DBD has no hope of getting balanced

You've got to try at least. A game never became balanced where the devs didn't try. And if we're in agreement that it's not balanced right now, let's keep going.

I really think we need to take the emotion out though, in regards to perks and strategies. Exaggerate if you must. But nobody can assume that the other side wants a power fantasy, or assume that they're playing to make the other person mad (unless there's BM). Gen rushing, body blocking, flashlight/pallet saving, tunneling, camping, slugging, these are all things players do to win. They're not toxic.

Toxic is doing something to purposefully make the other side mad. Tunneling and flashlight saving can* be done with that malicious intent, but you can't blanket statement say that they're toxic to do. It's about the mentality, and the unnecessary BM (tbagging, hitting on hook repeatedly).

A big thing that's got to be looked at is the matchmaking. When we had ranked (random) matchmaking, we got random changes that nobody liked or asked for. Once MMR dropped, high level killers started appearing to do worse, so they got buffed. Then one day, it didn't matter what side was doing better. Killers like Freddy, Spirit, Hillbilly, Wraith, Deathslinger, Pinhead, Clown, etc started getting absolutely slaughtered with the nerfs regardless. Around that point the MMR was made more loose, lower levels could be matched with higher levels, killing any consistency in teammate quality in solo. That soon led to basically what we had before, random matchmaking, as well as MMR hell, where despite you playing really well you just kept losing because of your teammates, and so we started getting random balancing again.

You can't begin to dive into what things are strong in the game and why, if you don't even have consistency in matchmaking. So a huge part of "ladder" being mostly mismatches where 1-2 survivors are trying to carry teammates who don't know what they're doing, and the killer's still struggling as well, is killing the game. You've got to make MMR stricter. I don't care if queues go back up to a minute. If you give people teammates and opponents of like skill, you'll see less DCs, and you'll have data to actually base balance off of. The 60% kill rate right now means nothing, because half those kills are from cartoonishly bad, game-throwing situations. Some of those killers have no place getting wins, and some of those survivors have no place dying to those killers.

Once MMR gets fixed, we'll see same changes again. My guess is that the game will be revealed as very survivor sided, in which case we might actually see a nerf to SWF for once, so that solos don't have to suffer for how OP they are, and then killers will have reason to relax a bit. But even if I'm wrong on that, there's no scenario where the game gets better by simply giving up on balance, or by leaving matchmaking as it is.

I say this all the time. The majority of us on the forums are just the LOUD minority. We don't speak for the other 80ish% of people and never will. We might THINK we do but just let us think we do. :P It goes without saying that some of us like myself have known this while continuing to be passionate forum members.

Humans are tribalistic. Us vs. Them is a lot of the appeal of the game. Killer main/survivor main is part of our identity. Any attack on the role is an attack on ourselves and must be defended

Well, right now there's basically no upside to hooking. You get the survivor 1 hook closer to death, but then they're on hook immune for 70 seconds, their Terminator mode activates with DS, OTR, DH, etc, and then you've got to hook them 2 more times. It's really only the final hook that counts, because that's when they die and stop being a threat. What we should have seen instead was killers getting a mini Surge to all gens on the map, even if just a 2% regression, for each hook. And if they get a unique hook instead of hooking the same survivor twice, they get more regression, and if they've hooked everyone once, they get more regression. I've always hated Otz's take that Pain Res/Pop was OP because "you get tons* of regression while still tunneling someone." You actually don't. Even at their peak, Pop and Pain Res individually knocked like 10 seconds off a gen, 20 seconds at most, which is nothing especially if there's 2 survivors on the gen. But regression is at least something, because it slows the survivor objective. Without ways to slow that, killers will just resort to getting people out ASAP.

And I do think MMR should be hook-based and gen-based as well, and probably include a bit of the emblem system as well. If survivors are gen efficient, they're clearly good and their MMR should go up. If the killer gets lots of hooks, he's clearly good and his MMR should go up. The devs would have to make a massive push for hooks as a win condition, and make it clear to people, "This is what indicates skill, not just kills/escapes." Kills/escapes haven't been indicative of skill in forever. I can run a killer silly all match, and then martyr at the end for my 3 mediocre teammates to escape. That doesn't make me the worst player, and yet people believe that. I can be downing survivors back to back, outplaying them at every loop, but because they did the gens fast, they all run out. Does that make me a bad killer? Most seem to think so, because they only look at results. They don't recognize game knowledge and skill, because it's more subtle, and because they refuse to come to a logical consensus of what those are.

I don't think the survivors spawning together change is gonna be the godsend people think it is. If you haven't noticed, survivors already spawn together 9/10 times. I spawn in, 2-3 of my teammates are in my same corner. Yes, it makes the killer easier to find at least 1 of us if he goes to this exact corner (which I'm assuming is the opposite spawn position from him), but then we just split up on gens as usual, and shortly after his first chase, 2-3 gens could Pop. I don't see that scenario changing because of this change alone. And if they don't give killers anything in exchange for the camping/tunneling/slugging nerfs, and just say, "We're punishing you for playing like this... after we've essentially forced you to play that way." it's gonna be gnarly. Nobody's gonna wanna play killer. The killer is supposed to be a big threat, with meaningful power, not have all these restrictions that orchestrate them playing into the survivors' hands.

I would be COMPLETELY satisfied if Gen Rushing and Tunneling/Camping got removed from the game somehow.
Both are braindead strategies that anyone with a low IQ can pull off.