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On the topic of MMR in Dead By Daylight.
I'm a fan of anything that improves the quality of life, for this game, but after having read the suggested changes that an MMR system would entail, I'm a bit confused, and so have a list of questions I would ask, and suggestions to make based on my questions. Obviously I'm not a game dev, so I'm talking out of my ass, in terms of my level understanding, but the questions are important to ask when changing a multiplayer ranking system like this.
First, how would you determine a "Win" or a "Loss", for the purpose of point distribution? Obviously for killers, a win is killing as many survivors as possible, but for a survivor, is a win just escaping? The win condition needs to be clear and cut in stone.
For an example, I repair 4 generators solo, destroy 4 totems, and manage to loop the killer while my team finishes the last gen. Unfortunately for me, when I do manage to escape the killer, my team doesnt want to heal me, or they're just so innept (read: they did 1 generator in the time it took me to finish 4) that they arent capable. The door is almost open, but I get hit, and die. The rest of my team survives. I get a loss, and lose points, while they all gain points. That, to me, doesnt make sense.
Yes, this is very much a fringe case that could maybe happen once in a billion games, but there are lesser degrees of the same issue, which leads to my second cluster of questions.
What point threshold would a team be held to to actually advance in score? If a player is killed 3 minutes into a match, would the consequences be harsher than someone who survives 6 minutes? Would the punishment for dying first be the same as dying last? What about dying during the EGC, going out as the martyr for the rest of your team to survive?
My second suggestion helps with further defining the Win Conditions. Instead of following my original suggestion, perhaps taking into consideration the point categories to affect rank would be more effective. One way to do this would be to award a player a number of Rank points based on their ability to complete the tasks the game sets to them. Lets say theres a scale, between 1 and 100 for how much this affects your rank. Survival, being the net objective, is worth 55 points, and the other 3 categories are worth 15. Fur survival, I would suggest that it calculates in two halves, worth 10 and 45 points each. The 10 points are based on survival time, and awards a single point per minute, up to a total of 10 (in the same way exp awards 1 point per second, to a total of 600). The other, much larger half, is granted on the basis of whether you survived the round. If you survive and escape, you instantly get all 55 points, but that way, a player who dies late into the round still has a chance of not losing as many points.
Putting that to test, a player gets max points in lightbringer and boldness, but only gets 2K Altruism. They also happen to die during the end game collapse, while the rest of their team escapes. The game lasted 6 minutes.
Since they got max points in Lightbringer and Boldness, they get 30/100 right away. For Altruism, they scored just under the halfway point, so they should get... lets say 7/15 possible points. Since the game was 6 minutes long, and the player died, the player gets 6 points for surviving. This brings the total score to 43/100. Not a very strong looking score, but since they died, it makes sense. Since they got less than 50, they lose points, but not as many as if they had died earlier in the round.
This would prevent a player in the higher division from falling too far when they have an off match where they get caught off guard and die in the late game, but for players learning the game, this system would reward them for trying to play, instead of playing the corners of the map like I (and many others) did, when learning the game.
As I said earlier, I dont have a base understanding of the way game development works, but these are questions I feel the community should be asking, instead of outright rejection in statements like "MMR wont work in DBD". Remember, behind closed doors, stats that create an MMR system could have, and likely already do, exist. We just didnt know they were there, until the devs decided to implement it, and replace the Emblem system, which players have been complaining about incessantly.