DbD is not a casual game

Two separate modes won’t work. First, it’ll mess with queue times. Second, all the sweaty players will go to non-ranked mode for easy games. It might work if they give ranked mode some amazing rewards or something but most rewards BhVR come up with are usually underwhelming

There’s no need to abandon Casual.

I’m not saying we should only focus on competitiveness.

I’ll say it again: the important thing is having the option.

dbd can be casual, but it suffers when both sides aren't on the same page. either casual or tryhard can be fun, but if one team wants to spam nothing but Oddjob+ Golden Guns then the other side can't be playing Jaws.

that will always be the fundamental problem. but you don't know what you get until you get into a match. this is why I play pure end game builds so when I get a chill lobby I can hang out

People tend to make way too much out of the differences. We're talking about broad, general terms - not ironclad classifications.

As an example, once upon a time I took Mario Kart extremely seriously. Usually when this topic comes up there will be a commenter discussing 'my house had to make rules to stop fights from breaking out during Mario Party' or similar post.

Take something like basketball - people can play it goofing off with their friends not keeping score, or they can form leagues with organized teams tracking wins/losses (and you have lots of ground in between, such as pick up games). The level of seriousness is mostly down to how the players treat it.

I like the idea of having the maps be more dynamic/interactable, particularly its impact on the speed of the game. I know people have discussed secondary objectives to death, but from what I've seen it's always been focused on slowing down gens specifically. The tricky part would be balancing the impact of any bonuses from such aspects in ways that don't remove too much from the opponent.

For example, something like having a shrine where praying at it might give you a small/moderate stacking action boost for every killed ally would work well to diminish the impact of hard tunneling on game speed, but it would require a lot of fine tuning to not be too punishing/worthless or be usable later in the game. Having such mechanics work around overall gen progress (as in, total number of charges across all gens) would work better than having it be based on gens completed, as basing it specifically on completed gens would allow people to 99 gens to store up a bonus for lategame as if someone was tunnelled out at 5 gens, for instance.

I also really like the idea of having secondary objectives be contestable like that, as it prevents them from just being a non-interactive approach to guaranteeing progress. The risk and reward would need to account for the roles, but more accurately than something like the hex/boon divide. For a survivor map interaction, it could have requirements like needing all remaining players to interact with it for a certain period of time, with a cooldown to prevent them from just taking turns to rush. That way the less survivors remain, the easier it will be to trigger a buff, and give the killer more opportunities to incorporate contesting it in their macro game. Likewise, a killer oriented one might require something like collecting blood from blade wipes to be collected then pooled in, which could then be balanced around the impact of whatever effect it has.

I don't particularly like typing the survivor one to gens (even specific ones) only because of how wildly variable gen speeds can be. They could either be too contestable by the killer, or it could be achieved by the time trapper even finishes picking up his third trap. The only reason I would incorporate it into the killer's normal gameplay loop is because they're the 1, and their ability to split time and attention is far more limited. Even then, survivor interactions like objective denial could potentially be used to impact their progress if done carefully: Using the blood gathering example, there could be a stipulation like every time a hook is saboed within 16m of carrying a survivor, the killer gains a notification and loses a portion of collected blood. Not direct enough to encourage straight up bully squad tactics, but with enough risk/reward to keep promoting direct interaction above retreating to cash in.

Edit: Thought about it more, and even targeted gens could still work if done right. Cap their max repair speed, give them basekit effects similar to surveillance and discordance, essentially make it so the killer knows at all times when they're being worked on and limit the potential to blitz them before even slow killers can reach. There's potential, but it would need a lot of considerations to avoid curling a finger.

This is all conceptual, but I guess I wanted to focus on the ways such an approach could potentially go wrong and how to avoid them more than anything. If done well, expanding something as core as map interaction could benefit both casual and competitive players pretty evenly. Very key word being well, and we've seen the monkey paw enough times with ideas that ambitious that I feel its important any devs considering ideas like these to really flesh them out before throwing them on a PTB in a halfassed state, wasting resources, and killing good ideas with poor implementation. The best part about your map specific approach is that any impact those types of objectives have on the match can be themed to the map itself, which unfortunately again, leaves it more susceptible to the monkey paw on some maps vs others. Alternatively, they could be used to address map specific issues. Lot of potential in the idea, for both better and worse.