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

You're missing the point though. Putting Kobe Bryant on the Houston Rockets is not enough to get them a championship. Listen, the houston rockets are known for 2021 as being the worst team in the league. If he scores 35 buckets a game and still loses because he's being held back by the rockets its a fault of management for leaving him on a sorry ass team. In the same token, a high skill survivor being dragged down by trash team mates, who cares if his team mates got out, if he gets left behind and camped, or even just left behind, he gets dropped in rating. Even though that survivor dropped 35 buckets, he still gets marked as trash by the current MMR because he didn't escape. I'm a killer main, I literally see this all the time. Survivors just playing like trash against each other unless they're an SWF group. I've seen it consistently watching other killers, and while playing survivor myself. That guy who scores 35 buckets against the killer has a target on their head. Even though they played like a maniac, they're not gonna just get let off the hook. And you're trying to tell me thats acceptable to count everything they did in that match as a goose egg?

Same token, Kobe on the Rockets right, say he scores 35 a game....thats not enough to get him a championship because THE ROCKETS SUCK. He still has to in that instance get WINS, he still has to go up against Lebron. Now on the opposite end of the spectrum Lebron plays with a bunch of premades SWF, or lets say, instead of running the killer, Lebron is doing gens. In the current system that says he's a good player, even though he had 0 interaction with the killer. Kobe drops 35 buckets and runs the killer for 3 gens, current system says thats trash. The current system in that case....DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE!

Not everybody can be on gens, somebody, one of these survivors has to interact with or get chased by the killer, one of these survivors has to be the hook save guy, one of these survivors has to be willing to heal and look out for others, and one of these guys has to be willing to not get caught out as much, so they can bang out gens. Everybody has a role. Yet the current system says none of these roles or actions matter and only counts skill and rewards being selfish by escaping alone. You got a whole team of players 1 of them being an MVP runner and you expect him to auto win against a killer who he's playing against practically solo because his team is trash and can't come in with a save or at least pass the baton off?

You're basically expecting to put Kobe on a team full of 12 year olds and pull a dub against the Lakers....THATS CAP AND YOU KNOW ITS CAP. Come on bro....stop it bro. You know damn well unless Kobe gets put on an actual team he's not getting a ring. He's not getting his MMR raised. Same logic, you put a good survivor with a bunch of scrubs, and have him running and get hooked and camped and die, they aren't getting an MMR raise or a dub either, but his team mates who may be less than skilled get a free escape and an MMR raise. And the MMR system only cares about dubs so you tell me? You got a 10 minute match and we're supposed to just ignore everything that happened in between and GIVE THE GUY ON THE BENCH A RING EVEN THOUGH HE SPENT THE WHOLE GAME LOOKING FOR TOOLBOXES?

The analogy is made by the developers and yourself. Take any team sport and the players within it have different rankings based on their personal performances and contributions, any major sport including Hockey track these records and place them in ranking. The fact of the matter is that the overall MMR system for teams does not reflect upon the individual and making that claim it this one is good because it does just that is the point you are missing.

The survivors are judged individually instead of based on the teams overall performance and being a star player doesn't move you into a better team, it might cause you to actually be placed in a worse one. You say these scenarios do not matter, but they do, because star players tend to place themselves in the more dangerous role of the team and that by no means that they will escape more as for that to happen they are reliant on the remainder of the team. You state they are exceptional circumstances, but that is simply false.

The system inherently promotes selfish plays in a team, as that is what is rewarded instead of skillful plays and teamwork. That is what people don't like about the system and find unfair. Your actions might have won the team the game, but there is no incentive to play that way if it results in you to die alone. You might have been that goalkeeper I am talking about with a great record on defensive moves, but because you don't take shots on goal... you drop in rank (because you don't take shots that means you score less, even though your role might have resulted in the team winning).

You literally are missing the point with the goalkeeper. As that is the whole problem, they make the team win, but don't score the goal. Yet all the ranking checks is who made the goals. Similar to survivors making their team win, yet not escaping themselves. That is the analogy used by comparing it to hockey or other team sports, survivors are on a team.

Each time people bring forth situations where skilled play result in a win for the survivors and yet they perish, you dismiss it.

You don't see it, but others do. Hiding behind no data while asking others to provide it is also such a bad practice and shows that you are not acting in good faith. Provide the numbers that showcase that skilled players are rewarded, because based on a hypothesis that it is.... a single counter example which has been given is enough to disprove it. Even the lead designer joked about it: if you did something yet it doesn't result in an escape was it skilled play? And the answer is, yes it very can well be.

The game is a 4v1, yet the MMR does not treat it a such. That is what people dislike and criticize. The fact that the system uses a 1v1v1v1v1 approach, means as a result it does not promote the 4 that are supposed to be a team to approach it as such.

According to you it only cares about the result, but my entire argument is that it doesn't. A 3 kill game, still results in 1 survivor being deemed a winner? Yet their team lost. So... did they win or did the killer win that match? The opponents scored more points in the hockey game did they not? So, why does it matter that you were the top scorer for your team? Did their contribution not enable you to score to begin with, so shouldn't the final result reflect the outcome just as with killers?

This is why it promotes selfish play, the game is survivors vs killer and yet the system doesn't align with that. It is a 4v1 game, so should the system not align with that result? According to the logic, that you claim to have: The match result would result in your increase or decrease in MMR and how you got there is irrelevant as more skilled players would win more of their matches, yet that is not how the system works as they sort of want to evaluate you individually even though you are on a team and don't bother however looking at what you contributed towards the final result of a match.

You do join as a team, ever entered a lobby... there are 4 survivors and 1 killer. You can sign up with a full team or asked to be assigned one, you still start the game in a team.

P.S. notice that the criticism here is purely on how it handles the MMR from a survivor point of view.

I love how that dude zarr and plays by shady keep defending the system when I can list two flaws with the system rn that can't be argued against

1:it's kills and escapes based matchmaking we all know this everyone knows this, that means it's easy asf to abuse all I have to do is die on purpose every game or let everyone escape every game and all of a sudden boom I'm smurfing

And I already know the counter argument will be oh well eventually you'll get to a point where you get such bad players that you win

And the simple facts are if I die for 80 games straight then would it not also take me 80 wins straight to get back to that point? I mean none of us know the exact numbers but most elo systems you lose and win the same amount so as not to inflate your elo after 2 losses and 1 win

None of that can be argued against these are facts the system is easily abusable that is a fact

And

2:if I play bubba and facecamp every single game I will always walk away with at least 1 kill probably 3 or 4 most games so that means I will never walk away from a game with a 0k like someone playing the game normally can, so yes I may lose mmr

But Does that mean that I'm performing better or am more skilled then someone playing the game normally? I'd argue not so and I don't really think that can be argued against

Facecamping bubba = guaranteed 1 kill every game

Normal player = ability to get a 0k

That can't be argued against that's a fact

I also like arguing for the sake of arguing so I'm more then down to debate even though you pretty much agreed with me lol

1:personally as being a dev myself (I worked on risk of rain 2 and a few other indie games) If I was gonna have a mmr system with a hidden number that impacts matchmaking I damn sure wouldn't tell the player base how it works because ik how people are and ik they would abuse it so personally I wouldn't mention an details on how it works and just explain it works using a algorithm and leave it at that

2:my point wasn't that the bubba player will climb mmr I know he won't like you said vs a good team he will get destroyed but he still eeks out 1 kill guaranteed which still means that he can never lose as much mmr as someone playing normally

So my point was according to this system a bubba facecamping even though he's losing mmr will always be and always perform better then someone playing normally because he can't lose xxxx amount of points like a new player he can only lose xxx amount of points because he always gets a kill so therefore statically it looks like he is the better player

When that couldn't be farther from the truth

3:me personally I think if they do something about face camping they need to look at map size or some way to improve killers because it's just hard to manage your time as a m1 killer on huge maps with how fast gens get done vs a good team

4: also unrelated but personally as a dev it bugs me they don't play their game that much, when I worked on ror2 if you wanted to implement a new item or make changes to a item everyone on the team had to beat the game in a normal run and then with artifact of command on to see how good or bad the item is and idk how many of you have played ror2 but your not gonna beat it every time it's a hard game it might take you 10 runs to get good enough items to beat mithrix so it was quite a grind it would be nice to see the devs play to iri 1 or max mmr before they think about implementing changes

I've refrained from butting into your discussion for certain reasons, but I can't help myself:

The whole problem is that you and other people are making the analogy about things they were never about, due to a lack of understanding of the system and therefore of what part of the system is analogous between the two. Yes, hockey is a team game, where two predetermined teams play against each other, and where individual players have certain roles within those teams, certain different things they do and don't do, are and aren't allowed to do by the game rules. This is different in DbD, so rather than question the intelligence or knowledge of anyone that draws parallels between the two, here is where I would caution to consider whether the analogy was actually about those things.

The analogy pertains one thing: Skilled play leads to wins, be that goals in hockey, or escapes and kills in Dead by Daylight. In hockey, you win by scoring goals. You do not win by preventing goals. Sure, preventing goals is part of the win condition insofar you need to score more goals than your opponent, but that's it, the sport could in theory exist without dedicated, rule-dictated goalkeepers altogether for analogy's sake, and if playing without a goalkeeper and with one more offensive player instead would be more successful (consistently lead to a team scoring more goals than their opponents), teams would then do so. In fact, goalies are allowed to leave the goal and play up to center, from what I understand, but even if a rule forbade this and would outright restrict the goalie's role to always being in the goal, it wouldn't matter because we're talking principles here, analogies, not actually saying hockey is DbD.

In DbD, you do not have such rules, and the player doing gens, rescuing players from hooks or leading the killer on a chase can be one and the same player, and any player on the "team". "Teams" also do not exist in DbD. Yes, we look at the game as a team game and I do think BHVR should embrace this fact more and design and balance the game around this more, but the game is not actually fundamentally a team game. Survivor players regularly go into matches alone, and any survivor player may only care about their personal survival. And even if every single player in the game did care and play for their own survival above all, that would not stand in the way of the functioning of the MMR system, because it would simply find ratings at which it is possible for players to survive around 50% of the time playing in those ways given their performances. Same for "teamplayers" - if there actually are things one can do that consistently lead to increasing the chances of survival of more players of a group (not the survival of just another player in your stead, but the survival of more players than would have survived otherwise) that come at the cost of consistently increasing one's personal chance and rate of dying, then so what? Players that play in such altruistic ways would simply fall in rating, and they have no reason to care about their rating as long as they enjoy playing in that way and actually care more about helping more other survivors survive that would not have survived without them than they care about their own survival and rating. And of course, that's entirely their own choice.

The parts people think are being drawn analogy to here aren't relevant, and even if they were, it wouldn't matter.

But let's for a moment entertain the flawed understanding of what the analogy is about, and ask ourselves, are there things in DbD that players do that lead to "team wins" (more survivors of the group escaping alive) that are antithetical to the individual player's chances of winning (escaping alive)?

Like OP, I don't see it. Even if you for some reason chose to be some sort of dedicated "runner", constantly trying to get the killer to chase you, if you are actually good at this and indeed good enough such that it increases the overall survival chances of survivors in your matches consistently, I can't see that even that "teamplay-oriented" "role" that you force yourself into would lead to you dying more often than escaping. If playing that way actually increases the overall survival rates of players in those matches, that means the runner is so good at what they do that gens get done and gates opened, which would in turn also allow them to escape often themselves.

And of course, in reality you don't want to always seek the killer out, if you care about winning, you want to do anything and everything that is at any moment opportune to increase the overall survival chances of players in that match including yourself, which can be leading the killer on a chase, or just sitting on a gen, or a multitude of other things.

A goalie in hockey wins if preventing goals has a positive effect on the win condition of scoring more goals than the opponent, and insofar the goalie manages to do this consistently and they consistently win, they have to be assumed to be skilled at being a goalie. Similarly, if a "gen-jockey" or "runner" in DbD actually had that "role" by virtue of not being allowed to do anything else or not being good at doing anything else, they would win if doing gens or running the killer has a positive effect on the win condition of more survivors surviving than dying, and would be seen as skilled at doing gens efficiently or running the killer. Couple this with the reality that the "gen-jockey" or "runner" is not actually forced into any role but is included in those "more survivors surviving" because as opposed to a goalie they actually also "take shots" (shoot themselves over the exit gate line, if you will) and do everything else that can be done on the "team", and you might be able to understand why personal survival chances/rates correlate closely with that of the "team", and likewise with things done to successfully increase the "team" survival chances/rates.

"Skilled play" in such a context just means any play that actually does lead to wins. While I personally think the play that leads to escaping and killing in DbD consistently against equal opponents is actually also the most overall skillful, ultimately it doesn't matter whether it actually is, for the system "skill" doesn't mean being good at just anything, skilled in a vacuum, it simply means being good at winning, skilled at the things that lead to winning, and it is measured by... whether people actually win.

Note: The system cares only whether players actually win, the assumption that they are good at winning if they consistently win is just what naturally follows, but it's not like the system "cares" whether they are "skilled", it does not say "good job, you are good", or "wow you suck lol", it just... does some math, invisible to us all in the background, and tells the matchmaker some stuff based on that.

This is easy to realize if you think of a cheater. Do you really think anyone is saying they are more skilled, just because they are high MMR due to being able to kill or escape at the click of a button? Of course not, so why is it hard to understand that the system is not about actually creating "true" skill judgments.

First of all, this can be dismissed because nowhere is it stated that you should play for the team's survival rather than your own, or vice-versa. Again, everyone is free to do so and it does not take away from the functioning of the MMR system, and the functioning of the system does not take away from one's freedom to do so. You don't even have a reason to care about the system rating you differently based on this. Worst case scenario if playing for the team actually leads to players dying more often, they will... meet less killy killers and more teamplay-oriented teammates.

It's also because it is statistically dismissable. Skilled play of individual survivors that consistently leads to more survivors surviving than dying will also lead to those survivors themselves surviving more often than they die; over many matches the situations where this is not the case will statistically matter less and less. I have explained this further up above even for a case where we pretend survivors would somehow be forced into risk-taking, team-serving roles, and as OP, I invite you to demonstrate that the best players (not only the best runners mind you, the best at doing everything that increases a group's survival chances) are actually the players that also consistently die more often than other players that are worse at these things.

First, you should stop using the term "reward". Your rating changing is neither a reward nor a punishment. Even if rating changes were to happen completely arbitrarily at any point in time, the worst that could happen is that you get... a matchmaking system where everyone is matched with everyone, which everyone benefits or suffers from equally, and which not few people have said they would even prefer.

Secondly, you are again making the mistake of misusing the term "skill". While I personally do go as far as saying the players that win the most are also the most generally skilled players, OP made it a point of explaining that "skill" in the context that a dev uses it in, in the context of an MMR system, simply means the ability of a player to win, measured by how often and against which opponents they achieve the system's given win condition. That doesn't necessarily mean the highest-rated players in such a system are also the best players overall when looking at every possible skill metric one might define, just that they are the best at consistently killing or surviving, the best when looking at skill metrics of things that contribute to killing or surviving, simply because they factually do kill or survive the most consistently and against ever more highly-rated players that themselves are also doing so consistently.

Anyway, this means that the ratings the system applies should determine a player's chances of being able to kill or survive against any other player, right? And so say the system can predict the outcomes of matches with regards to kill/survival rates based on those ratings, that would mean the system is accurately rating them, correct? Well, that is what the devs have gone on record multiple times now stating: the people that can look at the data in high detail and actually see the ratings, say that the ratings very accurately predict the outcomes of matches in terms of kills and escapes.

Need more? What about the global average kill and survival rates? The system is meant to predict the kill and survival rate in matches based on rating, and it is also meant for those rates to ideally be 50%. The global average kill and survival rates are surprisingly close those this, and indeed closer to it than they ever have been. These results of many many millions of matches over several weeks and months averaging out across the board (even over all killers and maps) so closely around 50% is a gigantic, numerical argument. It's actually a huge problem for anyone that wants to argue the system does not work, even with regards to the actual matchmaking part of making lobbies happen.

So, the devs are not hiding and are providing clear data, and unless you want to say they are lying... where's yours? Go ahead, evaluate (identify, quanitify, weigh) objectively the many different metrics of skills of a player in this game, demonstrate that this evaluation is accurate, find the best players according to this objective evaluation, and show us that these players consistently die more often than worse players (according to this evaluation) despite also consistently increasing the overall survival rates of the matches they are in, as opposed to the survival rates if they had not been in those matches. Also demonstrate that the worse players consistently survive more often despite also consistently decreasing the overall survival rates of the matches they are in.

The MMR seeks to instate 50% survival rates. It does this on a per-survivor, individual-player basis, but if you look at any match and assume a 50% survival chance of every single survivor in it, they will on average result in 2 escapes/2 deaths, which is a balanced result from the 4v1 perspective. The MMR does treat the game as a 4v1, because the target it aims for is based on the win condition derived from a 4v1 game state. The results it promotes are congruent with this. If it actually were based on the game state of a 1v1, it is obvious that the killer would have to have a 100% chance of killing the survivor as per how the game works, and as such the MMR would seek 0% survival rates if it treated the game as a 1v1 format.

You are making a mistake people commonly make with this topic: the system cares about results, of many games, and you cannot look at the result of a singular game to judge the system's functioning. Yes, in a 3-kill game, the escaping survivor (if they actually escape through a gate rather than hatch) "wins" (gains rating) despite their team having lost. The thing is, over many many matches, a survivor will not be likely to escape (through the gates) as the sole survivor often. Games where only 1 survivor escapes are tough matches, matches where the entire survivor team's performance - including naturally that of the escaping survivor - was not good enough for a survival rate of 50% to be attained. In such matches, it is unlikely for anyone to survive by leaving through the exit gates, and it is increasingly unlikely that a specific survivor manages to be the one escaping in these matches consistently, and the more often you assume this happens, the more astronomically small the chances of it happening get. It is much more likely that this survivor that themselves is evidently consistently not contributing enough for the survival chances of the groups they find themselves in to be able to reach 50% to also be dying much more often than not, in such 3-kill matches but also in many other matches where their failure to contribute will also lead to 4 kills.

First of all, you are again making the mistake of thinking the game is strictly a team game, or that the system has to treat it as such. It isn't, any player may only care about their own survival and play in selfish ways. 1v1 is still survivor versus killer, still surviving versus killing. Even if it were the case that selfish players survive more often than altruistic players, that would only mean selfish players (that are good at playing selfishly) usually have a higher invisble rating than altruistic players, and are matched more often with more higher-rated killers (killers that are better at killing) and survivors (other survivors that are good at playing selfishly), while the altruistic players are more often matched with lower-rated killers (killers that are worse at killing) and survivors (other altruistic survivors). And they would still respectively be matched such that they have about 50% survival/kill chances/rates, which is balanced from a 4v1 "team" perspective. No problem there, the MMR system doesn't care whether the game favours "selfish" players to survive, it doesn't even know or have to know what that is, and that the system doesn't care or know doesn't matter for the players, they can play however they want and the system will rate and pair them accordingly such that they will all have more equal chances of success in their matches, which is desirable.

But then beyond that, even if we want the game to be strictly a team-game, I will still tell you that the current system functions well-enough under that assumption: skill/correct altruistic play that increases an overall group's chances of survival actually correlates closely with the individual survival rates of a survivor making skilled/correct altruistic plays over large sample sizes. If a player is good at those things, and good enough that it consistently increases the survival rate of groups they are in, I would argue that is a huge predictor for their own survival rate as well, because teamplay - altruistic, coordinated play - is actually immensely important for every single survivor in a match of DbD. Sure there are exceptions where this is not the case and you can get an escape through a gate letting everyone else down and die all round, but over many matches, I think it's painfully obvious that teamplayers will consistently be surviving more often, because if survivors aren't helping their team, the likeliness of one or more other survivors dying earlier is highly increased, and if that happens, the likeliness of the rest of the group also dying increases even more dramatically. A 3v1 scenario can be so tough to turn into actually escaping alive (through gates or otherwise) that even in tournaments it is a regular occurrence that teams get 4k'd even though the killer spent a good 3-4 gens camping/tunnelling out the first survivor. And that is with high degrees of teamplay of those 3 remaining players, imagine how impossible those situations become if among the remaining players there are people that do not play altruistically; if the killer hooks one of them, the round can often already be over, since the killer can then pressure another survivor, and if the third survivor is not going to save, there is regularly no realistic hope for escape.

Unless you are in a 4-SWF, you join as a "team" of randoms you may have never seen, will never say a word to, and may never see again. Certainly, you won't be seeing them again anytime soon, and the likeliness of actually ending up with 3 other randoms again is vanishingly small enough to dismiss. DbD functionally is not strictly a team game, you cannot blindly treat it as such, a player may very well see and play the game as a solo survival mission and they would not be strictly playing the game "wrong". It has team aspects, and they are important aspects that the devs as I've already said should embrace more and more strictly design the game around, but it is not... necessarily necessary. It definitely isn't necessary for the MMR system to do what it's supposed to do.

BHVR will in the future also take group survival into consideration, and that is good. While the system does not need to do this because the game is not strictly a team game and because its goal is not to make high-rated matches be team-oriented gameplay matches, but rather to make any possible match as balanced as possible based on the win condition (with keeping in mind queue times, player pools), and while the current system as per my explanations already does factor in teamplay well-enough, looking at actual group survival rates and taking that into account for individual player ratings will more quickly arrive at the appropriate ratings, i. e. less matches are needed for a player's teamplay skills/performances to have the according impact on their rating.

Just as a general (repeated) ending note that I think I didn't find opportunity to bring up elsewhere in this post: You have to stop thinking of MMR/rating as a sort of ladder toward some marvelous place where the most difficult, desirable, enjoyable, fun, etc. gameplay happens that DbD can yield. The rating is only meant to match players more equally based on their survival/killing performances, and as such the highest rating level only means those players survive and kill the most consistently, which then means they care the most about surviving and killing, play the hardest to do so, and are the best at doing so. Nothing more, nothing less. The top MMR realm is supposed to be a "sweat"-pool of people using the strongest loadouts and strategies in the most efficient and effective ways in order to kill or survive as consistently as possible - Nurses, Blights, SWFs, genrushing, Rings, BNPs, Moris, Haddonfield offerings, camping, tunnelling, you name it. It is not supposed to be something anyone strives towards achieving, not a place anyone should want to be at unless they care about killing or surviving by any means possible and/or enjoy the gameplay that entails. If you don't, you have no reason to play in such ways, and are free to play however you want, and the rating will adjust to you, and pair you with and against other players that also do not care for and/or enjoy that gameplay, which will be more desirable for you too. There is no reason to care about the state of your rating, it does not encourage anything, it is not an incentive to do anything, it is not even shown to anyone. It is not a reward for anything, nor is it a punishment, as long as it works to fulfil its intended purpose (which it overall seems to do), you have no reason to even really think about it. Play however you want, your preferences and desires are the only thing that should inform your decisions on how to approach and play the game. Only of course, if your preferences and desires are to kill and or survive often, to win... you will have to play with and against other players more often that also have the desire to win, and are similarly as good as you at it, and that will mean you won't win all the time, it will be difficult, especially if you are not much better at winning than most players. And that is only fair, because every player deserves equal chances to succeed by playing to the best of their abilities.

You want to dictate that I don't understand MMR systems, while making conclusions that are simply not accurate.

The OP acknowledged a difference between individual rankings and team rankings. The end result is what should matter and the analysis done by the system is built around the standards used for team ratings. Yet is crammed into that for individuals. While normally individual rankings are far more detailed and stat dependent for a very obvious reason.

I am not misusing the term skill. Even if you listen to the devs the fact that they state if it didn't result in you personally escaping, it is not skilled play is the most backwards and incomprehensible analysis. Words have a specific meaning and once again trying to claim if it only has result x then it can be considered skill is utter nonsense.

Additionally I don't look at a single game, I look at scenarios and see how the system would apply to it. The run for 5 gens is just one of which could have said result. There are many others as well, claiming that the ones showing skill will be the ones escaping is not true in all cases. The question is why would they be punished for helping their team to victory? There are many clutch plays from greeding the last gen to running the killer or making a clutch play in the end game to save two other people just for the one; which would result in a bigger loss for the killer and yet the person responsible for it now is punished compared to when they would have just ran out, you are to focused on the one example commonly used. There is no incentive to save each other in the end game for instance yet the person left behind isn't the worst player by definition.

This is supposed to be a skilled based matchmaking system in a 1v4 game, if the developers want to take short cuts to judge people on the end result. They should do as most systems do and use the end result, else it is by design flawed.

They are the ones that made the comparison to a team sport, yet do not use the same type of metrics to analyze the results. In all honesty it is from a system point of view logically to point out that their own example showcases the flaw in their own system. There are many different comparisons that could have been made, but they went for a team sport!

The argument skilled players will more often escape, also applies to skilled players more often will get multiple people out. Yet where lies the more important metric in a 4v1 game, the one escape or the 4? It comes down to what is defined as a win, a 3k or 4k for the killer and yet a 1 escape is a win for survivors?

It is the same concept as 8 hooks, 4 escapes should that mean you now face more difficult opponents, because they all got out? Or apply that to a 9 hooks and 3 escapes? Yet on the survivors end they throw that in the wind, it might have cost your team 3 people to die, but clearly that means you are ready for a bigger challenge? The metrics are not in line with each other. It doesn't matter how you got there, but it does matter what the final result was. A killer is judged based on the 1v4 aspect of the game, the survivors however aren't promoted to see it as being part of the 4. Survivor skill is about being capable of running the killer, breaking a 3-gen, being efficient on gens, being able to reset and all that to get as many people as possible out. Working together is required to get an escape through the doors, you won't do it solo and yet the system does not look at the final result and tries to claim a 1 escape is worthy of going up in rank while the whole reason they got out is also based on the overall teams performance.

Why does this matter? I am not a god runner, but I do tend to try and be a team player. The system specifically targets this play style and punishes it. While it might lead to the team winning more often, it by no means is a guarantee that the individual will escape. In the end this is a 1v4 game and I don't think the system of MMR should favor the selfish player over the team coordinated player, as the coordinated team players are exactly those that should rise the ranks.

Yes, as opposed to me, the OP never went out of their way to explain that individual survival actually correlates with team survival. But they did point out that this wouldn't matter. Again, for one thing the game is not strictly a team game so the system's functioning doesn't depend on treating it as such, and regardless, 50% survival rate of any individual survivor applied to a series of matches on average means 2 escapes and 2 kills per match, which is the desired average state of balance by the devs regarding the 4v1 ("team") experience. Doesn't mean any singular match has to actually see 2 kills and 2 escapes happen, let alone that every player has to actually play for the "team" to be able to survive in order for this to function.

Again, this is not actually true. An individual survivor would stand no chance to win against a killer in DbD. If you start the game with 1 survivor versus 1 killer, the game rules dictate 2 gens have to be completed in order to be able to open the exit gates and escape. The killer will win in this scenario 100% of the time. (Maybe the survivor gets the hatch which spawns open here, but that does not count toward MMR so it doesn't matter in the context of this argument.)

The 50% survival rate applied for the rating goal the system is trying to nudge individual players toward is based intrinsically on the fact that the game is a 4v1 format, where survivors actually do stand a chance of escaping from the killer, and on the desired goal for players to usually have a 50% chance of escaping in these cases, since that is balanced from the 4v1 perspective (and in fact also from the 1v1 perspective mind you, since 50/50 is obviously exactly even chances between two players; if DbD were a game where, say, 5 survivors faced a killer, and a balanced outcome is seen as 2.5 survivors escaping on average, the sought-for balance would be 40% average survival chance/rate for any individual survivor).

While I will agree that simply using the term "skill" was a mistake, and especially that using it as the devs did was, that is because "skill" is a loaded word, not because they used it in a way that is not congruent with its meaning.

As per Oxford, skill is "the ability to do something well; expertise." - it is absolutely possible to use it to say "someone that is able to kill/survive well in DbD" is skilled. As I've noted in my previous reply to you (though perhaps in a later edit; I won't tell you to read my essay again but I did edit some things in which I find make some statements a bit clearer), that doesn't mean the system is measuring "skill" in and of itself, what it is doing is measuring kills and escapes, "wins", and the players that kill and escape (win) the most, are rated more highly, such that they play against other players that kill and escape as often as them, with the assumption being that if they do so that often, they are skilled at doing so.

It's not even about semantics: You (and many people, myself included) use "skill" to mean just any skill, of a good, skilled player, with everything and anything that can mean included, and that's certainly a valid way to use the term in general; in the conext of the system and in the way the devs use the word, "skill" specifically refers to the skills required to win in the game, not a good, skilled player in general, but a player good/skilled specifically at winning (according to the system's win condition, which of course is killing and surviving).

You are looking at limited scenarios and limited skills, such as a good runner actually running a killer for 5 gens and then actually dying. The simple assumption of the system is that players that are better at surviving will over many matches on average survive more often than players worse at surviving. They have the skills to survive, are skilled at those things - which are many things, ranging from macro-game decision-making such as which gens to repair and when to do so, to the micro-game minutiae of the mechanics and decisions of chaseplay interactions - and they survive more often as a result.

That is clear and couldn't be any clearer.

For the distinction of players helping their team survive and dying for it, again, there are two issues with your argument:

1. The system does not have to care about whether this would be true. It does not need players to actually fulfil "team-based" win conditions because the 50% survival rate target works regardless of whether it looks at a 4v1 or 1v1 scenario. Even if altruistic play would consistently lead to increased survival chances of the group at the cost of decreased survival chances of the altruistic player, that would not pose any problem to the system, its functioning, or indeed the altruistic player themselves.
2. Players that help their team survive with teamplay will not over many matches die more often as a result. On the contrary, as I've explained in my previous reply, teamplay is integral to one's own survival.

Your examples do not negate any of this. The player good enough to potentially run a killer for 5 gens is not only not strictly playing "for their team" (they are just running for their own life too), but they will in fact more often survive as a result of those chase skills, because time a killer is occupied in chases for means time for other survivors to repair generators, which upon their completing allows exit gates to be opened and for survivors to escape through them, including the player that's good at leading chases (who might very well in many rounds also simply be one of the people repairing gens while someone else is being chased, or while the killer is occupied otherwise altogether - they will not be running the killer in every game, let alone for 5 gens).

"Greeding the last gen" meaning finishing it in the killer's face? This is definitely a risk, but a risk a survivor has to take or not take based on educated, skilled decision-making, and if this decision-making is done with regards to their own survival (which, remember, their own survival counts toward the group's total survival by 25% - it's half of their "team" win condition, whether this survivor cares about this or plays for that "team" win condition or not!), it can certainly be very reasonable to come to the conclusion not to finish that gen. And in many situations where survivors do this it would actually absolutely be an objectively more safe play to just seek distance as the killer is approaching. Safer for themselves, but very possibly also their team at large, which suffers from one of its players getting into precarious situations or let alone dying.

Same for the saving-in-endgame scenario. There is no real team incentive to save in the endgame either. You risk additional survivors dying to get that rescue, and often what ends up happening even in the best outcome is that instead a different survivor dies than the one that had been on hook originally. This is a huge risk to take for what is often only a net-neutral in the "team" win condition (and a net-negative in one's personal survival). Not taking this risk can very often actually be proper "teamplay" too, and in actual teams (SWFs, tournaments) that actually care about the "team" win condition, you will find that leaving people to die in the endgame is actually the staple play. It's just objectively correct survival play often.

Again, if a survivor survives often over many matches, the assumption has to be that they are good/skilled at whatever the things are that lead to surviving consistently, all the decision and play-making that goes into that, and "teamplay" skills only factor into this if and insofar they actually increase survival chances. I for one do think it is obvious that teamplay and therefore teamplay skills correlate very closely with personal survival chances/rates too, but again, that wouldn't even be necessary for the system to work, because the system does not care about any of that nor does it have to, high-rated players do not necessarily have to be teamplayers, just players that survive often (...which I argue will obviously be teamplayers much more often than not, and certainly, the best players that survive the most will also be skilled at teamplay).

They never said it's a team game, let alone a team-based MMR system.

Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game where one player takes on the role of a brutal Killer and the other four play as Survivors.
As a Killer, your goal is to sacrifice as many Survivors as possible. As a Survivor, your goal is to escape and avoid being caught and killed.

Multiplayer does not mean teamplay. Your goal is to escape, your goal is not for your team to escape.

Again, I certainly agree that the game should be more designed around being a team game, and it in many respects is actually a team game... but it is not strictly that, so the MMR system does not have to strictly be designed for that. ...And yet, it is designed to function even under that assumption, since 50% survival rate is balanced from both perspectives, of 1v1 and 4v1. And yet again, I would even go further and say teamplay that leads to increased team survival chances/rates also correlates very closely with personal survival chances/rates, and as such the latter are a good predictor for the teamplay skills required to achieve the former.

Although: Again, I agree that using the group survival metric is desirable. Not because it will lead to different results, but because it will lead to the same good results more quickly, over fewer matches, as teamplay skills/performances will have more of an impact on rating changes on a match-by-match basis, rather than that being a development over many more matches. And because I do want the game to be designed and balanced more around being a team-centered game!

The analogy can perhaps be criticzed on the ground of its degree of "aptness", in as much as, perhaps there's other PVP competitions out there he could have used to draw parallel to instead, that would not have stirred up such a reaction. But I'm sorry, the reaction itself and the form we often see it in is definitely based on some deep misunderstandings by people such as yourself. The only thing he pointed out as analogous is the fact that since certain actions lead to wins in both games, rather than look at the various actions that lead to wins and try to determine how good/skilled someone is at those actions, you can simply... look at the wins and thereby determine how good/skilled someone is expected to be at those actions. This is absolutely true for both games, and even if you expand the analogy way beyond its actual purpose and ask "but the goalie??", you can still say, with a little more expanding on the explanation: well, since the win condition is actually not simply "goals" in hockey, but "goals vs. goals", the goalie's good/skilled plays in the action of preventing the opposing side from scoring goals plays into the line of thought that "skilled plays lead to wins".

And this is all again besides the point that the system does not even have to care about "skill" to begin with: The system looks at wins (killing vs. surviving in DbD) not because it wants to seek and "reward" the players that are the best at winning, but just because it wants to make matches happen where both sides can on average "win" around half the time - it is used with the desire to want to instante "balanced", "even" playing experiences in terms of the win and loss chances and rates of players involved in them, because that is deemed as desirable, which I would agree with, not even necessarily from the perspective of it promoting "skilled", competitive play (which it clearly does IMO) and giving people equal chances to succeed by using their skills, but from the perspective that regardless of "skill" and anything else, most people mostly care about winning (surviving and killing), and as such, a matchmaking system that selects for those things such that everyone has more even win/loss experiences will satisfy more players.

Of course, as I've noted elsewhere in the thread (The Book of Em-Em-Ar), maybe for this particular game, an even win/loss experience might in fact not be so healthy: if humans in this game generally feel like they should be favoured as the killer more so than they do as a survivor and even an average player is not happy with a kill rate averaging around 50%/2 kills, and many players stop playing killer/stop playing killer as much/stop playing the game altogether due to this, and this happens enough that player numbers/queue ratios are in peril, then a reconsidering of the matchmaking system could be in order. I definitely have the impression that most of the complaints about the MMR system more so come from killer perspectives, but I don't think that we are actually having a problem with people stopping to play killer/the game due to that. But who knows? Well, BHVR knows whether that is the case better than we do, and they will in all likeliness do whatever's most in the interest of keeping the game as popular as it can be. It's totally possible that they concluded humans are not actually on average more fine with less-than-50% survival rates in their survivor gameplay experience of DbD than they are with around-50% kill rates on the killer side of that. Maybe the MMR implementation already was a response to certain trends in player activity they saw as worrying. Pure speculation of course, I don't even think this is very likely, but yeah, who knows. We'll see what they'll do, but 'm reasonably sure the MMR system is here to stay.

The problem here is perception, you purely look on whether it is a functioning system and that is not something I am arguing against. It is about the effects and what the system promotes and rewards. The 1v4 and 1v1 situations are not mathematically the same, while both options can create a functioning system and yet will not be identical. They promote different type of actions and decision processes to be made by the player base.

You claim it is not a team game, while stating clearly that a survivor cannot do it on their own. Yet the system promotes survivors not to care about the overall teams outcome unlike the comparisons made with team sports. Nobody states what about the goalies shot rate at the end of a season, because that is not the role they fulfill.

Saving in the end game is not worth it according to you, yet that is because the system removes any risk/reward mechanics that would be in play for instance there are 3 survivors with 0 hook states to try and do exchanges to try and get a 4th survivor out. There is no incentive to do so, because there is zero benefit to those other 3 survivors. If you have a system where the survivors are rewarded for the overall result, they could go for that play or go for the safe 3 man out and the one left behind would still gain a benefit instead of being the only person negatively impacted along side the killer.

The metrics are not the same for killer and survivor, as the killers results are based on the final outcome while that of the survivors is not. All it comes down to is what is considered a win, a 1 man escape is not a win and yet the system states Yes it is. The opposite is however not true for a killer, a 1 kill is a loss from any reasonable mathematical point of view. You gain 20 and lose 60 aka a loss of 40 MMR (arbitrary numbers) if you are matched up equally, naturally it might be in a 2k a 18+16-22-24, but relatively which is what matters in a MMR system you stay about equal.

Stating that there are no MMR rankings is simply false, the whole point of a MMR system is to rank people. You give them a number and place them in order. The issue people have is what the system defines as a win, you look at the game as a single player even if you join a team. Most people view it as a 4v1 game where the 4 are a team.

You argue that it matches people in their approach to the game, but my entire argument is that it doesn't. My argument is that it would do just that if you would look at the final result and provide an increase / decrease based on how well your side did. It promotes those that will survive at any cost over those that play with a team mind set. The killers however are based on making as many survivors as possible die and would be best suited to face those with a team mind set... yet they don't climb as fast and far due to well them caring about the groups result and not their individual one.

MMR systems don't need to go into the nitty gritty and nowhere in my argument did I say it does. Using escapes and kills is perfectly fine, the issue is that the escapes are a team effort and yet the result is not reflected on the whole team.

They are selling it as a Skill Based Match Making Ranking system and yet they don't account to the actual most skillful elements of a survivor: teamplay! Yet favour safe plays, risk aversion, selfish and sacrificial plays with solely your own survival in mind. One must consider the ramifications of what the system favours and how people will respond to that and is where the grievances with the system lies.

I wanted to highlight this section from your response:

Actually, I want this to be true and I hope in the future it will be, but it isn't true with the current system as far as we know.

This embodies exactly what I am stating, yet instead of hoping this is going to happen in the future I am providing feedback stating that they should update the current system to achieve this.

Indeed, that would be a problem of your perception that the system "promotes" different types of actions. I don't know how often I have to repeat this, but there is no reward for gaining rating, none, nada. In turn, there is no MMR reward for utilizing or being good at the actions that lead to rating gains. Nor a punishment for the opposite, and as such no discouraging from any other type of actions.

It's getting increasingly more difficult for me to explain these things, because you are stepping into the same fallacious thought-traps over and over again despite me in my opinion pretty clearly pointing them out to you.

It is not in fact a team game, and survivors can in fact "do it on their own" if by that we mean they can sometimes escape by playing in outright-selfish ways that are to the direct detriment of the team's overall chances of survival. The point is that 1. the system does not and hasn't got to care about whether the game is such or such in order to be able to function, it only cares about the win condition and how often people meet it, and selfish anti-team players fulfilling the win condition poses not a single issue for its functioning and indeed for the players (again, that would only mean selfish players face killier killers and more selfish teammates, while teamplayers face less killy killers and more teammatey teammates), and 2. playing in such ways will, over a large enough number of matches, not be beneficial for one's personal survival rate; players with teamplay skills will outperform selfish players even on the personal survival rate metric. (But before you say "no" again, keep in mind that even if that weren't the case, the system would still function and it would still not "promote" any type of gameplay, selfish or altruistic.)

I will not even try to continue talking about the analogy.

Playing for additional rescues in the endgame is as worth it as you yourself consider it to be. The "reward" people get for trying to rescue another survivor is the additional gameplay, the fun, the Bloodpoints, the Emblems, and the feeling of having made it happen should it work out, or perhaps the feeling of having sacrificed oneself for another survivor if you end up dying yourself instead. The matchmaking system is not supposed to set any incentives, any "rewards" for behaviour, it is only supposed to match players that are more similar in their success rates, their average performances, since that more often leads to situations where players even can make such decisions rather than being dominated so much little of it will matter.

You really should stop thinking of the matchmaking system as something that "rewards" people. It is only supposed to match people such that their success chances are more even, and it can only do so by looking at the actual success metrics. And with regards to survival rate, it actually doesn't matter whether players play for their own or the "team" survival, because both are the same win condition mathematically, and over many matches will come out to about the same individual ratings for players. Again, I do agree that looking at group survival is beneficial, since it will arrive at those appropriate ratings faster.

A 1-man escape is considered a win... for 1 survivor of the team. The other 3 get a lowered rating. Again, over many matches, these rating adjustments will come out to the same results, and nudge toward 50% survival rates, which is the only purpose of MMR. More balanced matches in their chances of the players in them to succeed.

I don't know what your math is trying to say, but even with your arbitrary numbers, the killer comes out to a -12 adjustment in that draw. Which is because 1v1 rating adjustments actually do not lead to +/-0 adjustments on the killer side either. Which is another reason why I agree that using a group-based survival metric is better, even for the killer, where you can simply look at a 2-kill result and say "the ratings should not be changed".

The point of MMR is to match people with similarly-rated players such that they have more desirable playing experiences regardless of the way they play and regardless of the rating they have. You can play team-orientedly, you can play selfishly, you can play to win, you can play to hook, you can play to loot, you can play for BP... It doesn't matter for the system, it doesn't see a low-rated player as less "worthy" or "valuable", it only sees them as... lower-rated, for the purposes of matching them with other such lower-rated players.

Most people care about their own survival more than any teammate's, often even in SWF. But that is just my conviction, regardless of it being true or not, this doesn't actually matter for the functioning of the system we are talking about here. A player caring about their own survival is still playing for a 50% survival rate, and 25% of "their team" (note: if 50% of 4 players achieve the goal of playing for their own survival, that adds up to 2 x 25% = 50% of the overall team survival goal also being achieved), and they also play for the "team" because the same objective completion that allows themselves to survive also allows for other survivors to survive, and in fact, other survivors surviving too allows themselves to survive more often. They do not actually have to "view" the game as a team game or "care" about their team for any of this to be true.

It doesn't promote anything. Even if you think selfish play more often leads to personal survival, why does the MMR rating play into your decision to play selfishly and for your personal survival? What reward are you getting? Tougher killers? Teammates that also have to be assumed to be selfish?

Riddle me this: If players that care more about their team's survival than their own, and play in such ways to even sacrifice themselves for the greater good, and as a result die more consistently than selfish players... are not all of those teamplay players that care less about their personal survival more likely to end up at similar, lower brackets of the ratings, and as such more likely to end up getting paired with one another more often? This is literally what the system dictates based on your reasoning, how does it not match people based on their approach to the game? People that approach the game with the desire to win (kill/survive) as consistently as possible by using the most effective and efficient means to do so and are the best at consistently doing so even against similar players will end up at the highest ratings (and mind you, again, teamplay is absolutely part of those most effective means to consistently survive, very much so with regards to one's own survival as well), and the ratings below that will be an entire world of players with different types of approaches and levels of abilities and performances, likewise more regularly matched with more similar players. That's all the system is about.

I don't remember claiming you did say that, I only pointed out that the original analogy was only about that, and cautioned not to expand the analogy beyond that or to try and point out the ways in which hockey and DbD are different because the many ways in which they are indeed different don't matter, the analogy holds true with regards to the thing it was actually made in regards to.

But all of this is pretty unnecessary at this point anyway: We agree that group-based survival should be used instead, and we know that BHVR is at least looking to implement a hybridized version of looking at individual and group survival. I should not be here anymore having this discussion anyway, I have barely used this time to instead... check the mid-chapter/event, for one thing.

They aren't really "selling" it, the "sale" of the matchmaking system is if anything simply the types of gameplay experiences they are hoping it will (and apparently does) yield more often. They are definitely not selling it as a "ranking" system, the ratings are literally invisible and they had literally tried - but failed - to keep the system's functioning in the background too, and we are in fact still ignorant to quite some aspects of it. And they've literally told people to "just play how they want, the rating will adjust to them". It is not a leaderboard, ladder, or rank system, at all. If you yourself think of it this way, that is your personal issue. If you die helping your team, and feel bad for getting a rating decrease for that, I'll argue you don't actually care about your "team", because you apparently feel worse about an invisible number changing in the background than you feel good about having achieved the personal objective you yourself claim to play for to begin with.

I will admit that you are not the only one with that problem (if you have it). I think more players now care a little more about surviving (and sure, even surviving personally in certain situations where it can be detrimental to the overall "team's" survival), and a little more about killing. As opposed to other people I don't actually think camping, tunnelling, genrushing, good-window-abusing and all that stuff has suddenly sprung into existence, nor that players have now suddenly started to really care about killing and surviving (personal and otherwise) - I think overall the levels of trying to win (kill/survive) are... likely not very far from where they've always been. And for me personally, I can just play however I want anyway, and not care whether other people think the rating matters and play for it. And if they leave me to die on hook in order to get out the gates without taking a risk to save me... that's their prerogative, and I for one am not any more "upset" by that now than I had been before the introduction of MMR into DbD.

Simple question. You are going into great in depth responses so I want to see a simple answer. Why, assuming this system is somewhat functional as you claim, can a brand new survivor get killers with thousands of hours as their first game, in the middle of the day? This is not an outlier situation.

Yeah, matchmaking issues such as "expedited backfill" for one thing, as DesignDad pointed out. While the logic behind the ratings is sound, the system is definitely not functioning perfectly, personally I'm somewhat skeptical just how accurately ratings at the "soft" cap predict success rates and whether the top MMR realm isn't still too inconsistent for that reason, but then again, the "top" realm will always have player availability issues more than any other bracket, and even in a healthy MMR system you actually want wild matchups for players every then and again, in both directions. Not only because chaos can be fun in DbD (in the past the devs had even intended to "embrace" this chaos with the matchmaking somehow, whatever the long-scrapped ideas for that looked like), but also because they function as "checks" for the system and players alike too, think "periodic placement matches" that some games employed from what I've gathered.

Either way, even ignoring my personal and anecdotal experiences with the system that I talked about briefly in an earlier reply to you, I find it hard to argue with the numbers. Global average kill rates are coalescing around the 50% target more closely than they've ever been (for example: 40-66% in October 2020, to 49-58% recently; from 26% to 9%, an almost 3-fold increase in across-the-board "live balance", and even if you look at the more fair standard deviation of all killer characters from 50%, you go from 4% in 2020 to 1.9% now, still a two-fold improvement), and the devs also explicitly talked some numbers on the system earlier on:

From: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/276774/developer-update-september-2021#latest

While the top MMR realm is likely still noticably more off the target than the global averages, I can't imagine any character is actually averaging 70-80% there like we'd seen in the red rank past (although Twins might be). And most of the top players in my region do have noticably more competitive matches more often (think 1 in 10 rather than 1 in 100).

I agree that using a group-based survival metric would be better because I suspect it arrives at appropriate player ratings more quickly than using the per-survivor survival metric, that's it. I don't even think they arrive at notably different ratings, given large enough samples sizes.

That doesn't change anything about it being objectively wrong that the system itself "promotes" any type of gameplay. Sure, people's false perception of it as a sort of "ranking" that "determines" "skill" and you'd have to "go up" perhaps does actually affect their feelings and therefore in-game decisions somewhat, and for that reason I can kinda see why tying it to group survival might kinda in some cases maybe lead someone to play "for the team" more than they otherwise perhaps would have (and this is nice if you find this desirable, which you however do not necessarily have to, again, the devs do not strictly think of DbD as a "team" game, and there can be arguments for and against doing so, even if I as you lean toward wanting for them to embrace it as a team-centered game more strictly), but as I've pointed out, not only do I think that this will not actually change much at all in the grand scheme of things because most people have always cared about their own survival more than that of other players and did not suddenly start doing so just because their invisible matchmaking rating is based on their personal survival and won't stop doing so just because it then isn't exclusively based on it anymore (remember: even from a group survival perspective and even if you for some reason care about rating changes more than other, tangible stuff that can inform your game decisions, risking your own life to try and rescue others is only "worth it" if it results in the survival of at least 1 more survivor, that is, if you yourself don't die and the person you rescued actually doesn't die and would have otherwise actually died, or if you die but at least 2 other persons that would have otherwise actually died as a result don't - in every other case you risking yourself is actually a bad play from a group survival perspective too!)... but even if it did actually notably change people's decisions, that would not lead to very different ratings or matchups, over enough matches, because I'm not actually convinced that people that play "for the team" die disproportionally more often than people that don't to begin with, for the various reasons I've repeatedly pointed out; on average, the people that have a higher rating now are already the people that have actually-good teamplay skills/performances, and actually-selfish players that play in ways to survive that are actually to the detriment of the group's overall survival already have a lower rating on average.

Yeah, no, this is just mathematically wrong. You really need to understand that the rating system is entirely mathematical, and think about what that means.

The system does not "ignore" that the killer wins overall in a 3-kill match, because they gain rating from killing the 3. Even in the most ridiculous edge-case mis-matchups, the rating they lose from that one survivor escaping is very unlikely to make up for the rating they gain from killing the other 3 (it might actually literally be impossible), and for the vanishingly rare edge-cases where this could perhaps happen, you can again refer to the mathematical functioning of the system that looks at many matches and averages, and see that such outliers will not affect things much at all over many iterations.

Again, I agree (and have agreed since my very first post in this thread and indeed other threads before it) that using a group-based survival metric is better for reasons I have pointed out many times now. It leading to more desirable playing experiences is not one of those reasons, precisely because the system works to do that regardless of the way people play and regardless of the rating they have. I've explained this in every other post now: Even if "teamplayers" actually consistently died more often than "selfish" players as you claim, in the current per-survivor metric paradigm those "teamplayers" would populate lower rating brackets, where they get paired with other such "teamplayers" and against killers they can on average themselves escape against 50% of the time playing this way. The only thing you would change in this regard by switching to the group-based metric is that such players would all have an arbitrarily higher rating, meet each other at those new rating brackets, with killers they would still be expected to survive on average 50% of the time against... Similar players have similar ratings, and they equate to nudging them toward a 50% survival rate (personally and "as a team" because those are mathematically the same thing) in such similarly-rated matchups. That is just as true now as it would be then. The only difference I think the group-based survival metric makes is that the players will arrive at those respectively appropriate ratings where they more often have 50% success chances with fewer matches needed to get them there.

From https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/306073/developer-qna-stream-summary-20th-january-2022:

And from https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2768672/#Comment_2768672:

The rating adjustments from singular matches are indeed small enough such that any potential delays in rating adjustments shouldn't matter. I hope they will also consider using the group survival metric for the killer adjustments, as well as the group average rating for adjustment calculations.

That's not me contradicting myself, that's people's feelings contradicting reality. The system does not actually promote anything by its functioning in and of itself, objectively. In fact, "promote" itself is a loaded word that only comes up here because this system interacts with humans, who have subjective and at times irrational reasons for doing things. If the system were to deal with AI bots instead, those bots would just play to achieve any game objectives that have been set for them, and you could change the "win condition" of the matchmaking in any way without it at all affecting how those bots play, because it doesn't functionally promote any gameplay changes.

Any player rationally looking at the game realizes that their decisions should not be affected by the matchmaking system in and of itself, because it doesn't have positive or negative incentives either way. The only rational reason why someone would actually want for their rating to increase is that they want more competitive, head-to-head, even matches than they otherwise would get or did get in the past... and that is precisely what the system is meant to do to begin with and would do regardless of it calculating ratings on a per-survivor or group basis.

Play for Bloodpoints, hooks, chases, kills, escapes or whatever you want if you find those things worthwhile and fun or otherwise rewarding, but playing for your invisible rating to increase just for the sake of... an increased invisible rating, is just irrational. And you personally said you feel like it is not "counting" the stuff you do for your team if you die, and while I will again point out that it does over many matches do count that stuff because on average it will lead to an increased survival rate for yourself as well, even if it didn't, you would still be feeling "mistreated" by the system for no real reason. If you want to play to save teammates and don't care if you die for it, so what if your invisible rating decreases in such cases? You achieved the thing you yourself chose and played for! And if you feel more bad about your rating decreasing than you feel good about achieving your personal objective... do the thing that makes you feel better if you prefer, and play for your own survival in such cases.

I did admit that some people are somewhat affected in their feelings by the system, and their behaviour is in part affected by such feelings, but I've also noted that overall I doubt it makes much of a difference. I'm pretty confident wagering that most of the people that care and play for personal survival to the detriment of the group's overall survival now have done so before MMR and would do so in a future without it. And most people in general "casually" care for their own survival first and foremost, without even thinking about it or let alone about the system much (which, it might be worth noting, is not actually something everyone actually knows about - there's probably hundreds of thousands of players that don't actually know it's based on per-survivor survival, many likely don't even know MMR exists at all, or that it is based on killing and surviving, hell, there's still tons of people that think matchmaking is Grades-based...). To actually make the game more strictly team-centered, I'd want actual base-game changes that increase teamwork gameplay, and functionally make groups win as a team, anything short of that likely won't change much about people's desire to personally succeed regardless of their team (however, again, I'm convinced personal desire to succeed/personal success rates do correlate very closely with group success chances/rates, for various reasons, and so there isn't a real problem here in my mind anyway).

Nor does it have any reward for not doing it, and doing it is often much more thrilling, engaging, fun, etc. than just ditching. People are standing in their own way, it is not the system. But even that is not really an issue, as I will explain again:

The people that do not care about the rating and do go back into the map for someone else even if the gates are open and do die doing so will decrease in rating, yeah? That means if someone plays that way consistently and it consistently leads to them dying, they will more consistently be paired with other such players that also do not care about the rating and rather go back into the map. It's a self-solving "issue" because the people that care about surviving (or the rating) and just dip out will rise in ratings and get matched with and against other people that care more about surviving/killing (or the rating), whereas players such as perhaps yourself, will more often meet more players that care about altruistic play more, even to their own detriment in terms of surviving.

If playing that way does consistently result in "dying for the team", you would meet more like-minded players at lower ratings and should not want to go up in ratings to begin with.

And I'll point out again that such plays would not actually be "rewarded" by the system (increased rating) unless you risking yourself actually results in at least one more survivor surviving than otherwise would have. Again, regularly such risky plays would not and do not lead to a better result from a group survival perspective either, quite the contrary. (And any teamplay that does consistently increase group survival I argue already also leads to increased personal survival of players that employ such correct and skilled teamplay, and very predictably so over many matches, meaning the personal survival metric already accounts for it closely enough (just it takes more time to get there so I do want them to use the group survival metric).)

Appreciate the response. I do think you are in an unwinnable situation. If you extend the matchmaking range past +/- 400 MMR, queue times are better but accuracy decreases. If you make it more strict, people (survivors mostly) can't play the game for large portions of time. Whether or not the backfill changes you are making address this, how do you address the imbalance of killer to survivor players either resulting in massive queues or negating the accuracy of the system? I don't see how you can fix that problem short of simply having more killer players.

Additionally, I can't think of any other MMR system in which people playing their first game could go against someone with potentially thousands of hours. The only exception I can think of is smurfing, which people don't really do in this game because there is little need to, and plus you can just check people's hours and see they have in the scenario I'm describing. Games like Starcraft have placement matches to situate you, so I'm curious why DBD does not? Queue times too long? If so, back to my first point.

Good grief, the post lengths here keep getting longer. <_>

I think the way it's been described makes it sound like it's an adaptation of some sort of Elo-derived mechanic, so there's no machine learning involved at all that way (just a formula with some really weird constants). Kills just go in as win/losses, adjustments come from there.

Game design is about more than just, is the system functioning. One has to evaluate how people respond to it. Therefore you acting like it is irrelevant is the whole difference in view point. You can state people should just change, but that is not something that BHVR has any control over. The question is whether the system is having its desired overall result. I am not opposed to the MMR system, yet I don't think that all results are desirable due to how the win is defined. You like using the big number analogy, but it also applies to a small % of players changing their behavior is still a ton of people.

Stating that the system evaluates is on a survivor basis, but then when I point out that the killer wins overall the match as well as a survivor. To then fall back on the 4v1 overall aspect is the whole point of that argument, as it only applies to the killer. In a single match the killer and survivor are deemed winners, in a MMR system you shouldn't have the opposing forces both win. The survivors are not judged as a whole, so you cannot then go but overall the survivors lost! As for that survivor they won! However their opponent also won! From a pure system point of view. You keep stating how irrelevant the other survivors are and that is the basis of what I am talking about. This creates a mathematical discrepancy and as the devs pointed out weird things happen.

Skill is not some arbitrary word it has a meaning. The fact that the devs misuse it doesn't make it change its meaning. They use kills and escapes as a proxy for skill and I even stated that they still can. Yet those edge cases as you call it are important, especially some of them aren't as edgy at all and are experienced quite frequently. That is the difference between the systems functionality and the player perspective. These matter from the game design point of view.

50 games can be extremely volatile, for someone that points to data sizes as much as you do I would expect that you would understand it has little meaning. It would not convince or prove a point. It is like using streaks as a statement of balance. For a player 100games can seem like much, but for a system it is peanuts.

The problem with your reward is the adrenaline, the gameplay is that people are looking at it through the lens of intrinsic motivation. From the game point of view all you can be doing is losing out. There is no reason given by the game to do it and it even states it is the wrong thing to do. If your game relies soley on players personal motivations it is bad design.

Oh no, the matchmaking system is making people want to survive!

...What is your actual problem with the matchmaking system? That your rating is possibly not high? What's it matter?

That people don't rescue in the endgame? From my experience, it's about the same as it used to be. Some do, some don't, mostly it depends on whether it's sensible, most people do stay around in the endgame to help and don't just bounce first chance they get, but people won't usually take outrageous risks for at best a hook trade in endgames, and they didn't use to either. Well, some did and some still do.

Personally I really don't see that the system has had a big impact on player behaviour overall. You have to keep in mind that the behaviour you see has existed long before MMR. The only thing it tangibly did is sort more alike players into similar brackets and therefore matches, which obviously means you will encounter more consistent behaviour trends, but mostly just because you encounter certain types of players more often, not because they didn't exist beforehand. If anything I suspect any actual changes in player behaviour are more in reponse to those trends, which has less to do with how the matchmaking works and mostly just with how the game works when it is played with less disparate participants than was regularly the case in the rank-based matchmaking system.

It's leading to more even matches giving people fairer chances to succeed and more balanced win/loss experiences overall, which I'd wager most people desire because most people like winning and don't like losing. Aiming for a 50/50% win/loss ratio for "everyone" is aiming for the greatest good in that regard, since every % above that on one player is a % taken from another player. Obviously doesn't mean everyone is actually at that ratio, but we know from hard numbers that overall things are notably closer to it now.

It's also pairing more similar players, in their abilities but also their game approach to extents. Obviously not an exact thing, but it's easy to see that higher rating brackets select for players using certain playstyles and strategies that as such get filtered out more of the brackets below it, and vice-versa. If you enjoy endgame fiestas for example, you will likely more consistently meet people at non-high rating brackets that go for that kind of stuff, so you shouldn't mind that your rating goes down if you die taking risks to save others, on the contrary.

It's you that wants it both ways here: you say the killer won since they killed 3 survivors, and the 1 survivor won because they escaped, but that is only true if you look at the killer from the 4v1 perspective and the survivor from the 1v1 perspective. If you look at both from the same perspective there is no issue here, because the killer actually lost against the one survivor from the 1v1 perspective, they did not both win. From the 4v1 perspective on the other hand, you of course have to look at all survivors, and 3 lose rating, clearly meaning the survivors lost more rating than they gained in that match.

Remember that "winning" and "losing" from the system's perspective is literally just looking at whether someone gains or loses rating, and you can mathematically resolve this player-by-player without any issues of having both sides "win" in the equation. Also remember that gaining rating from a single match means next to nothing, and that consistently gaining rating only happens if a player consistently survives against more than 50% of the killers they meet, or kills more than 50% of the survivors they meet. And also that gaining rating merely means a player will more often face players of similar higher ratings. Nothing else. And if they cannot keep consistently surviving/killing at some rating level, they will not remain there. Being the sole survivor to escape through exits in matches where 3 people died is a fairly rare occurrence in general, and certainly not something a player will consistently be climbing ratings with... and if someone somehow magically would, that means they must be doing something that leads to that, and they need higher-rated opponents against which they cannot as often do whatever that is because they should be stabilizing around a rating with a 50% survival rate, not endlessly survive.

The devs don't "misuse" the word, I quoted its dictionary definition earlier already. It's a loaded word in gaming so they would have probably been well-advised to not use it in this context, but that people try to "strawman" their use of it is again more a perception/understanding problem. People take the general meaning of skill, of just being good at the game, and apply it to a single match, questioning the logic behind the use of the word when the devs use skill to refer to being good specifically at winning the game, and specifically in the context of a system that has to deal with an evaluation/average over many matches, meaning in turn players good at consistently winning the game. "Skill" just means being good at something, it is absolutely proper use of the word to refer with it to a person good at consistently winning a game, at whatever the game actions and decisions are that lead to that.

This wouldn't actually be controversial in much of any other game, nobody would find the idea ridiculous that if you win in Unreal Tournament you're good at it, that the players that win a lot at the game are skilled at the game... but the asymmetrical format makes people go all crazy. I for one never found the use of "skill" here particularly weird, if you consistently win against other players in a game, you must be good at that game, you have some skills. Sure there are matches where a better player can lose, skilled play doesn't always lead to actually winning, but it does always lead closer to wins, and over many matches, it leads to wins more often than non/lesser-skilled play. This holds just as true in DbD as it does in symmetrical competitions. And the distinction that one means actual win-oriented play is self-explanatory in this context.

It probably was a mistake to call the matchmaking system skill-based though, because what it is actually based on are of course wins (killing/surviving) - that ratings based on wins then also indicate a player's prowess at killing/surviving is a natural assumption, and while that assumption makes for the neat idea that if you pair players of similar ratings they will have competitive, evenly-fought matches, the system itself doesn't need for skill or anything to correlate with winning, it just needs a reliable way by which to predict outcomes such that it can match players to on average achieve 50% winrates. And the ratings apparently do allow for this, so they have to correlate with something there, but since skill is a loaded word, they should just have called it rating-based I suppose.

From a game design point of view, sure, but then with regards to actual changes to the base game to functionally promote more desirable gameplay wherever deemed necessary or possible. I think for the matchmaking system, there just is no better way to do it than MMR in competitive games, and much as people may want to think of the game as casual, it's awfully obvious that most people care very much about succeeding in it. A matchmaking system that aims to give people equal chances to succeed is pretty much objectively correct, and even if it would actively encourage certain playstyles that some people might not find very desirable, that's a small price to pay for the overall increased player satisfaction levels it is expected to yield.

It was not meant to be a suggestion to statistically-significantly demonstrate something, it was just a suggestion for you yourself to try and see how strong your conviction holds that altruistic play leads to higher group survival rates but lower individual survival rates, and selfish play lower group survival rates but higher individual survival rates. 100 games should be enough to get a better personal feeling for that. Mind you, selfish play doesn't only mean not going back into the map in the endgame, it basically means you are only ever on gens or hiding, taking chases to teammates if you're found, ditching as soon as you can.

Now that's something one could start a new discussion on, but it's not for this thread. I mentioned game theory in the context of why the game not being strictly a team game can have its merits, and having personal motivations play a more integral role in game decisions/interactions rather than clear objectives you either manage to achieve or not can make for interesting, worthwhile gameplay, it is not strictly bad design in my opinion.

But yeah, that's beside the point anyway, because it's still not like the MMR system sets any gameplay motivations for or against any decisions/actions either. It's not only a personal motivation to play for your rating, it's an irrational one.

Regarding your edit:

Acting like I claimed every single teamplay move will increase personal survival chances in every single match is just showcasing a complete lack of understanding my argument, and indeed again a complete lack of understanding the system that looks at many matches, over which correct teamplay that increases group survival chances/rates will also increase personal survival chances/rates.

...These are terrible examples to pick. May I remind you that you yourself are 25% of the group, and that risking your own life in scenarios that do not result in leading to more survivors escaping alive is still also something that will decrease group survival rate, or at best not increase it? Not attempting to save against a facecamping Bubba can be the correct teamplay as well, and regularly indeed will be. But before you try and come back with better examples, I refer you back to my previous statement. Of course not even every teamplay-oriented move that actually increases group survival will also increase personal survival every time. I argue it will do so more often over many times, which is what's relevant for the system.

As for it being a cop-out to say it is too difficult to account for everything... It's essentially impossible. Refer to my post where I show that even just trying to evaluate "chase skills" properly is not possible: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2773383/#Comment_2773383

As OP has done before, and as I did, I encourage you to actually demonstrate how you would objectively, mathematically, in a working system that assigns clear, diametrically opposed win and loss states, account for any of this stuff, such as "when was a survivor actually more skilled than a killer in chases, when did they "win" chases against them?".

I will also remind you again that even if it were possible to do this, it would still be wholly unnecessary for the system to fulfil its intended purpose. Its intended purpose is to make matches happen that overall trend toward 50% kill/survival rates for all players involved on average, not to make matches happen where everyone is equally skilled, that is just a correlative, collateral thing that comes with it. If for example matches of 5 equally-rated players would not yield 50% kill/survival rates on average, then the system could simply look for a rating ratio between players where it does; it doesn't have to care that people then aren't equally rated (or by implication "skilled") in such matches. That would then be something for the devs to care about, since that is obviously indicative of base game imbalances - which have to be remedied with base game changes if deemed necessary.

Honestly now you are just kinda raving. These two have nothing to do with each other. Both players in a game can be skilled and playing in skilled ways at the same time, the system being skill-based is not the reason why both sides being able to win at the same time is an issue. The issue is that if both sides can win at the same time, you cannot clearly decide who should gain or lose rating, and if you cannot clearly decide this, eventually everyone will gain rating and the entire purpose of rating-based matchmaking goes out of the window. A single survivor gaining rating in a 1-escape is not an issue of "both sides winning" because the killer loses rating for that survivor, and the other survivors also lose rating.

And again, the system does not fall flat in selecting for skill, it selects correlatively for skills that consistently lead to wins (killing/surviving). If you feel better with it, think of them as kill and survival skills that correlate with killing and surviving consistently (over many matches, with and against many different players), not just "skill". Kill/Survival Skill-Correlated Match-Making doesn't have quite the same ring to it though.

White knighting? This is just a discussion, and I'm not doing anything but arguing I actually believe the system is good. If me pointing out that people are misunderstanding the dev analogy and indeed the system at large in pretty ridiculous ways is white-knighting, then so be it.

The rest of your argument is honestly irrelevant to me. The system works to its intended, desired purpose regardless of "player types, human nature and other aspects of game design", and I for one consider the purpose of creating more even matches where players overall have more equal chances of being able to succeed by playing to the best of their abilities desirable regardless, and if it somehow encourages certain play more often through players' psychological and emotional response to it, and if there are issues with that type of play, then changes to the actual gameplay are in order, not however a different system that somehow absurdly tries to account for this.

I think we've gone on quite long enough. This is not interesting for me anymore.

I'm asking you directly now because all I've been doing is explaining over and over again that the things you think you dislike the system for are simply false, and yet you keep going on saying the same things again. You are still not understanding at all, and I will have to repeat myself for the nth time going through this. Here goes...

First: How does the system "punish" certain playstyles? What is the actual punishment? Please answer clearly, and keep in mind that a number change is not an actual punishment in and of itself.

Nowhere did I say you are upset or "salty". I am saying your criticism is based on simply not understanding the system.

In a system that matches people such that they have more equal chances to succeed, "sweatier" games are literally what has and is supposed to happen, especially the more you care to and do succeed. The players that do and try everything to win existed before too, they just didn't meet as consistently as they do now, which is what I explained in the section you are quoting. Anyone is still as completely free to play as "non-sweaty" as they wish as they've been before MMR... they just can't expect to also win as frequently and comfortably while doing so as they might have done in the past, which is a good thing, because there are always players on the receiving end.

Refer to this post https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2778178/#Comment_2778178 where I quote official numbers given by BHVR that prove it is creating overall more even matches. You have consistently been demonstrating issues to distinguish between singular instances and overall averages, so I'll point this out clearly: not every single match and every single player has to have 50% winrates in order for the global, average to be around 50%.

BHVR is making this claim, based on actual numbers and actual insight. They are also saying the ratings predict match outcomes very accurately.

It is good that you are finally getting closer to realizing that you yourself aren't being punished or are otherwise suffering if you die and lose rating due to your chosen playstyle, rather now you say your opponents would suffer from this... but no, this is a pretty good summary of you still not at all understanding how the system works. Those lower-rated killers are still matched such that they will have 50% kill rates on average, which means the other survivors in those matches will also be worse at surviving, so you won't regularly be "demolishing" the killer.

No, if the killer side wins, that means they gain rating all in all. But if 1 survivor escapes, they gain less rating than they otherwise would have. They won, but they didn't win decisively, and this is naturally something you would want to account for a in a group survival-based system as well, with 3ks increasing rating by less than 4ks.

Either way, this is still you not understanding that the system works over many matches. You are still looking at 1 match and think "how can this person "win" if the team lost, the system can't function then", but if the system looks at every player individually and applies ratings based on whether they survived or got killed, moving them around in the matchmaking such that they get matches where their rating stabilizes, they will end up at around a 50% survival rate overall. If every individual player in a match has a 50% chance of surviving, matches will on average end in 2 kills and 2 escapes. This is the goal of the system, and it does mathematically work to achieve this even if you look at individual player survival, even despite the existence of 1-escape and 1-kill matches.

I'm sorry, I'm not the right person to explain the step from our intuitive understanding to the mathematical functioning of the system any more easily comprehensible than I have been. It is definitely an a bit difficult concept to understand, but I implore you to think about this and read what the OP and devs have said on this as well, and consider whether the people that do this math and program these systems don't actually know what they're talking about when they say the system works. If you look at 1v1s for the rating adjustments, you never have an instance where both sides of that equation gain rating, and since these adjustments lead to 50% kill/survival outcomes for both players of that 1v1 equation over many confrontations, it will also lead to 50% kill/survival outcomes in the overall matches with them, because 4 survivors with a 50% survival chance each on average comes out to 50% of survivors dying and 50% surviving, 2/2 per match (on average).

Why are you assuming that the killer rating increase is actually the same that survivors get? You could simply use "/ 4" on the individual rating results for the killer to prevent this.

Sure, it may be possible that the devs did not think about this and killers rise in rating much faster than survivors due to that... but I highly doubt it. And it would still not be a problem inherent to the system, it would just be an oversight regarding something that can easily be solved.

BHVR in the context of the system we are talking about here has absolutely defined a win. Killing vs. surviving. That you don't understand that the system does not have to look at the 4v1 result in order for this to function since 50% of every individual player scales to 50% of all players is the precise problem.

You are again looking at a single match. I went out of my way to specify in very simple terms that the "skill" that is "defined" (correlates) in the context of the MMR system is being good at winning consistently (over many matches, with and against many different players). The logic of the system is tied to many matches and averages, please try and understand this and stop looking at individual results trying to argue against its logic on that basis, your thinking here is deepy flawed and you are not beginning to understand.

And yes, If a player actually manages to consistently survive despite their team constantly dying (impossibly unlikely to happen of course), they are absolutely still good at surviving consistently, and they are doing something well, they have some skills that lead to this consistently being possible... and that still doesn't matter for the functioning of the system, it doesn't care about this "skill", it only matters if they survive, and if they do survive more often than they don't, they systemically move up in ratings such that they ideally arrive at some place where they cannot do this as consistently anymore due to facing killier killers, and approach a 50% escape rate.

I have laid out the objective definition of skill and demonstrated that it absolutely can be used in the way the devs did (definition: being good at something; dev use of the word: a player that is good at consistently winning), yet you keep contesting it with arguments that amount to "no". That is the problem here, you keep not understanding and repeating the wrong, flawed thoughts over and over again.

Oh joy, now the time has come to get into semantics, huh?

By base game, I mean actual mechanical gameplay aspects. A "base game" can function with bots, it can function if you play with a predetermined group in custom matches. Matchmaking is certainly part of the game, but not of the basic game functioning.

It also doesn't determine what a win is in general. The MMR system has clearly-defined win conditions that serve its function, but those do not necessarily have to be the ones players play for, and indeed some players play for other things, such as hooks, or Bloodpoints, or anything else they may care about. That said, the basic win condition of killing vs. surviving has existed since DbD's very inception, I quoted BHVR's official description of the game for you earlier.

The central idea here was just that problems (if they are actually problems) such as Bubba's facecamping interactions are infinitely more sensible to be addressed on a mechanical base-game basis than somehow worked around with a matchmaking design. I think for many of such things it's at best absurd to try and do the latter, and at worst impossible.

I never said only base-game mechanics matter, I specifically referred to base-game changes vs. matchmaking changes. I didn't even say matchmaking can never in effect change anything about gameplay, I just said base-game changes are much better suited for remedying some of the issues people are trying to fault the matchmaking system for.

I also told you that I believe the MMR system is already conceptually the best it can be in my opinion (functioning on the premise of making players on average approach 50% success chances). Doesn't mean it can't be improved upon in its actual working, but the concept behind it, its goal, is "correct" for a competitive game, and that's why so many such games use MMR/Elo systems.

I'm glad there are things we firmly agree on. It irks me whenever people talk about it being a "casual" "party game", when its reality is, as you say, by definition competitive, it being a PVP game where players compete to achieve their objective against their opponents, and do so literally by preventing their opponent from achieving theirs, with players on one side literally being thrown out of the game if they fail to do so. And people are pretty fervent in their desire to win in this game.

Yeah, sorry, but this works about as well as my argument predicted it could: not at all.

To start with, you fail to define what even a "chase" is.

Next, as pointed out in the post I referred you to, you have to find a way to detect a "chase". The chase state mechanic does not do this, you can and do lose chase state frequently while being in an active chase, for various reasons, and there are even reasons why intentionally doing so is beneficial. You can also be in chases without active chase state for prolonged periods, and this too can be intentional. So, how do you technically define and detect what a "chase" actually is, and when a player is in a proper chase?

The next issue you run into is that you have to define an endstate to a chase and decide whether the killer or survivor "won" the chase. If the killer leaves a survivor intentionally, did the survivor actually "win" the chase? Maybe the killer is playing a hit-and-run playstyle, or maybe they have a thousand other reasons why they are not committing to a chase, all of which may very well be leading to game wins (kills) ultimately. So, did the killer really "lose" the chase if they intentionally break it off?

Do chases end when a survivor goes down? What about the countless instances where survivors die outside of proper chases? Such as when they go for a calculated hook trade. Did they now lose a chase in 10 seconds?

Another issue is that maps, map spawns, perks, items, other survivors and more play into chase duration. Survivor used DH, Storehouse window 3 times, a Styptic, 5 pallets, and 3 times a teammate took a hit for them... did they play a good chase, as good as someone that got the same chase duration without using all of this? (Although for this I will say that you can assume that it will be the same for all players over many matches, so it's not a real problem if you just look at it comparatively between players. But it will definitely give a lot of fuel for people to falsely make fun of the dev's concept of skilled chases.)

Determining what the right chase duration is "to help the team progress" is not actually easy at all, and it can be completely different in different matches. As far as I can tell, it would just be an arbitrary value no matter what.

There are different killers with different chase mechanics, they would all need different chase duration values to determine what a "won" or "lost" chase is. Various of the abilities also make it much more difficult to decide what a "chase" is.

I'm sure an actual dev could go on and on here, but I hope you understand that your idea for an implementation does not even begin to be functional at objectively defining chases, detecting chases and differentiating proper chases from things that aren't, deciding what a won or lost chase is, how this applies to every killer, ...

I hope someone better than me at explaining how ludicrous this idea is will at some point do so.

I will say this: I myself actually did want them to look at "chase duration" averages for a "skill-based player rating" when we first started hearing about SBMM being in the works, and while I understood from the beginning that it cannot be used in an MMR system because you cannot define actual win and loss states for chases (I wanted them to just use average chase durations of players to somehow factor into their ratings... I didn't really think about it further though), I had to realize that it's just impossible to actually define and detect chases, there are tons of scenarios in the game that may look like a "chase" but aren't, and yet others that are a "chase" but may not look like it.

Simply looking at killing vs. surviving does the trick, even regardless of whether it would correlate with any skill at all, because the goal is just to reach 50% kill/survival chances/rates on average in more matches, which the system can achieve by rating players based on killing vs. surviving...

You say it would be more "truthful" to the nature of the game as a 1v4, but what does this actually mean?

As I told you, 50% in 4 1v1s is 50% in 1v4 too, it does not need to make that distinction to achieve its goal from both perspectives. It does not have to rate based on 1v4 results in order to lead to the desired 4v1 results, it already fits the reality of the game mathematically and achieves the state of balance in matches on average that it was implemented to seek.

And with regards to your point that the solo survival metric "promotes" selfish gameplay in players' psychological and emotional respone to it, even if that were the case for every single player playing this game, I will tell you again that the game is not strictly a team game. You and I may prefer it to be, but there are arguments for keeping it more in the spirit of a game of 4 individuals with the same basic objectives that however may well play for their own survival first and foremost. Are you in favour of implementing in-game voice chat for survivors? You must be, because that makes the game a lot more team-centered, and most team multiplayer games feature in-game voice chat. I think BHVR is strictly against that precisely because they want survivors to be lone actors that may choose to be more selfish, or only opportunistically altruistic, with merely rudimentary means of coordination and communication. They want this to be more of a player choice rather than the game dictating that they have to play for and as a team.

This is again the problem of you not understanding that mathematically, win and loss of 1v1 and 1v4 are the same thing over many matches, and it works out, it does not lead to any scenario where "both sides win" because in the 1v1 rating equation of killer vs. survivor, the survivor can only have survived or died, either the killer gains rating against this survivor or the survivor gains rating against this killer.

I've already admitted I'm at my wit's end in trying to explain this to you. Maybe OP can do it more pellucidly. I dunno, maybe this helps you bridge this gap of understanding: In a match, a survivor player can only either live or die, correct? Then the "survival rate" of any 1 survivor in any 1 match can only ever be 0% or 100%. ...So how could this survivor ever have a "balanced" match outcome if they can only win or lose? How can the system ever give them any 1 match in which they actually somehow half survive and half die? Of course, it cannot! It can only give them an actual survival rate of 50% over more matches, and this explains how a survivor can potentially live in one match (such as one where 3 others died) or die in another match (even one where the 3 others escaped) but still be in a balanced scenario where they achieve a 50% survival rate over many matches, and where all matches taken together can have a "balanced" average outcome from the 4v1 perspective of 2 survivors living and 2 dying, without the actual matches actually having 2 survivors live and 2 others die, but sometimes 0 or 4 or 3 or 1. Or indeed they can have have a higher-than-50% survival rate over many matches, despite sometimes dying where 3 others survive, or a lower-than-50% rate despite sometimes surviving where others die, and then they would be gaining/losing rating accordingly over those matches and arriving at a place where they will move closer to that 50% rate. The win rate over many matches is what matters and makes the system work to achieve a more balanced outcome, from the 1v1 perspective of individual players, and in turn the 1v4 perspective of the matches they play in.

I know what the argument is about, and you are saying the the system does not function from the 1v4 perspective, based on a failure to understand how the system works.

You say it "falls flat in accounting for all types of playstyles", but you are never clarifying what this functionally even means. It accounts for everything, respectively to the degree that those things increase or decrease personal survival chances/rates over many matches by. If your playstyle includes risking your life in order for others to be able to escape, and if this playstyle means you consistently do not survive more than you die at whatever rating you are, then you should lose rating because the system wants you to survive around half the time, whatever your playstyle is. You need easier opponents against which you don't have to take such risks as often/don't die as often taking such risks in order for you to be able to hit 50% survival rates if you aren't doing so at a higher rating.

Dude, what I state isn't false nor does this mean I don't understand how the system functions, it is from the perspective you claim not to care about and therefore you want to view the system in a vacuum unrelated to the game that it is being applied to. This is a 4v1 game, you wanted to know why people dislike it and what the impacts they have on the game... but clearly you don't all you are trying to do is act like what you state is gospel and that anyone coming from a different angle is by default false.

I have not stated that the current system is a total failure or isn't functioning to a certain degree. The fact that you state that you should be lowered in rank so you don't have to take risks, meaning that over time the system is to remove all risk from playing. Just shows that you don't understand the concept of game design. Risk/Reward is a vital part of having a fun game, if you never have to take risks that results in the game becoming stale and boring. It is literally part of the desirable result, if people seek these type of scenarios to occur in their games and want to play them out... the system shouldn't try to punish your playstyle. The 50% survival rate is about all survivors in a match, the fact that you want to approach the game from a 1v1 perspective, but it isn't. You go but big data and yet when it actually applies you now want to go: to on an individual base. Even if you die 100% of your games, if your actions would result in the rest of your team getting out 100% of the times, it means your side won the match. It means that for those games you would be involved in would have a 75% escape rate and not the 50% that you claim to want to achieve and yet that survivor would be placed against lower ranked killers to bump them up to 100% to even out their numbers. Ones playstyle can still result in a higher overall escape rate for all players in the match, yet you don't want to account for these plays.

This is of course an exaggeration of the point, but it is something that happens each time someone makes those plays and they are more common than some edge case scenario. You claim this evens out over a long course of games, but that is now shifting the goal posts again from a single survivor to the entire collective and that is why the system has an issue in my point of view; it creates the stomp or be stomped effect within the game. For individual players that might not be the case, even if the escape rates are 50% across the board as the playstyle of trying to get your team out is as far as I remember not one that is undesirable or should be punished; just in the same way that self preservation isn't something that should be taken out completely and with what I suggest wouldn't as you point out self preservation will also impact the rests survival rate.

Risking your own life is not the same as throwing the match, it is just seeking as you say the adrenaline in the match, which tends to be done by the more experienced and better players in the game. If they are good they will most likely also only do this in a situation where the game already is going to be a win for their side and there in lies the problem. They would have won if they didn't take any risks, but because they did and even if the overall result remains the same. Those that benefit from it change and that skewers the math.

You want to ignore these facts, because mathematically the system works over the large amount of players and games. You don't care about how it reflects upon the gameplay of the game, which gameplay it promotes under the less experienced players or how it punishes those that seek a more thrilling match by taking higher risk plays because they know they can. You don't look at the system to see what playstyles are of note within it or how it shifts the mindset of people. Looking the overall result of a 1v4 is how the approach I suggest is more truthful to the games premise of an asymmetrical PvP game.

So... you can " mark all you want on other peoples perspectives, but frankly you are just becoming rude and dismissive. You are arrogant and entitled to believe that a MMR system like this can be seen only from one view point. I am not viewing this from a mathematical theoretical point of view, as I view this from a game design one and that isn't false, wrong or bad. There is no use in my explaining it as you have no interest in anything beyond your own point of view and the only way I could appease you is by looking it from a mathematicians view point and I won't. I understand what you are stating I just look beyond the mathematical model and at the product as a whole. I view the MMR system as part of the base and foundation of the game and believe it should be designed to promote the desirable results.

You are wrong to believe that game design and development can only be viewed from one angle and every other one is false, wrong and inaccurate because of it. I admitted from a mathematical point of view it can work, but I don't believe it promotes the desirable results and it limits the accessibility to a larger audience because of it. That is why people are angry about it, that is why people are leaving because of it and that is why if the developers would want to improve the system they need to look beyond the does it mathematically make sense. If they truthfully are looking at a more hybrid system as you claim... it means they too have acknowledged that.

To account for your last post:

And mind you, again, I agree that the system would be improved by looking at group survival as opposed to individual survival. But not because the game is strictly a team game, nor because the system will then or should necessarily encourage teamplay, not because it will rate players very differently and make very different matchups, nor because then the high MMR bracket will be place of self-sacrificial altruism and rainbows... But just because it will come to the appropriate ratings more quickly. I'm convinced much of the same players that are in similar rating brackets now will be then as well and we will see much of the same gameplay in matches involving such players, they will just get there earlier, and will have to go through fewer potentially uneven, undesirable matches (for themselves and/or the other players in them) to do so.

Like I don't think you actually understand what I am talking about, because the fact that you state it would be more accurate and quicker means you concede, as it is exactly what I am stating. The fact that you point out it won't rate players very differently or that the match ups would maybe be still similar showcases this fact, because you are applying my metrics and is why I used them to begin with. You literally are stating what I have been pointing out consistently: It would be an improvement on the current system, while still using the same metrics of Kill/Escapes. Where did I state it will create totally different metrics to analyze. The fact you believe it would lead to only self-sacrificial altruism and rainbows in high rank based on what I stated and those that throw the game for trying to do so... just shows you don't understand what I am talking about.

My point is that players need to get to their appropriate rating quicker means the system is better, because from a single player point of view they aren't going to be at mass data points where they even out for a large majority of players. It would also address many issues people have with skilled plays being punished. People are less likely to get angry if they go up in rating while not playing to well and their team winning than the other way around where they lose rating while their team wins the match. Unless you are really petty and are to busy with what ranking other people get..

If you always escape, but the rest of your team always dies... I think that is worth more of an evaluation than if you always die and the rest always gets out. It is more desirable. High ranked players should be able to keep not just themselves, but also the majority of their team alive. To even out at 50% escape rate, where the games aren't just a stomp one way or another.

You keep on showing that you don't actually understand the math and the principles I am talking about. It will be just faster reflects on the volatility index of the system and improving that is important as it ensures that the players themselves actually experience the effectiveness of the system and create a more consistent experience. You claim it doesn't promote gameplay just once again means you are clueless on how game design works. Even in your examples there are clear signs of this that you flat out ignore. If the game allows you to take risks to improve the teams outcome, then if that risk is successful that should reflect positively upon those that took it and that is one of the most complained aspects of the system as it is purely set to punish those plays at no potential reward.

Nothing in my proposed improvements would btw restrict or limit players to playing in ways if that would net a positive outcome for their team, yet players on the survivor end if they want to climb the ranks would have to simply consider their sides overall outcome and selfish plays might be totally justified in that approach. The fact is that it would widen the acceptable plays as long as it ends up in the overall survival rate of the survivors. If your plays end up getting more people killed, then appropriately it would make you lose rating. Naturally it is a risk and therefore it isn't the safest play, yet a game shouldn't promote only taking safe choices because it is a game. Additionally acting like lower ranked killers are trying less hard to get kills is misrepresenting what the system is trying to achieve, as it wants these killers to also get a 50% kill rate in their games. The whole concept of the MMR is a 50% escape, rate which means that killers will get a 50% kill rate and be just as Killy on all levels. By your own logic these type of statements that you make are complete bogus and doesn't align with the math you are so keen on falling back on.

I have already stated multiple times that the current system isn't broken or faulty and it functions to a degree. I am discussing improvements and you admitted that what I stated would result in a faster, more efficient and better system. Therefore you already conceded and are purely arguing because you believe that the quality of the system is irrelevant. The improvements I have stated would make the system better, it would be more accepted and would account for a larger spectrum of gameplay types therefore appease a larger audience.

You keep acting like big data is the only metric that should be used in design choices, yet that is wrong. Players don't experience it that way and is not always the most accurate reflection of the actual product in place. This is not some holy grail that you can fall back on that is undisputable, while data is important it is far more nuanced than that and you claim what I state will improve the accuracy and speed of the data achieving it desired results. If the sum of all the aspects to consider and the shift in the metrics based on those reasons would result in a better system... why are you trying to disprove the concept while admitting that you do not care about them nor want to go into them. The fact that you claim I didn't explain this, means you really aren't reading what I have stated. It is like talking to a brick wall.

Hm?

Uh, this is the first time you use the term "volatility index" in our discussion, so not sure which discussion you think you have been having. If you want to do and show some actual math in which you apply the principle of a "volatility index" to ratings in an MMR system, you are welcome to though, I for one would find that interesting to see. I doubt the function does what you think it does there though, as if changing to a group survival metric would "reflect" on this.

That players do not experience the effectiveness of the system with the individual survival metric is also just a baseless assumption. You are again to free to show this with actual math (which is of course impossible for you, given that you don't actually know what numbers the system is working with), but even if you now agree (and pretend like you've always agreed...) that the different metrics don't actually change what ratings players arrive at but merely the pace at which they do, there is no reason to assume the pace will be that much increased that players tangibly experience the system's effectiveness, or indeed that it isn't already fast-paced enough with the individual survival metric as it is for players to do so.

With how often you make reaching claims regarding tenets of game design, I have to wonder whether you are an actual game designer. Because if you are, I kindly suggest going back to school, your idea for an implementation of a "chase metric" was laughable from a game design perspective. Like, I guarantee you if a dev actually reads it, they will laugh.

I asked you in clear and simple terms "How does the system "punish" certain playstyles? What is the actual punishment? Please answer clearly, and keep in mind that a number change is not an actual punishment in and of itself.", and rather than give an answer, you have continued what you have been doing all "discussion" long, you just keep on saying the same things without substantiating them. How does the system reflect positively or negatively on anything?

What I did admit is that there's the vague psychological aspect of people irrationally, emotionally caring about their rating despite not seeing it, and I have already laid out various reasons why that aspect of the system "promoting" certain playstyles is not a "game design" issue or "flaw" of the system, and may well be argued to be a positive effect from a perspective other than your own subjective one that taking risks for the team to the detriment of oneself should be encouraged. I have also shown that even with a group survival metric, such risk-taking is not actually much more "encouraged" (if you irrationally care about rating) than it is with the individual survival metric, if at all. In many scenarios such risky plays are to the detriment of the group survival just as much as they are to one's own, not least because oneself is part of the group.

You could use a metric of how many bananas survivors eat in a trial and the system still wouldn't "restrict" or "limit" players in the ways they play. You are not getting this, the system is not "promoting only taking safe choices", you are completely free to play however you want, it does not make any play more or less "acceptable", and there are actual, tangible gameplay and personal incentives that can lead to players making risky plays, or making much of any other play, regardless of the invisible rating. And again, much of the time, risky plays that actually increase group survival increase personal survival just as much precisely because of it. Players often take risks for other players because they know they most likely or definitely won't survive themselves if they don't help.

Yes, some players irrationally care about the rating, but I'd wager even of them most players don't actually care enough for it to substantially change their play, if they care about their personal survival they most of all do because they want to survive, not because that increases their rating. I have not noticed a dramatic increase in "selfishness" personally at all, the only thing I've noticed more consistently (at higher ratings where I presumably am) is people not taking reckless, overly-altruistic risks, which are risks that more often than not lead to decreased group survival as well and as such would not be "encouraged" for people that irrationally care about their rating in a group survival metric environment either.

With regards to widening the "acceptable" plays under this assumption, so the plays players are comfortable going for in caring about the rating, I could argue that the personal metric is actually much more liberating, because if everybody is only "responsible" for themselves and their surviving or dying does not in itself impact the rating of others, they will feel more free to play however they want without worrying about it directly negatively impacting the team rating. I gave you the example of players not approving of a teammate going for risky endgame plays "for fun" in an already-won game, so how would this reflect on an individual player, and how "acceptable" they feel it is to do something like that, how "discouraged" they are from going for risky plays by the group metric?

Tons of players don't even know about the metric, nor the workings of the system at large. If anything I could argue of the people that know about the personal metric and care about their rating, the system may well also encourage many to take more reckless risks than they otherwise might have, because they want a lower rating instead. Either way, if you really think a notable amount of players in this game aren't taking risks anymore that they did before, or care more about their personal survival than they didn't already anyway, I just think that's pretty unrealistic. ...And even if it were that way, again, it is still only your subjective opinion that self-sacrifical altruism is more desirable gameplay than self-preservation, it would still not be an objective "flaw" of the system, changing it not an objective improvement.

You are again portraying a severe lack of understanding the system. They are less killy in the sense that they have shown that they only consistently achieve that 50% kill rate at lower ratings, i. e. against survivors that also do not manage to survive consistently against other, higher-rated killers. They are not as good at killing (due to lack of killing skills or just due to their chosen playstyle preference) as players at higher ratings because they simply didn't consistently kill at those higher ratings. That's literally what the ratings you care so irrationally much about are there for, exclusively: signifying the killiness of killer players and surviviness of survivor players, their average kill and survival performances, such that they can be matched accordingly to be able to even out to 50% kill and survival rates against each other, rather than get below-50% rates against higher-rated players, or above-50% rates against lower-rated players, where killiness and surviviness levels would be in disproportion.

I have since the very beginning and indeed before even replying to you said I think switching to the group survival metric would improve the system by making it reach the same ratings faster, that is literally what I explained to you multiple times when you were clearly doubting the functioning of the system and claiming it would function in a flawed way. Now you make it out as if I agreed with your explanations that the system actually functions correctly already? You are still talking about it "accounting" for a larger spectrum of gameplay types with the metric switch, thereby showing you are still not understanding that it already does "account" for everything. If those altruistic gameplay types you personally find desirable would actually lead to decreased personal survival rates (which I have explained I'm convinced they don't, which you vehemently disagreed with, saying players with such playstyles would end up at ratings where they shouldn't be with the current metric), the system "accounts" for that by those players having a lower rating, which does not harm them, on the contrary.

This honestly seems like some odd way to "gaslight" your way out of this discussion. But luckily the posts are saved, so now we are at a point where I seemingly have to repeat not only the things I've said, but those you did too. Literal quotes from yourself:

Here you showed that you didn't understand that the system looks at many matches, over which the "star player" would not go down in rating consistently if they actually are a "star player".

Here again, claiming contributions to the team would not lead to an appropriate standing with the current metric, implying they are not significant for the rating.

Here you imply teamplayers and "stars" would not "climb ranks", clearly claiming the current metric prevents them from doing something outright that the group metric wouldn't, again neglecting that when looking at more than 1 match in which they happened to die for one reason or another, they would actually "climb ranks" due to these things. You further showcased not understanding that as per the functioning of the system, if players of the same "level of play" actually consistently personally died due to their play, they would end up at similar lower ratings and get into matches with each other, and the only difference the change in metrics would make for that is that they would meet at arbitrarily different ratings, against the same level of killers against which they stabilize out to 50% survival rates.

Here again you are outright claiming different players would "climb the ranks" with the different metrics, again outright in disagreement to the idea of the metric only making the same players reach the same ratings faster. You are also again showcasing not understanding that the system logic works over many matches, in which no player is more or less likely to be found than another player in principle. Or, if they only hide, that will be to their team's detriment, which will be to their personal detriment, which will over many matches prevent them from "climbing ranks". Or yet, if they would actually be able to consistently escape through exit gates playing that way, it would be a playstyle the system should select for. You were showing you don't understand the system and indeed the game by thinking that "safe" and "selfish" play that actually leads to decreased group survival chances leads to increased personal survival chances, and that "altruistic" and "risky" play that actually leads to increased group survival chances leads to decreased personal survival chances, based on exceptional, singular matches, which is not true in principle and all the less true over many matches, where personal survival rates of a player will correlate with the group survival rates of the matches they're in. And in any case, this would then make a difference with the different metrics, leading to different players ending up at different metrics, again going to show you did not argue the metric switch would lead to the same players simply ending up at the same ratings faster.

Here you even go beyond saying it doesn't only not let teamplayers gain rating, but make it out as if skillful play is teamplay strictly, as if someone running a killer for 5 gens is somehow a teamplay. And of course, again neglecting that proper teamplay and survival-oriented skillful play leads to increased personal survival rates over many matches too, alongside increased group survival rates.

As OP asked you to, prove that the best players (and at this point you were not even saying the best teamplayers, just skillful players, "star" players) are the ones that consistently die, more often than worse players. And then, demonstrate how even if that were the case, this would be bad for those players, that this would "punish" them, or harm them, derive them of rewards they would otherwise get, that this would be "unfair" as you say. Rather than just... an invisible number change, that results in matchups where they can actually survive more often.

This is also one of the examples of you failing to distinguish that in the context of the system, "skill" means being good at consistently surviving, measured by a player's actual survival results over many matches, so if what we usually understand or want to take as "skilled" play doesn't lead to consistently surviving, but yet other play does, it simply means in the context of the system that other play is actually the "skillful" play that has to be selected for because it actually leads to surviving consistently, even if someone might not subjectively like that type of play or considers it to be less skillful. If having selfish survivors on a group (and even 4 of them) would more consistently lead to more of the survivors surviving against higher-rated killers, it is simply those players that will be and should be at higher ratings, and teamplayers will and should be at lower ratings where they can more often survive. Of course, I don't think this is the case, but if it were, there's no issue with it, it's still exactly what should happen, what the desired and desirable outcome of the system is, because players should be having roughly even success chances/rates regardless of their playstyles, which this ensures on average.

Here you go claiming skilled players are not "rewarded" by the system, failing to understand that "skilled" in the context of the system literally just means "winning consistently", which by definition means they are gaining rating (are being """rewarded"""). The rating itself is literally the number that showcases that "skilled" players (players that consistently win) are "rewarded" (gain rating), because... players gain rating for winning.

You falsely assume only teamplay is skilled and that the system has to rate based on teamplay. You falsely assume that teamplay leads to decreased personal survival rates. You falsely assume any however-skilled player is meant to gain rating, rather than literally just players that survive/kill consistently (are skilled at consistently winning). You falsely assume that gaining rating is a "reward" rather than just something used to put players into matches with other players of similar rating, such that they can on average kill/survive 50% of the time.

Claiming they are supposed to be a team, which they aren't.

Again claiming such contributions that lead to team wins would not result in players personally also winning over more matches, and that the system does not work to do so and with a different metric would. Clearly saying there are functional differences between them, and clearly showcasing that you don't get that the game is not a team game, and starting to show that you don't get 50% per-survivor is also 50% per-4-survivors.

Outright calling the system flawed, and not understanding that the 50% survival per-survivor end result is the same as 50% group survival end result.

I will spare us the rest because I have of course literally addressed all of these things in great detail over the course of the discussion already, but just to include one more thing:

You claim the current metric creates situations where "both sides" can win, which would indeed be a flaw if it were true, but it is objectively false and objectively you claiming the system doesn't function correctly with the current metric, based on not understanding the mathematical logic behind it.

You "explained" this? Much of what you did is make false and flawed statements based on a lack of understanding how the system works, what its purpose is, and a lack of understanding the game in certain regards. I was the one to explain to you what the system is meant to do, that the system actually works to do that, and that it does so from the "1v4 perspective" as well (instating on average more even success (kill/survival) chances/rates, per-player, which automatically means per-match (or per-"team", if you will)). I also showed you that even if your 1 true argument would actually be significant (people irrationally care about rating and this changes their playstyle to be less self-sacrificial), this would not be an objective flaw of the system whatsoever, and is only your subjective opinion regarding what desirable playstyles are (which I happen to share, but not everyone has to and not everyone does, and anyway, you never really realized that with these self-sacrificial playstyles, we are actually talking about stuff that can also be detrimental to group survival, and would as such not necessarily be "encouraged" (if you care about rating) with a group metric either, and that altruistic teamplay that does lead to increased group survival also often leads to increased personal survival, and is as such not necessarily "discouraged" (if you care about rating) with the personal metric).

This is a funny section anyway, because you go off about "nuance" and whatnot claiming I would only look at "big data" or let alone think it is the only thing that should be used in design choices, neglecting that the group survival metric the argument is about... is still completely a "big data"-based metric. You won't suddenly get the appropriate ratings after a single match, the scope which your flawed reasoning continuously could not move away from. I parodicly presented you an example case where a baby Meg can die early on but get a higher rating due to the rest of ""her team"" besting the killer 3v1 without her "contributions". Please just stop dude.

I agree with this: the problem, as I recognise with this system, is the insistence on the word "skill". If it had been labelled MMR then half these .. nay, most of these arguments wouldn't even exist.

If the devs just remove the idea of skill from this system, then it would be accurate to say it is MMR. Just forget SBMM. From a tin-foil conspiracy pov, I'd almost say the devs are using the word "skill" purely to troll.