Sincere buyer's remorse

Thank you, that's very nice of you to say.

I've wanted to play this game for years but don't generally enjoy the online experience. I play to relax and have fun, not to compete or win at all costs. The only game I played online to any real extent was GTA V, and that was only with some friends that I had on another forum. I had loads of fun and really miss it. I don't play the game online now because it means playing in public lobbies, and I've found that playing public lobbies in almost any game means at least some needless degree of frustration and stress.

Still, this game has been calling to me, and a buddy of mine gifted me a Steam copy. I played and fell in love with it immediately. It's far deeper than I was expecting (I didn't know about all the lore, teachable perks, didn't realize that there were roughly 6-7 times as many characters as I thought there would be, etc). It's got a bit of a learning curve, the community uses more acronyms than I can count, and I've had to look things up more times than once. But by and large it's been fun.

When I talked about wanting to get into the game I was warned that the community was incredibly toxic. I have to admit that it's...at the very least, highly negative. So many people complain about so many things. The survivors hate the killers. The killers hate the survivors. Survivor builds are laughed at. Killers are all called broken. All perks are criticized. The developers are called lazy and careless. The game is described as bugged. There's a lot of annoyance directed at new players as well as extremely experienced players. People celebrate exploits and get angry at most changes that are made to the game.

That's not to say that any of this is unique to this place. It's the same as things were on the other forum I mentioned, also a forum for some other games. I've been negative too, bitching about how annoying I find Trickster to be. That stuff doesn't bother me as much I suppose. It's just certain aspects of the game that I wasn't expecting. I had no idea going in that there was this massive reliance on the looping #########, which I hate. I'm not interested in having to memorize certain tiles and lure killers into lengthy chases, it's not fun or compelling to me. I thought that the game was more about sneaking around and being able to get away from the killer if you were simply good enough at unpredictable evasion. I also didn't know that some perks made certain killers really irritating and that I'd sometimes be waiting five or ten minutes to get into a match only for the killer to go straight for me, hook me, and then camp me until I died.

Can't say that I like that stuff. But I'll adapt. I'm still largely loving the game. I wish that I could be more evenly matched up with other players who are as new as I am (or close enough to it), I wish it felt like the people I played with didn't already have a thousand hours of practice and already have maxed-out meta build characters, but I still largely enjoy it. There's enough content here to keep me really intrigued, and my goal is still to have fun and play casually, not cheaply or competitively, even if it's been hard to find others who share the same philosophy.

As for the game being balanced, it does largely feel to me that it is. I have as much trouble / success with survivors as I do with killers (I just enjoy the survivor playstyle more). I've seen lots and lots of stories of how crappy a character was when first released, what the game was like before some of the balance it's gotten, etc. It really does feel like a weird time to suddenly find myself getting involved (and spending sixty or seventy bucks on four years' worth of DLC, lol) but, minus the cheap and annoying stuff, I really enjoy the game. I think that there's a lot here TO enjoy. I wish that more players looked at it that way instead of fighting and being irritated about everything.

As for you, if you don't mind, what DLC do you regret buying?