Tunneling Solutions: An uncomfortable possible reality.
So long story short, tunneling is probably the biggest problem for continued larger enjoyability of this game. its one of the most suggested problems and without a doubt sucks to be tunneled out. yada yada old man yells at cloud.
And while I'm sure we could discuss tunneling yet again on these forums, that isn't the topic here, make your own thread. What I want to discuss is what you guys think think might be a possible solution that BHVR might employ to deal with it?? The assumption is tunneling is unfun for the victim, so we wanna minimize it. Brainstorm Go!
Comments
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Here is my own take:
Tunneling Penalty/ Fatigue System for Killers
This a in-game mechanic that discourages killers from immediately downing and rehooking the same survivor right after they’ve been unhooked. Instead of preventing tunneling outright in any game, which would remove killer agency, it adds temporary penalties (fatigue) when the system detects that a killer is serial tunneling.
It isn't about just one tunnel because its the best solution right now, its if you tunnel again and again.
It should be easily detectable in large quantities.Once we got that, slowdown and other effects can be added to make it much harder to continue. ala Orange Glyph.
I think this is a flexible system that does not punish any tunneling, but will hit the serial tunneler Killers the hardest.
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True tunneling barely ever happens and any system designed to prevent it will inevitably hurt people not tunneling or those who tunnel when they have to in order to have a chance if winning.
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it adds temporary penalties (fatigue) when the system detects that a killer is serial tunneling.
So, if there's one take away we should have from the recently attempted go next and crows systems it's that any automatic system trying to "detect gameplay" is going to be highly flawed, subject to false positives, and is basically just defining "what is gameplay".
How does this system even work? It seems abusable if the survivor throws themselves at you for a DS play or even just to force the system to activate. We saw the same thing happen where tunneling someone out forced the game to consider the survivor to "not be trying" and hit with a dc penalty.
What they should do:
Hook donation system. Survivors can choose to donate their first hook stage to a shared pool that is pulled from before individual stages. Shuts off at end game
Doesn't touch player agency, doesn't affect end game. Killers can still choose to camp and tunnel, but early game will have to camp through 6 hook stages to get someone out. It becomes inefficient, and people will lose games trying, so they will do something else.
That "something else" is chase. We go back to "gens aren't worth kicking" and killers are driven to get into chase as fast as possible to get through hook stages. This is also slowdown since, instead of standing around a hook with their mouth full of teeth, they're pressuring survivors off gens. Ideally, getting more than one person on hook at a time becomes the most efficient play, while slowing down the game.
No penalties, no "detecting gameplay", not abusable by either side in any way. You're just making tunneling and camping early game less efficient, and allowing people to choose to pay more efficiently. Coincidentally, this also creates map pressure to slow down the game naturally, and allows better killer skill expression, since more hooks is at least one measure of killer skill.
That's all you have to do to change this meta. And if it impacts kill rates, we can finally talk about buffing trapper and other killers individually. Although I suspect that there will be killers at the top tier that can still perform perfectly fine with this system also.
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It has to be a scaling difficulty system or something akin to it. Tunneling is not as reactive as it's presented to be and incentives are negligible (and sometimes buff slugging/camping instead). You can't realistically remove tunneling and it would be unfair to do so anyway. But what you can do is make it so that if it's used early enough in a trial, it is so impotent that it isn't worth the time or effort to do at all. Then you watch players adapt and see how it goes.
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If I were the devs I'd just buff DS and call it a day, anything slightly inconvenient for killers and reddit/twitter/forum will be on fire + review bombing, it will be scrapped immediately, or it won't do anything like anticamp
I honestly think they can't fix it, but i'm ready for them to prove me wrong
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Actually, that would mean the killer should just tunnel the same survivor through 6 health states instead of 3.
Do you want to know what would be more frustrating for solo q survivors? Being tunneled through 6 health states.
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Yeah? Remember the review bombing from the crow system? The medkit changes that didn't come through?
Not from killers. They are the minority.
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It didn't happen but crow system was bad anyway, it was a net negative for the game. Just watch and see when anti tunnel update comes, they won't do anything too upsetting, they can't
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I think they'll release something that will destroy killer agency and harm the game in the long run.
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See lots of suggestions here and in other similar threads that boil down to "give survivors nuclear counterplay that eliminates tunneling as an option forcing killer to play suboptimally".
nobody tries to look into why or how the game's own design encourages tunnelling, nobody tries to suggest a rework to the system to emerge a more fun optimal strategy, just blame players for playing the game in the way you dont want them to and nerf nerf nerf.
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The bulk of balance arguments for the game almost always boil down to "rules for thee but not for me".
Truly, I don't think BHVR nor the player base really wants the game to be fun and fair. We'd have to contend with a total overhaul of the game, which BHVR certainly doesn't want to do. Beyond that, a fun game from the Survivor's perspective is wildly different from a fun game from the Killer's perspective. Give Survivors too much autonomy and Killers give up. Give Killers too much power and Survivors give up. Even something as simple as bringing solos in line with SWF via implementations like comms are given the ax any time they're suggested because the thought terrifies players.
We have to think of it like this: how do you balance a game where neither side is willing to budge, where the idea of traditional PVP elements in a PVP game is vehemently rejected, and where the developer is unwilling to dedicate enough resources to improve the game beyond tweaks and bug fixes?
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you're absolutely right.
people dont want the game to be fair, they explicitly want to maintain the status quo of being able to abuse unfair things for themselves but not to deal with the unfair things the opponent has.
and it's somewhat okay in a very unhealthy way when these unfair things cancel each other out in a rock-paper-scissors manner, but for the last few years we've been basically in a situation where people that main paper demand scissors to be deleted while telling rock mains that they should just git gut against paper.
they want to feed their ego beating down real people reduced to the capacity of AI. that's immediately apparent when you just get into the game and play "big scary killer" simulator once you grasp the basics and then not so long after the roles switch when you realize that you are not meant to win fairly. any of your wins are founded on survivors consistently (thats very important, one-two ######### ups arent enough anymore) messing up the counterplay, failing interactions or their own part of the one-sided skill expression. anytime you are facing off with a roughly equal or god forbid better opponent, you can only hope they throw the game.
it's really sad that this is the direction we keep going instead of focusing on making the game more interactive and enabling fair skill expression even if it remains ultimately asymmetric. devs refuse to determine a fair win condition, devs refuse to design around win condition, devs punish for playing for win condition and blame you for playing for win condition.
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I wrote a big long post earlier about fixing all kinds of problems with dbd all at once…
But to here's what I wrote on the subject:
When a survivor is on hook, or unhooked, the server checks how many hook states that survivor has compared to other survivors. Example: Dwight has been hooked for the first time, and Meg, Jake, and Claudette haven't been hooked at all. Dwight has one hook state, the others have zero. That's a difference of one hook state compared to each survivor, and therefore, three total. While Dwight is hooked, the anti-camp system actually has a +30% additional range, and the bar fills up +30% faster. When Dwight is unhooked, his endurance and haste effects will last +30% longer, and the haste effect is +30% stronger.
Then, let's say Meg is hooked next. Dwight has 1 hook state, Meg has 1 hook state, the others have zero. So she'll get those same bonuses, but only at +20%. Then, let's suppose Dwight is hooked again. He now has 2 hook states, which is 1 more than Meg, and 2 more than Jake and Claudette. This will therefore further increase the effects of the anti-camp and anti-tunnel system by +50%.
TLDR: the more hook states a survivor has compared to their teammates, the more effective the anti-camp system is, and the more powerful the borrowed time effect off of hook.
I ALSO think, in addition to this, that the unhooked survivor's scratch marks, pools of blood, and grunts of pain, and aura should be completely disabled for that duration, and they ALSO lose collision with the killer. So that will prevent the killer from trying to block them from going up basement stairs for instance. It will also prevent the survivor from trying to get in the way of the killer and take a hit for their teammate.
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For sure. The game wasn't necessarily balanced ideally years ago, but the balls to the wall play certainly felt better. Now players are just as frustrated, but with more restrictions and less fun.
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oh yeah.
good example is the devolution of the survivor gameplay. even though it became much more balanced, the way it was accomplished is by making solo player's agency / impact on the match much less meaningful compared to good teamwork.
you have way less power to win chases, you have to rely on teammates way more and situational / optional teamwork plays are utterly devastating but only if you're doing them with your team.
another thing is "win harder" meta. it's so difficult to make comebacks in this game and every year there are less and less options for that.
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If we're going to punish killers for more optimal objective gameplay then we're going to punish survivors for optimal objective gameplay right? Right?
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I think the majority of players would rather make tunneling be highly discouraged but not impossible, however serial tunneling should be downright impossible and then Killers be buffed as needed eventually.
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I would make it harder and much more annoying to tunnel but not impossible. I‘m not a fan of potentially having to deal with ds every game.
My idea: The unhook notification and hud changes appear delayed after a unhook and the unhooker/unhooked leave no scratch marks/ grunts of pain for 20-30seconds, so survivors are able to get somewhere to reset. As of right now tunneling has no counterplay and perks don‘t count as such.
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This system would be too complicated and we need something that works all the time instead of only after you did it a lot of times.
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It just highlighted the pre-existing issues with the game. It's one thing if the players suck the fun out of the game, but when the developer gets on board with that as well, you end up where we are. People say they have a lot of fun with DBD, but I don't know that that's entirely true. It doesn't offer a great casual experience anymore and it's really underwhelming for a comp game compared to anything else.
That's how these patches typically roll out. Something that benefits Survivor marginally with a hefty nerf to counteract it which is a buff for Killer. The 3 gen meta is a good example. We'll never hear the end of the 8 kick limit just because Eruption chews it up, but the removal of gen tapping was a massive change from a patch that was designed to help Survivor to begin with.
I would genuinely be shocked if these phase 2 changes (if they roll out) actually make a real dent in camping/tunneling/slugging and don't do something additional like nerfing half of the Survivor perks or making gens take 150 seconds or something. The bait and switch of, "yes we did address those issues, but made sure to compensate enough that it doesn't really matter".
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I've seen gameplay of a new 1v4 survival game and I found their solution to "tunnelling" quite interesting:
In that game if the killer grabs and throws a bunny (which essentially takes 1 hook stage from them in dbd terms), the bunny enters panic mode. In panic mode, the bunny is faster than the killer, if the killer tries to throw the bunny again, it instantly escapes the killer's grasp and, this the most important part, if a bunny is in panic mode (and only then), it can enter a rabbit hole that teleports it to a random different rabbit hole somewhere on the map.
The last part is imo the interesting one. What if dbd did something similar? What if a recently unhooked survivor could enter a locker to get teleported to a random other locker? I don't see how that could be abused, as it can't be used to get in the killer's face and stun or bodyblock them.
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I think BHVR is going to address tunneling the same way they did camping.
A lot of the discussion around tunneling gets muddy because people can't agree on what tunneling even is. Does tunneling only refer to chasing a Survivor immediately after they have been unhooked? Many would argue there are already perks to address this. What about when a Killer stop chasing one Survivor because they spotted another Survivor who is closer to being sacrificed? Many would argue this is simply just good gameplay on behalf of the Killer (or bad on the Survivor for not hiding better).
In my opinion, there's degrees to tunneling: the former refers to "hard tunneling", and the latter refers to "soft tunneling". When BHVR addressed camping with the Resolve mechanic, it seems like they aimed to address the instances of "hard camping", otherwise known as "face camping". However, for "soft camping" (aka "proxy camping"), they made a few perks to help Survivors counter those scenarios (Reassurance and Camaraderie).
Therefore, I believe they will address tunneling in a similar way. They will implement something like a basekit version of Decisive Strike, giving a Survivor some ability to save themselves from getting hooked if they are picked up shortly after being unhooked, and then update the currently existing tunneling-related Survivor perks to counter the instances of "soft tunneling" / "light tunneling". This could lead to a meta where simply chasing a Survivor who has been hooked before may give them some sort of buff for the rest of the match.
This is further supported by their limited time Modifier, 2v8. In that mode, every Survivor class comes with an "Unlockable ability". The only way to unlock that ability is to get hooked by the Killer. In its own way, it counters "soft tunneling" by simply giving the Survivor some passive buff they can utilize in the next chase. I believe this "unlockable ability" was a test of sorts to see how Killers play around giving Survivors passive buffs for being hooked to reduce the feeling of being tunneled (although that modifier has many extra mechanics that make tunneling harder, so it's hard to say how effective it is)-1 -
First issue is majority of possible systems are either useless, or can be heavily abused by survivors.
Second issue is they also want anti-slugging feature along with anti-tunneling feature.Thing is usually if you down a survivor and don't want to tunnel, or they are just dead on hook overall, you just leave them on ground for some preasure. But what the hell are you supposed to do, if you can't slug or tunnel.
Anyone who says just don't go after that survivor simply never played killers more than few games.- other survivors hide
- unhooked survivor body blocks the killer
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We just had issue where survivors were getting wrongfully banned and you want to do exactly same thing with killers?
That simply could never end well.
Also suddenly survivors giving up, could very easily trigger this system, so this would be another reason for survivors to give up in their games, which we want to avoid.4 -
its only killer players who are at fault and boosted for playing optimally © mandy
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I mean, if you want to punish killers in any way for tunneling, then you better show killer hook stages of survivors.
I would take the trade personally, it would make 8 hooks so much easier for me.4 -
well this doesnt seem to happen so far
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As a survivor main, it’s crazy how killer sided this game is. It needs to be balanced, killers already have the advantage.Every time we get a good perks killer mains complain and we get nerfed, while killers stay just as strong and receive buffs. It’s so easy to forget killers to find you when all they gotta do is open a locker and they can see you or use add-ons to see through walls. But distortion gets nerfed into the ground and made for this just to name a few. Now on to tunneling and camping. To deal with camping all that has to be done is when meter goes up and the survivor jumps off the hook, the killer will lose the hook they’ve just gotten and the survivor loses their hook state as well even in end game stop giving killers kills the anti camp needs to stay on, and expand the camp zone too because killers are perimeter camping too! Now tunneling, when a survivor is unhooked and the killer tunnels them that survivor receives an over shield and it stays on until the killer chases another survivor for a certain amount of time.
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I don't think people understand one thing.
You don't need tunneling at all, if survivors are bad.
You need tunneling mid-end game against good survivors.
You need tunnel someone out asap, if survivors understand what game they are playing or against just good survivors with strongest stuff.
Even tunneling won't help, if survivors understand what game they are playing and they all bring strongest stuff.
As killer I play mostly for chases: I see – I chase. I try and want to win, but I want to get as many chases as possible, so mostly tunneling and camping doesn't fit my playstyle. And I can say for sure: my playstyle alone made SO MANY people escape for free, because almost every second game I have 7-9 hooks with 1 kill at best. And I know if I was playing a little bit more mean, it could be 4k for sure.
And if this tunneling update will make every killer play like me, then no doubt it will affect kill rate. And you know what will happen next? Chase will be shorter and more boring. Because it's only thing left killer can pressure – survivor in chase. If you want to play against killers with 20-30 seconds chase at best no matter what, I don't. Not as survivor, not as killer either.
Add here changes to MMR and you will see how these changes will be even deeper.
I think this change to tunneling won't be meaningful anyway, and I even want to see 5 gens tunneling become punishing, but I honestly would love to see MMR changes more, because majority of game "problems" are starting with MMR isn't working at all.3 -
Antitunneling - No survivor can be hooked twice in a row before 5th hook. Hooking same survivor twice will not add hook stage. Meaning that you can split it between two survivors which is pretty common strategy but you cannot hard focus single player.
Antislugging - If two or more survivors are downed after reaching full recovery progress they can pick themselves up. Survivors can heal each other while in dying state.
New general killer ability: Bloodhunt - after each survivor has been hooked once the killer will receive bloodhunt mode. The bar will be shown below power icon and lasts 90s. During that time killer has: 25 % faster attack cooldown, 25 % faster damage action, 25 % faster pick up and hooking. After timer elapses, bloodhunt can be activated again once every survivor has more than one hookstage.
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That system is going to get some changes and it will come back.
Same thing with this system, try fail and try again.
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I'm a lot more in favor of that than the usual model of "we tried it 8 years ago and it didn't work so we can never try it again".
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Thing is you really don't want to fail at such a system, because it can cause a lot of damage to your player base. Luckily they were able to disable it fast.
That doesn't change the fact they clearly are not able to balance such system. So trying to "fix tunneling" with system that would get disabled anyway seems kinda pointless.3 -
Every time we get a good perks killer mains complain and we get nerfed, while killers stay just as strong and receive buffs.
Well, at least you get some good perks in first place…
Also wanna talk about gutting Ultimate weapon and Skully? That was surely not done, because of survivors, right?9 -
Did you ever consider that when survivors complete generators, that means there's less locations that the killer has to patrol in order to find them? And if the survivors are REALLY bad and thoughtless and just rush gens that seem easy to do at the corners of the map… then they DO get punished hard for 3genning themselves.
So yes. You asked for punishing survivors for doing their objective? There you have it.
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I think there's an easy pitfall to trip into in this discussion, and that's overcomplicating solutions with a big fancy mechanic designed to track variables. In my opinion, you can make solutions to tunnelling much simpler and more elegant than that, though of course you do always need to add in a few caveats or twists to cover for potential problems either way.
What I'd propose is the following:
A survivor who is unhooked no longer has Endurance. Instead, they lose collision, and cannot be damaged or bodyblocked— alongside not being able to bodyblock the killer themselves. This loss of collision should last a reasonable amount of time- somewhere around fifteen-ish seconds if you want it to be static, but I personally support making it last ten seconds and then having the timer pause for ten seconds if a chase is initiated.
The survivor still gets Haste, and in fact the percentage should probably be increased a little bit.With this setup in place, tunnelling a survivor becomes functionally impossible for a good chunk of time, during which the survivor can get into a better position so chasing them after the timer elapses (which the killer has to wait out, unlike now) is also harder.
This solves tunnelling outright. It's no longer easier/quicker to chase someone after they're unhooked because you cannot bypass their safeguard and must wait out a noticeable timer before you can even try to do damage— chasing a halfway competent survivor this way just makes chases take far too long. The next question though, is can this be abused?The answer is, yes, so we need to make a few adjustments. While survivors can't abuse it the way they currently can Endurance, with bodyblocking, aware survivors could try and get in position for flashlight saves or pallet saves without the killer being able to stop them.
Fixing flashlight saves is easy; survivors should simply not be able to use items until the timer elapses. Easy enough, worst case scenario for them there is they wait a short while or touch a generator if they want to heal with a medkit.
Fixing pallet saves is a little trickier. Throwing down a pallet is something a survivor being tunnelled may want to do, even with a loss of collision, but you could feasibly make that impossible too for the duration. Some testing would need to be done there, for sure, but that's the only major roadblock.Either way, successfully getting a save should obviously count as a Conspicuous Action, the same way hook saves do.
From there, adjust a few perks here and there, and you're golden. Tunnelling is impossible, the solution can't be abused, and killers even get the removal of Endurance bodyblocking post-unhook as a little bonus.
As a final note I'd probably give survivors some kind of visual effect during the timer, just so newer players know something is up. That part isn't required, it'd just be a bit better overall.-4 -
Lol. So the "tunneled" survivor can follow the chase, make themselves a nuisance by dropping pallets and the like, and be permanently invulnerable. Like, you're trying to chase the guy who unhooked, playing at a pallet, but the "tunneled survivor" is running around blocking your FOV and masking footsteps with his grunts of pain, and just in general being as distracting as possible. Then he drops a pallet on your head while the survivor is on the opposite end of the loop. Then they follow the chase to the next loop and repeat. Permanent invulnerability lol.
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You caught where I tentatively suggested making them unable to drop pallets?
I'll grant they could run around and try to be an annoyance, but I'm fine with that. They're not achieving anything productive, I'm fine with survivors dicking about to try and distract me.
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Might be fine for some killers, but others would be effectively crippled. Spirit struggles when there's different sets of footsteps and grunts of pain.
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Use a carrot not a stick.
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Feels like bhvr has tried and tried to offer some incentives via perks, yet many killers still prefer the crunchy fiber of the stick because the easy 3v1 after is still such a nice dessert.
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The most effective anti-tunnelling solution already exists in the game: Cages.
Cages teleport the hooked survivor to another place (usually far from the killer and close to other survivors) and effectively removes them from being tunnelled without quite a lot of effort.
If caging activated from two hooks in a row, it should give survivors a fair chance to contribute to the match.
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You kinda nailed the exact issue without realizing: all of the devs' attempts to reward not tunneling have been through perks, which come with two main issues:
1. Not every killer (or even a majority) will have access to that perk, especially if it comes from a licensed killer.
2. The benefit of that perk has to not only outweigh the benefits of tunneling, but also has to outweigh the opportunity cost of not being able to bring a different perk that would benefit tunneling.The only way to actually give killers their "carrot" is by giving some sort of basekit benefit for having hook stages on multiple survivors.
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The best counter to tunneling is just playing smarter. Don’t give free hits in high-value zones near key gens, only to go down instantly — especially when your whole team is already spread out on nearby gens, handing the killer a perfect area to proxy camp and start tunneling right off that first hook. Early game greed on a gen is often dangerous — sometimes it’s way smarter to W-shift into a zone that’s completely irrelevant to the killer.
No killer wants to hang around a hook and start a tunnel from a dead zone with no map control. Smart teamplay, efficient bodyblocks, using your time wisely during the tunnel process — not looting chests — staying on gens… the killer might actually think twice about tunneling if 2–3 gens pop during that first chase.
And cover your teammates — even in solo queue. Don’t just let the tunnel happen for free. You know how good it feels when you’re getting tunneled, but someone’s nearby, and you can go down at a trash 50/50 pallet knowing 1 person is there and the rest of your team is using the time?
We already have plenty of tools to counter tunneling. Survivors just need to start actually using them.
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It's armchair philosophy advice.
"Just play smarter." - Yeah, that's what most of us are already TRYING to do. Everyone makes mistakes one way or another. But EVENTUALLY someone is found, and eventually, someone goes down. That's just how it always is.
Which then leads to the second nitpick. The first chase doesn't possibly count as a tunnel. It's the second chase and onward that count as tunnels.
Last, expecting teammates to come and help is… well, it's a pretty dead freaking argument. Even on comms it can be hard to locate someone, and then not sandbag them. This pretty much feels like deeply-ingrained propaganda at this point. Yeah. FEED the killer free health states and free slugs! So they are still rewarded for tunneling….
I cannot count how many times anymore, when someone was getting tunneled out and one or more people tried to help. Be it body blocking, or trying to get some kind of flashlight or pallet save. Then the killer just happens to know they are there, and now there's two survivors on the ground. It's pretty much a lose-lose situation unless you get insanely lucky and the killer is bad. Someone gets tunneled out and the game turns into a 3v1. OR, everyone throws trying to save this one person, and the killer still wins because the whole survivor team stopped doing their gens, and they threw the game completely, just for everyone to die.
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of course it depends on the situation... you really need to get a feel for when covering is too risky, depending on the map and the killer. But in general, good teamwork can be super strong against hard tunneling. Still, sometimes it's actually better to just let the tunnel happen and focus gens, so the rest of the team has a real shot. It all depends heavily on the map, the killer, and the team. People who go for covers need to at least kind of know what they’re doing. a double down for double pressure is always bad. And a lot of teams also undercommit to the cover… sometimes you just gotta accept that you need to give up a teammate
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No. I'm just surprised that for YEARS killer mains keep insisting that the team just needs to get good and deal with the tunnel… when in reality either way the killer is getting an early kill or tons of free pressure.
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inb4 someone mentions that we have the HUD 😵
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which… relates to what, exactly?
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