If You Play Killer, Tunnelling Is Against Your Best Interests
Bear with me. I've got some real points to make about this.
So, tunnelling is often a hot button issue, with those who want it to be addressed often answered by comments about how it's necessary at the high level to secure any hope of victory. This, broadly, isn't true, but what I have to say doesn't really get swayed either way by that statement.
There are two reasons why tunnelling is against your best interests as killer… long term. That's the hitch, I'm only taking about long term effects, not short term. In the short term, it's very much in your best interests, it's the easiest value you can get as killer and teams that can properly counter it tend to be pretty rare. In the long term, though, two things become potential problems for you.
1: It stunts your growth with the fundamentals.
If you lean on tunnelling to gain an edge over teams that are giving you trouble, or if you go straight to tunnelling someone out from the start, you're not honing macro fundamental skills (Spreading pressure being the most notable example, but there are others too) and you're also getting much less practice on in-chase fundamentals since the chases you're taking after the first one are very often heavily stacked in your favour.
In the long term, as you gain more wins through tunnelling someone out, you'll face progressively stronger opponents, and you'll be increasingly less able to answer them with anything other than more tunnelling. You'll find yourself locked in to this one strategy even as it gets harder and more frustrating, because you won't have as much of the fundamental skills to fall back on.
2: It's unbalanced and it will get changes.
I want to be very clear about this point, and be transparent that I'm not shaming anyone or judging your gameplay. I am just noting, fully neutrally, that the unbalanced nature of tunnelling means BHVR are going to be addressing it in the future. Whether it's a slow set of incremental improvements like we've had so far, or one fell swoop that handles it conclusively once and for all, we're eventually going to reach a point where tunnelling is no longer actually easier and more impactful than not tunnelling.
Much like the previous point, in the long term that means you may find yourself up a certain creek without a paddle if tunnelling's swept out from under you and you're left at the mercy of teams who are skilled enough to make you flounder. If you don't have anything to fall back on if and when tunnelling stops working, you're going to struggle.
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Those are my points. If you don't care about long term results and only care about the short term then by all means, keep tunnelling, it's very strong. If you do care about being able to beat skilled opponents in the long term, though, tunnelling is against your best interests. Resist its allure, and be a better player for it as time passes.
Comments
Matchmaking would only make tunnelling consistently punishable at higher levels, though.
The whole point of tunnelling is that the chase is heavily stacked in the killer's favour and the survivor team needs either coordination or pretty significant skill in chase to overcome it. Matchmaking being more consistent wouldn't help lower or mid ranked matches with tunnelling at all.
Oh, that's a reminder about where the terminology "tunneling" spawned from.
As for the relevance check: The OP was written from the angle of "catching the same survivor consecutively is bad" was it not?
To clarify: The points you're making in the OP aren't actually valid.
1.) The Fundamentals of playing killer are about understanding and executing actions that ultimately stop the survivors from escaping and lead them into death. Nobody's growth as a killer is "stunted" by taking the path of least resistance if the opportunity presents itself. Killers are supposed to exploit the mistakes of survivors and a skilled killer is a master of this.
2.) Hooking the same survivor consecutively is unpopular, but not unbalanced due to the time constraint of generator speeds. Generator completion speeds can be harsh. The time a killer has to make a difference against seasoned survivors is very short, thus tactics like "tunneling" for faster eliminations and "slugging" to create more time and pressure are employed (These tactics started and persist because of fast completion speeds).
With exhaustion perks, inapposite second chances, resource distribution and varied killer power levels, the entire thing is extremely messy, and as such, a consistently comfortable hooking rotation is a pipedream at best.
Even with possible incoming deterrents, there's not much sense in trying to convince killer players to adopt such a bizarre sense of one-way etiquette in an environment where they'll probably lose the game if they do (unless they play an S-tier character).
I mean… no?
The OP was written from the perspective of "Relying on the easier chase that comes from chasing someone who just got unhooked can be harmful in the long run".
Remember, this isn't a complaint. It's advice, from one killer player to others.
I'll grant that I should've clarified that tunnelling in this context is just that, only chasing survivors who were just unhooked, but otherwise you're presenting the post in a heavily skewed way, and your initial comment still doesn't reflect even that view whatsoever.
@jesterkind FINALLY someone who gets it. I'd shake your hand if I could good sir. I've always wondered why some killers inflate their MMR by tunneling match after match, victory after victory. Only to complain that tunneling is the only way for them to win in this unfair game. Makes no sense.
A fair enough definition and one I agree with, however I suppose the follow up question is do you consider tunneling a problem in any instance? Or is tunneling fine at all times? Or is it somewhere in between? Cause thats effectively the important point we're debating about and is the reason I make the distinction.
I play mostly SoloQ survivor (apparently) and I personally consider opportunistic tunneling fair game. I believe a very important skill on Survivor is to play the macro game and put the killer into difficult macro choices. For example if I have a survivor that is on hook, or I know where a very important gen is about to pop, I will ensure I take the killer away from that objective, even if that means running to a less safe set of tiles to do so. Effectively I'm treating my hook state as a resource to exchange when the team needs it. I have even been known to deliberately "screw up" my looping or run into a dead zone to make me a more enticing target, to ensure that the killer doesn't leave me and return to hook to tunnel.
This is why I make the distinction between opportunistic tunneling and hardcore tunneling, and why I don't see opportunistic tunneling as a problem at all. If I as a survivor make tunnelling a difficult decision for the killer, they are far less likely to tunnel due to the risk that it entails... and I consider this a part of the game.
Following this mentality I have found that I very rarely see low tier killers tunneling... it is simply far too costly for them to do so. I have seen high tier killers also don't tunnel often with this play style because even for them, you can still make it a reasonable risk... of course taking them somewhere where you're gonna get downed fast is less effective vs. these killers so naturally it's all a big game of weighing it up... but you get the point.
Had nothing to add, just wanted to 🤘😁🤘
I too have a friend who plays survivor only, and love him as I do, he amuses me sometimes with the vitriol he levys at the killer in scenarios where to me it was a perfectly reasonable action for the killer to take... and tontake any other action would benthe killer throwing the game...
He has played killer 5 times and concluded its too easy... so I know the pain of explaining that perspective well xD
There's nothing inherently wrong with any kind of tunneling (otherwise, it would be bannable). However, I feel its just poor sportsmanship and lame to hard tunnel someone out of the game early just for the sake of hard tunneling and I do think early game tunneling needs to be addressed somehow by the devs.
I personally do not do any early game tunneling even though I accept not doing so will lower my chances at success. We are all playing the game to have fun, and I am not out to make anyone else's game experience a miserable one.
Pretty much exactly how I feel on it. 😅
It's one of the reasons I main Pig, since she is probably the only killer with a built in mechanic that actually discourages tunneling. If you chase a head trapped survivor, you pause their timer, thus you are actively going against the pressure the RBT gives you. 😁
I suppose the short version of all of the above, is while I don't tend to tunnel myself (I tend to play more for fun than kills and am probably one of the few players who still gives hatch), I do also hold the opinion that expecting the killer not to tunnel when you serve up a teammate like an hors d'oeuvres is wishful thinking, and I wish more survivors would consider that before they unhook me 🥺
Well then you admit that the killer is on a time clock that pressures him into focusing out certain survivors, which taken to its extreme (or most optimal) is just tunneling.
Edit: Oh wait, you didn't even get that far. You just think simply seeing other survivors and then going for them one by one is gonna cause team-wide massive pressure. I had a lot more to say, but no, I'm done.
…Again, why are you assuming this isn't strategic and purposeful?
If you're playing properly well, then you'll already know (or strongly suspect) where all the survivors are, and you'd choose the one that'd cause the most damage to the survivor team, like going towards any gen with two survivors on, or going to a survivor on a central gen, or a survivor that's already injured, whatever.
It's not just "see survivor, walk to survivor, don't think about it".
Someone else already tried that one, friend.
Killers trying to win as efficiently as possible: “no skill”, “toxic”, “trash”, “bad sportsmanship”, “git gud”
Survivors trying to win as efficiently as possible: “just doing their objective”, “you want to punish people for playing with their friends” (SWF on comms)
Killer players - play however you want and don’t feel bad about it. It’s only fair because that’s what so many on the survivor side demand for themselves. The only people who are going to get mad at you are survivor-only players who would get curb-stomped if they ever tried playing killer themselves.
I feel like a broken record, but this post is not aimed at shaming or judging killer players. I am also a killer player. I'm making an argument that is wholly divorced from how survivor players will feel about you or your gameplay.
Not surprised the usual suspects derail your thread @jesterkind
It can be discouraging to post; when its met with ad hominems, false equivalencies, and contextually ignorant responses.
Understanding your message though; and I agree. There’s a time and a place for tunneling, but generalizing it as 100% go to strategy in every situation, without considering context or adapting your gameplay, works against a killer’s best interest in the long run.
You will struggle once you start facing higher MMR opponents.
It’s like using a calculator in math. Sure, it’s helpful, and sometimes even necessary; but if you rely on it for everything, you don’t develop the core skills you’ll need later. Once you reach higher level math; calculus, derivatives, integrals, linear alg etc…. You’re expected to actually understand and apply the foundations you've built. You can’t lean on shortcuts like WolframAlpha, Symbolab, Desmos, Calculators forever.
Same with DBD: if you don’t develop your fundamentals like pressure, chase skills, map awareness, reading(not literary but maybe lol) you’ll hit a wall and come to the conclusion "tunneling is the only answer"
With the changes on the horizon your last point, yes, if BHVR intends on discouraging this playstyle; you really are going to struggle as a killer if this is your go to strategy. But we just dont know what they have planned.
Personally I would love the game to discourage both camping and tunneling, I dont do it myself out of respect for my opponents. If I lose, its not because I "chose not to tunnel" it could be due to so many other things, thats fine too.
And people really need to be a bit more humble, but this is the internet; losing is apparently seen as the ultimate weakness for whatever reason. So admission of it is rarely seen on the forum, and admission of messing up anything else in their play… honestly I haven't seen it yet.
Which is understandable given the responses you got just in this post. You are dogpiled with just nonsense.
Did you read the post? Genuinely.
Speaking of long term when the game is over 9 years old.
Yeah?
It doesn't look like it's dying any time soon, you still have the ability to think about your long term results.
chase is heavily stacked in the killers favor?
no not really chase is completely dependent on survivors skill and how competent survivors are at doing gens since a good survivor can run for 3+ gens in the first chase and a bad survivor goes down in 30 seconds
Tunnelling makes the chase heavily stacked in the killer's favour. Regular chases are closer to equal, favouring survivor on some maps.
Remember, if you're chasing someone that was just unhooked, that survivor starts the chase injured and directly next to you. That's two huge elements of chase tilted in your favour.
Well I'm re-reading it, and it definitely boils down to "taking the path of least resistance is bad, learn better 'skill' instead."
It's misleading advice to try to get killers to "tunnel" less.
The OP was answered with an example and explanation. It's hard to argue that posts like this don't crop up largely because of all the complaints about getting caught again and the crooked, anger-driven insistence that it's an imbalanced issue (in complete ignorance of the time constraint against the killer).
I mean, you're just wrong on both counts. Firstly, tunneling strategically IS a fundamental. Second, tunneling is not unbalanced just because you personally don't like facing it.
and it's okay for matchmaking to do so because that way everybody would see how extremely situational the strat is rather than constantly reading "tunneling is overpowered" takes.
i mean yeah, game requires huge amount of macro knowledge in order to compete with truly good killers.
But matchmaking would actually help even lower ones because those bruteforce tunneling players would quickly get out of lower skill levels and then they'd just face the wall at some point. Every PvP game i played has something that basically stomps newer players (champs like Nasus in League that prey on other players not knowing wave management; Negev and PP Bizon in CS2 etc.) but people don't really have good time when they suddenly get to know their strat gets hard punished if they bruteforce it.
It is an imbalance issue. I'm coming at this from the killer perspective, so you know it's not driven by anger or annoyance from having to deal with it, and it's pretty plain to see as far as I'm concerned.
If a killer chases someone as soon as they're unhooked, that survivor starts the chase injured, directly next to the killer, and with a good likelihood of not being near resources. It takes no effort or skill for the killer to stack the chase heavily in their favour, and it takes considerable effort and skill to beat them.
On its face, that's pretty obviously unbalanced. I don't see a way around that. Equally, if you rely on leveraging something unbalanced too heavily, you won't know how to play without it, and you'll have a harder time after a certain point.
See above. This isn't about what I like facing, and I have actual reasons for saying it's unbalanced.
well at that point that's the unhookers fault for not bodyblocking or in the usual case when the unhooked starts blocking me when i'm going after the unhooker because they have endurance. to clarify i have done this as survivor too and have gotten re-hooked because of it
I mean, what if they can't?
Being able to bodyblock for the teammate who just got unhooked is pretty dependant on the killer not being able to easily go around you. It's a very situational counter for a very universal tactic on the killer side, and if it doesn't work out, the killer gets massive value.
Sometimes you get into situations in this game that are simply bad luck. Sometimes you get off the Hook, the Killer is patrolling, sees you, goes to smack the unhooker, and hits you and decides to waste not want not. Sometimes, you go to heal in a corner and the Killer simply finds you. Sometimes you mistime the Deliverance and mistakenly unhook too close to the Killer. It happens. The game is unpredictable that way.
Killers are given unhook notifications for a reason - it's to find and chase Survivors. Sometimes, that means they end up chasing Survivors off hook. One of the tooltips even states that checking on hooks is a good spot to find Survivors, and common sense dictates that SOMEONE has to come save the hooked Survivor usually (unless certain perks are in play), meaning it's intended for the Killer to do this, the Devs see no problem with it.
This is a feature not a bug, unfortunately - blame BHVR for this.
That isn't bad luck, though. That's the killer intentionally leveraging a basekit unbalance and you not being able to do something about it.
The killer intentionally targeting you because you're at a severe disadvantage isn't the same as the killer stumbling across you while you're trying to heal.
Tunneling is in my best interests because it works now. And if it does get nerfed, then I'll just adapt to whatever becomes the optimal strategy. Seriously, I'll adapt to whatever meta the game turns into. That is what I do in the other PvP games I play, and it's fine.
Your logic is also wrong, because you're assuming everyone wants easy games. I purposely try to keep my MMR number as high as possible, so I can have the harder games. So yes, I really should tunnel.
Genuinely, I don't want to be rude, but is it even worth me continuing to repeat that if you don't care about the reasoning I laid out then the advice isn't for you? It seems like nobody's listening to that.
If you want to tunnel for harder games and you're willing to adapt if and when it's nerfed properly, this post isn't aimed at you.
Your post is titled "IF YOU PLAY KILLER", which means you're making a huge blanket statement for all killers.
I then go on to clarify multiple times what context my statements are relevant to. I do believe this to be true overall of the killer role, but I respect some people have different priorities to me.
Tunneling is nothing new and the game has been around for a long time. The reality is you cannot stop it and neither can bhvr without making the survivor invincible which we've already seen the result of. DS used to make survivors invincible. They could repair a gen right in front of you without worry. If you grab them you get stabbed. That's the kind of stuff that happens when you remove the ability to "tunnel".
Well, the first argument applies either way, but for the record I don't actually think it's impossible to fix tunnelling. Honestly, I don't even think it'd be that hard?
If it were me, this is what would be on a PTB to test: When unhooked, survivors lose collision instead of gaining Endurance, alongside the basic Haste. Both last a little longer, both cancel on Conspicuous Action, and survivors can't use items until the effect disappears.
Fixes tunnelling, can't be abused, everyone wins.
Either way, BHVR are planning on weakening tunnelling, and have been trying to this whole time. There's a good chance they'll eventually succeed.
Lose collision for how long? Killers already chase unhooked survivors and wait out the endurance timer. If the timer last too long then the survivor can troll. Think old Freddy where awake survivors still affect M1 aiming.
That'd need to be tested, but I think fifteen seconds would probably strike a good balance?
Enough time to use the Haste to make distance if the killer's trying to wait it out, but short enough that a survivor lingering to be annoying will still be vulnerable soon enough.
Again, that's outside the scope of this post for the most part, though.
I feel a strange sense of loss.
I have a sick suspicion that because he only posted Killer-sided takes, he may have been targeted by people who dislike that. The same occurs for the downvote system - I know, because I am currently being targeted that way for talking about Killer side here, and it's 100% worse when I use an avatar that is a Killer (I can prove it, I can show you posts from when I had Cheryl as my PFP and they didn't get near the amount of hate I do now), just like when I used to be on Reddit. It's why it needs to go, it doesn't promote discussion, it only promotes trolling and targeted harassment.
Daniel did not deserve the ban, he did not post anything problematic, he did not harass anyone, and he did not post anything that was an issue to anyone. He just happened to post EXTREMELY Killer-sided takes that while tone deaf were harmless. I have seen this with countless other people here too - almost always Killer-sided posters, almost never Survivor-sided ones.
If it's not direct favoritism or targeting, then something is off with the ban detection or people are getting false flagged. That needs addressing.
Can't say if it was deserved unless I saw what got him banned lol.
I'm not super surprised though.
I strongly agree with this one.
The existence of a downvote system is exactly why I really dislike Reddit. It doesn't promote discussions, it replaces them in the worst way possible.
Just downvoting and moving on completely defeats the point of being on a platform meant for discussing and talking about things.
Let's not make things worse. Discussing bans/forum policy in a thread is also against a rules. I've seen some survivor accounts get banned before and I was really surprised when it happened, but like Pulsar said, without seeing the post that caused the incident impossible to say.
But let's not derail @jesterkind 's thread, he's put so much work into arguing with so very, very many people :).
only the case if you are brand new to killer
otherwise you should and often need to tunnel as the 4v1 is impossible even for nurse and blight
I'm just gonna leave this here. Most recent official stats, 69% kill rate at the top end.
Yeah, really struggling. They're merely defeating their opponents more than twice as often as the survivors are escaping.
these stats are literally useless and serve no purpose for balance talks
Translation: The data doesn't fit the narrative you want, so you'll dismiss it wholesale, and not even consider things like context or having a discussion about it.
I never said anything about balance, just that the data directly contradicts your exact statement.
It's not an imbalance issue because the chances are pretty good that you get to a window or pallet within your 10 seconds of endurance + speed boost, especially if you did the smart thing while on hook and considered where you ought to go next if a teammate performs an unsafe unhook on you.
And even if you don't make it to a pallet or window, so what? You're on a team of 4 people vs 1 and there's a strict time constraint. You can't elevate the way you feel over what's fair in a time-sensitive asymmetrical scenario. You're supposed to understand what you're signing up for before you press the ready button.
You can't have an environment where the survivors are ultra safe, can finish their objective minutes from the start, with only a few killers that can handle it.
How many of these idiot-proof style handholds are going to be installed before DbD transforms from a game into a horror-themed ride? The better question is 'why are people pressuring the devs to do this?'
Having read a lot of the responses here, I'm not sure the message is getting through.
Short term - Tunneling is going to get you wins with little effort.
Long term - You're going to eventually face opponents who are better able to deal with tunneling.
That's about the gist of it, right?
the actual translation: matchmaking in this game is atrocious to the point where stats are absolutely irrelevant for balance talks. Good killer player will have enormously high killrate even after passing soft MMR cap, good survivor team will have enormously high escape rate even after passing soft MMR cap. Even with these stats being irrelevant, Blight and Nurse are the strongest killers in dbd tho, but how does Freddy manage to be killer with highest killrate even after passing soft cap at all?
That's the best case scenario, and it's already kind of questionable. Okay, you've got a good chance of getting to a window or pallet within ten seconds- let's be generous and assume it's a good window or pallet, and not a filler rock loop or a Z window or something.
So, you now are playing a chase where the killer's right on top of you and you're injured, which the killer went out of their way to engineer with zero effort. That's already not great even though you do have a resource, but hey, if it were just that we wouldn't really have a problem, you'd just have the occasional annoying match.
However, what if there isn't a resource nearby? What if the killer is able to bypass your Endurance somehow, what if the killer you're playing against gets to ignore whatever resource you do get to?
At that point, you're just dead, because the killer decided that you don't get to play. It's not "what I feel is fair vs a time constraint", it's something obviously just being unfair and the time constraint not being that relevant because minimising the time constraint is already the killer's job. These hypotheticals aren't one-in-a-million chances, they're very realistic, and the counterplay to these things is locked behind either specific perks (that can be hard to use) or behind coordination (which is borderline impossible in solo queue).
As survivor, when you queue up, you should be willing to get chased and to potentially die. You should also get to expect to actually play and have it not be up to random chance if you get any agency in keeping yourself alive. Tunnelling isn't as bad at stripping away that agency as it used to be, but it's still the biggest obstacle in the way.
Two final points, since this is getting long already.
First, you say survivors can "finish their objectives minutes from the start". I will point out here that their ability to do this is getting a serious nerf in the QoL roadmap, BEFORE any hypothetical anti-tunnel. That's just flat out getting addressed and weakened noticeably, and people keep ignoring that for some reason?
Second, these things are not handholding. They're balance changes. Neither side has really received anything I'd call handholding in the time I've been playing, save for maybe the auto-aim on Singularity? Even then, that's not particularly egregious.
What we have seen is basic gameplay issues get addressed, like solo queue getting significantly less information to the point of it being a detriment, or hatch being a free-win scenario for dedicated teams, or killers being able to stall out regular gameplay via either staring at a survivor on a hook from inches away or by aggressively defending a cluster of generators. These things aren't handholding.
Yep.
That, plus, tunnelling is eventually going to get weaker, inevitably. It's on this roadmap, and if those changes don't make it weaker, that means more changes will come in the future. Long-term, tunnelling has downsides to your experience from those two angles.
Correct, yet there are many ways in which you can manufacture this scenario through zoning, proxying and utilizing existing deadzones.
It’ll be interesting to see how they approach anti-tunneling, but I hope it’s left to the Survivors discretion and not an automatic system like the anti-camp bar.