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Skill Based Match Making?

I have 646 hours in dead by daylight and my friend I played with has 494 hours in dbd. I understand that we have a lack of killers in queue for the game at some times of the day but I was in awe when me and my friend loaded into a match against a player with over 5,000 hours in the game. Is this a common occurrence? How does dbd matchmaking work? And is there something I can do to combat this on both killer and survivor side?

Answers

  • Tsulan
    Tsulan Member Posts: 15,093

    There is a soft cap and a hard cap in mmr. When there are not enough players of the same mmr lvl, the game widens up its search and allows for players of different mmr ratings to play with each other.

    Apparently you can reach the soft cap pretty quickly and the devs prefer that players have short queues over "fair" matches. So thats why you see this.

  • Aven_Fallen
    Aven_Fallen Member Posts: 17,604

    A huge problem are backfilling Lobbies. This means that the initial Lobby will be somewhat decent when it comes to MMR, but once a player leaves it, it prioritizes queue times over fairness. So if you and your friend play Survivor, you might get a Killer which is somewhat in your range, but if they dodge the Lobby, it will be backfilled with basically the next person available. This can be a 5k hour-Killer. Or a 10 hour-Killer.

    Yesterday I played against a Wraith after several Killer dodged. I dont know their hours, but they were P0 and had 3 Tier 1-Perks and 1 Tier 2-Perk and a pretty random Build. This Player was clearly new.

    A few days ago I went from a 14k hour Nurse in a span of two games to a 26 hour Nemesis, who got backfilled into the Lobby. (I have almost 9k hours, my friend has 5,5k hours)

    You cannot really combat this, the only ones who can combat this are BHVR by making Lobby Dodging harder or outright remove it or put a penalty to it. But you can make it the games more enjoyable for everyone if you dont dodge Lobbies. Then there is a chance that there is actually the initial Lobby, meaning you might not be outclassed on either side or outclassing the other side.

  • tjt85
    tjt85 Member Posts: 1,652

    In my experience, the MMR system seems to work a little better outside of the big events. It's never great, but there's something about events and new chapter releases that makes the matchmaking go completely out of the window. Last night I had a game against two sweaty tunnelling Ghost Faces, followed up by a Nemi who decided to DC and played like they'd just bought the game. They weren't even doing that badly, they had a hook on each of us with one of us on death hook and 2 gens to go. I'm losing my will to play Survivor, tbh.

    I think I'll probably spend the rest of the event being a chill Killer so I can collect the cool cosmetics I want, then come back in a week or two when the games are much less sweaty. Because I don't know where Killers I usually get matched with have disappeared to.

  • Deathstroke
    Deathstroke Member Posts: 3,709

    Well for me matchmaking is terrible. I get best loopers when I play killer and worst loopers when I play survivor well occasionally I manage to carry them if killer is on me. But why even once I can't get these survivors. Sweaty pc killers I get though. I think they should separate pc and console players.

  • crogers271
    crogers271 Member Posts: 3,245

    How does dbd matchmaking work?

    As survivor, if you escape you gain MMR (a hidden number where the game ranks you), if you die you lose MMR. This number is then modified by the overall performance of the team (if you die, but three survivors escape, less MMR loss) and the difference between your MMR and the killer (ex: if the killer has a high MMR and beats you, you lose very little MMR).

    Killer is the other side of this, gain MMR for kills, lose MMR for escapes, with 2 escapes / 2 kills being a draw (hatch is counted as a null value, so if one of those escapes was hatch it would be 2 killers / 1 escape on the MMR). Killer MMR is tracked per each killer, though there is likely some kind of overall killer MMR per play.

    When you look for a match the system tries to match you with other survivors/killers of roughly the same level in your region. The longer it takes to find a match though, the more it broadens the search.

    Then if someone leaves the lobby the system feels like even more of a crapshoot for who ends up replacing that person.

    There may be more to it, but that's all I've seen them post about on the forums.

    So how did you end up hitting a 5,000 hour player? Well in addition to those ideas mentioned above (backfills, needing to expand to find players), there are 3 other possibilities. Just because someone has a ton of hours in the game doesn't necessarily mean they are great at it. Second possibility, you mention you are playing with a friend, if you are frequently in a SWF you have leg up over a lot of players, which is really going to boost your MMR.

    It's also possible the player you hit is a survivor main and/or that isn't their main killer, so that killer's MMR is not as high as player's skill level may be.

    So there's a lot of reasons this could happen.

  • Vanishlord
    Vanishlord Member Posts: 555

    Lobby shopping is a big reason for this. The MMR system is horrendous and if the first killer who usually is around the same MMR level leaves then the game just tries to fill that spot as soon as possible.

  • drsoontm
    drsoontm Member Posts: 4,954
    edited October 2023

    Depending on the hour of the day, I can be matched against survivors in the two digits hours. I've (way) passed 3K hours on my Steam account alone. I can kill them as Nurse without blinking.

    Never play after midnight.

  • PotatoPotahto
    PotatoPotahto Member Posts: 250

    Sounds crazy, but BHVR could make lobby backfilling MMR-based and that would solve the problem.

    Everything else is just a bandaid lowering the occasion of the issue but not resolving it.

  • Thusly_Boned
    Thusly_Boned Member Posts: 3,421
    edited October 2023

    Yes, it is unfortunately a common occurrence. I don't lobby dodge (okay, very, very rarely) and I have been on both ends of some absolutely insane mismatches.

    I have 3K+ total hours (about an even surv/killer split), and have recently been matched against players with less than 10 hours, and as many as 12K. Those are extremes, but not total aberrations by any stretch. Not even uncommon.

    And no, there's not much you can do other than play at peak hours and hope for the best.

  • Thusly_Boned
    Thusly_Boned Member Posts: 3,421
    edited October 2023

    I have to say, 3 a.m. DBD is kind of fun sometimes. Well, interesting, at least, lol.

  • The_Krapper
    The_Krapper Member Posts: 3,259

    Lol what mmr system? There is none and never will be a true mmr system, regardless of what the devs say they know the lobby times will skyrocket if it were truly done correctly and that's the last thing they want, they're gonna throw you to the next opponent available regardless of hours or skill just so if there is a mismatch you can que right back up for the next match without waiting 30 minutes

  • Aven_Fallen
    Aven_Fallen Member Posts: 17,604

    It would solve the problem, but would increase queue times. Making Lobby-Dodging not possible or penalize it would also solve the problem. And would prevent Killers from cherrypicking Lobbies.

  • Aven_Fallen
    Aven_Fallen Member Posts: 17,604
    edited October 2023

    Yeah, and ideally even pressing Alt + F4 should be punishable. Lobby-dodging is cheap and mainly hurts Killers who are surely not prepared for games where they should not be in.

    And well, not showing prestige... It is a step in the right direction, but as Survivor, you can already make your Lobby look like a Lobby the Killer would not dodge. Even with prestige, showing your P2-default Meg and switching to the P100 Claudette works as well. However, this should also not really be the solution. It is totally fine if the Killer can prepare for a game (e.g. equipping Franklins against Items, equipping Lightborn, maybe not using the fun Build but the Meta-Build for 4 Medkits or stuff like that) and this should not be taken away from them.

    But lobbydodging until they find the most inexperienced Survivors should also not be a thing.

  • PotatoPotahto
    PotatoPotahto Member Posts: 250

    Well, if the killer will see you switch to P100 and he doesn't want to play against it, he will find a way to don't do so. Information is good, but sometimes it just hurts - if you played against a P100 survivor not knowing that you might not even notice he was in your lobby, and the opposite - if you have a P100 but you decide to play a level 3 default skin Claudette, it's not like your skill disappeared. So the information that is being provided to the killer is unreliable to a degree of being misleading.


    With the rest I agree, lobby dodging hurts the game. I'm trying to learn the Alien and I won, like, 2 games of a grand total of 10, but I'm already getting very sweaty teams. I bet that happens because I'm being backfilled to their lobbies, because no chance my average MMR would be high enough to still throw me into the pit with such pathetic winrate.

  • KSzerker
    KSzerker Member Posts: 191

    Can't remember the last time I even had the gates powered against my Blight or Nurse and I still get thrown into lobbies within a minute of queuing up where survivors are clearly noobs. I'm sure MMR is technically a thing, but it seems to have little to no barring on matchmaking.