DBD has always and likely will always fail to balance solo que

I think you can give soloq all the basekit kindred or information you want but it will not balance it out, why? Because information does not make you good at the game, for example, a killer like onryo gives you a ton of info, enough to never get ambushed/surprised by her, yet so many people manage to give her free hits.

Communication will not make your teamates good, so you can even see everything thats going on in the match, if you still go down to an m1 killer without at least wasting between 60 to 90 seconds, no amount of info will solve your problem.

People complained about deadmans+ pain res, a combo that gives you an aura warning when it will proc, if they considered that a problem when it gave them all the information to counter it, then I believe soloq will always be the weakest role in the game, not because of lack of information but because most of them are simply not good at the game.

...Wait, what's wrong with the Obsession perks in this context? I expect to see NOED pop up here despite not warranting it as it has a weird reputation, but this is the first time I've seen someone call the Obsession perks as a whole "ridiculously cheap and unfun", I'd love to hear your reasoning there.

As for the topic as a whole, I think this point probably would've seemed slightly more reasonable before the update on the action icons. Clearly, BHVR are in fact willing to attempt addressing solo queue.

Sadly, I have to agree with you.

STBFL is strong, sure, but I wouldn't call it "completely busted". It's a good idea for the Obsession to start taking hits if they suspect the killer has it, but if they don't realise... on a majority of killers, it's good, but not broken. Certain killers do make better use of it (giving a far more hefty hint that they're running it from the get-go), but even on its best user it's still just "above average".

PWYF, similarly, isn't even all that great? Tombstone Myers is its own thing whether he's running that perk or not, and it's almost useless on literally every other killer due to how it loses tokens. Clearly not a problem.

Those are also, for the record, not the only Obsession perks. What about Grim Embrace, or Furtive Chase? Dying Light? The Obsession mechanic isn't inherently a problem because there's one pretty decent perk that uses it, surely?

Let's take a bet, imagine we take a group of 5 random players with 100-200 hours of playtime each, 4 survivors and 1 Tombstone Myers + PWYF, who is going to win? 90% of the time it's going to be a 3K at least. In order to win this match as a survivor you have a ridiculous list of things to be cautious of, you need to have the obsession hiding all match, know that you shouldn't take risk in chase (probably shouldn't even go for chases if he has PWYF), somehow be able to track the amount of stalk even though you have no idea of how your teammates are doing, have everyone getting ready to jump into lockers at all time when close to tier 3, not go for the rescue if Myers proxy camps, etc. any mistake by any of the survivors and it's an instant game over. Do you realistically see these conditions met by casual players? I think at 100 hours I didn't even know Tombstone was a thing, let alone PWYF.

For the killer, the only non-obvious trick to know is that you can 99 the Tier 3, but everything else is straightforward, the perk literally tells you what to do, and it's even a Myers perk. Whereas for the survivors, the counterplay is not only to know all the perks in the game and a list of completely obscure mechanics, but also to have a divination gift to know what your teammates see and want to do.

The other perks you mention just have bad values to be useful, but it does not mean they are well designed. As soon as you buff these perks they will be problematic just like Eruption is today, not because they will be impossible to beat, but because they rely on unfun mechanics and the same problem of "easy to use, hard to counter" as I described above. Obsession is inherently a bad mechanic for solo queue because it usually involves one survivor A noticing the killer has X, then survivor B needs to do Y in reaction to counter it, but in a game where you don't give any ability to communicate between survivors A and B, how does that make sense? This just creates frustration and toxicity towards your teammates.

Another Obsession example, take Rancor. It's a useless perk but that's not the point. Imagine as a survivor, you're the obsession and the killer chases you at 1 gen. If you are in a SWF, then fine, you just tell your friends to 99 the gens until you're downed, and the killer can get literally NO VALUE from it. If you are in solo queue, then now it's the complete opposite, killer gets full value from it, both the mori AND the exposed synergize extremely well in this situation since as soon as the gates are powered it will be 1 hit = 1 dead. Maybe your teammates could take hits for you but they have no way to know, and because of the fear of NOED, it is extremely unlikely to happen anyway. So the perk will get either full value or no value at all depending on an entirely uncontrollable factor. It is inherently a gimmick, luckily it's bad so noone uses it today, but even if it would become viable it would ALWAYS turn on to be a problem.

Everything in your example is a problem with Tombstone, not a problem with PWYF. Take that perk out of the equation and what do you get? The same situation, except the Myers is a little slower. Far more importantly, though, take Tombstone Myers out of the equation and put that same perk on Trapper. Do we still have a problem in that scenario, or is that perk honestly not doing much of anything in the second case?

As for your second point, no you wouldn't, because those perks aren't designed to need countering in that way. They just kind of do what they do and that's it, similar to other perks that just provide some small benefit without being something survivors can counter beyond just, playing around it. The Obsession perks don't require survivor B to notice and counter, unless it's a perk that warrants doing that. Even the ones that do require countering don't require survivor A noticing but survivor B acting- if survivor B notices, that's enough.

Really, I think you're exaggerating this issue. In almost all cases the Obsession mechanic is a hindrance for a killer perk, not a benefit.

Difference in scale does matter, though. Six months ago if you told me Eruption was a badly designed perk, I'd have agreed not because it was too strong or too unfair for survivors, but because it was just too much finnicky setup for not enough reward. Now that its effects are stronger, it's swung in the other direction, because specifics do matter. Viability isn't the issue, the specifics of what the perk does and how it does it is what matters. Most of the Obsession perks are either too weak, or perfectly fine, none of them are actually badly designed or unfair in the way that Eruption is.

As for Rancor, I'm struggling to see the issue here. If you don't like getting smacked out of nowhere with an instadown mori, that's one thing, but surely the Obsession angle doesn't matter? Would you really feel better about Rancor if it did the same thing but didn't have the Obsession requirement, or is it that you don't like what Rancor does? The Obsession mechanic doesn't make Grim Embrace or Furtive Chase unfair, in fact it's a hindrance on Grim Embrace, and I think that says it all; the mechanic itself isn't inherently unfair, only when it's attached to certain other mechanics.

Hell, from the perspective of a solo queue player, I've always been grateful for the Obsession mechanic. If I see those legs a-wigglin', I know the killer's chasing someone.