Can We Talk About How Unfun "High MMR" Is?

So far I only had 2 games out of something in the double digits that had tunnelers and campers. Maybe I'm insanely lucky, maybe I'm just a really bad survivor. I have experienced the Tinker, Ruin, Undying, Blight quite a few times.

As for killer I do see a lot of medkits and I mean 3 medkits minimum every match. I haven't seen a single match without 3 as absurd as that sounds. Most groups are swf's. If your curious how I know it's a swf it's cause matching names, in the endgame you see very similar builds.

My experience for MMR has been pretty good for survivor but for killer it's been horrendous. Once again I might just be a bad survivor.

I thought MMR was a good idea, and I still kinda do, but the issue for me is less the MMR but more the balance of the game. If they fixed the balance then MMR might be good for everyone, but that's the issue. BHVR is not gonna be able to balance maps, killers, medkits, tiles, loops, perks, camping, tunneling, and totems that quick. We've seen how long it takes them. So while I do like MMR, I do think it should be shut off until the game gets properly balanced.

So I feel like "High" survivor mmr isn't working that well. So the only thing to complain about here is: Why does it blows so much?

But everytime I play Killer it works prettty accurate to my skillrate on different killers. And I like that noobs doesn't get matched with me bc that's not fair and pretty dog since the beginnings of gaming. Noobkilling is bs. So I'm fine. Also since I get matched with survivors on my or above my level I feel like I'm improving. Only slightly but I definetely do so.

Long story short: Killer yay, Survivor... hmmnay? medio rare? but not yay.

I feel high MMR is far worse for killer. If you want to stand the slightest chance of winning on a killer that isn't Nurse, Spirit or Blight then you need a bunch of gen slowdown. Even then you'll still sweat.

Survivor is far less of a struggle when it comes to camping, slugging or tunneling because most survivors at high MMR have borrowed time, DS, unbreakable and so on.

Killers must run some type of gen defense to have a chance of "winning". Whatever winning might mean to you. To the devs clearly winning is getting kills/escapes. Nothing else seems to matter based on the last Q&A stream. This explains why MMR killers employ all these tactics.

Now on the bright side, good or bad i guess, pin head power does create a secondary objective for the survivors to complete. If we don't solve the box we can't even do gen work for the duration. Personally i feel this is a good power for the game. the killer can run less gen defense perks than others and the survivors have a fair chance to prevent the chain event.

For the killer this means they are chasing one survivor, one survivor is going for the box, 2 survivors max are on a gen. The killer has a chance to keep multiple survivors occupied at the same time which slows gen progress. As a survivor ( I play majority survivor b/c on console the frame rate drops are so bad killer is broken), this gives me more opportunities for blood points. i only care to escape if i'm doing a challenge. other than that i'm in it for BP and to help others escape.

High MMR is a terrible experience on both sides. It's full of DC, suicides, tunnel and proxy camp.

As a killer, you can't win if you want to play properly without camping and tunneling.

As a survivor, you mostly do gens and that's all.

Killer queues are now instant, survivors queues take way longer.

It shows how terrible the experience is for killers... sad

RIP

Everyday DbD is loosing more and more players. Compare each day with the last week and you will see there is a 10% decrease in the number of players.

DbD has now less players than BFV, a pretty much dead game that resurrected with good free contents. But players don't leave and they play everyday now....

I have a hard time making sense of most of the complaints I see about MMR. Many display a fundamental misunderstanding of what purpose MMR serves, some just don't really make sense.

"High MMR is unfun" - If you do not have fun trying to kill as many survivors as possible by any means possible or trying everything in your might to escape, then you should simply... not do those things. Nothing is preventing you from using off-meta loadouts, refraining from camping, tunnelling, slugging, genrushing, or doing anything else you consider unfun as either role. The only thing that I can see people bring up is preventing them from this is... their desire to win. And you can't have that without trying hard to kill or escape - if it would be possible to consistently win (i. e. climb to and remain at high MMR) without using the strongest loadouts and tactics to do so, the system would make no sense whatsoever and everyone would sooner or later end up at the highest rating, regardless of their skill, performance and "sweat" levels. That would be the most unfun thing, as you would have players with 100 hours who consider a victory being cleansing all totems in a round, match against players with 10000 hours who usually kill everyone before 2 gens are done. As was regularly the case in the ranking system.

I think this issue is mostly due to people wanting to eat their kill or escape cake and have it too. They want to win, which to most players in this game actually absolutely does mean to kill survivors or escape as survivor. They want to do so without having to stress or needing to practice and improve too much. And they also want to do so against non-bad players so that they can feel even better about winning. But that is simply impossible in a PVP game, because if one player is having a comfortable and fun time and is winning, the other(s) cannot possibly simultaneously also be. The reality is that if you want to kill or escape by any means, you should be matched against likeminded players, and all players in those matches should be expected to have to try their very hardest and yet still come out having people escape or dying around half of the time. If you do not consider that gameplay fun, then simply stop trying to kill or escape by any means possible. You think playing in other ways is more fun? Then do so, and if that means you aren't averaging at least 2 kills or 50% escapes over your matches, you will fall to a rating where that is eventually feasible. But please don't expect it to be possible to consistently kill and survive at the highest rating while also playing for any type of fun that is not performing in ways to kill or survive as consistently as possible, otherwise you are asking for the game experience to be ruined for everyone and are misunderstanding what MMR is. It is precisely about sorting players into matches in which players are more on the same page about how to play the game. It is not a reward, it is not about making the highest rating level the best or most fun one that everyone should want to be at. Only those that care about winning and also enjoy what sort of gameplay that entails.

"High MMR is unbalanced" - That is by definition impossible. You can only climb MMR if you consistently kill or escape, and only maintain high MMR if you consistently at least kill half of the survivors/escape half of the time. If you are high MMR, that necessarily means that you perform at least well enough to average 2 kills per match or a 50% survival rate. That the rating is capped is a problem in terms of actually matching people as closely as it could be, but it is not a problem in terms of creating an overall balanced playing experience where players consistently perform well enough. If you don't like how the game is played when both roles use and try everything to kill and escape, then again, you are free to simply not use those things and not play in those ways, and if that means you now cannot compete at the high MMR levels anymore and will sink to levels where you can, so what? There is no reward for your rating.

Some aspects of this game are definitely still problematic from a balance perspective, but that is not something a matchmaking system could ever iron out. Would every 4-player SWF be paired against Nurses exclusively, and vice versa? Obviously a ridiculous thought. These are things that have to be addressed by game design.

"MMR does not reflect skill" - There is nothing that will correlate closer with a player's prowess in this game than their kill and survival rates, certainly over large enough sample sizes. If you are good at chasing/being chased, pressuring objectives/controlling them, snowballing/recovering, quick decision-making, the mechanics of that all, etc., you are absolutely more likely to kill or survive more consistently as a result. All of those things ultimately and inadvertently contribute to one's ability to kill or survive, the connection is obvious. And while it could be argued that metrics such as hooks might more accurately reflect skill, ultimately MMR does not even have to be about skill, or more precisely, the "skillfulness" with which wins are achieved. The vast majority of people care about killing as killer and surviving as survivor in this game, and for very obvious reasons. Those are just the clearest win conditions. The MMR system is meant to measure performance in that respect and make matches that on average allow players an equal shot at both. And to that end, of course there are easier, less demanding (less "skillful") ways to achieve kills and escapes. But they are still the most effective ways to get to that end result, not having to exert a lot of effort to use them then only means being efficient. If a chess master won all of their games with simple yet effective play, nobody would argue they aren't justified to be gaining rating just because they aren't using very complex strategy. Winning is the prime objective, not winning in the most impressive ways.

And I would even go further and say fun levels also correlate more closely with balanced kill and survival rates than anything players might think would more accurately determine "skill". Again, ultimately most players enjoy killing and surviving respectively, and so they will have better playing experiences with a matchmaker that selects for precisely those things. I suspect not few of the people complaining about MMR are if anything even more dependent on their win rates for enjoyment of this game than the average player, and the reason they say it should not select for kill/survival rates is not that they think those do not actually reflect success in this game, but because they want to keep winning most of their games like they could in the old matchmaking system that did not try to give players fair matches in terms of kill and survival chances.

If you on the other hand personally actually do not care about surviving or killing and dislike the ways the game is played by people who do, you should be grateful for MMR. MMR selecting for things you do not care about means MMR will benefit you, if you truly do not care. You won't kill or survive consistently, your MMR won't increase, you won't have to play with and against players that do care a lot about killing or surviving and play in those ways. All is well. Obviously it's not quite that easy because in reality the matchmaker still has to make matches happen from actual available players and there's a lot of messiness with that, but in concept all those people that for some reason seem to take huge issue with the matchmaker selecting for kill and survival rates at least can rest assured that it will tend to give them matches with likeminded individuals that also do not think killing and surviving is all that important, certainly more consistently so than the ranking system ever did.

I'm not saying MMR is perfect, and certainly there are problems with BHVR's implementation of it (for one thing, it seems to try to achieve a "balanced" kill/survival rate by sometimes flip-flopping between matchups that are grossly stacked toward one side and the other, and I also dislike the MMR cap as well as the fact that personal survival rates are used rather than team-based ones), but much of the criticism I see fails to see the point of MMR.

Where has that been demonstrated, out of interest? I don't have specifics myself on how many 0/1ks or deaths it takes to significantly drop in rating, it's certainly possible that those numbers might have to be adjusted, but honestly 30 games is not that unreasonable in my mind.

As for my view of skill being uninformed and MMR being one of the worst things ever, those are unsubstantiated claims. Same for most players seeming to dislike it, for that matter. There's hundreds of thousands of players monthly, the amount of online complaints is a drop in a bucket in comparison. BHVR's survey might be a more meaningful measure of people's initial impressions of it, but that's probably also merely in the tens of thousands, if that.

Well...at least it is no surprise. I mean, its "test" sessions were so awful that most people knew it would create sweaty games.

So do I. But then again, you know me. There are very few things that I do not miss.