Only killers should be punished for forcing their objectives?
While whole community crying about tunneling, i want to ask: why it's bad that killer forces his objectives, but "oh well what else should we do", when survivors do the same?
Completely ignore everything in game because of 4 Resi, 4 Adrens? Oh yeah, these 4-5 minutes matches are completely fair
I'm so tired of being punished for non-tunneling with 4 Adrens, really. (No, Terminus is not good perk against it and i don't want undeserved kills because of NOED)
4 toolboxes with BNP? Sure thing, gen tunneling doesn't exist you stopid killah mains
3 gens done by first hook every second game? 8% of killer's objectives vs 60% of survivor's objectives? Oh your chases are bad. What, it's *popular killer main streamer* match? Oh, survivors are just better than
I mean, all these questions are rhetorical, i know how it's going on both sides and why it's a case. All i want is so people remember that both sides can complete their task crazy fast. And if you want to punish one side for doing their job on a game level, you can't don't do the same for other.
So when i read something crazy like "make basekit DS 10 seconds on both hooks without consp. actions" and don't see "also basekit 60 sec Deadlock and 50% pain res" from some people here pretending both sides players, I always laugh really well from that.
Game really need to be slightly slower on both sides imo. But it also can't be "party game", when game is literally one side competing another and both want to win.
Comments
You bring up some good points here.
I don't necessarily agree with tunneling being required, I think it is still possible to secure a win without doing it. But I definitely agree with what you said regarding the change in playstyles after the meta "adjustments".
I really miss the days where survivors only had Dead Hard to work with, because the rest of their build was made to counter tunneling and slugging, while the killer didn't resort to those strategies because he had BBQ stacks to collect. Was playing as effectively and as scummy as possible a possibility? Yes, but it wasn't the normal scenario of an average trial and that was an excellent thing.
Reading through patch notes 6.1.0 again, it is no wonder that it caused playstyles to be shifted and eventually led to unfun situations. There is just so much wrong with that patch that it is hard to know where to start.
I know some people disagree with me when I say this game was better in the past, and they have every right to do so, but I don't think anyone would truly be opposed to going back to the gameplay you've described as the fun and kinda tense games we used to have.
Although that would require changing the way people approach this game, and that isn't easy to do.
Asylum isn't that bad for Freddy. But if you get RPD, may the Entity have mercy upon you because the game won't.
I mean, 20 seconds is "a few/couple seconds" to me but ok. I can be more specific.
So just to reiterate and clarify, a chase lasting 20-30 seconds, or "short" chases on average what should be the norm. If the chase last any longer you're in a match where either the survivors are better/stronger than the killer or the RNG gave you the finger.
Chases longer than that in your average match mean you're not in the MMR you should be.
Hmmmm. Not nuanced enough.
Early-game? A 45 second chase is good, really anything under a minute or so. Mid-game should be shorter. End-Game can be longer.
What a load of manure. Aggressiv blanked statements like this help no one and only addfuel to the fire of "us vs them". You can't expect empathy from "the other side" if you lack it yourself. Both sides play miserable at this point and its everyones guess how to improve things, but claiming that one sides plight is completely invalid doesn't help at all.
I always consider tunneling a risky strategy, as it lets the three other survivors do as they want ... or two, while one shadows me with a flashlight/flashbang. If the tunneling fails, the survivor will get away, hide, reset, while 2 or 3 gens pop without me interfering. Thats pretty risky in my eyes.
What exactly is the risk of the tunnelling failing, though?
Anti-tunnel tools aren't that strong, so it's solely down to map resources and the skill of the survivor you're chasing. The latter is a non-starter because if they're that good you wouldn't want to chase them to begin with, so that means that - meaningfully - it's random chance if tunnelling can be countered, rather than perks or skill. Not a good place for that tactic to be, in my opinion.
If the survivor could use perks to bridge the gap and better express their skill, because the killer has to invest time into actual hit-blocking and a proper DS stun which would give them time to get to resources, it being risk/reward would be the case. Currently, it's not, so tunnelling is just the easier option in a lot of matches.
Thanks :)
Well, of course it is possible to secure wins without tunneling, but it has become much, much harder of late, with the survivors prioritising gens before anything else and splitting up has no downside. Sometimes you can spook a survivor away from a gen, while chasing another, but the good survivors will return to the gen the very second your back is turned on them. Literally. And this leads to the infamous 3 gens popping by the time the first chase concludes.
If this happens, you got 1 hook and the survivors only have 2 gens to go, what are you going to do at this point? Well, you can try to defend gens and hunt someone new and pingpong between them and the first hooked survivor, this is kinda the most "fair" way to handle it, but even then survivors will complain that you ignored one or two of them.
I know that I am pretty alone on this hill, but I think the early game can too easily be a desastrous for the killer, like you picked the wrong survivor, they get away and then 3 gens pop without even one hook. I personally would want a PTB to explore the possibilty of prohibiting splitting up at the very beginning by making gens repair extremely slow and inefficient when all 7 are still standing, but this inefficiency malus going away as more and more gens get done and the map shrinks. It just feels aweful to have so many gens pop in unision and knowing that you are already backed against the wall, while the match has barely started. To compensate for this, we could also implement some hard anti tunneling mechanics while the survivors havn't completed many gens, like if you pick up a survivor at 4 gens that you just hooked, they get an auto DS (5s) and free unbreakable if you slug them, thus incentivising the killer to go after fresh prey.
Of course, stuff like this is taking agency away and make the game play more to a script, but this would be an option to slow down the early game. My ideas here are just brainstorming level, though, so don't come down hard on my by pointing out holes in them. But thats the general idea that I would try to go for: make splitting up early undesirable and give survivors hard anti-tunneling during the early game. I don't think that the game would suffer with such new mechanics.
Maybe its just me, but I sometimes actually do lose survivors, when they turn a corner in an unexpected way and hide behind something while I don't notice. Sticking to a survivor is not guranteed for me to catch them, but maybe thats just me being bad and everyone else has a 100% successful chase rate?
Non-the-less, I actually explained the risks of tunneling in my original reply to you pretty well: while tunneling you leave the other survivors freely at their gens, putting a hard 90s timer (or less) on the first 3 gens and another 90 (plus maybe 20 traversal/search time) on the last two. If you can't tunnel and kill the survivor in 200s, you lost, because you gave away all gen protection in favor of tunneling and no other survivor has any hooks.
If the tunnel fails and that survivor you were tunneling somehow gets away, you got nothing to show for your effort, but all the disadvantages, ie you lost 3-4 gens with the fifth probably already under way, and the escaped survivor resetting and helping the wash up, while staying low. Tunneling is an inherent risky proposition, as you hand the gens scott free to the survivors and if you can't translate the tunnel into a kill, you lose it all.
Ok but on average.
The average chase time is 45-60 seconds in tunnel games to be even as I stated here:
So it can't be the same length. You need to make up for having a 4th survivor in the game doing gens, healing, saving, distracting the killer and ect which as we both know is a big difference; as well as hook count going from 5-6 to 10-12. As well as additional travel time between each chase to go to different targets.
How much time on average?
While I am a stoud opponent of basekit mechanics, as this dilutes the perk variety of the game and even more solidifies the meta, there is one basekit that I propose every time I get the chance for:
(old) BBQ. In the past every killer had BBQ equipped for the blood point bonus, and many survivors hated the aura reading part, but the vast majority didn't realize what good this did for the game. Killers had it equipped for the BP, but every hook showed them opportunities and thus peeled them away from the hook.
So, why not combine the two effects into a basekit incentive for the killer? They get the old +25% bonus BP for each survivor hooked, BUT only as long as all four survivors are still alive. If you tunnel the first survivor out you are stuck with +25% bonus BP etc. Also, upon hooking you see the aura of a single random survivor that hasn't been hooked yet. Once all 4 survivors have been hooked, no more basekit aura reading will be shown, but at that time the killer has chased and hooked every survivor and spread their hooks around. A mechanic like this would again put "hooking every survivor once" back again as a personal quest on many killers agenda, instead of just having kills as their only means of success.
I'm not sure how you lose survivors when you're right on them and hitting them within 10-15 seconds of them being unhooked?
If they could make distance using anti-tunnel perks, yes, you'd be right, but right now they've got at most Off The Record buying them a few more seconds. With OTR, they could maybe break line of sight and pull the tricks you're describing, but only if they're in a favourable area for it, which means... their ability to even attempt to counter tunnelling is random chance re: map position, as I described.
Your description of what the risk should be is accurate. That risk just isn't there because there's only meagre protection against tunnelling in place. It made the most egregious form of tunnelling impossible, but it didn't exactly make tunnelling in general properly risky.
Imagine if, instead, the basekit protection wasn't Endurance, so it can't be used to cleanse OTR before it's elapsed. On top of that, DS is a five second stun, so you're rolling the dice on if you'll get a stun that matters after downing them, which in this scenario took three total hits because OTR couldn't be waited out or cheesed immediately. In this scenario, tunnelling is a risk- you can get that chase finished fast enough to not lose value, but it's not going to be particularly desirable in most situations. That'd address tunnelling (mostly, at least) without harming regular gameplay, which is the ideal situation.
Fair points. But if we make tunneling riskier and prone to failure, I also think that we should make splitting up on the three early gens less efficient. One of the main reason stated by killers why they tunnel is that they feel pressured and backed against the wall so early, ie they finish their first chase and 3 gens pop. If we could make splitting up on the first 3 gens less effective, I wouldn't mind if every tunneled survivor gets an auto 5s DS and free Unbreakable during that early game to incentivice the killer HARD to go for another target and not wasting time.
The way both sides have been forced to play most optimally has lead to the current situation and the breakneck speed we are experiencing.
Could you re-state that?
I'm in favour of addressing the edge cases for early generator speeds, yes. I do think it's a bit of a false equivalence, but it's not as though the generator stuff doesn't need addressing too, so it's fair to mention it.
Personally, I'd just have every survivor spawn grouped up in groups of four or two, and nerf toolboxes. The only real problematic starts are when everyone spawns on a separate generator with a good toolbox, and those two things separately are too strong as well so they should just be addressed individually.
Now, again, I don't think those two things are linked. I think they should both happen but they don't both need to happen at the same time.
I believe we can solve both problems simultaneously by reverting BBQ back to its previous version. And WGLF, of course. Can't have one without the other.
BBQ was not only a great incentive for you to go after other survivors, but it has the added benefit of costing a perk slot while also having a great secondary effect. It is one less regression perk for a killer to run, and they are rewarded by doing so.
It would help a lot.
On the contrary I think that they are very linked. Killer being so strong and gens taking longer after 6.1 forced survivors to stop dillydallying and play efficiently, meaning that they no longer do gens casually together but split up with everyone doing their own gen. They leads to 3 gens popping first chase and killers feeling that they have to tunnel at 4 gens, to even have a chance of winning.
Everything is connected in a complicated web of conditions and influences.
What is the average chase time for a match to be considered balance while going for a 10-12 hook game.
45-60 is widely considered too long to not tunnel, so how quick should a killer be downing to make up the time differential between a 4v1 vs a 3v1.
Again, on average.
Hopefully that's better
This falls into the trap of assuming that tunnelling happens when the killer loses gens too quickly, but it doesn't, it just happens. I've personally had matches where the killer goes hard into tunnelling someone out before a single gen is even done, and that happens much, much more frequently than any game of mine for either side where the killer has a true genrushing "everyone's split up immediately with a toolbox" start.
Addressing genrushing is reigning in uncommon but unbalanced edge cases, but addressing tunnelling would be addressing a problem the game's been struggling with pretty consistently for a long while. It's part of why my initial post here objected to the framing- the two problems just aren't comparable on nearly any level.
I'm not saying tunnelling should be addressed and then it's okay to wait years before toolboxes get nerfed, but that doesn't mean the two must necessarily happen together.
Thank you.
On average, probably 45 seconds. Again, I don't think this is a good way to measure it, as it's normal for your first few chases to be longer due to abundant resources, then your middle chases to be short due to dwindling resources and an attempt at management, followed by a longer chase near the end due to despration.
The thing is, the killer can't just shift gears when things turn sour and start tunneling, most games are just at a too high breakneck speed. Its part of the meta: the meta tought killers to tunnel early, to then have maybe a breather during the last section of the match, just as the meta tought survivors to split up and pressure the killer from all fronts. Heck, if so regularly 3 gens pop during the first chase, then there isn't any breathing room for the killer to decide that its now time to tunnel, they either decide early or perish (or play potatoes, in which case it doesn't matter).
Somewhere earlier I proposed an old BBQ like basekit mechanic, to give killers a sort of secondary victory condition, again. I think that this would do wonders to the game. Besides that, I think that gen speeds and tunneling need to be tackled as a whole, if you fix one part without the other, you will severely imbalance the game.
So I agree that the BBQ and even WGLF BP bonuses should've just been made base kit. I think that's generally a good thing, and probably one of the few things that shouldn't be controversial.
But nearly everything else is just plain wrong here.
Killers can switch to tunneling at any time in the game. There's a reason people tend to distinguish between tunneling at 5 gens, vs *switching* to tunneling in the late or end game.
The meta didn't dictate tunneling, this is backwards. The gen kick meta locked down games in the killers favor for months. The point that was driven home incessantly was 'do gens fast, or you're guaranteed to lose this match'. You're seriously confusing cause and effect here. Not to mention nerfs like circle of healing, for example, where early game time spent hunting and blessing were deleted, and survivors' only option is to do gens at the match start now.
Similarly, killers don't just 'tunnel because they don't have breathing room'. Again, when killers could choose to lock down the game for 30 minutes to an hour, they had tons and tons of 'breathing room' and yet tunneling only got worse during that time too.
That makes sense to me but others don't see it that way apparently.
If you need to tunnel to stand a chance you don't deserve that MMR and you're boosted. The game is balanced to the point you can go for 10-12 hooks every match with players on your skill level.
Incentives don't work, only punishments.
Not my words, just what has been expressed to me in the thread.
Tunneling time average: ~50 seconds
Me: "It can't be the same length."
Given non-tunnel time average: ~50 seconds
That doesn't add up. It needs to be faster then that. You have to make up for a 4th survivor where there wasn't one doing gens healing, saving, ect. for most of the match, extra time finding more survivors, and going from ~5/6 hooks to ~11 and the number of chases to get those hooks.
If it takes the same chase time, it's the same speed to complete your objective between the two or very close. Wouldn't that also throw the whole foundation of your argument of "tunneling is nigh impossible to counter and way too strong, but not tunneling isn't" out the window? Both would either be fine or both would be "too fast/strong". Isn't that untrue?
I'm sorry you don't personally think it's a good way to measure but it's important to have an expectation of how fast a killer should be completing their objective to be balanced with survivors speeds, especially in this context. So imo you're gonna have to give a better one or explain the one you gave.
It's because not everyone's experience is the same. However, just because our experiences are different, that doesn't mean either one of them should be invalid. In my experience, the day I stopped camping or tunneling was when I started finding it less and less necessary. I very rarely do either one now and never feel like it's needed. For others, they may have the opposite effect. Maybe they like playing different killers than I do or enjoy different play styles.
All that aside, and this is my opinion, there can be no "true" balancing of this game. MMR would have to be so incredibly tight that everyone is matched against, and with, people of similar skill only. Regardless of queue time. The only outliers being people who are partied up, when one is lower MMR than another.
Then after that and several months of play, they might have an idea of what/who is stronger at every MMR range. They could make basekit changes to either side to try and balance it out. Killers would have to be done on a case by case basis most of the time, which could take a long while.
There was a time when I thought incentives could work in this game. They always just end up with a loophole though.
I think @Ryuhi might have mentioned comeback mechanics before. As it stands tunneling/camping can be used at the start of the game or as a comeback mechanic. I think it should be hard punished as is. Then both sides given some sort of basekit mechanic that might help turn the match around. Gen speeds based on hook count, maybe a moment of slower movement speed if a chase takes a certain time, quicker hook timers, etc... Those aren't great ideas just throwing something out there.
I know it might sometimes feel punishing to the player/s doing well but at least it would provide hope to the losing side. Might help prevent some DC's, and make it a little more fun, if the match doesn't feel like a loss at the start. Then again, without a lot of trial it would also have some loopholes
I understand they have different experiences. I didn't say they were necessarily wrong there nor was that my intention, just that they pretty much have a completely opposite view.
I see points to both sides of the argument. The main thing in contention is what can we mostly agree on as some middle ground.
I don't know if that's going to happen, but that's one reason why the forums exist. To discuss things like this.
So far we at least got that both sides really need to treat each other better. Which is better than most of these conversation I've seen in the past on this subject.
You are also, presumably, applying pressure on other Survivors. You are using Pop, PR, etc etc since you're not tunneling one person out.
Your mere existence as a Killer allows you to buy time. By not tunneling someone out, you make it clear you're a threat to everyone and they cannot just sit on gens while you kill their friend. This, once again, allows you to proc PR and Pop.
I thought those incentives weren't strong enough to actually matter in regards to tunneling or not?
It doesn't buy you more time than you lose by not tunneling though. It's not even close.
The chase times still need to be a lot faster than if you tunnel someone out.
When tunnelling, only the first three chases need to be fast. After that, you can be very slow in your chases and still win, because survivors get way less progress. Also, when tunnelling, if you're aggressive enough, you're going to be getting half-chases for the second and third chase, since the survivor will still be injured when you pick up their trail. And if you chase them in the area where they were hooked, then they've likely already used some resources in the initial chase.
And once that survivor is dead, you can take way longer on your chases.
Why? Why do they need to be so significantly shorter when you aren't tunneling? The game isn't balanced around someone being dead at 4 or 5 gens.
There does seem to be an incorrect assumption. Tunneling doesn't take extra time. The game is, for all intents and purposes, over when someone dies before 3 gens are done unless the Killer hard throws. You are also not going to be getting a full chase when you're tunneling. They are already injured in a disadvantageous position, it should be a 20 second chase, if that.
When you aren't tunneling, you are getting PR and Pop every down for four downs. That's 55% regression, but let's say it's only 50%. That's at least 45 seconds every down, not accounting for time saved via interruption, healing, rotating, travel time etc etc.
Pop and PR aren't going to STOP people from tunneling, but that's not the argument you're making right now. Pop and PR buy you massive amounts of time, especially when you are NOT tunneling.
ok but why are you telling me the benefits to tunneling? Isn't that my point?
Those are all the reasons why your non-tunneling chases need to all be even faster.
I'm telling you because 'this is how fast chases need to be' isn't a good way to show the difference between tunnelling and non-tunnelling.
Because doing so makes your objective go a lot slower and that's the chase time given for tunneling to be even, not ahead. I already pointed that out. That's not the time for 1 survivor dead at 4-5 gens. 50 seconds per chase is too long for that. So if the time for non-tunnel to be even is the same, that would me there's no time difference between the two in terms of objective completion. But that goes against what you were saying before.
It's not that tunneling takes extra time. Its that tunneling allows you to spend more time in chases since after 3 you get your slowdown from killing one survivor. Which as you said, is stronger than anything the killer has at their disposal. If you don't then you don't have that until around your 8th or 9th hook, which is late game and doesn't really matter anyway since that's maybe 1 gen.
Ok so what values can you tell me that are? If its not how fast the objective gets done compared to your opposition?
What would insinuate that MMR is working most of the time, which he have established time and again, it is not. I like winning, so I sweat a lot; when MMR is working this puts me up against a lot very, very good survivors, and against those I doubt that anyone could go for 10-12 hooks, in this cases you NEED to play dirty or to perish and get rediculed "OMG. 2500h and you still lost and got not one kill. Baby killer.", stuff like this always makes me wonder whats wrong with this people, do they always perform at top level without ever having a bad game? But I digress ... when MMR is not working, well then everything goes and the strangest stuff can happen. I usually let one survivor go in that case, if I can idenfity a newby usually them, but until one is dead, even a newby can pressure gens just like everyone else.
I get the feeling that punishments never work, they only harden the sentiments on both sides and make some people extra stubborn. I really think that old school BBQ BP bonus as basekit would help a lot, with the added twist that the multiplier only increases as long as all 4 survivors live, ie once the killer kills off one survivor they are stuck with whatever bonus they got at that point. Just try that out BHVR, its not like you would be losing much, but could gain a lot.
I didn't mean to direct the experiences part right at you. I meant it more for all of us even though I sometimes forget it for a moment.
I agree 100% that everyone should treat other better. I do it all the time. If the killer had a bad game I will often wait until everyone leaves and let them hook me. I do the same for survivors. I'll try not be so vicious with killer powers if I'm making quick work of things. Survivor is often more tricky, I can't just stop and do totems or chest unless I know the outcome already. Otherwise I feel like I'm throwing the game for the other 3 and that isn't being kind to them.
We can all also agree I think that whlf and BBQ never should've lost the bonuses. Whether the perks do anything else or not they were great for the grind
This has actually been a pretty healthy thread compared to most lol. It's always good seeing points of views and ideas, even if they aren't always agreed with.
My biggest complaint with this game is matches being so fast I can't even enjoy it, it's either gen rush, survivors giving up, or get stomped, no middle ground.
Until there is no more killers and the game dies out because of it.
They it should not be balanced in the eyes of the average survivor either or it will be favoritism.
There will always be survivors to play this game because it's the more chill less stressfull experience but there wont always be killers since it's such an exhausting and pressuring experience.
Yeah afaik no one really disagrees that MMR and matchmaking are a mess frequently. The divide there seems more to be "improve it or erase it?" But that's a different conversation as far as I can see.
That's why I specified that it was evenly skilled matches being discussed as well. I'm not sure how much of the thread you read so apologies if I'm going over what you already did. Supposedly the level where you can go for those 10-12 hook games is where you skill level is. If you need to tunnel to win it's because the survivors are better than you so you needed to resort to the "nigh impossible to counter" playstyle of tunneling. Which for context, "counter" was getting at least 2 out.
As for the incentive vs punishment thing, yeah I would also like an incentive. But the opposition on that was essentially that without an incentive stronger than tunneling there's basically no point since if you want to win you'll still tunnel. We can't do that because tunneling is already way too strong. If it doesn't stop basically all tunneling why even consider it? Also that BBQ had little if not no effect on dissuading people and it was really the fear of DS that did that.
Why would you be killing someone only at your 9th hook???
Because you're spreading hooks? If you're intentionally not tunneling anybody, ping ponging between survivors, and going for 10-12 hook games you'll end up with a hook spread such as 2-2-2-2, 2-2-2-1, or 2-2-1-1.
That's around your 8th hook before someone dies.
I've actually started using the 400 something BNP's and toolboxes I have and have been encouraging my friends to do the same. Deja Vu is pretty much a staple in my builds now.
There's so much gen defense(as usual), anti loop, nerfed maps, and tunneling; none of which are the killer's fault. But the game currently is a race to the finish.
If a survivor dies before all gens finished you lose. It's pretty gnarly.
I think part of the problem here is that the conversation has become a hard binary between "Tunnelling" and "Not Tunnelling", as though the latter is a single strategy the same way that the former is. It does also seem, and I don't mean to put words in your mouth, like you're expecting "not tunnelling" to involve the same gameplay, effort, and type of value as tunnelling, which it does not.
Tunnelling is, boiling it down as bluntly as possible, taking a shortcut on overall skill expression to put all of your eggs in the "short chase times" basket. It's making a play that allows you to focus on that one skill, that one aspect of good killer gameplay, and have that be the thing that wins you games over everything else.
If you aren't making that play, though, you're going to be using all of the other skills, so expecting that the chase times must necessarily be shorter is somewhat missing the point. You don't need them to be shorter because you're using everything else at your disposal.
Bruh. We've been arguing about completely different things holy ######### I'm so dumb.
I go 1-2-1-2-3-1-4-3-2-3-4 as a starter. That can be adjusted as the game goes on. It's not 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 nor is it 1-1-1
Well, and of course, there is tunneling and there is tunneling. You can do some suplemental or tactical tunneling, that will ferret SWFs out and cause them to take protection hits, thus opening themselves up, when they would otherwise have been sticking to their gens, even if your intention never was to tunnel that player out, yet. Is this also taking a shortcut? Many players, myself included, are under the impression, that a team, that sticks to gens before friends and only goes to safes in the last second and maybe even letting someone slip into hook stage 2, are next to impossible to beat. You just can't generate enough pressure and the second you turn your back, they jump on their gen again. It feels mercilessly from the killers POV, just like tunneling feels for many survivors.
The best natural games are around killers with natural slowdown, like Pinhead, Pig or Sadako, as these games give the survivors a solid, tangible side objective besides slamming gens. Maybe every killer needs their very own objects and side objective? This would be a massive undertaking, but could be a way to go.
I do agree that the best games come from natural slowdown, but you don't need that to be part of your power. Playing killer well results in natural slowdown to begin with; teams that refuse to get off generators to go save are extremely vulnerable to someone else being chased and downed before their generator can be completed, and once you've got two people on hook you're in a winning position.
However, yes, there is a slight distinction between hardcore tunnelling and just harrying a freshly unhooked survivor to ferret out their altruistic teammates. I'd consider the second one kind of irrelevant for these conversations, though, since most anti-tunnel generally revolves around when a survivor is downed or picked up again.
That's not what I expect and you're right those things are different. However the main issue is the power/speed difference.
What else are you using that's making up the difference without faster chases?
Slowdown? Tunneling someone out is the best slowdown by far.
Macro? Having good macro but slow chases isn't a winning formula as we've seen with killers like Sadako, Pig, Dredge ect. The gens go too fast for that, especially with a 4th survivor left alive when they don't need to be.
But you still need to use these things, and use them well, and also still have good chases. But since tunneling provides the best slowdown and the fastest objective completion, your chases can't just be good, they need to be better than if you were tunneling to make up the difference; while having more work to do and more things to juggle and also preform well on. Not to mention actually playing your killers power well.
You need good slowdown, good macro, and faster chases (objective completion) together to even start to compete. But the allowed chase time even if you tunnel is already short (imo) so I was curious as to how much better at chase is the killer expected to be?
If that's not necessary then I would like to know what is believed to be making up the difference. Since it can't be slowdown and macro alone isn't enough without really fast chases. That's why killers like Nurse and Blight are at the top and exceptions, they can do both very fast so they don't need to tunnel and can make up the difference. But that's not the majority of the roster.
This is just starting to sound like the infamous "just pressure gens 4head" meme.
The thing that's making up the difference is what you're describing, it's natural slowdown and good macro play.
These aren't perk or power related things, to be clear, every killer can do them. I'm sure you've seen others lay it out before, in fact I think I might have said it elsewhere in this thread to counter the idea that tunnelling actually is 'forcing your objective', but I'll go over it again just to be sure we're on the same page: While survivors are alive, your ideal situation is one survivor on the hook, one in chase, and one peeling off to get the save, leaving only one on generators. So, macro play largely consists of keeping survivors occupied like this through whatever means are at your disposal (mostly downs and hooks, but power-specific elements and even injuries count to varying degrees), but it's also keeping a good working knowledge of where each survivor is, it's zoning survivors (the base mechanic, not a power thing), it's creating and capitalising on deadzones, and then it's also any power or perk specific stuff you might want to keep in mind like Jigsaw boxes or defending hexes or what have you.
Doing this well is comparably strong to tunnelling, it's just harder. You do need fast chases, yes, but on top of that you need to minimise your downtime and keep the pressure up across multiple survivors at once. Tunnelling allows you to ignore almost all of this save for chase speed, making it much easier on top of it being stronger, but it's not so much easier or stronger that playing the match without hardcore tunnelling is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy for anyone that isn't a top tier player controlling a top tier killer.
If there is a meme regarding "just pressure gens", the only problem with it is the last word. You don't pressure gens, you pressure survivors.
This is why I don't really see how you'd need faster chases playing normally. If anything, you'd need faster chases in order to tunnel, because you're leaving three survivors unoccupied while you're attempting it and that's a lot of generator progress. By contrast, keeping multiple survivors occupied at once gives you much more breathing room.
So essentially the expectation is that by the time the survivor has gotten unhooked and back on a gen, you have already found, chased, downed, and hooked someone else and you need to keep that cycle permanently up throughout the entire game to be comparable to the same thing you would get by tunneling. As long as you got it going early enough.
Which if that's the case ok. I was already aware of that loop. But I was missing the part where your "time limit" for it to be good enough is by the time the hooked survivor gets rescued and progressing gens again. Without that it just sounded like it was expected that it would be the same even though there's an extra person running around while you're in chase with someone else. Which didn't make sense.
Eh, kinda?
Certainly, you should at least be chasing someone by the time they're back on a generator, because even if they don't stop to heal that's going to take a few seconds. I don't think you need to have 100% uptime on this loop because the amount of damage it does to survivor's efficiency overall is enough that you can afford lulls where progress actually happens-- especially if you're running slowdown perks, then you're undoing some of that progress when you start the loop back up again.
A big thing to remember when conceptualising this kind of thing is that stopping generators from progressing is a tool, not a goal. Survivors getting some generators done is a given, you can't stop them from doing it. With that in mind, your goal is to slow it down enough that you're burning through map resources and hook states, to make each successive generator even slower than it already would've been naturally, to make each chase faster, to get closer to winning...
Again, the macro matters, a lot. Things like using up map resources and shrinking the effective play area by selectively ignoring certain generators heighten your lethality as the game progresses, instead of putting you on the back foot because survivors are closer to their objective than you are to yours.
I'm being vague on purpose, by the way, because this isn't a single tactic or playstyle, it's just killer fundamentals. It's broadly applicable to a bunch of different playstyles and tactics- you can enable this by opting for stealth and punishing survivors that don't heal, or you can build to aggressively chew through resources and leave survivors nothing to work with, and so on and so forth. You don't need to perform like a god to get these things working, either, if you're in a fairly matched game (and I know that's not a given, but we should probably assume it for discussions like these) then you're gonna get a lot done just by keeping survivors occupied.
Ok first off to make sure we're talking about the same thing, the numbers I used were referring to the number of hooks on each person, so 2-2-2-2 would be everyone on death hook. As the 3rd hook is death hook.
It seems like you're putting it in as which survivor you hook, so survivor 1 then survivor 2 1 again ect. and the order you go in.
That said, the version you gave here is a lot more reasonable, but in my experience that still gets you labeled as a tunneler fairly often because supposedly "you tunneled 2 people at the same time (#1 and #2)" or "I got death hook before you even hooked #4 once, so you tunneled me". Which to me sounds silly, and given your playstyle I would assume you agree.
Which if we're taking those player into account, in order to "not tunnel" what was given was not a good enough hook spread. If we agree that that's an unreasonable ask, then we can go with your version. Which to me sound reasonable enough. Tunneling is still stronger, but that playstyle should be good enough for most matches.
Right now I do take those players into account because of how many I bump into, in and off the game. So when I said and heard "no tunnel, 10-12 hooks", it was going for max hook spread or close to it. Since that's what's been expressed to me as what that means (not by you just to be clear). Which is also why I also said the survivors have to be... not great to do so. Again, at least if we agree that idea is unreasonable. If so, I'm adjusting my playstyle lol.