why do survivors take it personal when you’re just trying to play killer
i play both survivor and killer, more of survivor because killers get treated like garbage. I don’t t-bag and i don’t flicker my flashlight because i know the unfairness of playing killer. So why is it that survivors feel the need to do it? It just gets very annoying and toxic. We are all trying to play a game and have fun try not to make it toxic.
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Because they find it fun, every game ever has had people doing "taunty" things either to get a specific response or for pure schadenfreude.
Looking any deeper at it than that is honestly a waste of time if you ask me.
Two reasons, they have much more things they can do (such as tbagging, wide known toxic thing in many video games) which some killers do if they're able to, but that doesnt mean every killer does (Such as Ghostface being able to tbag, some do, some dont).
The other reason is that survivors are in a group. Even if they dont know them, they may believe that the other survivors have their back on being toxic, and that usually at most only one person will be toxic back.
Because that's what pvp is all about, to rub your victory on your opponent's face :)
Well there is another way to look at it, and profit from their behavior.
While T-bagging is certainly unsportsmanlike, it is largely benign. The flashlight thing is just a tactic; you are the one letting it annoy you. Stop doing that and you will find the flashlight clickers to be a helpful tool. I advise purging the word "toxic" from your vocabulary and ignore anyone who throws it out willy-nilly. The word is entirely subjective and has no value anymore (if it ever did). It is a just a glittering generality, a term used to invoke an emotional response without any actual logic or support.
There are real things to get upset about in DbD but these are pretty tame. I once got called "toxic" by a Survivor because I didn't chase him; I ignored him the entire match until I killed the other three. He asked me why? I said, "because you wanted me to chase you, and kept clicking your flashlight at me." This answer infuriated him further. He said I purposely caused him to lose Pips by not giving him any chase. I pointed out that he could have tried to bait me a little less obviously, gotten on an objective which I would have been likely to force him off, and so on, but none of that swayed him. He had decided I was toxic and had wronged him. What actually happened was simple; I judged that he must be the team's best Looper since he was working so hard to get me in a chase with him. A good Looper's efforts are usually applied to leading the Killer away from the others while they do objectives. I wished to keep up Generator pressure. Why bother with the clicker when he is wasting his time following me around? He is not on objectives so I've neutralized him simply by ignoring him. Last but not least, he will be far easier to catch when I can do it at my leisure, not having to maintain pressure on anyone else.
I got "reported" once for what appears to be simply kicking some Survivor butt. Hell, I've probably been reported for that many times but not always told. This particular time I was playing a Spooky Myers build at Midwich. The team was clearly a SWF and exceedingly altruistic. I usually test for this early. I played around with them for awhile, but then I started sticking them in the basement because they kept trying for Generators by the basement. Go figure. The spawn had a pallet there right before the stairs with that bit of obstructive terrain. Once the pallet is gone the Killer can literally stand where it was and the only approach possible to the basement is to go upstairs the long way and come down behind the Killer. Here is where it gets funny. They had launched a very well done rescue from the basement and gotten two out but one person got slugged as they ran away and I was chasing the others leaving that person on the basement floor. When I got to the pallet, they dropped it and I started kicking it. The Felix had brought in a fully tricked out flashlight (remember these are a SWF) and blinded me. I stayed still. Why run forward when I can't see and I know people will just go behind me? While I stayed right where I kicked the pallet they couldn't quickly get by me. Well, the Felix kept blinding me over and over again, apparently expecting (for some reason) this would make me move. It didn't, obviously. :) Once the flashlight had pretty much died and 60 seconds had passed I went down and hooked the one in the basement. The game went downhill for them very quickly as they just kept staying within my wall hack, never leaving that corner until it was down to just one of them. Every single thing I did was in response to THEIR actions but somehow I was the toxic one. When the game ended, all they said was: REPORTED!
We all have war stories, and as a Survivor I also have a few where the Killer complains about this or that, does the same thing over and over again, and they are all equally foolish as the two Killer examples I give above. Nobody acting within the rules is being "toxic" but are simply playing the game and doing the best they can with the tools they have available. Try not to let it tilt you.
Different people have different ideas of what's in good fun, and what's acceptable to treat strangers on the internet like unprovoked.
Both sides tend to get aggrieved and assume the other side did something specifically to spite them when a game isn't going their way - I can't count the number of times I've watched streams, even of good-natured streamers, and seen camping/tunneling accusations fly when the killer comes back to the hook to check out a gen, or follows someone to the hook and then goes after the unhooked person because the healthy person ran off and broke LoS. There aren't a lot of good faith assumptions in DBD. And I've been tilted by people saboing hooks or surprise flashlighting me when they're just trying to look after their team. So I try to stick to the rule of thumb where if there's another explanation for a behavior than trying to piss me off - if they actually gain something out of their actions - I do my best to let it go.
(On the other hand, I had a really bad Pig game against a SWF earlier where I got my first down at 2 gens left, and the SWF went out of their way to deny me hooks, have healthy players interrupt chases, all ignore gens for bodyblocking extravaganzas - so at that point, because there's no actual need to be so aggressive when the killer has no pressure and the game's all but won, I'd say that kind of altruistic play falls into BM territory. Plus they were clicking the hell out of me anyway, so it wasn't really ambiguous.)
Using that metric... it's way easier to tell when survivors are being jerks compared to when killers are being jerks, because they have a variety of actions that don't benefit them in any way that they can do. Killers only really have hitting on the hook/camping and refusing to hook past any possible DS/nodding while facecamping as explicit BM options; everything else can be a legitimate gameplay choice, unfun as it may be. The guy who knocked you out of the game at 5000 points might be doing an adept, the Trapper that's camping the ever-loving hell out of the basement and herding everyone into it might be doing Six Feet Under, the pub-wrecking Forever Freddy might be trying to power through to rank 1. You generally don't know what the killer is thinking until the GGEZes come out.
Clickers do it to keep your attention off of their teammates and though it may be annoying, it does serve a purpose in the match. Whatever someone can do to keep your attention off of gens, is a good strategy if they want to win. Same with teabagging.