Anniversary Update

With the anniversary rolling in there's a lot of speculation of what's going to be updated. So I figured I'd give my opinion on what I feel should be addressed. The game as a whole has been frustrating on both sides for different reasons for some time now. These are the things I feel should be changed with the new updates that'll make the game overall more enjoyable. Some of these are things that the devs have already said they're working on, but I feel that these should take priority over other things.

1. The grind. The grind is getting even larger and there's nothing that has been done to really help it. I feel this needs to be addressed immediately. Right now win or lose, it doesn't really feel rewarding to play the game. Mix in some bad matches and it's easy to see how people, especially new players, are put off to the idea of continuing to play the game. Bad matches+no real reward=bad game. Now it's a lot harder to have 100% balanced matches every single game. No matter how much they balance it, you're still going to get really great and really bad matches. It's a lot easier to fix the grind and make it feel more rewarding to play the game even after having a few bad matches, than it is to balance every match perfectly. Addressing this would fix half the equation. Yeah you had a bad match, but it still feels rewarding to play the game.

2. Matchmaking/backfill. At first, when they first updated the MMR after the tests all of my games felt pretty balanced. And then after about a day it went back to #########. My matches felt random again with either being against babies or extremely efficient teams with very little room for mistakes. No matter what the matches felt unbalanced one way or the other. I could definitely tell this was most likely due to backfill. The backfill needs to be addressed prior to changing MMR numbers and things of that nature. It still feels like I'm being backfilled 80% of the time. And you can't make meaningful changes to matchmaking, if you have a large backfill problem that is manipulating the data of how matches are going.

3. Map balance- A lot of the times when people are frustrated with a certain match, or they're getting completely stomped, it's typically not because of a certain perk or how they're playing. Usually it's because maps are so unbalanced 90% of the time that they can favor one side or the other in major ways. You can have one match where you spawn in on a map and there's just large dead zones where survivors have nothing, or they only have like 8 pallets on the whole map. Did they get outplayed? No, there wasn't anything for them to do. Or you'll spawn in as killer and there'll be 30 pallets and 10 breakable walls, with a bunch of strong windows. Most of which can't be mind gamed, it's just break and go. But the loops will spawn so close together that by the time the killer breaks the pallet, the survivor is already safe at another tile. And there's yet another two tiles next to that one. Did the killer play badly? Not at all. But they feel like they did, which makes the game unfun.

Add into the fact that you're currently trying to balance matchmaking to make it to where you go against equally skilled players. So most of the time the deciding factor to where you win or not is, what map did you get?? That's one of the major issues that make this game unfun for a lot of people. Is that RNG plays more of a factor in this game than skill does sometimes.

Anyways, these are the things I feel need the most immediate attention if you want the game to feel better to play, as well as retaining more players overall. Let me know what you guys think!