A friend of mine started a round for keys, so I'm now part of a frustrated group of four. You can't queue with your friends in the beta. All you can do to play with your friends is host a private lobby in which no XP is earned, or repeatedly queue into matchmaking until you get into the same game as them which is very unreliable. Character unlocks are randomized per player per victim, so you may get unlucky like me and not have a single victim with a medkit readily available to unlock. Likewise, you can get random rewards from certain character upgrade nodes, and the first one I got for the killer is a very rare bear trap mod that causes the traps to put victims in the dying state instead of just immobilizing & wounding them (also got a trap camouflage mod so they're harder to see
).
The rewards you get as killer for a partial wipe are dramatically higher than what you get as a busybody victim that successfully escapes. As an example, one game I killed 2 of 4 people, got almost 19k points. As a victim where I started 3 of 5 generators myself + rescued someone from a hook + escaped, I got 10k points. Stressing over "winning" as the killer is pointless, the best thing for you to do is just be as brutal as possible to increase your score. Plant traps in grass around generators and near people you hang on hooks, constantly roam, inflict as many wounds as you can. Whenever you stick someone on a hook and the generators aren't on, patrol around the hook to catch anyone coming to free them. Even if the whole group shows up to distract you and save their buddy, you can still wound some of the others and make it easier to find them later. Wounded victims constantly moan and groan, so they're easy to find in lockers and are likely to be more mobile (if they're smart). Hook kill progress doesn't reset when someone is rescued from the hook (generator progress doesn't reset if you cancel either), so eventually you can kill everyone regardless of rescues by repeatedly hooking them.
As a victim, best advice is to keep your head up. You'll often see the killer long before you get an audio cue, and if you watch where he's going you can better decide where to go yourself. It's also very easy to tell when he's placing or picking up a bear trap because it's the only time he'll ever crouch down. You can repair generators faster with multiple people (up to 3) but you all have to pay attention for the timing check. Random people will be assigned a timing check at random intervals, and the backfire of the generator usually draws the killer to you. This isn't a very reliable way to create a distraction, because you may never get a timing check during a repair. Contrary to the best advice, you also want to watch where you put your feet because stepping on traps notifies the killer but disarming them does not.
Supposedly the biggest gripe people have is hook sabotaging. Getting a toolkit lets you destroy every hook except those in the basement, and while the hooks in the basement are the easiest to defend for the killer they generally take longer to get to because you have to navigate through the door and stairs. On the plus side, if you catch anyone trying to rescue their buddy there are 4 hooks down there, so you've got room for the whole gang.
