Toxicity in the game.

Toxicity isn't something unique to this game. If you have PvP, you will have salt, that's just the way it is. PvP is just competitive by nature and it brings out the frustration in other people easily. It's so easy to vent out frustration through a keyboard. Go to any pvp game's forums and I guarantee you will see "toxic" written somewhere.

If you're the type of person to say, "wow that was rude", let me help you, don't don't say that. Trolls thrive off this response and will dig their claws deeper if they sniff blood. I don't initiate this type of garbage, but I'll troll people that start it with me. My suggestion is to fight fire with fire. It's so easy to wire people up that are already mad.

An example of this is this morning I got 4K in, I'll give a rough transcript of what happened:
Survivor 1: GG
Me: GG
Survivor 2: you were easy to loop lol
Me: just accept your loss bro
Survivor 2: you suck tho
Me: you can call me 4k Freddy tho
Survivor 2: you're not even good, how is it to be that bad. I wasn't even trying to win
Me: 4K FREDDY BREAKIN' NECKS AND CASHIN' CHECKS
Survivor 2: git gud
Survivor 2: ur terrible (disconnects)

Just have fun with it and don't feed the trolls.

an entire thread to defend infinite looping.. nice one.

Alright, I'm going to do a long rant.

Toxicity in the current game is a combination of a lacking identity on the game's part, and personal immaturity on the player's. What some people don't understand is that we're part of a transitional period in the game's life, and the difficulty associated with this change is making games more frustrating than fun in some cases.

Example:
This game started out with the concept of being a 1+1+1+1v1 stealth horror game, where even the Wraith was terrifying for that reason since he would catch you unaware and feeling helpless.

The players evolved, however, and people realized they could run literal infinite loops to prevent ever being captured. This encouraged a sense of bravado and the false idea that anything resembling infinites were only performed by skilled survivors (Good old Mcote was quoted for that one). Ever since then, survivors felt increasingly comfortable with the idea that they were more or less capable of 1v1ing the killer, and even flat out demanded it as a possibility in some cases.

On top of that, SWF was introduced and brought to the game a more 4v1 team-like essence. Survivors started to band together more efficiently in an increasing manner. Eventually, even solo queue players were beginning to unknowingly define roles for themselves in certain games as being a generator jockey or even taking it upon themselves to taunt and pre-occupy the killer.

So all of a sudden this game that started as a 1+1+1+1v1 stealth horror game has started to become a more chase-oriented 4v1 team game. This is basically the exact opposite of the original intention, and balance went haywire, especially in regards to the time it takes to complete objectives relative to potential chase times in an ideal scenario (as most popularly highlighted by Marth and his crew).

So, killers started feeling discouraged by looping (an unintentional feature in the game that uses map assets and hitboxes to create an artificial distance and area of security) and the introduction of SWF (an originally unintentional feature that gives large team-oriented benefits to the survivors). The amount of obstacles killers had to adapt to in that regard was pretty sudden and immense, and has/is causing some backlash. After all, it's a pretty forced and unexpected change from the original game idea - the latter of which hasn't even been officially addressed in the years since its release. The large increase in altruism likely lead to an increase in camping, and likewise, the increased efficiency from co-ordination between survivors reduced gametime, encouraging tunneling to slow it down. Neither really fun for survivors, but feeling necessary for killers.

Then the problem got further compounded because it's not like the developers were very transparent in what they're expecting from this game. They'd say things like "looping isn't bannable" or "camping isn't bannable" but they never really mentioned if it's something they want to directly promote in-game or not. This was likely to prevent angering anyone in an already confused and hostile crowd, but I believe it's also a large part of why the community couldn't/can't settle on what is and isn't fair for so long. This, in turn, lead to players creating their own rules and standards and trying to force it on the opposing side to improve their own personal experience (often while completely disregarding the other side's) and created a pretty harsh spiral of aggression when those standards weren't met.

Fortunately, the developers have been making pretty great strides recently. The introduction of an innate Kindred to level the playing field is more or less a direct acknowledgement that SWF is here to stay, but that it's also an issue balance wise and that they're doing something about it by leveling the playing field for solo players first. I believe in a recent stream they also highlighted that camping, tunneling, and looping is fair game, but I could be wrong.

Either way, I think things are actually making progress and people will (finally) begin to accept the new kind of game DBD is becoming. If so, that could also hint at the possibility of a slightly less toxic community. I at least have noticed less people complaining about me tunneling someone when there's say, 2 generators left and no one dead and to me that's a great sign of improvement in the community aspect of the game lately.

That said, toxicity will probably always exist to some degree. Some people actually really love being ######### and promoting that kind of behaviour, regardless of what you do or even the game they play. It's for this reason that I really hope the developers are working on a better reporting system, and hopefully one that highlights (even anonymously) when a punishment has been handed out. This would immensely improve the community's faith in their system, and perhaps discourage toxicity to a larger degree.

That, and I would hope that one day the developers actually release a video (maybe a stream) dedicated solely to addressing these controversial topics. Preferably by saying if they're reasonable strategies or not, with visual examples as to why certain strategies are efficient and how to counter them. I can't help but think that an official video dedicated SOLELY to topics like looping, camping, and tunneling, bodyblocking, etc would be great in finally shutting people up and learning to cope.