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We’ve observed a growing Community concern about matchmaking in recent months. Matchmaking wait times have exceeded our targeted limits and we’ve seen rank disparities fluctuate. In this Status Update, we will go in details on factors impacting the matchmaking, our current matchmaking system and our future solutions.  

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Above are the three variable factors in matchmaking, with a fourth being the number of players on each role, with an ideal ratio of 4 survivors for 1 killer at all times. When dealing with matchmaking, we need to decide how much to focus on each of the factors. If we focus on one point, the other points will see some sort of impact. For example, if we focus on time, your matches will likely end up being less fair, and you might get paired with people further away. Dedicated servers have helped us ensure a stable connection, with over 90% of players being put into matches with 150 ping and under. Our goal is to get you into a match as quickly as possible with a good connection, without compromising too much on fairness.  

This is a difficult task in a game like Dead by Daylight, where both sides have different objectives and cannot be directly compared to one another. We’ve attempted to address this in the past with the Emblem system, but upon further review, we’ve concluded that rank does not directly correlate to skill. While a player who plays a lot will tend to be better than someone who plays very little, there are also players who are good at the game but don’t play enough to reach the upper ranks. 

To help improve with the fairness factor without sacrificing wait times or pings, we will be making two changes. The first is a new system to better reflect a player’s skill level, and the second is a change to the matchmaking system to create fairer matches. 

 

Going forward, we will use a hidden skill rating for matchmaking purposes. Your skill rating will increase when you do well and decrease when you do poorly. To keep this as fair as possible, the system will predict the outcome of the match based on the difference in your opponent(s) rating and adjust the amount your rating changes: 

• If your rating is higher than your opponent(s), your rating will increase less if you win and drop more if you lose. 
• If your rating is lower than your opponent(s), your rating will increase more if you win and drop less if you lose. 

This way, even if you aren’t perfectly matched with people of the exact same skill level, your rating will not change unfairly. 

In the future, we would like to extend this system to support different ratings for each killer, allowing you to practice a new killer without being immediately matched against high skilled players. This may not be included in the initial launch of the feature. 

 

Additionally, to make sure that your matches are as fair as possible, we will be switching over to “batch matchmaking”. 

Currently, our matchmaking system takes the player in queue and looks for a match close to their rank. If it is unable to find an appropriate match, it will gradually expand the search range until it is able to give you a match. This can lead to both unfair matches and long queue times. 

The new batch matchmaking will instead pool a larger number of players together, compare their skill levels, and then create the fairest matches possible simultaneously. With a larger pool to pick from, we hope to improve the fairness factor of matchmaking while also keeping pings and wait times low.  

 

The release of these changes will be gradual. With the release of the mid-chapter update, we are able to start tracking skill levels. For the time being, this is only a test and is not being used for matchmaking purposes. Once we are confident that the skill rating is working as intended, we will be running tests on live servers. 

When this happens, you may notice some disparity in ranks during your matches. This is to be expected as rank will no longer be used for matchmaking purposes at this time. To avoid confusion, we are considering removing ranks from the post-match scoreboard once testing is complete, as they will no longer be relevant to matchmaking. Ranks will remain visible only to you for bragging rights and a goal to work towards, but will be a reflection of your dedication to the game rather than skill for the time being. 

We are confident that these changes will allow us to create fairer matches without losing sight of our goals; to get you into a match as soon as possible with a solid connection. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on our progress as we move forward.