How the MMR works, and why what Patrick said makes absolute sense (from a dev POV)

Completing generators is not 100% of the survivor objective, escaping is part of it. Besides, players can very well die before all gens are completed, even in games where eventually all gens do get completed and 2 survivors escape, and so those players that died earlier did not complete the gen objective before the game was over.

Regardless, they aren't aiming for either 2 escapes every match or an alternating cycle of 4-escape and 4-kill matches, they are aiming just for a 50% kill/survival average, "per-player" but over all matches, which in the results of the individual matches can mean much of anything, inlcuding games where 1 or 3 people escape.

What a perfectly-balanced round of DbD (or any game) ultimately truly is is another question entirely, and one that basically cannot be answered since different people see different things as differently important. But contrary to what you said, defining surviving and killing as win conditions is... the opposite of ridiculous in Dead by Daylight. Those are the clearest, most obvious criteria by which to measure success, and they are also what most people mostly care about. Maybe DbD could be better if it instead revolved around hooks, and killers could win with less-than-3 kills if they get enough hooks, and lose with more-than-2 kills if they didn't get enough hooks... but that is not the reality of the game, and so regardless of whether people would like such a game, the MMR cannot possibly be based on hooks as is, that would actually be ridiculous and lead to absurd consequences, the game would have to be redesigned in some major ways to make this possible.

As for @TheSubstitute's question whether MMR - the success-based, "skill-correlated" matchmaking system - is preferable to other matchmaking systems like the one we've had before... I for one think it is, both based on my personal and anecdotal gameplay experiences, and also on my conviction that people ultimately care about killing and surviving above all, and will have more "fun" with the game if they do so often enough, which MMR is meant to ensure, as opposed to the old system where again, average kill rates were very high, due to having very lopsided matches. I think it is no coincidence that most of the complaints about MMR seem to come from killer players, who have on average suffered a decrease of 10-20% in kill rates down from what they were before. They are actually averaging around 2 kills now as the system is intending (and good players still average much above that, since the system not seldomly does not and often simply cannot supply them with similarly-rated players, due to lack of such players in the pool), but they are having a harder time than in the past, getting less kills, and are often seemingly not happy with averaging around 2 kills.

Of course, if enough players (on either side, for whatever reason, justifiably or understandably or not) are dissatisfied with the game due to the system, having less "fun", playing less or not playing at all anymore, and if this actually leads to the game being less successful, and does so to such an extent that BHVR considers it to be too detrimental to (new) player retention, then it probably should and in all likeliness will be changed. Perhaps the game needs to be designed around average kill rates of around 70% since humans just want to be favoured in their average playing experience of being a killer in such a game, more than they feel they should be as a survivor. Those could be reasonable assumptions. But so far I have no reason to assume this is the case, the decline in player numbers over the last few months is not major and a more steep downtrend to be expected given that the game had experienced its by-far biggest surges in player activity in the months before that, with the RE chapter and Covid affecting things - and beyond that, the fact that BHVR went and reworked such an integral system to their game's experience to begin with that they knew would notably decrease global kill rates if it worked as intended, and are still not showing signs to be reconsidering on (to scrap the system), suggests to me that they have concluded (based on many more insights than we have of course) that it is actually beneficial for the game.

You are basically taking every point the OP attempted to explain, and showcasing again the flaws in understanding those explanations are meant to alleviate.

We've already had a matchmaking system based on Emblems, and as you yourself point out, it had problems. In fact, BHVR can see with hard numbers that it was vastly more imbalanced than the current system. As you allude to, there are problems with the things Emblems count and how those things are weighed. And there are things it does not count at all. The main problem with the ranking system based on Emblems and the matchmaking in turn based on ranks was that pretty much everyone ended up at rank 1 sooner or later, and that's how ridiculous kill rates approaching 80% even on average could happen in red ranks. They just did not track player skill and performances well at all, otherwise you would not have had 100 hour Megs at rank 1 every season. The problem with trying to track all the things that go into playing DbD (or indeed any game) is that they are basically uncountable and unquantifiable, and even if you could define, determine and detect all of them, you would then run into the next essentially-impossible task, of deciding concrete tiers of how important they all are in relation to each other.

The solution is to simply look at the results that all of these things lead to: wins. Looking at that will account for all of those things well-enough, and it will automatically weigh the many different skills because those skills that are the most conduvice to winning, naturally lead to winning more than others that aren't as conducive to winning.

So much for the explanation why skills are best accounted-for by looking at results in terms of wins/losses (every MMR/Elo system in existence does this, it's what MMR is designed to be). Keep in mind however that accounting for skills is not actually the reason why these systems look at win results - winning is what people play for, they compete in these player-versus-player games in order to succeed, the vast majority of players does not play in order to not succeed. As such, the system that pairs players should give them a chance to be able to succeed. Ultimately games are about fun, and people usually have fun in games if they succeed, especially if the games are designed to yield good (engaging) gameplay in competitive contexts. The MMR system gives players this chance, it uses algorithms to predict outcomes and pair players such that roughly equal chances of success are at play more often than not. You don't want a chess grandmaster regularly playing against beginners - but not because the chess master is more skilled and therefore a superior person that a beginner doesn't deserve to play against, but simply because neither player involved would enjoy that experience much, let alone if they had to play such lopsided matches all the time (and more problems with this exist if they're playing for prizes of course). Skill merely correlates with winning, it is not the reason why we use MMR in games in and of itself.

For the team aspect thing... While it is true that a team-based rating could (and apparently will in the future) be used, you are failing to see how the per-survivor survival rate ultimately will also account for their teamplay performance. Teamplay also leads to increased chances of succeeding (surviving), and so while it is certainly possible to die despite having done a lot for the team, a player that is good at teamplay will still over many matches survive more often than a player that is not good at teamplay and does not contribute a lot. Your assumption that such players that do not contribute get even better teammates as they rise in rating and players that do contribute worse teammates as they fall is glaringly flawed in various respects. First of all, this is one match, the rating adjustment won't mean much. Secondly, if the survivor that did not contribute much would consistently survive, so would others that do not contribute, and so at higher ratings they would be less and less likely to encounter teammates that can carry them, instead they would all hide. You see quickly how this leads to an absurd scenario. And this is because people that do not contribute on average do not actually survive, they will never surpass players that do contribute in average success rates. Over enough matches, the players that do stuff, are even good enough to "carry" a team among which are people that barely contribute at all, will always outperform those people that do not contribute, in terms of success (survival) rates. You are also failing to account for the fact that players that do nothing but rise in rating would face increasingly tougher killers against which surviving is less likely, especially playing in that way, and that players that do a lot but fall in rating would face increasingly less tough killers, against which surviving is more likely, especially playing in that way.

As for your last point, it's funny how starkly you contradict your earlier point about how this game is played as a team, but suddenly hockey is not fit for an analogy because it is a team game. Regardless, as pointed out, the analogy didn't pertain all of those aspects of hockey, just like it didn't pertain the aspect of hockey that people play on ice and wear helmets. The analogy specifically pertained the fact that as in hockey, the team that wins (scores more goals) is also automatically seen as a better team and matched with better teams in turn. They do not have to use very complicated means to evaluate a team's performance/skill levels to decide who they should play against, and they definitely don't let the team that lost (scored less goals) proceed in the brackets and leaderboards to face the better teams just because someone analyzed the game and said that the team that lost in terms of goals is however still better... No, they just look at goals for that stuff, which does also account for performance and skill levels, but ultimately is just what the game is about, winning, by achieving clearly-defined, diametrically opposed win conditions, advancing if you do so, not advancing if you do not. That's the point of the analogy, and Patrick could have used essentially any competitive PVP game in existence to make this point, he just chose hockey because he's Canadian.

As somebody who stopped playing the game entirely a few days after MMR dropped because I just stopped having any fun (and has been thinking about giving the game another try after it decays some due to inactivity), I think using pre-MMR data under the old system, not factoring in items/addons, and not being able to see our MMR as an option in the settings were big mistakes that make the system hated and feel awful.

I think it is interesting that you mention that survivors not being efficient (hiding well, not doing gens) is a "rare" incident when it is more common than you think. It is a huge reason why solo queue survivor is in bad shape.

Like, you can think whatever you want about the system, but the fact still remains. Games are unfun with people who are so inefficient they end up forcing others to do everything. If the game is constantly giving them "wins" then (hypothetically) they are bound to be at the matchmaking level of those who escape who also actually perform objective actions. I don't see how pointing that out is in any way shape or form a bad thing.

Even while on a hook you can see the auras of survivors who are actively doing SOMETHING, and I don't believe anyone is expecting recognition for being efficient and contributing to the match, but to me its the same thing as when you ask a teammate why they didn't take a hit or why they didn't do a gen...in other words "contribute" and their immediate response is "I am alive you are the dead one", because they don't want to admit what that answer is.

So I am sticking with what we know right now, and that is that just because you escape doesn't mean you are good at the game. Which is what has always been there anyway.

You've probably heard these critiques before but since I don't want to read every single post on this thread I'll voice them anyway.

First and most important issue is I disagree strongly with viewing DBD as a 1v1 game in any capacity. This would be a critique of the base assumption that the goal/ideal for a SBMM system in DBD is to achieve a state where each individual survivor has a 50% chance to survive and the killer has a 50% chance of killing each survivor. This is so wrong because that just isn't what DBD is. DBD is a 1v4 game and any SBMM system is at the very least required to reflect this nature to be even remotely effective. While it seems there is some plan to create a hybrid system, I will repeat, considering DBD a 1v1 game ever is deeply flawed and can't work. Either all survivors win or none do.

Secondly on the subject of a facecamping Bubba you're coming at this just from the wrong perspective. Better players do not have solutions to a facecamping Bubba. While you're trying to distinguish this event from player skill you are already assuming player skill to be at issue here. It is functionally impossible even for the literal best teams in comp to do anything about a Bubba that intends to facecamp. They will always get at least 1 kill, potentially even 2 regardless of their skill and regardless of their opponent's skill. This isn't even the only version of this strategy, several killers can guarantee at least 1 kill per match regardless of their opponent's skill. And even those that can't guarantee it can make it vastly more likely by giving up on 'winning' to instead earn as many kills as possible. A SBMM system that uses individual kills/escapes fails to capture these basic gameplay facts.

Very similar to the previous critique, in fact this even comes naturally as a result of the previous critique, but a survivor that does a 5 gen run and dies losing MMR is a very significant problem. You speculate that pulling off a 5 gen run and dying must be a fluke, something not necessary to be accounted for by the system. That is wrong. If you 5 gen run the killer they have quite literally no better choice than to try and confirm their kill on you. If you had allowed yourself to go down earlier the killer would have had alternative options than to camp you. The system is actually consistent in this. Being better at running the killer will increase your odds of dying in a match. Now this doesn't apply when all 4 survivors are very good but more likely than not an above average player will be matched with players a bit lower than them. The players worse than them get hooked after short chases and the killer moves on. But when they get to a higher skilled player, the chase takes much longer. So long all the gens get finished and the killer is left with no real viable option other than to try and confirm their kill. This is not a fluke it is the standard way the game works. The system not only fails to capture skill but it can actually rate a player negatively because they were just too good. There is no greater failing for a SBMM system than to consistently lower the MMR of the best player in the match but that is what this system does.

You seem to have a very deep understanding of the statistics and algorithms used for this but if you don't understand the emergent metagame in DBD you will apply your statistics incorrectly. And that's what I believe I've seen from your post. It's also quite likely why we've ended up with this system in the first place. The MMR works perfectly for some game that doesn't actually exist but it absolutely fails DBD.

if it was designed to deliver 90% of games not being fun, yep it's a wild success.

I actually like the kill vs escapes thing, I just wish the team was considered as a whole rather than 4 1v1's.

I'm not convinced queue times would get prohibitively long if we made the matchmaker a little more strict. Crossplay off queues (at least prior to MMR when lots of people still played on it) used to be pretty reasonable in my region, yet also much more consistently paired notably higher-level players of both roles. The players are out there, queueing at the same time, the matchmaker just seems to usually match them away before they can find each other.

Obviously we don't want Dowsey-tier hour-long queues, but if the system would at least look for much stricter rating matches during the first 5 minutes, I think things could already be much more consistent. And this could even be implemented with a cut-off point, where only players above a certain MMR threshold (starting at high mid to high range) are more strictly queued among their brackets in those first minutes, which might help with queue times overall since less of them will be paired away into lower brackets, more remaining available for "bracket-exclusive" pairing, and since it also won't affect lower bracket queue times much as they can still be matched more liberally even in the first 5 minutes, including with players from the upper brackets that have at that point already been waiting for more than 5.

Obviously I don't know any of this, we would have to see actual numbers on this stuff, and it might be fair to say that since BHVR is not doing it they may have already decided faster queue times are more important... but I for one would be okay with ~5 minute average high MMR queues if it more consistently led to closer matches. Although you as a streamer are probably not quite okay with that.

Interesting. People who have turned crossplay actually notice their games are even more mismatched than ever. I think CoconutRTS did an experiment with that as well (as anecdotal as it is). It would make sense, as you would have longer queues with it turned off, thus leading to wider variance.

Its also a slippery slope. You might be okay with 5 minute queues every time, but a lot of people wouldn't be. This would in turn, lead to less players, leading to longer queues, leading to wider variance, in an endless cycle.

To be fair, I haven't been queueing much on cross off post-implementation of MMR, I'm one of the people that transitioned back into the ""casual"" pool after it became more bearable thanks to MMR (I know in your experience things haven't changed much, but I for one really do see top-level players relatively frequently in my lobbies now that I only rarely did prior to MMR). So I can't really say what cross off is usually like now, but it used to be good enough.

I get your second argument, and as easy as a suggestion like "make matchmaker a little more strict for high MMR" sounds, in reality tweaking these numbers likely indeed leads to more and unforeseen knock-on effects. It's definitely rather complicated, I mean, there's a reason BHVR has for years been and still is tinkering with this stuff. So yeah, like I suggested, maybe the fact that BHVR seems to favour queue times to be as short as they are now already suggests making them any longer in favour of ratings would lead to bad things.

Maybe they could test a split "casual"/"competitive" queue for a week or so after all...

Yes, I didn't say completing generators was the entire Survivor objective. I said completing generators and opening the gates is. You could pedantically add "and then walking out of the gates", but the gist is that for a 2E you still need all mechanical impediments to escaping completed--i.e., Survivor goals must be completed.

And I said the ridiculous part was that the win condition is defined per-Survivor. i.e., you can have two Survivors win, two Survivors lose, and the Killer technically has two wins and two losses. We get 8 individual MMR updates (neat that the Killer's batched into a glicko-like update rule, but that just converts it over to four terms in a sum--they're still liable to have a net shift). But this is a draw. And if one person dies but 3 people escape, that's a clear win for Survivors. But here we have it as three wins and one loss.

Let's say we have a SWF group who make new accounts to always play together. You'd think they should have the same MMR, but instead if one person is specifically the one who draws attention and dies the most, then you'll get this divergence where their MMR is drastically lower (if not decreasing), even if they maintained a 3-1 escape average. But by approaching the team-focused side as a team, the current matchmaking gets thrown off.

And this actually matters if the team MMR is averaged! Let's say they're particularly extreme about it and always die. Maybe this then gets to the other players and one of them dies or they all die--a pretty bad performance for this person individually, sure, but maybe they're just an average-ish group otherwise and the others die even faster. Nevertheless, they always "lose" by the individual standard, so their MMR drops to 500. But on average, the team escapes enough for the others to rise to 1500--theoretically starting at 1k. Average MMR is (1500*3+500)/4: 1250. If you consider that the fourth person's skill (regardless of deaths) is integral to the results, they're being consistently undermatched until the average MMR is this 1500-point. Which may take a while, as the remaining player's MMR hasn't quite bottomed out, and the other individual players are consistently out-MMRing the Killer. This might even stabilise them at a lower MMR than they belong for their match results, due to the gap in individual MMRs getting too big to really adjust against the points they're matching.

If the team MMR isn't averaged then it's simultaneously matching against noobs as well as good Killers, and we know that's a failure.

i.e. defining the win condition based on individual results can be demonstrably aberrant if the team side functions as a team.

The problem with MMR is, even if it’s a PERFECT system, it won’t work if people aren’t playing one side *cough cough* killer so the MMR system has to expand the range at which people are included in the search for a lobby, rendering it ineffective