Some Thoughts and Reflections about the new MMR

knell

When players' MMR score settles (giving a month or so), will there be enough killers with high enough MMR scores to give a good match for survivors with high MMR scores? Or will killers with mediocre MMR scores have to step in as substitutes, basically forced into the role of being the good survivors' entertainment to make up for the lack of good killers?

On one hand, there only needs to be 1 good killer per every 4 good survivors.

However, the problem lies in the fact that there are only 1 Survivor MMR score per player, and up to 20 Killer MMR scores per player (as of now). There are few issues because of this.

1. Once you learn how to play one survivor well, most of the time you will be able to play all survivors well. Which is why there only needs to be 1 MMR score for that side. However, on the other side, even if you are generally a great killer player and have mastered some killers, it doesn't mean you are efficient at all killers. So in order for great survivor players to be matched with equally skilled killer players, the killer-player must also have chosen a killer-character that he is great at.

As soon as one good killer player chooses a killer he isn't good at, 4 survivors with high MMR scores will lose a match that should be equal to their skill level, and probably will end up having to dominate some poor killer player that aren't as good at this game. I'm guessing that will happen quite often.

2. It's well known that even though beginner-killers tend to dominate beginner-survivors, once you reach a certain playing level (of having basic map-awareness and understanding of perks and mechanics), killers become much more difficult to become proficient at it. Moreover, for whatever reason, most people here in the community expect that the killer-role needs to have a much steeper learning curve in order for it to be 'strong'.

I won't get into why I think killers don't need to be 'strong', but instead need to be 'balanced' and in my opinion, regardless of how difficult/easy the character is to master, they should all be balanced equally.  But in regards to the MMR system, having a steep learning curve for killers is in fact a hindrance because it takes many more matches for killers to become 'good' with each character, while when playing survivor, you don't have to keep relearning different sets of new skills. So over time, playing survivor will stop being difficult (or at least, not any more difficult than before), but learning to play new killers will always result in requiring many more matches to become good at the character, giving much more surplus of 'good survivors' with high MMR overall.

So the question is, will there be enough players who are patient enough to get really good at particular killers, especially if they have to suffer through survivor players who have a much high MMR scores if they can't find an equal match?

For the PS4 US-East region, we've always had a lack of killers (and therefore long wait-times for survivors). Not only that, but we've had a lack of high-skilled killer players. Not that there weren't any, but just not enough of them to go around. And because of that, even when matchmaking was determined by ranks, average skilled killers would have to constantly be matched against really good SWF teams. Which then creates a vicious cycle where killer-players don't even want to bother to continue suffering through much better players in order to become better at those characters.

Will this MMR system fix that type of cycle? Call me a pessimist, but my guess is, even though the actual MMR scores are hidden, as months go by, the average MMR scores for the killer players in the match will always be much lower than the average survivor players in this region for my platform, just like it was before.