The many problems of DBD's matchmaking (and how to fix them.)

If there is one subject of DBD's balance that can be equated to beating a dead horse, it would be complaining about the matchmaking. This horse is more then just dead, it's so dead that it's basically ash on the wind. So with the 2026 roadmap including a supposed "MMR Rework" I felt it would be good to look at exactly what the problems with the matchmaking are and see what can be done to fix it.

Lets first start not with the current matchmaking, but the matchmaking that existed before SBMM and MMR, the Rank-Based Matchmaking.

Prior to the introduction of MMR, DBD's matchmaking was based on your grade, starting at 20 and going all the way up to 1. The matchmaking looked at your grade and looked for people within 4 ranks either below or above you to pair you with. If you won, you gained a pip or two, if you lost, you lost a pip.

A lot of people want to go back to this matchmaking system, and speaking as someone who played under the system for a long while, I will never understand why. The Rank-based matchmaking sucked, it was very easy for a SWF to boost you all the way to Rank 1, SWF in general could break the system with rank 1 players teaming up with rank 20s to bully killers who had no idea what they were doing, and, I think a lot of people either don't remember or willingly forget this part, it very easy to rig the system to guarantee you easy games. Simply never play the game after reaching the rank you were comfortable at until the rank reset on the 13th and you would be able to cruise on by, or, if you were really desperate for easy games, just AFK until you depipped to a lower rank bracket, there was and still is no punishment for doing this and let you go up against people worse then you for minimal effort. When a matchmaking system actively encourages either not playing or going AFK to get easier matches I think something might have gone wrong.

BHVR, evidently, agreed with me on that, which is why they made the MMR and SBMM system. In theory this system is meant to replace the ranked matchmaking. The game looks for people in your "skill-bracket" and pairs you up with them. However, the current system has a few very obvious and very intentional problems.

Problem 1. You have no idea what MMR bracket you are in.

There is no in-game information to tell you what your skill level is, you do not see a number rising or falling as you play matches, the Grades that replaced the Ranks are completely meaningless for determining skill, all they do is determine your playtime each month, this is a problem because of you will have no idea what sort of people you are getting matched with, you could get paired with people who have less then 50 hours, or go up against people with 5000 hours. I assume BHVR did this to both prevent people from rigging the system in their favour and using their MMR to boost their ego like they did with Ranks, but…a visible MMR or symbol representing your MMR is a cornerstone of systems like this, want to know what happens when you don't make your MMR visible? You get stuff like Siege's ranked 2.0, a universally hated system that is routinely lambasted for being completely worthless as a skill-based system, where your actual skill is completely hidden from you and you're instead given a worthless emblem that doesn't actually correlate to your skill but rather your playtime.

Problem 2. The MMR Brackets are practically non-existent.

What little public information we have on the MMR system shows that there's 3 brackets, the beginners bracket for people who just installed the game, the middle bracket, and then the soft-cap. You see the issue with this, right? These MMR brackets are extremely wide, so wide in fact that people can easily breeze past the beginner's bracket and then get paired with people who are just barely teetering on the soft-cap. This is the reason why your matches feel so random, the brackets are set up so that people with 50 hours go up against comp players on a not infrequent basis. The reason the matchmaking is loose like this is to accelerate queue times, sacrificing quality in favour of quantity. This is a problem because it makes the matches incredibly frustrating, the simple logic of "The MMR will eventually balance you out and put you with people on your skill level" doesn't apply when the brackets are as broad as they are.

Problem 3. The MMR system only rewards kills and escapes, encouraging selfish behaviour.

Dead By Daylight is not a simple game, shocking revelation I know, but in one match of DBD, one person could be keeping the Killer busy in chase, one person is keeping people healed, one person is doing gens…and then the last person isn't doing anything but rotating between lockers, the Killer manages to kill the other 3 Survivors, and then the guy that didn't do anything the entire game gets out with Sole Survivor and says GG EZ in end-game chat. Let me ask you something, did this person "win"? According to the MMR system, this person won and the other 3 people lost, despite the fact that the person who escaped didn't help at all and the other 3 people did all the work. This selfish player got the rewards and the other 3 people did not. This is, to be blunt, awful game design, the MMR system should be rewarding people who are active and helping the team, not playing passively and waiting for everyone else to die so that they can get out via a lucky hatch or gate spawn. The same also applies to killer, getting a 10 hooks 2k with Trapper should be rewarded a lot more then the same result with a Killer like Blight, especially when factoring in the perks used. Dead By Daylight is not hockey, Dead By Daylight is Dead By Daylight, and Dead By Daylight should not reward players based on how they'd rewarded in a hockey match.

Problem 4, and easily the biggest. The MMR System is at odds with Dead By Daylight's core gameplay design.

Dead By Daylight is not a balanced or even stable game. The differences between the weakest and the strongest are astronomical and bugs frequently cause perks and even entire killers to break. It is not a uncommon occurrence for a single glitch to cause one side to lose the match and it is infuriating when it happens, even without bugs you can sometimes just automatically lose because you picked Hillbilly and got Lerys or Hawkins. Why then, in a game like this, does BHVR feel the need to add a SBMM and MMR system? The game isn't balanced, it isn't even close to balanced, and what determines if you win is what you bring to the match and what map you get more then your own skill, you can't sincerely say someone deserves to lose MMR because they wanted to play Dredge and then got literally any map that isn't Midwich.

So, with all of this said, how can we fix this?

Well, ignoring the fundamental problems of the game and the matchmaking being completely at odds. The fixes are actually really simple, add a visible MMR and tie it to the Emblem system. Make it so that actually playing the game improves your MMR, add more brackets to further differentiate people, tweak it so that the weaker killers are on a roughly equal playing field in terms of increasing/decreasing MMR. Make the MMR system actually function like a MMR system, instead of a glorified slot machine. If you're going to commit to a MMR rework, make it work like a real MMR system, that would help with a lot of the game's many frustrations.

G'night