What is the point of SBMM anymore?
After the SBMM changes in the beginning of the year, we learned it broadens the search faster and that the MMR cap has been lowered. So now we effectively have a system similar to the old colored ranks. Many factors can come into play in a game - survivors play exceptionally well and commit a singular blunder that costs them the game, the map can just benefit or hinder either side (and maps have wildly inconsistent RNG, to the point where I don't even know where to begin with balancing them), the time of day influences how fast you find a game and by proxy how strong the players you face are, ping might be an issue depending on where the matchmaking decides you should go and some bugs just straight up cost you games (I'm looking at you Wesker drop bug and survivors getting stuck on nothing)... What's the point of it? It's probably a burden on the devs to keep it working properly and the community has been dissatisfied with it since its inception in the game.
If matchmaking was simply connection based, I think a lot of people would just not be as angry at BHVR. If it's all up to luck, people would maybe not be as upset. Plus, even with SBMM survivors claim solo queue is still awful and that the teammates they get suck. If SBMM is working as intended, the survivors paired together are in relative proximity to each other in terms of skill, so clearly people aren't able to assess their own skill level with how weird MMR is. If there are no plans to remove it, then... Why keep it hidden still? We also know anyone can just give up on a game and do nothing as killer or survivor. Of course, on the survivor side, peer pressure probably keeps the AFK players in check. But there are still tome challenges that demand a hatch escape, which makes the player who chooses that challenge as useful as someone who's AFK.
Oh yeah, there's that too! Tome challenges sometimes affect the way someone plays. I'm an awful Blight player, so when I did the challenge to get 6 Lethal Rush downs (or was it Lethal Rush hits?) I had a 4-man escape. That and smurfing are basically the same thing in the eyes of SBMM, so I lost MMR. Challenges that have people sift through chests also make survivors lose more. In general, challenges that make us deviate from our main objective and that can't be done naturally as the game progresses can affect MMR.
So to recap - SBMM exists in DBD when the core mechanic for it to function (MMR) isn't even a good measure of skill or a good indicator of how the matchmaking system is working. And there are way too many factors that can decide the outcome of a match due to the neverending web of perk and item interactions, add-ons, maps, bugs and crazy RNG. Why have it anymore?
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Because it's still better than no SBMM, as was apparent during the tests earlier in the year. When you have purely 'random' match making, the amount of mismatch between sweatlords and newbies is far worse.
And it's better than the old ramk based matchmaking because it doesn't reset every month.
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Yeah, but if people claim to still be mismatched even with it and we can't really gauge our own skill level compared to others unless they're way better or way worse than us, then what is the point? Mismatching sucks, but if the entire matchmaking is focused on that when many other factors may interfere with that, won't that affect how it works and how we give feedback on it? Why keep something that's supposed to gauge skill if it doesn't actually gauge skill? And once again, if they want to keep it and we all know anyone can lower their MMR artificially regardless of knowing how high or low it is, why keep it hidden?
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I'm pretty sure it's just to separate the very top from the very bottom as far as "skill." I know it doesn't seem to work but if I jump on my wife's account I can tell I'm playing with new players on both sides.
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At the very least, I main blight and can see that everyone is running full meta on survivor pretty much everygame regardless of skill. Does that mean their perks are carrying them or not idk.
Even in SWF's I'll good one great player, 2 decent players and a "weak link". But in low to mid mmr on survivor side, it's clearly awful. You can be an amazing survivor, but you are not getting out if your teammates are potato's while you run the killer for 3 gens. I think a start to fixing sbmm is changing how survivor's gain and lose mmr. It can't be just escaping because a lot of the time that escapee just happened to be the last person and got out in a good gate spawn. I'm not sure, it's very hard because they way the rate survivor skill is bad and a lot of the players in this game are bad.
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I do not know why people complain so much about this system.
You maybe should compare it to other games while asking the question how matchmaking for a smaller game like DbD is even possible. We are not playing chess here where you can have anything between 50 to 20.000 elo and millions of players around the world, we a playing a medium sized survival game with little to no competitive implications.
The first goal is thus to make matches for players so that they can play. The second goal is to make balanced matches. As soon as the second goal interferes with the first the experience becomes miserable for all (remember something like more than 20 minute ques for top-killers with a single main).
For me personal this works: I rather take some unbalanced matches than no matches at all. I want to come home, do some housework, make dinner and then sit down with a beer and play DbD with my friends. Waiting a long time for a perfectly balanced match would ruin this. I do not want to wait for all eternity to get a game, I want my games and do weird stuff with funky builds.
Sure this works better when facing a Killer on my level and I prefer that. MMR does the job for me and I get a mixed bag: Blights who run over me and Masterminds who do not know anything about their power.
I think the majority of players are more like me and less competitive. Thus you need to tailor the MMR system to them to keep them enjoying your game. BHVR did that with MMR and it works.
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Do people actually want an accurate MM system? It would lead to very long wait times depending on your skill and matches that feel very stale
I and many others prefer having more random matches with shorter queues since we don’t take the game very seriously
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Mismatching is always going to happen, with any system, unless you want to sit there for hours waiting for the perfect match.
Plus lobby dodging and backfilling will always negate matchmaking.
You can't gauge your skill level from any one particular game for those reasons. It's a system based on averages. To produce an environment where you have an equal chance of getting a 4K as much as a 0K, not an environment that facilitates a 2K every time.
And as mentioned above, you don't want that anyway. Too close a match results in a very sweaty experience. You want it in a healthy middle ground, with matches not too far apart, but not too close, in a way that allows for reasonably fast queues, and I think the current system is the best the game has been so far. Doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement, but I'm personally happy with the matchmaking system as it is.
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You mean a system which you could do 5 gens, 20min chase but die on 1st hook and still think you're bad isnt a great system?
Call me flabbergasted
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(Yet they already stated they will adjust the SBMM to address these exact scenarios)
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I'm not sure I'm following the post here, could you elaborate?
The point of the SBMM system, as is the point of all MMR systems, is to sort you into general skill brackets to make the matches you get more fairly balanced than something purely random or, in DBD's case specifically, more fairly balanced than the emblem system. That's a low bar, so I'm not praising the system by saying it passes it, but it is the bar and it is passed.
Is this a longer version of the whole "wins don't indicate skill" misunderstanding? The last paragraph makes me think it is, so I can cover that briefly- the misconception there is that a single win or loss matters much for your MMR, and it doesn't. You have to win or lose consistently before your MMR changes all that much, because it's based on your overall performance, not how you play within one match. It's not a progression ladder, you aren't getting meaningful feedback (or any feedback at all for that matter) at the end of a match.
Let me know if I misunderstood your point, of course, but if I didn't- the system could absolutely use some improvements but it is better than the emblem system and the core design is extremely standard.
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Yeah but they also said MMR would decay slightly over a period of time.
Said and do is different things, while I'd love the change I'm not gonna give them props till its added is all
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Fair enough.
they have always been slow on this kind of stuff and doesn’t seem like this will change anytime soon
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to push away anyone trying to get into the game by making them face 3k hours survivors
and also support camping and tunneling cuz that's all that exists in high elo
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My guess is that if 4 solo q survivors lose a game, that all 4 of them think they were the best player, and each person thinks the other 3 players were garbage at the game.
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Literally nothing. At this point they should just make lobbies completely random. Or assign people by play time. And before someone jumps in with their galaxy brain take on time played=/=skill, yes, I'm well aware of that. But no system could be worse than what we currently have.
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That's what I want too. I don't want every match to be perfectly balanced. Plus, SWF becoming more and more common because of the bias against solo queue certainly interferes with that. Which is why I asked - why keep it around if it doesn't work and it gives the community something to pester the devs about when they could be improving the code in other areas?
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Part of why I ask is in fact related to skill and I know it's not a progression ladder. But my issues with it are: it doesn't give you good enough feedback on your skill to make you understand what type of people you should be paired with and many more complex issues affect the way it works. And of course, there are more pressing matters to balance the game to a point where SBMM could work better and removing it entirely in favor of connection based matchmaking would lift a lot of weight from the backs of the devs. If matchmaking is just random, then the devs will be blamed for one less thing and that's one less thing for them to worry about. But let's get to more specific stuff.
Say a streamer gets sniped by hackers for many games in a row and loses. Where could they have showcased skill? Or say someone is utterly dominating in a game and a bug prevents them from winning. They had the skill, but at the end it didn't matter. Sometimes the randomness from DBD also screws you over. You might be a great survivor, but a map just came out and it won't stop showing up on the rotation and you keep dying due to not knowing the map well. Maps are also a big factor that led me to make this post - there's barely any that are balanced. They're either super killer sided or survivor sided. And of course, people who prefer playing a particular killer or are grinding with said killer and they keep getting bad maps will struggle far more than usual. Perks feel more varied and better balanced, but maps still have issues that they had years ago. Of course, reworking maps takes time, but it feels like the newer maps have the same or worse flaws compared to old ones and the map design philosophy hasn't changed much. Gen speeds are also a problem - a killer might make gens take over 3 minutes to complete or survivors can have a team that completes all gens in less than 40 seconds and the middle ground seems all but gone. When all these factors come into play, is the SBMM really pairing people because of skill or is it just all over the place? And of course, SWF can really make the matchmaking system go haywire. It feels all over the place when you stomp team after team/killer after killer or when you get stomped non-stop and you can't gauge your skill. And if you can't gauge your skill, how will you know if who you're facing are survivors/killers of your own caliber and give proper feedback on how it's working?
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It doesn't give you any feedback, because it isn't meant to. It's not even capable of giving feedback, it's just a matchmaking system.
As for your other points, I'm struggling to see the relevance of any of those examples? A matchmaking system obviously can't be built on top of things that need to be fixed, or you'll end up with a matchmaking system that may not work after you've finished fixing whichever given thing you built it to accommodate for.
Like, I absolutely agree that those problems exist, but they'd need to be fixed even with a system that was built to keep them in mind. I'm assuming we're talking about crafting a system that keeps those in mind, because it's that or just purely random matchmaking, and I hope I don't need to explain why purely random matchmaking would be a horrendously terrible idea that far outstrips any issues our current SBMM might have.
Lastly, I don't know why people say things like "how are you meant to know it's working", because... you're not? That's not your job? You're just meant to play, the matchmaking isn't meant to be treated with such inherent suspicion that players demand glimpses into the inner workings of the machine.
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To punish killers for playing well, and punish survivors for playing poorly. It makes weaker survivors unable to climb and stronger killers need to sweat constantly or take more L's. The game just isn't balanced for such a system, especially regarding the pidgeonholed metrics it uses.
On the bright side, at least strong survivors and weak killers kinda flourish.
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Knowing how it works actually affects enjoying the game. Hell, this extends for any mechanic of the game. We're supposed to understand how things work and interact if we are to play the game properly and enjoy it. If you're paired with people far too strong or far too weak, won't it affect the outcome of the match and by extension your experience? Because BHVR decided this game will have one game mode and one queue, it's only gonna be competitive. That doesn't float everyone's boat. If we understand why we are being paired with who we're being paired, we're gonna enjoy the game more. If we know it's random, then we don't worry about playing with/against someone strong or weak, it's easier to accept if it's just dumb luck. As far as I know, many older games had systems like these and games that have casual queues also work like that. I don't see people complaining about those games. But if you know a system was designed to pair us with the best possible teammates and opponents and it visibly fails at it or it simply stopped doing that altogether (as it seems to have happened recently), why keep it around?
But back to the topic of game mechanics that are more behind the scenes, one absolutely must understand them to play a game properly. DBD elevates that to a whole other level. The fact hitboxes of a survivor unhooking and a hooked survivor temporarily merge, the way speed affects hitboxes, animations, perk interactions... Hell, survivor techs like the FOV tech and the CJ tech REQUIRE you to understand the game at a more technical level and not just play it. And because we have to understand all these, they affect the balance. And it'd make the devs' life easier if we gave them feedback on how all of these are working. The matchmaking system is another system in this game that affects balance, gameplay, queue times. It would be good if we understood its workings so we can tell the devs if they did a good job or not.
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My only gripe with the system is not being able to see my own mmr. i'd like to know if im improving.
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