Players aren't going to stop thinking grades determine matchmaking.
There is no indication of MMR in the game
Not just in the form of not being able to see your MMR, I can't even find a reference to the fact that there is an MMR system or even a mention of matchmaking in general.
The "Game manual" makes grades sound like ranks
Remember that big wall of text called the "game manual" that your friends told you not to bother with, or you probably skimmed and took in next to zero of what it said? Go have a read of what it says about grades. It tells you how they reset etc, but it never mentions that they have nothing to do with matchmaking. In fact, the final line says "NOTE: Custom games are unranked and will not affect grades." This further implies grade and rank are interchangable.
"Grades" are shown on the endgame screen as an assessment of your performance
There's no indication of "here's how your MMR changed." All that you see is "here are the categories you are being judged in, and here's the outcome of the match based on that."
"Grades" are an existing rank system with the name swapped out and the meaning behind them obfuscated. Any player who comes to the game and wasn't around for the change will look and see a ranking system being presented that assesses how they perform each match and has a seasonal schedule, and will assume that is the rank system. They see each other player in the match's "grade" and assume it is their rank. If "grade" is not relevant to anything, why would it matter what any other player's grade is? You shouldn't really need to know how many bloodpoints another player is getting a few weeks from now.
MMR is so backwards that it's laughable
I am never going to pretend the emblem system for ranks was perfect. It wasn't. However, taking 2 years to decide to throw that out the window and say that escapes vs deaths = skill is ludicrous. The sarcastic, lazy attitudes we all saw when the MMR system was explained shows just how big of a step backwards the MMR system was. We as a community were mocked for wanting our performance within a match to be assessed. The emblem system at least tried to do that. The emblem system looked at your gameplay in the different facets of the game. It gave survivors pips or took them away based on how much they contributed to the team in progressing the objective, helping each other, buying time through chases AND escaping at the end was just one facet of the assessment.
The emblem system should not have been disconnected from rank, it should have been altered and improved upon. Better weighted for how different killer powers work etc. The fact that it still exists in the game shows an unwillingness to let go of a system that actually took thought and effort, but the complete disconnect between how it progresses and what it actually means to players only serves to confuse new players, and make old players wish the current system were better.
Conclusion
You can't leave the facade of a functioning rank system in the game and expect players who weren't there at the changeover to know that it actually does nothing of value, and there's a secret matchmaking working in the background. Until MMR is visible and tangible, and more importantly mentioned within the game somewhere, we'll forever have people still complaining about the grades of people in their matches etc.
Comments
Getting to Iridescent grade 1 in one month at high MMR (only presumptuous of course) should in theory be even harder than how it used to be prior to SBMM, plus grades require more than simply escaping / getting kills. Of course that would only be at high MMR, but saying that grades do not reflect "skill" in the slightest is just wrong to me.
I'm not accusing you of saying that, it's just what I think about this whole Grade =/= MMR confusion.
Show MMR - there is absolutely no reason why not. Grades don´t matter, so nobody needs them anymore.
If you want player time - show "Time played this month: xyz"
Every normal player wants to know how high his actual player rank is which is the MMR.
To be honest, I think grades are a representation of skill. Or at least to clarify, high grades are more of a representation of skill than MMR.
In order to get your grade up, within a month you have to play enough to get a net gain of 85 pips. Yes, you can depip without losing your grade now, but that's only on one of 3-5 pips on a rank. It's unlikely you lose any more matches on 1 pip than you do on 3.
Killer is simpler to look at (and also easier to pip on than survivor), but in order to gain a pip, you almost certainly have to kill SOMEONE, in order to double pip, especially at higher ranks, you must kill 3 people, sometimes 4. You almost certainly don't pip if you camp people to death, and you're punished in a variety of ways for tunneling (including less hook states for the devout emblem's higher requirement, and less chaser emblem points as they have not healed to get a second chase per down). It takes a LOT to reach iridescent 1 in a month, and regardless of what they say, it takes into account a lot more than just your gameplay time, because by definition the emblem system has categories that need to be filled to progress. You cannot reasonably be getting into high "grades" without also gaining a lot of MMR.
With the amount of people playing and how broad the skill differences still are in matches, (because let's be honest, you can hide MMR all you like but a good player can still observe the difference in skill between different survivors) the ranges for matchmaking based on MMR HAS to be broad. Hell, new players seem to get treated as reasonable skill and are expected to lose MMR before they'll get matched with people who struggle as much as them.
They have said there's no "upper limit" to the MMR system, you can keep gaining and gaining, but it becomes redundant as you still have to be in the matchmaking pool so it'll just match you with a broader and broader range to work.
I can't see a logical way a player can be getting iridescent 1 without progressing SIGNIFICANTLY in MMR, let alone if they do it consistently which you assume people who have it within a week of the reset must. You could throw 40-80 matches every time you reach iridescent 1 to theoretically counterbalance your MMR, but people aren't AFKing enough for that to be happening, and it would be a very niche case.
We already DO see played time, it's directly converted into player XP and profile level. We just have so many worthless progress systems that don't actually do anything that people forget about them or flat out don't know what they do. They could very easily remove XP and level and just have iridescent shards gained by playtime (which they still technically are, just in a convoluted way) and it would just tidy up the game a bit with no loss. Devotion doesn't even have a benefit, it doesn't affect anything at all and only shows to be used for dick measuring.
Exactly, it's weird but MMR which is supposed to determine skill is worse at it than the now "outdated" grade system and it's the only confirmed value we get.
One of the devs posted about a month or so ago asking if we thought he should remove the grades from the endgame screen because they were causing confusion with players thinking they’re used for matchmaking. The unanimous reply was yes, seeing opponents’ grades shouldn’t be a thing since they’re irrelevant. I’m not sure if they’re following up on that and planning to remove opponent grades from the screen but hopefully they are.
What would be nice is if instead of those we saw a rough percentile bracket indicator of the MMR ratings. Just what 5% or 10% bracket everybody is in to give an idea of roughly where everybody is. No idea if they’re considering something along those lines or not though.
Exactly, showing grades makes people think they're relevant, and hiding MMR because you're ashamed of how weak the system is just means new players don't even know it exists.
I don’t think they hide MMR because they are ashamed of it, they made the decision to hide it long before it went into effect. The reasons they hide it, I think, are
Personally I think it would be beneficial overall to show at least rough relative MMRs for you and your opponents, if only to give you an idea of where you might stand in a hypothetical leaderboard of sorts. That’s just me though.