Best Of

Mental state is really the number one thing with this game. You can try to cut out emotion and view balance from a completely clinical perspective but that isn't going to work. Where there's humans, there's emotion. I'd venture to say that most people who are unhappy with either role still have stats at the target numbers. It's not the outcomes that matter so much as how the match feels. People want to feel like they had a full experience. As killer, the thing that keeps my mindset from tanking is those shock turnarounds. They are utterly undeserved, but they keep me from feeling beaten down.

Survivor is more complicated, because there's a lot of moving parts.

For me, personally, my mindset is actually quite good right now. That doesn't mean I don't think survivor as a role needs help, but I myself feel possibly the best since I was fresh and new. But four or so months ago my mindset for survivor was at rock bottom. My friends were leaving, my matches were miserable, I was burning out and felt like a punching bag. The thing that changed was making more friends. I played with seven different people yesterday, in three separate sessions. Was there tunneling and slugging and general scuzziness? Yeah. But frustration over cheese tactics can cool very quickly when your friend runs over to slap the killers butt while it's happening. Something disheartening becomes funny. The outcome is the same but how you feel about it isn't. This is why I'm a huge advocate for SWF. It's not about sweaty squads for me, it's about groups of friends having fun.

That's also why I want more for soloq. I'd like a reason to play it as well. More info like basekit Kindred. More in-game tips to develop macro. These aren't game-breaking. They'll just make survivors—especially new and average ones—feel like they have a shot. And yeah, more reason to feel like you accomplished something when things are rough. They had said when the abandon was being introduced there'd be big incentives to stick out rough matches. I don't even know what those were supposed to be. If the only thing they can give us is a free pass to leave whenever things are bad, then the game is not doing a good job with making people happy.

Like I said, the fair and balanced versions of camping and slugging involve spreading hooks.

Forcing someone through hook states without letting the survivor team rescue is not one of the fair or balanced contexts for camping, and it's been nerfed accordingly. Still doable, but an aware team can counter it.
Compare that to proxy camping to initiate a chase with someone who comes for the save, to force them a little further out of position at the start of the chase + cut down on potential lost time searching for someone. That still involves spreading hooks, and it's also the far more reasonable version of camping.

Same for slugging. Bleeding everyone out isn't fair or balanced and also isn't even fun, but leaving one person on the ground so you can go chase someone else still ultimately involves spreading hooks.

My larger point, though, is more important. Even if you include all three as alternatives to spreading hooks… the sheer amount of options, tactics, and playstyles that do involves spreading hooks massively outnumbers them because spreading hooks is still the basic interaction of killer gameplay.

All stealth oriented playstyles, hit and run, totem defence, resource denial, loop zoning, M1 fundamental looping, and the million different perk builds you can lean into, all of these things involve spreading hooks because that is fundamentally just kind of the cornerstone of skilful killer play.
"Only able to spread hooks" is tantamount to "only able to play the game". It implies only that one (or three, if we accept the other two examples) option has been taken away, not that you're being railroaded into taking only one specific option.

The game has so much more depth and nuance than tunnelling someone out or camping them through hook stages.

it's true. but developer has had 9 years to find a solution. when they tried to address tunneling they came up with the most asinine changes i've ever seen proposed in any game at any time in my life. their ideas unfortunately are more likely to hurt the game at this point. they introduced fog vial just to nerf it into obscurity. why introduce an item that you don't expect anyone to use? that's the kind of thought level at bhvr

Ghoul by the way can be out played by playing a stealth game

Saying that a killer can be outplayed by "stealth" is just another way of phrasing "the only way to win is not to play at all".

I mean, if you look at the Steamcharts, you see that they basically lost all the players they got with the FNAF-Chapter. And this due to their poor decision making including creating a Killer like Ghoul.

And well, there is also a big difference with Springtrap and Ghoul - Springtrap (or FNAF to be precise) was one of the most anticipated licenses. Therefore, there was no need to make him really good. Springtrap is decent, but nobody would really say that he belongs into the Top 10 best Killers or so. But there was no need to make him that strong, because people would buy the Chapter (and the Skins) regardless.

Ghoul on the other hand is Anime, which was quite controversial. And also not as anticipated as Springtrap, so they made the Killer busted to have a selling argument. Because if you want to win most of your games and have it quite easy, you buy Ghoul. No need to be so precise like you have to be with Blight and also no need for a steep learning curve like Nurse. Just play Ghoul and you will probably be fine after 3 games max.

Sorry for the long title, but it’s basically the thesis of my statement:

Balancing the game solely around S-tier killers and SWF bully squads ruins the experience for anyone trying to play a basic M1 killer or solo-queue survivors. The top-tier killers Behavior keeps releasing are so oppressive in their base kits—map traversal, passive debuffs, projectiles, stealth—combined with meta perks, that maps are forced to have 45 pallets just so solo queue has a semblance of a chance to escape.

However, this creates the opposite problem: basic M1 killers are dragged through pallet hell, struggling to down a single survivor as they throw eight pallets in a row, wasting massive amounts of time with little to no consequence. At the same time, average solo-queue survivors suffer against these overtuned S-rank killers, whom they have almost no chance of beating without a coordinated team.

Of course, the current model of meta killers didn’t come out of nowhere. They were designed specifically to combat SWFs—and here lies the real problem. Each new killer is made more powerful and oppressive than the last. SWFs complain, receive new buffs or perks that further disrupt balance, and Behavior responds by releasing even more overtuned killers. The cycle repeats endlessly.

Meanwhile, anyone just trying to have some silly fun with a basic M1 killer or playing average solo-queue matches suffers as collateral damage.

The way Behavior develops this game feels like a snake eating itself.

This is why we have to deal with their constant doomposting:

They're not making the money they used to make while streaming this game because the viewers aren't there anymore. Clickbait and faux outrage is all they have left to get those click$ in. Unfortunately, the playerbase has to feel the impact.

ThIs is pretty rare on my end, especially compared to my killer matches, where I get at least one script-flip every session. Even with that good chase, there's a solid chance the killler will at least get a 2k or slug everyone in end game. I've had plenty of matches where I loose momentum and gens start popping even though I have everyone with hook states and someone dead, but this comebacks is usually everyone dead at 1 gen instead of 4.

But I also feel anyone with any sense will drop chase if a gen or two pops with no down.

I can't speak for OP or the person you're responding to, but two things did leap out at me about your post here.

The first is that the notion of nerfing slugging, tunnelling, and camping forcing players to not do them is sort of assuming a very specific kind of nerf that I don't think most people are even necessarily advocating for in all cases.
Sure, you'll find plenty of people who want tunnelling removed in particular, but take slugging as a counter-example here- slugging has an actually legitimate place within the game, it has contexts that are already well balanced and fair. Most people who advocate for anti-slugging changes are more concerned with reigning in its most extreme versions, like bleeding everyone out or slugging absolutely everyone before you even start hooking.

Hypothetically, in those cases, it would be the case both that slugging gets nerfed to be more fair, but that players still get to choose to slug if it seems like the best call. This isn't even that much of a hypothetical, frankly- that's what we saw attempted on the 9.2 and 9.3 PTBs, even if the implementation was slightly lacking.

The second thing to mention is a bit of a misconception a lot of people have, which is that "spread hooks" is not one playstyle. It's the basic bread and butter that will be a part of literally every single playstyle that isn't specifically tunnelling, including the more fair and balanced versions of slugging and camping, which would be used to get into a more favourable chase to spread the hook states around.

Any playstyle or tactic that you'd care to bring into the trial is going to involve spreading hooks unless it's specifically the one single tactic that is defined by avoiding spreading hooks where possible. It's not actually all that limiting to only take away tunnelling in particular, you'd still have the entire rest of the game available.