http://dbd.game/killswitch
Addressing the Issue of Tunneling in Gameplay: A Constructive Perspective and suggestions
As someone who primarily plays Killer, studies game development, and has a strong interest in game theory, I’d like to explore the current prevalence of tunneling in gameplay. My goal here is to break down why it happens, how the game’s structure encourages it, and propose a potential solution that feels fair and rewarding for all players.
Understanding the Motivation Behind Tunneling
First, let’s consider: why does tunneling happen so frequently? It’s a more complex issue than it seems at first glance. Survivor and Killer roles offer vastly different experiences. Survivors typically work together, often playing in groups, with a gameplay loop centered around cooperation and mutual support. Killers, on the other hand, play solo against a coordinated team. This difference in dynamic creates distinct motivations.
The Killer role often appeals to players who are competitive or goal-oriented, especially since they're playing alone. In that mindset, focusing on effectiveness and results is natural—especially when playing without the social reinforcement that comes from a team.
Tunneling—focusing on a recently unhooked survivor—is effective in part because it disrupts the survivor team's momentum and removes a player from the match sooner, reducing pressure on the Killer. From a purely strategic standpoint, it's an efficient path to a win.
The Current Anti-Tunnel Tools: A Double-Edged Sword
The game already includes anti-tunnel mechanics such as endurance and speed boosts for unhooked survivors. While helpful, these systems can sometimes have unintended consequences.
For example, teammates may use these effects to take hits intentionally, supporting their team as they’re naturally inclined to do. This can result in Killers unintentionally triggering anti-tunnel mechanics even when they were attempting to switch targets. That experience can feel frustrating for the Killer, especially when they're penalized for attempting to play fairly.
Additionally, despite added protection, the recently unhooked survivor is still the most vulnerable. Chasing and hooking them can remain the most efficient choice for Killers looking to maintain pressure, particularly against strong survivor teams. Efficiency, in many cases, still favors tunneling.
A New Approach: Rewarding Diverse Targeting
Rather than penalizing tunneling directly—which could feel punishing or restrictive—we can look at how to positively reinforce alternative playstyles that align with the game’s intended balance.
Imagine a basekit mechanic that encourages spreading hooks among all survivors. For instance, each unique survivor hooked could grant a token (similar to how Pain Resonance or Grim Embrace operates). These tokens could trigger beneficial effects, such as temporary generator blocking—giving Killers a powerful incentive to hook each survivor once before repeating.
A proposed mechanic might look like this:
- When the Killer hooks a survivor they haven’t previously hooked in the current cycle, they gain a temporary effect: the most progressed generator becomes blocked for 30 seconds.
- This effect could chain—if the Killer quickly finds and hooks another unique survivor, the generator block could extend, possibly leading to a short, powerful game slowdown without affecting generator regression.
- After hooking all four survivors once, a larger block could activate, stalling all generators briefly and rewarding Killers who focus on rotating targets.
To prevent this system from being abused or creating stalemates:
- If the Killer hooks a survivor they already hooked in the current cycle, any active block is removed.
- Survivors with basekit Endurance could temporarily be non-collidable to prevent body-blocking, which sometimes unintentionally punishes non-tunneling Killers.
Perks and Anti-Tunnel Tools: Balancing Power and Fairness
Perks like Off the Record and Decisive Strike serve important roles, but it may be worth rebalancing them so they deactivate once another survivor is hooked. This change would reward Killers who are spreading hooks effectively and playing fairly, without creating scenarios where they’re unfairly punished by multiple survivor defenses stacking up.
Conclusion
The goal of these ideas isn’t to make the Killer role easier or harder—but more rewarding for strategic, fair play. A system that encourages variety in targets through clear, gameplay-impacting rewards could lead to a healthier experience for everyone. It’s about shifting the balance away from needing to tunnel to be effective, and toward a model where diverse, dynamic play is the most successful and enjoyable path.
Comments
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How come u re uploaded it? Also love these changes 😘👍
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I think there are a couple things missing from this rundown, and I think they'd affect the conclusion pretty heavily so I think they're worth bringing up. I can respect the intent here for sure, but there are three things I'd like to mention. I'll list them bullet-point style, then I'll go more in depth on each one.
The things that are missing from this rundown are:
- Tunnelling is unbalanced.
- Tunnelling is not necessary to perform well
- Positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement aren't the only options available
So, in order.
First, tunnelling is unbalanced. This is a pretty obvious point, but I find it tends to get lost somewhere whenever people take these big-picture views about the game. Tunnelling offers the killer a much easier chase by targeting the survivor that was just on the hook, because that survivor is
- Injured
- Out of position (IE, you start the chase right on top of them)
- Likely to be in an area where resources were just used
This is relevant because it's why tunnelling is seen as the most efficient route forward even though it's actually quite inefficient on paper- it takes very little effort to do and quite a lot of effort to counter. This is one of the most central elements of tunnelling, conceptually, it should be front and centre in discussions like these.
Second, tunnelling isn't necessary to perform well. This might seem like it's not relevant from the game design perspective, but bear with me. Simply providing potent bonuses to players who spread their hooks around will make players who already perform perfectly well skyrocket in effectiveness, and might make them feel pretty unbearable to face. Killer isn't hurting right now, this kind of buff is going to affect the game's balance in a major and pretty negative way.
Now, I don't like to just shoot down ideas without providing alternatives if I can help it, which is why the third point is also very important.
Third, there are more options than positive and negative reinforcement. People often assume a false binary here- either the killer needs to be punished with lengthy stuns and obnoxious tools, or rewarded with objective balance buffs and potent effects for doing something else. This overlooks the much cleaner and simpler solution: Make it impossible to actually do without negatively affecting the killer.
You actually brought up the best way of doing this in your post, it doesn't require anything else. Replace Endurance from being unhooked (+ probably from the perks Off The Record and Borrowed Time as well, honestly) with a loss of collision. Suddenly it's impossible for the killer to focus that survivor because they flat out cannot be hit, but they're also not being punished with stuns, longer chases, bodyblocking, or any of the other negative associations people currently have with anti-tunnel.
Don't get me wrong, a few extra things would need to change - I'd probably recommend disabling item use until the intangibility wears off, so survivors can't coordinate unbeatable flashlight saves - but in general, lessening the effectiveness of tunnelling by making it difficult to start attempting would be a much more natural push towards engaging with the game's broader skill expression. Pair that with the kind of basic, generic buffs BHVR have been making consistently for the past few years and you've got the best way to solve tunnelling as an issue. Everyone wins- survivors don't get tunnelled, killers don't have to deal with obnoxious bodyblocking or other weaponised tools, and things can be buffed more safely without those problems getting in the way.
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Why should survivors get a 100% safe unhook?
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So, briefly..
Reasons why tunneling happen varies widely, especially depending on a few factors. Most people, when they talk about tunneling aren't referring to end game, or "resorting to tunneling" gameplay, for example.
Most mechanics and perks disable in the end game, and most of the time were discussing tunneling "at 5 gens" or "at the start of the game", which is going into a match with the intent of chasing the first person you find to death hook as fast as possible.
The biggest reason people tunnel at 5 gens though is that it's easy to execute and difficult for survivors to counter. There is nothing stopping killers from doing this right away, every match. (Although, the one thing that does punish this is MMR, which is also largely complained about)
I don't believe for a second that directly buffing killers will do anything to solve this issue. The gen kick and 3 gen meta were arguably some of the strongest killer metas, and slowest gens this game has ever seen, and killers simply used those buffs to camp and tunnel more simply for easier wins.
That said, I don't think there's nothing that can be done here. I think intangibility on unhook is generally healthier than endurance, assuming it still has the same conspicuous actions restriction (and probably item restriction also).
I've also said since it was removed that the old BP bonus for things like BBQ, wglf, and prove should be base kit. Add an indicator on the UI to help track the "BBQ" spread hooks bonus and at least some people will pursue it. I also think that BP incentives like this are a simple, non-balance related incentive to healthy gameplay that shouldn't be controversial. It's not a final solution, but it is a good step in the right direction that doesn't involve nerfing (or buffing) anything.
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In order:
1: It's unbalanced no matter who does it because of the nature of what you get when you do it.
You could pick Trapper, run zero perks, ignore your power entirely, and tunnelling would still be unbalanced. It probably wouldn't be unbalanced enough for you to still win, but the fact remains that if someone starts the chase on an insane back foot because they're injured, out of position, and not near any resources… that's unbalanced.
The thing that causes the imbalance isn't how good the killer is, it's how much effort it takes to stack the chase in your favour vs how much effort the opponent has to put in to counter you.
2: Splitting your second response up into three here because you cover a couple points, this bullet point is for not needing to tunnel to perform well.
Again, it's really not different across MMR brackets save for how easy it is. Sure, survivors at a high level know their checkspots, they know where the good loops are, they know the killer counterplay… but proportionally, killers at a high level should know those things as well, and how to deal with them.
If your climb to higher levels (assuming any person commenting actually is there, obviously) was spent honing the fundamentals, sure, high level survivors can still make you sweat, but it's not "leverage this one specific imbalance or lose". Killer has a lot of agency in this state of the game.
3: This bullet point is for the perks that help against tunnelling.
Broadly, I agree anti-tunnel is probably in the best state now it's ever been (though that's not saying much), but there's still a few things to mention here. The first is, it's very hard to coordinate and use anything altruistic in solo queue, so that narrows the viable pool down considerably, and second is that it's broadly not great to have to run very specific perks every single match just in case the killer decides to try to tunnel otherwise you lose by default.
The power should be shifted away from perks and coordination, and towards just not letting that chase be easy to begin with.
4: This bullet point is about the loss of collision punishing lower tier killers harder.
I mean… it doesn't? It's still not a punishment no matter what way you slice it. They just can't tunnel to begin with and there's nothing that'll harm them about that. It can't be leveraged against them in any way, so there's really no harm here.
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Killer has been pretty good in a lot of ways (depending on the killer) since launch, for sure.
That said, if you really want to know where balance lies, just look at competitions. There are a LOT of restrictions against survivors, and not many against killers, because once you get survivors who know how to play and work together, killer gets absolutely dumpstered.
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Comp is its own thing and a radically different beast to the main game, there's not much you can really conclude from it if you want to understand the functional balance of the game.
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So survivors should be literally invincible when they are unhooked.. I think there are probably better solutions than that.
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Comp is played by the best players showcase how the game is played most optimally. And even when they aren't using comms, everyone knows what to do and how to do it best, and that's why killers get absolutely ######### on when you have 4 survivors who know what they're doing.
This obsession with balancing at the lower skill ranks is what is going to eventually kill this game. We don't need low skill floor killers, but we also don't need this incessant hand holding for survivors, because all it does is making the higher MMR games absolutely miserable.
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- You could pick Trapper, run zero perks, ignore your power entirely, and tunnelling would still be unbalanced. It probably wouldn't be unbalanced enough for you to still win, but the fact remains that if someone starts the chase on an insane back foot because they're injured, out of position, and not near any resources… that's unbalanced.
Absolutely not. If you are getting tunneled and dying to a 0 perk trapper without power, you fundamentally do not understand the game.
2. "Again, it's really not different across MMR brackets save for how easy it is. Sure, survivors at a high level know their checkspots, they know where the good loops are, they know the killer counterplay… but proportionally, killers at a high level should know those things as well, and how to deal with them."
Kind of. If the survivors play properly, the killer has little left to counterplay (with the exception of killers that can ignore loops). Don't believe me? Okay. Lets take a look at one of the best players in the world, and your the closest example I could find of an "m1 trapper being OP for tunneling."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uq6VMew_F0
He looped trapper for five and a half minutes in a 1v1 tournament.. and didnt even get downed. All it takes is shift tech to make the m1 killer lose BL and.. trapper didn't even down him. Trapper quit 5 and a half minutes in because it would have probably been a 6-7 minute chase, even longer (probably 10+ minutes) if IVN wasn't memeing and actually left shack. In a normal 1v4 game, a chase even half that length is usually an automatic loss for the killer.
3. Broadly, I agree anti-tunnel is probably in the best state now it's ever been (though that's not saying much), but there's still a few things to mention here. The first is, it's very hard to coordinate and use anything altruistic in solo queue, so that narrows the viable pool down considerably, and second is that it's broadly not great to have to run very specific perks every single match just in case the killer decides to try to tunnel otherwise you lose by default.
Do you think it would be valid if I was playing killer and was complaining about not being able to find people (while not running any auraread), or would you say "Use an auraread perk or get better awareness"? I'd bet the latter. You can't be weak in chase and also expect to not be forced to run perks that help to make up for that shortcoming. Its the exact same for suvivor. Get stronger in chase, or run a perk or two to make up for that shortcoming.
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post posted twice for some reason? its below.
Post edited by ToadMagic on0 -
I absolutely agree. I don't think the game should be balanced around the top 1%, but it should ABSOLUTELY not be balanced around the bottom 75%. There's a happy medium. People cannot refuse to learn and adapt to the game and expect the game to be made easier for them. Right now the easiest way to win more games, though, is to just go on reddit or twitter and cry that something is OP until the circlejerk becomes strong enough for it to get nerfed.
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It's really infuriating, because I will agree that releaase Kaneki was WAY too oppressive, and I still think his skill floor is just way too low. I feel like I'm hacking when I play that character because a guaranteed first hit is really, really not fair. At least even with Legion you can spin them / pallet stun them out of their power, but even then, Legion just isn't fun to go against because it's basically a guaranteed injury… his follow up is just kinda weak.
But besides Kaneki, I've seen survivors literally cry about every killer. Release Unknown had 500 million threads about the fact he was game breaking… now he's mid tier, at best, because everyone but the lowest MMR survivors don't know how to absolutely dumpster The Unknown.
As soon as you run down the killers that survivors feel are the most balanced, you end up with a killer list of killers who get absolutely demolished at anything other than games against new players and memers.
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