Why Do People Dislike SBMM?
I know that it sometimes does weird things and pairs experts with newbies (and sometimes throws me to the multi-thousand-hour SWF monsters) - but compared to what this was like when I first started playing?
I'm having a much better time.
I started out mid last-year, when killers had zero matchmaking protections and 3 games out of 4 was either me up against a solid wall of red and purple or me vs a brown/yellow rank smurfing SWF with fancy skins.
It was miserable. I'm honestly surprised I stuck with it.
Now?
Barring the omnipresent DCs, maybe 3 out of 5 games is really good, 1 is a bit easy and 1 is really sweaty. I get to play a lot more chill, give the odd survivor (or sometimes two, if you've been fun) gate and fool around with silly perk combinations.
It's also better than it was even a month ago. Either BHVR have been tweaking things or people's MMRs are stabilizing.
Either way, while it's certainly not perfect - I'm having fun.
That said - I see a lot of negativity about SBMM. Is this just the standard 'I had a rough game and need to vent at something' videogame forum mindset? Or have people actually been having a worse time of it?
Genuinely curious.
Comments
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I'm having fun.
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I don't like SBMM because if you play in my region after 8 or 9 pm, the matchmaking throws you in every match. Most of the time with new players and new killers too. Or sometimes a killer with one perk (maybe a daily challenge)
Sometimes with experienced survivors and the killer don't have any chance and that's not really fair.
During this time there is no SBMM
The old system works better after 8 or 9 pm.
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People don't like SBMM for a variety of reasons. Some people are unlucky and don't get chill games because of how high their MMR is. Every game they play is a sweat-filled game with the same killers/perks. This is only due to how SBMM was very poorly implemented.
Some people think SBMM shouldn't be in the game at all since its a 4v1 Asym game.
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Its binary win/loss metric really punishes doing anything but going for kills/escapes. Don't go for kills? Your MMR will fall and the games will be super easy. Go for kills? Tunnel and camp sweatfest. Flip it over for survivors; be altruistic and do gens but die a lot and then the MMR will go potato and give bad teammates.
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Because we waited two years for the a garbage system.
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Also, look at this great system.
I've played a lot of Survivor since MMR came out. I was playing with my friend who has well over 100 days. Here's what our teammates had.
This was Meg's first game.
Dwight is slightly more experienced. Still, 1K hour Killer, 2K hour Survivor, 3K hour Survivor and then 13 hours between the last two.
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Also, look at this great system.
I've played a lot of Survivor since MMR came out. I was playing with my friend who has well over 100 days. Here's what our teammates had.
This was Meg's first game.
Dwight is slightly more experienced. Still, 1K hour Killer, 2K hour Survivor, 3K hour Survivor and then 13 hours between the last two.
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I find I either end up in matches where I dominate, or in matches where I get my ass handed to me (or on a team of baby survivors). Far less balanced matches than I used to have. And though I don't play all day long, I am petty sure I have a decent sample size.
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Every multiplayer game I played was ruined by SBMM and this DBD version of it is even worse cause it makes no sense
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I don't think we even need to get into detail here, in order to have grounds for loathing everything about the current system, as it is not even close to a Skill Based Matchmaking, combine that with the extremely shady approach Behaviour has chosen and I myself am surprised people are willing to tolerate it.
Also, time to post my favourite quote by Patrick, the Lead Game Designer, that is best enjoyed when read in an extremely condescending tone: "There's sort of, a question I get asked a lot, I see from the community, I've even had people on the team talk to me about. They talk about the Survivor perspective of: I was playing a game of Survivor and I looped the Killer for seven consecutive hours and I unhooked, y'know, eighteen other Survivors and I healed for ninety-three health states, I fixed ten generators, it was such an amazing game, I truly am a god amongst men when I play Dead by Daylight. But then, right at the end, I got thrown on a hook and I died and I don't like that counts as a loss. And the idea here is, wouldn't it be nice if you could do all of that and sometimes you get out alive? Right? Wouldn't that be nice? That's the idea, that's all that MMR is trying to do. It goes, I know you've died, it's ignoring how you got there, because there's too much nuance to be able to make a real, effective system."
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I think at the heart of the issue are the concepts of "efficiency", and "winning".
Winning
Most people who play this game want to "win". Most Killers have defined this as some variation of 3 kills. On the survivor side, most people see their victory condition as escaping the trial. The goal of SBMM, as stated by the Devs, is to get that average to be a 2k and 50% escape rate. Most people on the forums do not seem to accept that as a win condition. So to counteract that, they try to run the best builds they can to chase their own win condition. This is why a lot of people say they are "forced to play sweaty". It's a bullshit claim that removes all self-responsibility. They claim that they don't want to play sweaty, but the reality is that they enjoy "winning" more than they enjoy "playing chill". Or they want to play chill while still dominating their opponents. As their MMR goes up they face more efficient competition (because yes, the MMR system is not measuring skill - it's measuring your success), and to maintain their win conditions they feel like they need to use the strongest tools available.
Efficiency
People here seem to prioritize efficiency over everything. What's the point of running a survivor perk like Distraction when you can run Dead Hard? Whenever people complain about camping and tunneling what is often the response? "It's the most efficient way to achieve your objective as Killer". Why do people run DH, DS, and bring strong medkits? "It's the most efficient way to waste the killers time, extend chases, and prevent yourself from being tunneled". Survivors try to finish gens as fast as possible because they want to "win", Killers try to secure as many kills as possible because they want to "win". As you climb up the MMR, you start going against people who play just as efficient as you do - and it sounds like most people don't like that.
IMO people who prefer the old rank system do so because they had a balance of games in terms of the efficiency of their opponents. They would only occasionally play against opponents who played as efficiently as they did - and those games would be balanced by people who didn't play efficiently or simply did not have the same game knowledge. It was great for them - not so much for the people who had no business going up against them in the first place. With SBMM, the more efficient you play, the more efficient your opposition becomes.
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In my experience, it just doesn't work.
And if it is working, its making my killer games miserable.
At least playing survivor is a bit better, but i still occasionally get really strange matches.
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I really like the new system. In the old system I could play for two/three weeks fine until my rank went up to a point when I would lose every match. Now I can play throughout the month and have a reasonable chance of getting a balanced match.
However, I don't think survivors should be escaping 50% of all matches and since I rarely escape as survivor, I am now teamed with the default Dwights and the default Megs.
As killer it seems to be working really well, but if I get zero kills and maybe only one or two hooks, the MMR really needs to take a bit hit on my MMR and/or give the survivors a big boost to theirs to lessen the chances of this matchmaking anomoly happen to someone else.
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The problem, of course, is that this is an asymmetric game with a heavy snowball effect. If one person goes down early enough, the rest of the team has to do more, it's harder, they're more likely to go down, etc.
If a killer drops down enough that they can use non-meta stuff, they probably have enough of a skill advantage to get that win, snowball the game, and then pop back up to the meta ranks. If a survivor drops down that far, there's a chance of being snowballed out because the rest of the team can't keep up and falling further, or getting a killer that can't keep up at all, running them, getting a 4-man, going back up again.
Trying to balance around a 50% kill/escape ratio is just bizarre because the game just doesn't have that sort of linear response. 8 hook states could be anything from 0 to nearly a 3k pretty easily. A survivor team easily clears 4 or 5 gens, then gets greedy trying to rescue one person off hook and a bunch of them die? Everybody winds up getting a less satisfying matchup with this simplistic results-based logic, since the winner/loser moves into a bracket they're not actually equipped for.
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The Game is not balanced for escalating skill. There's an array of evidence which shows almost everything implemented for the lower tiers of the community poorly impacts balance for more experienced players.
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I know that the game thinks 2 1000h+ survivors and 2 20h- survivors is balanced for a 3k hour god nurse but after getting put there 20 ######### times in a row and dying as a result, getting facecamped and hit on the hook because I dared to last longer than 12 seconds in a chase, I kinda wish the MMR was at least a little bit based on actual skills over pure luck.
We literally have the emblems, why can't those affect my rating a little??
It would also help a lot to not be told I have no skill when I leave the match with more points than the killer when I die.
And let's not talk about playing killer.
Bought legion yesterday just so I could farm iri emblems for that one challenge easily. Seems pretty fun an fitting for my style so far but my first matches were all against some legit good squads with matching names and builds.
(Had one with 4 sabo toolboxes but starstruck is bae :D )
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The system was a lie. We were explicitly promised a system that would better identify our standings that weren't just kills/escapes as BHVR THEMSELVES said they used that system and it failed.
Whatever they were using during the SBMM was thrown out and they are back to kills/escapes, and we got a genius who quips "LMFAOOO can't quantify skill in this game lol 2hard. If you wanted to rank up after doing 8 gens and unhooking 13 survivors, maybe ya should a done that....AND escaped lol xd rekt"
I actually supported SBMM before its release and I feel like the worlds biggest idiot
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I had this same thing happen to me, I had a dwight in my team who had like 10-15 hours, I have 5k. The killer also wasn't new at all.
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Pain.
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Same here. I have 2,3k hours and my friend has 1,5k and we got paired with two survivors with less than 50 hours in the game against a 800 hours killer.
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Instead of prioritizing hooks or teamwork you know things that make the game better. They prefer just escaping and getting kills. Which means leaving teammates behind and just camping and hard tunneling. Things that the make game less enjoyable. And gives you worse players.
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I just...do not understand it. It confounds me.
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Yup. Lead designer Patrick summed it up best when he said that SBMM revolves around nothing more than kills and escapes. There's no skill involved here. It's why you keep seeing such wild discrepancies between survivors and killers. Regardless someone's guaranteed to have a miserable time.
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SBMM has been fine for me. Honestly don't notice much difference from before. I'm not experiencing constant sweaty games like others claim, even though I'm a good player.
Personally, I think everyone should stop obsessing over MMR and just play the game. It's way more laid-back and fun that way. You won't win every time, and that's okay. :)
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because bad players refuse to play better
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:( there's only so much that I can do
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Hackers.
Hackers every ######### where in High Mmr, and no way i can just start dropping it outta the blue, it would take me atleast a 3-4 weeks to get low mmr on Every killer.. And even then, i'd hate that...
SBMM was a April's Fools Joke Gone Wrong... and there's only so much Bs i can take as Killer,
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It sounded like a good idea but then they told us its based on escapes and kills. A blendette can hide all game and get hatch=rank up. I can do 3 gens, 4 heals, 2 rescues, various chases but i got face camped=no rank up. To me the old pip system was better.
Either way its pointless for playing killer. No matter your rating the mm will ignore it in favor of faster que times for survivors.
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Trying to adopt a care free attitude though can only take you so far. I'm as casual as casual gets, and using a build on my killers that I like to have fun with can only take me so far when I'm constantly losing game after game because I'm not investing in massive regression builds.
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This system is beautiful you guys just need to get good. The HOOK system, The TUNNELING chase system, The KEY SKill based system, the SKILL BMM, The Bloodweb Grind. The GEN rush exploits. PERFECT.
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As someone with I'd estimate 800 hours, the new system works better for me. Under the old system, every single trial I'd get tunneled out within the first 60 seconds for no reason other than tunneling is efficient.
Under the MMR system, I rarely get tunneled out of the trial within the first 60 seconds. Usually I'll die around the third or fourth gen and I'm happy with that. I've probably done enough to merit a pip at that point.
I do think the system is a little too skewed towards survivors.
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The hatch doesn't affect the MMR. It is considered as a tie. Leaving through the exit gates after idling the entire match tho, that is another story.
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Don't forget to bring a yellow key for a 100% escape...
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But...if their MMR is high, they will be matched against other high MMR people.
It wouldn't be fair to match them with low MMR people - at least not for the lowbies - would it?
How is it worse?
I wonder (and not trying to be nasty here) - if people were used to stomping, but are now getting matched against people of a similar skill to them?
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Steve and Bill roleplayers get told by the MMR to pound sand and git gud but the Nea who camps hatch is playing correctly and rewarded despite potentially sandbagging a potential comeback.
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It sounds like what you are saying is: the game has serious balance issues and something needs to be done about the proliferation of hackers.
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Which is fair.
But what I don't get is the 'remove SBMM' posts I see multiple times a day.
It's a million times better than what we had before, at least on my end.
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The thing is - while SBMM might make matches sweatier at the high end of things, I'd wager dollars to donuts that it's substantially increased retention rates of newer players.
If I hadn't had...literally nothing else to play at the time, I'd have quit pretty soon after starting. It was just an endless montage of me getting stomped and teabagged by smurfs and people I had absolutely no reason to be paired up against.
It was so easy to smurf your rank down that even some Fog Whisperers admitted to doing it - to get easier matches.
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I don't care about killer MMR cause for that role kills kinda are the main point even though I prefer to look at overall performance and pressure put into the match but for survivors escaping is such a bad way to see your "skill" that it baffles me how they spend so much time to put mmr as simple as a escape = Win. That at the end of the day is benefitting once again, coordinated SWF's. I can't even remember how many times I looped the killer, Just to die on my first hook to let the Clauddie who hide selfcaring all game escape.
And back then I really was pumped for MMR cause my silly brain thought it would help solo q players but in reality It made worse. I barely escaped 5/10 matches before in the old system, and now If I manage 1/10 depending on my day's luck, is too much...
Also, low mmr also brings the worst of both worlds.. killers who know How to play but got destroyed by a swf and are being matched with me and 3 other noobs, or killers who literally started playing and get destroyed (or at the worst case, start facecamping and tunneling everybody)
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I dislike SBMM for two reasons.
One - I like to play friendly. My ideal killer game is to get 2 hooks on everyone and then play around until I let everyone go. This almost immediately tanked me into baby ranks when MMR came and now I have to routinely play 'normal' in order to get myself back to where I should be - but that involves beating up newbies and I hate that. Then I can go back to playing nice again... and in doing so I get sent back to the shadow realm to repeat the cycle ad infinitum. Old system let me do this and still kept me at my skill level because my pips were fine, so automatically the old system treated me better.
Two - I like to play altruistic. I'll sacrifice myself to save the team, whether that's hook trading to get someone out in the endgame collapse or being the patsy to lure the killer away from the 3-gen so the others can hammer it. SBMM doesn't care how well you played in the match, only if you lived or died, and dying after playing well still dips your MMR. Lower MMR is bad for survivors because you get weaker killers but also weaker teammates, who continue to dent your ability to survive.
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That's...not what I'm seeing.
DbD saw an absolutely enormous increase in players between April and July, a bit of a drop-off in August and then consistently high numbers. Last month was the one of the highest numbers of peak players DbD has ever seen. The game has gained something like 20-35% since last year this time and average player numbers are definitely higher.
I agree that survivor SBMM needs to be more nuanced. As a killer, I'm far more likely to let a good looper get the hatch or gate and to kill off selfish hiders ASAP (can't stand that playstyle, MMR or no MMR).
Facecamping is very much a 'new killer' thing. I know that I did it a ton when I started out, I didn't really understand the 'etiquette' of the game and often it was the only way for me to get any kills.
Tunneling...that's just how killer is sort of played at high MMRs, and most high level killer streamers prioritize an early kill. There's probably a trickle-down effect happening here regarding playstyles/meta (welcome to gaming).
There's also, especially at the lower end of things, a definite deficit of killers. On my 'likely low MMR' bad killers, I get lightning fast queues at any time of day. This is just sort of the nature of DbD - starting out as killer is rough and even with me having likely 250 hours on killer alone, it feels like I'm really only starting to get a solid 'feel' for it.
This means that queues will be longer and you'll definitely have some lopsided matches.
But...honestly, that was going on before and also comes down to BHVR's bizarre nerfs on 'easy to play' killers like Wraith.
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I think that's a matter of a lot of people trying the game during summer months. The only big drop I'm seeing is August - I'd be curious as to what other games came out around that time.
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I think there may be a simpler explanation - July had increased players because the anniversary event ran through most of it and there was a Blood Hunt at the end of it. August, a lot of people were burned out after nonstop cake grinding.
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That could also be it.
There's usually one month every year with a big drop off, and it's seldom the same month.
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That end game score board is most of my matches with my swf teammate. Our teammates rarely if ever break 10k even if they get hatch when everyone else dies. Teammate and I are in what feels like a neverending death loop because we keep getting randoms that just don't do anything while we make saves, work on gens, interact with killer, etc. Our teammates are either just dying quickly or hiding waiting for hatch. Old rank system the scores were more consistent across the team, occasionally you'd get a match like that but now it's like every single match and it's not fun.
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There was a time in 2020 with no matchmaking protection for killers?
Do you remember why?
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Halo Infinite dropped too. All events are over. I don't care about challenges or playing anymore. They nerfed some favorite Killers, granted they have mild buffs on Burger King Meyers and Pinhead is strong if you know the Dowsey strat/build or Plague but most people don't like them and killer has pitd issues to deal with making cues increase for survivors.
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That's when I started.
If I recall, it was because of long survivor queues at high ranks.
It was a miserable experience for me, especially as a complete newbie.
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I have played some matches as billy today and I lived to read what someone said in chat. It was hilarious. They were skilled players and me noob Billy. I barely play this killer. So I got my first hook after they finished all 5 gens because I tried to use chainsaw and not M1. They asked my why I'm so noob lol and why I camped (considering it was end game). That's the wrong question. Ask yourself why are you paired with noob killers instead of asking me why I'm noob. And anyway, why do you care how is the killer? Especially if he's noob. That's good for you as survivor, don't pretend you are not happy getting easy games. I told them "I'm not here to entertain you". But most of survivor mains will complain no matter what.
Same as survivor, my matches are most of the time against noob killers. I know how to loop. I don't "deserve" to play against noob killers. As killer, I don't "deserve" to play against good loopers because I'm not that good as killer, especially with the hard ones.
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And you know the funny bit?
They say that it's too complicated to make a system that tracks these things...
But they ALREADY HAVE A SYSTEM THAT DOES THIS.
Emblems LITERALLY do exactly what MMR was supposed to do- Track what you do in a match.
They literally lied to our faces, spouted nonsense for a year, then sent out Escape/Kill-Based Matchmaking, which has done basically nothing to help any of the problems with matchmaking the game has had.
In some cases, yeah, it helps.
But on the whole...
Not really.
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