Every Game is Just Hook Trade & Tunnel – The Game is Falling Apart
At this point every match feels the exact same:
- Someone gets hooked
- Teammate trades
- Killer goes right back to hook and tunnels
There’s no counterplay, no variety, no skill expression. It’s just hook → trade → tunnel until someone is out of the match in the first 5 minutes. Survivors don’t even get to play the game, and killers aren’t being pushed to actually improve because tunneling is the easiest way to win.
The worst part? Every killer can do this. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing Nurse, Wraith, Clown, whatever—they can all tunnel, and they don’t even need a perk to do it. Yet survivors are constantly told “just bring X perk” as if it’s our fault. Why should survivors be perk taxed just because killers want the easy way out? If it’s a strategy every killer can abuse without building for it, it’s a design problem, not a survivor problem.
And BHVR, stop listening to the people that live on the forums instead of actually improving their gameplay. The players defending tunneling aren’t interested in balance, they just want their free wins. Meanwhile, the larger community is getting tired of the same unfun loop.
BHVR needs to implement something at this point. Look at the player count—dropping every single day by the thousands. That’s not just “burnout,” that’s people getting sick of an unplayable loop
Dead by Daylight is supposed to be about tense chases, teamwork, and clutch moments. Right now it’s just a tunnel simulator, and if nothing changes soon, the playerbase will keep bleeding out.
Comments
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reminds me of when the old mori system was getting removed. You used to be able to mori people after 1st hook, and there was no basskit BT. When it was announced that the mori system would be changed to being after two hooks, well, people did not like that.
As soon as it was announced, felt like everyone started using a mori and then turbo-tunneling off of first hook.
feels like the same thing here. Tunneling itself was threatened, so now tunneling increases
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I haven't noticed any difference. Its been turbo tunneling for years no matter how many buffs killers get and nerfs survivors get. It remains the easiest way to win 90%+ of matches with no strategic thinking involved.
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Yeah, since the PTB I have noticed an uptick to the already high rates of tunneling. Guess Killer players figured the best way to show that they are against the system is by abusing the mechanic it's trying to address. Go figure.
They know BHVR will not push it through even in the future, and if they do, it will be neutered to the point of being worthless.Actively punishing tunneling is the only way to hinder it from being abused in most matches. Every Killer reward, like the one they had during the PTB, would just be abused by people who tunnel, which is why people that ONLY want the rewards for unique hooks are just being disingenious. They just want a straight Killer buff. Unique hook buffs will NOT stop people from tunneling in the slightest. It would still be the easiest thing to do, and people will always take the path of least resistance.
Tunneling would still be the single easiest and most effective way to play, spreading Hooks with rewards wouldn't even come close. And hey, if the Tunneling Killer even get's the unique hook buff once for the first hook, they didn't disincentivize tunneling, they just BUFFED it.
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The game has always lost players in the months after big chapter releases. This proves nothing. Go look at the history on Steamcharts.
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Soon this game will just be toxic tunnelers and bully squads that both despise each other.
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Same with gen rushing every game i play fair with fresh hooks if unhooked survivor doesnt run into me abusing antitunnel for free bodyblocking gens are done in 100% effiency faster pushing me to play dirty as my opponent and its still 90% easiesnt win for survivor just do all gens asap so killer is left with all of his gen protection in endgame with few hooks but its not fun as your discription of first problem.
-19 -
Check steamdb the game had between 80k and 120k from june to august, it's dropping hard and the next few months of hard tunneling meta aren't going to help
I suspect the hype for krasue chapter isn't that high all the good stuff is deleted, ironically new killer is S tier tunneler
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And that tunneled person gets penalty for dying so fast plus grade loss, killers should be punished for doing so too
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You are incorrect
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what are you even linking bruh, september just barely started… check the last week of august the game had between 70-90k at all times, now it's already around 40k and as low as 27k (yesterday)
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the counterplay is dont unhook too soon, do the gens furthest away from the hooked survivor. killer will have to either camp the hook giving people free gens or they will have to go fair distance to chase someone else which then someone can unhook and run. dont hook heal and dont unhook too soon.
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If tunneling should be punished so should gen-rushing.
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There are many anti-tunneling and anti-slugging perks,
But no one uses them.-14 -
Define gen rushing.
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Although I personally haven't really noticed a noticeable difference in tunnelling, it kinda makes sense as we have a few precedents;
After Map offerings were announced to be killed, suddenly map offerings were used every game almost without fail since people knew their offerings would soon be near-useless (rip map-dependent achievements, the offerings really either should make more of an impact or at least not be consumed if the map wasn't chosen).
Whenever a Killer, or any perk, is announced to be nerfed into the Shadow Realm, there's a rise in pickrate before the update (people using the Killer/perk before it gets nerfed.).
After the (2nd) BNP nerf was announced, I had rarely seen so many BNPs in matches since the days where BNPs did a full gen with one button press.
Now tunnelling is effectively on borrowed time (pun intended) so, either in "protest" or just to do it while they can, people might tunnel more since it won't be an option forever.
I don't know why, but people seem to forget that the changes weren't scrapped, they were just delayed since almost the whole playerbase showed/told them all the holes in their first try. In a coming PTB, when those systems won't completely overshadow a new Killer, the systems will come back hopefully improved and, at the very least, getting hard-tunneled at 5 gens (hooked 3 times in a row) will be either much harder or punished and incentives for not tunneling will also return better.
I hate getting tunneled as much as anyone, but if it's not done correctly then the system could do some serious harm to the game. I'd rather wait a bit longer and have a system that won't be easily abused/weaponized and/or forces players to follow a set gameplay loop every game.
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The only way to effectively play against camping and tunnelling is by slamming gens. Removing the ability to do so would be a massive buff to the very things they're (ostensibly) trying to lessen.
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Wanna know why?
Because it is boring to always have to run second chance "meta" perks, that maybe gets you to another unsafe loop before you inevitably go down again.It shouldn't be a requirement at all.
True gen-rushing would be to bring toolboxes with BNP's and builds specifically for doing gens as fast as possible. At least that is how I would define it
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I was gonna say, business as usual then.
He's right. Numbers drop and then a licensed chapter drops and they spike back up. It's what keeps DBD afloat.
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I mean yeah the new chapters brings back some players, my point is that player retention is awful, they got their highest peak ever and average of 100k players whole summer, they're already gone and we're back to early 2025 numbers. If they're ok with terrible player retention then sure, good for them
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If that's the case, then Survivors are thoroughly enjoying the chase even when under concentrated fire.
It's understandable for players doing simple tasks at generators to complain, but it's strange to complain to the player who's being targeted.-7 -
Oh yeah, the game is a revolving door. Bringing new players in alone has to be a full-time job. Eventually they'll run out of bigger licenses and the game will dwindle into maintenance mode. Better to iron out as many of the kinks now.
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I feel the same about having to run gen defence so there’s more than 3-5 chases before the gens are done and the games over in 5 minutes without having even seen some of the team.
I’d love to be able to run some of the undetectable and terror radius stuff without the game being over before there’s chance to get any value from them.
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Just DC, take the stacking penalty until not enough survivors can even play to start a game. If you’re a killer, you just have to whine. Survivors have to take drastic measures to get anything done.
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Not that I advocate doing this AT ALL, but historically it seems like agitating the staff gets the most done. But hopefully we're moving away from that now.
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You can thank no hook grabs for the removal of skill expression. No threat of the killer grabbing = free trades. Why coordinate a save against a camping killer (which still can happen in soloq) when you can just wait for the killer to walk far enough and then full send it to the hook.
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Behavior keeps enabling killers to be more and more toxic, and they’ve implemented things to force survivors to stay in the game. They do not care about the survivor experience whatsoever. Everything is lip service and they walked it back immediately. Making sure that killers have everything that they want and they don’t give a ######### about what happens with survivors. The only way that will if enough survivors do drastic things to make sure that they have to pay attention.
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every abandon option available was for survivor benefit. they are adding more pallets for survivor benefit. the anti go next to stop people suiciding leaving 3 people to do all 5 gens was for survivor benefit. they even back tracked on the anti hiding afk crows because survivors complained. to say they dont care about survivor experience is just flat out wrong.
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A lot of this can be literally said for BHVR keeps enabling survivors. Still no abandon option for killers when gates are powered/opened so if they're in the gate they get to rub in their escape by either bagging at gates or intentionally waiting out the end game collapse and running out at the last second. So many killers are left in the dust because their kits weren't designed to keep up with decent survivors and that shows when some people are noticeably cockier when it's a killer they know that can do nothing about their taunting.
If anything, the PTB would have showed BHVR absolutely caters to specifically extremely casual or even bad survivor players that don't really have a fundamental understanding of DBD other than objectives which wouldn't be bad if they did the same for killers which they didn't despite their proposed "incentives."-5 -
"At this point" = the past 9 years.
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And that camped survivor will get go next penalty how is that fair?
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True gen-rushing would be to bring toolboxes with BNP's and builds specifically for doing gens as fast as possible. At least that is how I would define it
Which almost never seems to happen. I never see more than one person with a gen build in my killer lobbies, if even. It's all second chance and exhaustion. Yet this term is ubiquitous.
I feel like the usage really means "three gens got done while I wasted two minutes chasing the strongest looper instead of maintaining uniform pressure."
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I think blocking the hook notifications for Killer's per the PTB is a good idea and would at least force the Killer to actually camp the hook and give up pressure if they want the hook trade.
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camp the hook and give up pressure if they want the hook trade.
Except the people who hard camp the hook are likely also going to not acknowledge that they are simply allowing survivors to do whatever they want while they do nothing.
Most of these killers have zero reflection or analysis of their own gameplay.
So when this does happen, and it happens right now, on live, people largely don't see it as "giving up pressure", they see it as the survivors fault (gen rushing/toxic), or the devs fault (gens are too fast, slowdown needs to be buffed). Most players who play like this need 500 second gens and gen kick meta levels of slowdown and they still won't be happy until they win 100% of their games as 4k at 5 gens.
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Exactly!
Couldn't have said it better myself2 -
nah I disagree. Killers need buffs. They are super weak rn and can’t do anything in this game. We need bhvr to buff them so that killers win a 100% of their games so they can go on their winning streaks!
^This winning streak is not enough!!!!
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While it's annoying if they don't do that 80% of the roster just instantly losses against a good team if they don't do it not sure what the devs should do anymore .
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lool he did complain about upcoming patch at 1min10 saying win streaks are dead, this is perfect example of why the devs should have balanced for 50/50 these guys are way too spoiled, imagine winning 1100 games in a row in any other game
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i think the game is impossible to balance and trying to do so will just ruin it which it seems is happening rn with the the latests changes that got rolled back. You just gotta accept that things in the game are just gonna suck and probably never get better.
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also his winning streak was only 4ks. He lost his streak because he got a 3k
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I haven't booted the game up since they announced they were axing the changes in the PTB. But I'm not surprised it has gotten so much worse.
Also it's ironic that the more I think about it is that tunneling hurts the killer role far more then helping it. Think of all the nerfs and ideas they have come up with killers to make them truly fearsome just to toss the idea because it will be used to tunnel some one out to quickly so it needs to be balanced around that.
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There’s no counterplay, no variety, no skill expression.
Protection hits exist. You are not completely helpless as a team against a tunnelling killer. Even as a solo player, taking protection hits for a recently unhooked Survivor is still an extremely effective strategy.
Why should survivors be perk taxed just because killers want the easy way out?
I hope you realise that this goes both ways too. You have to throw on at least one slowdown perk if you don't want the game to be over in an instant.
Look at the player count—dropping every single day by the thousands.
We're actually up ~15000 players on average per-day from this time last year, according to Steam Charts.
Dead by Daylight is supposed to be about tense chases, teamwork, and clutch moments.
There will be no tension if there's never any threat of someone being eliminated. It will make every match play out the same.
I agree that they need to do something, but railroading people into playing a certain way all the time isn't it.
You can provide more tools for Survivors who are being tunnelled to escape, but nuclear options like a global 25% gen speed boost for killing someone "too early" (which is possible without any tunnelling at all, by the way), or blocking any generator from being kicked or blocked ever again, is too far imo.
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It's not really impossible it's just the tactics they use are really that fun, and your average person will feel a level of compassion when it comes to tunneling some one from the start and slugging 3rd kill for minutes as you hunt for person 4. They are VERY strong strategies that have been proven to have no counter truly as you can see knowledgeable people about the game getting 100s of win streaks. But a good portion of the player base hasn't played over 2000 matches let alone the fortitude to get a winstreak of that level using really repetitive and unfun strategies.
A lot of killers don't load in to a match with that mind set but that really only masks the problem with it's effectiveness because when they do it's very obvious you won't win.
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And this is why they should stick to the 6 hook requirement and not lower it!
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Your answer does not make any sense. Why should 6 hooks be alright? Why go any gigher than 4?
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Killer mains always bring up the comp swf argument but the blight winstreak is justified because it's not all players.
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Because it would make the system completely useless u can't give wiggle room that can be abuse if they want to truly stop it, look at hatch for an prime example it abused in 90% of game to stop it from spawning
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It's always funny seeing people bring up Steamcharts as a sign the game is dying just because the number is less than a previous month. We've done this song and dance before several times and the game is still here. Looking at the numbers on SteamCharts you can see that the game has more players now than it did at the start of the year. Hardly the death of DBD.
Let's also not forget that Silksong and BL4 are new game releases this month and currently DBD has no active event or recent content.
EDIT:
For some further evidence let's look at this page: https://store.steampowered.com/charts/mostplayed
#24 for most current players
#17 for most daily players0 -
I never said the game is dying if you read the comment, just saying extra players from fnaf are gone we had much higher numbers during the entire summer, player retention seems terrible
the "funny" thing is many people seem to like the 2v8 meme mode more than the real one, even though you play against the same 5 killers endlessly it's still more fun somehow, they should probably be worried about this… there's a reason they constantly do player satisfaction survey
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That's happened with literally every chapter since the beginning. There's a surge of players for the new content, and some of them leave after that. It's not an indication that player retention is dropping, we're actually up in terms of playercount from this time last year.
Summer is also far more popular for games in general because all the kids are on school holidays. September time is when they all go back, so there's always another drop there.
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