A simplified attempt at addressing tunneling
After posting my previous attempt at addressing tunneling, I was given some feedback that it was too much at once and possibly too complex. I was also made aware of some issues of unintentional or intentional sabotaging if teammates were to see a death hook survivor's aura. As such, I'm simplifying this theoretical "update" to be not only more realistic but also much more simple and easy to understand.
- Unhooked survivors have base kit 30s of elusive and haste, endurance would remain at 10s. All status effects go away when the survivor becomes healthy, and all status effects become a flat 10s when exit gates are powered. Babysitter would need to be adjusted or reworked.
- Before the killer has a total of 4 hook stages, any death hook survivor receives aura reading on all other survivors for 60s.
- For the first second after an unhooked survivor's animation is done, they have immunity to attacks (similar to Mettle of Man). This is a simple way to counter killer powers that encourage the killer to get a double hit on both the unhooker and the unhooked survivors, which then in turn encourages them to tunnel the survivor they now know has zero endurance (or dead hard).
- Possible DS rework: DS is increased to a 5s stun, but completely disables when the killer reaches 4 total hook stages. This more effectively counters hard tunneling while being much less likely to affect killers that spread hooks.
- For both sides, change the score cap to being 40k total rather than 10k in each category. In relation to tunneling, this more adequately rewards a survivor that ran the killer while being tunneled. For killers, certain killers are way harder to max out in certain categories making it much harder to reach the cap.
These changes simply focus on making tunneling harder rather than actively punishing it. I think keeping the scope to just this makes it relatively simple and easy to understand. Some key things that would need to be looked at in a future update:
- Nerfing toolboxes and key genrush perks.
- Reworking or nerfing certain perks that punish killers for spreading hooks.
- Make certain actions, such as interacting with Pinhead's box, count as a conspicuous action.
- S tier killer nerfs.
Comments
2 seems like it would only help swfs attempting to bodyblock, won't really affect solos. Aside from that still completely agree with these changes.
The idea of the aura reading in this scenario is that if the unhooked survivor is able to use the haste and elusive to slip away from the killer, they are able to easily find a survivor to get them up to full health. If they aren't able to easily lose the killer, they have the choice to 1. if they are confident in chase, they can choose to run the killer away from gens, getting a ton of gen progress done, or 2. run the killer a bit closer to an unoccupied teammate and hopefully they will bodyblock or save. A decent SWF would be able to know where their teammates are either way for bodyblocks, so this really doesn't do much for them.
I originally had it so that teammates could also see the death hook survivor's aura, but I heard some concerns about intentional and unintentional sandbagging with that. Perhaps that effect also would be better though if it was on the same 60s duration (since in my original concept this was an effect that lasted until a certain number of hooks / gens which could be a long time).
No
Care to explain what problems you have with this system?
The way i see it, elusive being the primary anti-tunnel mechanism just means that the game would revolve around maintaining eyes on the hooked survivor whenever the get pulled. Really, that just replaces one problem with another (if we even are to consider tunnelling as a problem, which I am skeptical of)
Hard tunnelling someone in 3 hooks isn't even the meta. That only happens when the the tunnel out gets two tapped every chase or die on active gens repeatedly. If the survivors play properly you have to go for a pressure reset otherwise you'll lose a playable gen split and/or go into 3v1 with high enough gen progress to where the game is guaranteed outs unless the survivors troll.
(Remember, that the win condition of killer is to have a survivor dead with 3 gens remaining and a playable three gen OR have a survivor dead with 2 gens remaining + no gen progress.)
A survivor dying so quickly that the killer does not need to pressure reset is a result of playing poorly. I do not see someone being punished for playing poorly as a game design issue.
You wouldn't argue that if survivors pop three gens for the first chase the killer should get slowdown. The killer played terribly and got punished for playing terribly. That's how well designed games work.
All of the tools that you need to counter tunnelling exist in the game entirely basekit. The problem is twofold.
A: The game's design encourages you to solve your problems not by playing better, but instead by putting on perks.
B: Solo players cannot coordinate even the most basic strategy.
Frankly DS is still top 3 perks if it stuns for three seconds. I don't think buffing individual perks is the best way to address broad system issues if that is your goal. This also punishes the killer more, which you directly said you did not want to do.
This feels like a band-aid fix to me. For the record, I am an ardent hater of the resolve mechanic, but I think 70 second hook stages and basekit BT were very good changes. All this does it that it means you wait like half a second before m1'ing the tunnel out, or just force the trade on the unhooker. Instead of a universal change, just make certain killer powers (like dracula hellfire,) slightly worse in unhook situations.
The point of endurance is to give the tunnel out time to reach a resource. Getting hit off hook with a power does not stop you from doing that if you have even decent pathing. There are exceptions of course- such as basement. I do not see that as an unhook issue, but as a broader issue with how basement completely skews the risk-reward of camping.
I mean thats fine. I've never really cared that much about bloodpoints, but that seems reasonable.
I don't really understand the point of this. This is just an issue with how soloqueue is in general. Just add voicechat and a ping system to survivor and the issue of coordinating resets vanishes entirely.
TLDR: i think most of the changes you suggest address symptoms instead of the root causes of issues. I also think that most of the changes you suggest aren't even related to tunnelling, but are instead complaints about other mechanics entirely.
I think they could add the timer speeds up if you run towards the killer to counter that type of abuse after being unhooked. I think they need to add if the killer targets the same survivor after 1 hook they gen speed repair for all survivors increases by 10% until someone else is hooked and if they survivor is hooked again the gen repair increases by 20% and If the same survivor is targeted a 3rd time it becomes a permanent 30% gen repair speed increase.
Giving a longer period of elusive and haste would make it much more possible for survivors to use LoS blockers to escape the killer, while also fixing the current terribly thought out issue that the elusive tells the killer exactly when the survivor's endurance has run out, they just need to wait for the grunts of pain and scratch marks, so as it is it effectively makes tunneling even easier.
Hard tunneling is the meta. It is mostly done on strong killers such as Blight or Nurse because they can get downs extremely quickly, even against a decent survivor. These killers are also often some of the strongest at defending gens, creating map pressure, and rushing across the map back to the hook, making no time to unhook actually safe. Even if the player is good, expecting them to consistently last a long time in chase against a Nurse or Blight, especially when most of their chases they have one health state to begin with, is unrealistic for most players, especially depending on the map and as resources may get consumed.
The solutions to tunneling are not basekit. The only basekit "solutions" are 1. other survivors (who for many people you are not queued with) to body block, which does not work on killers like Nurse or Billy, and 2. just be better. 10s of endurance doesn't do much when a killer is breathing down your neck, it just extends the chase a few extra seconds. And you're right, every other "solution" is attached to perks you and your teammates are not guaranteed to be running.
As for solo queue players being uncoordinated, yes, they are uncoordinated at least in part because of a lack of info, which the 60s of aura reading is meant to try and address. By having that 60s of aura reading, the tunneled survivor can go to a teammate for a heal if they manage to use the elusive and haste to lose the killer. If they don't manage to lose the killer, they can either bring the killer closer to a teammate in hopes that, now that they know where they are being chased, the teammate may come and take a hit, or if the tunneled survivor is confident they can last a bit longer they can take the killer far away from any gens being repaired. BHVR is adding a communication wheel which will be useful, but won't be able to give some of the more specific information needed, and it's extremely unrealistic to expect voice chat to come to this game when the community is very opposed to it. Even if voice chat was added, so many people would choose not to use it and the problem would very much still exist.
For the DS change, I am assuming you weren't around when DS was changed to 3s and became an absolute joke. Even at 4s killers such as Nurse, Blight, Henry, etc can easily down the survivor again in a few seconds. I wouldn't even consider this a buff, as even if the stun is 1s longer, the perk entirely deactivates only a few hooks into the match, preventing any kind of aggressive DS usage for the majority of the game.
As for the second of invulnerability off hook, this does make m2 abilities like Dracula's hellfire worse for camping. This effectively makes it so that the killer can either confirm a hook trade or go after the tunnel, they can't essentially get two health states for one attack and then continue to tunnel anyway.