How Do I Turn Down My Competitiveness?

Yeah, people like to pretend that this game is ultra casual "party game" random fun time, but then all they do is cry about balance. If you complain about balance, that means you do care about winning, you're playing to win, and therefore give up your status as a casual player. That doesn't auto- make you pro. You just become a scrub, like me. After more learning and experience, and trying and failing, only then do you start to become a veteran player, and have actually good, informed takes. Unfortunately most just skip all that, and less than 100 hours in start saying, "Wraith and Freddy are way overpowered. I can't last 15 seconds in chase." Totally a result of those killers' level of strength, right? I've tried to advocate better matchmaking, so that they go against other actual learners, and not just a really good killer with crappy teammates all the time. But no, the devs and community have decided that the MMR system is perfect as is, and can't possibly have a negative effect on match quality.

If ever I had the ability to switch back to playing more casual, I've lost it at this point. When you suffer enough landslide losses from a completely imbalanced game state, and then people say it can only be your fault if you lost, you tend to do everything you can to avoid losing (giving a bad performance). Either I tunnel, or I forget to tunnel, and usually the latter costs me what should have been a win. Whenever I intentionally don't tunnel at all, it feels physically bad, because I can't forget that I'm making the worst possible play. And I've always found it strange that 1) you get BM'd even if you play "the correct"/nice way, and that 2) using optimal strategies that increase your kill count gets mocked as being "cheap" or "skilless." Try arguing that in any other competitive online game, I dare you. You'll wonder why people are laughing.

You're more focused on survivor. I have plenty of experience there, too. In solo, even. You might need, say, 2000 hours to really get the role. I thought I knew it all, about 2000 hours ago, and now I'm like "I didn't know anything." Like I said, as long as this MMR system keeps putting "whatevs" survivor players consistently against a good killer, the match result is completely out of your hands as a solo. Either you manage to carry the whole team, which gets old after like 2 matches, or despite all your efforts you just all die anyway. So you have to minimize risk of being killed yourself, while maximizing gen efficiency and chase length. If you often fall prey to tunneling, use anti-tunnel and get good at looping. If your teammates are the target instead, use We'll Make It to heal them, which at least gives them a fighting chance, whether they've got anti-tunnel themselves or not. I know most like to say, "The killer is just at hook during unhook, hits through their BT and downs them again," but I've literally never seen this occur even once. The killer either downs the unhooker and then goes for the unhooked, or waits out the base BT anyway. Any way you cut it, the gens need to be flying. There's 4 survivors; please use that to your advantage. If the team keeps having large sections of time where not 1 person is on a gen, it's a skill issue. Either they're not being touched for no reason, or the survivors are legit feeding the killer downs. Exhaustion perks and stuff that lets you see the killer's aura, or toolboxes to repair gens faster, or medkits to heal faster, or flashlights to cheat a killer of their down, all massively help with survivability.

So again, try as you might, sometimes your team just doesn't have what it takes, and you'll lose. Not your fault. But I have a feeling that a lot of people complaining about survivor are those kinds of teammates. We have people who admit to straight-up DC'ing against multiple specific killers because, "Don't like that killah! Rage quit!" This is why I advocate for strict DC penalties, and better matchmaking so that those who play casual/suboptimal and those who play to win can be put in different queues, instead of the current mishmashed abomination. It would also help with everyone understanding where each other are coming from. Having no ranks, and having grades and MMR hidden to confuse players, everyone thinks they're diamond when they're actually bronze. I know it's to protect people from feeling... inadequate? Noobish? But you know, all that's done is cause chaos, and created barriers between players debating balance.

Well put - the situation with this game identity is like wanting to keep the cake and eat it, too; you just can't claim it is anything like a casual partygame were you goof off against the killers from various slasher flicks, but then discuss endlessly up and down the forums about any minute balancing issue.

The game long lost its casual roots, but if you want to actually play the game at an acompetitive level, then you need to adhere to vast lists of banned perks and items/add-ons on both sides, but strangely the survivors side is much bigger then most people would think.

The closest thing we got to a casual mode is the random event, because players can't bring their sweaty builds in there and it was very much a breath of fresh air, but the real bread-and-butter game is just a confused mess.

IMHO the game needs the big changes: being balanced around hook stages, not kills and letting all survivors share their pool of hooks, so that only the last 4 give kills, and giving the game a come-back mechanic of some sorts, so that it can't snowball this hard as it does right now.

Yeah, I still get mad at my matches sometimes. But when it gets bad enough, I just laugh or satirize it off. Like, "Yep, you can just afford to follow the killer around the whole time!" Or, "Yep, keep BM'ing me on the ground, because you were getting destroyed until people started randomly giving up." Mostly I've just been switching over to Minecraft single player. Much more peaceful.

This is the single best piece of advice for people who want to get better at the game. Many critiques against killer are 1-dimensional, because the person either hasn't played killer before, or they got clueless survivors for 2-3 matches and said, "See? OP." If you actually understand firsthand the limits of what the other side can do, you can start to counterplay them better. It's like, "I know this Wraith wants to 99' his uncloak, make me drop the pallet, and then break it without having to uncloak/recloak. So what if I just stood there and didn't drop it, calling his bluff?" You can get in killers' heads and make them start second guessing/mindgaming themselves. As killer, it's not as simple, because you'll know what vaults you can and can't get as survivor, and then a survivor randomly gets a fast/medium vault that you couldn't punish for some reason. Like, I'd never be able to get some of the vaults these people do. And there's such a variability in gen speed, you never know for sure if the gens will be done in 5 minutes or 10, unless you're clearly already winning. But by and large, playing the other side massively helps with getting good at the game.