
This.
The core way the game works encourages it. Against a competent survivor group, most killers will struggle unless they remove someone.
DbD is in a weird state where 4 survivors is potentially too much for a killer to handle, but 3 is too easy.
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There is no tunnel problem.
I see a problem and I tunnel it.
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I could physically feel you spit with that last sentence.
That one's a classic.
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Are you implying I'm a killer main?
People who only play one role post biased nonsense. You need to play both roles to understand how the game works guys.
Saying things like "camping should be impossible" is a blatant confession to never playing killer in any real capacity.
Even as someone who doesn't camp and tunnel out of principle (because I play survivor and know how it feels) I still recognise that it is a necessary mechanic under certain circumstances, which even I will use occasionally.
- All gens done, 3 survivors healed out of sight and one is on the hook. I don't have a choice but to camp.
- Unhooked survivor bodyblocks with BT/OTR and forces me to hit them. They forced me to tunnel them and need to learn that these anti-tunnel measures are there to protect you, not to be used as weapons against the killer.
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I think something like basekit BBQ or No Way Out, could help. And unhooked survivors should lose all collision with the killer, so no body blocking the killer when they're literally trying to go for someone else.
But with the current, and heck even the previous meta, tunneling can be a logical strat when needed, and camping during the end-game. As it is now, survivors have so many healthstates, you have to hit a survivor 3 times (with most running DH) to down them, then you'll get 1 hook. And with most survivors nowadays running PTS combined with toolboxes with BNPs, you'll easily lose 2 gens at that point.
And that's disregarding other second-chance perks, endless and fast healing with CoH, bodyblocks, hook-sabo's, and so on.
That being said, both of those strats shouldn't be the to-go at 5 gens, but the killer perks aren't the only perks that need some looking into!
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I wouldn't ever do such a thing.
Just, y'know. The aggressive terminology and the way you went off about it activates the almonds.
Dude didn't even say that camping should just be straight impossible, period, no negotiations. He said it should be balanced around if it was. That's actually the second or third time you ignored that part.
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"Make camping and tunnelling impossible."
Yes they did.
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Correction, that's the fourth time you ignored it.
That's ambitious.
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I misunderstood. I thought you meant they didn't say make camping and tunnelling impossible. There's also no need for the snark grandpa.
But the fact is, you still can't do that. There is no way to "just balance it" after you make a fundamental mechanic impossible. So many suggestions are just "fix this and then just balance the repercussions" without any thought about what it would take to balance it.
As I detailed here, making camping and tunnelling impossible means the killer loses at 1 gen, if there are any survivors not on death hook, no questions.
The only 'balances' I could possible see that would make this feasible would be something like:
- Camping is impossible, but whoever makes a hook rescue gets automatically and immediately hooked themselves.
Or:
- Tunnelling is impossible, but an unhooked survivor cannot move or carry out any action until another survivor has been downed.
Both of which are equally and obviously problematic in their own right. Otherwise, it's just free time or opportunities the survivors have while the killers hands are tied and they're in no danger.
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There's no "need" for much of this, y'know. Just a whole lot of wants.
That's kinda what the forum is for. Spitballing and wild ideas and discussions and "golly goodness wouldn't it be nice if they did this?"
'Cause at the end of the day, none of this is gonna happen. Actually big cool changes are scary, so any big changes will be middling, and they'll be comparable in speed to dead, frozen snails. Changes to things that couldve done overnight have taken actual years to do. And a thousand more sensible tiny number changes will be ignored.
They even outright said "it'll never be done". No point in writing out a full-scale thesis paper proofing the concept, aside from fun. Just "damn wouldn't it be a wacky pipe dream if this game was good".
So, yeah, at THAT point, up-turning the nose and throwing out the 'main' feels a lil bitty bit goofy.
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Survivors would counter this by not unhooking the first survivor hooked. Making the killer perk useless. Also completely unfair for that player who had the misfortune if being found / downed first. Weren't we all trying to increase solo q survivor chances of escaping?
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Survivors would try to counter one killer perk (that they can't possibly know is in play yet) by throwing the game?
This is like trying to counter Devour Hope and Make Your Choice by letting everyone die on hook...
Even once it activates, survivors wouldn't necessarily know it's in play, and if they did, how would they communicate that to each other in solo q? Someone would go for the save. And if like you say, they don't, then the game's lost anyway, killer gets an easy tunnel.
Post edited by Seraphor on0 -
Old BBQ wasn't effective at anti tunneling, the killer still got the BP bonus from the 4k wether they killed 1 person before hooking the others. In addition, what killer actually cares about BP... you can score BP easy as killer even if you don't kill anyone.
You literally can't incentivise players to play a certain way, in DBD especially as with most other games, they just take what is the easier route even if its not fun for other people. If you want to go into the psychology of it, killer is a more selfish role, there's no altruism, there's no team, and the people who tend to play it (obviously not all) I find aren't going to care if behaviour gives them an incentive to play a certain way. Don't get me wrong toxicity and not caring exists on both sides, but I find it far more common in killers.
The only way this game would ever be fixed and made better was if the devs redesigned the way hooks and everything worked so camping and tunneling literally wasn't an option and that will never happen, do I'd suggest giving up on any idea of camping or tunneling being fixed or addressed in any meaningful way. At some point they may bring some band aid perk that 'helps' but reality is nothing will work and I'm not sure they really want it to anyway if you look at the lack of attempts at trying to counter awful playstyles that result in people dropping the game altogether. - in my own group of friends literally 2 of us remain, 4 or 5 have quit for almost a year now (they all had 2k + hours) because they all got sick and tired of constantly being camped, tunneled or in a game where someone else was.
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