MMR for Survivors should be based off of Emblem Score, not Escaping
I'm not one who hates MMR by any means--it was necessary for the game and is definitely an improvement over the old ranking system. However, while the current system (based off of kills/escapes) is fine for Killer (I've had mostly good games as Killer, balanced outcomes while playing normally), it's awful for solo Survivor.
While my games for the first week were pretty balanced and enjoyable (teammates who knew how to play the video game), they've become increasingly frustrating and tedious as time has gone on. I would like to first mention that I don't mind dying in my games, and I really don't care what the Killer does--be it hitting me on the hook, slugging me until I bleed out (which has been happening more frequently as of late) or whatever's their fantasy... however, I HATE having teammates that I'm obviously not correctly matched with. Feeling powerless because you're the only one doing generators while your teammates are hook juggling, or me being chased for 2+ minutes and not a single generator gets done are the only things in this game that actually bother me.
The biggest problem with the MMR for Survivors is it being based off of escapes. I don't always escape in my games, of course--just yesterday I had three games out of five where I died first: The first game, I was slugged by a Knockout Legion until my bleedout timer ran out, and I died first (with 3k points, I might add). The second game, I was tunnelled to death by a Ghostface while my teammates popped the gens and escaped; only I died. And the third game, I was left in the basement on Midwich by my teammates while Pinhead was chasing the Yui all the way across the map... the other two teammates chose to run in circles in the exit gate until I went into struggle and then left. The Yui escaped as well and I died on first hook after playing well the entire game up to that point (I had escaped two minute-long chases, unhooked two teammates and healed them, and did one and a half gens).
Since MMR for Survivors is based off of escapes, me not escaping on those games (and dying first, to top it off) resulted in my MMR taking big hits. Which is apparent because my games are progressively getting worse and worse, and since I'm the only one playing well in my games the Killer tunnels me to death and then facecamps me while my teammates escape... although with my teammates lately, the Killer doesn't even have to facecamp me--I just get left on the hook either way. And it just continues downhill from there.
Basing the MMR for Survivors off of emblem score rather than escapes would be a million times better and would actually match Survivors who play well in their games but don't necessarily escape, resulting in better games for solo Survivors. It would actually reward Survivors for being altruistic, progressing the objective and holding their own against the Killer. I miss having teammates who actually do the objective and know how to loop for longer than ten seconds, even if I don't escape. It's just discouraging to constantly be matched with newbie or inexperienced (or just bad) Survivors who don't seem to know what they're doing most of the time, and all of your efforts are for nothing.
Another thing I would like to add is that whenever I get decent teammates, we usually get matched with an unskilled Killer who is obviously inexperienced and probably new to the game, resulting in all four of us escaping easily. It is ridiculously unfair for everyone involved, especially the Killer.
TL;DR: Basing Survivor MMR off of escapes is an awful system. Changing it to be based off of your points/emblem score is much more healthy and encourages Survivors to play well, not sweat about escaping the trial and be rewarded for their efforts with better teammates.
Comments
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Wholly agree. I think the killer MMR is flawed too (mainly because I like to let survivors escape after a good match and the game equates that with me being a noob, so I tend to get matched with survivors below my skill level unless I spend the whole day playing mercilessly, which I don't enjoy doing), the problem is much more pronounced on survivor - as you say, it feeds into a cycle where getting killed gives you bad teammates that get you killed because they don't pull their weight and the killer has near-infinite time to accomplish their objective.
Sadly, it also discourages you from playing genuinely altruistically - taking risks and making self-sacrificial plays, not just farming bloodpoints and racing people to unhooks. I never had an issue with dying at the end to try and save another survivor, or to lure the killer away so everyone else could crack the 3-gen, and I considered it a win just to make it that far in the game, but now I'm strongly encouraged to bail out the gate ASAP if I want to improve my chances of getting not terrible games.
I had a match today where I found a Claudette almost immediately, had a decent chase, and hooked her. I started chasing an Ace nearby, but another player was AFK and got bonked down by a wandering zombie, so I left the Ace alone to pick her up - Ace was close to the Claudette and I figured I'd give him room to unhook her. Nope. I finish hooking the AFK (I took her across the map to get a tangled hook) and Ace just went back to his generator while Claudette's busy hitting second stage twenty meters away. I try chasing him into the hooked Claudette and he runs past her. At this point I'm genuinely mad at this guy for letting down his team, so I hook him too. The hooks are spread all over the place and there's nothing happening. Where's the last player? Crouching near a locker. I down the Feng while Claudette dies and bring her next to the Ace, then let her wiggle off so she can unhook him. She doesn't, just bolts away. Normally I give hatch, but there wasn't a chance in hell I was enabling this. Naturally, Feng DCs.
In chase, Claudette wasn't amazing, but she showed a few tricks and knew how to bait a pallet against Nemesis. Ace ran in straight lines past structures and Feng tried to run around objects and crouch behind them (so, seemingly ignorant of scratch marks and injured noises.)
Sure enough, in the end screen, the Claudette was silver rank and had a strong mix of meta or near-meta perks, all T3 and from various characters. Everyone else was ash and had yellow/green baby perks; Ace had no perks and the AFK had one. I wanted to reach out to the Claudette and apologize (or chastise Ace and Feng), but they were all on console. But that Claudette clearly had no business being with this team, and neither did I.
I also had a survivor match today where I completed four of the five gens (as in, I had a gen challenge and it went from 5.4ish to 9.9 in one game - I didn't just pop them, I did a duo gen at the start and then the rest of them from the ground up), and only escaped because one of the other survivors was also competent and looped the Bubba for 80% of the game (and he wasted another minute or so facecamping someone else.) At one point, one of the baby Claudettes came over to my gen, blew it up, and ran away, and I had to bail and find another gen. I'm not an amazing survivor, I can't loop a skilled killer for very long, but I don't belong with newbies and I get a ton of them in solo queue now. It's at the point where I feel like it's necessary to play with a SWF just to avoid the bad teammates and stabilize your MMR, because old solo queue matched me with much harder killers, but I still had better games than this because the teammates knew how to play.
Perhaps a mix of emblems and escapes would be the ideal scenario. I did think your survivor rank got pushed too high too fast with the old system, but an escape-only metric is a quicksand pit when your ability to escape is so strongly tied to what your teammates are doing.
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it simply amazes me that devs worked months on a system that counts kills and escapes when they have emblem system already implemented...
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You know... honestly, I think that Killer MMR system would be corrected easily if they corrected the Survivor MMR system.
I think what's happening is when you have games against three baby Survivors and one good Survivor, those three baby Survivors escape off the hard work of the one good Survivor, increase their MMR rating and move onto the next game with one good Survivor. And then the cycle continues. I can honestly say that I've seen this happening in my games for quite some time now... I get matched with complete newbie Survivors and I'm the only one able to loop or progress the objective. And on Killer side, I'll have the same situation as you sometimes where I'm against three baby Survivors and one good Survivor. It's very discouraging.
And honestly, the only reason I still play altruistically and prioritize helping teammates over escaping for myself is because I enjoy it (and you get decent points sometimes). However, it's getting less and less appealling since my MMR is just hitting the bed due to my playstyle. I wouldn't mind it being emblems mixed with escapes at all, I think that would be a perfect balance (and far better than the mess that we have now...).
Another thing I would like to mention is that I think it's wrong for people to say that grades are not indicitive of skill. I'm still finding that teammates who are in the lower grades are not even comparable to iridescent grade teammates. I think the bottom line is that iridescent grade Survivors have still put in some amount of time and effort (and gotten enough points to pip, which directly correlates to their actions) and probably know what they're doing to some degree. And as long as the grades reset to the bottom every month, you'll still always be able to tell who has more experience on your team. Maybe we should bring back seeing ranks/grades in pregame lobby.
Some wonderful pictures of the amazing MMR system in action:
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Agreed
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My killer MMR issue is one of my own making, but I still think it's worth complaining about despite its nicheness simply because the old system handled it better: my ideal killer match is one where I'm evenly matched with the survivors, I smack them around and manage to get the upper hand in some challenging but not tedious chases, I 2-hook everyone, and then I start playing around with them and let everyone go at the end. I'm only inclined to kill players when they BM me or sandbag their team - if anything, the better of a job they do in chases or protecting their teammates, the more I like them and the more I want them to escape. I will kill for rifts and adepts, but I really don't enjoy it.
I got my ass kicked plenty of times in the old MMR, but I did get survivors who were close enough to my skill level most of the time, and so I got fulfilling games alongside the usual rank 1 SWF stomps and bully squad nonsense nobody could truly avoid. My emblems suffered a bit because I rarely got above bronze devout, and I safetied a lot, but I could still pip up and my natural trajectory was purple ranks (though I tended to hug green due to old MMR's tendency to pair you with survivors a rank above you - I was fine going against purples but got wrecked by the red squads.)
Now it doesn't matter how well I play. If I let everyone go, the game thinks I got roflstomped and my MMR goes down. And it has. A lot. And I actually do feel myself getting worse at the game because I almost never get a survivor that challenges me anymore - I can just braindead follow them around and employ some simple predictive routing to win chases basically every time. It's gotten exciting to find a survivor I would have used to consider average. I'm not learning new tricks as survivor and I'm forgetting old ones as killer. I still have fun playing with them once everyone's paid their two hook tax, but I miss being challenged - but to get back to that, I have to play a ton of games where I kill everyone (which is even worse when it's a noob stomp, that's just cruel - I've adapted to all the newbies by easing up, bringing weaker perks, and intentionally making mistakes to give them more breathing room), and my MMR will still go down once I go back to doing what I actually want to be doing, so there isn't really any investment I can make to fix this, only patch jobs.
I agree with everything else, though - I like playing altruistic for the same reason I like letting people go as killer, I get punished for it now in exactly the same way, and grades are still a very good indicator of your teammates. Even if not all ashes are new players, all new players are ashes - and all golds and iridescents are players who both play a lot and are able to pip up consistently. You can be iridescent without being a top-notch DBD god, but it still means you know what you're doing and you pip up much more than you pip down.
I doubt they'll bring back seeing ranks in lobbies, though - the whole deal was that people would ditch their teammates if they didn't look attractive enough. That's not going to change just because we've decided rank is no longer the crux of your matchmaking - with no other information available, you'd rather have a rank 1 survivor than a rank 14 on your team. Even now I'm tempted to flee lobbies that are all default survivors with free cosmetics.
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It's good to see I'm not the only one struggling in the new system.
I was hopeful after a recent pause. Then I started playing survivor again, and under the SBMM it just went downhill for me. I am not a good juker (I am on console, and let's just say I didn't start to play videogames in my youth), but I have good game sense and was always able to do what was needed: Finish a crucial gen, save a teammate across the map etc. I actually like(d) solo queue, guessing what is happening across the map, quietly sitting somewhere completing a gen. Under the old system I kept hovering around rank 7-8 lately. Maybe I was the oh-so-dreaded weakest link in a lot of matches, l die easily, but with my skillset I could make up for it in different ways. Three years ago, when I started playing, I could still rank up to 1 with my particular skillset, People weren't so competitive back then and a lot of what is now common knowledge in looping actually wasn't known or at least not as canonical and important as today.
After starting to play again I died in a couple of games, and now it feels like I have hit rock bottom and won't ever be able to play on the level I was at before. Teammates leaving me to die, camping and tunneling killers, nothing new in a way, but it feels much more awful with the new system, more like a constant fight, an uphill battle. The way matches run now is a constant source of grief to me. Even if I escape, once in a while, it feels like then, in the next match, there will be a better killer who stomps on everyone again, teabagging at the hatch, and it's downward again, to the next camper and tunneler and to teammates who are not exactly worse than me, but much less experienced nonetheless.
Before SBMM I might have a couple of bad matches and then one good one again, making up for the frustration before. Now it feels like there can be a dozen matches in a row without any fun whatsoever in them.
I feel like I will never be able to get out of this hell of losses again. I feel like the game now doesn't reward my particular set of skills anymore. The only way out I see is to play more swf, but I actually like solo queue a lot!
I hate this change.
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