Rank/Pipping System and Matchmaking Overhaul
Well, our beloved game just hit the 4th year landmark and that's amazing. By now, most producers would already have dropped the project and launched a "Dead by Daylight 2" or something like that cause dealing with the changes the game went through must not be easy. And not only that, but the entitlement level of this community is scary. But with the ages, comes the need for some changes, and i wanted to talk about one of the most approached themes i ever seen in this forum, trying to take another approach about the issues, without the regular saltiness and vitrilicism present on most of the discussions: The Rank and Matchmaking Systems.
And I want to talk about both of them because they are deeply connected and just fixing MM to make "rank leveled matches" may not be enough to solve its problems.
Are you ready to face a walltext? No? Then jump to the "summarizing" part of the topic ;)
venting about current systems problems
Trying to get a little "logical" approach of the problems, i have to start by talking about the rank/pip system.
I know this system passed through a lot of changes since the start. Bloodpoints, goals, emblems. And the current system lasted a long time and we are all used to it. But the time passes, the skill cap increases constantly and the meta has changed a lot too, in a way that this rank system doesn't reflect exactly what it once did. When you have a small player base, you can make people rank up or down in two matches. When you get big, that just ruins part of the game system.
It's way too easy to rank up or down. You can literally go from beige ranks to purple ranks in a day, and i already did it more than once. You can also derank from red ranks to green with ease. All it takes to go up is understand a little of the game system. All you need to go down is to DC (when the penalties are off) or sacrifice yourself. If you are a killer player, you can go invisible afk with wraith. Done, you lost a pip and destroyed the experience of your colleagues. Some people do that just to avoid higher-ranked matches, cause it's really easier to play against unexperienced players and (sometimes) the queue times can be much shorter. I don't know any other "ranked" game that makes it that easy. The "rank consequences" of each match should be delayed, but i will talk about it later. Let's return to easy-pipping for a while.
The "ease" of pipping/depipping on current scenario also makes players get punished too often. If you cannot score well in all 4 emblems, specially on higher ranks, it means you will depip. Even if you played well and/or did all you could. There is a lot of actual scenarios i played through and i can describe to illustrate that: I) As a survivor, the killer is AFK and blending. The Objective and Survival points are not enough; II) As a survivor, you run the killer for 4 gens and got face camped. You played very well, maxed out boldness, but your other 3 emblems are dead. You could get more points, at the cost of letting the killer get you, but who will throw out a chase when you can actually play the game? That's bad; III) The killer brought a red mori and tunneled. Easily a deppiping match, even tho it was not exactly your skill level that made you score badly. IV) As a killer, play one character you are not fully familiarized with, or face a death squad SWF (they may be "rare", but here in my region is all you can get late at night at higher ranks).
In a opposing way, you can rank up fair easily by FARMING. Specially during the event, the number of players just farming or giving up if you don't accept the offer is way too high. In general, you just need to pop a Bloody Party Streamers or an event cake and the chances of at least one player start to look for farming is high. And this is a cheap way of sky-rocketing your level. SWF is another way of easily ranking up. I don't think the mechanic is game-breaking, but with a little communication, you chances of survival are higher than playing solo.
That ease to transverse rankings was not a problem while the game was a niche one, but now we have a massive player base. And it really raises the question about how well the pip system actually aged.
Moving on to the next topic, the rank-up ceiling is pretty low. That's something I think everyone can agree with me. I'm a rank-1. Fungoose and Otzdarva are also rank-1. And so are a lot of boosted SWF players, and players with 100h into the game, along with the 5k hour players. There is a huge gap between me and those streamers, there is a huge gap between me and most of SWF-only rank-1s, there is a massive gap between a player with 100h, 500h and 5k hours. But they are considered all the "same rank", because the ceiling is too low. Once you reach a certain level of mechanics comprehension, it's easy to get to rank-1, just to get smashed by actual "rank-1 deserver" players.
It means the rank system doesn't represent, by far, the skill level of the player nor the time he spent playing that. Of course we can agree that a lot of rank-1 players, the same way a lot of rank-20 players will actually play whats expected from their rank. A rank-20 will have a bad time facing a red rank, but we cannot think that it makes the rank system accurate.
In addition, this rank system penalizes even more the killer players who get to rank-1 by mastering few characters (or maining only one). You get locked on your character, or else, you are gonna have a REALLY BAD TIME. Survivors who try new ones get almost no impact, since the mechanics are all the same. And even if you get more of the game than a newbie trying a new killer, you probably will need a good time with the new killer until you are used with his mechanics. In the end, this issues make the MM system become flawed, even if you get only matches versing your current rank.
Another big issue (at least for me) is that the rank system is not even a little rewarding. You know, the red badge looks nice, but once you get the achievement, there is not much to make you really want to stay on Rank-1. The queues are lame, you will face some matches that will make you want to rip yourself in half, and you literally don't get anything by reaching the high ranks. It's not challenging to get there, and sometimes it's not even funny to be there. It doesn't even mean you will have good teammates who plays seriously or a challenging match. Sometimes, toxicity is all that comes with the high rank. And knowing your rank will drop a little on the next 13 makes it even less important. Why should i fight to keep this rank?
Rank reset itself is kind of meaningless. Makes casual players get stuck on low ranks, punishes medium ranks with very hard matches against ex-rank-1s for around 2 weeks, and that's it. Some high rank players love it. 10 or 20 easy matches. Some green and purple ranks just wait until the first weeks are gone to go back to the game. And don't get me wrong, it's better now than before, but still kinda useless.
When you add up the MM current problems, the things get even more messy. Unbalanced team composition, versing ranks all across the rank-charts, full lottery matches and rules that rewards high-ranked players that team up with low rank players.
We have rank-1 vs. rank-20 matches (probably a lack of players issue), rank-1s on swf with rank-20s getting rank-10 adversaries, instead of ruling it by the highest player on team. And the necessity of applying some changes really opens an opportunity to nice little tweaks that could make the game a lot better.
Lets talk about possible solutions then? But first, let me summarize my ideas so everyone can follow my train of thought.
Summarizing the problems, if you think it's too much to read
Rank and “pipping” system
· It’s way too easy to rank up or down;
· Players get punished for things completely out of their control;
· The rank-up ceiling is way too low;
· The ranking doesn’t really represent the skill level or time spent on the game;
· More, the current rank system favors survivors, since there is not much difference between Survivor characters, while there is substantial difference between killer characters;
· That makes the MM system unbalanced, cause even a “balanced ranked” match often doesn’t really offer a balanced experience;
· The system doesn’t offer that “rewarding” feeling it should do;
· The rank reset makes no real difference nowadays;
· The system worked well for a good amount of time, but the game and player base have changed a lot, and we need to acknowledge that.
Matchmaking system
· Currently, we have a lot of MM issues, with unbalanced team compositions and/or players of very different ranks getting to face each other;
· You can’t really have an idea about what you are going to face while playing today, and there is ways to do that without ruining the surprise or the game;
· The MM rules about ranking are not effective, and can be rewarding towards high rank players teaming with low rank friends.
Sugesting some changes
Oof. That took a long time. But now we can talk about the suggestion part of the text. I'm not a dev, i can trip over some technical issues here and fall hitting the floor with my face, but maybe some of this can really be useful. If you can improve what i imagine, please do, but let's keep the discussion free of salt, please <3
- First of all, the pip-system should not be the rank-defining mechanic. I know everybody is used to it, but this is actually a better info-collecting system than a direct rank mechanic. Let me explain: The rank should be based on more statistics than raw pipping. The devs have access to info about chases won and lost, gens done, skillchecks failed or succeded, survival rates against any character, pips, trial duration, along with a bunch of information that could be part of an evaluation algorithm. I can't give a formula here, since i don't have access to all this data, but a lot could be done with that, especially if my next suggestion is accepted (or object of study at least);
- The rank update also should not be instant. Yeah, I know that people might not like that, but let's talk a little more about that first. If rank updates occurred on every tuesday, or even took the rank reset place on 13th day of the month, people would not be able to abuse the rank down or up mechanics. And let's be real, nobody should be able to go rank-20 to rank-1 in less than a week. It happens cause you can grind down or up, and the weekly/monthly update of ranks would make people dedicate to play well, instead of looking for ways to sabotage your rank to get advantage;
- We could adopt a new ranking system that would be both MORE FAIR and MORE REWARDING. How? Lets imagine we don't get ranks like 1, 2, 3... 18, 19, 20. But instead we adopt a color system less specific, something like: Unranked (grey), which would put players that are too casual, that are learning the system and newbies in general together, and above it we could use the color scheme to rank players by their individual monthly performance on their region (South America, North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, etc). Red ranks would be the top-10% (or top 5%, depending on player base) of their region, purple the 15% just below the red ones, green and more colors, the same, making it really rewarding. With the monthly or weekly update, players who reached "ranked" (above the grey) would be in constant struggle to improve their scores trying to get to higher ranks. Streamers and youtubers would always bring their best game trying to keep themselves at the REAL red ranks. And that would allow new "middle" ranks to appear, with more balanced ranks that they are currently. Not all ranks needed to be given by "top percentage", but at least the highest of the ranks could be something really exclusive, that will actually reward players with the greatest skill level.
- The adoption of a rank update system like this would allow the "rank reset" to die, with the rank updates getting it space. Players that were too casual (too little matches across the month) would drop down the rank until they become unranked. And we would raise a little suspense until everyone discovered their new ranks.
- That way, we could implement another mechanic that I imagine would make players happy about matchmaking. With a established color-scheme and a more realistic rank system, we could give player a LITTLE WARNING if they get a very unbalanced matchmaking. If the players have a huge rank difference (which will happen, since SWF is a reality), something like a red or purple rank teaming with unranked players, the characters at the lobby would have a little glowing aura with the color representing their respective ranking. If the killer is way off, the scenario could get lighter if he have a low rank or darker if the rank is way too high. That way everyone could actually know a little about the match they are going in, not being able to complain about it later.
- And i read a thread sooner today about server regions that would be really good with all of this. Along with the ping, players should be warned about the region the server they are connecting is. Not a great deal, but a good way to know which server you are being ranked and to let us avoid when bugs send us to another continent.
If you had enough patience to read my text until the end, i really thank you, and i hope it reaches some of behaviour staff, and who knows maybe it can me useful.
By the way, I love your game, even tho i criticize it that much. See you all in the fog <3