Lobby Shopping vs Going Next
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Each and every time they ask this community if they want quality matchmaking or faster queue times, the overwhelming response has always been in favor of queue times. So the only real chance for their MMR system to work as intended is that first or maybe second lobby, and the dodging & shopping around messes that up.
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Kinda sad tbh
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And yet people hate mismatched games, and survivors especially seem adamant about being able to go next as fast as possible when they happen, meaning that they actually do care about matchmaking quality quite a bit. Personally I think its a combination of running the numbers game (more matches = better chance of at least one of them being good) paired with impatience (both for queue times and unfavorable matches.) In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if many people prioritize matchmaking speed because they're expecting poor quality matches and assume they'll need a higher frequency to have actual good matches. Or maybe they just assume that longer matchmaking will be some egregious amount of time instead of maybe a few minutes more.
I still think backfill respecting MMR should at least be experimented and tinkered with instead of just shrugging and ignoring it altogether.
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I agree better quality matchmaking should be the priority. But right now the only ways I see to make that happen is we tolerate longer times, or we lock the lobbies once all five players are found, or we get rid of lobbies all together.
And I do not believe any of those three options currently have enough support from anyone, players or devs. So here we are.
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Another point that hasn't been raised is whether there are enough players from different mmr ranges queuing.
The backfilling is speculated to happen when someone of similar MMR dodges the lobby. What about cases where there aren't enough players of similar level playing in the region in the first place? Wouldn't the queue system be forced to grab someone from a higher or lower mmr range to compensate?
There is a possibility that even if lobbies are locked to prevent lobby dodging, there will still be cases of mismatched opponents. I don't think all the "backfilled" situations are purely due to people lobby dodging but probably a combination of dodging and not enough players on both sides for each mmr range.
I say this because last year, I got matched up against a 8k hour Survivor who was streaming. I went back into their vod to check if there was anyone who dodged the lobby prior to me and there wasn't. I had 800 hours at that point in time so I think it would be reasonable to assume that this Survivor would be in a different MMR range from me.
So if there was no backfiling, how did I get matched with this 8k hour player? The most likely conclusion was that there was no one else of a similar mmr range queuing so the game just gave up and chucked me into the lobby.
The lobby locking/hiding player information suggestion probably won't resolve the issue of people from different mmr being matched together, in fact it will become more obvious when it happens.
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Because killers dodging the match before it starts doesn't give the killer a direct in match benefit and handicap 3 survivors.
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Should survivors have the ability to see the killers and dodge killers who have toxic playerbases?
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They've already told us a bit about how this happens when they did some live MMR testing with the game about a year and a half ago.
The matchmaking system initially looks for players who are relatively close in MMR (this range is one of the variables they tested).
If the system can't find enough players to fill a 'perfectly matched' lobby after a little bit (another variable), it expands the MMR range it's using (yet another variable) and looks again.
This process basically continues until the lobby is full, ideally… however, if a player leaves an already full lobby, the system uses a fairly wide band of MMR range (again, another variable) to fill that slot as quickly as possible.
When the devs did their testing, they tweaked all of these variables every day for over a weekand asked for feedback from the community for how games felt every day, but didn't tell us what they had changed. The consensus from those tests were that getting into lobbies faster was most popular (meaning MMR ranges vary more in a lobby). Lobby dodging does this fastest.
Oh, and one of the tests they did without saying what they changed was to use the old 'rank' system from before MMR. And that was one of the least popular options.
Post edited by AmpersandUnderscore on0 -
I don't want to play matches with people who have red text ban records displayed on their Steam profile.
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Post edited by JPLongstreet on0
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This is one of my main issues with the MMR system. When I get instantly matched with a lobby, it's incredibly obvious that my match making rank has been completely disregarded in favour of finding a match for players that may have been waiting a while.
Personally, I'd like to be able to turn off this quick match making just like we can turn off cross platform. Turning it off might result in a very long wait for a match (or it may not find one at all), but I'd rather not play too many one sided games if there's nobody around my level currently playing. It's a recipe for a terrible time. The majority of the community might be in favour of faster match making, but the choice to opt out would be good.
I think it would help soften the blow when mismatches happen if we knew our own MMR scores too (and also allow players to gauge if the game currently has enough players on to make fair match ups). Letting players know their rank could lead to sweatier games, but I feel like that ship has kinda sailed already.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that mismatches are a big reason for players DCing or making an early exit from trials, so anything that could be done to reduce that would be good for the game.
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The system isn't being subverted though.
The current system isn't particularly good and prioritizes matchmaking speed over balanced matches when it is working properly. It isn't like MMR changes function just because a killer leaves the lobby since it not that narrowly gated to begin with and since by default we can't see the MMR scores you have no way of knowing how much of an actual difference there is.
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It is being subverted though.
They've basically already told us that once a lobby is created, and someone leaves, matchmaking basically turns itself off completely to get literally anyone that can fill that slot as fast as possible.
So when killers dodge a lobby, this is how you get situations of a 10k hour nurse going against 200 hour survivors, or the other extreme of a 5 hour killer against 6k hour survivors.
When searching for a lobby, it only gradually widens the MMR range slightly every several minutes. The only way the matchmaker would make these mistakes before the lobby is created with players in it, is if the players are literally waiting to queue for something like 30 minutes.
Lobby dodging opens the flood gates and completely bypasses the matchmaker to prioritize speed as much as possible.
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All I know is the first or maybe the second lobby formed has the best chance to have something like a fair match. And we're dancing around that.
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Because when a killer shops for a better lobby someone backfills into it, when someone gives up 1st or 2nd hook it leaves the other 4 players out to dry playing a game that's already decided 99% of the time.
This is not a "why complain about suvs doing x when killers do y" thing. When a suv exits a game early it leaves 3 other suvs and 1 killer out to dry in a game where. When a killer leaves a lobby someone backfills.
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Except I've legit watched the game build a lobby where it just slapped people in with wild degrees of disparity between hours played.
In a system where getting a balanced matchup is left to a background MMR score that is purely composed the most baseline metric available you'd be better off just not having the MMR be a factor to start with. A bad system isn't really harmed much by people not taking the first lobby they get shuffled into when the things that do the most damage happen after a match has started. Lobby shopping while not the greatest thing, personally I think it overall makes you a less adaptable player, doesn't really compare to myriad of thrown games that actually cause MMR scores to rubberband up and down.
Just even trying to accommodate the current matchmaking system on its terms of playing the first lobby you get often means you're better off only playing the killer or survivor you're best with/have the most stuff rather than using anyone new. MMR has been worse than the only rank buckets in almost every way other than speed of matches made which really was only a problem for people in low population regions and at extremely low or high ranks where. The old system did a better job of sectioning off people with massive amounts of hours from players who were just starting the game or playing very casually. If you were a player who could push to Rank 1 within a couple days of a season start then you'd effectively needed to wait for others on your approximate skill level to catch up to you in order to get matches. It sucked if you were in that situation, but most players were having more fun with the game and what felt like less scenarios of being completely overpowering for their opponent or completely outclassed as often.
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