The difficulty of balancing using the new system
So, I wanna inform on why balancing dbd with the new system, is kinda a bad idea, while also expressing the difficulty of balancing the game with any form of mmr.
I didn't really notice any major difference as a survivor, so I'll talk more about the killer side where I and many other content creators tried and expressed their concerns over the new system. Dbd might be a balancing nightmare but one thing stays the same, sometimes it's extremely hard, but in others you just dominate. And this asymmetric-based nature almost always worked and made players enjoy themselves, while also having some challenges at times. In the content creator side, it allowed for killers to explore new builds and fun combos on the youtube side, and being able to communicate with the chat more and have funny challenges on the twitch side (and vise versa!). That's why dbd isn't really challenging to stream, it has a lot of content and new ways to play the game and techs are discovered every patch. Aside from balancing, the only bad thing that people are always annoyed with is matchmaking, because it can be ######### in both sides. The new mmr actually does it's job, it makes it fair for both sides and forces good players with good players (speculation, but when I played pig I got 6k+ hours players but when I played ghostface I was against 600k, I suspect that the more you play a killer the harder the lobbies get, starting from old mmr. Meaning if you play a lot of nurse and that day you played nurse, you'd probably be faced against 7k hours survivors, but if you haven't played oni before, get ready to face rank 20s). But after getting what we basically wanted, we realized that this actually ISN'T what the community wants surprisingly. The game becomes too anxious and difficult for both sides, and it's pretty tiring to tryhard each match and leaves no room for creativity.
So if bhvr makes the perfect mmr, people will still complain of the game being difficult. For that, I have 3 solutions actually.
1: you can only be matched with people of your rank color and fix the pip system to make it harder to reach rank 1. After that they'll be a top x player for survivor and for their specific killer (top 70 bubba for example)
2: make it so there's a weak link in the team. Meaning of you have 4k hours, the survivors should have 4k,3.5k,3k,2.5k for example, so the killer can choose to pressure the more inexperienced players first, I know it's kinda of a dick move, but that's a suggestion. It would promote tunneling, so I don't recommend this idea
3: release the new mmr and balance the game accordingly. Adjust the gen times, perks add-ons, killer powers based on the information you collect. You can have tests every week to keep collecting data, for example every Tuesday will have the work in progress mmr. Basically sacrificing one day of dbd for information each week. Balancing this way is the most effective, but by far the slowest and most painful.
So the devs are basically stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, if they do nothing dbd will still remain unbalanced since the data they collect could be illegitimate due to awful matchmaking. On the other hand, if they change the mmr and make it as fair as possible, the game will turn into a sweat show and content creation will be far more difficult, not even accounting the people who will leave dbd because every game is like a ranked game in league.
Some people suggest a ranked mode, but shall I remind you that no one will want to play tryharding dbd? Every killer will be nurse and spirit. Not even mentioning the queue times will feel so sloooow.
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