We need killer-based MMR
What prompted that thought on my end: Another discussion on Dredge being put in C-Tier by Otz and how he needs buffs had me thinking "yeah, right, because I see the Dredge so often I would absolutely know how to deal with him if he gets those buffs /s". I see Dredge maybe once every 50-80 hours of playing survivor, maybe even less frequently. I had one yesterday and can't even remember the one before that; definitely not in January or December.
But is that the Dredge's fault? No. - On the other hand, it doesn't matter if a survivor has high or low MMR; if they don't know the ins and outs of that specific killer it's as if they are low MMR - bottom mid at best, if we make the argument that overall experience and general game sense has a decent impact on the overall match. (We can also see that whenever a new killer releases; the first few weeks are marked by two things: oversaturation and exceptionally high killrates)
This might in fact be why to the devs the Dredge and other killers look perfectly fine: They have an overall decent killrate. Not because they're in a good spot but because very few people know what to do. It's easy to win against survs who don't know about the killer specific things they need to do.
Which brings me to the title of the post: The best way I can think of to remedy that situation is, if survivors have an MMR for each killer. That way killers will receive buffs if their kit is indeed too weak if matched against somewhat equally skilled survivors since their killrates aren't inflated from going against, de facto, inexperienced survivors.
Comments
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Really quick note on this:
This might in fact be why to the devs the Dredge and other killers look perfectly fine: They have an overall decent killrate. Not because they're in a good spot but because very few people know what to do. It's easy to win against survs who don't know about the killer specific things they need to do.
We don't make decisions solely based on kill rates. Kill rates only show us where a problem might be, they don't tell us whether or not there is a problem or what that problem is. We spend a lot of time gathering feedback and watching gameplay before committing to changing something.
That aside, matchmaking is incredibly complex, so it's difficult to account for absolutely everything. To shed some light on why this isn't the case at the moment, most skills you use as you play are transferable and work against multiple Killers. Managing your time and deciding when you should be working on a generator, when you should be healing, and when you should be saving are all things that will come in handy no matter who you're facing. Memorizing the layouts of different maps so you know where to run is always going to be the same. Looping a Trapper isn't very different to looping a Legion, or a Pig, or an Oni, and so on. Some force you to play a bit more differently, but there's still a core set of skills that you bring with you.
The tricky part with splitting your Survivor rating into a rating for each Killer is that there are a lot of Killers in the game - 34 and counting. In practice, this would mean that your rating against any given Killer would only update 1/34th of the time, making it very slow to adjust. If you were struggling against the Dredge, for example, you would have to play many matches against them before your rating would lower to a more comfortable range. It takes a bunch of matches to estimate where you should be, then many more to fine tune it. In order to have an accurate rating against each of those Killers, you would need to play hundreds if not thousands of matches.
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Kill rates don't show where problems might be; Killer-specific MMR ensures that every killer that has some realistic potential to kill Survivor without being unbeatable will gravitate to the same kill rate.
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With all due respect - but playing against an Oni and a Trapper are two completely different things. Some aspects are transferable, very true. You still have to do gens, yes. And you can still block the path with a pallet. It's a bad idea to three gen and a bad idea to get hooked right next to a progressed gen or go down right next to a hooked person. Running into teamies repairing a gen is also a generally bad idea.
But no amount of playing against a skilled Trapper (or Legion or Pig) will help you against a flicking Oni. If you don't know where and under what circumstances Oni can flick and can land frankly absurd hits you'll always sit there with a surprised pikachu face. You'll only know that once you encountered a bunch of Onis who could do that and slowly learned to deal with it. - But as you say: there are many, many killers. It will take survivors a lot of time until they encountered enough killers to learn how to deal with all their kits. Until then their overall MMR just means they'll get stomped match after match after match. And only facing killers who are way out of your league doesn't really help you improve either. (In theory the bumping up and down between killers you already know your way around and killers you don't know your way around should help - but if you face Blight and Wesker disproportionally often, then...well.)
I'm not saying it's easy to do a Killer based MMR - or feasible, honestly. Not neccessarily even because of the complexity (which I for obvious reasons have no clue about) but because of Qtimes. If a very skilled Oni would have to wait until they get matched with survs who have encountered enough Onis to get to their MMR.... they'll probably gonna wait for a very long time.
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"The best way I can think of to remedy that situation [...]"
Well, I can think of a lot of even better ways to solve it:
- Better in game documentation about every killer.
- Killer bots so survivors can practice against them.
- Per killer tutorial to learn how to both play as and against them.
- Any other idea that is realistically feasible (in other words, not impossible to do) and doesn't imply close to infinitum queue times.
Also, I recommend you look what Skill Based Match Making is and the technical details behind it so you understand why what you are suggesting doesn't make any sense and can simply not be done. Knowing how every killer work and how to play against them is part of getting good at the game.
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I think the real problem here is that really good advice against a Killer isnt something the game gives at all, truth be told you DO have programmed the game to show some messages while loading. but those messages are not sufficient to a survival strategy.
You really SHOULD improve them to helps survivors AND Killers more.
You have fog whisperers and brilliant community experts, Why not ask them to pool game knowledge to make the loading screen tips?
I want to bet you a free next chapter Peanits, if you guys got the community experts together to make some better loading screen tips this game would improve in gameplay standards at least 5 fold.
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"Knowing how every killer work and how to play against them is part of getting good at the game." Which requires you to have somewhat fair matches against each and every killer, no?
Neither documentation nor tutorials will help there; sure, you can pump the knowledge into your head if you want to treat dbd like a seminar for your college major - but that won't help you with the excution part.
The bots would be an idea - but only if they're actually having an authentic playstyle. Looking at surv bots, that's... questionable.
"Any other idea that is realistically feasible" - patronising much?
--- Granted, maybe the title should have come with a "theoretically" at the front. But titles being somewhat exaggerated/made somewhat more forceful/polarising/assertive isn't exactly a new concept either.
The feasible option of all that? Better than bots. Better than tutorials. Better than documentation. - And better than all matches being based on Killer MMR? A built-in 1v1 mode. I'm certainly no "come shack 1v1"- or "trapper-wraith"-monke but more than once I wished for a base game feature (both as surv and as killer) to have focused practise without having to scour Discord servers for people to practise with.
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Which requires you to have somewhat fair matches against each and every killer, no?
To acquire that knowledge in first place? Not really, no. If you don't know that The Knight's guards disappear the moment you start to unhook somebody no matter how many matches you play, you probably won't even try to unhook if a guard is near the hook. And even if for some reason you try, you probably would either not notice it or being confused, thinking maybe is a bug or something.
The problem is the lack of detailed documentation about killers, and not having a way to practice against them without having another person playing that killer. Both better documentation / tutorials and a practice mode are needed.
The feasible option of all that? Better than bots. Better than tutorials. Better than documentation. - And better than all matches being based on Killer MMR? A built-in 1v1 mode.
How a 1v1 mode against strangers would help with anything? Because if you want to 1v1 against someone you know to practice in a secure space, you could use custom matchs to do it. Again, the problem here is not having the option to practice without a human playing the killer.
But do you want to know the real best option to really learn how killers work and how to go against them? Playing them. Pick a killer, play a decent amount with him and not only you would learn everything about him (as you would basically need to if you want to do good), you would also learn what works against you so you can do the same against him when playing survivor.
Believe me, it works. Being a killer main did wonders for me when I started playing survivor.
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Yeah, honestly, this. The games gives near nothing for players to work with when it comes to info about killers on the spot.
It's pretty obvious why killers like Sadako, Pinhead and Skull Merchant have the highest kill rates, their gameplay is far from regular.
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