Is smurfing with a low mmr friend back again?

Myla

Just something I noticed.

I thought they fixed this like a year ago where the matchmaking would prioritize the highest ranked in the party or in this case the highest MMR? Is it broken again?

The killer was new to the game and shouldn't be getting into this type of matches. Had like 100 below hours.

This isn't an isolated case as well. It's something very obvious when I'm playing alone I get competent killers but when I play with somebody the amount of baby killers is just unreal. If you can't confirmed their hours on their steam profile they usually have incomplete builds like this one and also not attempting any form of mind game.

StarLost

@Myla said:

Just something I noticed.

https://us.v-cdn.net/6030815/uploads/LP8VI0JKAKTF/image.png

I thought they fixed this like a year ago where the matchmaking would prioritize the highest ranked in the party or in this case the highest MMR? Is it broken again?

The killer was new to the game and shouldn't be getting into this type of matches. Had like 100 below hours.

This isn't an isolated case as well. It's something very obvious when I'm playing alone I get competent killers but when I play with somebody the amount of baby killers is just unreal. If you can't confirmed their hours on their steam profile they usually have incomplete builds like this one and also not attempting any form of mind game.

One of the devs responded in my MMR thread yesterday and explained this.

Basically what happens is that a super high MMR party waits for a long time in queue, people dodge them and eventually it'll just throw them essentially the next killer around as a sort of snack.

There are also definitely SWFs that smurf their ratings down (I'm sure everyone has encountered the groups that immediately run to you and suicide on hook).

It...sucks, especially as these SWFs tend to be the absolute most abusive types. I literally just had one who 99% the final gen and refused to end, instead wanting to show off their bodyblocking/sabo skills and how strong medkits+COH are for 30 soul-crushing minutes until I finally gave up and AFKed, after which they informed me that they were reporting me for 'non-participation'.

I'd love to know how many new killers run into this crap and just never return to the game.

Myla

@StarLost said:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/297751/is-smurfing-with-a-low-mmr-friend-back-again

One of the devs responded in my MMR thread yesterday and explained this.

Basically what happens is that a super high MMR party waits for a long time in queue, people dodge them and eventually it'll just throw them essentially the next killer around as a sort of snack.

There are also definitely SWFs that smurf their ratings down (I'm sure everyone has encountered the groups that immediately run to you and suicide on hook).

It...sucks, especially as these SWFs tend to be the absolute most abusive types. I literally just had one who 99% the final gen and refused to end, instead wanting to show off their bodyblocking/sabo skills and how strong medkits+COH are for 30 soul-crushing minutes until I finally gave up and AFKed, after which they informed me that they were reporting me for 'non-participation'.

I'd love to know how many new killers run into this crap and just never return to the game.

I mean this is a match recorded on peak hours where the Survivor queues are instant at daytime.... I played alone afterwards and the difference in killers are night and day. I was actually thinking that Ruin and Undying is steadily getting less usage but it turns out people still use it all the time when I'm alone.

I do get that matchmaking just throws around anyone if the queues are long though it's something I theorized about and I guess that's confirmed now.

StarLost

@Myla said:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2672806#Comment_2672806

I mean this is a match recorded on peak hours where the Survivor queues are instant at daytime.... I played alone afterwards and the difference in killers are night and day. I was actually thinking that Ruin and Undying is steadily getting less usage but it turns out people still use it all the time when I'm alone.

I do get that matchmaking just throws around anyone if the queues are long though it's something I theorized about and I guess that's confirmed now.

I see this crap at peak more - as there are more survivors queued at high MMR, more dodges and just not enough killers to go around.

RoaderFrost

@StarLost said:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2672828#Comment_2672828

I see this crap at peak more - as there are more survivors queued at high MMR, more dodges and just not enough killers to go around.

Sounds like an Uroboros concept. New killers get stomped and refuse to play. Then it's even less killers, so range of stomping increase.

Myla

@StarLost said:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2672828#Comment_2672828

I see this crap at peak more - as there are more survivors queued at high MMR, more dodges and just not enough killers to go around.

Actually I hard disagree about this. A good chunk of my win streaks as a Killer are at day time. Night time is basically where Navy seals are awake.

*Edit

Which isn't surprising since a lot of my Friends do in fact play at Night after coming back from work lol

StarLost

@Myla said:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2672838#Comment_2672838

Actually I hard disagree about this. A good chunk of my win streaks as a Killer are at day time. Night time is basically where Navy seals are awake.

*Edit

Which isn't surprising since a lot of my Friends do in fact play at Night after coming back from work lol

Morning = crazy Spanish, Chinese and Russian premades.

Night = navy seal types.

The issue is that MMR is creating a perpetual chain of stomps for some people, as when you become a 'snack' killer, you don't lose MMR.

rha

It's currently the group average, they confirmed this yesterday. They also said something about group MMR, see second to last bullet point here:

@DesignDad said:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2670592#Comment_2670592

I'll answer what I can so we can both go back to building decks / falling asleep while watching The Big Game. I'm mostly focused on answering questions about the existing system, and not going into too much details about potential future changes.

• For those insta-queues that feel unbalanced, you're correct! Imagine the situation I was describing before where you are waiting and waiting for someone to show up in the queue that's within your range, but from the other side. A group of survivors is waiting (and to be clear, they might not be a full SWF, just that they are grouped together by the MM system), and then you pop into the queue: An opponent who is near the edge but within the boundary for their search. "Wonderful!" the MM system thinks, "I can finally give them a match. It might not be the most balanced, but hey, they're playing after a long wait!".
• We actually had a system in place to prevent smurfing / intentionally dropping your MMR before, and it ended up causing more problems than it helped. That's not to say that it's off the table forever, but rather that it's a really tricky problem to solve in a way that works across the board. it's not at the top of the list right now, as there are other issues that we can tackle with bigger payoff in terms of matchmaking improvements. Prioritization!
• I could talk for hours about defining a "good match", but I'll do my best to summarize: What the MMR system does is predict the outcome of a match before it starts. More specifically, it predicts the odds of the outcomes. With a large enough sample size, it's actually really good at this! If you look at all the games where the system says "PlayerA has a 60% chance of escaping this match", PlayerA does escape those matches about 60% of the time. Generally speaking (and I'm definitely simplifying here, so don't take this too literally) we operate under the assumption that a 50% escape chance per player is indicative of a balanced match. This holds true in most games outside of DbD, be it Chess or [Insert Popular FPS Franchise Here]. If both players are equally as skilled, then the odds of either one winning are about equal. So if you can make a match where the prediction is that the odds are equal, then you've likely got a balanced match!
• Some people are willing to wait 30+ minutes for a perfect match, and others don't want to wait more than 5 no matter what. So we have to find a decent compromise, which is extremely difficult. Remember that the MM system isn't just trying to find you good matches, it's trying to find good matches for every single player!
• I'm not going to go into long-term plans here but I will say that we have consciously decided not to show explicit MMR values for now, as doing this generally result in a lot of toxicity for other online games.
• I'm very familiar with the technique of managing group MMR, and it's something that we have also considered. For a while, I was thinking about maintaining a completely independent MMR for solo queue and group queue, which is something I have seen other games do. That said, several of them have moved away from that technique as it didn't actually provide much benefit for matchmaking, but did result in a fair bit of technical overhead. Overall, we're still open to doing something like this once we feel like we've got a good solution and that it's going to be a meaningful improvement, but there are bigger fish to fry for the moment. As it stands, we're taking the average MMR of the group and using that for matchmaking, which works fairly well at a high level. We'll likely revisit this after we've made other improvements elsewhere.
• SBMM never goes offline. It sees you when you're killing, it knows when you escape. It knows when games are bad or good, so play good for goodness sake! But for real, the MM system learns by doing. When you get matched in something that feels crazy unbalanced, the system is paying attention and adjusting both your MMR and your opponent's MMR accordingly. There are situations where the system can be very unsure about where a player should fit, and so it tosses them into games to calibrate their MMR. When you do happen to end up in a game against these folks, keep in mind that your MMR is likely not being adjusted that much by the result.

I hope that helps clear a few things up. Overall, the biggest challenge of building a matchmaking system is that it has to produce thousands and thousands of matches every day, so we have to take the big picture AND the zoomed in view into account. For every discussion we have about a graph showing all games in the last month, we also dig into specific examples to see how they are panning out, too.

Thanks for taking the time to ask questions and listen! <3

I'm not sure if taking the highest MMR is the obvious, easy fix, particularly if the MMR difference is larger. What makes you sure that a single actually good person can make up for three bad players.

And then you'd have to make sure that you don't create an artificially high demand of high MMR killers. When there are too many high MMR survivor groups and not enough high MMR killers then the matchmaker will sooner or later assign some of the high MMR groups to a lower MMR killer to get a game going, and if it then chooses to hand down groups of four super experienced actual high MMR survivors to a mid MMR killer, and give the group of the experienced survivor who plays with his three friends who just bought the game to one of the sought after high MMR killers, that's not optimal either.

In the case of a 3SWF queuing, it would also be unfair to the solo survivor if there's just one other survivor of his and the killer's MMR.

cyniChris

Matchmaking doesn't work. Plain and simple. And it's nothing to do with SWF.

I started a fresh account a few weeks ago. By my second match as killer, with only 2 perks (thanks, tutorial bloodpoints!), I was already facing survivors with stacked meta perks.

It takes an absurd amount of time to unlock teachables, and these guys had teachables from as many as four different survivors to the ones they played. That requires leveling 4 separate characters and the one you're playing up. It takes roughly a million BP to go from level 1 to 40, so we can assume that they must have spent a minimum of 5 million BP. Say you average 20,000BP a match. That's 250 matches.

250 matches of experience vs literally one prior to this match. Granted, I had a lot of prior experience and still won, but imagine a new player gets a lucky 4K in their first game. Now they're facing considerably more experienced survivors. Why? There's plenty more new players joining the game. This shouldn't be happening.

And on my main account, I dodged a lobby a couple of days ago as The Artist - a killer I have played for 5 matches - because I saw survivors with 4000 and 6000 hours in-game (according to Steam) that I've faced on other killers before and know to be very good. I re-queued and got a lobby with survivors who had 200 hours at the most and got a relatively easy 4K. Same killer, same MMR, wildly different survivors.

Say what you will about the emblem/rank system, but it put new/inexperienced players alongside new/inexperienced players for the most part. Sure, the skill disparity at the old red ranks was huge, but all it needed was more ranks added (simple enough to do) and a stricter rank reset (like we used to have), and matchmaking would have been a lot more reasonable. Instead, new killers get fed to the wolves with this current system. If I was new to the game now, I wouldn't want to play killer. Ever.