MMR and the Peter Principle, or why camping and tunneling is harmful for the killer
Since it is - again - a time where the forum is full about complains about mmr as well as the killer experience, i try to explain why this happens, since its basicly based on the peter principle.
For those of you that dont know, the peter principle basicly says that an employee in a company will always rise to the level of his incompetence. If he does his job well, he gets promoted for it, and again, until he is at a position where he cant handle the job well enough to get further promoted.
Killer and mmr is basicly the same. In the beginning, you get some easy kills, because you can find survivors and end chases fast enough to get your 4ks. You rise in mmr and get more competent opponents. At some points, your ability to find and end chases fast enough might dwindle. Sometimes you win the games, sometimes you lose them just as close or as bad as you win. You might still rise in mmr, but slower now, because you dont 4k every game anymore. Somethere there should be your balance point, where you are close to your 2k 2escape ratio which is the balance goal of the devs.
However, thats where a lot of killer say "we have to tunnel and camp in order to win". By doing this, they manipulate the outcome of the cases, either by not going on a second chase at all via camping, or by going after the easy target you already know you can handle, and that is usually just one hit away from downing. Thus, you extend your kills on this "balanced level", and you make yourself rise in level, up until the point where you cant keep up anymore, because chases are so competent that you dont catch some players at all, or not fast enough while the rest is doing gens. You raised yourself to a level of your own incompetence where you cant keep up. And since deranking is not easily done, you are in mmr-hell.
And then people start blaming mmr for that. Sure, mmr is not what i hoped for, because it weights queue times way to heavily. But still killers end up at a skill level where they dont really belong, due to artificaly inflating their kills.
So, maybe overthink and accept the role you play yourself in your matches due to the sbmmr.
Comments
This is just simply not true.
You can tank your MMR by playing weird, or letting all the survivors go butyou're still gonna get shrekt or go against babies. It reallydoesnt matter that much.
Fact ofthe matter is, unless you are content getting a 0k quite consistently, you need to make power plays. Down-->hook just doesnt cut it
How he explained it is how MMR is supposed to work. If you tunnel and camp, due to how effective it is, you will end up at a MMR where you have to tunnel and camp. If you don't tunnel and camp, you stay at a level where you don't need to tunnel and camp. It's hard to do because it requires the killer to prefer to lose a game rather than tunnel and camp to keep their MMR from inflating.
What would be better would be fixing the underlying game mechanics so 12 hook play was the most effective playstyle but that's on BHVR; players can only respond to game mechanics. They can't be changed from the players' end.
That's just not true. I don't tunnel or camp and I definitely don't lose more often than I win.
This reasoning is flawed.
With the Peter Principle, the subject doesn't get adjusted down, which is tragic. This doesn't apply here, obviously.
Tunneling and camping are two valid and effective tactics if used properly. Getting more difficult matches because one has won isn't in any way harmful.
Not using an effective tactic amounts to throw the game. It may give to easier matches but it's not ideal and may even dull the player's skills.
The matching has many undesirable parameters : the time of the day, the wait time, if someone has dodged, ...
What's next? Doing generators effectively is harmful for survivors?
Yeah it’s a misunderstanding of what the Peter principle is. It doesn’t really apply here.
You did make a very interesting and fair point. The thing is, people severely overestimate themselves. It -must be- the game's fault. It can't be them. If they can't end chases quickly enough unless they bring the most broken combinations (Omegablink Nurse, tech Blight etc) on top of the usual tunnelling and camping which is how they always play, they quickly rush to the forums to cry for nerfs and claim "SURVIVOR TOO OP". The fact of the matter is, I (together with so many) started playing killer in 2016, when it was much harder, and even then I easily won most games. Nowadays, it's a piece of cake, for the vast majority of the time. I really have to go out of my way and be rusty with months and months of inactivity to lose a match.
And I'm nothing special, most killers 3-4k. There's just a very loud minority of them that make it their full time job 24-7 to demand their perkless Pinhead rekts every team as if he was a broken Nurse. They can't do it themselves, so they must have the game do it for them.
As I said many times, people at this point want to watch a cutscene, not play a game.
The thing you misunderstand about the Peter principle is it’s an institutional failure not an employee failure.
MMR will keep promoting you because it doesn’t really assess skill it only records kills and escapes which can be independent of actual player skill in many scenarios. It’s not the fault of the player that this happens it’s the mmr.
Blaming mmr would be applying a simplified Peter principle because it’s inadequate at assessing the skill set of players and matching them accordingly. So blaming bad implementation of mmr is more akin to the actual Peter principle than blaming the actions of the players themselves.
neurologically games and their subsequent skill caps are more closely related to the idea of intellectual flow and how it oscillates between apathy and anxiety based on perceived ability, similar to competitive sports.
People hit a skill cap competitively where anxiety overtakes ability and the effort to improve is replaced by apathy about what’s needed to improve further so they end up frustrated rather than motivated. This is player fault and could be used as a measure of competence but it’s more akin to motivation.
I guess my point is for the Peter principle to apply here you’d have to blame the mmr because the Peter principle requires inadequate assessment of skill by the institution not the individual. The individual is often oblivious to their skill cap under the Peter principle.
Your logic is flawed. If you know how to properly camp and tunnel (how and when) then you don’t below in low elo. You may think it’s not fair, not nice, doesn’t take skill, or any other survivor excuse for your loss against it, it’s still a strategy.
Do you have a video proof of win streak to back up your claim that killer is easy ? Something like 50 wins streak on any m1. Thanks.
The problem with applying that principle to DBD is that the SBMM system is laughably incapable of determining a given person's skill level. What does it tell you if you have 1750MMR? Absolutely nothing. The number and its changes are utterly meaning and pointless.
Well, i agree that the peter principle is not fully applicable here. However, that is the way how mmr works. Yes, you can derank, but seldom through normal gameplay. I think a lot of people will agree that the skill meassurement of mmr is ...flawed, at best. However, my point is that camping and tunneling artifically inflate the competence level of the killer, leading to games where he has to, and most likly, cant keep up.
Yes, a mmr that assess skill better than just the actually outcome of a game would be way better, but this is what we have to work with at this time, and i think people have to realize that.
Have you considered some people want more challenging and difficult matches, and playing using intentionally acknowledged strategies like tunneling/camping/slugging assist in that?
Yes, i have considered that, but i dont think that are the people that open threads in the forum to complain about mmr working this way, so they are irrelevant for this discussion.
I'm usually bored by the second or third match as killer these days. Most of the recorded ones I have go back a long time ago. Though I can try to find more recent ones in other disks etc. It's very repetitive, always the same, and overall too easy.
Apparently I recorded and uploaded a few matches and clips pre-buff Freddy and Clown etc... when they were weaker than they're today. I never liked broken unfair little-skill killers like Nurse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK6uLsi0yk0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5MdC4N5Lnc&list=PL3mvSb8KCzKUi34wyGg6umya6pSAZ2Rca
https://youtu.be/GuFeGX_KqEcBut infinites haven't existed for years now. Care to be more specific of this made up infinite you're mentioning?
This is way too old. Pre SBMM, it was very easy to get noob survivors. Please provide video proof from the latest patch. Thanks.
You mean you want an updated match with much stronger versions of Clown, Wraith and Freddy, and much weaker maps with breakable walls in main buildings and far less strong loops? I guess I could try again with enough coffee to not fall asleep
Although maps have gotten weaker, killers stronger, and survivor perks weaker, the competence of the average survivor has increased a lot since when I started in 2018 imo.
So has killer's. I also play a lot better now compared to that. I can definitely see a lot of mistakes and dumb moments on my side in those clips. 2018 though, a long time ago.
So, while killers and survivors competence has increased, survivors are considerably weaker, and killers are way stronger.
Do I need to elaborate on the result of that equation?
Are survivors artificially inflating their escapes by doing gens?
No, that is logical. I guess thinking about it the one way killer used to feel easier was old ruin. Nothing carried you like that perk if the totem ended up in a good spot and survivors couldn't hit greats, no matter how many instaheals and keys and old(est) DS and ironworks of misery god windows and all the other nonsense were in play. Not that I'm nostalgic for it though, glad it's gone.
As I've said many times. The only thing you can really complain about is, very sweaty tryhard thousands of hours SWF teams against most killers that aren't Nurse/Blight sweaty tryhard thousands of hours. How many of those are part of the 100% playerbase? 0,5%? if even.
I don't want my solo queue experience with randoms adjusted around the 0,5% sweaty tryhard 10.000 hours SWF team and buff killers around those, because then my solo experience with randoms is just pointlessly miserable.
That's my main point. I'm not saying every killer is super strong everywhere and every survivor is super weak everywhere.
What.
Are they artificially inflating their MMR by playing in SWF compared to Solo? You might make an argument for that.
"But still killers end up at a skill level where they dont really belong, due to artificaly inflating their kills."
I agree with the OP and its a problem with current MMR valuing only kills and escapes, obviusly its not as simple because you also have to take on account SWFs (Im willing to bet 4 1000 MMR Solos perform worse than 4 1000 MMR SWF team just by virtue of info sharing) and map disparity (a 1000 MMR Myers would perform much better on Lery's than on Mother's Dwelling yet the results are weighted the same).
IMO both Killers and Survivors should go for wins but trying to avoid cheesy tactics unless they want to inflate their MMR to a point where they are going to get curbstomped by opponents who wont fall for them, this happened on SC2 too, people who climbed the ladder by cannon rushing or rushing zerglings reached a spot where they faced people who were literally inmune to cheeses so they were crushed in minutes in very humilliating ways.
The solution would be to take on account more variables to calculate the MMR but I guess BHVR still doesnt current formula as a problem.
So doing gens is the equivalent to tunneling and camping for you? I wonder, what is your equivalent of killing someone with 3 hooks without tunneling or camping?
You wrote a whole lot for someone looking to tell killers to not play optimally because they might get a harder opponent next time.
Who is your target audience here?
The part about being in a SWF is a more accurate comparison. I'm not saying people shouldn't camp or tunnel but, if you do, you will end up at an MMR where you do have to camp and tunnel or you will get stomped.
The same thing applies to SWF. If you always play in a SWF and then try to play solo your games will be much harder than if you just played solo.
I think the OP's point was that if you camp and tunnel your MMR will hit a point where, if you don't camp or tunnel, you'll get stomped and your games will be less likely to be fun. The same applies to a SWF survivor who then switches to mainly solo; they'll get stomped tons of matches until their MMR drops since SWF provides so many advantages to solo queue.
As I stated above though, player behaviour is shaped by game mechanics and not the reverse. The only problem I see with what's said (in general not specific to this thread) is that people talk about killer mains and survivor mains when both sides are just trying to complete the objectives for their side. I don't have a problem with players camping, tunneling or gen rushing because they're just reacting to game mechanics. They're just doing their objectives and it's on BHVR to change it if it's not fun; not the players.
Tunneling and Camping is the best viable way to win (thats why they do it in tournaments) it almost always guarantees a 2k which is 10 points minimum to mmr and makes the game boring and miserable to play for everyone but that's what Patrick thinks this game needs and that's exactly how it will stay till he retires.
The people complaining about mmr giving them hard matches, while playing in a way that lead them to get those matches.
First off, that's a Venn diagram of people. Not everyone who believes in A is also B. Some people want the challenge but don't like how stale the meta is. Some are people who are truly unlucky due to the wide net the MMR employs to prioritize time in queue, and their gripe is legit too.
There's no second. This forum constantly lumps group of people together if they're killer or survivor biased. It's a spectrum.
I guess that tournament level players are just incompetent. I wish we all asked Sulaiman before jumping to conclusions about the game balance. Oops.
It's the trend everyone and their mother easily 3-4ks every match. If you can't get that experience maybe it's a you problem. I know I'm nothing extraordinary as killer. I could or couldn't make it big on Twitch, but it wouldn't be because of my unique talent and skill playing as killer, that's for sure.
But i dont talk about game balance at all. I talk about mmr and what might lead to them. Things can be related without being the same, you know.
But just in case i am just misinformed, you can surley give a source of this tournament level players adressing mmr.