Tunelling is so bad for the game
Today I witnessed the worst tunnel I have ever seen. I played solo-queue and went against MiNa on Coal Tower.
One of my teammates (Claudette) goes down at 5 gens. Killer soft camps but stays just far away enough so the unhook meter doesn’t activate. Another teammate (Sable) goes for rescue. At this point, Mina is in main event power (or whatever it’s called) and comes straight to the hook, eats the endurance with main event, gets Claudette down again and re-hooks her straight away. I’m sure you see where this is going… repeats the process and then mori’s Claudette. I’m on a gen but other two team mates give up and go AFK at hooks and get killed. Mina downs me whilst they’re hooked so I abandon.
No interaction, no chases, no side objectives … just another boring game over within 5 minutes and barely any BP’s.
Listen, I get the whole “tunelling is a viable stratedgy” rhetoric. 3 gens have popped and you only have 1 hook, I get it! Tunnel in the end game to secure a kill, I get it. But in the example I’ve just discussed, a gen hadn’t even popped and Claudette clearly was not a threat to this players ego… so my question is… why? Before anyone says “I’m not responsible for other players’ fun”, please explain how that is fun? I just don’t understand.
I really felt sorry for the Claudette player. What an unfun and frustrating game to play. And no, I’m not talking about the “survivor rule book” here that some killer mains talk about. To me, this is just basic human respect and not playing the game to win like your life depends on it. I don’t care about “losing”, I care about players (old and new) experiencing this kind of trash gameplay and thinking “what’s the point in even playing?”
Rant over.
Comments
I've had these Tricksters before. Depending on the hook location there's often nothing you can do. They just machine gun through your Endurance. Draculas do this same thing where they hold their hellfire and wait until the person's feet touch the ground and rip right through their Endurance while also injuring the unhooker.
The anti-camp on powers is way too inconsistent. Killers need their M2s turned off near hooks, and it needs to linger a couple seconds after. I think Henry is the only one with a linger and I don't know why. If there's going to be a system it needs to apply to everyone.
These people only have fun through winning and they don't care how they get there.
^^ unfortunately this is what happenes when ypu try to make a thread about stopping tunneling. Over 400 replies of mostly unrelated us vs them argument.
As a killer main, I can add some perspective. Sometimes, it can be hard to keep track of gen progress across multiple gens. Killers can see the survivors need to complete 5 gens, but if the killer didn't apply the necessary pressure, instead of committing to a chase, then 5 gens could go to 3 gens in an instant. There is no way of telling besides having really good positional awareness or playing a killer with high map control like Jason or dracula. While trickster cannot do that, she has a particular strength in proxy camping.
Also, before the 10.2 ptb, proxy camping had become an effective counter to a problematic perk called shoulder the burden (stb). Being nearby hook, but not close enough to trigger anticamp is a good way to prevent a survivor from attempting to use stb without consequence, and pairing this strategy with low commitment gen regression perks like scourge hook: pain resonance, dead man's switch, and turn back the clock allows the killer to temporarily pressure gens from afar while still preventing an unhook.
There are some perks that can help counter this. Reassurance pauses the timer of the hooked survivor, giving you more time to reset and save the survivor. Another (albeit risky and inconsistent) strategy is using ace visconti's luck perk(s) and a salty lips jar offering. This gives the hooked survivor the ability to self-unhook before 2 survivors die, and the chances of successfully unhooking increase from 4%.
Hopefully my input was helpful. I hope you have better matches in the future. 😁
Does Judgement also have this where their power lingers near hook? I swore I saw this happen when I unhooked a teammate once. Basically they threw it straight at me and the unhooked, but it kind of stalled and disappeared. This has only happened once, and I'm unsure if it is a bug or maybe the Judgement just threw it from very far away? I'm nearing 100 hours on the game and I still don't know some interactions 😅. The Henry one is new to me as well…
I am all for things that help circumvent/discourage tunneling at 5 gens. That's the one tunneling that isn't understandable to me, and also the only tunneling that upsets me. It's why the people I tried to introduce to the game don't play anymore rip.
I’ve seen enough. Nerf STB.
this is why we nerfed Shoulder. Imagine if that poor Trickster had to wait another whole hook to kill that Claudette
It's ok for the survivor experience to be horrible, as long as the killer had fun. He was only trying to win after all.
Windows of Opportunity was obviously unfair for killers. It's not ok for survivors to try to win. Maybe we need to nerf some more anti-tunneling perks. 🙄
BHVR just want to listen to their clip farming killer content creators atm, it's so obvious
Survivors are escaping 40% of the time. It has been that way for a long time, unless someone has brand new data to share that proves otherwise. What does the escape rate need to be for the survivor experience not be considered “horrible?” Killers are getting on average between 2 and 3 kills per game, which at least to me feels about right for a horror game where escaping isn’t supposed to be guaranteed. If the experience is really so bad, then why is the player count still at historically high levels? Obviously it can’t be all killer players, so plenty of survivor players are still here having fun.
Matches with a DC are not included in stats. While I would certainly agree that those stats should not be included for balance reasons they are very much part of what you experience when playing survivor. Unless matchmaking is going to stop placing those players in the same lobby as you its part of what you experience.
We also have zero confirmation of how BHVR treats abandons internally. I would hope BHVR isn't treating them as escapes or ignoring them but we do know that the stats page ignores them and they have had issues sending out stats to players in the past so it wouldn't be a total surprise if they get thrown into the "DC" bucket.
2 or 3 average but that isn't the same as most common match outcome. Personally 2k matches are the least common outcome with 4e and 4k being the most common.
Even if 4e and 4k are most common, the average survivor is still escaping 40% of the time - there’s no way around that fact. DCs and abandons don’t impact that number. This boils down to players’ expectations about the game. Some survivor players feel like the game is unfair because they’re not escaping often enough. Some survivor players are escaping at below the average rate because they’re just not that good at the game. After all, every game has a skill curve and a good portion of players will be below average. The same goes for expectations and skill curve on the killer side. We see plenty of complaints here from killer players who feel like the game is too survivor-sided. They are just less frequent because the game has far more regular survivor players than killer players.
BHVR has to balance the game around the entire population of players, not just players on the low end of the skill curve who feel like the game isn’t fair for the side they prefer to play because they’re not performing as well as they think they should.
I don't think you understand. Lets say a match is going south for the survivors, but no one has DC'd. After being slugged for the 4k (not enough to abandon) and out of sheer frustration with that situation, the slug DCs. That is a 4k match but the match result gets totally thrown out and isn't included in the official stats. That inflates the official escape rates. It doesn't have to happen late in the match either, any match with an early DC is also not included in official stats, the ones that show us the 40% escape rate. If you also think matches with an abandon are not being included in the official escape rate then things become truly dire, most matches the killer wins include at least one abandon right now.
I've run into players implementing this strategy despite having 10k hours in the game.
Like you, I can't quite wrap my head around how this could ever be fun (for both the survivors and the killer).
Most eye-opening for me was when I encountered a big streamer playing this way on a killer with whom they had 4k hours in-game. It became apparent to me they were focused on engaging with chat rather than engaging with the game.
I can imagine a not-so-insignificant amount of players engage with the game passively, in much the same way as a streamer, perhaps while chatting with friends, watching videos, or juggling some other activity. It is during this time that they would be oblivious to their own actions and the impact it has on others.
Until survivors get punished for "omg the killer is at 1 hook and youre about to knock out the 3rd/4th gen!!!" I don't think a catch up system to that degree should exist. Or is there not an equiv where the killer has nothing when the 3-4-5 genth pops? In b4 "dude this never happens except streamer killers vs 4 randos"
Meant to include this here but it went into a different thread.
We haven't actually been given the official overall escape rate for quite a while at this point. Unless I am missing a post these stats are the most recent and were released alongside specific stats for South America. They cover a time period from Jan 1, 2025, to Dec 31, 2025. This is before Henry, Jason, Judgment, Diminishing (which hit survivor harder), and a slew of other killers buffs. In the same timeframe survivors got Five Moves Ahead and very little else substantial that hasn't been taken away or is currently being taken away. Given that, I fully expect the escape rate has dropped since then. This is also not including deaths from matches with any DCs in them (and we still don't know for sure about abandon).
I kind of compare it to stuff like Battlefield, where the game can be so 1 sided that the players on the other end are forced to sit there and endure a never ending rain of grenades into their spawn point and if they make it out of the spawn zone they get shot by 5 snipers, 3 tanks and a helicopter waiting for the first person to show up.
Its the game's design that allows this to happen. And so players will make it happen, and some will ensure it happens every time. And any attempt to balance it out will be weaponised by the same players on the other side and will make the same thing happen in reverse.
So all we have is a courtesy ruleset for the power role (because the killer is designed to overpower 1 survivor enough to catch 4 people 3 times before they can finnish 5 generators) that is not even remotely enforced. Because if it were enforced, the courtesy has only ever gone 1 way. You could go after someone else and avoid someone you just hooked, but they wont hesitate to get in your way to prevent a hit on their rescuer, they will also run straight back to the gen you just chased them off of and finnish it in your face if given the chance. And then t bag you at the gate despite you showing "courtesy") survivors would abuse anything and everything they can about the enforcement.
Everytime a new generator perks comes out every streamer makes a video on "how fast can this perk do a generator with a genrush build". And everytime an anti tunnel or anticamp mechanic comes, every streamer will make a video like " you can now unhook yourself from basement at full health!". Or even when they changed people being unhooked now lose collision to get past the killer easier and avoid being tunneled, the first thing all the streamers did was make videos on " you can now travel inside the killer to ensure 100% chance on protection hits".
So long as the killer's objectives are players and the survivors objectives are objects, the game won't have a fair way to make both sides happy at all times.
On another note, even the loading screen tips would say "if the survivor is being camped, just do the gens and leave" as if aknowledging that flaw in the game's design in saying that one player's experience doesn't matter so long as the rest of you escape. Meanwhile until this new ptb there hasnt been a way to communicate to random players to do the gens and leave so soloque tunneling/camping would always end with someone trying to go for the save instead of following the loading screen tip. (Now there will be a chat wheel to tell players to leave you and focus gens)
I agree 100% with the impact of the scenario example you provided, but DCs are far less common than abandons so I don’t believe they have a huge impact on the official escape rate stats. Of course I could be wrong because BHVR refuses to share data that would help us clear up the debate. But it would take a huge number of matches with DCs to significantly skew the official stats (I’m not talking about the stats tracker page - that’s a whole separate discussion) and as much as I think DCs are still too common, they aren’t common enough to have that kind of impact.
If we had any official stats showing that average escape rate is truly lower than 40%, I would be fully on board the “we need to buff survivors” train. But I haven’t seen anything to indicate that the 40% average still isn’t true for the overall player population. I’d love to see contradicting data if anyone has that to share.
With the number of times the phrase "DC Epidemic" has been thrown around I don't know. I didn't see it as often as some claimed but I also see people saying they see it practically every match. Recently I haven't been playing a ton outside of events. I did share the most recent stats we have been given in another post but they are nearly a year outdated at this point and were practically exactly on 40%. Given the changes over the past year it isn't unreasonable to assume those rates have gone down.
I remember trying it out with friends in the ptb and it didn't but it's possible it's been adjusted. I can't be sure as the few Judgments I had to deal with put a pause on my 1v4 survivor playing.
And yeah Henry's anti-camp lingers around the hook for a couple seconds after unhook. It's just delayed though, not a full stop. Jusdgments current anti-camp is a full stop.