SBMM Improvement Idea (Yes, Another One)
I'll put my position upfront so people know what angle I'm coming from: The current system is fundamentally fine and primarily suffering because the game itself has balance issues which need addressing rather than because it's not fit for purpose at all. That being said, I do think that the system would be improved with a little bit more nuance, and that's where I'm aiming to make my suggestion: nuance.
Currently, the system primarily tracks whether you get your kills for killers, and if you manage to escape for survivor. This is obviously fine- those are the objectives, so you should only climb the ranks if you can do the objective. If you lose, though, the system does a few checks to see if it should soften the MMR decrease- were your opponents higher than you in the system? Did you die first, second, third? I think this aspect is excellent, and I want to add more checks to that part.
What those checks are looking for is naturally up for discussion, but I think a good place to look would be the emblem system- obviously the emblem system being used for matchmaking on its own was godawful and we shouldn't just go back, but using it to gauge how much you should be increased/decreased after a match based on how well you did in that system is, to my eyes, probably the single best solution.
Did you die as a survivor, but perform well enough to get all iridescent/gold emblems? The system recognises you performed adequately and you lose less MMR than if you didn't get any emblems at all. Did you not get a single kill as the Killer, but two-hooked everyone with impressive chases and good emblem score? You'll lose less MMR than a crushing loss with only one or two hooks. The only downside here is that survivors who get camped out of the game at the beginning of the match still don't have their MMR measured accurately, but there's not much to be done about that outlier situation from this end- better to tackle that problem on its own elsewhere.
I'm curious to hear what people think about this idea!
Comments
Hey, might be a late reply, but yeah I like your ideas.
I have another idea, adding a team score to get more depth to the sbmm calculation. That team score could simply be the number of survivors that escaped, but it could also involve the number of generator done. I didn't think too much about what a team score could measure with a good consistency, but I think there's ideas to be found.
The main idea is that if you sacrifice yourself to let the other survivors escape, the game still awards you points towards the sbmm. The team score could have as much weight as the individual score to calculate the sbmm.
I think adding more nuance to the MMR is definitely needed. While the emblem system wasn't perfect it discouraged gameplay like camping and hiding for hatch. The emblem system encourage survivors to be an all around team player and killers to get multiple hooks by going after everyone throughout the match. Sure you'd get the killer that camped or useless survivor in a match but if you were higher rank it wasn't as often because people wanted to get their pip at the end.
Having a killer that got 2 hooks and 2 kills thanks to camping first and having NOED for second have higher MMR than the killer that hooked everyone twice and got one kill doesn't seem right. On old emblem system the killer that camped, especially at end of the game, would've lost points towards the emblem and they would've stayed in low ranks because they were not as skilled as the killer actually making an effort. SBMM being only kills actually ends up encouraging gameplay they had been discouraging with the emblem system. Having hooks be counted towards how much you actually move up/down as killer is definitely needed.
Old emblem system you'd lose a pip when camped out at start of match, which sucked but camping also wasn't as popular a strategy except in low ranks. Now if you're only one to die at end when killer camps to secure a kill it is the same as if you died in the beginning - it's like everything you did in the match didn't matter. Your teammates in next match are a mix of players that died first because they are not good and players that died first because they were killed during end game to secure a kill. Personally I get stuck in deathloops with my swf teammate because we keep getting randoms that do nothing but hide. We'll have 15k-20k+ BP even though we died while the randoms that hid all match, even if they grab hatch, get less than 10k BP. Us getting an easier killer because we died in previous matches doesn't help much when it's a 2v1 instead of 4v1 because our teammates are hiding waiting for everyone else to do gens/die.