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Camping/Tunneling are the leading cause of imbalanced matchups - to the Killers detriment
The more 4Ks you achieve by targeting only one survivor, the more MMR moves you up to where that one survivor is harder and harder to catch.
Camping and tunneling is a feast or famine playstyle too. So once you hit the MMR where Survivors start to avoid you successfully, it’s usually a stomp.
And after this point if the same playstyle continues it’s kinda a continual switch back and forth.
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It's a factor, but the leading cause is the MMR soft cap that pretends everyone over a certain rating has the same rating.
I recall one of the DBD devs making an offhand remark in one of their videos about how they use modified Glicko for MMR. Glicko takes into account the frequency of recent play to determine the certainty of a player's rating. The more they've played, the more certain their rating and so the less it moves each game; the less they've played, the less certain their rating and so the more it moves each game. For a player with few recent matches, Glicko can easily make adjustments of over 200 rating points from a single match result.
The theory is similar to that of the binary search algorithm: you make large changes at first to try to get the player in the right range for them, then smaller and smaller changes to fine-tune their rating within that range. This is very effective at getting the player very close to their "true" rating in a relatively small number of matches.
By default, Glicko starts ratings at 1500. Various numbers have been thrown out for what the soft cap could be, but 1600 or 2000 seem to be the most frequently-cited numbers.
Now, we don't know exactly what modifications they've made to Glicko, and the exact numbers really don't matter that much for the purposes of this discussion. The point is that it's not too hard to see that it's entirely plausible for someone to reach the MMR soft cap after as few as 3 matches (or the first 3 matches after a break).
And that's where everything breaks down, because as soon as you get close enough to the soft cap, you are suddenly eligible to be matched with players way above it. It's a certain kind of "ELO hell" but at the upper end of the range instead of in the middle.
This is true regardless of how the killer plays. It will happen sooner if the killer employs hyper-efficient strategies, but it will still happen if the killer doesn't -- just later.
I get why the soft cap is there. Without something like it, two problems emerge:
- You have to consistently bring the same energy to every match to achieve the same result, which creates a situation where competitively-minded players are going to have to sweat their ever-loving butts off to get a 2K/2E. (A 2-out being the most perfect possible result in a match where everyone has the same rating.)
- Players at the extreme upper end of MMR have to wait a lot longer for a match because the population at both ends of a bell curve is miniscule.
The only real solutions to problem 2 are to either not solve it and let the players wait, or to give up after some time and feed the top players bunnies they can stomp.
But problem 1 isn't technically a problem. That's what you expect if matchmaking is very good at putting together matches: a very close result every game. So it's actually evidence that matchmaking is good! If you only want either sweaty or chill games, it's perfect. But it becomes problematic when you want to have a combination of sweaty and chill games, which I suspect the majority of the player base does. Matchmaking doesn't have a way to predict how a player will play.
So the soft cap tries to fix this perceived problem by effectively introducing an element of randomness, putting everyone above a certain rating in the same bag and shaking it up to create matches. It works pretty well for players near the median rating of all active players who are above the soft cap. For players near the bottom end of the range, which includes players who are merely approaching the soft cap, possibly for the first time, it can create this wall where you suddenly and apparently inexplicably start facing players who are not just better than you, but not even close to being in the same bracket as you.
But this is by design.
tl;dr: The soft cap creates imbalanced matches. That's literally what it's supposed to do.
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What I do know is tunnelling off hook in particular (usually after camping that hook) is one thing that is killing the game. People just DC and the matches are ruined for everyone and this is happening more and more.
Of course there are a lot of ridiculous reasons people DC and sometimes it appears there is no logical reason of course. But the most common reason I see is someone is tunnelled off hook and they decide to just leave.
I don't even thing SBMM is really even a thing for the most part, I think it just throws you with anyone close enough to you as quickly as possible. So in the old metric we would be getting rank 1 and rank 10 in the same lobby, I guarantee it.
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Interesting.
Does the Soft Cap come into play as soon as someone hits the queue, or is there a grace period where it tries for closer matchmaking before the Soft Cap allows for a greater range of ratings to be pulled from?
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Devs should already be aware that tunneling and camping are one of dbd's biggest issues. There are complaints about it everyday and it's been the case for years. Now the real question is why hasn't it been actually addressed yet? Laziness? Do they not care? Do they think it's actually fine that way? (I don't think being this delusional is even possible so perhaps not it) HOW is it not their number ONE priority yet.
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I believe the devs already said tunneling and camping are "strategies"
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I already said this too many times. For some reason people think 4K should drop their MMR and play against weaker survivors.
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We could say that bully/sabo/rush squads are a strategy too but it doesn't mean it should exist, especially when it's ruining your game.
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The soft cap is a maximum rating for matchmaking purposes, so it's immediate. For example, if the cap is 2000 and you have a 2300 rating, when you enter the queue the matchmaker will pretend you have a 2000 rating, which means it could put someone at 1950 in your lobby and it thinks that's a good match, when you're a far better player.
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Hmm. Sounds more like a matchmaking Hard Cap, if MMR hits a wall after a point.
Would have expected something more like: After the Soft Cap, upper and lower bounds for search ranges expand much faster, with the lower bound resuming standard search expansion once reaching below the Soft Cap.
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Make the MMR tighter and you will see less tunneling. They need to take MMR back to where it was when the system released. Even if it means slightly longer matchmaking queues. I used to favor faster matchmaking but the amount of mismatches i've seen has changed my mind. When MMR was released if you played like a sweat then you got matched with survivors who also played like sweats. You were much more likely to get matched with juicer squads if you 4K'd often. I was balls deep in my killer main phase at that point so I know from experience that games used to be significantly harder. It's much harder to pull off cheese tactics against good teams. Unfortunately killer mains cried that the game was too hard and Behavior caved to their demands for an easier system. If people want to play every killer game like their life is on the line then why shouldn't they get matched with top tier survivors? The current matchmaking is far too loose and it leads to killers getting bad players they can easily tunnel out. Nearly every game is a killer immediately hard tunneling the least experienced survivor who realistically should not even be in that game to begin with.
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bHVR needs to give Survivors more tools to deal with Face camping and survivors need to stop pulling Survivor off the hook when the Killer is still in the area. bHVR should not put in fairplay mechanics that restricts Killers from enacting a Slasher movie Scenario.
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Blablabla. Watch any tournament et find me one killer who is not tunneling or proxycamping at some point (and is not nurse or blight).
"But you don’t have to sweat !! Play chill"
Don’t force people to play the way you want. The survivor rulebook is getting boring.
These strats are only a problem for some survivors, the ones who are bad, can’t loop and take the L.
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In my opinion, tunneling and camping should not exist, at all. The game should be designed to make it impossible to do. And at the same time buff other killer aspects such as gen speed and loops. I am okay with spending more time on a gen or having to loop better if I am guaranteed to be free from tunneling and camping.
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MMR restrictions will not really impact tunneling/camping, especially if a player is already doing that.
Why take a harder route when you could take the path of least resistance?
Chill or not, if all you do is camp and tunnel and complain that survivors are OP, you dug your own hole.
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I am not against guarding hook or focusing one survivor.
Though I am against the disproportionate impact removing one survivor from the game early has, compared to going through multiple survivors.
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Mostly because anyone who dares to make any suggestion will get yelled at.
EDIT: on a more serious note, there is a problem where the community doesn't want to address this either. Anti-camp solutions often get a mix of 'just rush gens', 'it's a valid tactic' and the asinine 'the devs tried one thing, once, six years ago, so it's pointless to try and come up with something'. Anti-tunnel solutions will have killers swearing on their grandmother's grave that they have never gotten a single kill without tunnelling.
The campers and killers are absolutely sabotaging the search for a solution.
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Chill survivors would not matched against you anyway, dont care about them.
Though dont complain when you matched against the sweat.
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There's no need to overhaul anything particular core to make it fair (keyword fair, not either-sided) in at least 90% of situations, imho.
The fact that camptunneling works so well is because the good ol' parroted sayin' "just do gens and escape 4head" doesn't apply anymore with current repair times and slowdowns. And even a coordinated team has to commit 2 people to a save (possibly even ending in a 1-for-1) due to the most stupid mechanich that is unhook grabs/interruptions.
Simply remove unhook grabs/interruptions and add 5/10 sec per hook stage. It's not even an unheard-of exception, given that jumping into the hatch was also purposefully changed to be ungrabbable/uninterruptable (minus a possible oversight with Wesker). The rescuer becomes locked in an instantaneously queued animation, but they still take damage. The killer can get their 1-for-1 but they can no longer force a single rescuer in a stupid chicken game, or force an additional survivor off gens by simply Sstanding at the hook. That is for camping.
Then make the unhook endurance work as MoM's (aka doesn't put you in deep wound. Oh, look, another exception that's already intended). Savvy tunnelers will smack the rescued as soon as the save is complete, also because mobility and ranged killers can follow up very quickly with a second attack. But the change will make it so they now will have to contend with OtR, DH and whatnot, instead of being able to circumvent them.
There will still be fringe scenarios like Bubba. But if they haven't been able to fix his facecamping after all these years and a rework, there's not much faith to have in general.
As always, DbD's community is its own worst enemy. I believe the devs have to carry part of the blame on the specific topic of this thread, simply because they tried something six years ago, didn't work and just didn't revisit the issue despite many suggestions throughout the years. And they seem very wary of not upsetting a very vocal minority.
Even when fixing camping issues through perks, which is a terrible band-aid, but still better than nothing, they just backtracked without even giving it a chance. And I'm talking about how they butchered Reassurance to make it work on hook instance basis, where a simpler, straightforward and more gradual nerf would have been per hook stage. Or, they could have increased the range in compensation. Instead, they opted for the sledgehammer.
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I am not complaing when survivors are good. I mostly play survivor now anyways. Good for them. Just tired of the double standard.
- Good survivor = skill, fun, fair
- Good killer = ruining the game, carried by X perk, Y addon, Z strat.
Tunneling and proxycamp are fine. When you don’t hide from the killer and make yourself an easy target because you can’t loop, that’s not the killer playing dirty, it’s you being bad at the game. Or your teamates because they don’t take hits for you.
Back in the days, when rank matchmaking was still a thing, a friend of mine got matched against Otz. He played very "fair", yet my friend called him a dog tunneler in the end game chat, only to realized it was Otz streaming lmao. You guys have to realize tunneling, camping and boring / zzz are copium words for survivors.
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This thread isn’t saying that proxy/tunnel shouldn’t be a strategy (and a survivor being out of place is different than proxy until hook notification and chasing them), but that if you rely on it too much (to the point of starting off with it every match) you’re going to be inappropriately matched up with loopers at a higher skill level. And your games are gonna suck hard and it’ll feel like the survivors are OP when in reality it’s that you’re lacking in other areas of gameplay.
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So what ? That’s a good thing anyways. It’s good for a smart killer to be matched against good survivors. This way he can improve and learn how to beat them. It’s not like mindgames are hard to learn either.
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I would not say tunneler is "smart". Everyone knows tunneling is the easiest way to win, its like knowing 1+1=2. Super reward and lowest risk in mid to low MMR.
- Good survivor relied on chase, big items & DH is unfair, but its necessary against tunneling.
- For killer, there is a difference between playing Trapper, Yellow addon, 0 slowdown, play fair ; and playing Spirit, Red addon, 4 slowdown, tunneling. Eventhough the skill is the same.
Thing is, for example in mid to low MMR you can hit survivor once per 20sec during chase, many of them are chill survivors that dont use DH, the chase end in 40sec for the first down. Later, by tunneling, you cut down the chase time by half, 20sec per down, of course good for you.
Then you play against great survivors in high MMR, they players are difference, you can hit them once per 40sec. You will need 80sec for the first down; and most of these players use DH, the chase would take 120sec for the first down. End up 2-3 Gen done every first chase. Even with tunneling, they will stand 80sec before their next down. There is no fun on both side in these match. Either tunneled out or Gen rush, stress on both side.
There are entitled players on both side, survivors dont entitled to escape as killers dont entitled to 4K. But everyone can be entitled to have fun.
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Assuming that the player has the time to get better, and isn't playing sparsely and set in their ways.
Even then, smart play doesn't equate to engaging gameplay, nor would I call camping or tunneling smart. It just so happens that following the carrot (The Survivor) for any kind of sense of match progression usually results in camping/tunneling. It's not like the game gives Killers any incentive to go for other Survivors.
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I would adding further to his line.
Smart survivors know first chase is important, they will predrop and W. Now Im sure killers dont see thats smart.
Which is correct, it isnt smart, but easy and effective. Exactly the same to tunneling and camping.
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Still kinda wish that Survivors didn't have all the Map chase resources pre setup for them at the start of the Trial. Would be interesting if Survivors did have to choose where and when to place Pallets.
Akin to how Defenders need to setup reinforced walls in R6 Siege.
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A hard cap would mean your MMR is capped, but it's not. You can gain MMR above the cap, but it's only capped when searching for a match. This is why it's called a soft cap.
It's not a meaningless distinction -- your real (uncapped) MMR is used when calculating rating adjustments post-match. This means if you are way above the soft cap, you would have to lose a lot more games to drop below it than someone who is exactly at the soft cap.
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Regarding problems 1 and 2, I think they're only really issues because the devs want to have it both ways with their matchmaking system. They want it to be fairly accurate but they also don't want people treating the game competitively in relation to MMR. I don't think players would mind sweating as much at higher MMR brackets if there was a real reason to do so. But a lot of players understandably didn't like it when they turned on SBMM and suddenly they had the hardest games of their lives for no reason or reward/rank title. And problem 2 kind of ties into problem 1. The player who sweats to an elite level will probably be ok with a longer queue for those games.
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Agreed, and I think this could be resolved with separate ranked and unranked queues. Unranked could reward a fraction of the BP and/or have access to all perks, items, add-ons, and offerings just like customs. Whether dailies, tome challenges, and achievements should be enabled for unranked would be a matter for further discussion.
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