FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLAY THE GAME CASUALLY AS A FUNNY PARTY GAME WITH SCARY KILLERS AND DO NOT FALL INTO THE TRAP OF PLAYING COMPETITIVELY FOR EVEN A SLIVER OF A MOMENT YOU'LL HATE YOURSELF A LOT AND THE SUNK COST FALLACY WILL TRAP YOU IN THE GAMEPLAY LOOP. The game is not new player friendly and I'll stick to this statement because plenty of players have optimised the fun out of the game when it comes to playing it. People not even near the MMR they think they are in playing as if they're in a tournament and the tribalism between both survivor mains and killer mains is WAY TOO TOXIC. Let me try and break it down for you and paint you a picture and I hope this helps in making an informed choice on getting the game. As it stands currently though the game is more survivor sided purely due to the fact that core aspect of the game being hide and seek type of game with barely any info shared between players conflicts with how groups of friends normally play which is over voice chat, which means survivors are actually both under-powered (solo) and overpowered (team play)

Tribalism - Survivor mains
They're whiny for sure, but statistically this is bound to happen as it's 1 versus 4 but man survivors are pretty delusional. Those that play competitively will kick a person learning to play killer while they are down, they take ANY win as them being good at the game forgetting that an asymmetric game really just depends on RNG and the reactions of every player. Plenty of times there are those people who set arbitrary rules to how killers should be killing properly even if at times those rules put killers in a spot where they practically can't do anything and post game they can be very toxic to even their own teammates. I've had teammates who could not function for 2 minutes after being injured following me for heals when the killer is on their tail AND CAN SEE THEM MY GOD LOOK BEHIND YOU! And then they act like everything they did was perfect and it was just the killer being toxic when the killer was alerted by them all the damn time because they didn't put any effort in surviving like a survivor SHOULD.

Tribalism - Killer mains
God competitive killer mains are actually the whiniest babies I've seen and no not the people calling for nerfs to perks or reminding us that the game is survivor sided every minute but there are killer mains who genuinely are mediocre at the game, but want to play competitively, but are not seeing any progress in their gameplay so they stew in the forums and discussion boards complaining about survivors literally doing ANYTHING?? Killers have accused me of genrushing and tryharding when I don't have any items or gen perks on let alone META perks?? Killers constantly whining not even about toxicity (but I'm with them there) but about being STUNNED? do you want the survivors to stand still? I've seen people complain about looping and being blinded like looking at a wall or perks that remedy the stun time don't exist. Complaints from people who clearly do not test or even experiment with their builds because the discussions and forums have become a killer echo chamber.

Plenty of people playing competitively see the balance of the game in a black and white manner. Survivor bad Killer good, but fail to realise that survivors both hold plenty and no power in that the strength lies in communication, meanwhile the game is set by the killer who when applying pressure well can come out with a clean sweep or close at least. The game is asymmetric too so it will never be fully balanced and people don't want to admit that it's in a much better state than it was years ago. BHVR is slow with balancing but they aren't the worst, but you see streamers overreacted setting off a chain reaction within the playerbase and can just SEE people don't actually think for themselves when they parrot their opinions. Yeah so the game is very competitive now but please don't set out to play it in that manner, even if you're tough or can endure it's FUNNY when you don't take it seriously, break the ice and chat to people, emote, have fun but still try to survive. It's a video game at the end of the day. Not recommending for your sanity, but give it a try if it's on sale, the game is littered with stupid amounts of micro-transactions so the grind for anything good is where most of the play time comes from with some people.