Why aren't we matched up with people who are actually at our skill level?

BHVR currently doesn't have a way to do this. They tried MMR and it failed.

It just matched everyone up with new players

^ This is what happened.

As BAD as you think the ranked system might be where it queues people according to your rank, it is nowhere NEAR as bad as what MMR was. It was laughably horrible, so much so that it became one of the extremely rare and very few instances where the dev team actually decided not to double down, but to say: "hey, we messed up, and we'll change what we did wrong and go back to the original thing we had before, at least for the time being"

MMR took your idea @WalkedMoss92 of "Who cares if you are matched up with other players at your rank level, it doesn't determine anything." and exaggerates that concept to a goddamn eleven. Red Ranks with hundreds or thousands of hours were continuously on a CONSTANT basis being queued with people who were literally playing their very first match of DBD and other similarly inexperienced players who were in the brown ranks because MMR made no distinction for rank because "rank doesn't even matter".

What MMR taught us was yeah, to a certain extent, rank is not the best at identifying and determining a player's skill level, it certainly doesn't paint a whole picture and there are certainly flaws with the system. However, rank IS at the end of the day an aspect that identifies at the very least an overall part or general scope of a player's skill level. There might be a wide range of players in Red Ranks but at the end of the day they're all certainly more experienced than someone who's in green, yellow, and obviously brown.

So obviously ranks don't work by themselves, at the same time an MMR system that completely tosses aside rank as a negligible and meaningless feature doesn't work either. I hope the next thing the devs try to do is incorporate a system that combines both and if it doesn't meet expectation, then it may be as Scott Jund says that an MMR system will simply never work ever in DBD because there are too many randomized elements for a machine or system to really gain an accurate picture of a player's skill level in DBD.

Personally speaking, in the wake of what an absolute disaster MMR was, I've never been more satisfied with matchmaking in my entire life. It's one of those things that you really take for granted until you lose it and realize what a disaster things would be without it, and they certainly were.

I honestly don't think the matchmaking pool is stable enough as killer vs survivor across all zones and times for MMR. I think thats the real reason it didn't work.

The game's not exactly dying. there are still plenty of people playing it at any given time. The problem comes from trying to match players in the same region, at the same time, at a ratio of 4:1 while also accounting for the fact that the 4 could be groups of 2-4 and having to also pool them in with individuals who fill the number of flex spots exactly.

Thats already a hard filter to sift through, and it shows why we get so many rainbow rank games without MMR. Add MMR to the mix, and you need to try to factor the suivivor "winrate" (still dont know if thats pip or survival based) vs each individual killer's "winrate...." which might not even exist if they havent been playing the killer since MMR started collecting data. You can see how this calculation makes the pool of eligible matches slimmer with every condition.

Many games get around this by having visible MMR, so you can take bad matchups with a grain of salt. Those games are also 1v1, and luck tends to have less of a direct impact on your chances. Since this game has none of that, the results of MMR have proven pretty unreliable, at best.

Its not a bad system, and it could work. But it requires a massive pool of players available at all times for both roles, and this game only has a "very good" pool to work with across all times and regions simultaneously.