http://dbd.game/killswitch
My experiences with Skill Based Match Making so far.
It's been almost a year since SBMM was enabled indefinitely. I think it's time to tell about my expiriences with it so far. But first I'd like to point out what kind of player I am.
I'd like to focus mainly on my survivour experience. I have a little over 1k hours of playtime on Steam. I'm a player who does not really care about escaping. My goal is to have fun during the match. That usually means going for risky plays. I also like being chased and I'm more than fine with dying for a team. Back before a keys rework I'd sometimes pull a tactical dc to let someone get a hatch and if a killer is fun to play against I'd sometimes give him a one kill too. Killers sometimes let me escape so why can't I give a killer a kill?
Edit: Just to clarify - no, I am not intentionally dying every game. Doing that and complaining about the system would be silly. I always try to do my best. But if I'm at the gates and my team goes down I usually stay and try to save them. I'm not suicidal, if it's bubba or someone who can secure kills I'll just leave. But if I die because of that I am fine with that. That's how I enjoy my game.
With this intro of who I am you probably know that my personal escape rate is not very high. This also means my mmr is probably somewhere on the bottom of the sea. It's low. Very low. At least that's how it looks like because we can't see our mmr. I just feel like I am playing with people who are playing this game for the first time in their lives. All my teammates have basic skins, barely any teachables. They just walk around the map with no purpuse. With no offence to a new players, we all been there, but they just look like a bots. It's just so depressing. And the worst part is that it's actually really hard to gain some mmr because noone does anything. If I am being chased noone is on gens, if I am on a gen everyone dies instantly.
I think SBMM is worse than old emblem system and I don't know if it can be improved. Kills are not a good representation of skill. There is so much stuff happening you just can't tell if someone is good only because he escaped. Personally I think mmr system belong in competetive games. DBD is not a comp game and will never be. Not with the amount of wild rng and maps balance. You just can't treat this game too serious to care about winning or loosing.
Also, a little bit off topic, but I am really concerned about midchapter update. Those changes, especially self-care will absolutely demolish low mmr lobbys.
I hope the devs are aware of this and they are working on improvements. But for now I am stuck in the elo hell.
Comments
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You are not into escaping, you like risky plays, you give killers free kills. Sorry, but why do you complain then? How is the game supposed to know that you are actually better than it seems?
It's only logical that you get matched with low-skill survivors, because at the end your game skill matches their skill, regardless if you make it look lower on purpose or not. If you were matched with higher-skill lever survivors, you would simply ruin their games.
Other things to consider: some survivors play just for fun, some play for escapes, so it's hard to please everyone with a single MMR. But DBD is still a game and in any game the classic goal is to win and for survivors it means to escape, so DEVs decided to use it as the main criterion for MMR. And having fun and escaping don't always contradict. It's hard to fine-tune a complicated MMR system for a game like DBD that takes too many criteria into account, I think this is why DEVs decided to go with such a simple MMR, otherwise it won't be better than RNG and would be much more exploitable.
If we were to judge pure survivor skill, then yes, escaping isn't very accurate, the problem is there are 4 survivors. One player can be a good looper and waste a lot of killer time and die at the end of the game, while other survivors do gens and escape. If were are to judge pure skill, the best criterion would be average chase time. The longer a survivor is chased before going down - the higher his skill is. It's not the only criterion, but it's surely the most important one. But you need to add many other less important criteria to it, you need to cover altruism (if someone never saves anyone, he doesn't deserve high MMR), gens (what if you fail 50% of skill checks?) etc. And this all would make MMR very sophisticated and would need very long testing and fine-tuning, so DEVs decided to go with a KISS approach.
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So you are telling me that I play as good as someone with 41h of total playtime?
I think the big problem with current mmr is that it treats each game as 4 seperate 1v1's with the killer. Imagine a situation - you are opening a gate and your whole team goes down. Should you risk dying trying to save your teammates? It's not that I intentionally die every game. I try to play more as a team. If I die, but I save someone else I am fine with that. This is what I mean by "risky plays". In general not leaving people behind. You can do a lot in a match and die and it's still considered a loss. This is my main issue with sbmm. I think emblem system was better for me and my playstyle. I am pretty sure you could rank up even if you died, or at least get a black pip. Don't get me wrong, emblem system was not great either. You could derank from doing only objective or by running a killer whole game. But that could be improved.
There is too much stuff to take into account for a proper mmr system. That's why there should not be mmr system in the first place. Current implementation is oversimplified and does not work properly. Especially on low mmr. It's probably okay at higher mmr.
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I understand what you mean. But players are demanding a good matchmaking system, it was always one of the most frequent requests, because when weak survivors or killers get matched to strong ones, people get very upset and complain a lot, so some solution is needed.
Emblem system is probably very hard to manage. For every change in game balance you need to go over it and fine-tune it again, sometimes with arbitrary changes, which are not backed by real evidence. In order to make proper adjustments you need to spend a lot of time testing it every time balance changes come out. That's a PITA. And it wasn't any better than SBMM when it comes to evaluating your real skill.
The problem with SBMM is, how do you formalize being skillful in DBD? What are the actual criteria that you can translate into game code?
For me it's certainly long chase times. Most valuable survivors are those who can run killer for long. But if you base MMR only on that, it can be exploited. Have one long run and then just stand in the corner for the rest of the game and your MMR will rise. At the end you can end up with two dozen criteria and it still probably won't work well and one of the reason being, as you already mention the 4v1 nature of the game. You can be the most skillful survivor in the game and at the same time the only one who was scarified during the game.
I think the reasoning behind the current SBMM was: if you play enough games with many other players and you escape a lot, that means you are of big use for the team, which is logical, so your rating goes up. Playing in SWF when someone specializes on running the killer while others are doing gens will skew your rating. But what are the alternatives beside the old emblem system?
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Well, you can run a killer for a pretty long time by using a lot of resources. If your team can push through gens fast enough then great. But that usually does not happen. This means every other chase will be extremaly short because all pallets are gone. This also depends on map you get. Just look at the Otzdarva 1v1 Cowshed challenge. In my opinion the difference between good survivour and bad one is that a good one uses resources wisely. But skill is also decision making and this cannot be measured by any system.
Reasoning behind sbmm is that a good player should escape more on average than a bad player. That's what the whole hockey reference means. But what happens when you constantly get baby Claudettes who keep self-caring in a corners of the map? How can you win a game like this? Especially with those unnecessary nerfs to a self-care.
I am not saying mmr is not working at all. I am saying that mmr is not working properly for me. No matter what, I should not be matched with people with about 40h of total playtime.
"portions of the matchmaking ranking spectrum where individual matches are of poor quality, and are often determined by factors such as poor team coordination which are perceived to be outside the individual player's control. This ostensibly makes it difficult for skilled players to "climb" up the matchmaking ranking (and out of Elo hell), due to the difficulty of consistently winning games under these conditions" - Elo hell, wikipedia.
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Okay. Let's qualify here. Because you're not saying 'worse, objectively'. You're saying 'worse, subjectively'. Ala - worse for you. Because you've got a playstyle contrary to what the game wants you to do, so you're going to drop your MMR.
Now, this is your prerogative. But the SBMM system is not designed to cater to people doing this, it's designed to cater towards people trying to kill/escape. And, by and large, it works.
The thing about RBMM is that while it did allow people to mess around and still be paired with stronger (or weaker) people, it was miserable for newer players (especially on the few days after the reset), was wall-to-wall smurfs and derankers and would constantly pair people with a dozen hours of experience against people with 1000.
Are they escaping?
Are you?
Because by the sounds of it, the former is true and the latter isn't. You're basically unplaying the game.
Also - I think a lot of people misunderstand two things about the SBMM system.
- MMR is not a reward. It's something there to - on average, and over time - pair you with more evenly matched opponents. That is all.
- 'Average' is the key word here. In the often cited hypothetical case of a person who runs the killer for 5 gens and then dies, and the Claudette who spends the entire game stealthing around the map but escapes, that survivor is going to *on average* escape more than that Claudette. One game is not going to break things in half.
It still has it's issues, particularly when long queues happen (which the BP rewards should help fix) and when lobby dodges happen (this needs to be fixed) but - for the intended purpose of making games more even, it's 100% better than RBMM was.
Then play the game properly.
BHVR are looking into smurfing/deranking and how to prevent it, so I suspect that this won't be a problem for much longer anyway.
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I would argue that the game IS 4 1v1's vs the killer. IMO, your end goal should be to survive, the other survivors be damned. If choosing between helping my team mate and dying, and me surviving, I'm choosing me. I will get the MMR tick, they will not, and I will be matched with other players who did get the tick. Theoretically, at the top of the charts will be the most grizzled survivors, and they didn't get there by throwing the killer kills, or putting others before themselves.
I think the MMR system is actually quite elegant.
I like to think of it more along the lines of a battle royale. Only 1 player wins. Which will you be, the winner or the loser?
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Their version of SBMM is terrible for the game.
Whether you played well or not ends up irrelevant since all that matters is escaping or dying. It rewards survivors for just letting teammates die instead of attempting a rescue and rewards killers for just tunneling/camping someone out instead of going for hooks and fun chases.
I ran the killer for 5 gens but finally went down after all that? I'm a bad player apparently.
The old system was way better since even if I died, the system would recognize that I still played will and move up in rank. So if my team was bad I would still slowly be getting better and better teammates.
With the SBMM even if I played well not only am I not slowly getting better teammates but I actually slowly getting worse ones since it think you played bad from dying.
Terrible design.
Then even if the SBMM system was somehow miraculously fixed to be perfect the game doesn't support it since the game is balanced for extremely low skill level solo queue. In other words, the game currently needs bad matchmaking to throw worse survivors into your matches because it's not balanced for good vs good players.
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Doesn't mean you played bad, means you didn't get a pip. Why should you? You died. The game isn't about looping the killer for 5 gens, it's about surviving.
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"The game isn't about looping the killer for 5 gens, it's about surviving."
That is the exact flawed design philosophy that the devs have which caused this problem in the first place. The skill of how well they played the match is more important than if they survived.
A killer that got 8 hooks is a way better killer than one that got 2 kills.
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The actual purpose of SBMM is to separate tryhard serious players and casual players which playing for fun, not to measure your skill.
Although MMR could be changed to up/down based on team win/lose instead of single win/lose, there is no better MMR than simple "win or lose" as winning/losing generally include all the aspect of game.
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If a killer got 8 hooks no kill intentionally or didn't care about it, he deserved to tick down as he will not be interested in tryhards.
If a killer got 3k ( 2k is 6 hooks worth of kills so I don't get why you put 2k there) by sweating as much as possible, he deserves to tick up because killer himself is a tryhard.
There is no such things as "problem" here.
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Just for reference, the devs commented in their big MMR blog post a couple of months ago that one change they’re working on is making MMR for survivors go up or down based on how many survivors escape as a group (i.e. something like 0-1 escape then all the survivors lose MMR, 3-4 escape they all go up, and 2 escape there’s no change). That way if a survivor sacrifices themselves to help the rest of the team escape then their MMR will go up, or if a survivor tanks the game by hiding all match to get hatch then their MMR will go down if everybody else died. If or when the devs implement this it should address your complaint about you sacrificing yourself to help your team.
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"2k is 6 hooks worth of kills so I don't get why you put 2k there"
Because it's not 6 hooks. 2k can be me literally just standing in front of a hook reving my saw on Bubba.
Hooks are much more indicative of skill than kills are. They are not equivalent as you are using them.
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My experiences with sbmm. That's the title of my post. Those are mine expieriences with sbmm. From my point of view. That's why in my opinion mmr is not working properly for me. I am not intentionally dying every game. Last time I intentionally died was against a farmer about 100 games ago. I do try to escape. But I am also not taking this game too serious. I just can't. It's not balanced enough.
Suvivour who can run a killer for a long time will escape on average more than scared Claudette. This is a fact. But the good survivour still depends on a team. Good survivour will eventually die even if he's facing a bad killer. This is the matter of time. What do you think will happen if you match a good survivour and 3 bad survivours who does everything except gens? In theory a good survivour should easily carry 3 bad survivours. In practice a good survivour will get full attention of a killer, basically playing a 1v1 game while the rest of a team is hiding the moment they hear terror radius. I remember one time I was playing against a Plague. I heard Ace cleanse 3 times while not being in a chase a single time. How can I say that for sure? Because I was being chased the entire time. The rest of a team was fully sick. I guess every time he touched something stinky he'd just go and cleanse. Other time I was playing against a Pinhead. Match lasted about 20 minutes. I could probably loop him for a long time and keep him busy, but eventually someone would need to take the box. How a new player is supposed to know how one of many killers power works? Low mmr games are just something else.
The thing is I think I actually never been at high mmr. I never played this game much. With emblem matchmaking I'd stick around purple ranks. I could mess around and still rank up. Even if I run a meme build I'm still be a valuable teammate. I do gens, I try to keep killer busy and away from gens. Even if I die I did something to help others survive. I progressed game in some way.
Mmr is not a reward. It's a system that determines if you are valueable teammate or not. Escape ratio does not directly translate into skill. Escaping is the end result. But a skilled play does not necessarily makes you escape. Maybe a skilled play is saving someone else? Mmr does not take into account what happens in the game. It can't tell if you are skilled or not. Perhabs making it more focused about team would make it better? I hope devs keep on improving the system.
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That's not what they're saying at all. What they're saying is if you run into the killer and die lategame, and you do this every game, you'll be low MMR. Doesn't matter if you ran the killer for 5 gens. If you go for saves and die but your teammates get out, doesn't matter, lose mmr.
If you really want better teammates, start playing for escapes instead of whatever you're playing for now. Eventually you'll reach an MMR with better teammates. If you're actually a good player you should have no problem escaping most matches if everyone in the lobby is bad.
The kill/escape based MMR system is a stupid oversimplification that makes it insanely easy for survivors to drop their mmr, and very very easy for killers as well. But it is what it is. I think the tweaks they have made makes it more loose anyway, I'm okay with it. Still very random match quality and skill level though. Funny that when I get to high MMR on a killer, I see more gen focused players. Some are good in chase some are bad, but they all do gens.
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If you can't kill anything, hooks are just waste of time anyway.
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Not killing anyone doesn't mean that you couldn't kill them, that's a false equivalency.
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