If You Play Killer, Tunnelling Is Against Your Best Interests

these stats are literally useless and serve no purpose for balance talks

It's not an imbalance issue because the chances are pretty good that you get to a window or pallet within your 10 seconds of endurance + speed boost, especially if you did the smart thing while on hook and considered where you ought to go next if a teammate performs an unsafe unhook on you.

And even if you don't make it to a pallet or window, so what? You're on a team of 4 people vs 1 and there's a strict time constraint. You can't elevate the way you feel over what's fair in a time-sensitive asymmetrical scenario. You're supposed to understand what you're signing up for before you press the ready button.

You can't have an environment where the survivors are ultra safe, can finish their objective minutes from the start, with only a few killers that can handle it.

How many of these idiot-proof style handholds are going to be installed before DbD transforms from a game into a horror-themed ride? The better question is 'why are people pressuring the devs to do this?'

The Perks against tunneling being so strong is an indicator of an imbalance in the first place…

Also they’re not Tools, they’re Perks. I’d consider a tool against tunneling to be something akin to a base-kit mechanic or an item of some kind.

Like how they eventually made Borrowed Time base-kit because of how mandatory it was to slot (indicating oversight on the overtuned viability of tunneling off-hook).

And if kill-rates get an axe due to a reduced capability of tunneling, so too can soon an axe be taken to survivors innate gen efficiency by requiring them to move around more to complete gens, adding more time and possible exposure to the Killer at inopportune time like with the blood generators (albeit those needing a lot of tuning and reenabling of perk usage)

Spawncampers generally aren’t viewed in a good light in shooters where it’s possible, as they’re taking advantage of systems outside of the spawncampee’s control.

If the stats are irrelevant for balance talks, we can pack up, because everything else is unverifiable and biased.

But you can't just dismiss stats because they don't support your conclusion. You point at Freddy, for one, but what's wrong with Freddy? Global traversal and anti-loop are two key features of a strong kit, and he has both, so why is it odd that he does well?

Is it not possible that a more rarely picked killer is more likely to be picked by players that master him? Is it not possible that players that don't do well with him just stop picking him?

I'm sorry but this is like telling survivors that trying to get generators done quickly is against their best interests. Tunneling, camping, and gen rushing are all the same thing. They are just examples of trying to get your objectives done as quickly as possible.

I think a lot of people here are taking personal offense to this discussion and that's not constructive at all. I urge you to take a step back:

Tunneling hinders your growth as a killer if you:

• Tunnel regularly regardless of the context
  • This case is targeted at killers whose strategy is: I hook then I patrol nearby so I can tunnel when the unhook happens
  • Hardly anyone regularly falls in this category, but it's still an issue

• Generally avoid tunneling until things start to look bleak
  • this is where we all need to take an honest step back and ask ourselves: did we get outplayed (cooked in chase, made a costly mistake, …etc) and if so the argument at hand is that regularly tunneling in this scenario hinders your overall growth. This is a fairly subjective analysis at times which is why this discussion can feel like a personal attack imo.
  • I fully sympathize with the argument that it's nearly impossible to win as the killer in a 4v1 scenario, so if that's the case the discussion at hand should shift to how can we make the 4v1 more balanced so that killers don't feel forced to tunnel. But please, do not use the 4v1 as a blanket statement excuse to justify tunneling every time your game is heading towards a loss.

Finally, keep the original discussion point in mind: excessive tunneling hinders fundamental growth long term.

I'm personally guilty of tunneling in matches that I would have normally lost simply because I was getting outplayed, and it doesn't feel like a good win. Hopefully others can empathize or at least sympathize with that feeling.

So you are basically saying that if the survivors get too many gens done too quick you should just accept that you are going to lose instead of trying to turn it back?

Like sorry but that isn't how it works lol. You didn't get outplayed because the gens were popping too fast. Gens just pop too fast. Faster than the majority of the killer roster can hope to secure downs.

If you don't like tunneling, then ######### tell BHVR to buff the weaker killers so that they don't have to. Then maybe you can have more basekit anti-tunnel. If you implemented more anti-tunnel now you are just going to be making it more necessary to run the stronger killers and making the weaker killers even weaker.

Like telling people to just play better when they can play super efficient(getting into a quick chase and getting a down relatively early in a match) and still be losing a gen before they can hook is just absolute nonsense. The fact is for like half the killer roster it is not possible to get downs as efficiently as survivors can get gens done efficiently - if the survivors are playing efficiently.

Like sorry but that isn't how it works lol. You didn't get outplayed because the gens were popping too fast. Gens just pop too fast. Faster than the majority of the killer roster can hope to secure downs.

Ironically, I think this is basically what the OP is referring to.

You lose a match, and the first thing you do is preclude the possibility that you could've done anything differently to win the game. How do you expect to improve at the game when your first response is to just lock out the possibility that you did anything wrong?

You're just reinforcing the same thing. You're not getting better.

What are you supposed to do? Ask more capable killer players. Get coaching. Record your game and see if there's anything you could've done differently.

If you start at 'I couldn't have done anything', you're not going to get better under any circumstance and the issue will persist. You're just letting yourself get stuck.

Tunnelling is a very good way of turning losing matches around, because it provides huge value for little effort and often little risk.

I think it's the opposite of this, though, like everything with tunneling, it depends on your definition.

People like to justify tunneling based on - 'if I hit a 4 person SWF and 3 gens pop on the first chase, what else am I supposed to do!?'

Except if true, tunneling is the worst thing you can do now. If its truly a 4 person SWF playing just to win, they're going to ignore the person on hook until its safe (unless they have anti-tunnel perks). They're going to just do the gens, open the gates, then maybe try a rescue if they care about the 4e.

One of the reasons I think they need to look at tunneling isn't that killers can use it to comeback, its that when a killer already outmatches the survivors they can turn a winning match into a boring stomp.

So there's a very fundamental way that I look at the game that is, apparently, not how many other people on these forums see things. So let me explain a bit:

There are 2 main premises for how I play:

1. The default for survivors is to do gens and leave. If they have nothing else to do, they will do gens.
2. The primary method the killer has to slow down the game is to give as many survivors something to do at the same time as possible.

So I aim to get into a match, establish pressure as early as possible, and give as many survivors something to do at the same time as I can. So, generally speaking, I don't want to camp the first hook because that survivor is already not doing gens and I need to give someone else something to do other than gens. If I leave the hook, then one is on hook, and another survivor will come to rescue automatically. I don't need to wait around to witness that, and I certainly don't need to be nearby to chase either of those two. They already aren't doing gens… I need to give the others (who are doing gens) something else to do.

So, ideally, I have one on hook, one going for rescue/recovery, and one in chase. That makes only one survivor on gens. If they get greedy, and leave someone on hook, then I have the potential to have two on hook, and the other two both have to rescue, so no one is on gens at all.

Compare that to hard camping or hard tunneling early: If you hook one and stand around the hook, you're investing all of your time on a survivor who already can't do gens. So even if one person comes to rescue, that's a minimum of two on gens you're just letting do whatever they want. And if they have a way to confirm that you're camping, then they can just leave one on hook and then you have all 3 doing gens.

A similar thing happens with tunneling, where if you just chase one person, the rescuer can go right back to gens. So you put maximum pressure on one person, and you have 3 survivors doing gens behind you. It's literally a race to see if you can get one person out completely before the gens are done. And this is where many people complain about "gens are too fast" because they're not able to hard tunnel fast enough at a certain point.

So, to me, if I "spread pressure", I can end up with only one person dedicated to gens (maybe less, if I have other tasks like Devour Hope or my pig hats), as opposed to 2-3 survivors dedicated to gens. That, right there, is effectively 2-3 times the slowdown that hard camping or hard tunneling gives you.

I also believe that Lethal Pursuer is the best perk in the game. Early game is when the survivors are strongest, and establishing pressure as early as possible is important. LP removes the guesswork and waste of time "searching". THis is another big difference, is that I feel like many players who complain about this are running 4 slowdown perks, then taking forever to find the first survivor and close out the chase. Yes, of course "gens fly" if you've effectively done nothing for the first minute of the match and are wandering around blindly.

And they have not given every killer the tools to do that consistently. It is almost impossible to spread pressure on killers without map mobility or lethality. So again yeah you are going to have to tunnel sometimes if you want to have a chance at winning. I am not saying you need to do it from the beginning of the game but like every killer youtuber I have ever watched has said that you should try to identify the weakest link in the survivor team from the start of the match and attempt to get them out before two gens are left.

They've spent 3 years giving you tools for this.

Maps were made smaller, tiles, loops, and pallets weakened, dead zones are weighted heavier now. They spent at least 2 years buffing 1-3 killers every patch individually. All of that reduces chase times, which is the entire point of my post.

They got chase down to 60 seconds per survivor (on average) for the entire match, so killers (on average) are finishing chases in under 30 seconds. That's insane.

Map mobility and lethality? Have you seen the recent killers? Every single killer seems to come with haste, map traversal, and probably some kind of additional slowdown mechanic.

And even then, I highly, highly contest that these are required for killers to do well. The most lethal killer right now is Freddy, at a whopping 71% kill rate. And that's across the board, at every MMR. So survivors who do "git gud" are still going to die to him about twice as often as they escape. Freddy is generally one of the poster boys for "weak m1" killer.

ETA: What you really mean by "they haven't given tools for this" is slowdown. You want (need?) gens to take 5 minutes each. They reduced chase times for you on top of adding extra gen time, and nerfing prove and BNP, and people still want to go back to Gen kick and 3 gen metas, because playing pve gen kick simulator is all sone people know how to do.