Any Plans to Reinstate MMR?

When the matchmaking system "gradually expand its search range," does it prioritize the outer ends of the population bell curve? For example, if the MMR ranges from 0 to 100, does it give priorities for 0s and 100s (with the least numbers of players) over 10s and 90s so that 0s will much more likely to be matched with 5s and 10s, and 100s will be matched with 95s and 90s, instead of the least number of players being stuck with each other (0s and 100s being matched together because of the difficulty in finding others with similar ratings) From the complaints sometime heard on the forum (I don't know if it's true or not) it sometimes sounds like brand new players are going against players with thousands of hours - to the point where it's hard to believe that there is absolutely no other players in between those skill levels during that time in that region. Or do all of those cases occur only because of random backfills? ...any progress made on the backfill issues?

I guess what I was wondering is when the matchmaking expands, it should be much easier for the middle 80% of the ratings curve to immediately find a game with each other than for the top and bottom 10% to find a game with players within that 80%. Just wanted to make sure that top and bottom players are not being matched with each other because everyone in the 80% had already found a match amongst each other. It sounds like it's not - thanks.

Few more questions:

1. You said:

What percentage of current matches require the game to expand the search for players beyond what BHVR would consider a fair match for all players?

2. How well does MMR predict the escape outcome for SWF games vs solo-que games?

3. Any progress made on the backfill issues caused by lobby dodging? Mandy had suggested locking the lobby - could we at least test that out to see if it would improve the quality of matches?

So then how is it possible that one of the most well known Survivor player that should by all reasonable accounts be well over the MMR cap got matched against a killer with 97 hours in the game? I understand that playtime doesn't equate to skill, but I find it impossible to accept that a multiple competition winning survivor was pitted against someone who only recently picked up the game and matchmaking was doing a pretty good job so far.

...because it's only natural that the extreme ends of a bell curve would have fewer closer relations...

This is a mathematical truth, not a conspiracy.

Thank you for always explaining the MMR system when it come up, it is very helpful ad clears many misconceptions.

I am curious, would it be feasible to have a 2 system matchmaking where players can control their matchmaking preferences in settings.

Setting 1: Prioritize Time - Literally the present system, unchanged other than the "always improving updates" you mentioned.

Setting 2: Prioritize Rating - A system where time is not a factor and you are only matched once players at your rating have been found. Due to the way lobbies and backfill mechanic work, if a player left the lobby, the whole lobby would need to break and the search would begin again.

This way players can have their cake and eat it too. Personally, I'll always choose the present system. But, this wuld allow players who state "I'll wait however long, as long as it's a well matches game" to actually do that. But, it won't force it on any player. Additionally, if the player is in control, they should have nothing to complain about.

I do realize this could be unrealistic if you invest the resources into an implementation/system such as this and +90% of the players stick to the present system.

I don't believe mmr is legitimately used. I won't believe until I see it. So many times I'll check after a match because the other survivor couldn't last long in chase, missed multiple skill checks, hides across the map when chase is nowhere near them, etc. Everytime it's a new player. Same with a killer that obviously makes dumb mistakes and gets smoked. I spend maybe 10 seconds waiting for a match and the lobby is filled within a few seconds, so I don't really believe these replies by Peanits.

To clarify what Peanits said, they don't want to make the majority of players feel they need to wait longer for a more fair match as many of those same players will get bored of waiting and just go play another game like Civ V, so until further notice, we're stuck with the faster Q times and worse match-ups. :/

If it were balanced around the Claudette crouching around the map there wouldn't be so many complaints about solo queue. It would be awful for playing killer as it would be balanced around one or two people. A player to do gens and one to run the killer for 5 of them.

It would be like balancing the game for killers that don't know how to chase. They try to bloodlust every safe pallet on a map, refuse to break them, and take turns around obstacles as wide as possible. They'd have to remove 90% of the pallets and allow killers to phase through the objects to balance for that.

I think a big part of what has alot of people convinced that DBD matchmaking is near to non-existant is a combination of two main things

The first thing is that there is a possibility that the maximum range is a bit too wide at the extreme ends. The main complaint I hear is from cases of extremely skilled players with thousands and thousands of hours matching into people who have maybe a few hundred- and such a fact shows well before the match ends, as such games tend to be terribly onesided in the favor of the veteran. I hear and see from alot of high end players that something in the park of 90% of their matches are basically trivial because they match into people who don't know what they're doing.

The second thing, and the thing that much easier to fix, is the fact that MMR/Ranking is not visible or apparent to players. The way you've phrased your post here implies that the MMR system is very granular with a wide range of tiers or brackets for skill; but that is about as far from common consensus on MMR as it gets from the perspective of the players (as propagated by the game's content creation community). Most players are convinced that DBD MMR consists of a very small number of brackets, the absolute highest end of which is extraordinarily wide and encompasses the vast majority of the playerbase- therefore resulting in these skewed matches being the norm.

If that is in fact the case, then the fault is clearly a flawed system for calculating MMR which does not accurately reflect the skill of the players and is falsely placing too many people in the highest bracket. If it is not the case, and the system is in fact granular as your post seems to imply, then the easiest fix would be to simply make MMRs visible to players. Their own, and those of their opponents post-match; including MMR changes from match results. This would give everyone a much better idea of how the MMR is actually working and do absolute wonders to mitigate complaints about the system- as if people can clearly see their relative granular rankings, they may be much more inclined to believe that the other players simply made too many mistakes and had a bad match.

Of course, this would also happen to expose any potential flaws in the MMR calculation since it would be glaringly obvious if the system is giving players too much MMR for wins relative to losses- or if the game is even correctly identifying what constitutes a win or a loss in the first place.

For me it feels the majority of the playerbase is at least above the soft cap at this point. And for how this MMR works, it means it will be still a mixed bag of average, good and really good players. Maybe it's time to higher the soft cap a bit?

Did you know that modern MMR is broken? That's why there's been a lot of discussions about MMR on the forums lately. No matter how much you listen to the explanation in words, no one can believe you if you can't see the rating.

Consider making casual and ranked matches as others have suggested. The reason is simple. This is because there are players who value "time" and players who value "quality". And make sure that only you can see the rating. This is for credit. What to do is very simple.

Since there have been several suggestions in this thread that promoted separating those who want quality matchmaking vs fast matchmaking, I'm going to bring up why BHVR has probably not done that.

By separating the queue into "quality" lobbies and "fast" lobbies, you are actually dividing up the pool of available players. So even if you want "fast" matchmaking, half of the people in the current queue may be unavailable because they want "quality" matchmaking, and therefore you may be forced to wait twice as long - it is no longer a "fast" matchmaking system. Players who want "quality" matchmaking may also need to wait e.g. 20-30 minutes instead of 5-10 minutes also - this would be because even though there may currently be others who are at a similar MMR, they may get immediately pulled into the "fast" lobbies because that's what they had picked as their preference. (although some folks, like me, may be ok with this.)

This game already divides players by 1.MMR, 2. eight server locations around the world, 3. and role (survivor or killer) that they play. (And remember, they want the killer:survivor ratio to always be 1:4 as much as possible.) It is also influenced by the time of day that players are able to play. BHVR may be hesitant to separate the queue further because of that.

The last time they asked this community in a survey whether they favor queue times over quality matchmaking the overwhelming response was for the queue times.

Getting the blasted Cross Progression done can solve your second point.

I'm surprised so many people say this game is a casual game. If it's a casual game, why are so many people commenting on balance changes? I think it's because people want the game to be fair. So what does the game look like when we seek fairness? The answer is simple. Makes the game more competitive. In other words, it can be said that many people are really looking for competitiveness in their hearts. Fairness⇄Competitiveness

I think a lot of this is true and goes to human psychology. If MMR works players should get to a point where they feel like they hit top tier competitors, regardless of whether it is true or not.

In addition to the snowballing, I think people don't really grasp the probabilities. Example: let's say I'm using huntress and I have a 50% chance to hit the survivors with a hatcher based on our skill levels. One out of four times I'll hit the first two shots and be doing great, one out of four times I'll miss the first two and potentially be way behind. But people tend to think in the first scenario that the survivor was just really bad and in the second that the survivor was really good, when its more of a case of randomness. Given how important the early game is, early good luck/bad luck can be a deciding factor.

I'm surprised so many people say this game is a casual game. If it's a casual game, why are so many people commenting on balance changes?

If you took everyone on the forums, reddit, etc. posting about the game, we'd still make up well under 1% of the player base.

Also, a casual game can still have balance changes, things can be broken, those two aren't really related.

Thing is, BHVR had a test week last year where they messed with their SBMM every day to see how people reacted. On the more accurate MMR days, people overwhelmingly did not like the longer waits. In fact, at its most strictest there were people waiting for upwards of an hour. Lots of people say they'll be happy to wait longer yet when that time arrived, it was recieved negatively.

The problem with this is that you're dividing the playerbase, which itself effects matchmaking negatively.

With the people who select 'long queue/closer matches' out of the 'fast queue/looser matches' running, both options will end up taking longer.

Fast queues will end up having no matchmaking at all, and long queues will take a ridiculously long time to the point where you'll probably give up waiting around the 30 minute mark. Everyone loses.

I'm against anything that splits the playerbase sigificantly.

I don't want to sit in lobbys for 5 minutes plus. Sure once it's a minor inconvienence. But 200 times it's a reason I stop playing your game. It sucks in Apex, it sucks extra hard in Overwatch, and it would suck here too.

Absolutely no.

Because long time players don't want competitive matches, they want quick easy wins. So all the best and sweatiest players would just play Casual, with an even bigger chance of being paired with newbies they can bully.