If you were the devs, what would you do first?

Buff every bad perk of survivors and killers. I need thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. :)

Fire everyone except for Mathieu Cote, not_Queen, and the Art team. Hire Tru3 to deal with all the balance and design issues and find someone who can actually code properly. A small 20-30 person team.

Mind games that are so one sided they might as well win without you pr input

First thing i would do is take a look at the strongest perks in the game

1. .DS I would adjust it to etiher

A. same amount of time but it is disabled if you touch a gen or totem or locker or you heal to full

B. it is a 30 second timer that pauses while you are in chase still disabled if you touch a gen or tote

2 I would look at perks like ruin and undying figure out why they are so favored realize it is due to gen times being so short compared to the 12 hook objective of the killer. adjust as needed.

3 i would remove object adren and noed completely they are unhealthy mechanics in the game as well as insidious.

4 i would take a look at the grab mechanic and fix it so people

A. stop getting stuck in animation hell.

B. it is more balanced on if the grab goes through or not.

C. if i cant fix it i would change it to a "hard hit" mechanic that its a 1 shot down instead of a grab

5 I would make it so you can select an auto fill option for the web so you can grab the thing you want and then auto fill the rest

6 i would change future balancing to the high level rather than low level players ( as its been said before) a full squad of high level survivors has very little fear from the killer if they are playing so sweaty

7 i would limit the system to 1 second chance perk on per survivor IE DS unbreakable, soul guard, borrowed time ( unless i fixed the gen timers first)

8 I would take a look at the range needed to hit through windows and maybe put a little box or design outside each window to show how far you have to be away before you cant be hit.

9 get rid of aim assist.

10 many other small things

1: Hire a PR department. Seriously, saying things like 'I don't give a **** about DS' or 'Go play Civ 5' is an embarrassment and horribly unprofessional. The fact that these comments keep happening to the point it's basically become a meme is proof some PR is desperately needed.

2: Implement voice as a standard feature. One of the big issues is that SWF with coms provides a HUGE advantage if used properly. Giving all survivors the capability of voice communication means you only have to balance around voice comms, so instead of ignoring the fact that SWF is a thing and being blissfully ignorant that despite OoO's stats being underwhelming it is far from balanced, you can actually start balancing the game around a single playerbase.

3: Put a limiter on DS. DS is necessary, but it needs some kind of turn of condition to keep it from being a 60 second god button. Jumping on a gen, healing yourself or another survivor a full health state, basically anything you couldn't do while being chased, turns it off. If you can safely sit on a gen, you're not being tunneled. It still helps as an anti-tunnel perk since if you are legitimately being tunneled it'll still work, but now you can't just safely make progress while the killer sets one of 4 kitchen timers to keep track of your DS.

4: Make sure the balance team isn't so out of touch with the game that they can't explain simple questions about balance, like why a certain thing is getting nerfed. Not trying to throw shade at Almo here, he's a chill dude and all, but as someone who actually wants this game to succeed and do well, it physically hurt hearing him say "Freddy's getting a nerf because he's OP, Idk why he's OP, but he's OP". If you're going to nerf something, you should at least be able to explain the basics of why when asked. Maybe not all the stats and numbers, but at least the basic premise. Even something as simple as 'He's a bit overtooled right now, and his ability to teleport, lay traps, and make you oblivious in the dream world is just a bit much compared to other killers." would be much better than just flat out admitting you have no clue why something is OP, but you're nerfing it anyway. If it was just kind of a one time blank, ok sure, but it seems like these kinds of things happen constantly.

5: Stop balancing the game around the lowest skill level and reimplement skill gating mechanics. Old ruin was strong, but it made sure survs learned how to hit great skill checks, or skill checks in general. Old nurse while definitely a bit too powerful, at least required survivors to learn how to mind game, which helped with looping more traditional killers as well and juking. Now red ranks are basically a participation award and the one thing the matchmaking is currently based off of is actually completely useless at determining skill level.

6: Buff a lot of the low tier perks and killers to bring them in line with some of the better perks. This is the only game I've seen where the same stale meta has been in play for 4 years. There are characters in games that are generally always going to be strong, or abilities, but outside of maybe that one, there's usually at least some variance in the meta over the years. Nope, not with DBD, DS/UB/Adren/BT has basically been the standard for 4 years running. Combine that with the fact that whenever something is meta on killer side it gets gutted (ruin, undying, pop just to name a few) you can see why people have finally had enough. Now the only reason M1 killers aside from freddy and the chainsaw bois are pretty much unplayable is because the survivor skill level has dropped so low that I've managed to adept nurse first try, after a 3 month break, and not being a nurse main. I actually felt bad for them, and it was a r4,6,9,12 I was up against to, so it wasn't like a bunch of brand new r20's.