Give me one tiny reason not to tunnel | Tunnel discussion

"It's boring as hell" and "It's pointless on killers without chase potential"

as a fellow killer you explained it yourself

I am a survivor main but I completely agree with this statement. Tunneling a survivor out early in the match is objectively the most effective way to guarantee a win as killer. We also have to keep in mind that some killers tunnel not because they want to win, but because they just want to troll or "bully" survivors for whatever reason. At the end of the day, a killer who wants to tunnel, is going to do so regardless of any anti-tunnel mechanics the devs implement.

My main reasons:

I like low-tier killers and I find gen-perks boring, so I use fun but not terribly impactful tools. If I want efficiency, I achieve it by how I play and not by packing strong powers.

I like this approach because this way I don't have to decide my threat-level before the trial. I can just adjust it on the fly based on how experienced and efficient are my opponents. I don't tunnel to win all my matches. I do it to make trials exciting that would be one-sided otherwise.

The game needs both. Spreading hooks needs to be more viable, and tunneling and camping much less viable.

It's a nice idea, but ultimately, that's almost an entirely new game.

This.

Direct tunneling, especially at 5 or 4 gens left to do, just FEELS so bad. How could they realistically regulate an emotion like that? Without taking away more of what a killer can do? If you're only looking for efficiency then yeah tunneling is the way to go, with emotion taken completely out of it.

I will say those that only play as killer may have lost that empathy for the other role, or never had it to begin with. But those who play both sides and feel that tunnel several times may chose to look for another target sometimes, ignoring the efficient play on purpose.

In truth the only change to the game that'll matter regarding tunneling will come from players themselves. And not everyone has the same gaming heart as some do.

If you can only handle a 3v1, you are objectively not very good at the game.

I would be too embarrassed to tunnel.

It hurts...

But I have to agree to some extend. However, I think tunneling could be disincentivised via punishment and reward together.

There should be any form of positive feedback for spreading pressure.

Best incentive to not tunnel:

A new feng skin with this picture and a "pls don't tunnel me" on the back.

The only way to deal with this is aiming at the tally score

less bloodpoints

less xp

Yeah, players can tunnel and win, but at a cost of low income

thats the only way to "fix it"

So... by not touching how any of the following work: movement, gens, getting hit, healing, windows, pallets, lockers, or saving, merely allowing Survivors to keep interacting with the game... that's somehow redesigning the core game mechanics?

No. No it's not. I'm changing exactly 1 mechanic and the way it currently works is terrible for both sides.

Would this change the meta? Absolutely it would and that's literally the point. We don't want killers tunneling, so let's reduce the reward for doing it, but increase the reward for those who aren't.

For me it's about playing with your food. I do what I must to win, if that means camping and tunneling then so be it, but the moment that isn't required to win I will lay off the pressure and give chances to recover, but make no mistake this isn't about mercy it's about getting them to believe they can still win and to give it their all before that crushing defeat just seconds away from victory. In my opinion there is nothing more satisfying than this.

All that being said though in my experience hard core tunneling doesn't happen that often, and I do play survivor a lot these days. I honestly believe that most people on the forums crying about tunneling are people who just want to win and focus on a specific element of the game to blame when they lose, instead of looking at their own self. As for reasons to not tunnel, why not give them a BP bonus? All I ever read are forms of punishment but the stick loses it's value without the carrot.

Mostly true, from what I've found. I generally go out of my way not to camp or tunnel, and while I tend to get "gg"s and "ggwp"s and hits at the gate, teabagging or other BMing and various complaints still aren't at all uncommon, and the only actual "thank you"s I get are for giving hatch, which I do frequently.

As survivor, if I notice a good killer going out of their way to not camp or tunnel (i. e. they know how to most efficiently and consistently win and are good enough to do so but actively choose to play a more challenging and engaging match), I will tell them "ty for fairplay", or something along those lines.

While it can definitely be a bit eye-roll-inducing to see survivors gloat or complain about a match that you actively chose not to end prematurely by tunnelling at 5 gens, I have grown past caring about it much. I choose not to camp or tunnel because it is more fun for myself, I want to be engaged in actual, fair-and-square chaseplay and not stand around a hook or leave chases only to down someone again shortly after they have been unhooked. I do this for my own enjoyment, kills in and of themselves are inherently meaningless. Plus, insofar that I also do it for the survivors' enjoyment of the match, I know that they will have had a much more enjoyable experience than they would have had had I camped and tunnelled, so even if they may not appreciate it (be it due to not understanding that I went out of my way to play "nice" or otherwise), I will still have given them a better time. I don't need a "thank you" for that. A real hero of a killer, I know.

If you can't handle survivors teabagging and the like, and find it frustrating to see survivors gloat or complain, not understanding that you handed them a much more engaging match than you could have, of course, it is your prerogative to camp and tunnel with a vengeance. Or make a "naughty list" of sorts, and camp and tunnel whenever you meet one of those players again.

Lots to disagree with in this section. First of all, given the matchmaking in this game, it is entirely possible for any good killer player to win the vast majority of their matches without tunnelling (and camping, slugging), and pretty handedly at that. There is an endless amount of evidence for this, ranging from literal experiments in which players have set out to play killer without the use of these strategies (and without the use of a killer ability...) and still decisively winning more than 90% of their matches, to just countless streamers that rarely have anyone escape despite not regularly tunnelling hard.

While the Blight streak you are referring to still has a whole lot to do with Blight as well, ridiculous killer win streaks only go to show that matchmaking is a mess and tunnelling a severe balance issue (although not every streak is about hard-tunnelling, at all: if you actually look at the streaks you will find that it is actually fairly rare for the first 3 hook stages to be on the same survivor). Streaks like that are completely inconceivable in any even only remotely balanced competitive multiplayer game. Not even the best StarCraft players in the world (that are hundreds if not thousands of times better at SC than the best DbD players are at DbD) can post streaks like that in regular matchmaking. Hell, 70-80% winrates are already nigh unheard-of in that game, yet in DbD any even only just semi-competent killer can get them. Once you reach a certain threshold of skill and experience and game understanding on the killer side, DbD's matchmaking will consistently fail to be able to give you competitive opponents. And this is particularly true if you camp and tunnel, let alone if you also use a strong killer and loadout. And part of the reason for this is that in order for survivors to be able to compete with a killer like that, they actually all need to be comparably as skilled, experienced and knowledgable, try as hard and use as strong loadouts. Any weak link or lack of being comparably armed and ready can spell a loss. The only matches where it will regularly even get close to challenging are SWFs, because they more regularly fulfil the competitive premise set out here. I would go even further and say that the game skews fairly notably toward being killer-sided if the survivors have no voice communications and loadout coordination. It depends on the map, killer and loadouts in play of course, but in general I hold this to be true. It is painfully obviously true in public matches where you have wild mismatches in levels of skill, experience, knowledge, trying to win, loadouts and the like between random survivors of a group. Any competent killer can capitalize on these disparities and win pretty handedly pretty consistently.

Tournaments are not at all all about "who can tunnel the fastest", then we would expect the best 1v1 players to consistently win in the 4v1 setting as well, but that is far from true. It is a huge misconception in general that tournament DbD doesn't have macrogame depth, as if on the macroside everything would just be "rush gens, die edge map; tunnel survivor, camp hook". There is a world more that goes into proper strategic decision-making and though chase skills are obviously big part of it, the best killers don't win by winning their chases the fastest, the best survivors not by having the longest chases. Apart from this, there are more misconceptions, or rather misconstruements in here. First of all, killers in tournaments have severe loadout restrictions themselves. Believe me, Nurse and Blight would not need to tunnel to win against anyone, if they were allowed stuff like Compound 33, Adrenaline Vial, Alchemist Ring, Ultimate Weapon, Pain Res and DMS and Weasel, Corrupt and Deadlock. Mind you, they may still camp and tunnel out the first survivor, simply because it is often optimal and reliable, but not because it is absolutely needed. You also say they need this to have a "chance" of winning, neglecting that the best players on these killers actually consistently 4k even in tournaments. They don't have a "chance" of winning, they win most of the time. And the survivors they are going against are not just the best survivors, they are the best survivor teams. Meaning they are on voice comms with trained call-outs, coordinate their loadouts and strategies, play and practice together in highly competitive contexts all the time. This is a far cry from basically anything anyone will ever meet in public matches.

Yes, tunnelling is often optimal and one of the most consistent ways to a 4k, but not only is this not always true (particularly once anti-tunnel perks come into play), it is far from always necessary. In public matches (i. e. the matches 99% of players play 99% of the time), it is almost never necessary. Tunnelling regularly just makes the game boring for good killers because too often it is too easy to win. Will you more often have people escape than you otherwise would if you choose not to tunnel out someone? Sure, but if you are good enough you will still be winning the vast majority of your matches, escapes still being rare. Personally I even go out of my way not to camp or tunnel, and I still easily average above 2 kills. I mean, it seems awfully entitled to me for anyone to expect to have streaks of winning hundreds or let alone thousands of matches. Even regardless of the fact that most of the players are nowhere near good enough to justify such an expectation. So why not be happy with winning 80% of the time or whatever, rather than tunnelling expecting to win all the time?

To note: If you are struggling to kill people, you should absolutely try tunnelling. It will help you be more competitive and it will also teach you better how the concept of "pressure" works in this game's context, because you will often find yourself in 3v1 scenarios then and you will realize that at that point, building pressure is so easy that you don't have to tunnel to win out from there. Which can be a hint to come to the realization that if you were to become good enough to build more pressure in 4v1 scenarios, you'd also be able to win without tunnelling someone out as soon as possible.

The "as soon as possible" clarifier is also something to note: You can still get someone out of the match before hooking everyone 2 times, it just doesn't have to be before hooking anyone else. You can "tunnel" two people at the same time, alternating between them. Or you can get someone to death hook early and only fall back to getting them out of the match should you at a later point realize you are not likely to otherwise win. Or you can just chase and hook whoever you find and down but as the match progresses preferrentially seek out and go for those that already have been hooked. All of this will still make for an overall more engaging match, more regularly.

I also agree that in order to remedy the balance and game experience issue of tunnelling, rebalancing is required that both nerfs tunnelling and buffs other playstyles. Things that reward alternating chases and hooks between survivors should be rewarded. For just one example you also brought up, Grim Embrace could be reworked and buffed, to make it so it blocks generators for a longer time the less hook stages you have total before getting a hook stage on everyone (or just make it so it blocks generators for 30 seconds for every generator remaining, such that a killer is incentivized to hook everyone once as soon as possible). Barbecue could show you the aura of any survivor without hook stages and give you a token for every fresh hook, gaining Haste for every token, but losing a token whenever you hook someone for the second time. Stuff like that. Same for buffs to means of combatting tunnelling, such as Decisive Strike activating up to two times, and/or lasting 4 or 5 seconds. And yes, some of them should even be basekit. Unhook Endurance should be unhook invincibility instead, so as to not allow the killer to put the unhooked survivor into Deep Wound instantly. Various killers could do with specific basekit buffs, and global changes such as increased base generator regression rate, basekit Corrupt (or blocking all gens until a chase starts), the ability to fake kicking a pallet, a much-increased wall breaking speed, and countless other things that could improve general killer play.

Oh, and of course, if BHVR were to make the matchmaking more strict, further increasing the "soft" cap and increasing queue times a bit more to look for better matches more often, that would also already change the balance and game experience issue of tunnelling for the better, it wouldn't be sticking out as as much of a sore thumb of the game's design. They have already adjusted the matchmaking to be a bit more strict recently, hopefully they'll go further with this in the future.

Then how on earth would you fix it?

I'd suggest somehow adjusting the strength of Survivors in the 4v1 and 3v1.

You shouldn't have a big advantage in the 4v1 and you shouldn't be doomed in the 3v1. Then we can go about actually punishing tunneling.

That's essentially what my suggestion does. The survivors start off stronger with a 4v1, but a single hook essentially drops it to a 3.9v1. Two hooks drop it to 3.8v1. But then if the 3rd hook happens to the same survivor, the game doesn't abruptly drop to a 3v1... just a 3.5v1. Which is still good for the killer but shouldn't be insurmountable for the survivors.

On the flip side, if the Killer gets 8 hooks but no kills they're still rewarded and the Survivors are repairing at 3.2 total efficiency.

But along the way I've addressed tunneling because the killer can't fully boot a survivor out of the match anymore. They can still do it, they aren't punished for it, but they're not nearly as handsomely rewarded for it.

If instead of kills, it was about hooks then tunneling would matter less.

e.g. you only kill a survivor after N hooks (total, all survivors included)

But if they do that of course, killer will be even less satisfactory because getting a kill will be insanely difficult for all but the most experienced ones.