You don't get tunnelled frequently. You are just biased.
Scott Jund conducted an experiment and survey on tunnelling. In his experiment, he played 50 matches and recorded the number of matches where anyone on his team was tunnelled. Tunnelling occurred in 5/50 (10%) matches and in only 2 of the matches, the killer was deliberately tunnelling. In the other 3 matches, the tunnelling occurred due to survivors making stupid mistakes. Considering there are 4 survivors, the odds of a specific survivor being tunnelled out is 1/4*10% = 2.5%.
He also conducted a survey, which gathered 3103 responses. 80% of people were tunnelled less than 40% of the time. Only 7% of people were tunnelled more than 60%. The average tunnel frequency was 27% (assuming the average of each range). Though, the real values are extremely likely much lower since the survey question was "how often do you feel like you get tunnelled". It was based on feeling and their own definition of tunnelling rather than actually tracking their matches with a standardised definition. When matches were tracked, people were tunnelled (individually) 1%-3% of the time, as seen in Scott Jund's experiment and the data I discuss later.
Tunnel frequency | Percentage of responses |
|---|---|
0-20% of the time | 47% |
21-40% of the time | 33% |
41-60% of the time | 12% |
61-80% of the time | 3% |
> 80% of the time | 4% |
He also found that region and time of day had minimal impact on tunnel frequency.
It was also found that tunnel rate was correlated with escape rate, so it's possible that survivors that get "tunnelled more frequently" are not actually getting tunnelled more but are just dying more frequently due to being worse at the game.
From the data and his experiment, Scott Jund concluded that the myth of frequent tunnelling occurred due to negativity bias, which is a bias that caused people to remember and place higher weight on negative events than neutral and positive events. He also challenged anyone that thinks they get tunnelled frequently to record their gaming sessions and send them to him for proof.
The takeaway from this is to track the percentage of matches you get tunnelled. For example, someone recently posted data from 1212 matches they played (Jan-June 2024), which tracked tunnelling. Note that 18 matches were cancelled from the start, so there were 1194 matches in total. I compiled the data from it and these were the results:
- Tunnelling occurred in 49 matches (4.1%)
- In 47 of the matches, 1 person was tunnelled. In the remaining 2 matches, 2 people were tunnelled. Therefore, 51 survivors were tunnelled in total.
- There were 4776 survivors (1194*4) in total. Therefore, the odds of a specific person being tunnelled was 51/4776 (1.1%)
- In many of the matches with tunnelling, there was a DC, so tunnel rate would be lower if DCs were excluded.
Nazzzak also provided their data set of 421 matches and found that tunnelling occurred in approximately 1/12 (8.3%) of matches.
Comments
So let me see if I can sum up the forums here generally. Tunneling is:
But somehow, it's "rare" and "nobody ever tunnels" despite these being the responses in nearly every thread on these forums?
Come on.
It's definitely weird to see this really obvious contradiction in the popular narrative go unaddressed. Like, surely you can't hold both positions at once, right?
In another thread it was claimed that BHVR balances around tunneling but tunneling isn't common. That's another inherent contradiction.