Some More Observations/Questions Regarding Matchmaking/MMR/SBMM
I've been playing quite a lot this week and have had some periods of good games, and some weird ones.
I've also noticed a handful of...quirks with the MMR system.
Let me know if you've had experiences similar/contrary to these: genuinely curious.
Prime time (evening to early night) seems to frequently have instant queues and absolutely bonkers matchups, frequently SWF groups containing players with 3-20x the hours I've played. I often get 3-4 outed.
I've tried deliberately easing up, wondering if maybe I've been playing too sweaty. It...doesn't seem to do much. However, the next day will usually start with several much easier (sometimes way too easy) matchups.
Does MMR take a while to update, maybe?
Are people smurfing?
Are a lot of people dodging lobbies (and thus I'm getting thrown into them)?
Is SBMM just not operating during these times?
The bizarre thing: off-peak hours, I tend to have longer queues but significantly more even, quality matches.
It's so...odd.
Comments
MMR is a failure. Gone are the days where a month long break from the game gave you a causal experience. You will always be punished for winning. Awful design
SBMM is all over the place today, I dont know if they changing something but my games made no sense considering they were opposite day before. Maybe rank reset did something more
That's...an interesting point.
I wonder if the rank/grade reset did something.
I honestly have no idea.
BHVR implied a while back that MMR was reset on your killers after 3 weeks of not playing them, and that when this happened they'd be assigned a new MMR pegged just below the MMR of your best killer.
So if you decide to learn a new killer, or play one that you haven't for a long time, you might have a bad time.
Regarding survivors, the idea is that as your MMR falls, you'll get better teammates (to bring up the MMR average) or a worse killer. I think that what's happening in a lot of games is that people dodge lobbies that they think will be rough, then the system grabs the next survivor/killer in the queue regardless of MMR - leading to some bogus games.
However, as we don't know much about the system, it's difficult to tell for sure. All I know is that things don't seem to be working right sometimes, especially during 'peak' hours.
The issue has to do with differing killer to survivor player numbers during different times.
So during peak playtime hours the DBD concurrent player population is large. However a disproportionate of that is SWF. As it's only when after work and school can friends play together. The problem is for the rapid rise is survivors during peak playtime hours there isn't a similar rise in killer numbers. Hence why killers get instant queues but much more mismatched matches than they do during the day. The game has but no choice to grab any killer it can so all these SWF groups aren't waiting too long for a match.
TL;DR: Way more people than is required play survivor over killer which causes mismatched MM. People simply do not want to play killer.
For there to be perfect matchmaking would require that at all times, MMR ratings, and server regions for their to be 80% of players playing survivor and 20% killer. But the killer percent drops below that 20% often at higher MMR ratings and peak playtime.