What are your hot takes?

BM doesn’t bother me when done to me. I actually find it hilarious when done to me. I think it's the exaggerated display of this type of passion that I find so amusing. It’s so ridiculous that I can’t help but laugh.

Balanced =/= competitive. Competitive is about sweat; especially in an asymmetrical game, it means optimizing the fun out of the game in order to achieve better outcomes. Balanced just implies the game is fair, which is something you can appreciate even if you're playing something as casual and simple as war with a deck of cards.

This forum is an echochamber of people who spend way too much time playing this game. If the people here love to assert they don't think this is a competitive game (which isn't exactly what you're saying, but I've noticed this, and do so myself here), normies definitely aren't going to think it's competitive.

Gens are fun to be on, it makes the game a bit scary when you don’t know where the killer is. 

Agreed, though I'd more broadly say 'you don't have to be in chase to have fun as a survivor'. Not knowing where the killer is or how well a chase is going on with someone else is exciting.

Stealth isn’t a bad play style

Agreed, it's a key part of the game and there are many ways to do it and still be very helpful for the team.

Both sides are fair, well mostly. 

In the sense that both sides can be broken, yes, if the players want to play that way.

In the sense that game has fun for both sides, yes.

You don’t need meta perks to have a good build, as long as you have a style that works for you it’s the best one.

Agreed, there are lots of valid builds.

The Cleansing or Crotus Prenn (Nurse's tome lore) was good.

The game would be more fun with old Ruin+Undying and Circle of Healing back.

Gens should go back to 80 seconds.

hot take: Merciless Storm should be the default of how gen skill checks work.

I don't think this is an unpopular opinion these days, my dear friend.

In the past? Yes. Many players tried to play him the same way people used to play Wraith and then got really surprised when it didn't work. But now, at least in here, I think many looked back and finally saw his strengths and advantages.

When we get him back, I doubt there will be people claiming he is weak.

definitely disagree with this one.

Artist is really good at tunneling and can put survivors in bad situations by getting someone out early, but Blight has far higher map control, is far less predictable, and generally has a higher skill ceiling. Still, after hug-teching was removed I would agree they are definitely comparable and I think Artist is better than people say she is because of how difficult it can be to learn and how long it takes to master her.

old Freddy was fun and not that bad.

I'm bout to piss off 99% of the community with this next one lol.

I don't like Demogorgon.

-Wesker in my opinion is probably one of the best balanced killers in the entire game. This is a surprising take because he's a universally unhated killer, fun to play as and engaging to play against. He can be one of the best killers in the game in the right hands, but even then it doesn't feel too bad losing against him because of how engaging his chase power is to play against, it almost always feels like a misplay on your part.

-EGC (I'm pretty sure this is end-game chat abbreviated) I actually like a lot. Yeah, there's usually toxic people chatting ######### and being mean, but more often than not I see people sending their GGs and talking about something surprising or funny that happened in the game. I even get kind of annoyed when something super weird happens that I want to talk about and when I get to the EGC everyone's a console player so I can't talk to them. Toxic people will always find a way to make something fun into something negative, and that should never be cause for removing or never introducing a mechanic.

-Well, it is. Killers want kills and it is infinitely easier to camp a survivor on a hook than search through literally the entire map to hopefully find a probably healthy survivor, only to hit them once and they either have enough distance to escape or have people come in for bodyblocks. Killers really have no other option if they want a kill, and you really can't blame them for not wanting to throw.

-I agree with this, though mostly just because of how subjective "weakest" is. I don't think he was ever the weakest, but he was definitely usually ONE OF the weakest.

-Of course, but that's the thing. Fun and balance are inherently intertwined. People play games for fun, and generally balanced games are more fun, so balancing a game usually leads to more fun.

-I think the 5v5 gamemode teased I think a year and a half ago now would actually make a competitive mode viable for DBD as it would be a symmetrical experience. I don't agree with the people who say DBD is "just a party game" I mean, what other party game gets frequent balance changes and public test builds? But if people like a game enough, they will build a competitive scene around it. There may be balance changes and ramifications to the main game because of it, but it's inevitable.

You probably aren't going to read any of this and I'm well aware I massively over-responded but I accidentally took 2 adderall instead of 1 and had some energy to burn off.

The game should be slightly killer-sided. Slightly.

When I saw DbD's kill rates for each killer, I was kind of confused when they said they wanted the kill rate of each killer to be somewhere around 60%, when 50% made more sense to me, but I think I get it now.

Think about every "DbD killer" that crashed and burned, didn't last more than a month, or was perpetually doomed to have a smaller player base than DbD throughout it's lifespan. Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, VHS, etc., the one thing they all had in common was how survivor-sided they were. This made sense to the developers, the larger portion of their playerbase wants to play survivor, we should make survivor more fun and easier to win with, what they barely took into account is how frustrating this made killer. But who cares? There'll always be someone playing killer, right? No, there won't be. A lot of complaints from players about why these games were bad (at least in Evil Dead and VHS' case) were the abysmal queue times, as well as how horrible playing killer felt. They didn't want to buff killer or nerf survivor, how could they turn their back on the majority of the playerbase by taking away their means of defense? Well, because they had these means of defense at their disposal, playing killer was incredibly difficult and many killer players opted for a different game, and thus the games died out, or at least have a much smaller player base than they used to.

The exception is DbD itself. Look at some footage of old DbD, it was ridiculously survivor sided, the only reason it was balanced is because this asymmetrical horror genre was very new at the time and people didn't exactly know how to abuse survivors' capabilities, but they quickly learned. This is also why new asymmetrical horror games are burned to the ground by the survivor role when they come out, DbD veterans know exactly how to exploit the killer role in these new games. DbD had the massive benefit of being the first and having the least experienced playerbase, so they were able to slowly tweak survivor and killer into being more balanced at the same rate players learned how to use them well.

Killer isn't necessarily harder to win with, but definitely takes a lot more focus and effort on the part of the killer. If that effort and focus doesn't feel rewarded, players will not hesitate to turn their backs on an experience that pushes them to their limit only to get nothing out of it. This is sometimes what killer felt like in the early days of DbD, and it's how killer feels in other asymmetricals now. Killer NEEDS to be overpowered. He NEEDS to have a massive advantage over survivors, because when it's a 4v1, the 1 will always have more on his mind and more to do. If survivors have too many ways of fighting back, if their chances are just as good as the killer's, then half of the game is about putting in 4x as much work as the other half and getting an equal, or sometimes worse reward.

Killer needs to have the advantage, even if just by a little bit. A 60% kill rate makes much more sense than I thought it did.

TL;DR, Killer takes much more effort and that effort needs to be disproportionally rewarded more than survivor, many other horror asymmetricals died out because killer was too weak.

Huntress is powercrept and hella weak against good survivors even after her buffs, Idk how people can still gaslight themselves into thinking she's an A tier killer.

Artist is just a weaker Unknown and against not clueless survivors her power only has value in zoning.

Making Trickster a 115% speed killer was a good decision and I'd say he's definitely at least better than Deathslinger when it comes to ranged killers.

Without her current very strong add-ons Plague probably wouldn't be an A tier killer (which I suspect will become the case as they'll very probably gonna nerf them in November).

Vecna's honestly a bordeline C tier killer.

It's funny seeing people debate who's the top of A tier killer between Spirit and Chucky when Dracula clearly wrecks both of them.

Deja Vu deserves to be nerfed now that we have the 8 gens kicks limit.

Old movement, which meant 360s weren't complete garbage (although good killers still never fell for them), was a huge improvement over the current system imo. Same goes for the flashlight changes they've done.

I am not.

Actual facecamping was removed when Freddy released (October of 2017) and actual infinite loops no longer existed outside of Haddonfield with Balance Landing.

I'm sure that was part of the difference, but the downsides you're calling out really aren't that bad in my opinion. Face camping affected exactly one survivor and often only came into play in the endgame, where killers can still face camp if they really want to. Every survivor suffers the whole game against most of the recently released killers, though. True infinites were BS for killer, but only some maps even had them, and if you knew about them you could just refuse to chase on those tiles; it's not too different than refusing to chase in a main building with a completed gen, say, just even more of a hard "NO".

Back then, these issues were not that big of a deal, because people were not sweating to win at all costs. There was no MMR, rank rewards, etc., so unless you were grinding for the Rank 1 achievements, rank was completely meaningless, and you would get a much wider variety of skill in your teammates and your opponents. That random difference in skill made more of a difference in day-to-day games than aspects of the game high-level survivors could theoretically (but infrequently in practice) exploit.

Even back then kill rates were reasonably high, probably in large part because survivors were not sweating! I used to love to do totems and chests in part precisely because I didn't feel like I was likely to be dominated in a chase. It was never optimal, but optimal play did not matter back then. Now it does, even if you don't want to be competitive, because of how many killers are dominant in the chase now; the only counterplay is to rush gens. Back then, there was enough inherent room for counterplay in the chase that you didn't need to glue yourself to a generator to play a fun match. And I thought that was more fun on both sides; less stress as survivor, more memes, etc. and less despair when you have a long chase as killer because the survivors are less likely to be absolutely slamming gens.

In terms of the sheer tools at the disposal of each side, the game was very survivor sided at launch and has gradually gotten less so over time, yet kill rates have always been similar. This shows up in the gameplay, as now against many killers survivors need to pound gens or they'll get 4k'd. This isn't particularly fun for either side.