Why do killers tunnel?
My fellow killer mains, please help me by letting me know your thoughts here.
When I play killer I try to leave all 4 survivors alive until everyone has been hooked at least once. I can understand that it doesn’t feel good to lose and tunneling makes it easier to put pressure on survivors but what I’m trying to understand is what is actually making killers to feel pressured to do this on a regular basis.
I’ve been playing more survivor lately because the blood point bonus is over there most of the time and I’m usually straight on a gen so I tend to be the first survivor found. 6 out of 10 games I get tunneled out. I know this is a skill issue on my part (I’m not a great survivor lol).
I guess to sum it up, what types of changes would make you feel more comfortable to spread pressure rather than focus a survivor out. (P.S. I don’t blame people for tunneling and it’s okay to play how you want to. I just want to see if there can be a world where tunneling isn’t a thing)
Comments
Prefacing this to say I play like you, preferring to spread hooks.
There are two things that cause people to fall back on tunneling:
That isn't to say tunnelling is required to beat a genrushing team. In fact, if you try to tunnel a good looper, genrush will crush you, but the fact that you do not know how much the other team is going to sweat means that not presuming the worst can result in a loss.
I don't think every killer that is tunneling is doing it out of malice. They're not trying to ruin the game for that survivor, they're just not concerned whether that's a by-product of it. Which, while tunneling remains a solid strategy, is a game design issue and not a personal failing.
I still think it's cheap, but I don't blame people for saving themselves a headache. It is just a game after all.
I tunnel if i have to. Sometimes there are games you can’t win without getting one survivor out if the team you play against is good. Some games are even not winnable with tunneling. For example a 4 man swf on eyrie of crows against a Ghostface is going to win if they don’t mess up extremely badly. The 3 v 1 is also much more manageable than the 4 v 1. I don’t feel bad when slugging, Proxy camping or tunneling because: „Survivors normally dont care about the killers fun so why should I care about theirs?“ A world without tunneling must contain a world where 4 hooking actually rewards the killer somehow.
Because sometimes you have to tunnel to have a chance to win against good teams. Survivors will play as efficiently as possible - I don’t blame them, as this is the way I play survivor as well - so killers also need to play as efficiently as possible sometimes to keep up, especially if the odds are stacked against the killer in a given match (SWF on comms, low tier killer, bad map for a specific killer, etc.). Anyone who says “you never have to tunnel under any circumstance” is either being intentionally dishonest or doesn’t play killer at all.
Sometimes I don't tunnel so much as the Survivors tunnel themselves. Poor positioning, risky decision-making and a lack of altruism or game-sense means that the team expose a Survivor I've already hooked, and as much as I don't go out of my way to get someone out of the game as quickly as possible, it also feels stupid to see an injured Survivor I've already hooked twice working on a gen directly in front of me and not to do something about it. If the whole team but one person is pre-running with Sprint Burst and stealth perks and I'm an M1 Killer with limited mobility or map control, I don't have many options other than to go for the one poor sap with no exhaustion perks and no idea what's going on who I actually have a chance of catching. If I see someone with a toolbox in the lobby I might go out of my way to find them first and harass them a bit so they can't destroy my generators in the first minute of the trial.
There's also the murkier tactic of tunnelling to exert pressure on the rest of the Survivors. If I believe the Survivors will try and help someone who's in danger, by going after the previously-hooked Survivor I can bait them into getting off gens and maybe giving me a few health states or downs to save them. And if it doesn't work then I can still secure a numerical advantage by 'pulling the ripcord' and getting rid of that Survivor.
A lot of the discussion around tunnelling assumes that Survivors have no agency around it, and that if you get targeted you might as well lay down and give up, but it's not a done deal. Sometimes a Killer's investment into tunnelling a Survivor can backfire and end up wasting precious time. If a Survivor sees the game as getting as many Survivors out of the game or even getting as close to that as possible, sometimes taking one for the team is worth it. The problem is that even though the devs have already put in a lot of protections for Survivors against the hardest forms of tunnelling, the strongest Killers can still circumvent them: Decisive Strike, Dead Hard and basekit Borrowed Time don't really matter to Nurse and Blight (and Judgement can ignore them entirely) but they absolutely wreck Trapper and Ghostface.
Definitely can understand and thank you for your respectful answer! I just hope one day that people won’t feel like they need to tunnel to have fun
Thank you everyone for your answers so far. I can definitely understand what everyone here is saying. I play solo queue a lot so that probably adds to the whole issue as well.
I want to say it would be good to add something to block hard tunneling but I know it would just cause SWFs to abuse it and killers to have really bad matches with the people who abuse anything like this. I guess I need to study survivor more and run a million anti tunnel perks in the meantime haha
It feels kind of ironic because I used to wonder why so many people ran DS as well lol
Yeah unfortunately the unhook protections are not at all enough of a deterrent for tunneling. Hard tunneling from the beginning of the game is by far is the easiest way to win the game, so people do it because they enjoy winning. I still think it's cheap and I'm still able to have a high kill rate without tunneling, but maybe that's because I'm okay with not winning literally every game (hence why I play Springtrap and Ghost Face).
BHVR has tried a couple Public Test Builds with attempts at an anti-tunneling system, but due to the amount of things that they changed and how harsh they were (resulting in affecting killers not tunneling at times as well) they were discarded because of backlash from the community.
There definitely needs to be some kind of anti-tunnel system as the difference in the ease you win while tunneling vs not tunneling is astounding, it makes it hard to balance killers as a whole, and because stronger killers can tunnel easier it makes the gap between killers even wider. And of course, hard tunneling isn't really fun for the target of it.
camping and tunneling used to be considered noob strategies that weren't effective. the idea was that you'd open yourself up to being gen rushed and it was really only effective against bad teams. but then patch 6.1 hit and made gen times significantly longer and killers significantly stronger. prior to this patch only nurse, blight and spirit were really considered competitive killers and literally every other killer was of a similar power level to skull merchant now. that's how bad killers had it back then.
patch 6.1 took nurse, blight and made them overpowered while bringing up the rest of the killers to being reasonably competitive/capable.
and because all the killers were stronger, and gen timers were longer, camping and tunneling went from being considered noob tactics to being considered easy and effective ways to win most games.
for as much as killers will say that "it's the only way to win games" a more accurate statement would be "it's the only way to win almost all of your games". because that's really the difference. if you don't camp or tunnel you're still winning 70% of your games at least if you're any good. but you add camping and tunneling to the mix now and that number can jump above 90% very easily and with streamers we're seeing it being the norm to go on 50, 100, 200+ winstreaks.
so in terms of "what can be changed" to make tunneling/camping less necessary. it's not necessary now, unless you consider winning every single game to be necessary.
Where are you getting this “70% win rate” from? As far as we know, the average kill rate is 60%, and that is kill rate not win rate. The typical player is not winning anywhere close to 70% of their killer matches, much less doing it without ever camping or tunneling. I don’t know where you are getting this from.
the typical killer is winning around 60% of their matches. the typical killer is also horrible at the game to the point that camping and tunneling mean very little. the typical killer regularly misses basic attacks. the typical killer is easily mind gamed at every loop in the game. the typical killer uses very little strategy. and yet they're winning 60% of their games.
where am i getting 70% kill rate from is.. well.. if you could read i phrased it as "if you're any good at the game." i didn't say "if you're a typical killer." why did i use 70%? because i don't camp or tunnel (not intentionally) and have above a 75% kill rate on every killer in the game. i also don't consider myself a good killer and thus view this performance as reasonably obtainable by any experienced player.
and again the point is that camping and tunneling, when used by good killers, isn't about breaking even. it's not about winning only 60% or 70% or 80% of your matches. but it's about winning almost all of your matches.
As it turns out finishing off a single survivor as soon as possible is an effective method to win. Dead survivor cant repair or help other survs.
Its similiar to a survivor focusing down a single gen as fast as possible instead of swapping between 2-7 gens every 20 seconds. Finished gens cant be regressed.
Its really just the same strategy.
a game can go from a 5 gen situation to a 2 gen situation in literally 30 seconds in some cases. the momentum can shift so fast that going easy on a team at a point where not much progress has been done yet can mean you are all of a sudden way behind and can not apply enough pressure to slow down the surv snowball. games go so quick that many times killers simply dont have the clock on their side and so will play from the start with the idea of removal.
Its just the best strategy in some cases and survs do themselves no favors many times with how they allow a tunnel to take place. in soloq of course people are not well organised, we shall see how the chat wheel works out but whats a killer to do when the surv runs right into you or you see them on a gen progressing the game. Why ignore that?
Why is there an expectation that you should have a guaranteed amount of time in the game before you are eliminated? how do we quantify when its "proper" to eliminate a survivor just so the survivor loses a little bit slower?
You risk getting eliminated quickly when you que up into a 10-15 minute match where eliminating you is the sole objective of your opponent.
The same applies in reverse with genrushing
I wouldn't call myself a killer main, but for me tunneling is very situational. I am aware that it is a valid strategy, but I try to avoid it until it gets "necessary" or "unavoidable":
That's roughly the main situations where tunneling seems ok to me.
Ok well, I’m not sure how you’re objectively gathering all this data about how the typical killer plays, but if most killers play the way your are describing, then the average survivor player is also equally bad at the game if they are failing to escape in most of their matches against killers who play like this. If “camping and tunneling mean very little” against the average killer, who is horrible at the game and easily mind-games at every loop, then what are you complaining about here? If you’re any good at survivor, then you should be running the killer for multiple gens in every match.
Can you share your total killer playtime and recent kill rate stats? I’d like to know how you are doing compared to your own standard for how a “good” killer player should perform.
Short answer is to get control of the game. When I play killer I tend to avoid early tunnels out of courtesy, but I'm not averse to tunneling someone out once I'm down to 2 or less gens.
But a lot of players who play for the win will tunnel someone out at the first opportunity because once that's done you really swing the game in your favour. Especially if they identify a weak player.
The easiest explanation I have is these players want to win by any means necessary. They don’t care what the entity thinks at the end or what they had to do to get the 4k, as long as there’s 4 skulls of any kind, that’s the only thing that matters.
I have multiple incredibly sweaty friends who will absolutely 4-man slug at 5 gens without a second thought and their entire Steam profile is “negative rep”, soooo… they realllyyyyy don’t care as long as no survivor is alive, even by hatch. If a hook isn’t nearby, well, all of you stay slugged even if it means “entity displeased”, they died anyway. (I personally will never understand this mindset)
Being overly competitive and saying f sportsmanlike behavior is just the expected outcome of this game these days, sadly. It’s not a fun game. It’s life or death and you need to win always.
Player removal is the best gen defense. But basically think of it this way.
Now at that point, what makes more sense. Should you go after the person who is starting their chase at one of the strongest structures in the game? Or should you go after the person you know is injured, probably getting healed, and on top of that where you likely know 2 survivors are.
The other aspect is if you don't tunnel survivors tend to get complacent and start immediately healing right under hook saving them a ton of time and pressure.
Its the most intuitive and optimal way to play dbd (proved by comp and common sense)
If killer refuse to tunnel then he give the opposite side a favour and as we know favour could be appreciated but should never be expected or demanded, with that said somehow good part of survivor mains not only actively demand it but often get personal over a fact that opposite side chose to play without selfinflicted limitations, its as ridiculous as getting grumpy or spewing death threats at your chess opponent because he chose to play the strongest opener.
So i tunnel because its the most intuitive and human thing to do, like why would i go across all map with no basekit info and choose any target that farther from death and presumably in a more safe position than unhooked survivor? no offense but starting performative chase with some random objectively undesired target is feeling too robotic and "botish" to me, its a horror pvp game-"killer vs survivors", not a "1 entertainer chained by imaginary rulebook vs 4 guests waiting for performance"
I think the answer to this question depends on what you mean by tunneling. If someone starts tunneling someone when 3 or 4 gens are done and everyone is still alive with few hook states, that's generally an understandable and unsurprising desperation move. They're doing it because they feel like they're in a corner. Loading in intending to identify a weak link and immediately shove them out is completely different and is driven by a desire to win at all costs, regardless of how anyone feels about it.
This is also a fair point, the community itself can't even agree on what the term "tunneling" means often times. For example, i once had a game where i was told i was a "tunneling scrublord" while playing a sadako and using her mori to kill someone that i literally never hooked or even downed once until they got 7 stacks because they weren't doing tape runs.
I will usually just go after whoever I see first, or whoever is at a weaker part of the map. If I have the choice between two survivors, one heading to shack and one heading to a weak pallet, I will always go for the person who went for the weak pallet, regardless of how many hooks they have.
That does sometimes lead to tunnelling because sometimes one player will be a bit clueless and stand out in the open so they are more visible than others, or will always go to a weaker part of the map. In most of my games though a person doesn't die until 7-8 hooks.
some people just enjoy the power trip
I'm of the opinion that some people use tunneling as a word to justify their loss being out of their hands.
I honestly think topics like tunneling get way more complicated than they need to be.
Sometimes the answer is just: it makes the game easier
I think people start overcomplicating when they try to come up with all these other explanations or worst-case scenarios to “justify” why people tunnel. People seem to have a hard time accepting that something is popular because it’s easier, and that’s there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
And I mean we see this all over the game.
Nurse is pretty much universally acknowledged to be the strongest killer and one who can basically ignore the rules of the game, but she still doesn’t have the highest pick rate Because she’s harder to play. Judgement isn’t as popular as Ghoul or Jason even though they’re arguably just as if not stronger, but they’re not as easy to play
Sprint burst was king for so long because it’s easy to use , there’s really no activation requirement. Windows is easy information and it’s been a very popular perk for ages because it’s easy to use.
Players are people, and people generally choose the path of least resistance. Yeah some want a challenge. But for the majority they’re gonna do what’s easiest.
That’s tunneling in most cases.
It’s not malicious, it can be done in a malicious way but more often than not it’s nothing personal. I also don’t think it’s some grand statement about the state of the game. It’s just an effective relatively easy strategy for winning and it’s not the players fault the game is built that way. I think people get kind of weird about acknowledging that tunneling is popular because it’s easy, but that’s anything in the game. People use strats because it makes the game easier, people like certain maps because it makes the game easier. People use certain add-ons, items, perk combos, and meta because it makes the game easier. It’s normal. I don’t think tunneling is excluded from this.
I think when people start framing these topics as some kind of consequence, threat, or some deeper psychological thing or statement is where I feel the conversation gets totally derailed lol
TLDR; I don’t think it’s that deep.
It’s often just easier to win that way
That's a whole lot of words to be put into a single line at the end.
But your not wrong it's easier, that Is correct. And everyone wants the easy but efficient way to win.
The reason people give reasons to things though, is due to people also stating that there is no reason to do so, because one side isn't having fun being targeted.
In this case tunneling, which weirdly enough has become a broad umbrella term, is considered toxic by some. Unfair by some. And while I won't sit here and say "hey I like it happening to me" people only ask for these people to understand that hey there can be a reason why it is happening and it's not malicious to you as the opponent. But often times they are talking to a brick wall
Different reasons. Sometimes some just want to tunnel due to their current disadvantage in the trial, some do it it because the unhooked intentionally body blocks the killer with their basekit BT and perks like DS, or sometimes the other survivors just don't make their chases appealing enough.
Reasons I have "tunneled"
-To claw back a losing game from the brink by getting one survivor out ASAP
-I can't find anyone and run into the last hooked survivor again
-Someone is being a lil turd with a flashlight or lurking near pallets constantly when i down someone else
-Bodyblocking with unhook protections.
-They litterally run into me.
The reason tunneling is such an overdone topic is because A. Ppl love to complain about/defend it B. Discussions on how to fairly disincentivise/nerf it. Unfortunately most ppl focus on A instead of constructive discussions about B.
Heck i made a thread about trying to stop hard tunneling and it's been going about 2 months and has over 400 replies and about 80% of said replies are just bellyaching 😑
I tunnel for three reasons:
1. The obvious fact that you simply have a higher chance of winning with one survivor out the game.
2. I don't get anything from not tunneling. There are usually 2 types of people if you don't tunnel. There are the one's that just play normally (I'm completely fine with that obviously), and there are the one's that start taunting as soon as you don't do it. I rather kill them quickly and give them a reason to not taunt me.
3. Also if I start tunneling at the start of the game I can always stop if it's too easy then, but I couldn't come back from that maybe if I start at the second half. So it's generally always a good idea to start like this and then stop if you want to.
Well yeah, the TLDR is short because it kinda needs to be lol.
I know why tunneling is controversial. I don’t really advocate for it but I can still understand why it’s done. Whether that makes it good for the game is a separate discussion. I don’t think tunneling being the easiest way to win is good for killers or survivors as a whole, but that the way the devs want the game so it is what it is.
The recently unhooked survivor is vulnerable because they’re already injured, so they are an easier target. At the same time, it’s also understandable why that survivor feels it’s unfair because they don’t have the same opportunity to succeed as their opponent. They’re starting the race with a broken leg. Both things can be true. The strategy can be easy and understandable from a gameplay perspective while still being an unpleasant or unfair experience for the person on the receiving end.
It’s when people try to make it out to be more than that where I feel things get lost in translation. When we start equating human survivors to non-sentient gens or make tunneling out to be some kind of personal vendetta or something is when we lose the forest for the trees. It’s easy to do and that’s why it’s done lol.
Haha yeah I still lurk on that thread. As toxic as it can be, the community sure is passionate and I love that. People go to war like it’s politics or religion it’s so divided. And while it’s a shame we can’t be more united, it’s nice to see people care so deeply about such a silly little game
At this point I'm honestly not even sure what tunneling even really is because the term is just randomly thrown around all the time.
As a solo queue player I see so many surv players that do random sh.. and then blame the killer for tunneling in the end. Like they get unhooked and start following the killer for FL save, get smacked, dc and write a long essay in endgame chat why they got hard tunneled.
Or they get unhooked and insta sit on a gen in front of the killer and also cry about tunneling.
Or the killer didnt go for every of the other 3 survs before they come back to me
Etc.
Yeah hard tunneling still exists in some games but the whole tunneling situation is blown way out of proportion by now. If you look at endgame chat or even this forum u get the feeling that tunneling happens in 90% of the matches which just isnt true