another plea to make Kindred basekit

Half of Kindred should be basekit, pretty unambiguously. The survivor aura half absolutely should be made basekit to better prop up solo players without giving SWF anything extra.

The killer aura half, though, would be too strong as a basekit thing, and honestly kind of unnecessary once the anti-camp change goes through. That part being on the perk is 100% reasonable, I think.

Constantly? No. When it's relevant? Yes, obviously. It doesn't require all that much skill to ask "hey who's going" when someone gets hooked- I'll admit that I don't play in a SWF so there's always a small chance I'm wrong, but I hardly see how it could be possible.

As for your comment about the activity HUD, you're completely right!

....If your teammates are actually doing generators when the hook happens. Or at all. And, it assumes that your teammates are making the same rational decisions as you. Even if everyone's skilled, it's imperfect information. Playing with Kindred and playing without is night and day, specifically for this reason.

Yes, but in those games, you at least know when your Genji is going off on his singleplayer adventure on the other side of the map and you know when your support is doing something stupid (or so I'd assume, I haven't played DOTA but I've played other MOBA games). So, in DBD, you can only control your own actions but - to a degree - you should know to do that.

Kindred's information still has to be acted on intelligently, it's not handholding. It's just the information you need to make intelligent, informed decisions that aren't hinging almost entirely on guesswork. Seeing their teammates' auras won't make bad teammates actually bother doing a generator or going for a save, even if it were permanent and mapwide; only seeing auras when someone's hooked isn't going to change anyone's behaviour except the ones who'd be putting proper effort and intelligent thought into it.

Of course you know in those games? Taking Overwatch as our primary example, you can see your Genji through walls. Obviously information on that level can't be added to DBD, but in a general sense, you're basically aware of what your teammates are doing at relevant junctures.

For the most part we've already been given that information through the survivor HUD, and the only real blank spot still left is the knowledge of who is going for a save. Neither the survivor HUD nor a hypothetical basekit Kindred count as handholding, dumbing down, or 'freebies', they're just giving players the tools they need to make decisions.

I've always found this argument particularly interesting, honestly. I actually agree that players should be expected to utilise good game sense and decision making, and that you can't game-design away bad teammates; players will have to just react to having bad teammates and do their best on their own terms, while accepting that they're more likely to lose. All of that is absolutely golden, in theory, but for some reason people are suggesting that argument alongside an implication that players should be doing all of that while also flying blind.

Like I said above, you can't make decisions without a basic level of information, and a basic level of information also won't help you unless you're making decisions. Getting this information won't take away any decision making or skill expression, it'll enable decision making and skill expression. Minimalist doesn't mean missing, there's a certain amount of info players should be expected to have in order to make decisions, in any game- otherwise they're just guessing.