OhTofu on MMR
I don’t usually post about videos but OhTofu had an interesting video about MMR this week where he breaks down what he considers faulty arguments against the system and arguments against it that have some validity. A lot of what he says I’ve said independently at one point or another so I wanted to give the vid a shout out.
I’m not going to try and bullet point the whole thing, but TLDR you can tell MMR actually does work because of people complaining how they have to “sweat” to get 1-3 kills. Having to work hard most matches to get 1-3 kills as a killer means you’re actually tending to go against survivors your own skill level. Likewise MMR doesn’t force you to play any particular way, but obviously if you play suboptimally then you shouldn’t expect to be winning when you happen to be matched against survivors who play better and have more effective loadouts than you. There are issues with MMR, such as nobody having any idea what their MMR is so everybody complaining about it is grasping at air what the numbers really are, but by and large the system does produce closer matches on average than the old emblem system.
The strongest argument he feels that is valid is that MMR just highlights that top level playstyle and meta isn’t as fun as less effective styles. In other words the more you win the more you encounter the same builds and playstyles and killers, and either you tend to lose to those (which obviously losing is less fun than winning) or you mimic the meta to keep up. Again, this means MMR is giving a good estimate of performance, but it’s making it even more clear where balance issues and similar problems exist at the higher level of the game. Nothing prevents you from running whatever fun build you like, but the more you win with that build the more you come against better loadouts that tend to thwart it. You have to be prepared to “win less” to have “more fun”, that’s the paradox and problem which MMR is bringing to light. It’s not even so much a problem with MMR itself, but more an underlying fundamental issue with how DbD as a game is designed in the first place.
https://youtu.be/1j4xnpxtbiE
Comments
Right, the devs say they want to avoid people being toxic bragging about their own high MMR, but a lot of posters already assume they are high or at least above average MMR and brag about it. I’m not sure hiding the MMR actually lessens that at all.
For reference the median playtime for DbD is 192 hours, the top 10% is 1064 hours. So anybody with a little over 1000 hours is in the top 10% in terms of playtime. (Among Steam players at least.)
According to the Q&A the MMR and predicting match results is working correctly.
What is not working is creating balanced matches e.g. because time constraints.
So what happens? The matchmaking will take 4 survivors with e.g. MMR 100 and match up against a killer with MMR 1000 and say: sorry guys, the killer will most likely 4k. And the actual result: 4k.
Right, I think a lot of people assume incorrectly that mismatches are because the ratings are inaccurate, when what’s probably happening is the ratings are right but the way the system times people out into “first available slots” is what causes a lot of these. Which is tricky because the only obvious way to adjust that is to make people wait longer for closer matches. But if people wait too long then that’s as bad or worse than getting lopsided match ups.
For me it was way worse before sbmm when I was starting killer I would get red rank games and when I got better I got everything from rainbow lobbies to just yellow/green teams while meanwhile I'd be purple or red. There seems to usually be less weak links in my games so it seems to be doing something.
I think the problem with the previous system is that it barely weighted what ranks people were at all and just threw lobbies together whereas MMR at least looks at the score(meaningless as it is). The current system however must have such a low matchmaking cap that even first-time players can be put in with the highest cap of people so it means almost equally little. I've heard it works slightly better for survivors but that may be because it's actually harder for survivors to get MMR so the score means a little more but MMR was a straight downgrade from my experience as a killer main. My games weren't even harder and I certainly didn't play sweatier they were just more boring cause I got teams that had absolutely no idea what they were doing or good teams on a bad map.
Right. Also just this week, for instance, I can tell that my rating is probably about where it should be since most of my matches are in the 1-3 kill range. I normally don’t even think about my Grade but for the heck of it I’m trying to gain about a Grade a night and I’m hitting the point where 2 kills is sometimes a pip and sometimes nothing so it’s taking longer, which is how I can tell my results are usually around that 1-3 range. (Couldn’t quite get it last night on Wraith that I just Prestiged, settled for +2 pips).
Which by the way is another reason not to trust Grades. To get a Grade I can just play over and over until I get lucky and get a couple of two pip games in a row. Do that once a night or so and you’re Iri 1 by the end, even if your acccurate rating would be average.
No, but it is indicative, and these were utter stomps that should never have been allowed to happen.
Please remember that OhTofu said because Nurse (1 killer out of 26) can 4k against tournament comps (on 1-2 maps out of 37 ) that the game (as a whole) is balanced. Take everything he says with a grain of salt.
Edited for a typo.
I agreed with most of what he said. I'm definitely low MMR and my killer games got a lot easier after the system came in -- I feel like I actually have a chance to play most of the time, now, instead of just getting stomped immediately.
On the survivor side, there are a lot of different playstyles people can have that lead to them losing more than they win, and I think one of the frustrating things about matchmaking is that you might get teammates who die during EGC because they're too altruistic or you might get teammates who die in the first three minutes because they bomb the hook and get themselves and the person they were trying to rescue killed. And that's a very different experience to play with, depending which one you have.
So, I think, at the low end, when people talk about matchmaking not working, it's partly stuff like that -- where you would always prefer to have the teammate who contributes to a team win but dies vs the teammate who creates more deaths than needed.