http://dbd.game/killswitch
Does DBD have Engagement-Based Matchmaking or am I crazy?
I was watching a few Marvel Rivals videos a while back because I’m planning on getting back into it (inb4 50 people tell me that’s a mistake) and something that kept coming up was EBMM, or Engagement-Based Matchmaking.
For those of you who don’t know, EBMM is a matchmaking system like SBMM that prioritises quick queues and quick games, at the predictable cost of matchmaking quality, in Rivals this leads to queues being pretty quick with matches generally lasting 5-8 minutes, but this comes at the cost of most games being one-sided stomps.
Sound familiar to anyone?
Now, unlike Rivals where the existence of EBMM is still heavily debated (I am of the opinion it exists, Netease’s design papers and my personal experience pretty much confirm it for me), I don’t see anybody even entertaining the idea of it being in DBD, and this is where I feel like I’m going a little bit insane.
BHVR has said DBD has SBMM and MMR, however they have never actually shown raw numbers, they’ve shown what the brackets are but they’re so broad that they might as well be nonexistent, matchmaking also prioritises queue speed over match quality, you can’t see your MMR, you have no idea what MMR bracket you are even in, and at least in my experience in SoloQ, I’ve had loss streaks of like 6-7 deaths and then get blessed by the most cracked teammates ever for like 3 games, followed by another losing streak, and as for Killer? I either completely roll over the Survivors or they completely roll over me.
My experience is purely anecdotal and doesn’t confirm anything, but that’s what’s driving me a bit mad, I always joke that SBMM doesn’t exist because DBD’s version of it is so bad that it might as well do nothing, but I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t actually SBMM at all, and is just EBMM calling itself SBMM
Or 3000+ hours and counting of DBD has finally driven me insane, one of the two
G’night
Comments
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nah, it has engagement based game design
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No one can convince me dbd matchmaking is based on anything but speed and convenience. The weird part is that my killer queues are almost all high performers. My survivor queues are super uneven. I chock this up to a lot of good survivors being in parties, which is likely why I encounter them more as killer and less as a soloq survivor.
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Feel same the way about my killer and survivor matches. I get good survivors as killer, but playing survivor solo queue is hell.
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DBD match making is based on your MMR score. It starts by looking for players within your MMR range but will expand that range the longer you wait in queue.
So, if both sided have fast queues the matches will comprise of players within the same MMR. Long queue times will produce imbalance for one side.
The exception is High MMR. There's no limit to how high your personal MMR can go but there's a threshold to which matchmaking stops making distinctions. This means a killer at 1700 could be equally matched with survivors at 2000.
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I always like that our community has both the view that BHVR lacks the competence to fix simple bugs and they are also such coding geniuses that there is a secret matchmaking system that knows everyone's precise skill and lines people up accordingly to keep engaged.
This just sounds like randomness. Streaks will happen in random systems. As for the blowouts, that's just the nature of DbD broadly, but also games in general.
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Nobody will ever me able to convince me that matchmaking actually exists in any meaningful form until the devs release stats. In my experience it seems to be indistinguishable from completely random match-ups.
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this is why i tell people that sweating for 4ks playing 4 slowdown and stressing over hatch is literally a waste of time.
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Due to the fact that the backlash would be terrifying if it ever turned out to be a lie, I don't doubt the matchmaking is MMR-based in DBD. They've said, repeated, and even showed stats based around MMR brackets, it's also why smurf accounts (like some people who do "Hardcore Survivor/Killer challenges" & hackers (who can freely choose their lobbies)) have games where they destroy their opponents at first. If it was ever discovered that MMR wasn't a thing, any kind of DBD social platform would burn down almost overnight.
However;
The "average MMR" bracket is huge and, as such, takes from most of the playerbase (as the "low MMR" and "high MMR" brackets are minuscule). This by default causes a few mismatches but would be manageable on it's own.
This is further exacerbated by the true problem: Backfilling (when someone quits a lobby that's filled before the game starts) because, to not double the wait times every time someone quits in the lobby, the system essentially ignores MMR in order to get someone else to fill the void almost immediately if someone leave, which makes it likely to bring someone from a completely different league (it's hard to see it when playing Killer or SoloQ because it's often you who joined a lobby that someone left, and sometimes more than one people leave a lobby which makes it even worse).
The feeling that matches are complete stomps is even further given due to the fact that, on the Survivor side, even a single bad teammate (or troll) can easily cause a massive snowball even if the rest of the team is much better. I've rarely seen multiplayer games where the saying "A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link." is so accurate. Even the best looper needs his teammates to be efficient on gens for his skills to be useful, even the most skilled gen-jockeys can't do gens efficiently if there's two people on hook at all times.
If backfilling didn't exist at all, we would likely see a massive improvement to match quality with only a moderate impact on queue times. But it's quite frankly impossible to entirely remove backfilling since it would mean that every time someone leaves a lobby, the system would need to refresh it's search and the wait times would double, maybe triple, if someone left, and no one would want to wait so long to play. Imagine how long 2v8 wait times would be if even our current loose system makes Killers wait 20+ minutes (because while the secondary modes/events don't increase or decrease MMR, the system still looks for players in your bracket unless backfilling happens).
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