Fixing matchmaking would be less complicated than people think

This is going to be a very long post, but I figured I'll go into depth about the matchmaking, why the way it works now is a problem and what I think should be done to fix it, since it's a huge talking point among the community and in my opinion one of the games biggest flaws. If you don't want to read it all, it boils down to "make mmr based on the performance of the whole survivor team instead of invidivually based" and "remove pregame lobbies".

In my opinion there are two main flaws with the current matchmaking in DBD. The first is that MMR being tied purely to your own personal escape and the impact you have to the team overall isn't as important. The second is that the existence of pregame lobbies allows for lobby dodging which destroys any semblance of accurate matchmaking since the matchmaking system has to scramble to backfill players to fill in the slots.

How to fix would be pretty straight forward, only two changes would be needed to make matches more even and better overall, faster to start too.

The first fix is straight forward:

Treat MMR points like literally any other team based online game and make your gains and losses team based instead of individual

What does that mean exactly? This will sound controversial if you don't play other team based games that use matchmaking, but hear me out. In every single other team game, the MMR system works by checking one thing and one thing only. Who won and who lost. But it checks it as a team. Your individual contribution to this win or loss is what over time will determine what players to escapes in a team, and who doesn't. For DBD, this would mean to tie the MMR to the overall progress of the suvivor team as well as the overall amount of escapes. To put it simply, if you are a good player, you are more likely to get your teammates to endgame and have survivors escape. If you are a bad and selfish player, you are less likely to get your teammates to endgame and have survivors escape.

You guys know the main reason people want the emblem system back? Because if you did everything except escape, you'd still gain emblem points and rank up. Your contribution to the team felt like it mattered, which it did. With this new system of team based mmr gains and losses, that aspect would be back. Not only that, but it would actually incentivize you to play more selfless and try to get saves in the endgame to make sure everyone gets out, because that could potentially win you more mmr. The opposite is also true, if you think for a second. If someone plays selfish and hides every single match, their MMR will plummet very quickly since on average, they're not helping their team win, meaning teams with these players will on average die more, so the mmr of such players will remain low instead of being artificially boosted by selfish endgame plays and hatch escapes.

In short, start treating the survivors as a team role instead of a 1v1v1v1v1, and matchmaking will better reflect which players are consistently contributing to the survivor team escaping/winning/progressing the game, even if the metrics are as simple as "how many gens get done on average and do players escape". This is also a good time to explore rewarding altruistic and team focused play with bloodpoints, for example letting all the survivors in the trial get survival points whenever a generator is completed, giving everyone and not just the unhooker points for lategame unhooks, etc.

Oh, and fix abandons and how they impact mmr. If a survivors abandons a match because everyone got downed or hooked for example, that's them officially conceding. That should count as a death/loss in terms of matchmaking. It's not complicated. The player isn't in the trial anymore, who cares what happens to the bot? Why would that even affect matchmaking? That shouldn't impact matchmaking. The survivor abandoned because the game determined that the match was over, they accepted this, so they lose, simple as that. What happens to the bot after is irrelevant.

The second fix is even simpler, but may well be even more effective:

Remove the pregame lobby completely and have the matchmaker send people straight into a match after they accept the match through a prompt

The pregame lobby is extremely outdated and actively works directly against the matchmaking system BHVR has implemented to make match quality worse and matchmaking take longer time than it needs to. It should not be up to the players to somehow judge lobbies after they've been matchmade into them, and dodge ones they deem too sweaty or too casual, at least if you want any semblance of reasonable matchmaking. When lobbies are dodged, this means the left slot has to be backfilled, which prioritizes speed over accuracy and causes even worse matchmaking than the original lobby that was dodged.

Say five players are matched perfectly into a lobby, what would be a pretty even match. But two of them decide "this lobby isn't it" based on entirely their own interpretation of the lobby, and who knows what they judge people for that they deem wrong enough to dodge the lobby based on. What was once a perfectly fine lobby and would have been a perfectly fine match suddenly becomes a terrible match as two random players far outside the lobby's original skill rating, either too high or too low, are backfilled in to help the match get started. After all, you wouldn't want to waste people's time sitting in lobby, right?

But wasting time is exactly what the lobby causes in the first place. And then the matchmaking system has to backfill to "save time" when it's the very lobby that the matchmaker places players into that causes time to be wasted and the need to backfill in the first place. It's ridiculous. In no other team game can you join a lobby, check who's playing, leave, and some random other person joins afterward far outside the skill rating. Either you accept the match when a prompt shows up that says your match is ready, or you decline and go back to searching. You never even get to see who the players are and that's a good thing, because that's the matchmakers responsibility.

If you've read the whole post, thanks, and I'm curious to hear what you think. From my point of view, the matchmaking isn't actually that hard to fix. BHVR just have to be comfortable with tying MMR to overall team performance, and dare to let players sit in queue a little longer to get match, at the benefit of immediately getting into a much higher quality, better matched game once they find and accept the match from the search screen.