How the MMR works, and why what Patrick said makes absolute sense (from a dev POV)
Comments
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So, there are two problems with what you're describing as flaws with the current system.
1: They happened before! The absolute worst you can say about the current system is that it didn't fix people playing like cowards, but since it'd be kind of nuts to expect it to - it's just a matchmaking system, it's not supposed to be fixing balance or player behaviour issues - I'm not really going to entertain that as a genuine point. People have always played the way that would guarantee their own win, that hasn't changed. Also, regarding the point about a 3K where you get out - yes, you won that. Personal win conditions don't have to be the same as the game's actual win condition, and this game is a great example of why; your goal as survivor is to escape, that's it, but you might find it more entertaining to take the risk and help your teammates leave. Hell, some people actually prefer losing so their team can win!
2: The cheap and cheesy strategies you're describing should elevate someone's MMR. Especially the killer tactics- you should, as killer, be elevated to higher skill brackets if you're using cheap tactics like facecamping and such, because then you'll go up against survivors who stand a higher chance of being able to handle it instead of facing newbies who get completely stomped by it. This principle applies to survivor, too- if you win a lot, you go against better opponents, and if you're winning by hiding and playing it safe that'll eventually stop working.
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Yes, I agree, it probably wouldn't be very hard - though neither of us have any way of knowing that for sure - but it's also unnecessary. Why fix what isn't broken? If it does turn out after the current issues with matchmaking are fixed that there is a problem with how the number is calculated, sure, I think looking at team results is a fine first step, but we have no reason to believe that's the case right now.
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The game also has numerous references to working together and helping your team, as another person already cited for you in this thread, but there is no point in cherry picking. That's also the easiest way to explain the game to a new player because it's the simplest thing to understand. "You want to escape" is much simpler than "You want to escape, but like, sometimes you'll be able to make so much more BP by not escaping, and sometimes your rift challenge is worth hanging around for, and sometimes you're playing with a friend and you really want to save them, and..."
My point Re: the opponent is simple. If you are helping your opponent do their objective, that should be negatively reflected in your MMR, because MMR is based on the principle of a zero sum game where a loss for one side equates to a win for the other side. The fact that it doesn't in the current system means the system is flawed. You don't need to care either way. It is what it is.
MMR does reward selfish plays that lead to players' own escape, yes. 100% agreed. That is a problem. There is nothing skilled about waiting in a locker for your teammate to die in a winnable match. There is nothing skilled about leaving through the exit gate instead of taking an easy save because 10% of the time you'll end up dying for your teammate. MMR thinks so, though, and will tend to boost the rating of players who do these things. This is a problem.
Selfish players are not "stuck with" more skilled players. They are being carried by them, and necessarily so, because they're also facing killers that are too good for them. This just incentivizes more selfish behavior, since these players get disproportionately stomped whenever they interact with the killer. It also hurts the experience for their teammates. This is a problem.
You have every right to be an unapologetic, "screw you I got mine", political compass meme of a DBD player. Nothing wrong with that. The fact that the system rewards that style of play results in worse experiences for everyone, though, including you. When I say that selfish play is "rewarded", I'm talking strictly in terms of MMR. MMR itself is worthless outside of matchmaking and you get nothing of value from having a higher rating. If you're laser focused on surviving all the time, you should actually consider the opposite (getting matched with weaker killers) to be a reward. A higher MMR is more like a punishment. I'm surprised you wouldn't prefer to play the game in a system that lets you face weaker killers and escape more frequently, even well over 50%? That's the only way for you to complete that selfish objective more often. In the current system, you'll always get dragged down to roughly 50% because that's what matchmaking is based around.
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The definition of a win by the developers:
"One of the difficulties is that the game does not have a clear-cut win/lose condition. It's more of a gradient of did I have a good game, do I feel like I’ve accomplished much, was it fun?"
This isn't specific for killers, it is across the board. You claim it is speculative what I state and not a developers clear words. Yet I quote once again the developers words and you claim this hasn't changed? It is in the exact interview you use for your argument. The fact that this win condition isn't suitable to e-sports, still means this is what they defined as a win. The emblem system was far more inline with their original definition of a win, they changed the system as their definition is no longer the original one as you claim.
What is the original win condition, well according to the developer - the quotes you claim to care about: Did you have a good game, do you feel that you have accomplished much and was it fun? Nowhere in the developer you claim we should listen to does he state, it was just reliant on kill and escaping.
Escaping was not the embodiment of the win condition according to the devs quote from the interview, it is simple one of the goals, one of the factors to strive for and that was it. Just the same as striving for more survivors getting out than those that would die, under the escaping section it even says you can stick around and try to get the other survivors out. You argue that the win condition hasn't changed, but the interview you linked actually showcases that is exactly what happened. Their original design wasn't that clear cut.
It isn't true to their original design, it hasn't been a hide and seek game as it is evolved in being mainly centered around chases. It hasn't been a pure lone wolf, survival of the quickest among survivors for even longer than that. The fact is that you are playing a 1v4 game, you cannot win on your own as a survivor and are part of a team. You go what does it matter that you have to collaborate to achieve the final goal? Well the fact that means you are reliant on your teammates to get you to the finish line.
You state that the game of hockey could have been replaced by any other sport, yet they prepared the Q&A this was what they chose to use. The game is team based and simply put in any sport or game where a collaboration takes place to achieve a win, as is with the survivors in the game. None will result in a personal loss, if you managed to contribute enough to get the team a win. There is a reason for this, while I think a combination would be far more suitable to maintain the original win condition alive where having a good game, the idea where you feel accomplished and whether it was fun. The team aspect is not to be ignored.
Since you love quotations have the following: Patrick, lead game designer: "We are looking into improvements to the current system an example is to take team results into account for survivors in addition to the personal results" (You can thank the previous conversation I had here for them pointing out the fact that they actually stated this) Clearly he is speaking of a team...
You state to not care about the player-base, which frankly means you don't care about the game. Without a player-base there is no game and no they shouldn't simply listen to the player base... if they did that they would need to remove the MMR completely.
This is pretty much sums it up, funny I saw this pop up in while I was writing this:
Post edited by Kalinikta on1 -
- Not disagreeing that this happened before. I just finished a roughly 6 month break from the game, though, and what I've come back to has been worse than anything I've experienced in 1300 hours. It's been match after match after match of getting camped to death on the first hook. I had a streak of actually 8 matches in a row a few days ago where it happened. Why? As far as I can figure, killers at my MMR are likely going to fit into a few moulds: 1) Terrible killers who camp for the 2k. 2) Actual killers of my skill. 3) Killers way better than me who like to meme around instead of completing their objective (i.e. BK Myers, the classic Wraith EGC Rancor/Nemesis murder spree). Bucket 3 has always been pretty rare, and now bucket 1 is incentivized since 1) some players value being more "skilled" and will play so as to fit that definition, and 2) players who find success with that playstyle will find it harder and harder to stop, because they're boosted to the point where they're playing against players they can't kill when they don't camp. I could be wrong, but I can't think of any other change during my hiatus that could have caused this change in someone's behavior.
- Very much disagree. Anyone with two thumbs can 2k with Bubba unless they're facing a team that is so much better than them they can't even get a down. Are these the kinds of matches we want to incentivize? Killers who are so boosted they can only camp to win, so they have no choice but to keep camping, and this vicious cycles it's way until the gap is so large they finally start losing again? This is just bad for everyone involved since it encourages unfun play. Rather than this stick of collateral damage, I prefer the carrot of deranking these players. If you're facing baby survivors and don't need to worry about playing perfectly all of the time, players don't need to resort to camping in order to win. They can just go off and chase and take it easy and still do well and not get bullied. This will gradually raise their ranks until they're in a good place.
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The current issues with MMR are independent of whether their algorithm is working as intended. The concept is fundamentally flawed. My guess is they figured it would be a decent proxy for skill without anticipating the side effects in terms of match quality for incentivizing selfish and unfun play.
If you haven't noticed worse quality matches under MMR, that's good for you. I'm sure YMMV. I'm a very altruistic player, though, and will frequently sacrifice myself for teammates during the EGC because it's more fun and usually more lucrative (in terms of BP) to try to save them than to let them die. It also builds camaraderie and is fun to smile about in the postgame chat. For these sins, I am apparently doomed to play with more than my fair share of selfish potatoes against killers that if I'm lucky are just a bit worse than me, or if I'm unlucky are a lot worse than me and just camp the first hook. It's been pretty awful, honestly.
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Just going to lump both of those into the same block of response this time, since it's the same answer- the MMR doesn't incentivise this. It's not a progression system.
Now, I do have sympathy in that it's going to be very hard to actually get that through to the majority of the playerbase who keep thinking that getting more kills = some kind of reward, but it's also not something that the MMR system could fix even if it made the changes that you're suggesting. It's just not what an MMR system is for, if you want to incentivise altruistic play and disincentivise strategies like camping, that has to come from somewhere else within the game.
The good news is that there is a framework in place for that already- the incentive system actually already exists, it's just a bit lacklustre: the emblem system. Personally, I think the simplest and neatest fix for people playing selfishly, especially survivors, would be to give the emblem system a little sprucing up so it becomes far more obviously the progression system people keep wrongfully assuming the MMR system is meant to be, give it some more rewards and more overt feedback for when you perform well within the emblem system.
On the killer side, the devs have mentioned some basekit changes to aid in reducing facecamping, though I obviously can't speculate on how effective they'll be.
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I've been trying to explain why I feel it does, though. It's incetivization out of necessity. Killers who camp are rewarded by this system, meaning they face better survivors. Invariably, this means that they have two options: 1) Continue to camp. 2) Stop camping, and get absolutely pummeled until their MMR bottoms out. So, naturally, the players continue to camp. The same goes for immersed, selfish survivors. They start escaping that way at the expense of your teammates, which causes them to face better killers. Their options become 1) Continue to play immersed. 2) Try to be a productive team member and get absolutely pummeled until their MMR bottoms out.
I'm arguing that a team-escape-based MMR would help address most of these issues. Let's take the same example of our immersed survivor. This time they derank and start facing weaker killers. As a result, they don't feel as much danger in the game, meaning they start acting bolder, such as doing risky objectives or even stepping in to take chase for a teammate on death hook. This sort of play is gradually rewarded by MMR until they arrive back at a good balance.
I'd also be open to changes like the one you described, but given that the current MMR system seems to be making these issues worse and really should be doing the opposite it seems like a logical place to start.
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You know, I think I misunderstood your point at first- I'll cop to that, I'm tremendously unwell so I'm a bit out of it lol
So, simply changing the survivor side to be more about the team escape is a pretty okay idea, I don't hate that. I think most of the suggestions I've seen for it are too complicated, but some kind of adjustment where you don't rise as far if the rest of your team are dead is definitely a workable idea in theory- but the problem is that we can't know if the MMR system actually is causing any of the problems people are currently experiencing because the matching half of it is currently broken. Your experience may be that you're facing woefully unmatched or differently skilled killers, because the system is currently being far, far too lenient with the number matchups in a few cases. It's currently broken, which makes it hard to properly assess how well it works.
In the case that having the matching half fixed still results in what you're describing, which is possible but not a guarantee, then yes- team based adjustments would be the best first place to look.
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*The game also has numerous references to working together and helping your team, as another person already cited for you in this thread, but there is no point in cherry picking. That's also the easiest way to explain the game to a new player because it's the simplest thing to understand. "You want to escape" is much simpler than "You want to escape, but like, sometimes you'll be able to make so much more BP by not escaping, and sometimes your rift challenge is worth hanging around for, and sometimes you're playing with a friend and you really want to save them, and..."
Go ahead, show me an official reference in which working together and helping your team is identified as being the winning condition to the game.
*My point Re: the opponent is simple. If you are helping your opponent do their objective, that should be negatively reflected in your MMR, because MMR is based on the principle of a zero sum game where a loss for one side equates to a win for the other side. The fact that it doesn't in the current system means the system is flawed. You don't need to care either way. It is what it is.
The problem is the you continually assert that there is only two sides without providing any evidence to show for it. In fact, there is five sides, one for each of the survivors and one for the killer. Never will it ALL go up, and never will it ALL go down. It's functioning exactly how it's supposed to.
*MMR does reward selfish plays that lead to players' own escape, yes. 100% agreed. That is a problem. There is nothing skilled about waiting in a locker for your teammate to die in a winnable match. There is nothing skilled about leaving through the exit gate instead of taking an easy save because 10% of the time you'll end up dying for your teammate. MMR thinks so, though, and will tend to boost the rating of players who do these things. This is a problem.
Disgree. The purpose of any game is to figuring out the path to victory. Thus, skill, in the context of games, is defined by whether the player have the knowledge, and the actual ability to carve out the path to winning. It's important to understand that it has nothing to do with "effort" that one may put in, nor how "difficult" the ability is obtain. For example, even if a player is able to somehow memorize every random map formation and figured out a way to predict every pallet spawn location so that he/she is able to throw every pallet down within the first 20 seconds of the game by taking the shortest route before even the killer can find him, would that be considered "skill" in this game? Unless that player's ability is shown to provide consistent victory, it's absolutely meaningless. Sure, it might have taken lot of effort to learn it, and it may be difficult to pull off, but unless it somehow correleates to his/her escape rate, it's irrelevant to his/her skill. So ultimately, it's always a question of "Am I doing what it takes to earn my victory?"
So yes, if you are consistently able to pull of a win majority of the time simply by hiding all game, guess what, it's a marvelous skill to have. But honestly, how often does that happen? Every time I've seen players like that, the player ends up either dying, or simply getting the hatch (which doesn't affect the MMR). Leaving another survivor to die while escaping? Why wouldn't it be a skill? On the other hand, I've seen overly altruistic survivors running headlong into a one-hit camper and dying off - displays of horrible decision-making ability that would counteract any good skills they may have demonstrated during the game - so they go down in MMR as they should.
*Selfish players are not "stuck with" more skilled players. They are being carried by them, and necessarily so, because they're also facing killers that are too good for them. This just incentivizes more selfish behavior, since these players get disproportionately stomped whenever they interact with the killer. It also hurts the experience for their teammates. This is a problem.
Why would it be a problem? Eventually (and probably really quickly), they'll start running into killers that are too strong, and survivors who won't be able to carry him/her. After all, the game is balanced in a way that on average, four players must play well (at least in the beginning) for any of them to have a chance of surviving.
*You have every right to be an unapologetic, "screw you I got mine", political compass meme of a DBD player. Nothing wrong with that. The fact that the system rewards that style of play results in worse experiences for everyone, though, including you. When I say that selfish play is "rewarded", I'm talking strictly in terms of MMR. MMR itself is worthless outside of matchmaking and you get nothing of value from having a higher rating. If you're laser focused on surviving all the time, you should actually consider the opposite (getting matched with weaker killers) to be a reward. A higher MMR is more like a punishment. I'm surprised you wouldn't prefer to play the game in a system that lets you face weaker killers and escape more frequently, even well over 50%? That's the only way for you to complete that selfish objective more often. In the current system, you'll always get dragged down to roughly 50% because that's what matchmaking is based around.
The reason why a player is focused on escaping is, wait for it, it's literally the point of the game. That is the win condition. And trying to achieve the wincon is the fun aspect of ANY game. Figuring HOW to get there. It's not about being a "selfish" player or "altruistic" player - it's about figuring out what needs to be done so that wincon can be fulfilled. MMR is neither reward or a punishment - it's just a matchmaking tool that allows you to find opponents that are around the similar level as you in your thirst for victory.
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*"One of the difficulties is that the game does not have a clear-cut win/lose condition. It's more of a gradient of did I have a good game, do I feel like I’ve accomplished much, was it fun?"
This isn't specific for killers, it is across the board. You claim it is speculative what I state and not a developers clear words. Yet I quote once again the developers words and you claim this hasn't changed? It is in the exact interview you use for your argument. The fact that this win condition isn't suitable to e-sports, still means this is what they defined as a win.
...did I not just clarify the context of that quote? Or are you choosing to repeatedly cherry-pick that quote I've already refuted because you don't have anything else? Let me repeat: 1. This is in context of explaining why their esports/tournaments scene didn't work, because 2. True, the Killer's win condition is not "clear-cut", [but I have shown you repeatedly that the Survivor side is], 3. Your words: "the developers have avoided for years to create a clear message on what a win/lose condition is." - your quote is just another example of them paying lip service to avoid being clear about it. Or do you actually believe that player's "skill" is their ability to have "fun" within the match, and that the MMR should be based on Fun/Not Fun ratings, and that the game should be balanced by players ability to "have fun" or not. How does any of that even make sense?
*The emblem system was far more inline with their original definition of a win, they changed the system as their definition is no longer the original one as you claim.
Uh, what. Show me EXACTLY where the developers have stated that the results from the emblem system (pips/losing pips) have anything to do with the survivor's win condition. Why in the world are you just randomly making things up?
*What is the original win condition, well according to the developer - the quotes you claim to care about: Did you have a good game, do you feel that you have accomplished much and was it fun?
Why in the world would you think that lip service he gave is the "original win condition?" You realize that their official website and in-game tutorial have been around since its inception, right? You are also insinuating that if a facecamping Cannibal is having "fun" and feels like he had a "good game," then he should be regarded as having already won. Gotcha.
*Nowhere in the developer you claim we should listen to does he state, it was just reliant on kill and escaping.
Fun fact - nor does he say anything about the win con being reliant on escaping as a team. In fact, he specifically mentions that abandoning fellow survivors could be part of the game - and yet you keep ignoring that, huh? And yes, he doesn't say it in that interview, but hey, let's keep ignoring the official website and the tutorial, eh?
*Escaping was not the embodiment of the win condition according to the devs quote from the interview, it is simple one of the goals, one of the factors to strive for and that was it.
What? How in the world do you infer all that from that quote? He doesn't even mention the win condition. "Simply one of the goals, one of the factors to strive for?" Show me EXACTLY where he infers that.
However, I have shown you EXACTLY what the Survivor's win condition is (repeatedly) in BHVR's official words, and you have repeatedly fail to demonstrate any evidence of some "team escape" being a win condition. But hey, may be you found it by now. Let's cross our fingers and hope.
*It isn't true to their original design, it hasn't been a hide and seek game as it is evolved in being mainly centered around chases. It hasn't been a pure lone wolf, survival of the quickest among survivors for even longer than that. The fact is that you are playing a 1v4 game, you cannot win on your own as a survivor and are part of a team. You go what does it matter that you have to collaborate to achieve the final goal? Well the fact that means you are reliant on your teammates to get you to the finish line.
...what does any of that have to do with the win condition? And where did I say that collaboration and cooperation isn't necessary? It's usually absolutely necessary for most matches. What does that have to do with the win condition being simply an escape?
The one lonely quote is insufficient due to the reasons I've already given - try again.
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Totally on board with this. Hope you feel more well soon! :)
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- Them defining the win condition and stating it isn't suitable for e-sports, just means that the win condition in the game doesn't work for that type of environment. It doesn't change the fact that it is the win condition of the game according to the developers.
- Where in that quote are they speaking specifically about killers only and not about survivors? They state that the win condition is a gradient within the game, not just for killers. For someone that acts like a stiffler for words, you only do it when it is convenient for you?
- The emblem system tried to embody the original win condition that was set out. It was literally a system to try and quantify the gradient, the accomplishments and whether or not you did good in the match. From the wiki: "Pips were either gained, lost, or kept at the current number depending on one's performance in ranked Trials." What exactly do you think this means? Ranking your performance, did you win we are only looking at ones individual performance after all? Escaping was a big chunk of it if you remember, just not the only factor.
- I didn't say that they should base the MMR system on that, they changed the definition of the win condition to make it more suitable for this type of MMR system. You are the one stating they didn't change. A match making system tries to determine your level based off your performance to match you with others at a similar rating.
- It is funny that developers quotations are something you call out people to use as a foundation of their arguments, where did the devs state that... now it is just lip service? Just because the devs didn't say something that fits your narrative doesn't make it less valuable.
- Don't you understand what the statement: doesn't have a clear-cut win/lose condition means? If it was simply escaping as a survivor, wouldn't that be clear-cut, there would be no gradient to speak of and he could have stated that.
- Another quote of a recent Q&A, you don't have to go to far in the past: Patrick, lead game designer: "We are looking into improvements to the current system an example is to take team results into account for survivors in addition to the personal results" This shows that not only are survivors on a team, they actually have a result aka a win condition they can meet (escape rates of the whole team). Currently the MMR doesn't account for it, but it is there and they can use it. People like myself state that they should use it.
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I don't have time or energy to reply to all of this. A few points:
I have said at length why I feel it hurts the game for selfish but less skilled survivors to have a higher MMR. They will eventually face stronger killers, but they will also be matched with stronger teammates... Who will be forced to carry in order for the selfish player to leave them to die at the first sign of trouble. If you're a team player, as many players are, you are therefore punished by this system. Instead of competent teammates who contribute as much as you did to any of the escapes that occur in the trial, you get useless potatoes who only care about themselves. That would not be the case in a team-escape-based system. Selfish players would fall in rank until their contribution to the team matched that of their teammates. That means that everyone is contributing evenly. This should also have the advantage of incentivizing more altruistic play, since they'll have weaker killer opponents, and therefore will not need to sweat to escape.
There is no single win condition in DBD. The tutorial tells you as simply as possible what you should try to do as a new player. "Not die". There is no nuance in that, because there can't be. New players don't know enough to understand anything else.
As I mentioned, there was another comment on here citing perk text and later excerpts from the same Cote interview you referenced that contradict the game being just about one person escaping. The game has historically been based around a pip system which punished the team collectively if survivors were left to die on the hook. It was also much harder to rank up without individual hook saves. That wouldn't make sense if the point of the game were just to get out, though. Why should you care if someone else dies on the hook if the tutorial said just to escape (4head). Well, because that's a big part of how you rank up, for one thing. That is the game that this MMR system was added to. It is not based on the win condition. Rather it ignores teamplay and all other valid win conditions.
I could point to the fact that the leaderboard is organized by BP, not escape status, as another message to survivors that "escape at all costs" is not what helps you win. In order to finish first on your team, you also need to complete a variety of objectives. I could also point to the existence of SWF, which clearly implies cooperation is at the heart of the game.
Winning by hiding all game is defined as winning by almost no one. The killer who 3k'd thinks the survivors lost. The MMR system that increases the killer's rank thinks the survivors lost. The three survivors who died thinks the survivors lost. Hell, even the person who escaped after doing nothing all game probably thinks they lost. The survivor not pipping indicates they lost. Their low BP total indicates they lost. The only element not in alignment is MMR, which rewards that one survivor along with the killer. It makes no sense with the rest of the game's incentive system and with how many, probably most, players choose to play. I can't imagine hiding in a bush as your team gets 3k'd in what should have been a 1k and thinking, "Yes, I won!" And, regardless, incentivizing behavior like that is not good for the experience of most players.
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*Them defining the win condition and stating it isn't suitable for e-sports, just means that the win condition in the game doesn't work for that type of environment. It doesn't change the fact that it is the win condition of the game according to the developers.
Yes, that's exactly he was saying. Win condition for survivors being Escaping, and Win condition for killer being Killing [without the specification of how many] is not suitable for esports/tournament scene. So instead of focusing on the win condition given by the actual game, Cote suggests players focus on the "fun." Again, a lip service. You yourself stated that, "the developers have avoided for years to create a clear message on what a win/lose condition is." And yet you are tripping over yourself with excitement over that one line.
*Where in that quote are they speaking specifically about killers only and not about survivors? They state that the win condition is a gradient within the game, not just for killers. For someone that acts like a stiffler for words, you only do it when it is convenient for you?
Why would it not be specifically about the Killer's win condition? The Esports scene wouldn't work BECAUSE the Killer's wincon is not specific. If it was, it would be. If you have another explanation, you are more than welcome to divulge it here.
*The emblem system tried to embody the original win condition that was set out. It was literally a system to try and quantify the gradient, the accomplishments and whether or not you did good in the match. From the wiki: "Pips were either gained, lost, or kept at the current number depending on one's performance in ranked Trials." What exactly do you think this means? Ranking your performance, did you win we are only looking at ones individual performance after all? Escaping was a big chunk of it if you remember, just not the only factor.
Emblem system was BHVR's failed attempt at trying to matchmake players of similar "performance" - has nothing to do with the win condition. You can perform well, and still make stupid mistakes that causes you to lose, and vice versa. And because it had nothing to do with the actual win condition (or as you say, only partly associated with the win condition) it completely failed to do its job. They mistakingly thought by scoring up points in each of those sub categories, it will place players of similar skill - of course it did nothing of that sort. And that's why it had weird circumstances in which despite winning (escaping), you failed to pip, or despite losing (not escaping), you were able to pip. Made a terrible matchmaking system. No wonder it was dismantled. But yes, it was obviously not the win condition for either side. AGAIN, you are more than welcome to find a quote by an official source that state otherwise, just as you are free to find a quote that says Escaping with the "team" is win condition, or any other win conditions that you want to make up at this time. It seems like something you enjoy doing without any evidence to back it up.
*I didn't say that they should base the MMR system on that, they changed the definition of the win condition to make it more suitable for this type of MMR system. You are the one stating they didn't change. A match making system tries to determine your level based off your performance to match you with others at a similar rating.
You know why I keep saying that it didn't change? Because it always stated the same thing since it was brought online.
- In-game tutorial: "Survivors: How To Win - The primary objective of a Survivor in a trial is to escape."
- On DBD's official webpage (under game objectives - how to win): "As a Survivor, your main objective is to escape the map and live another day."
I know you like to keep avoiding this though.
*It is funny that developers quotations are something you call out people to use as a foundation of their arguments, where did the devs state that... now it is just lip service? Just because the devs didn't say something that fits your narrative doesn't it less valuable.
Don't you understand what the statement: doesn't have a clear-cut win/lose condition means? If it was simply escaping as a survivor, wouldn't that be clear-cut, there would be no gradient to speak of and he could have stated that.
Again, you attach yourself to that one line like a baby about to have its blanket taken away - despite the fact that you yourself stated, "the developers have avoided for years to create a clear message on what a win/lose condition is." They were clearly, like you said, avoiding it. Win condition is to have "fun?" Are you seriously suggesting that DBD's official condition for winning was "have fun?" That in the tutorial, it said, "How to Win = have fun?" That in its official webpage, it listed "Have fun!" as the goal of the game? Can you imagine that type of idiocy being in ANY other game? "Hey, disclaimer guys! The game objective for chess is to errr have "fun" guys!" "Hey guys, this new fighting game? You win just by having fun!" ...sigh. You are supposed to have fun playing games, but it's idiotic to think that it's the actual wincon. That's why I'm saying it was simply a lip service, nothing more. I can't even believe that I have to explain it.
*Another quote of a recent Q&A, you don't have to go to far in the past: Patrick, lead game designer: "We are looking into improvements to the current system an example is to take team results into account for survivors in addition to the personal results" This shows that not only are survivors on a team, they actually have a result aka a win condition they can meet. Currently the MMR doesn't account for it, but it is there and they can use it. People like myself state that they should use it.
Finally. Congratulations. This is the only quote that is even slightly relevant to the discussion, and gives some credit to your point. But if Patrick truly wants to add some sort of team-result variable into the formula, he should be very careful in doing so unless he's actually willing to officially change the win condition of the game - otherwise he's just adding another sub variables much like before, and it didn't work out last time, or the multiple times before that, either. Adding sub objective variables are usually problematic because players sometimes tend to get focused on fulfilling it instead of the actual wincon. Hopefully, he doesn't need anyone to tell him that, and is fully aware of that problems it could cause. Personally I don't agree with it due to the numerous reasons I gave above, but more power to BHVR if they can pull it off.
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*I have said at length why I feel it hurts the game for selfish but less skilled survivors to have a higher MMR. They will eventually face stronger killers, but they will also be matched with stronger teammates... Who will be forced to carry in order for the selfish player to leave them to die at the first sign of trouble. If you're a team player, as many players are, you are therefore punished by this system. Instead of competent teammates who contribute as much as you did to any of the escapes that occur in the trial, you get useless potatoes who only care about themselves. That would not be the case in a team-escape-based system. Selfish players would fall in rank until their contribution to the team matched that of their teammates. That means that everyone is contributing evenly. This should also have the advantage of incentivizing more altruistic play, since they'll have weaker killer opponents, and therefore will not need to sweat to escape.
First of all, this black and white thinking of "selfish players = bad, useless, etc. players" and "altruistic players = good, useful, etc. players" need to be reexamined. Higher in the ratings you go, there are certainly great 'selfish' players that would help out as much as possible, especially in the beginning if they believe that it helps them escape, and there are also horrible altruistic players that make awful judgment calls like coming to rescue from other side of the map, wasting gen progress from Ruin in low rankings.
Second, as I said before, it's not a punishment to have your MMR lowered. If you are a decent player who can't handle covering for weaker players, you will have your ratings lowered eventually to the point where your opponent is also weak to the point where you should be able to cover the other weaker survivors.
*There is no single win condition in DBD. The tutorial tells you as simply as possible what you should try to do as a new player. "Not die". There is no nuance in that, because there can't be. New players don't know enough to understand anything else.
...what exactly do you think "How To Win" means, if you don't think it's the wincon of the game? For example, in Connect Four, do you actually think that wincon is to get 4 in a row, BUT also the wincon is to get 3 in a row before that, and ALSO the wincon is to get 2 in a row before even that? And if you believe that there are multiple win conditions in the game, then SHOW me - exactly where is that documented? I don't want your opinion - show me the actual source, just as I have done for you.
*As I mentioned, there was another comment on here citing perk text and later excerpts from the same Cote interview you referenced that contradict the game being just about one person escaping. The game has historically been based around a pip system which punished the team collectively if survivors were left to die on the hook. It was also much harder to rank up without individual hook saves. That wouldn't make sense if the point of the game were just to get out, though. Why should you care if someone else dies on the hook if the tutorial said just to escape (4head). Well, because that's a big part of how you rank up, for one thing. That is the game that this MMR system was added to. It is not based on the win condition. Rather it ignores teamplay and all other valid win conditions.
Yeah, I already explained in detail what that was all about - you should probably review it.
*I could point to the fact that the leaderboard is organized by BP, not escape status, as another message to survivors that "escape at all costs" is not what helps you win. In order to finish first on your team, you also need to complete a variety of objectives. I could also point to the existence of SWF, which clearly implies cooperation is at the heart of the game.
Is that as concrete as you're able to get? How the end results screen is organized by bloodpoints? That makes you think, "hey the win condition of the game is not escaping, but earning bloodpoints!"? Really? And exactly how many bloodpoints is a win? Or do you win simply by having more than everyone else? ...yeah, perhaps you can show me EXACTLY where it is stated that the amount of bloodpoints is relevant to actually winning. - Note that I am not talking about player's personal goals in a match, but the wincon of the actual game. And I've already explained about SWF several times already - perhaps you need to reread.
*Winning by hiding all game is defined as winning by almost no one. The killer who 3k'd thinks the survivors lost. The MMR system that increases the killer's rank thinks the survivors lost. The three survivors who died thinks the survivors lost. Hell, even the person who escaped after doing nothing all game probably thinks they lost. The survivor not pipping indicates they lost. Their low BP total indicates they lost. The only element not in alignment is MMR, which rewards that one survivor along with the killer. It makes no sense with the rest of the game's incentive system and with how many, probably most, players choose to play. I can't imagine hiding in a bush as your team gets 3k'd in what should have been a 1k and thinking, "Yes, I won!" And, regardless, incentivizing behavior like that is not good for the experience of most players.
It's considered winning by the actual game, ...so the opinions of players who don't seem to understand basic aspects of this game don't really matter. ...we did review the actual winning conditions already right? We did review the in-game tutorial and the official webpage?
And we did review that there's more than two sides, and therefore the killer winning doesn't indicate all survivors suddenly losing? And I just went over why pipping or BP have nothing to do with the wincon. Of course, you are more than welcome to show me evidence that points to contrary. Not guesses, not opinions, not inferences. Evidence. I'm waiting.
Great, hopefully I don't have to keep repeating myself.
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If the player is selfish, but still doing objectives and helping the team, that's fine. I don't care if they save me because they think it's the right thing to do or if they save me because they know it increases their odds of them personally escaping. I just care that they save me. My post is aimed at the legions of players who are boosted in terms of MMR because of an extreme lack of altruism. For example, the people who leave you to die on first hook after you ran the killer for most of the game, even if the killer is across the map from the hook, because "I don't need your help to power the gens anymore, so byeeee."
I have said a few times now that when I'm talking about a "reward" or "punishment" I mean strictly in terms of MMR. I'm not talking about the players' emotions.
There is no single documented win condition in the game. I cannot give you evidence to the contrary any more than you can give me evidence to prove it. I have already addressed why citing tutorial text is not productive and have listed a number of counterexamples that show how the game accords importance to other objectives: first and foremost the pipping system, which drove matchmaking for 5+ years of the game's life and which is still displayed after every single trial to show players how they performed.
I personally do treat making a lot of BP as a win condition. I will trade with someone on hook in the EGC every day of the week for two WGLF stacks. Easy money. What if I need three more vaults in a chase for the rift but the gates area already open? No choice to be made; time to find the killer.
The only other thing I care about is how my play helped the team. If I run the killer for quite a while but still get sacrificed, I'm much more satisfied with how a match went than if I accidentally run into a tree and get downed quickly, or something, but later escape. If the killer gets a 1k, but I mess up a flashlight save that should have made it a 0k, that feels like an L every day of the week. What if we get 4k'd, but manage a clutch Break Out save in the middle? It feels great. It generally feels like a win to me if I can help my teammates regardless of who survives.
The pip system views objective-focused and unselfish play kindly. Unhooking teammates, chasing effectively, and doing gens are all heavily rewarded. The pip system a big factor in how player behavior has been molded over the years, mine included. MMR is the exception to that conditioning, not the rule.
No need to feel compelled to repeat yourself - I've been replying to your points, so just reply to me.
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*If the player is selfish, but still doing objectives and helping the team, that's fine. I don't care if they save me because they think it's the right thing to do or if they save me because they know it increases their odds of them personally escaping. I just care that they save me. My post is aimed at the legions of players who are boosted in terms of MMR because of an extreme lack of altruism. For example, the people who leave you to die on first hook after you ran the killer for most of the game, even if the killer is across the map from the hook, because "I don't need your help to power the gens anymore, so byeeee."
Recently after I ran the killer for awhile and got hooked, there were 2 players on the other side of the map doing a gen, while the third player was obviously being chased due to the obsession mark. Because they chose to do the gen first, I ended up going into second phase before one of them rescued me. At the time I was frustrated due to the fact that it lessened my own chance to survive, but ultimately everyone survived - then I realized that the killer had pretty much all gen regression perks, which made me realize that it was probably the right call by the two players. If one had come to get me, the other player may not have been able to finish that particular gen, and lost progress, putting all of us in danger. So even if I had died because of it, I believe those two players made the right call if they had survived. Selfish of them? Sure, but each player should be doing what it takes to survive (the entire point of the game) - I certainly don't blame them putting their own lives before mine.
*I have said a few times now that when I'm talking about a "reward" or "punishment" I mean strictly in terms of MMR. I'm not talking about the players' emotions.
Then you raise or lower MMR, not reward or punish - there's a negative connotation attached to those words and makes it confusing to the readers.
*There is no single documented win condition in the game. I cannot give you evidence to the contrary any more than you can give me evidence to prove it.
...I literally showed them to you. Do you really not understand what "How To Win" means?
*I have already addressed why citing tutorial text is not productive
...no, you seem to have made assertions that actual game objective is too difficult for beginners to understand, but without proving that is the case. What makes you think that there is anything more than what is actually written here - please provide proof:
- In-game tutorial: "Survivors: How To Win - The primary objective of a Survivor in a trial is to escape."
- On DBD's official webpage (under game objectives - how to win): "As a Survivor, your main objective is to escape the map and live another day."
*have listed a number of counterexamples that show how the game accords importance to other objectives: first and foremost the pipping system, which drove matchmaking for 5+ years of the game's life and which is still displayed after every single trial to show players how they performed.
I personally do treat making a lot of BP as a win condition. I will trade with someone on hook in the EGC every day of the week for two WGLF stacks. Easy money. What if I need three more vaults in a chase for the rift but the gates area already open? No choice to be made; time to find the killer.
The only other thing I care about is how my play helped the team. If I run the killer for quite a while but still get sacrificed, I'm much more satisfied with how a match went than if I accidentally run into a tree and get downed quickly, or something, but later escape. If the killer gets a 1k, but I mess up a flashlight save that should have made it a 0k, that feels like an L every day of the week. What if we get 4k'd, but manage a clutch Break Out save in the middle? It feels great. It generally feels like a win to me if I can help my teammates regardless of who survives.
The pip system views objective-focused and unselfish play kindly. Unhooking teammates, chasing effectively, and doing gens are all heavily rewarded. The pip system a big factor in how player behavior has been molded over the years, mine included. MMR is the exception to that conditioning, not the rule.
Whether it's the emblem system (which I have already described in detail why it has nothing to do with the wincon), Bloodpoints (also already explained), or your personal feelings on doing certain things within the game, these are all things you seem to claim are the game's win conditions, but have absolutely nothing to prove is the case, except that you want it to be true. Nothing to indicate from an official source. And the actual official evidence that I have provided for you repeatedly - you choose not to accept them and claim that there is something more to it - again, without proof. Ultimately it seems like you are willing to reject every fact that is presented to you, and are content with just keep believing what you want despite the lack of evidence to the contrary.
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Is you agree they have avoided making clear statements on what a win is, you cannot claim that the one line in the tutorial is the undisputed champion of what that is.
If the game is so clear on what a win is, then by that logic it would have been easy for them to simply refer to that. Yet they talked about gradients, not clear cut when referring to a win.
If the matchmaking is not relevant to the win condition as you claim with the emblem based system, why would you care if they added team metrics into this one as many people ask for. I bet you the tutorial isn't going to change.
They already changed the win condition of the game and they indicating that there are looking at team results. Half your argument was this isn't a team game... well according to the devs it is.
Post edited by Kalinikta on1 -
This perspective is too individualistic. A useless survivor should not be given a higher skill rating on the grounds that now they'll be more likely to die. This is ignoring the fact that survivors like that will forever have a boosted MMR, which destroys the experience of their teammates at their MMR.
The thing is that a useless survivor will not be consistently surviving, and as such not be getting a higher rating. Singular rounds where they do survive against killers they should perhaps not have survived against due to being carried by other players are negligible, because they are statistical outliers and have next to no effect on their rating.
Such players do not consistently survive even at low ratings. I don't see why they would have a "boosted" MMR, let alone forever. They will totally die sometimes (most of the time, really) and lose rating, eventually arriving at around an MMR where they can survive around half the time playing as they are (the goal of the system/the MMR target value around which it systematically stabilizes), and that MMR certainly won't be high.
In the current system, rather than each 50th percentile MMR lobby containing four survivors of average skill, it could just as easily contain a mix of survivors with 10th percentile actual skill who prioritize their own survival at all costs and survivors with 90th percentile actual skill who are extremely altruistic and are willing to die to save their teammates.
Those survivors would only end up at the same ratings and therefore in the same matches if they have comparable survival rates against killers of comparable ratings. You really think average-skill, selfish survivors survive as often and against as good (at consistently killing) killers as "actual-skill", altruistic survivors?
And if they did, they would have to see 50% average survival rates in those matches where they are paired together, meaning all of them would stand equal chances to survive, matches on average still attaining the 50%/2-escape balanced results, and the altruistic players could still be happy either way, because their "team" is doing well. If you on the other hand assume the "actual-skill", altruistic survivors would die disproportionally more often in such matches consistently... they would decline in rating, settle elsewhere, and not be in matches with selfish players as often to begin with. And gradually this would lead to higher ratings being full of average-skill, selfish survivors who increasingly alongside each other face killers that are better and better at killing consistently, and yet they would still have to survive around half of the time (2 per match), or they wouldn't be there in the first place. Which means either selfish play of all survivors is actually the right play (and "teamplay") because it consistently leads to better overall survival results against better killers... or it's an absurd thought to even assume selfish players consistently survive and climb to high ratings.
Boosting the skill rating of useless, counterproductive survivors is an awful idea because it impacts the in-game experience of those more skilled teammates. They will have endless strings of matches where they run the killer for 5 minutes and then get left to die on their first hook, and the like. It makes no sense to build a matchmaking system that punishes skilled and altruistic players by saddling them with a disproportionate amount of useless and selfish teammates.
This is one of the major points OP tackled. Useless, counterproductive survivors are not being "boosted" in rating. Their rating scales with how consistently they actually survive. And I'm sorry, but the idea that useless, counterproductive, low-skill, selfish players consistently survive and do so against killier and killier killers and alongside other useless, counterproductive, low-skill, selfish players that would likewise be at those ratings is just absurd. That would be the logical end result of the system with your line of thinking.
In fact, nobody is being "boosted" in rating (unless they play in an SWF with other players way better at surviving than they are that carry them to escapes all the time), people gain and lose rating exclusively in proportion to how often they actually survive. If counterproductively selfish play (i. e. such which decreases group survival) actually leads to survivors surviving more consistently (it doesn't, again, it would lead to absurd scenarios to assume so), then it simply means it is the right play for survivors, and the system doesn't care how someone plays, only whether they survive consistently, and whatever they are doing is objectively the best (most "skilled") thing in terms of achieving the win condition of surviving the most consistently.
I want to give a few general pointers here as to mistakes I think you are making that have been addressed by OP and other people already:
The system is not actually meant to rate players based on skill. It is meant to rate players based on their performances in terms of success (killing/surviving). It is not meant to match players that are similarly skilled, but players that are succeeding similarly as often and against similarly-as-often-succeeding players. Kills/survivals are not used as a win condition to say the players that win are also the best (most skilled) players in general, just that they are the best (most skilled) players specifically at killing/surviving consistently. The end goal of the system is not to make matches happen where everyone is equally skilled, but matches where everyone has equal chances to succeed (kill/survive). The thing that is deemed desirable is for players to have more even win/loss experiences such that ideally nobody is winning too much at the cost of someone else losing too much. Whether the matches in which players have equal chances to succeed are also matches in which all players are similarly skilled in general is not important, it is only important that they do have equal chances and average out to equal success rates (50% kills/survivals). That matches that average out to equal success rates contain players of similar prowess at succeeding (so not skill in general, but specifically the skill of consistently killing/surviving) is only a natural assumption and correlation, since if players are paired based on ratings that are in turn based on success rates (killing/surviving performances), and if the matches such pairings yield consistently result in equal average success rates (50%), there has to be something that correlates, otherwise it would be magic. That correlative is the "skill" of those players - skill meaning the level of prowess at everything one can do to consistently succeed (kill/survive).
All "skills" are relevant for the system insofar they correlate with one's ability to consistently kill or survive. If being a good runner or teamplayer correlates with (contributes to) increasing one's survival rate consistently, they will over time (many matches) increase one's rating; if they correlate with decreasing one's survival rate consistently, they will over time decrease one's rating. Since the rating is only used to pair players with and against other players such that all players in those matches have more equal chances of success, gaining or losing rating is not a "reward" or "punishment", but something that leads to desirable outcomes in both directions for all players involved.
As opposed to what people have been arguing based on singular match scenarios that are rare in the grand scheme of things, things like being a good runner or teamplayer do in fact correlate with increasing one's personal survival rate. Leading killers on long chases creates time for gens to get finished, which allows gates to be opened, which in turn allows survivors to escape, including those that are able to lead killers on long chases. Keep in mind that they don't actually have to lead killers on 5-gen chases for this to be true, or that they will always be chased for 5 gens, or in fact chased at all, it is only about the fact that long chases help bring about the conditions necessary for survivors to be able to survive, and that survivors good at leading killers on long chases therefore will on average (over many matches) survive more often than survivors not good at this (all else being equal).
Helping other survivors helps oneself too, because if you can help other survivors, other survivors can help you. In general, it is important to realize that since all survivors have the same conditions that have to be met in order for them to be able to personally survive (escape through gates), survivors playing for their own survival (e. g. running from the killer, repairing generators) are also playing for that of every other survivor automatically. And that since every survivor is 25% of the overall group, survivors playing for their own survival are also playing for group survival automatically. Beyond that, I think it is easy to see that leaving survivors on hooks or the ground for no reason, not healing them, etc., will not lead to success in DbD. If you refuse to help others (be altruistic, employ teamplay) in principle, it is very unlikely you will be able to consistently escape through exit gates yourself. That is because the overall escape chances for everyone in matches decrease dramatically if even just 1 survivors dies, for various obvious reasons. It is also because if survivors do not help each other, they are themselves also being left to die on hook and such. And this is even easier to understand if you again remember that even survivors playing for their own survival are still also automatically playing for that of other survivors - that means helping other survivors stay alive allows them to keep playing for everyone's survival, including yours.
Having said all that about runners and teamplayers actually being players that more consistently survive over many matches and gain rating as a result, it is again important to keep in mind that even if they wouldn't be, that would not be a problem. If being a good runner or teamplayer actually consistently led to players dying, they would not be "punished" by the system for this, but gradually trend toward a rating level where they can actually start surviving more often in their matches. Nothing else. This is not a punishment, but something that should be desirable for everyone. Such players want to survive too after all.
And of course, good running or team-playing skills alone might not be enough to survive consistently. There are many more things that contribute to (correlate with) success chances, ranging from macrogame decisions pertaining loadouts and in-game strategy and tactics (which can sometimes also mean not taking a chase or not healing or attempting to unhook someone (not being altruistic) because it can lead to more survivors dying (i. e. cases where altruism is in fact not the right "teamplay")) to microgame stuff like the mechanics of playing around a killer power or even something benign like hitting great skill checks. The point is that the players that win the most consistently are the best at the things that correlate with winning consistently, and of course, the very best would be the best at as many of these things as possible.
The high MMR realm is not supposed to be a place of the most desirable, best, most impressive, or whatever gameplay. Since ratings are only meant to match players such that they have more even chances to succeed, based on their overall performances in terms of success rates, it is clear that the high MMR realm is by design filled with players that care the most about succeeding and do everything to do so the most consistently, and are the best at that. This begins with the loadout choices of characters, perks, add-ons, etc., and extends to every single thing that can possibly be done in the game itself in order to increase kill/survival chances. It is by definition systemically supposed to be a place of tryharding and sweating. Nobody is supposed to want to get into the high MMR realm for any reason, there is no reward, people are not even being told they are there. Players can and should play however they want, only, the players that care about winning consistently will have to try and sweat ever-harder if they want to keep doing so, and they will be the players automatically ending up in higher MMR brackets if they actually consistently succeed. Everyone else will be at lower ratings, where things are gradually less tryhard/sweaty. And matches at all skill levels ideally trend toward 50% success rates for everyone on average (in higher MMR brackets this becomes increasingly less likely because less players that are that good at consistently succeeding exist, so the best players at consistently succeeding are the most likely to still have lopsided success rates due to the matchmaker giving them more lopsided matchups lest queue times grow too long).
In a +/- style MMR system, even one just based on team escapes and nothing else, a useless player's ranking would be hurt if they were only survivor to escape a trial. This is a good thing. Now they're playing with teammates that won't be able to carry them and against killers that aren't very good. This will incentivize them to come out of the bush and actually play the game, for one.
Either the scenario of a useless survivor escaping a trial through the gates by themselves where 3 other survivors died for them to be able to do so is statistically irrelevant enough to where it won't actually affect that player's rating non-negligibly, and as such not a problem of the system... or that player is actually good at something that consistently leads to this. Which is an absurd thought because that would have to be something like hypnotizing other players to somehow sacrifice themselves for their survival (which itself is already something that seems impossible to consistently be able to happen, in as much as even if 3 survivors would try to do everything and even throw their lives at the goal of making a fourth survivor survive by themselves, it would not consistently happen), but either way, if that is the case that a player is surviving consistently like this, they should be gaining rating, because otherwise they will be even more consistently surviving doing this because they get worse and worse opponents. The system is meant to give individual players 50% survival rates, this player would be exceeding this, that would be a system failure, they should be corrected toward 50%. And since 50% individual survival rates translate to 50% group survival rates, such a player would never end up in a scenario where they can consistently be the only survivor escaping from the groups to begin with, since other survivors would also have those chances and rates on average in them.
It's an absurd thought to assume useless players would consistently be paired by the system with non-useless players that carry them. How would they end up at the same ratings to even be matched with each other? The useless players would die much too often before ever even getting to these rating brackets where they could in theory be carried to sole escapes against stronger killers. Over many matches, the likeliness of that happening is very low and ever approaching 0, because they would not be together in the first place for the useless players to be carried to escapes which puts them at these higher ratings. Not only that, as explained earlier, if such useless players would be at those same ratings, they would naturally also be paired with other such useless players at those ratings, and the non-useless players if they actually consistently died here to even allow for this scenario to be relevant, would decrease in rating and not be there anymore to carry useless players. And even if it were still absurdly the case that somehow 1 useless player gets matched with 3 non-useless players consistently, the next absurdity of this assumption is that the useless player somehow consistently manages to survive through gates here, while the others die.
In reality, these players will be in completely different rating brackets and not frequently be matched with each other (if the matchmaker half of the system works).
It also doesn't punish the killer, since this survivor will only stay in low MMR so long as they're not helping the team. In other words, even if they escape a lot, they'll be basically paying off that escape by gift-wrapping the other three kills for the killer. If this survivor actually starts working to help the team, their match outcomes will start to improve, and their MMR will increase. They'll then be matched against stronger killers who are able to counter their increased productivity.
But this would not be nice for those other three survivors? If a player consistently somehow is able to play in a way that consistently somehow leads to the other survivors dying in their matches but to their own gate escape, having that player decrease in rating for those matches would mean they can only do this more and more easily to other players, and more and more survivors in their matches suffer. Instead, if it would actually be possible to consistently play in a way that somehow consistently leads to such a scenario, the player should be gaining rating such that they meet tougher opponents that can at some point hopefully prevent them from being able to do this, ultimately arriving at a rating level where they die around half the time rather than keep surviving and ruining matches.
See my previous comment in this thread for more about this system, but it would wipe the floor with the current system. There is no reason to have an MMR system for matchmaking if the ratings don't do a good job of showing player skill. Currently they don't. Players are being evaluated as individuals in a team game, which makes no sense.
The reason to have an MMR system for matchmaking is to match players such that they on average have more equal chances of success (killing/surviving) in their matches, because that is deemed desirable. And that makes sense because most people like succeeding (killing/surviving) and don't like failing (failing to kill/dying). It is the most sensible, greatest-good goal. This automatically also leads to more even, balanced matches, and it does lead to players being matched based on skill too, but specifically their skill to consistently succeed (kill/survive). "Skill" (general or specific) is not the reason why MMR is used, it's not the goal, it merely correlates.
The game is not a team game strictly, players are free to play for their own survival. As I have pointed out, playing for one's own survival not only implicitly means playing for that of others, but helping others explicitly is also part of playing for one's own survival, since teamplay is necessary to consistently be able to oneself survive. Either way, the game is not strictly a team game, players do not win strictly as a team (they are not being told "you lost" if they survived and other survivors died, they are not being told "you won" if they died and other survivors survived), team-oriented plays and decisions are optional actions and skills, and people are matched in accordance to how much they employ them and how good they are at employing them based on their success rates, which correlate (positively and negatively) with such choices and skills. I for one find it very obvious that teamplay skills and teamplay-oriented plays that actually lead to increased group survival rates (i. e. are actually good plays from a team perspective) in the matches of the players that have and employ them also lead to those players themselves having increased personal survival rates on average, but even if this weren't so, it would merely mean they end up in matches at arbitrarily lower rating levels where they can actually survive more often themselves playing this way. It is not necessary to select for teamplay and teamplay skills specifically, because the game is not strictly a team game, and because those plays are optional and are selected for if they do contribute to increasing success rates. And if they don't increase success rates, the players that die due to them suffer no ill consequences from their decisions to play in those ways by the system, they will benefit from the system putting them into matches where they can actually survive despite their playstyle preference/decision. It will also not hurt match balance from a "group" perspective, because no matter how any single player plays, once they stabilize around a rating, they approach 50% personal survival rates; if 4 survivors in a given group have 50% survival chances each, 2 survivors of that group will on average survive in their matches, and therefore it doesn't matter how individual players arrive at their personal 50% survival chances, even if they do so by playing very "selfishly", if they all have them (which at similar ratings they by definition of the system's functioning do) and you put them together into matches, the matches will have the desired (50%) survival rate outcome on average from the group (or "team") perspective too.
If you meet a lot of subpar survivor players in your matches, that may be because you are a very good player with a high MMR, and the system has issues finding players similarly as good as you are (and in your region and at the times you play). The matchmaker also has confirmed issues, such as backfills all but ignoring ratings, a soft MMR cap, a +/-400MMR range for players from the get-go.
The rating system based on killing and surviving (and even personal survival) as win conditions works very well to achieve its intended purpose of making matches on average approach balanced outcomes, and numbers show this very clearly. High MMR results are still likely to be the most out-of-whack, but they too are much more even than they had been in the rank-based MM past. I personally also find the frequency of meeting more equal players on both sides has increased notably even in terms of general skill, and I see the same being true for all the top players that I watch, who are also having tougher matches notably more frequently than in the past. I'm seeing more tournament players in my matches than I ever have prior to MMR, it's a very blatant thing for me. We don't need a different rating system that tries to evaluate player skill in highly complicated ways, we need them to iron out matchmaker issues, and maybe make the matchmaker more strict in general as well, favouring queue times over rating similarities less. That said, with the limited amount of players at high levels, queue times there will always be fairly long if they were to remove the "soft" MMR cap and make the matchmaker more strict (although I do personally believe there is still room to make it more strict at least at high MMR without it leading to prohibitively long queue times, but then again, this means different things to different people - I for one would not mind 5-minute queues much if it actually resulted in much more consistent high-MMR matches, but the same is not true for everyone).
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Not gonna read this wall of text, MMR doesn't fit dbd and should be removed asap cuz the game is slowly dying and there's no going back till is gone
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*Is you agree they have avoided making clear statements on what a win is, you cannot claim that the one line in the tutorial is the undisputed champion of what that is.
If the game is so clear on what a win is, then by that logic it would have been easy for them to simply refer to that. Yet they talked about gradients, not clear cut when referring to a win.
We both know that I'm specifically referring to their replies in the forums, weekly livestreams, interviews, etc. If you've also been in the community since the beginning, you'd know that both the actual game and the in-game tutorial existed long before players started whining over the wincon. When the players' handwringing started, that's the point when the developers started obscuring the issue instead of directly calling their attention back to the tutorial/website like they should have. It was a spineless move that have had a horrible repercussion to the game throughout the years, but I guess that was what they chose to do to not lose some of their playerbase.
*If the matchmaking is not relevant to the win condition as you claim with the emblem based system, why would you care if they added team metrics into this one as many people ask for. I bet you the tutorial isn't going to change.
What are you talking about? The emblem system failed to matchmake properly due to the fact that wincon wasn't based off of it - of course I'd worry about the same thing occurring if they are deciding to do the similar thing with the new MMR system by adding a new metric that is irrelevant to the wincon.
*They already changed the win condition of the game and they indicating that there are looking at team results. Half your argument was this isn't a team game... well according to the devs it is.
...are you serious right now? Please show me exactly where they've stated that they've already changed the win condition of the game. Stop putting the cart before the horse. Yes, like you say, they are looking at manipulating the MMR formula by adding in team-based elements - that means one of two things: either 1. they are going to add this new variable into the MMR algorithm without changing the current win condition of simply Escaping (which brings up new problems of competing variables like I mentioned before) or 2. they are going to change the actual win condition of the game, which will be a bigger deal than anything they've added to the game before - given that it would change the whole concept of the game from the ground up.
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You asked to quote the devs, which was done, even using the exact same interview that you based your argument on. Yet now you protest hard that we are using quotes from the developers when they defined a win. Their responses to the community in their QnA's, interviews are exactly what you asked for to be used as the foundation of the argument. Now you complain that we use their words, because they don't fit your narrative?
The fact is that the emblem system actually did match the win condition, as good as they could make it work, to what the developers stated towards the community. They didn't stick to their guns, they altered it and changed the win condition and yes they did so to appeal to a wider audience. That audience is now the player base that was sold on the evolved premise of the game.
They are now trying to define it more clear cut win condition again and people argue that it should reflect what the game is; a 4v1 where the survivors are indeed on a team. They attracted many players with the team based aspect of survivor and catered to them. Don't know if you noticed but SWFs are considered one of the cornerstones of the game in its current state.
Btw. you might want to check the website to see what it states on escaping?
It specifically points out, you can stay around and save other survivors, it doesn't state; Once the gates are powered and open it is a free-for-all, go save yourself and don't worry about anyone else. The beginner's guide also calls out to work together, work as a team, to maximize your chances of survival. The MMR system is purely here to try and match you up with equally adequate players and guess what that means also evaluating how well the team does (btw they mention that word in the guide as well).
You claim it brings up new problems and for sure it will, no system is perfect and yet it will remove other problems that currently are within the system. They are simply changing the manner in which the matchmaking defines whether you should gain, remain equal or lose rating and by how much, as that is what we are talking about here. Within the context of the conversation a win within the system is simply raising your rating. So, you don't need to worry, the tutorial will go untouched and it is purely on whether you should gain or lose rating in the matchmaking system. Nothing that's changing would affect your ability to be selfish and play for your own survival, so calm your horses. It would simply allow people that are better at teamwork, working together to increase the overall teams survival rate to now be gaining rank for it instead of losing.
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Many people, including myself and the others replying to you in this thread, treat this as a team game. Even if you disagree, you should agree that those who play selfishly should statistically hurt the overall survival rates in their lobbies, meaning that their presence in a match increases the chance of the killer completing their objective regardless of whether or not they survive. I feel they should be punished for that from an MMR standpoint.
I don't understand what you mean by "punished"... MMR is not a reward/punishment system. It's just a mechanism to match equally-skilled players together (skill as defined in abstract terms as a measure of overall performance... the system doesn't care about swag or style).
The fact that people keep referring to reward/punishment just highlights the lack of understanding of what's going on, and what should be going on. "Winning" etc is a purely subjective position
A survivor may consider a "win" if they prevented a 4K, or a "win" if they escaped, etc.
A killer may consider a "win" if they got 1/2 the team killed, or at least a 3K.
The system doesn't care what the players term as a win. It only cares about the ability for the survivor to escape (which is a concrete indisputable metric to measure... a survivor either escaped or died, there is no alternative).
If people stopped looking at the system with their subjectivity, it would make a lot more sense. I've made a few points where I've criticised the developers for not recognising how the community might understand abstract terms without clarification... but there's also a HUGE amount of blame that the community must also accept for refusing to listen and understand when matters have been repeatedly explained and clarified.
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*You asked to quote the devs, which was done, even using the exact same interview that you based your argument on. Yet now you protest hard that we are using quotes from the developers when they defined a win. Their responses to the community in their QnA's, interviews are exactly what you asked for to be used as the foundation of the argument. Now you complain that we use their words, because they don't fit your narrative?
I've already repeatedly explained in detail why that particular quote is a meaningless lip service, as well as explaining the absurdity of claiming that "fun" can actually be considered a win condition IN ANY GAME. Do we need to go over again? However, you have continually failed to address the quote in which Cote stated: "It’s anti-social multiplayer where survivors have to collaborate and cooperate up to a certain point. The old saying is that you don’t need to be fast than the killer, you just need to be faster than your friends." If you think that he's wrong, feel free to explain why - just as I have for your quote. Seems like it's you who are avoiding the argument that doesn't fit your narrative.
*The fact is that the emblem system actually did match the win condition, as good as they could make it work, to what the developers stated towards the community. They didn't stick to their guns, they altered it and changed the win condition and yes they did so to appeal to a wider audience. That audience is now the player base that was sold on the evolved premise of the game.
That's simply your assertion unless you can prove otherwise. The emblem system didn't "match" the win condition - sure, it incorporated 'Escaping' to a small degree, but was overburdened with too many other meaningless variables (gens/chases/altruistic actions) to make it meaningful at all. And no, they never altared or changed the wincon as written in the tutorial; it's always been simply to Escape, and that has not changed - you keep claiming that doesn't actually make it so. Again, feel free to provide actual evidence to the contrary - you keep failing to do that. By the way, still waiting for you to show me the official source where a developer states that the wincon of the game is "team" based. It seems like you keep avoiding that issue.
*They are now trying to define it more clear cut win condition again and people argue that it should reflect what the game is; a 4v1 where the survivors are indeed on a team. They attracted many players with the team based aspect of survivor and catered to them. Don't know if you noticed but SWFs are considered one of the cornerstones of the game in its current state.
Sure, some players are clamoring for that type of idea, wringing their hands and being loud about it, and it's true the developers are actually considering it - but that's it. At this stage, they are just considering it. Nothing at all has changed officially in regards to MMR, and certainly not the wincon of the game. And yet you keep claiming otherwise. Why are you continuing to spread falsehood?
I've already explained why the existence of SWF is irrelevant to the current win condition - perhaps you need to go review what I've already stated so I don't have to repeat myself.
*Btw. you might want to check the website to see what it states on escaping?
It specifically points out, you can stay around and save other survivors, it doesn't state; Once the gates are powered and open it is a free-for-all, go save yourself and don't worry about anyone else. The beginner's guide also calls out to work together, work as a team, to maximize your chances of survival. The MMR system is purely here to try and match you up with equally adequate players and guess what that means also evaluating how well the team does (btw they mention that word in the guide as well).
Key word: "can". Like I said previously, the game doesn't prevent you from making a lot of bad decisions. Sure, you "can" stay around and saves others. Is it wise to do so? It depends on the situation. But the game certainly doesn't consider saving others as being a win condition currently, does it? Otherwise the game would indicate that you have lost due to not saving someone. And yes, how many times do I have to repeat myself - survivors have to cooperate with each other up to a certain point so that they can escape; I have never denied that - but that's certainly not the goal of the game, which is what makes it a "win condition." Please keep up.
*You claim it brings up new problems and for sure it will, no system is perfect and yet it will remove other problems that currently are within the system. They are simply changing the manner in which the matchmaking defines whether you should gain, remain equal or lose rating and by how much, as that is what we are talking about here. Within the context of the conversation a win within the system is simply raising your rating. So, you don't need to worry, the tutorial will go untouched and it is purely on whether you should gain or lose rating in the matchmaking system. Nothing that's changing would affect your ability to be selfish and play for your own survival, so calm your horses. It would simply allow people that are better at teamwork, working together to increase the overall teams survival rate to now be gaining rank for it instead of losing.
You still seem to be confused about the relationship between win conditions and MMR. MMR system should be based off of the win condition (because that's what makes the system accurate) - however, you can still create ones that aren't solely based on the win condition. Sure, it makes it less accurate, and it will probably be too complex for it to work, but it's possible. The point I'm making is just because MMR incorporates new variables into its algorithm, it doesn't necessary mean that its win condition has also automatically changed. That would be up to the actual game designers. At this point, you are making too much assumption on what the developers are going to do. Like I said in the previous post, there are two possibilities - 1. team-based elements that the devs are considering will remain a non-win condition, and will simply be an additional variable in the MMR system (making it more complicated and problematic over time) or 2. team-based elements will be changed into an actual wincon of the game, changing the core of its game, and using it as a replacement of the 'Escape' variable in that same algorithm.
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General note: The devs are planning on a hybridized metric for the MMR system, still looking at individual survival but also incorporating group survival to an extent. This of course has little to do with the basic game premise and its "win condition" (which is just killing and surviving in general, attached to no further specifications), but it does go to show that even if one were to take the MMR metric to be indicative of how the devs see the game, they are still saying individual survival concerns are at least equally as integral as group survival concerns. (Still not like that matters for the desirable functioning of the system though.)
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I completely agree that your teammates made the right play in that hypothetical. I wouldn't even call that selfish, since that was probably the right play to do the most good for the team. Those sorts of things would also be rewarded in a team-survival-based MMR system, though, and for good reason.
How is a tutorial supposed to explain the nuance in positive outcomes with regards to things like bloodpoints and pipping when new players don't even know what those things are? Telling players to just try to escape is the clearest most understandable message to give to players who have no clue how the game works. I have no problem with that even with my opinions about there being no one true objective. Ease them in and they'll figure out what they value soon enough. It doesn't make sense to start getting into currency and teamplay before they have a clue what the game is about.
Also remember, these tutorials were added years after the game launched and years after the pipping system was developed. Most players probably haven't touched them, or played them once a year ago and will never touch them again. Meanwhile they see pips, BP counters, dailies, rift challenges, etc. after every game. Those inevitably shape what players value. Players now have a wide variety of things they would consider win conditions for this reason. It has always been far more nuanced than kill/survive. That's also why the devs describe MMR as a proxy for skill, rather than asserting it is a direct measurement of skill because it measures the survivors' ability to complete the game's one true objective.
Edit: Imagine a FPS team deathmatch tutorial that says all players should try to kill the other team and not die themselves. I don't think anyone would quibble with that, since that is exactly what players should do in order to win. In reality, though, dying is sometimes necessary to advance the team's goal. Let's say an opponent is in an amazing camping spot and has been killing your teammates. Dying to kill that person would help you win more than just avoiding that spot and letting your team get mowed down. That sort of nuance isn't necessary in a tutorial, though.
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A useless survivor doesn't need to be consistently surviving for this to be a problem. They just need to be surviving more often than they should given their contributions to team survival. Simple logic says that this is necessarily the case now. Imagine two identical players, except one will go for a save in the EGC once in a while and the other won't. The one that never goes for the save will have a higher MMR. This is because the one who goes for the save will occasionally die as a result, and it doesn't make any difference to their ranking if they saved their teammates. This effect must be present given how the system is set up. The only question is the extent of the impact it makes.
I am arguing that this impact is big enough to be felt, and big enough that it should be addressed. If you disagree with that, I can't dispute that. I'm only basing this off my experience, and my experience is probably more extreme than average because care more about team results than individual results and I am whipped for BPs. I can say that the game has been pretty terrible to play lately, though, and worse than I remember it over my ~1300 hours.
I disagree with your point about it not being an issue for players like me to be routinely paired with useless, selfish teammates. It's not as simple as 2k = 2k. The reality is frequently playing matches against weak killers in which everyone should have survived, but watching your moronic teammates essentially throw the match by refusing to unhook, refusing to pick up slugs, refusing to take chase for someone on death hook, refusing to take a hit for someone, etc. It's a terrible, frustrating experience, and worse than what it was with the pip system.
You seem to be misunderstanding my gripe with the current system. I'm not saying survivors are boosted in the confines of the existing MMR system. In theory they're ranked right where they should be. I'm saying they are boosted with regard to their actual skill at playing the game. It might be easier to understand this point if I reiterate what I feel an MMR system should do.
In most cases MMR systems do show actual skill. Imagine classic Elo systems in 1v1 games, like chess, or AoE. Your rating will be directly determined based on your ability to win. In Dead by Daylight, though, MMR models outcomes as four independent 1v1s against the killer. This is fundamentally incorrect, because these 1v1s are heavily influenced by each other. This is because it's actually a 4v1 game. My view is that players whose actions increase the odds of success over all four of these 1v1s are actually more skilled, and that they should have a higher MMR. Players who are very skilled at winning their personal 1v1 but whose actions make it less likely for their teammates to win theirs are who I'm referring to as "boosted". My view is that their MMR should be lower because they are succeeding because they are being carried by less selfish players, not because they are actually a better player.
I like SBMM as a concept. I just fundamentally disagree with individual kills/escapes as a proxy for skill (I do think this is the goal btw - I recall hearing the devs say as much). I would like to be matched with other survivors who will, on average, contribute as much to the team as I do. I also want to be matched against killers that are as good as me. That should be what is reflected in MMR. This could be accomplished by an MMR system based on team kills/escapes instead of individual kills/escapes. In the current system, my altruistic tendencies result in my playing with and against players who are disproportionately weaker than I am. This leads to a disproportionate amount of bad matches. I don't care what my MMR is. I just don't want to have to try to carry teams full of potatoes against legions of baby killers for the sins of valuing the collective over the individual.
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*How is a tutorial supposed to explain the nuance in positive outcomes with regards to things like bloodpoints and pipping when new players don't even know what those things are? Telling players to just try to escape is the clearest most understandable message to give to players who have no clue how the game works. I have no problem with that even with my opinions about there being no one true objective. Ease them in and they'll figure out what they value soon enough. It doesn't make sense to start getting into currency and teamplay before they have a clue what the game is about.
Both concepts of bloodpoints and and the new grade system with pips are fully explained in the tutorial - just not under the section about the game objective... because they are not the win condition. Sure, it's definitely something they should learn - but the important part is recognizing that they have nothing to do with the win condition of the game. It's the same with other game mechanics like doing gens, altruistic actions, doing chases - they're all important things to learn, but you do all of those things because you want to accomplish the actual win condition, which is to escape.
*Also remember, these tutorials were added years after the game launched and years after the pipping system was developed.
The tutorial has been in the game - they've been updated several times to include things like actually playing as a character, but the most basic aspect of it, the game manual, has always been a part of the game.
*Most players probably haven't touched them, or played them once a year ago and will never touch them again. Meanwhile they see pips, BP counters, dailies, rift challenges, etc. after every game. Those inevitably shape what players value. Players now have a wide variety of things they would consider win conditions for this reason. It has always been far more nuanced than kill/survive. That's also why the devs describe MMR as a proxy for skill, rather than asserting it is a direct measurement of skill because it measures the survivors' ability to complete the game's one true objective.
Again, no one is discussing what each individual players value. It doesn't matter what players' "personal" goals are in the game. If you want to practice throwing in a fighting game, go for it - be happy that you achieved 10 throws in a match and earned a trophy for it - but also realize that it doesn't make it the game's actual winning condition. What we are talking about is strictly the winning condition as officially endorsed by the game. Everything you listed - none of that is the wincon of the game - it's YOUR personal goals that you set for yourself at your own convenience. Do these personal goals often help you accomplish the game wincon? Sure - but again, it doesn't make them the win conditions of the game.
*Edit: Imagine a FPS team deathmatch tutorial that says all players should try to kill the other team and not die themselves. I don't think anyone would quibble with that, since that is exactly what players should do in order to win. In reality, though, dying is sometimes necessary to advance the team's goal. Let's say an opponent is in an amazing camping spot and has been killing your teammates. Dying to kill that person would help you win more than just avoiding that spot and letting your team get mowed down. That sort of nuance isn't necessary in a tutorial, though.
Yes, exactly. In your example, dying to kill that one person helps to fulfill the actual win condition, but it's not the win condition itself. Is it important part of the game? Sure - but it doesn't make it the win condition. And moreover, is trading kills always the right move? Nope, sometimes it may end up as a bad trade, causing you and your team to lose. Same action, but different results. But you are always striving for the result of earning a win. It's the same thing in this game - sometimes altruism will help you escape, sometimes it will kill you. But you should always be striving to escape, since that's the goal of the game.
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I understand perfectly how the system works. I just fundamentally disagree with how it works.
I mean reward/punish in the sense of "give a higher/lower rating". When you are given a lower MMR rating because you play unselfishly, this means you will be paired with players who are just as skilled at surviving, but who will be disproportionately more selfish than you. The more teamplay you show at the same MMR, the stronger the player you are by basically every metric outside of MMR. This results in a disproportionate amount of terrible matches. See my response to zarr for more details.
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They are explained in the tutorial... after explaining the basic idea of the game. That's how you teach people. You start with the most basic possible idea, then get more specific. The original, crappy tutorial was only added in 2.0, and I don't even think that had any of text you're quoting. The updated version came out maybe a year ago. No one is reading that text from the tutorial and basing their play style and values around it. They probably forget all about it shortly thereafter and continue to evaluate their play by the endgame statistics. My point in the edit is to show you that telling people how to play in the tutorial does not mean that that is the game's win condition. The win condition of TDM is collective, but the tutorial could easily still focus on the individual, because that's the target audience for the tutorial.
DBD has never had a single defined win condition. If it were that easy, why do tournaments, which are the sweatiest and most competitive thing I can think of for DBD, choose tournament-specific win conditions, often based on things like BP? Maybe because it is not well defined, and also because basing success around only kills and escapes leads to unfun gameplay? I.e. my point?
I'm not devoting any more time to this idea. Feel free to disagree.
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*They are explained in the tutorial... after explaining the basic idea of the game. That's how you teach people. You start with the most basic possible idea, then get more specific.
You know what the most basic (and most important) idea is in any game design? The win condition. You teach people the ultimate goal of why you are playing the game first, and then you slowly proceed to fill in the gaps with game mechanics. Amazing!
*The original, crappy tutorial was only added in 2.0, and I don't even think that had any of text you're quoting. The updated version came out maybe a year ago. No one is reading that text from the tutorial and basing their play style and values around it. They probably forget all about it shortly thereafter and continue to evaluate their play by the endgame statistics, as I'm sure most players do.
If no one is reading them, and they fail to understand the entire game objective, then it seems like no one got but themselves to blame. It all sounds like these players' personal problem, not the game.
*My point in the edit is to show you that telling people how to play in the tutorial does not mean that that is the game's win condition.
And yet, you keep proving my point instead; how ironic!
*DBD has never had a single defined win condition.
You keep saying this, but I've shown it to you. Repeatedly. Like, over and over. You just don't seem to want to accept it. You cover your ears and close your eyes. You can downplay the tutorial and the official website all you want, it doesn't change the fact that it's fully endorsed by the game developers. It also doesn't change the fact that you don't have anything to back your own assertions up. So you create stories to try to rationalize your fantasies about the game.
*If it were that easy, why do tournaments, which are the sweatiest and most competitive thing I can think of for DBD, choose tournament-specific win conditions, often based on things like BP? Maybe because it is not well defined, and also because basing success around only kills and escapes leads to unfun gameplay? I.e. my point?
It probably usually has more to do with balancing problems of the game and randomization that benefits specific players. I don't know, but it also certainly doesn't sound like you know either. Just making random guesses and seeing if something sticks, eh? Ultimately, just because you personally feel that win conditions being based on escape "leads to unfun gameplay," doesn't magically change the game's actual winning condition.
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You have admitted it isn't the only time they stated that a win isn't clear cut, on the forums, QNA, interviews. Either way we provided the word of the devs as requested, you can act like it is a lip service and yet nowhere did they state that. That is your subjective opinion and by how you act we may not consider that.
The emblem system was the match making system with a rank, a MMR, your rank was even shown. You accurately point out that a MMR system has a correlation between a win condition and where you stand. It might have had flaws, but it was the system they upheld.
You claim it is purely anti social based off a quote, claim people aren't in a team and yet the tutorial refers to it. The notion that there is a team result based on Patrick's quote and they are considering having it factor in the MMR system. It is a win condition, it is a viable option to play and it would make it complex? Did 0, 1 or 2 or 3, 4 people escape.... so complicated.
You aren't impartial, you only use dev quotes if they suit you. Who states that isn't a lip service to appeal to players like you? In the end it is a team game, the game explains this in the tutorial.
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*You have admitted it isn't the only time they stated that a win isn't clear cut, on the forums, QNA, interviews. Either way we provided the word of the devs as requested, you can act like it is a lip service and yet nowhere did they state that.
I've already explained why your examples are insufficient. Instead of crying about it, if you have a problem with that, go find something else. ...you actually think Cote would admit that what he is saying was just a lip service? Wow. I'm saying it's a lip service because, as you yourself stated, devs started avoiding discussing the wincon of the game after the playerbase started make a stink about it. In addition, what he claimed, "fun" being win con, is not only moronic, but impossible.
*The emblem system was the match making system with a rank, a MMR, your rank was even shown. You accurately point out that a MMR system has a correlation between a win condition and where you stand. It might have had flaws, but it was the system they upheld.
I explained exactly why their emblem system was flawed. Are you even reading, or having comprehension problems?
*You claim it is purely anti social based off a quote, claim people aren't in a team and yet the tutorial refers to it. The notion that there is a team result based on Patrick's quote and they are considering having it factor in the MMR system. It is a win condition, it is a viable option to play and it would make it complex? Did 0, 1 or 2 or 3, 4 people escape.... so complicated.
Again, the tutorial refers to collaborations between survivors in order for them to escape, but no where does it negate the wincon of the game. Sure, you have to help each other out - until you don't. Ultimately it's about escaping since that's the win condition. What's the problem?
...And what does Patrick's considerations or plans for the future have anything to do with the current state of the game's win condition? We are talking about the game as it is right now.
*You aren't impartial, you only use dev quotes if they suit you. Who states that isn't a lip service to appeal to players like you? In the end it is a team game, the game explains this in the tutorial.
I've explained the reasons why the quotes I've used is relevant and true, as well as explained why yours are not. It's now up to you to comprehend it.
Show me in the tutorial where it specifically says that you have to win as a team.
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A useless survivor doesn't need to be consistently surviving for this to be a problem. They just need to be surviving more often than they should given their contributions to team survival. Simple logic says that this is necessarily the case now. Imagine two identical players, except one will go for a save in the EGC once in a while and the other won't. The one that never goes for the save will have a higher MMR. This is because the one who goes for the save will occasionally die as a result, and it doesn't make any difference to their ranking if they saved their teammates. This effect must be present given how the system is set up. The only question is the extent of the impact it makes.
I am arguing that this impact is big enough to be felt, and big enough that it should be addressed. If you disagree with that, I can't dispute that. I'm only basing this off my experience, and my experience is probably more extreme than average because care more about team results than individual results and I am whipped for BPs. I can say that the game has been pretty terrible to play lately, though, and worse than I remember it over my ~1300 hours.
The impact of EGC-specific scenarios like this is very low. First, groups including those players have to have gotten to the EGC to begin with of course, meaning that taken as a consistent occurrence that could affect ratings meaningfully, those players have to at least be pulling their weight to lead rounds into endgames. And then once in it, it can often be argued that simply leaving is actually the correct "teamplay" as well, as the risks regularly are much greater than the likeliness of getting more survivors out than you would otherwise have. In that sense, if you actually care about teamplay and your "team" surviving, you can if anything not seldomly be grateful that you have randoms competent enough to make the call not to go for endgame parties. Obviously there are degrees to this, very "selfish" players might bounce first chance they get even though they could have easily helped someone else also escape at no real risk, but I highly doubt among the players that regularly lead matches to endgames at these levels there are many that don't actually stick around and at least help in low-risk ways. My experience (at presumably high MMR) definitely hasn't been that people are more keen to just leave now, most will stick around. They just won't usually go for gambly rescue attempts on far-away or otherwise difficult-to-contest hooks, which is fair, and something competent players had not usually been doing in the past either.
But I can appreciate if you have been having worse experiences with MMR now than in the past. Depending on how much you've played in recent months, it's possible you are stuck in low MMR brackets and have to first fight your way out of them to get more competent teammates more regularly. Other than that, you could record your survival rate over a period - maybe you are already surviving around half the time playing for BP and risking yourself for teammates, and much as it may seem really bad, maybe you are just "coming down" from things having been much easier in the past where you as a competent player could play like that and still escape more often than not?
I disagree with your point about it not being an issue for players like me to be routinely paired with useless, selfish teammates. It's not as simple as 2k = 2k. The reality is frequently playing matches against weak killers in which everyone should have survived, but watching your moronic teammates essentially throw the match by refusing to unhook, refusing to pick up slugs, refusing to take chase for someone on death hook, refusing to take a hit for someone, etc. It's a terrible, frustrating experience, and worse than what it was with the pip system.
If you are routinely being paired with such players, I have to assume you are somehow stuck in low-mid MMR. Not saying this can't at all happen at high MMR, not least due to matchmaker issues, but it's not nearly as frequent an occurrence for me anymore as it used to be, nor for the players I know and watch. I routinely get comp players in my matches now, something that was a one-in-a-hundred matches occurrence in the past, if that. I will say that the pairings we get in duo queue are noticably more often worse though, so if you are duoing, that could be contributing.
I totally understand your frustrations, I know them all too well. It's just that a drastic decrease in the frequency of having morons in my matches is genuinely one of the precise reasons why I'm all for MMR. A few suggestions: Maybe for a while, try a little harder to actually consistently escape, up until you get to a level where you do see more competent teammates, and then you can settle into a more relaxed playstyle again, as long as you are able to maintain a roughly even win/loss ratio at that rating. I don't know what region you are in, but we could duo too to make that easier. Playing at different times or trying the crossplay off queue could also change your experience.
In most cases MMR systems do show actual skill. Imagine classic Elo systems in 1v1 games, like chess, or AoE. Your rating will be directly determined based on your ability to win. In Dead by Daylight, though, MMR models outcomes as four independent 1v1s against the killer. This is fundamentally incorrect, because these 1v1s are heavily influenced by each other. This is because it's actually a 4v1 game. My view is that players whose actions increase the odds of success over all four of these 1v1s are actually more skilled, and that they should have a higher MMR. Players who are very skilled at winning their personal 1v1 but whose actions make it less likely for their teammates to win theirs are who I'm referring to as "boosted". My view is that their MMR should be lower because they are succeeding because they are being carried by less selfish players, not because they are actually a better player.
My argument is that precisely because the 1v1s are heavily influenced by each other, the players whose actions consistently increase the odds of success over all four of them will also consistently have higher personal survival rates (and therefore ratings) than players who actually consistently make it less likely for other survivors in their matches to escape. I'm convinced group survival rates correlate with personal survival rates (and vice-versa) very closely over many matches, such that players who see an average of X% survival rate for players in their matches will personally also be very close to that % over those matches. Actual data on this would be interesting, but the correlations here are just so compelling that I really doubt those selfish, detriment-to-their-groups players are at the same rating brackets that altruistic, beneficial-to-their-groups players are.
But yeah, while I can understand it is frustrating to have selfish players in one's games, even if those players somehow arrive at ratings to play with better, more altruistic other players, those matches would still only regularly happen if they do average out to around 50% group survival rates too, and so while it may not be much of a comfort, you could perhaps still find some satisfaction in the fact that your contributions at least still lead to players escaping, even if they may not always "deserve" it. Although my suspicion is still that you are just currently at MMR levels you do not belong at, and that those others players you frequently meet (if you do frequently meet them and aren't biased in your perception of it, which I don't assume) aren't "boosted" there, but that you've kinda sunken yourself to that level by playing for BP, taking gambly risks more often, and such. If you actively try and increase your escape rate for a while, I'm confident you could arrive at a more bearable level and largely fall back into your preferred playstyles without dropping out again.
I like SBMM as a concept. I just fundamentally disagree with individual kills/escapes as a proxy for skill (I do think this is the goal btw - I recall hearing the devs say as much). I would like to be matched with other survivors who will, on average, contribute as much to the team as I do. I also want to be matched against killers that are as good as me. That should be what is reflected in MMR. This could be accomplished by an MMR system based on team kills/escapes instead of individual kills/escapes. In the current system, my altruistic tendencies result in my playing with and against players who are disproportionately weaker than I am. This leads to a disproportionate amount of bad matches. I don't care what my MMR is. I just don't want to have to try to carry teams full of potatoes against legions of baby killers for the sins of valuing the collective over the individual.
They are proxies for skill, just not skill in general, but the skill specifically of all the things that consistently lead to kills/escapes. In my experience that works out really well, my matches and those of top players I know and watch have been notably more competitive ever since the implementation of MMR. Don't get me wrong, really good players still have lopsided success rates, there simply aren't that many players at such a level (although the MMR cap and matchmaker strictness could be increased still too), but it's still blatant how much more frequent tough and challenging matches at that level are now, how often top players meet each other that in the rank-based MM past at most met once in a blue moon. For such players it may still be a thing of like 1 really competitive match every 10 matches, but that's still something of a 10-fold increase over conditions of the past, where good players (particularly on the killer side, but also 3/4-SWFs) had a really challenging match maybe once every 100 matches.
Don't get me wrong, I do actually want the devs to use the group survival metric (and they will, at least partly), I just don't think it will actually lead to different players overall ending up at different ratings at the end of the day, rather get players to the appropriate ratings faster and keep them there more stably (which will still spare us all some more bad matches, but I don't expect it will be a sweeping change in the experience whatsoever).
I really do think the primary issues for good players are that there simply aren't that many good players to be matched with to begin with, and beyond that, that the MMR cap exists and that the matchmaker favours short queue times over consistently accurate rating matches (it gradually extends the eligible rating range to at least +/-400, probably within the first 5 minutes, which is significant if we consider that the "soft" cap is at around 2000 last we heard, so no matter how good and how far beyond the 2000MMR "soft" cap you are (how consistently you are winning), you can still always be matched with and against players that are a good 20% away from even reaching the cap, not few of which might also very well even be unable to reach it).
In your case, I do suspect you are in somewhat of a personal little "Elo hell" currently. I suggested some stuff to try and get you out of it and hope it'll work out for you. If nothing else, maybe once the devs do incorporate the group metric into the system your average experience will change without you yourself having to change.
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I don't disagree that the impact of that specific scenario is low playerbase-wide, and I'm not trying to argue that the "selfish" play is always the wrong one. That example was just meant to make the logical point. It can be extrapolated to many more in-game situations, though, like refusing to take chase for a teammate on death hook when the survivor side is ahead.
I think you're 100% right that I'm stuck in low-mid MMR. I don't have stats on hand, but I think I'm actually dying in way more than 50% of my matches. If I had to guess I'd say it's been more like 80%. It's pretty much the exact situation that Scott Jund calls out in this [video], except I think I get more tilted by having useless teammates than he does and I also don't get better streaming content out of it, so I'm having a worse time. It feels like the only way to get out of this situation is to fundamentally change my play style, but that would also hurt my enjoyment of the game. I very much do get satisfaction out of helping my team escape, even if they're potatoes who wouldn't do the same for me! So, it's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
Your suggestions about trying hard to escape for a bit to boost MMR and then playing normally could buy me some time, and I think it's worth a try, but I don't think it would be a permanent solution. So long as I'm more unselfish than the average player, my MMR will be lower than similarly skilled but more selfish players. As far as I can tell, that means that anyone with a similar playstyle to mine will necessarily have less skilled teammates and opponents on average. And, once that imbalance is present, my experience has been that it's a bit of a positive feedback loop that just makes things worse and worse.
It's good that you're actually getting competent teammates, but in theory that would also be the case in a team-escape-based MMR system. I can't think of any major downsides to a team-escape-based system. From my perspective it's just a flat upgrade over the current system, since it will more reliably match players together who will make the same contribution to the entire team's survival. In a 4v1 game that requires a cooperation, that seems very desirable.
As for your point about the existing MMR actually reflecting who helps the team most, I'd expect it to correlate, but not nearly as tightly as a team-escape-based system. A team-escape-based MMR system is pretty much directly measuring this, albeit in a simplified way. Let's take the hypothetical of a player who is usually willing to trade with teammates in the EGC. That player will have a much lower MMR than their skill would suggest. Conversely, let's imagine the hypothetical player who is sometimes saved by these trades, but who never reciprocates. That player will have a higher MMR than their skill would suggest. This hypothetical is useful because it's easy to understand and specifically isolates the impact of unselfish play, but again, it's far from the only situation where this comes into play. There are tons of similar situations that arise over the course of a game. That exact hook trade scenario is a possibility in many games, though. If a player like me is willing to go for it just about every time for those sweet WGLF stacks and for a fun, friendly exchange in the postgame chat, but most of my teammates are not, it doesn't matter how much I carried the team for the rest of the match. My outcome per MMR will usually be worse than my teammates' outcomes.
So, in other words, my exact experience, of being a solid player with ~1300 hours on record who is mired in low MMR with no end in sight, is evidence that the existing MMR system does not do a good job of evaluating a player's contribution to the team. For players with average levels of selfishness, I'm sure it does just fine. Anyone towards either extreme will not be placed well, though.
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Let us just put the record straight here;
- You claimed: The win condition hasn't changed, the change in the match making system clearly indicates otherwise. It might be an improvement, the old system was maybe flawed and yet it is a MMR system regardless. We agreed upon the fact that MMR is driven by the win condition defined by its parameters. It simply changed!
- You claimed: The survivors are not in a team, yet the tutorial and the developers both speak about a team. Like it cannot be more obvious than that. Therefore once again your argument debunked.
- You claimed: Their statements were just lip service. You realize their not clear-cut and ambiguous definition of a win, aligned very well with their emblem MMR system, literally their win condition was just as flawed as their system... maybe because the system was built around it. This wasn't some lip service, it is how they implemented it. Patrick speaking of potential manners to improve the current system is relevant, because well it is the dev speaking of the win condition and how it isn't accounting for the overall outcome, but that it maybe should be doing that? It is kind of the topic. Those that agree with this statement and those that don't.
There isn't anything wrong with my comprehension levels, yet I don't simply dismiss all the other information that is given along side what you picked. Self preservation is important in the game where everyone is 1/4th of the score, people playing reckless is a good way to lose as a team and so yes it is good to teach this to people early on, the longer they survive the more chances they learn the game. Team work is important, as it increases the survival rate of everyone involved as stated in the tutorial.
Tutorials simply lay-out the basics, don't feed, work together and once the gates are opened consider who is still out there before you choose to leave. Euhm... interesting it didn't say ditch them the moment you can leave, but if it is teach you that self preservation and your own escape is the only thing you should care about... why is it teaching you this: "Survivors choose when to exit the map. They can stay around and save other Survivors that did not make it but must do so before the Endgame Collapse."
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*You claimed: The win condition hasn't changed, the change in the match making system clearly indicates otherwise. It might be an improvement, the old system was maybe flawed and yet it is a MMR system regardless. We agreed upon the fact that MMR is driven by the win condition defined by its parameters. It simply changed!
1. The old emblem system did not utilize the MMR system. The whole purpose of changing the game's matchmaking was to transition from the Ranking system to a MMR. Everybody knows this. Are you new to this game? Show me exactly where the developers stated that the emblem system was based off MMR.
2. The old emblem system failed because only a very minor part accounted for the win condition (Escaping) and added too many random variables like gen progression, altruism, and chases/encounters. And because of these junk in the ranking algorithm that had nothing to do with the wincon, the Ranking system ending up focusing more on "how often you play" and not "how skilled you are."
3. The win condition was 'Escaping for Survivor' from the very beginning. We went through several different iterations of matchmaking systems, but the win condition has never changed.
*You claimed: The survivors are not in a team, yet the tutorial and the developers both speak about a team. Like it cannot be more obvious than that. Therefore once again your argument debunked.
Show me exactly where the tutorial or the developers state that the win condition is team-based. Forming a temporary alliance to actually fulfill the win condition (Escaping) does not make them a "team" (unless you count Survivors that backstab each other or leave each other behind in the end as a "team") nor does it have anything to do with the win condition - it's just one of the many game mechanics.
*You claimed: Their statements were just lip service. You realize their not clear-cut and ambiguous definition of a win, aligned very well with their emblem MMR system, literally their win condition was just as flawed as their system... maybe because the system was built around it. This wasn't some lip service, it is how they implemented it. Patrick speaking of potential manners to improve the current system is relevant, because well it is the dev speaking of the win condition and how it isn't accounting for the overall outcome, but that it maybe should be doing that? It is kind of the topic. Those that agree with this statement and those that don't.
Lots of assumptions here. Also lots of random, incoherent ramblings. Do you have anything to prove any of it? Sounds like a bunch of conspiracy theories. Also, like I said earlier, emblem system did not utilize MMR. And there is nothing ambiguous about Tutorial's "Survivors: How To Win - The primary objective of a Survivor in a trial is to escape."
*There isn't anything wrong with my comprehension levels, yet I don't simply dismiss all the other information that is given along side what you picked. Self preservation is important in the game where everyone is 1/4th of the score, people playing reckless is a good way to lose as a team and so yes it is good to teach this to people early on, the longer they survive the more chances they learn the game. Team work is important, as it increases the survival rate of everyone involved as stated in the tutorial.
Team work is important, I agree. But again, there is nothing that suggests that it is a win condition in this game. The point of the game isn't to do team work, but to escape. In order to escape, players will most likely have to do some level of team work. Part of the skill is knowing when team work is advantageous for escaping, and when it isn't.
*Tutorials simply lay-out the basics, don't feed, work together and once the gates are opened consider who is still out there before you choose to leave. Euhm... interesting it didn't say ditch them the moment you can leave, but if it is teach you that self preservation and your own escape is the only thing you should care about... why is it teaching you this: "Survivors choose when to exit the map. They can stay around and save other Survivors that did not make it but must do so before the Endgame Collapse."
Tutorials and game manuals also lays out the game objective. Which it did. Which I have repeatedly copied and pasted.
Also I've already stated in previous post: "Key word: "can". Like I said previously, the game doesn't prevent you from making a lot of bad decisions. Sure, you "can" stay around and save others. Is it wise to do so? It depends on the situation. But the game certainly doesn't consider saving others as being a win condition currently, does it? Otherwise the game would indicate that you have lost due to not saving someone. And yes, how many times do I have to repeat myself - survivors have to cooperate with each other up to a certain point so that they can escape; I have never denied that - but that's certainly not the goal of the game, which is what makes it a "win condition."
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- Moving from a ranking system to a MMR, literally a different ranking system. Rating people and placing them in order to match them up according to their standing, is ranking them. All they did is change the parameters from emblems to escapes/kills to determine ones ranking aka changed the win condition (for the system) and hid it.
- It changed the win condition to determine whether to increase, remain or decrease the standing you have for the match making system. Your personal view on what a win is hasn't changed, but the win condition for you to climb the match making conditions has. It has been simplified and clearly you like it as it is more inline with your style of play.
- It hasn't changed for you, them adding a variable to the MMR system to account for team results will still not change it for you. You can still play for your personal escape, just as you did under every other system that had different win definitions.
- I have pointed out the different lessons that are taught to the survivors, which includes going back into the field to save others while they are at the exit gate and simply have to cross a line. You look at a single lesson given to survivors in the tutorial and act like it is the holy grail. There is more that is taught to survivors than that one lesson, look at the whole manual? Nothing that suggests that it is team based, other than calling it a team and giving a manual on teamwork. Part of skill is indeed to know when taking risks to go for the save in the end game collapse or when to cross that line to escape is the correct choice. That is why they say you can do it, as it is not just one answer is always correct! By your definition the second part wouldn't be explained and shouldn't be part of a manual, as that would be them instructing you to lose? How does that make any sense, I don't see the tutorial explaining; you can go find the killer and just stand there at the hook and point at it while standing next to the killer. People can make bad choices, but they wouldn't tell people to do them in a manual if it wasn't sometimes the correct one. In your definition there is nothing to gain, it is never the correct choice.
Post edited by Kalinikta on1 -
My God some people have way too much time on their hands...
It's only a game, why you have be mad?
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*Moving from a ranking system to a MMR, literally a different ranking system. Rating people and placing them in order to match them up according to their standing, is ranking them. All they did is change the parameters from emblems to escapes/kills to determine ones ranking aka changed the win condition (for the system) and hid it.
1. Wow, you must be really new. The ranking system was not in any shape or form a MMR system. A. Because the wincon only accounted for a small part of the Emblem system, doing well in the Emblem system did not mean that you won, and doing poorly in the Emblem system did not mean that you lost. Therefore it actually did not correlate at all with the actual win condition of the game. This does not happen in MMR. B. Whether or not you won, if you performed well with the Emblem system, you pipped, which eventually led to players ranking up. However, because it was possible for everyone in the match to do "well" with their emblems regardless of their wins/losses, it often allowed scenarios where everyone in that match would be able to rank up at the same time. Again, this does not happen in MMR, where there should never be a situation where everyone raises their ratings at the same time. There are few other differences, like MMR using (if I read correctly) the Glicko formula for this game - while Emblem system just adds random meaningless points.
To put simply, the Emblem system did not determine the players' wins/losses in a match because it did not have any correlation with this game's win condition. MMR system theoretically should. And I guess I should emphasize that again, the win condition has not changed over the course of this game's life span- no matter how much you seem to twist some ideas around.
*It changed the win condition to determine whether to increase, remain or decrease the standing you have for the match making system. Your personal view on what a win is hasn't changed, but the win condition for you to climb the match making conditions has. It has been simplified and clearly you like it as it is more inline with your style of play.
2. Nope. Again, Emblem system did not determine players' wins or losses in a match. Again, you can do well in the Emblem system while losing, and vice versa.
*It hasn't changed for you, them adding a variable to the MMR system to account for team results will still not change it for you. You can still play for your personal escape, just as you did under every other system that had different win definitions.
3. Adding variables that are not part of the actual wincons always pose some problems, especially if the players know what these variables are. Let's take altruism for example - normally players are simply driven toward a single goal of escaping (the wincon). They take altruistic actions so that they can escape, or they don't take altruistic actions (and instead do a generator) so that they can escape. No matter which action they took, the end result of escaping or dying will indicate if that was the correct, more skillful decision.
However, if some players, for some unknown reason, want to be in high MMR and knows that taking altruistic actions will raise their ratings, they may choose to display altruism even if it is obviously a bad idea (lowering the chance of them escaping). And if that is the case, and those players end up losing (dying), then it starts creating small discrepancies in the MMR system - where these players, even though they should have lost X amount of rating, instead they may lose X/2 amount of the rating for taking that altruistic action, even though it was a worse call by the players. Basically, it may cause competition between the variables, and allows the ratings to be higher or lower than they possibly should be due to the outcome of the new variable.
*I have pointed out the different lessons that are taught to the survivors, which includes going back into the field to save others while they are at the exit gate and simply have to cross a line. You look at a single lesson given to survivors in the tutorial and act like it is the holy grail. There is more that is taught to survivors than that one lesson, look at the whole manual? Nothing that suggests that it is team based? Part of skill is indeed to know when taking risks to go for the save in the end game collapse or when to cross that line to escape is the correct choice. That is why they say you can do it, as it is not just one answer is always correct! By your definition the second part wouldn't be explained and shouldn't be part of a manual, as that would be them instructing you to lose? How does that make any sense, I don't see the tutorial explaining; you can go find the killer and just stand there at the hook and point at it while standing next to the killer. People can make bad choices, but they wouldn't tell people to do them in a manual.
4. What does that have to do with the tutorial defining what the win condition is? Did I ever give an impression that all the other game mechanics are unimportant? Or perhaps you don't understand the difference between "win condition" and "game mechanics" within the game. And you still haven't shown me any evidence that suggest that the wincon for this game is team-based - let's work on that, shall we?
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You must be unable to separate your view of what a win is with what the developers stated and how it was implemented in the game. My views on a win and loss were also different a 3 or 4k is a killer win, 2k/2e a draw, 3e or 4e a survivor win.
The win isn't what you claim to be at that time, as it was what the developers said it was and how they used it within the game. You say where is this shown, well it is what the match making looked at. Now they changed it and it fits your definition, but not that of many people.
You could literally, lose a pip yet that isn't a definition of a loss? The emblem system in all intense and purposes functioned as the MMR.
Your argument, but it might cause people to play altruistic, is already the case. People that follow the tutorial are instructed to do so. If they succeed however they don't get the additional rating, while they took the risk. The whole idea of taking a risk is that it can pay out or backfire.
What does it have to do with defining a win condition? It is telling you to go save others. Maybe you don't understand the correlation between the game instructions and the win condition. You look at one statement in the full manual, but the tutorial did not end there. It isn't about adding variables that do not fall in line with a win condition, literally team results in pretty much any game that has a team is the true win condition. We already established that survivors are on a team, by them literally saying so in the tutorial and the developers words.
Post edited by Kalinikta on2 -
I don't disagree that the impact of that specific scenario is low playerbase-wide, and I'm not trying to argue that the "selfish" play is always the wrong one. That example was just meant to make the logical point. It can be extrapolated to many more in-game situations, though, like refusing to take chase for a teammate on death hook when the survivor side is ahead.
But if we extrapolate it beyond the specific endgame scenario where a person can actually secure an escape play to the clear detriment of the group, detrimental-to-group-survival selfish play will again negatively affect a player's personal survival chances and therefore rates as well, because there is regularly no secure play to their own gate escape that comes at a detriment to the group. Take the example of not taking a hit for another player that may be on death hook - sure, now you might say a selfish player that refuses to take aggro/a hit obviously has a higher chance of survival because they are literally not putting themselves in harm's way... but if that person on death hook dies, harm is often definitely coming their way anyway, and not seldomly indeed greater harm. Same for hook trades and on and on. "Selfless" plays that increase the survival of other survivors regularly also increase personal survival. There are exceptions, but over many matches the correlation is just too strong for actual selfish players that actually refuse to help and are to the consistent detriment of the group survival chances and rates in their matches to actually personally consistently survive more than they die.
I find this to be too compelling a relationship, especially if I look at tournaments where despite having some of the best and most coordinated survivors, killers can still regularly secure 3-4ks if they manage to kill 1 survivor before the endgame, even if it takes them 4 gens to get there. The 1v3 scenario is just such a huge shift in power dynamics of matches, and that's with the 3 remaining survivors still being coordinated teamplayers, whereas in the case of a selfish survivor at least one of them would still not be helping, making these rounds fall apart even faster from there on out. I can't at all see that outright selfish play that is to the detriment of group survival can lead with any consistency to anything but those selfish players dying at least as often as their groups.
But even regardless, ultimately the question would again just be, are these selfish players surviving comparably as often and against comparably as killy killers as altruistic players are? Because if they aren't, these players would generally settle at different ratings, and be less and less likely to meet in the long run. If you really think selfish players survive more often than altruistic players (all else being equal), and particularly so if they get paired together, you have to see that they would naturally end up at different ratings.
I think you're 100% right that I'm stuck in low-mid MMR. I don't have stats on hand, but I think I'm actually dying in way more than 50% of my matches. If I had to guess I'd say it's been more like 80%. It's pretty much the exact situation that Scott Jund calls out in this [video], except I think I get more tilted by having useless teammates than he does and I also don't get better streaming content out of it, so I'm having a worse time. It feels like the only way to get out of this situation is to fundamentally change my play style, but that would also hurt my enjoyment of the game. I very much do get satisfaction out of helping my team escape, even if they're potatoes who wouldn't do the same for me! So, it's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
While I understand that it sucks, I think the dilemma is also to an extent of course your own fault. In an MMR system, it just kinda isn't possible to have your escape cake and eat it too, so to say, like you could in the old matchmaking system. That is, if you aren't succeeding consistently, you should not be getting into games with players that are, that would lead to conditions like we've had them in the past, of even average kill rates being able to reach 70-80%, particularly in red ranks. What this means is that while you personally may not care about your own survival as much and don't even mind dying for BP and risky rescue plays and such, we can't apply this to the larger system without screwing up the very thing it is meant to achieve (more equal success rates for everyone).
If your plays are actually consistently leading to increased group survival in your matches, why do you mind that you yourself are dying, or that the players it helps survive are "selfish" players? If you care more about playing for the team than your own survival, you should be glad regardless as long as it actually works out. Unless you want to eat your escape cake too, meaning you want to help your team in risky ways that are often to your own detriment (and get BP and whatnot), but you also want your team to help you and increase your survival, and if both consistently happens, overall survival will exceed 50%.
Maybe you should really take some stats on your matches, see what your personal survival rate is and what the group survival rate in your matches is. Maybe you are simply already at the spot where your not-very-win-oriented playstyle can function given your overall abilities, leading to roughly 50% personal and group survival rates on average.
Your suggestions about trying hard to escape for a bit to boost MMR and then playing normally could buy me some time, and I think it's worth a try, but I don't think it would be a permanent solution. So long as I'm more unselfish than the average player, my MMR will be lower than similarly skilled but more selfish players. As far as I can tell, that means that anyone with a similar playstyle to mine will necessarily have less skilled teammates and opponents on average. And, once that imbalance is present, my experience has been that it's a bit of a positive feedback loop that just makes things worse and worse.
The idea is that you shouldn't be endlessly dying, but eventually arrive at a rating around which you stabilize by actually being able to survive roughly as often as you die playing the way that you are.
It should systemically be a positive feedback loop that benefits you: if anyone with a similar playstyle to yours will necessarily die more often at similar levels of play, they are likely to settle around similar ratings as you do, so you should find more like players in your matches more often with time.
Of course, the system cannot function perfectly because the game has its own myriad of complexities that may prevent such trends from being able to have the impact they ideally should (and the player pools vs. matchmaker algorithm relation also skews things), which creates the concept of the "Elo hell" where a player that may very well be able to compete at higher ratings is stuck fighting the game-specific dynamics and interactions in lower-level play that may prevent them from actually consistently gaining rating. While that concept is debated, in your case it could be a bit of that effect, since you are not even trying your hardest to gain rating.
It's good that you're actually getting competent teammates, but in theory that would also be the case in a team-escape-based MMR system. I can't think of any major downsides to a team-escape-based system. From my perspective it's just a flat upgrade over the current system, since it will more reliably match players together who will make the same contribution to the entire team's survival. In a 4v1 game that requires a cooperation, that seems very desirable.
While I agree that it is desirable, I only do so because I think it will increase the system's efficiency and stability a bit more, not because it will lead to players ending up settling at very different ratings.
There are just as many "issues" (that ultimately also aren't really standing in the way of the system's desired and desirable functioning though) in a group-escape-based environment. You brought up the scenario of people going for rescues in the endgame - it is very possible and even likely that endgame heroics actually more often than not lead to decreased group escape rates. The risks are just very high, and the return often is merely neutral from the group survival perspective. Ratings in that reality might be just as likely to correlate with "selfish", secure endgame behaviours. Or you bring up the great player that carries their team but loses rating due to dying in the end with the current metric, but what about the terrible player that dies yet gains rating due to their team carrying themselves to escapes in the 1v3 with the group metric? You say you don't care about your personal survival if your teammates get out, but what about the many players that do care about their personal survival and aren't happy even if 2-3 other survivors make it, but now are stuck in their own "Elo hell" of potentially consistently dying but not getting rating adjustments because their "team" is doing well? There is a pendant "problem" to most of the stuff people assume pose problems with the current metric (and in either case they aren't actually problems, the system still functions to achieve its goal, which numbers also show, and the numbers are actually so close that to whatever extent the incorporation of the the group-based metric will improve things, it can only possibly do so rather slightly).
As for your point about the existing MMR actually reflecting who helps the team most, I'd expect it to correlate, but not nearly as tightly as a team-escape-based system. A team-escape-based MMR system is pretty much directly measuring this, albeit in a simplified way. Let's take the hypothetical of a player who is usually willing to trade with teammates in the EGC. That player will have a much lower MMR than their skill would suggest. Conversely, let's imagine the hypothetical player who is sometimes saved by these trades, but who never reciprocates. That player will have a higher MMR than their skill would suggest. This hypothetical is useful because it's easy to understand and specifically isolates the impact of unselfish play, but again, it's far from the only situation where this comes into play. There are tons of similar situations that arise over the course of a game. That exact hook trade scenario is a possibility in many games, though. If a player like me is willing to go for it just about every time for those sweet WGLF stacks and for a fun, friendly exchange in the postgame chat, but most of my teammates are not, it doesn't matter how much I carried the team for the rest of the match. My outcome per MMR will usually be worse than my teammates' outcomes.
Looking at endgame scenarios is just not very useful for the argument here, and I think you realize as much yourself because you keep going back to it and say its logic should also apply to the rest of the game, which I'm sure means you've actually tried to think about players that refuse to unhook others and such over the course of a match, and realized that there isn't actually usually a clear line of play to their own survival with that behaviour at all, certainly not with any consistency. But that on the contrary, in most cases plays either increase group and personal survival chances, or if they don't increase personal survival chances, they regularly also do not increase group survival chances, and vice-versa. Hook trades for instance aren't at all always the right play from a group survival perspective either, it can absolutely be true that simply sticking to gens will result in more survivors escaping the match, particularly of course once we consider that hook trades aren't necessarily successful, but may end in the would-be-trader getting grabbed or otherwise downed, or at least prevented from being able to unhook, which is a huge waste of time. And this actually is clear even when looking at the "unfair" endgame argument: the player willing to trade in endgames might very well often also fail to trade and simply die trying, which means now the whole group is getting a lower rating than they would have if the player simply left.
So, in other words, my exact experience, of being a solid player with ~1300 hours on record who is mired in low MMR with no end in sight, is evidence that the existing MMR system does not do a good job of evaluating a player's contribution to the team. For players with average levels of selfishness, I'm sure it does just fine. Anyone towards either extreme will not be placed well, though.
Well, it would be evidence of that if you actually died more than half of the time, and actually died for those team contributions consistently, and if those team contributions actually led to increased group survival rates in those matches. These are things you could take stats on. If you die around half the time, that means the system is already "evaluating" you properly, because that's the goal; if you die more often but don't die strictly due to those team plays but stuff like trying to get a lot of BP, then the system is not failing to evaluate your team contributions because they simply aren't the correlative for your consistently sub-optimal survival rate; if your team contributions aren't actually leading to increased group survival rates (above 50%) in your matches, then you likewise shouldn't be gaining rating for it and wouldn't in a group-based system either.
And regardless, the system is of course not even meant to evaluate skills or let alone specific skills, it only does so correlatively if and insofar they coincide with increased personal survival rates. Personal survival skills, which teamplay skills certainly are part of by the nature of how the game functions, but they are not integral to the game's or system's functioning. While you and I may prefer the game to be a team game where players can outright win even despite themselves dying, that is not the reality of the game, and there can be arguments for the benefits of the game as a solo survival multiplayer with merely opportunistic cooperation and rudimentary coordination but no strictly "team"-based goal. While I'm convinced that the different metrics wouldn't actually ultimately lead to very different player standings and results, to that end the personal metric would obviously still be preferable, if only since it doesn't allow for edge-case "dying streaks" where players often die but don't decline in rating due to their fellow survivors surviving. I think it's obvious that most people do care about their personal survival more than that of random other people, and I would be lying if I said I didn't generally also.
I really suspect you are kinda soft-stuck at an MMR you do not belong at due to compounding issues, such as perhaps not having played so much since MMR implementation, playing in risky, "greedy" and self-sacrificial ways that aren't even always necessarily to the benefit of the group, potentially player pool issues in your region and the times you play at, and with matchmaker issues probably contributing too. I think you could absolutely play to increase your rating and then fall back into a more relaxed playstyle without consistently dying more often than you survive at that point. But either way, the devs are looking to implement a hybrid metric that looks at both personal and group survival, so if that actually has the desired effect for you, you can look forward to that.
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No matter how many times, and how many hours my mother plays Spyro The Dragon she will always call me to ask me to drive over just to glide from the hill to the ledge in Artisans.
But like seriously other than the obvious answer "That Killer is just bad". It's easy to manipulate this MMR system in keeping your rank low as Killer if you let all 4 survivors escape each round getting as many hooks as possible. Sooner or later you will find yourself in matches against new players. In addition to the answer given by the dev.
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Have to admit, this thread should be framed and safeguarded for future generations under "Mental Gymnastics" because ho boy...
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*You must be unable to separate your view of what a win is with what the developers stated and how it was implemented in the game. My views on a win and loss were also different a 3 or 4k is a killer win, 2k/2e a draw, 3e or 4e a survivor win.
I don't care about your personal views - the only thing that matters are facts. You don't seem to be able to provide any.
*The win isn't what you claim to be at that time, as it was what the developers said it was and how they used it within the game. You say where is this shown, well it is what the match making looked at. Now they changed it and it fits your definition, but not that of many people.
Just a string of random assertions again, eh? Again, the Emblem system did not determine player's ability to win or lose. The best it did was to assess how much stuff the players did within the match, regardless of whether they won or lost. Basically, the matchmaking based on the Emblem system ranked players on their "performance" within the match, not whether they won or lost. That's why it failed as a matchmaker, and why MMR seems to do better (because it IS based on whether players won or lost).
Look at chess, for example. You may make lot of smart plays. You may take their Queen. You may even take more pieces than your opponent. But despite all that, in the end, if your King get checkmated by your opponent, you still lost. Your "performance" doesn't matter - what ultimately matter is whether the win condition was fulfilled or not.
*You could literally, lose a pip yet that isn't a definition of a loss? The emblem system in all intense and purposes functioned as the MMR.
Losing a pip isn't a loss, nor is earning a pip a win. Because that isn't the win condition as defined by the game. The only thing Emblem system measured was to check off how much things you did within the match, and tried to rank you with other players who also could do the same - completely unrelated to the wincon of the game. Of course, as always, you are more than welcome to cite any official sources that states that the Emblem system is in any way related to the win condition of the game - but I doubt you can find any. You have consistently failed to find any so far.
*Your argument, but it might cause people to play altruistic, is already the case. People that follow the tutorial are instructed to do so. If they succeed however they don't get the additional rating, while they took the risk. The whole idea of taking a risk is that it can pay out or backfire.
It seems you didn't understand my explanation about adding new non-wincon related variables at all - you should reread it until you do. (Hint: It has to do with matchmaking accuracy - the entire point of the new matchmaking system.)
*What does it have to do with defining a win condition? It is telling you to go save others. Maybe you don't understand the correlation between the game instructions and the win condition. You look at one statement in the full manual, but the tutorial did not end there.
...did I ever indicate that the tutorial ends with just outlining the win condition? Did I not just emphasize the importance of all other game mechanics? Game mechanics are important - they are just not the win condition, which you don't seem to understand.
* It isn't about adding variables that do not fall in line with a win condition, literally team results in pretty much any game that has a team is the true win condition. We already established that survivors are on a team, by them literally saying so in the tutorial and the developers words.
No, we did not establish that survivors are a "team" - but rather a group of players forming a temporary alliance so that they can fulfill the wincon of escaping. Literally? Sure - let's take a look at it literally.
Tutorial? "Survivors: How To Win - The primary objective of a Survivor in a trial is to escape."
Developer's words? "It’s anti-social multiplayer where survivors have to collaborate and cooperate up to a certain point. The old saying is that you don’t need to be fast than the killer, you just need to be faster than your friends."
What part of those make you think, "team?"
Again, you seem to make a lot of assertions based on nothing. Start providing some worthy evidence to back up your random claims.
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A matchmaking system which ranks people to use it to group them together is a MMR system. While you might not have liked the emblem system or find it a good one, it was a MMR system.
You project your opinion on it to claim it did not hit the criteria of one is simply not true. Like the game literally calling survivors a team, not a temporary alliance. The developers reference team results...
I have provided proof, quotes and references to the tutorial and website. Yet because they don't match your opinion you dismiss them as lip service with zero proof of it being the case. This is what we call cherry picking: Using fragments of the tutorial, interviews, website, statements, etc.
You are a hypocrite.
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Then your comment simply indicates you have no understanding of what MMR is, and I request you do some research on it first before continually embarrassing yourself. No one with some basic understanding of MMR and the Emblem system would agree with you.
The miniscule number of references you provided, I've addressed all of them, and explained in detail why they are wrong. Your lack of comprehension on the matter is not my problem. I urge you to find better references that I can't refute.
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A match making rating system assigns a number to find similar people of a similar skill level. The emblem system assigned you a number, based on an assessment of your abilities and skills to achieve specific criteria in the game. Perform well and your number goes up, perform poorly and it goes down.
You are the one clueless of the concept. A reference you cannot refute, the game telling us we are on a team, the developers talking about team results? Sorry, but you have not dismantled any of that, just used a single line of text as some holy text while ignoring the context and further explanation given.
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*A match making rating system assigns a number to find similar people of a similar skill level. The emblem system assigned you a number, based on an assessment of your abilities and skills to achieve specific criteria in the game. Perform well and your number goes up, perform poorly and it goes down.
MMR assigns a number to find similar people of similar skill level... based on what? Good job, you're almost there.
*You are the one clueless of the concept. A reference you cannot refute, the game telling us we are on a team, the developers talking about team results? Sorry, but you have not dismantled any of that, just used a single line of text as some holy text while ignoring the context and further explanation given.
Yet the game tutorial never indicates that you must escape as a team. Why do you think that is?
Patrick referencing team results for it to integrate into the MMR system is 1. about possible future development and may never be implemented, and therefore has no relevance to how the game currently functions, and 2. we don't know whether he meant to add it as a non-wincon variable, or to replace the actual wincon of the game.
I've already pointed these out multiple times, and yet you keep failing to understand it. Any other references?
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This thread is HAM!!!! You guys are going in! lol
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I just don't agree with your conclusion that MMR doesn't significantly diverge from skill for exceptionally selfish/unselfish players under this system. I also disagree that what differences do exist will just settle out over large sample sizes, when my lived experience is that this isn't the case. The more matches I play, the more pronounced the problem becomes. There feedbacks here are positive, not negative.
Every time I trade with someone on the hook in the EGC, or take aggro for them when they're on death hook and completing the last gen is not in any doubt, or suck it up and go for the basement save at basically any moment in the game instead of letting my teammate do it, I am putting myself at increased risk of dying in exchange for increasing the likelihood of my teammates surviving. The more skilled I am compared to my teammates and my opponent, the more likely I am to be the one sacrificing myself for my teammates. Even setting aside the impact of selfishness, less skilled players are often still afraid of the killer and are less confident to make risky plays, so they'll do less of that regardless of whether or not that play will help the team. As a result, that plays falls to me more and more. There are plenty of additional factors that drive the outcome this way too. Like, if you run a killer for four gens and they finally down you, the odds of you getting camped to death skyrocket. The frequency of this scenario also goes up the lower my MMR gets.
Tournaments are not representative of typical DBD matches, so I don't think they're useful to consider. The skill of the players involved is not typical and tournaments' win conditions are almost always different than kills/escapes, which impacts player behavior.
I absolutely agree that selfish players would naturally end up at diffferent ratings than altruistic players (all else being equal). That should be the case if MMR is working as intended. My viewpoint is that this is a problem, though, it results in worse matches.
Again, I don't think it's a bad thing if I save my teammates, even if they wouldn't do the same for me. I'm perfectly happy with that outcome and wouldn't have it any other way. My frustration is that this outcome destroys the quality of the matches I get going forward. I'll start taking some stats on my survival rate versus the team's and report back once I have a decent sample size, though. I'd be curious to see that too.
I agree that there theoretically should be other players going through the same thing at similar MMR. However, the number of players like that are small compared to the number of players who just aren't very good at DBD. So, for every kindred spirit I get paired up with, I get an order of magnitude more potatoes.
I am completely on board with lowering the MMR of a player who tries to go for some endgame heroics and fails, e.g. trying to save against NOED and dying along with the person who was already hooked. On the flip side, though, successful endgame heroics should raise their MMR. If the tactic itself is not beneficial to the team, by all means, punish it. I can see an argument from people who just want to mess around that they don't want to have bad teammates as a result, but at the end of the day, if you're not trying to win the game, it makes sense that MMR doesn't reward that. I am trying to win when I take on risk to save teammates, though. I just treat DBD as a 4v1 game with a win condition of collective survival, not a game of four concurrent 1v1s with a win condition of individual survival. I know that not everyone will agree, but regardless, I feel encouraging teamplay is very healthy for the game. I find that selfless plays are very rewarding for both sides and bring joy to the game for everyone involved. It's a great way to counter the salt and toxicity that shows up in lots of matches. Discouraging play like that by pushing players to only care about individual outcomes is not a good idea.
Re: endgame scenarios, I keep going back to this in part because it's an easy example to understand and draws a black line between selfish and unselfish players, but also because scenarios like this as easily frequent enough to throw MMR out of whack. If you had to guess, what percentage of your games have at least one hook during the EGC? Maybe 1 in 6? Leaving in every single one of those scenarios versus hook trading in every single one of those scenarios would make a big difference in terms of MMR; 1 extra escape per 6 matches would in theory be a big difference in "skill", especially when you consider the fact that the most unselfish player is the most likely to get left if they're the one on the hook. In practice it's not as simple as 1 in 6, because sometimes both survivors will get out and sometimes it's a situation in which you basically can't trade (e.g. Bubba, injured with no way of healing, NOED and can't find the totem). Even if the actual number is more like 1 in 20 matches, this is just one scenario.
There are many situations in game in which you don't need to show the slightest shread of altruism to teammates in order to escape, but in which doing so would help them survive. These crop up in just about any mid to late game scenario in which the survivors are clearly ahead. At this point, the risk from confronting the killer and being the one hooked and left to die when the last gen is powered, is high enough that there's little reason to even bother. Let your teammates go for the save if they feel like it and just pound gens. There are even fun little extra selfish edge cases, like bringing a key and hatch spawn offering as a backup plan, and hiding near the hatch until your teammates die if you think you have a good chance of losing the match. Hatch escapes don't contribute to MMR, but not using your key and getting sacrificed certainly does.
One last point - I very much disagree with this:
While you and I may prefer the game to be a team game where players can outright win even despite themselves dying, that is not the reality of the game
"Reality" by which definition? The current MMR system? For almost the entire lifespan of this game, the closest thing to a defined win condition in DBD has been whether or not you pip. Pipping of course determines your rank and rank was used for matchmaking for 5+ years, so the clear message was that pipping is what shows you played a good match. Pipping heavily rewards team outcomes and altruistic play. You will have a much harder time pipping if you never interact with the killer and leave it to your teammates, even in a winning match where you could easily get out. You will also have a much harder time pipping if you don't every save a survivor from the hook. The entire team is punished if someone is left to die on the hook too, meaning team escapes were important for individual success. It was also entirely possible to pip without surviving if you did a lot to help the team (ran the killer for a while, did lots of generators, healed and unhooked teammates, etc.). This system still exists in the game and is shown on every postgame screen as a measurement of performance, and unlike MMR it is intentionally visible. Are we meant to ignore the multi-year history of the game, and the conditions in which most people learned to play, and just accept that individual performance is all that matters now, just because we've had a matter of months with a flawed MMR system? I see this as evidence that the MMR system doesn't reflect the reality of the game, not that the reality of the game has changed.
I'm not sure many people would want to 4v1 game in which the survivors are essentially competitors forced into an uneasy truce to overcome the killer, but who will and should turn on each other the second their own escape is assured. Just my opinion, but that sounds toxic and unfun. WIth the popularity of SWF, people clearly like playing cooperatively with their friends, and this also entails helping them whenever possible, because that's what friends do. I'm not trying to argue that players should value their teammates just as highly as themself, because I agree that's not realistic for most players. I just think it should be a clear goal going into the match to get as many people out as possible. No need to trade just to save your buddy, but also don't leave them to die when you could easily save them.
Definitely looking forward to the MMR changes they've been murmuring about, if and when they come. I just hope it weights all escapes evenly rather than just making a small adjustment for team performance, or something.
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I remember your name from some past posts that I thought were really well done, and I appreciate the time you put into responding to me. I'll try to put together some stats on my match outcomes too.
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