Matchmaking: My experience so far
Not trying to point fingers or get salty, this is just some (hopefully helpful) feedback on what our experience was.
1) Survivor Side
First of all: I played the game for a bit over 700 hours so far. I had some fun playing solo queue most of the time in the beginning. Recently (3-4 months ago) I could win a friend over to try out the game. He was hooked (no pun intended) pretty soon and we play most of our sourvivor matches in a 2 player SWF now. He's at about 400 hours now. So this is based on our experiences together. I know we're not god-tier surv players. But I'd say we can tell If killers or surv teammates have some good understanding of the game.
That being said, we all know a SWF will always be somewhat stronger than a solo surv game. Now here's the thing and I'm really starting to worry about the future of the game:
90% of our matches we were facing killers with a considerable lower amount of playtime (lowest being literally 3 hours). In a lot of instances we were facing killers who played killer for their very first time. I don't understand why this happens, especially regarding what was said in the Q&A: "We’re specifically monitoring the experience of new players to ensure the system doesn’t immediately throw them games where they are hopelessly outmatched, and we have a few techniques that we’re implementing already to help with this."
Other times we had killers totally destroy us, but that only happened a few times over the course of about 20 hours we played since the new system was implemented. But apart from 1 or 2 games we never felt there the balancing was right - it was rather frustrating, really.
I will try and look into some solo games soon.
2) Killer side
So... I understand there's a different skill rating for each killer you play. That's a really awesome idea I was looking forward to.
I don't consider myself a really good killer player yet - of the 700 hours i played the game, somewhat over 100 were invested in killer games. However I am happy with the skill level of my nurse gameplay. I'd say I'm most comfortable with playing the nurse. I also play Spirit or Huntress sometimes.
I played 3 nurse games where I got a 4k each time. It felt fair. I wasn't having the easiest time, but I also didn't feel overwhelmed (hence, the 4k).
After this I wanted to look into trying out Wraith for the first time. I played 3 games, I got destroyed. In one instance there was a player who had played the game for 3700 hours. Another one had 2k+ hours. One of the 4 survs only had 11.
3) Conclusion
Regarding 1): About half of those "low hour players" were really patient and just tried their best, even if they had the hardest time even landing a hit. I can only imagine how disheartening these experiences were sometimes. We felt really bad for a lot of these players. Some also were straight up dc-ing, some were giving up and just stopped moving, some let us finish the rest of the gens...
Also I hope some other points are taken into consideration:
- Survs DCing should lower the impact of the adjustments that influence your "skill recalculation" as survivor after a match
- Same thing If a surv is "camped to death" (since camped survivors can't rescue themselves)
- Hours played as survivor / killer
- How many SWF groups are joining (2, 1 or 0) and how they are paired (4 friends, 3 friends / 1 solo, 2 friends / 2 friends, 2 friends / 2 solo)
- If the killer brings a mori
- Noed also might make a difference - we had some killers with 0-2 hooks turn around the game last minute (but I'm afraid luck/RNG (i.e. totem placement) won't really be measurable)
Disclaimer: My phrasing might be a little odd - I'm not a native speaker 😐
Have a wonderful day - I hope we will see some improvements soon.