The Real Problem with Tunneling
I play both sides and my observations are that while tunneling is a legit strat i will admit. The problem is that tunneling is a strat with no cons. When you talk about strats in any game their needs to be pros and cons some sort of downside. Now you can say if you tunnel a good looper then you will lose which is absolutely true but most killers with any brain will find a weak looper to tunnel. Now in that scenerio which will be 80 percent of games where the killer tunnels you have only two options. Do gens and hope they stay alive long enough for real progress or take hits. Now both scenerios are win win for the killer if you do gens they get a easy out and make it a 3v1 or you take hits and you got 3 people in a chase with one on a gen and thats going to end in a win. BHVR needs to add a few cons to tunneling that even that stratagy out. What do you guys think?
Comments
-
I think the biggest problem is the absolutely massive power gap between a 4v1 and 3v1. I'd be curious to know just how much win probability flips for both sides when the game becomes a 3v1 with generators still remaining.
I think you could argue that there's not enough risk associated with tunneling right now relative to the massive power spike a killer gets when the game becomes a 3v1. I can accept the argument that player skill is the risk at higher MMR tiers, but survivors at mid or lower MMR are usually much weaker than the killer. And someone new to the game might not have all the DLC needed to induce tunneling risk to the killer (OTR/DS). The downsides to tunneling are literally paywalled at lower MMR.
Beyond that, you aren't beating many killers in a 3v1 if they're good at the game. You will not beat a good Pinhead player in a 3v1 with 2 gens remaining. Not happening. You might as well go next. A Bubba with Deadlock? Forget it. We haven't even covered the S tier killers in a 3v1.
The only thing keeping killers from hard tunneling every game is peer pressure and empathy. But there's no significant downside in terms of game mechanics.
13 -
It's not that tunneling needs cons. It's that not tunneling needs to actually reward the killer.
Having 3 survivors with 1 hook each means nothing compared to 1 survivor with 3 hooks. There's no reason for killers to spread hooks, because there's no benefit to it.
No matter what changes get made to tunneling, it is still better to make the game a 3v1 than to spread hooks out.
23 -
Tunneling has no cons? I am sorry, but if you played Killer for some time now don't tell me you ever got punished for it. How many times the rest of the team prevent you from finishing the tunneld Survivor (by many means) or you wasted like 4+ gens on killing them? (Endurance effects, body blocks, hell even DS sometimes can do something a bit).
7 -
tunneling is currently design flaw within hook-states. voluntarily, the killer has little reason to spread hooks. until spreading hooks is more rewarding. I would not expect tunneling to change to much.
0 -
I feel tunnelling has no real fix above being more aware and perks. Any fix would be to such an extreme that other aspects of the game could suffer terribly.
There are better tactics that could be used to avoid it. The simplest is to wait until you know it's safe before unhooking. People still unhook under the killer's nose and of course a killer will target the unhooked survivor because it makes sense and requires a bit of patience.
Perk-related protection like Decisive Strike, Off The Record and Borrowed Time should be used if experiencing tunnelling more frequently in trials. I'm still in favour of bringing DS back to a 5 second stun, since it doesn't activate in the endgame.
Also, if unhooked I've found bodyblocking using that temporary endurance state (again, unless used with the right perks) is very stupid. The killer will just wait it out, knock you down and send you right back to the hook. If someone wants to use that tactic, come prepared.
BHVR have done a fair bit of changing towards tunnelling, but they can only go so far in gameplay. They could make more aggressive, anti-tunnel perks. Other than buff DS, perks could be made to grant an extra hook state for a survivor if hooked within, say, a minute since being unhooked. Alternatively, create perks that reward safe unhooks, such as if unhooking a survivor and then healing, gain a gen buff increase.
0 -
I've said this before and I'm not replying to anyone directly here, but it's something you need to keep in mind when discussing changes to incentivize not tunneling:
Whatever incentive you give killers not to tunnel someone out has to be at least impactful as eliminating a survivor from the match. If it's not, it's not a strong enough incentive.
The metaphor I've used before is that if there are no repercussions for stealing $10 from you, offering someone $5 not to steal $10 from you isn't going to work. They're just going to steal the $10.
7 -
This isn't an absolute. Otherwise tunnelling would occur in EVERY game, and every killer would always tunnel, no questions. Tunnelling isn't fun for the killer, so there's already incentives to not tunnel, in that the game is more enjoyable when you don't. This isn't a transaction, it's a game.
There are already many perks that incentivise not tunnelling, such as Make Your Choice, Gift of Pain, Thanatophobia, etc. and on the right killers, these can be decent perks. So more like this, particularly if they're powerful enough to be meta, would reduce the amount of tunnelling.
Old BBQ reduced tunnelling, as evidence by the sudden surge in tunnelling after 6.1 gutted it. Many killers cite the fact that spreading out hooks and getting 4 BBQ stacks acted as a secondary objective that they didn't mind losing the 4K in order to complete.
You don't need ONE incentive that trumps tunnelling completely. You just need enough individual reasons not to tunnel. No individual incentive needs to be "at least" as beneficial as not tunnelling. At all. So ultimately your argument and metaphor amount to the equivalent of "you can't cure cancer, so why bother treating the symptoms" or "climate change has already begun, so there's no point using clean energy"
3 -
It's way too easy to tunnel in general right now, especially as killers that have strong tracking (like using Legion's Frenzy to find your tunnel target).
Once you have the 3v1, you just camp hook when you catch the second guy and the survivors simply cannot win.
The problem with tunneling is quite obviously the fact that you can force a 3v1 fairly early. I've proposed shared hook states before, so it is literally impossible to force a 3v1 until everyone is on death hook. The community hated it, probably because all the reddit killers can't win without hardcore tunneling.
2 -
Shared hooks doesn't solve tunnelling, if anything it just promotes it. It reduces the 'prize' for tunnelling, but it makes not tunnelling more costly at the same time.
If you need to score 8 hooks before the first survivor is eliminated, regardless of order, then why not tunnel out the weak link, and then eliminate the other three on their first hook?
You're ultimately also guaranteeing that every game must have the potential for 12 hooks, and thus rebalance the game around that new set of goal posts. Survivors would need to be very heavily nerfed.
For perspective, the killer equivalent of this, would be if survivors had to repair all 7 generators, or if they only had 5 generators on the map to choose from and needed to repair all of them.
3 -
yeah, that's pretty much all the exact problems with that idea. It's a flawed idea, but it's an idea.
If you want to stop tunneling, you need to make it physically impossible to do so. It's a pretty common idea in game design that if a player wants to do something, they will do it and you cannot stop them no matter how many barriers you put in their way.
The only way to actually prevent an undesirable behavior is to make it impossible. e.g., the only way to stop players from teamkilling is by removing friendly fire. Players WILL continue to teamkill even if they get a 48 hour ban every time they do it.
If we want tunneling to no longer be a part of Dead by Daylight, we as a community need to brainstorm solutions that will make it completely impossible. Since my idea is too flawed and causes too many new problems and I can't think of anything better, someone else needs to come up with something that solves the problem without completely uprooting the game (and I really don't there is a solution that satisfies that condition).
0 -
Killers need both incentive to not tunnel, as well as punishment for tunneling. It has to be a 2-way street.
0 -
No point doing it that hard way just make other more viable stragedy like 5 hooks before first kill. Stragedy which you target one or two survivors but not out right tunnel. Give killer basekit deadlock,/corrupt and gens increased to 100s. It's already often better stragedy than just hard tunneling someone out and ignoring others but it takes more skill. Survivors should get basekit ds to make tunneling less viable.
1 -
The downside to tunneling reveals itself when you go against a good looper with good teammates. The only people who have problems with tunneling are people who don't know how to waste the killers time.
0 -
There is not a method you could use to prevent tunneling that wouldn't break the game. Creating a method that would prevent a killer from attacking a survivor so that they aren't "tunneled" would upend how the game functions at a basic level and/or be used as an offensive tool by survivors, like they always do.
There's two demographics here: killers who want to tunnel because they like killing players, and killers who feel they have to tunnel to have a fair chance at winning the match. The latter group can stop tunneling if they're properly incentivized to do other things and offered methods of victory that don't require killing one survivor ASAP. But the first group will always tunnel because that's what they want to do, and as you said, they will continue doing it no matter how much you punish them for it.
Killers who want to tunnel will always exist and cannot be dissuaded, but BHVR can at least offer the other killers ways to play that don't need tunneling. It'll still be a problem sometimes, but it can be minimized.
3 -
I don't think you can truly stop a killer from tunneling if that's what they want to do. However, you could make it so that if someone is hooked back to back, that their struggle timer is doubled and skill checks are removed for the duration (something like a built in reassurance). Now the killer will have a choice; proxy camp to wait for the extend timer to elapse and lose all the gens in the process, or go for another chase. This would of course need to shut off once the last gen is powered. The aim shouldn't be to punish per say, but to de-incentivize unhealthy tactics and encourage more healthy gameplay.
0 -
Kind of. And at a low level level this does happen more frequently to killers. But a good killer is going to build around tunneling counters if they intend to tunnel. I'm not going to hard tunnel a good player if I don't have a way to deal with body blocks and whatnot. That's a bot move. But I'll run Sloppy or Forced Penance on more tunnel-prone killers to turn the tunneling counters into downsides for the survivors.
0 -
I have a skill of 5, tunneling and win against teams with skill of 6-7...then I wonder why I lose against teams with skill of 9.
Im not belong there.
Tunneling put Killers at MMR that they should not be.
0 -
It's very hard to say since the game has changed a lot since BBQ was nerfed. It is a leap to suggest that an increase in tunneling since is solely due to removal of things like BBQ stacks and has nothing to do with the way the meta shifted from everything else in 6.1.0.
Things like the DH and OTR changes combined with basekit BT makes tunneling off hook that much more impactful because not doing so means you probably will have to deal with DH and/or OTR on that survivor later. Hitting off hook disabling these perks is a very strong incentive to tunnel. (Ironic, yet again, that changes intended to help defend against tunneling only made it that much better of a strategic choice.)
Having said that, yes, certain things may incentivize some killers not to tunnel, but I would daresay the majority of those who do are not going to be swayed by minor incentives. It's the "win at all costs even if it's not fun" mindset that feeds into the epidemic of tunneling, and telling the killers in that mindset "hey, if you do this thing you still won't win, but you'll lose by a bit less than if you didn't tunnel and also didn't do this thing" isn't going to sway them.
There are already many perks that incentivise not tunnelling, such as Make Your Choice, Gift of Pain, Thanatophobia, etc. and on the right killers, these can be decent perks. So more like this, particularly if they're powerful enough to be meta, would reduce the amount of tunnelling.
Sure. They reduce tunneling by making not tunneling very close in power to tunneling. This is making my point, not disproving it.
You still have to voluntarily equip them, though. Maybe if you make those three perks basekit, it would move the needle.
Maybe.
So ultimately your argument and metaphor amount to the equivalent of "you can't cure cancer, so why bother treating the symptoms" or "climate change has already begun, so there's no point using clean energy"
You'd only draw those comparisons if you don't understand what I said.
I never said don't try. I'm saying don't expect killers who relentlessly tunnel to accept a not-as-bad-loss in exchange for a win. Maybe some will, but I think most won't. This is not an argument not to try; it's a caution to manage your expectations and to get people thinking along the right track when proposing incentives.
1 -
"It's not that tunneling needs cons. It's that not tunneling needs to actually reward the killer."
No. Tunnelling needs cons, otherwise it's just going to continue. Changing it from 'tunnelling is an over-effective strategy' to 'survivors are screwed either way' is not the solution.
Not to mention that killers don't necessarily tunnel for the win, either, but rather to ruin a specific player's game.
3 -
I think the one thing some commenters are missing from the OP is the idea that the tunneling killer will just find the weakest link. Yes, if the killer zeroes in on the survivor who is going to run him in circles, it's game over for the killer. But frequently what happens is the weakest link gets focused on and knocked out. It's the obvious strategy, just annoying.
To OP - there is one downside if the other team realizes what is happening, and that is much like camping they can stay on gens. Don't rush for an unhook because the killer has to stay on the side of the map with the tunneled target. If the tunneled target does get a moment away from the killer they should go into hide mode until a new chase is picked up.
Still, that takes a team to realize what happens which means generally limited to SWFs.
I think the bigger problem is that it would just play like a very different game.
You could play that killer has to get to a certain number of hooks and then the game ends. If there is a weak survivor the killer is focused on, just leave them on the hook until the killer moves away. Problem: the game would lose a lot of its tension.
To take your idea you could do something more complex. Let's call it an appease the entity meter. A killer has to get to 100 points before the entity begins to accept hooks and moris. The first time a survivor is hooked is worth 20 points, then 15,, then 10, then 7 etc. In the above math (which is meant as just an example) the killer could start eliminating survivors after 6 hooks if spread out. But if they just focus on a single survivor they get less and less value.
You could even use something like that as a balance hack requiring certain killers to get slightly higher or lower scores.
However I think BHVR prefers the straightforwardness of 3 hooks and out.
My suggestion for tunneling would be whichever survivor has the most hooks gets a permanent haste boost until another survivor equalizes them on hook states. Additionally, if one survivor is unhooked at two hook states and no other survivor has been hooked, they come off the hook completely healed. Neither would prevent tunneling, but make it a little harder.
-
Part of any solution though depends on how tunneling is defined. I don't consider it tunneling if the killer eliminates someone after 6 hooks (or even 5 if they've gotten everyone at least once). To address tunneling before that level requires minor changes, like haste/health/gen speed. If however you think killers should hook everyone twice before eliminations, than you are going to need more substantial game adjustments (such as killer benefits) to accomplish that.
0 -
So let's make a base kit change. Each player you hook for the first time gives every survivor a 9% debuff to healing, generators,totems, doors, chests, etc. If someone dies and then you hook someone for the first time you do not get the 9% bonus.
Also since survivors got base kit borrowed time why not give killers base kit deadlock. Add rollback protection so that if two generators finish at once then one is reverted to 99% and is blocked. Make the perk by the same name keep the generator blocked for an extra 30 seconds (60 total).
Finally make it harder for survivors to tunnel generators. Change generator placement on all maps so that more of the generator spawns allow for a possible 3 gen setup. Make all the maps smaller so that no map is larger than 9000m².
0 -
You're correct, but at the same time, if the survivor is good, they'd have wasted plenty of your time to have multiple gens done in the first chase. Then it would just be a matter of their team finishing gens or wasting time trying to protect their tunneled teammate.
While I agree that being on the receiving end, tunneling isn't fun for inexperienced players, it's not something that needs to be remedied. The game already has plenty that it equips teams to deal with it and just as killers are told to "git gud" and that they're not entitled to a 4k, the same should be applied to survivors and that they shouldn't expect to survive every round either.
0 -
Who did the 4+ gens while the rest of the team was trying to prevent you tunneling out another survivor? Because it's highly unlikely you didn't get 2 downs and 1 hook in ~6 minutes.
I don't like putting it like this because I always try not to offend anyone, but you have to be very, very bad to not be able to go through ~5/6 health states in 6 minutes. I mean, the people are literally throwing themselves to you. You don't even have to chase them.
And I know what I'm talking about precisely because one of my most frustrating games as killer was against a premade with every single stun you can imagine and a full set of flashlights trying their best to save their team mate from me. As frustrating as it was, they ended up losing because it was virtually impossible for a single survivor to go through all the gens in the time I managed to down all other survivors.
They managed to do roughly 1 gen and 3/4ths by the time I killed the "tunneled" survivor and hooked the other two.
1 -
OP is out here saying tunneling has no consequences, but in reality there are anti.tunnel.perks, may layout, tons of pallets = time to finish gens. And OP is asking for me more consequences. How about NO.
5 -
Adding cons won't do anything. Killers will keep tunneling, and trying to punish them for it will likely just make them double down on tunneling out of spite. Beating them with a stick or putting them in timeout isn't going to fix it.
You will never get rid of tunneling and camping. Just like you will never get rid of bully squads.
1 -
Yea, no. If they have to eat a DS every time they tunnel someone off hook, they're gonna stop doing that. They're going to feel like a fool if they just try to chew through anti-tunnelling measures. Saying they'll do it out of spite is like saying someone will stab themselves in the spleen to annoy another person.
We used to have better anti-tunnel, and there used to be less tunnelling because of it. These anti-tunnel things work, we already know they do, they just got removed because BHVR.
0 -
If they have to eat a DS every time they tunnel someone off hook, they're gonna stop doing that. They're going to feel like a fool if they just try to chew through anti-tunnelling measures.
Then the slugging begins. They will adapt. Imagine killers deliberately dumping survivors in corners to make it harder for their teammates to heal them. Things could get much worse than they are now.
Saying they'll do it out of spite is like saying someone will stab themselves in the spleen to annoy another person.
Have you ever heard the saying "Cut off your nose to spite your face"? People do stupid and self-destructive acts out of petty spite all the time, for centuries.
We used to have better anti-tunnel, and there used to be less tunnelling because of it. These anti-tunnel things work, we already know they do, they just got removed because BHVR.
You had one perk, which is still in the game, just weaker than it was before. Along with its nerf was a ton of other perk buffs and core game features added that are anti-tunneling, yet tunneling only got worse? Wonder why all this tunneling is happening in spite of all these anti-tunneling additions. It's weird, isn't it?
1 -
Then the slugging begins. They will adapt. Imagine killers deliberately dumping survivors in corners to make it harder for their teammates to heal them. Things could get much worse than they are now.
They're not winning either way. Tunnelling needs to not be an avenue to victory. If its as cumbersome to the killer as it is to the target, most of it will be gone.
You had one perk, which is still in the game, just weaker than it was before. Along with its nerf was a ton of other perk buffs and core game features added that are anti-tunneling, yet tunneling only got worse? Wonder why all this tunneling is happening in spite of all these anti-tunneling additions. It's weird, isn't it?
Yeah, about 50% weaker. And it was already not a good perk. It was just a safeguard. It did one thing, now it's bad at that one thing, no one brings it anymore because why would you? DS now fails as a tunnelling deterrent.
None of the other perk buffs did anything against tunnelling. We got baseline BT, which isn't good, and what was supposed to replace DS is OTR.
Except OTR is hard-countered by tunnelling due to baseline BT, and is actually better used to bodyblock a non-tunnelling killer.
So yeah, tunnelling got a major buff in 6.1 to be significantly more effective as the biggest anti-tunnel measure got effectively deleted and subsequently we got more tunnelling which no one could see coming of course.
0 -
The 'con' of tunneling is that if you mess up or misplay, its GG go next because of the lack of pressure you have
0 -
That hasn’t happened to me in like 3 years and I tunnel a lot. It’s the strongest strategy because the game is imbalanced.
0 -
Shared hook states have a couple of glaring issues. The first is that you'd basically be asking every killer to 8-hook before getting any kills. The game balance simply isn't designed around that. Assuming matchmaking is working correctly, survivors will complete the gens and leave before the killer gets their 9th hook and actually starts killing. You're moving the game to the complete opposite of tunneling which just doesn't work in practise, and would require a huge blanket buff to killers.
The other issue is that if there's an obvious weak link in the team, the killer would still be incentivised to 'tunnel' that survivor. Instead of being tunnelled for 3-hook states the bad-looper would be tunnelled for 9 hook-states until they died and now the other 3 survivors are all on death hook.
0 -
Knowing BHVR, they are gunna keeping nerfing Gen defence, promote more tunnel strats, the hard counter the tunnel strats and bring the New Age Slug meta. At which point the promised Built-In Unbreakable will be most wanted and pushed so they will release that then. The Devs know how to keep the community unhappy and give glimpses of hope to keep us interested and coming back. Instead of diversifying survivor perk builds, they are just manipulating how Killers play and using us as the springboard to meta shift the game around.
Personally I can’t wait till the Slug Meta comes around, I’ve already been practicing lol~
0 -
The problem is people kind of need to pick their poison when it comes to what killer strats they're willing to deal with because just saying you want no tunneling, no camping, and no strong regression or gen defense doesn't really work unless you want gens to be nerfed to 120 seconds or something because trying to 12 hook with no repeating hooks is just not a viable strategy unless you're nurse or blight.
0 -
Here is the crux of the problem tunnelling can essentially be broken into 3 categories. Which I would really only argue that the first category is actually bad.
1. Tunnelling because the killer wants to tunnel. Which usually starts at the start of the match. This can further be broken into 2 categories.
A. Because the killer wants to be a jerk
B. Because it makes or an easier/more manageable match.
2. Tactical Tunnelling.
This one is a concious descision and I dont think is problematic, this occurs when the gens are gettng done at a rate that is faster than the killer ia able to apply pressure. In this case the killer has to try to eliminate someone before the game gets out of hand.
Alot of factors go into where this point is for each person, it depends on the killer, the persons skill level, their build, the survivors perceived skill level, the map, gen spread, and so on.
I will give a personal example of this one. I was in a match the other night against an assumed duo and 2 others and the duo was very good, at least compared to me. 2 and a half minutes in 2 gens down most of it chasing the 2 and hadnt gotten a health state, only a few pallets. So I had to alter my playstyle I would catch and hook the 2 weaker players and proxy to try and get one of the strong loopers in a weak position.
Much of the rest of the match was 1 on the hook and the other slugged while the 2 stronger players would play cat and mouse to try for the unhook but never fully commit to put themselves in a dangerous spot this eventually lead to me against the 2 of them at 2 gens left with most of the pallets on map dealt with and finally getting 1 of them and the last one got hatch.
Now you could argue I played that scummy, to which I would counter with my add-onless no slowdown Freddy can only do so much.
3. The final type of tunnelling is the mostly incidental tunnelling.
This is where most of my personal tunnelling falls, these ones generally arent trying to tunnel, more often than not the unhook happens before they can really get far enough away to find another survivor, or they come back because the gen they went to check had no one there.
Half the time they are picking between 2 sets of scratch marks at random, and the other half they are just picking the injured person because they have 1 less health state and the unhooker just runs away assuming the killer will chase them instead of actually blocking for the person they unhooked or because the person off the hook used their BT to block for the unhooker. This also doesnt even go into when survivors deliberately make themselves harder to tell apart.
From here people fall into 1 of 3 camps
1. You dont think tunneling is an issue at all its just a valid strat. Nothing can be done here they will oppose any suggestion on principal.
2. All tunnelling is bad no matter what. Nothing can be done here either, all you get is punish punish punish, or make it impossible.
The 2 extremes are easy to identify and basically have to be ignored equally.
Then you have the people in the middle, usually would love to see the 1st type of tunneling dealt with while being on the fence or partially/completely understanding the 2nd and/or 3rd.
The issue with any basekit cons or punishments is they target all forms of tunnelling regardless of validity or intent. We also know from history looking back at the 2 most common anti tunnel perks (BT and DS) that survivors will find a way to use those effects against killers even when they are actively trying not to tunnel.
This is why there needs to be more basekit benefit to spreading hooks, you will still have the people who tunnel just to be a jerk, but if done properly, would gretly reduce intentional tunneling in all other areas, without punishing the tunneling that happens unintentionally.
1 -
Behaviour's response has always been, "But Survivors can play SWF," so the game never needs to be adjusted to favor Survivors. There is so much which could be done to eliminate Tunneling, it just never is. It is kind of pointless to discuss.
0 -
Or you're just not good.
🙄
0 -
No, I’m good
0
