Comments

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  @ScottJund said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2769014#Comment_2769014

  Interesting. People who have turned crossplay actually notice their games are even more mismatched than ever. I think CoconutRTS did an experiment with that as well (as anecdotal as it is). It would make sense, as you would have longer queues with it turned off, thus leading to wider variance.

  Its also a slippery slope. You might be okay with 5 minute queues every time, but a lot of people wouldn't be. This would in turn, lead to less players, leading to longer queues, leading to wider variance, in an endless cycle.

  To be fair, I haven't been queueing much on cross off post-implementation of MMR, I'm one of the people that transitioned back into the ""casual"" pool after it became more bearable thanks to MMR (I know in your experience things haven't changed much, but I for one really do see top-level players relatively frequently in my lobbies now that I only rarely did prior to MMR). So I can't really say what cross off is usually like now, but it used to be good enough.

  I get your second argument, and as easy as a suggestion like "make matchmaker a little more strict for high MMR" sounds, in reality tweaking these numbers likely indeed leads to more and unforeseen knock-on effects. It's definitely rather complicated, I mean, there's a reason BHVR has for years been and still is tinkering with this stuff. So yeah, like I suggested, maybe the fact that BHVR seems to favour queue times to be as short as they are now already suggests making them any longer in favour of ratings would lead to bad things.

  Maybe they could test a split "casual"/"competitive" queue for a week or so after all...

  in How the MMR works, and why what Patrick said makes absolute sense (from a dev POV) Comment by zarr January 25, 2022

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  @ScottJund said:

  Guys. These discussions are meaningless. Arguing how to do a proper MMR system in an asymmetrical game with player imbalances is completely pointless. The system could assign numbers perfectly and still not work because once you are in queue for a certain amount of time, the system doesn't work anyway. If you make it more strict in terms of skill, people quit because they don't want 10 minute minimum queues. If you make it less strict, like we have now, you have literally first game players going against people with thousands of hours. In both of these scenarios, the MMR might be calcuated perfectly, but none of this matters whatsoever in an asymmetrical game like Dead by Daylight that has an uneven amount of players on each side required to play the game.

  Imagine if you queued into a League or Dota match but you had to queue as solo mid, support, jungler, etc. Your queue times would either be astronomically higher or the system would widen the search range, leading to extreme variance in skill.

  League, Dota, Counterstrike - any game with functional MMR is not asymmetrical. You just need ten players to start the match. That's it. The roles do not matter. With Dead by Daylight, you need the exact correct ratio to make queue times not very long, and once they are long, as they are, the system does not work.

  These discussions are meaningless.

  I'm not convinced queue times would get prohibitively long if we made the matchmaker a little more strict. Crossplay off queues (at least prior to MMR when lots of people still played on it) used to be pretty reasonable in my region, yet also much more consistently paired notably higher-level players of both roles. The players are out there, queueing at the same time, the matchmaker just seems to usually match them away before they can find each other.

  Obviously we don't want Dowsey-tier hour-long queues, but if the system would at least look for much stricter rating matches during the first 5 minutes, I think things could already be much more consistent. And this could even be implemented with a cut-off point, where only players above a certain MMR threshold (starting at high mid to high range) are more strictly queued among their brackets in those first minutes, which might help with queue times overall since less of them will be paired away into lower brackets, more remaining available for "bracket-exclusive" pairing, and since it also won't affect lower bracket queue times much as they can still be matched more liberally even in the first 5 minutes, including with players from the upper brackets that have at that point already been waiting for more than 5.

  Obviously I don't know any of this, we would have to see actual numbers on this stuff, and it might be fair to say that since BHVR is not doing it they may have already decided faster queue times are more important... but I for one would be okay with ~5 minute average high MMR queues if it more consistently led to closer matches. Although you as a streamer are probably not quite okay with that.

  in How the MMR works, and why what Patrick said makes absolute sense (from a dev POV) Comment by zarr January 25, 2022

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  @Pulsar said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2768750#Comment_2768750

  Global averages are meaningless without the data behind them.

  There's far too many variables. For all we know, it could be CoH and CoH alone that is pushing the global Kill Rates down.

  They could've stopped counting DC's as Kills. We literally don't know.

  DCs have after some date always been excluded from these stats. So if they have for some reason not been excluded for the MMR-era stats, that would mean those stats are actually inflated by around 5% (Peanits at some point mentioned that this is roughly what the increased kill rate when including DCs amounts to, probably a bit less now due to DC penalties), putting them even closer to 50% when subtracting games with DCs.

  Either way, the "too many variables" argument is often misplaced. There are certainly too many variables at play to be able to use those stats to say everything about the game, there are arguments you cannot make in inference on global average stats alone... but you can absolutely say something and some things about the game based on them. One such thing is "the global, average state of balance when including all factors and variables is such and such", because that's what the stats literally say, they are the "live balance" that accounts for all possibilities that do affect matches, and they tell the story of the average, global win/loss experience more than anything else ever could, by literally showing the results of millions upon millions of matches, every single (pub) match every single player played during that time, "factoring in" every single thing that affected them.

  To illustrate this: Even if DCs had not been excluded from the stats, there can be the argument that DCs are important to include; DCs unfortunately do in fact affect the gameplay experience of DbD, and insofar they affect global, average win/loss rates, they are for better and worse things that have to be accounted for when trying to shape the experience your average player will have in the game. That doesn't mean you balance the actual game for the idea that players can DC, but trying to keep global average rates within a reasonable margin even when including DCs is still an obvious goal, ideally of course by trying to reduce the incidence of DCs to begin with. Same for the countless other factors (e. g. you know Nurse has a higher skill floor than any other killer in the game and players new to her struggle playing her and that's the main factor why her rates are low, but yet you still want her to have global average kill rates closer to 50% so that people overall can be assumed to struggle less with playing her, so you buff her, give her add-ons that make her more of a "regular" killer by increasing her base movement speed, fix her bugs, implement MMR that gives beginner Nurses easier matches, ... and that all despite her also being the undisputedly strongest killer in the game in the hands of a skilled player, which has always been true and yet she received various buffs throughout the game's existence and will soon receive a big fix pass, again without any nerfs).

  ...Anyway, comparing global average rates from then to now is definitely rather telling in terms of what the global average win/loss experience is like with MMR, and sorry, I have an impossible time seeing that COH is what would affect rates this much. But even if it did, that would ultimately just add to the argument, as the stats would say MMR can keep kill rates around 50% despite such an unbelievably (literally) impactful perk having been introduced.

  in How the MMR works, and why what Patrick said makes absolute sense (from a dev POV) Comment by zarr January 25, 2022

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  @Johnny_XMan said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2768561#Comment_2768561

  I think it is interesting that you mention that survivors not being efficient (hiding well, not doing gens) is a "rare" incident when it is more common than you think. It is a huge reason why solo queue survivor is in bad shape.

  Like, you can think whatever you want about the system, but the fact still remains. Games are unfun with people who are so inefficient they end up forcing others to do everything. If the game is constantly giving them "wins" then (hypothetically) they are bound to be at the matchmaking level of those who escape who also actually perform objective actions. I don't see how pointing that out is in any way shape or form a bad thing.

  Even while on a hook you can see the auras of survivors who are actively doing SOMETHING, and I don't believe anyone is expecting recognition for being efficient and contributing to the match, but to me its the same thing as when you ask a teammate why they didn't take a hit or why they didn't do a gen...in other words "contribute" and their immediate response is "I am alive you are the dead one", because they don't want to admit what that answer is.

  So I am sticking with what we know right now, and that is that just because you escape doesn't mean you are good at the game. Which is what has always been there anyway.

  You misunderstood. I don't think inefficient or otherwise bad survivors are rare (I know all too well that they aren't, believe me), it's the scenario that they survive that is rare, and certainly, they do not survive as often as more efficient, better survivors. The system is about consistently surviving.

  Those "non-players" (as I usually refer to them) do in fact not constantly get wins. Unless such a person plays in an SWF with players that are worlds better than them and does so exclusively, the scenarios where "deadweight" survivors are hard-carried by their teammates' 5-gen chases and whatnot are more than rare enough for them to not be able to maintain even just 50% escape rates at those levels, let alone more than that such that they would climb in rating. And again, even if this would somehow be the case for some absurd reason, you enter the next stage of absurdity where then a lot of such non-players would populate higher rating brackets, get paired with each other, but somehow still survive?

  Your issue is that you think the MMR system is some form of "recognition", and I can understand why it would then be extra-annoying to sometimes see a player that didn't do much of anything useful get to escape while you die. But realize that the MMR system is not actually a recognition of anything, the only thing that could happen if that player's rating actually notable increases from that escape or other such escapes, is that they get matches where they are less likely to escape, and more likely to be brutalized by the killer, a thought you can maybe find some solace or a chuckle in.

  The "recognition" if anything comes from the Bloodpoint/Grade stuff, which will definitely reward you more if you do all that stuff in the round, than it will the non-player.

  Either way, the matchmaking definitely still has issues, it's not like I don't see survivor players in my games (on either side) that clearly do not belong in rounds with me. Maybe part of that is that the system actually concludes that it has to sometimes mix in much more lower-rated survivors to achieve balanced outcomes, and while that can be totally frustrating, maybe you can take it as a sort of compliment too: the system predicts that you are good enough to be able to carry these Megheads over the finish line against actually-competent killers that they would otherwise never stand a chance in hell against. And maybe if you took stats on your games, you would find that you actually do still average 50+% escapes even despite these matches, or hell, even when looking only at those matches.

  I know that latter part doesn't do too much to make up for some of the frustations of playing with (and also against) such players, and I do hope that BHVR will tighten the matchmaking algorithms to actually pair more closely-rated players even if that affects queue times and turns out to skew kill/survival rates away from 50% (then actual game balance changes could be invoked of course), and reconsider on mixing much-lower-rated survivors into higher-rated lobbies (if this is actually an intended function of the matchmaker logic currently). But yeah, beyond that the only advice I can give is that you could try and change your perspective, to care less about actually surviving and more about just whatever gameplay you do get in those rounds, and see such games just as more of a challenge, give it your best, and don't mind so much if you don't make it. Easier said than done, but at least you should have an easier time with it now when you consider that MMR does not actually reward them or punish you.

  Also, BHVR will apparently make the rating adjustments be dependent on the entire team's survival results after all, so in the future you won't even have to feel bad about the "rating" in that scenario, since that Meghead escaping increases yours too!

  @illusion said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2768745#Comment_2768745

  Dude, you are trying so hard to defend the system that you are not comprehending the things you are disagreeing with. I clearly stated that the emblem system was flawed, but it contained all the skill based information needed to create a skill based system. I also said that it ranked people up too easily. There is no flaw in my understanding. I pointed out that all that was really needed was to tweak the numbers so that wasn't the case and to remove anything that boosted rank but had nothing to do with skill.

  I also did not contradict myself. I pointed out that it is a team-based game, but it ranks players as individuals, not as a team, therefore the analogy to hockey is completely flawed. How did you not understand that? If the survivors all won or lost as a team, then you could compare it to a team sport....maybe, but this system does not rank players as a team. Some members of the team go up, some go down, so nothing like hockey. If you are going to try and correct me, get it right. Yes, hockey looks at goals when it comes to who wins the game, but that does not reflect the skill of each individual player. Every player has their own stats, which is how they are ranked in the league regardless of how the rest of the team plays, and which is why good players on bad teams still get invited to the all-star games.

  Also, that whole "it will balance out" thing does not work. When you lose, you are matched with even worse players, so you have an even greater chance of losing the next match and matches after that. That logic expects that you will somehow solo carry a 4 man team to victory, which is ridiculous.

  I don't think the emblem system contained all the skill information needed for such a system, and I don't believe it would be possible to tweak it such that its metrics and how it measures and weighs them could yield an as well-balanced outcome in terms of kill and survival chances/rates as the kill and survival-based system does. I also think BHVR would have realized and made that happen if it were readily possible, rather than create an entirely new system.

  The difference between hockey and DbD in that regard is that in hockey teams are actually teams that play together all the time, "teams" in DbD are usually only playing together for that one match, so of course it would be absurd to rate them "as a team", those ratings would have to be discarded instantly. They can certainly be rated on basis of their performance as a team, but the ratings of course have to be applied individually. In hockey, teams are rated by wins as a whole, because they are the player entities that get matched against other teams, and while individual players are rated separately from their team with more metrics, those separate ratings are not used to make matches happen, matches are based on the team rating (goals - wins/losses), which are the equivalent to individual (survival/kill-based) player ratings in DbD. You can perhaps read more about that when you follow the trail left by OP/DesignDad, who mentioned that "PS – Love Trueskill, I remember reading papers about it many years ago. It solved some problems with matchmaking that are unique to videogames (ie building a fresh team for every game) in interesting ways."

  Either way, my pointing out that the critique of the hockey analogy is misguided didn't hinge on correcting you on the teamplay thing, even if hockey were a 1V1 game the point would stand that the parts of it that Patrick drew analogy to, are analogous between DbD and hockey. The "matchmaking" systems only care about wins, only those hockey teams that score more goals than their opponents win, only they advance to face better teams that themselves also won.

  I still don't get how you don't understand that it will balance out because you are matched against worse opponents (less killy killers in this case).

  Look, if you consistently get matched with teammates that are so much more awful than you, I feel your pain, and have had more than my share of those experiences. I find things have improved a lot in that regard with MMR, and I get really rather alright teammates more often now when I queue solo (noticably more tournament players and other players that I recognize than I ever did prior to MMR, and general veterans of the game, many high-hour gamers), but if you are actually stuck in "Elo hell", I won't deny that that can happen, might depend on region too. What region are you in, maybe we could duo?

  As a by the way: Much as it may seem here, I'm not usually eager to "defend" the devs or be optimistic about plenty of the things they do. I just genuinely think the MMR system - while certainly not perfect, for the reasons I was happy to point out in multiple posts - was an actual, tangible improvement over the old matchmaking system, and I am glad the devs "dared" to touch such an integral game function in this way. But ultimately none of what you or I or anyone here says will greatly sway them, they'll decide what to do anyway, and if you have any hopes that they will work on the Emblem system and bring it back to use for matchmaking, I doubt you'll see that happen.

  in How the MMR works, and why what Patrick said makes absolute sense (from a dev POV) Comment by zarr January 24, 2022

• @Pulsar said:

  I'm just not seeing any indication that MMR is better than the old matchmaking system.

  My games have stayed roughly the same in terms of fairness (if not less so than they were under the Emblem system) and the rest of the game appears to have suffered for it.

  I don't think the system was worth it at all, especially if we are going to continue to make glacially slow balance changes.

  Global average kill/escape rates are now much nearer 50% than they had been with old matchmaking, there couldn't really be much better of an indication that this new system has overall led to a more balanced state of matches in this game, which was its purpose.

  in How the MMR works, and why what Patrick said makes absolute sense (from a dev POV) Comment by zarr January 24, 2022

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  @RainehDaze said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2768619#Comment_2768619

  Oh, no, I meant if they were outright aiming for 2E as a most common outcome, you're trying to create a balance where one side must 100% complete its objective in all games and the other side needs to only half do its one. That's just troublesome.

  Things being stompy one way or the other and averaging out is the more likely outcome, but if that's not what they're aiming for then it's weird.

  Completing generators is not 100% of the survivor objective, escaping is part of it. Besides, players can very well die before all gens are completed, even in games where eventually all gens do get completed and 2 survivors escape, and so those players that died earlier did not complete the gen objective before the game was over.

  Regardless, they aren't aiming for either 2 escapes every match or an alternating cycle of 4-escape and 4-kill matches, they are aiming just for a 50% kill/survival average, "per-player" but over all matches, which in the results of the individual matches can mean much of anything, inlcuding games where 1 or 3 people escape.

  What a perfectly-balanced round of DbD (or any game) ultimately truly is is another question entirely, and one that basically cannot be answered since different people see different things as differently important. But contrary to what you said, defining surviving and killing as win conditions is... the opposite of ridiculous in Dead by Daylight. Those are the clearest, most obvious criteria by which to measure success, and they are also what most people mostly care about. Maybe DbD could be better if it instead revolved around hooks, and killers could win with less-than-3 kills if they get enough hooks, and lose with more-than-2 kills if they didn't get enough hooks... but that is not the reality of the game, and so regardless of whether people would like such a game, the MMR cannot possibly be based on hooks as is, that would actually be ridiculous and lead to absurd consequences, the game would have to be redesigned in some major ways to make this possible.

  As for @TheSubstitute's question whether MMR - the success-based, "skill-correlated" matchmaking system - is preferable to other matchmaking systems like the one we've had before... I for one think it is, both based on my personal and anecdotal gameplay experiences, and also on my conviction that people ultimately care about killing and surviving above all, and will have more "fun" with the game if they do so often enough, which MMR is meant to ensure, as opposed to the old system where again, average kill rates were very high, due to having very lopsided matches. I think it is no coincidence that most of the complaints about MMR seem to come from killer players, who have on average suffered a decrease of 10-20% in kill rates down from what they were before. They are actually averaging around 2 kills now as the system is intending (and good players still average much above that, since the system not seldomly does not and often simply cannot supply them with similarly-rated players, due to lack of such players in the pool), but they are having a harder time than in the past, getting less kills, and are often seemingly not happy with averaging around 2 kills.

  Of course, if enough players (on either side, for whatever reason, justifiably or understandably or not) are dissatisfied with the game due to the system, having less "fun", playing less or not playing at all anymore, and if this actually leads to the game being less successful, and does so to such an extent that BHVR considers it to be too detrimental to (new) player retention, then it probably should and in all likeliness will be changed. Perhaps the game needs to be designed around average kill rates of around 70% since humans just want to be favoured in their average playing experience of being a killer in such a game, more than they feel they should be as a survivor. Those could be reasonable assumptions. But so far I have no reason to assume this is the case, the decline in player numbers over the last few months is not major and a more steep downtrend to be expected given that the game had experienced its by-far biggest surges in player activity in the months before that, with the RE chapter and Covid affecting things - and beyond that, the fact that BHVR went and reworked such an integral system to their game's experience to begin with that they knew would notably decrease global kill rates if it worked as intended, and are still not showing signs to be reconsidering on (to scrap the system), suggests to me that they have concluded (based on many more insights than we have of course) that it is actually beneficial for the game.

  @illusion said:

  The game already tracks skill based player objectives in the emblem system, so saying that it can't be done makes zero sense. The only problem was that the numbers needed to be changed to properly reflect the value of each of the actions. Also, there were some actions in that system that don't require skill and they should be removed.

  Plus, survivors play as a team but are ranked individually, so if one of the players plays extremely well and carries the team, but dies on their first hook, they get put onto a worse team next match, while players that do little in the match but hide, get higher mmr scores and get placed with better teams that will carry them even more. How is that remotely fair and balanced? Who could possibly call that a good system for ranking players?

  Now, no one really cares that bad players get ranked up. They will eventually get to a place where their playstyle just doesn't work with far more skilled killers. The problems is that good players can end up in a snowball of losses because they keep getting teamed with less skilled players.

  And, to act like Patrick's comments were valid, when he used a hockey analogy that doesn't reflect the situation in DbD, is ridiculous. This is not a team game. You don't win or lose as a team. You win or lose as individuals, so individual skill should absolutely be taken into consideration. And since they already track that stuff, and were using it in the previous MMR system, you can't say it can't be done. It just needed to be tweaked.

  You are basically taking every point the OP attempted to explain, and showcasing again the flaws in understanding those explanations are meant to alleviate.

  We've already had a matchmaking system based on Emblems, and as you yourself point out, it had problems. In fact, BHVR can see with hard numbers that it was vastly more imbalanced than the current system. As you allude to, there are problems with the things Emblems count and how those things are weighed. And there are things it does not count at all. The main problem with the ranking system based on Emblems and the matchmaking in turn based on ranks was that pretty much everyone ended up at rank 1 sooner or later, and that's how ridiculous kill rates approaching 80% even on average could happen in red ranks. They just did not track player skill and performances well at all, otherwise you would not have had 100 hour Megs at rank 1 every season. The problem with trying to track all the things that go into playing DbD (or indeed any game) is that they are basically uncountable and unquantifiable, and even if you could define, determine and detect all of them, you would then run into the next essentially-impossible task, of deciding concrete tiers of how important they all are in relation to each other.

  The solution is to simply look at the results that all of these things lead to: wins. Looking at that will account for all of those things well-enough, and it will automatically weigh the many different skills because those skills that are the most conduvice to winning, naturally lead to winning more than others that aren't as conducive to winning.

  So much for the explanation why skills are best accounted-for by looking at results in terms of wins/losses (every MMR/Elo system in existence does this, it's what MMR is designed to be). Keep in mind however that accounting for skills is not actually the reason why these systems look at win results - winning is what people play for, they compete in these player-versus-player games in order to succeed, the vast majority of players does not play in order to not succeed. As such, the system that pairs players should give them a chance to be able to succeed. Ultimately games are about fun, and people usually have fun in games if they succeed, especially if the games are designed to yield good (engaging) gameplay in competitive contexts. The MMR system gives players this chance, it uses algorithms to predict outcomes and pair players such that roughly equal chances of success are at play more often than not. You don't want a chess grandmaster regularly playing against beginners - but not because the chess master is more skilled and therefore a superior person that a beginner doesn't deserve to play against, but simply because neither player involved would enjoy that experience much, let alone if they had to play such lopsided matches all the time (and more problems with this exist if they're playing for prizes of course). Skill merely correlates with winning, it is not the reason why we use MMR in games in and of itself.

  For the team aspect thing... While it is true that a team-based rating could (and apparently will in the future) be used, you are failing to see how the per-survivor survival rate ultimately will also account for their teamplay performance. Teamplay also leads to increased chances of succeeding (surviving), and so while it is certainly possible to die despite having done a lot for the team, a player that is good at teamplay will still over many matches survive more often than a player that is not good at teamplay and does not contribute a lot. Your assumption that such players that do not contribute get even better teammates as they rise in rating and players that do contribute worse teammates as they fall is glaringly flawed in various respects. First of all, this is one match, the rating adjustment won't mean much. Secondly, if the survivor that did not contribute much would consistently survive, so would others that do not contribute, and so at higher ratings they would be less and less likely to encounter teammates that can carry them, instead they would all hide. You see quickly how this leads to an absurd scenario. And this is because people that do not contribute on average do not actually survive, they will never surpass players that do contribute in average success rates. Over enough matches, the players that do stuff, are even good enough to "carry" a team among which are people that barely contribute at all, will always outperform those people that do not contribute, in terms of success (survival) rates. You are also failing to account for the fact that players that do nothing but rise in rating would face increasingly tougher killers against which surviving is less likely, especially playing in that way, and that players that do a lot but fall in rating would face increasingly less tough killers, against which surviving is more likely, especially playing in that way.

  As for your last point, it's funny how starkly you contradict your earlier point about how this game is played as a team, but suddenly hockey is not fit for an analogy because it is a team game. Regardless, as pointed out, the analogy didn't pertain all of those aspects of hockey, just like it didn't pertain the aspect of hockey that people play on ice and wear helmets. The analogy specifically pertained the fact that as in hockey, the team that wins (scores more goals) is also automatically seen as a better team and matched with better teams in turn. They do not have to use very complicated means to evaluate a team's performance/skill levels to decide who they should play against, and they definitely don't let the team that lost (scored less goals) proceed in the brackets and leaderboards to face the better teams just because someone analyzed the game and said that the team that lost in terms of goals is however still better... No, they just look at goals for that stuff, which does also account for performance and skill levels, but ultimately is just what the game is about, winning, by achieving clearly-defined, diametrically opposed win conditions, advancing if you do so, not advancing if you do not. That's the point of the analogy, and Patrick could have used essentially any competitive PVP game in existence to make this point, he just chose hockey because he's Canadian.

  in How the MMR works, and why what Patrick said makes absolute sense (from a dev POV) Comment by zarr January 24, 2022

• @SilentShepherd said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2768422#Comment_2768422

  And? That person who hides to escape, STILL got to a rating they do not deserve. bad system.

  And the person who actually tries to play the game and is doing everything for the team, this player puts themselves at risk more, and WILL die more, but they are an overall NET POSITIVE for the team in every game they play, as they take the heat away from others and help the team accomplish many things. This should be taken into account.

  Since this is a team game, and the Lead Ded used a hockey analogy, I will use a basketball analogy.

  Plus/Minus +/-

  A player who does 3 generators, 3 safe unhooks, puts up 3 boons, and escapes 4 chases is an overall NET POSITIVE. And we could assign numerical values to all of those efforts and find a +13, for example. This person should climb MMR and not be held back because they died.

  Sorry, but I'm afraid you are one of the people the OP refers to when they say "screeching" over things one does not understand.

  1. The system would be bad if the person that only hides, does not contribute much of anything to the round and ends up escaping wouldn't get an increased rating for rounds in which they actually escape, because then that person would get even easier opponents that they may well escape more often against "playing" that way, as opposed to getting tougher opponents against which they cannot regularly survive that way.
  2. The person that only hides and does not contribute much of anything to rounds may escape in rare exceptions of rounds where they just so happen to be lucky enough to get teammates that are so much better than them and than the killer that they carry the <3v1 match, but the rule, the thing that will consistently happen over many matches, is that such a person will not escape, their escape rate will be fairly low. Just think, think your complaint through to its logical end: If it were an actual problem with the MMR system that people that only hide escape and rise in rating, what would high-MMR environments look like? You would regularly have multiple players in high-MMR matches that only hide, and face off against killers that are increasingly better at killing survivors... but somehow they still escape? Of course this is absurd, they will much earlier stop escaping playing that way before they ever reach a high rating, in fact they would not ever be escaping more than they die playing that way to begin with, at much of any rating.
  3. Likewise for the person that "does everything", and contributes much more to the round - they will escape much more frequently because doing such things increases the likeliness of survival, and individual matches in which they do not escape despite playing that way (and in which players that contributed less perhaps do escape thanks to them) are exceptions to the rule that will over a large enough number of matches accurately be measured and predicted for by the rating. And likewise, in any matches where this person does not escape playing in this way, they should fall in rating, such that they can eventually escape by doing these things since they will match appropriately lesser opponents.
  4. All the "skill" factors that go on in the game are impossible to even define, let alone detect, measure, weigh. It would not only be an impossible endeavour to try and do so, but ultimately a completely overkill, overcomplicated approach - the accuracy of the ratings is not actually all that important, they don't mean too much, you are not actually being judged, or let alone rewarded or punished based on such judgements; the only thing the (invisible) ratings are for is pairing you with other players of similar ratings, and so not only wouldn't it matter if those ratings weren't entirely accurate for your skill or contributions or whatnot since they aren't for the players you are matched against based on them either, but ultimately making such pairings is never an awfully accurate thing to begin with because different players are different humans and it is impossible to find two humans out of the entire world population that are actually precisely-equally "skilled" or otherwise perfectly "matched" in their abilities of... doing much of anything, including playing Dead by Daylight. Instead, the match only has to be rough, an educated but rough estimate, good enough to yield on average even outcomes, where the respectively matched players have about equal chances to succeed (to kill and survive), at least over many matches.

  You have to stop thinking about MMR as some kind of ladder toward some kind of goal or reward. There is no leaderboard, there are no rewards, and you can't even see your rating. It is entirely in the background and should not factor into how you play at all. Stop caring about it and play however you want, and know the system is only meant to more frequently match you against players that are similar in the ways of playing the game and what they want from the game. If you care a lot about winning (killing/surviving) and are good at it, you will face players that also care a lot about winning and are good at it, ideally until you hit a point (a rating) at which you face equals, have competitive matches and win around 50% of the time. If you do not care about winning so much and do not win as often, you will face players that likewise do not care so much or win as often, likewise then being able to hang. In both scenarios you do not have to play for your rating whatsoever, you just have to play how and for the goals you want, your rating will adjust to you, and you will have more "healthy" gameplay experiences that are more desirable for everyone involved than you would have in a system that paired you with just anyone.

  If the game told you "you suck" based on these ratings, and if there even were rewards, such as cosmetics, and it told you "you suck and therefore you are not getting this cool cosmetic", I could understand why people are so up in arms about the idea that the system does not perfectly accurately measure and factor in all skills. But the ratings are not even shown, and so even regardless of the fact that they do actually factor in various important skills, they ultimately don't matter in such a sense. They matter in the sense of aiming to attain a goal of approaching 50% overall winrates, to yield more balanced win/loss experiences of players on average, and the devs say they do so rather well, and they can actually see this in detail. There are still some issues, most of all the matchmaker itself that frequently all but ignores the ratings, but it's an infinitely more accurate system in this regard than the old matchmaking system; it works in this regard, and the global kill/survival rates actually show this too, now solidly coalescing around 50% across the board, when in the past we had even red rank kill rates approaching 70%.

  in How the MMR works, and why what Patrick said makes absolute sense (from a dev POV) Comment by zarr January 24, 2022

• I appreciate to hear voices of reason on this. The response to MMR has been baffling, many people think the devs have it backwards but their own reasoning is backwards and fundamentally fails to understand what an MMR system is, as well as riddled with other fallacies and misconceptions.

  And I would go even further than you, and say the system is not only the technically most sound system it should be (which is, as any functioning MMR system, it should be about winning, and clearly-defined, diametrically opposed win conditions, which in DbD completely logically means - and without changing the game fundamentally indeed can only mean - killing versus surviving), but that it does by looking at kill and survival rates in fact also factor in skills more accurately than any other metric.

  As you point out, ultimately it wouldn't even matter if the system had nothing to do with "skill" as it is commonly understood, it would still do its job of giving people matches in which they on average are roughly equally likely to succeed. This is desirable even if the reasons for it would be something other than "skill" factors, since people generally like winning and generally do not like losing, and in DbD specifically, like surviving/killing, not dying/failing to kill. It would still yield more desirable gameplay experiences (more fair/even/"balanced") that lead to less frustration and more satisfaction. But I also am convinced that killing and surviving account for skills more than anything else, and that the skills required to consistently succeed in terms of killing and surviving - i. e. the skills that correlate with killing and surviving - are absolutely the skills that should be selected for. Chase skills are still heavily weighed by these metrics, but macrogame skills that a "number of hooks" metric for example would not nearly as much account for also play a huge role, and they do indeed require a fair bit of mental and mechanical abilities and make for nuanced play and decision-making on both sides, particularly of course because in an MMR system this happens between players that are increasingly more apt at competing in these ways.

  That doesn't mean the system is perfect (the rating cap and matchmaker logic in particular can be problematic), let alone of course that the game is perfect and could not be changed to "weigh" the different skills differently in its actual gameplay and potentially thereby become a more desirable experience in and of itself, but it does mean the system functionally fits the game as it actually is and produces desirable results (as long as and insofar the player pools and matchmaker algorithms allow for it).

  I think the system could be improved a little by looking at group survival rather than individual survival (so the win conditions instead are 0-1 kills/3-4 escapes versus 3-4 kills/0-1 escapes), and by calculating rating adjustments based on the average rating of the group rather than that of individual survivors, as well as factoring hook stages into the equation a bit (i. e. a 9-stage 3k would increase killer rating/decrease survivor rating by less than a 10/11-stage 3k, and a 3-stage 1k would decrease killer rating/increase survivor rating by more than a 4-9-stage 1k). Ultimately I do not think this is necessary and the per-survivor kill and survival rate calculations are doing their job well-enough for the purposes of matchmaking, but I suspect it could account for some performance aspects a little more accurately in the sense that it would take less trials to adjust ratings appropriately, as well as make rating adjustments on the killer side inflate less from facing very mismatchedly-rated groups. I think the devs also mentioned that they want to move to looking at group survival. Do you agree that these would be improvements?

  in How the MMR works, and why what Patrick said makes absolute sense (from a dev POV) Comment by zarr January 24, 2022

• COH would frankly be garbage if it only enabled people to heal themselves at Self-Care speed.

  1. As opposed to Self-Care, COH is tied to a Boon totem. That means it has to be set up, at a significant time investment, and at the risk of getting taken away again.
  2. As opposed to Self-Care, COH's effect is tied to a limited area. That means survivors have to traverse the map in order to be able to heal, which takes time, and additional time to then again get to wherever they need to be. The killer can also capitalize upon this, catching survivors that are healing in as well as moving to and from the area, another liability Self-Care doesn't come with.
  3. The perk slot argument only matters if all survivors are actually coordinating their loadouts, which the majority of players do not, and regularly cannot. COH can in fact even result in wasted slots and time if other survivors bring means of healing, including if they themselves also bring COH.

  Furthermore, even Self-Care itself is not a meta perk in many regions. And COH is not ubiquitous. I still have games as killer and survivor in which not a single COH is present, which is remarkable given that it means 4 individuals combined for a total 16 times of deciding not to equip the perk. Ever since the Self-Care nerfs years ago, there was a meta shift in most regions toward a "no-heal" paradigm, where people refrained from bringing means of healing altogether and regularly just remained injured to keep working on gens instead, often even forgoing healing each other. COH shifting the meta more toward people spending time on healing again is desirable, because it prolongs games due to reducing both the time spent on gens and the snowball potential of killers. While it is certainly a strong perk and that continual healing will often have a notable impact on matches, the time spent setting it up and healing at all as well as the fact that it leads to survivors moving around the map more can absolutely benefit killers.

  While the perk is not as overpowered as some people make it out to be, it is overtuned. For one thing, it absolutely shouldn't apply to med-kit heals, those healing interactions are just too fast. For another, since it also applies to altruistic heals and can therefore benefit survivors in ways that go beyond time efficiency (e. g. healing up a survivor from the dying state before a killer can get there), I think reducing the healing speed boost is a sensible nerf. The planned healing speed boost reduction to 75% could already be enough, although personally I think 60% might be a sweeter value, coming out to 20-second self-heals and 10-second altruistic heals.

  I do think some adjustments for the Boon mechanic in general are also in order. For one thing, players should not be able to bless a totem if they already have a Boon standing, until the killer snuffs it. That way players have to make more of a committment to an area and cannot relocate as they please. It would also force them to cleanse any Hexes they may encounter and want to get rid of, if they have a Boon still up.

  For another, snuffing totems should be a little more impactful. Snuffing could destroy totems, put the respective player's Boon perk(s) on a cooldown before they are able to bless again, or it could render the respective player unable to bless that respective totem again for the remainder of the match. Alternatively, Boon perks could continually lose strength with every snuffing and reblessing, seeing reductions in effective range or in their specific effects (e. g. -6m per blessing, or -20% healing speed on COH per blessing). A reduction in blessing speed could also be interesting, such that every consecutive blessing takes longer.

  Either way, any potential nerf beyond the one BHVR is already shipping should have to be reasonable. If one were to actually ship the ridiculous nerfs people here often suggest (32s healing time, no self-healing at all, disabled completely if snuffed), the perk would just stop seeing any use whatsoever, and too many perks already barely see use (including the other Boons). The survivor pool of meta-viable perks in particular has been stale for years, and COH (as opposed to original Mettle Of Man) is actually a desirable addition to that pool.

  in COH would be OP even without healing speed bonus Comment by zarr January 24, 2022

• A quick idea I've had when I thought about the perk in the past: Make it so that the healing speed debuff applies outside of the killer's terror radius, but inside of the radius healing speed is increased. That way it's a serious slowdown as survivors heal at half speed map-wide, but as a trade-off they can try and heal faster within terror radius, even attempting to do so mid-chase. Would make for a fairly interesting dynamic, leading to more interaction since survivors are encouraged to actively seek out the killer, and do so while injured, allowing the killer to capitalize.

  Obviously pairs well with Nurse's Calling. It would also be the first true synergy for Furtive Chase, lol (albeit still more of a meme combo, of course).

  in How would you buff Coulrophobia? Comment by zarr January 24, 2022

• 
  

  @lemonsway said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2766203#Comment_2766203

  Getting hooks means you're winning more chases, winning more chases means you are doing something better than the other player and that can equate to skill. Honestly i don't understand why it takes 3 hooks to kill someone permenantly, 12 hooks total is insane given how quickly gens can be done, it's a time consuming and repetitive process that only showcases the lack of gameplay options given to killers. Pyramid Head can Cage and quick Mori people based on applying a debuff, why is he the only killer that has a quick option?

  First: Getting hooks doesn't actually necessarily mean you're winning more chases, or indeed any chases. A killer that gets a 3k with 3 hooks might have very well won 3 proper chases, and did it so well that it was fast enough to be able to spend 6 minutes standing around facecamping those hooks. A player that gets 2 kills with 8 hooks might have very well been... a Plague, for instance, that instantly went and activated Corrupt Purge, got an early down out in the open, and then just hovered around her hook for the remainder of the match, with survivors continually coming in and trading hooks. Not a single proper, skilled chase has to have happened for such a scenario to be possible.

  Now, I certainly agree that getting many hooks usually will mean the player did properly and successfully chase survivors and is thus good at chasing, that the continual-hook-trading scenario is more of an exception, especially since increasingly more highly-rated survivors should be increasingly less prone to play into that too... but the same is true for a killer that gets more kills than another killer, especially against increasingly more highly-rated survivors: usually that will mean the killer with the higher kill rate is more skilled, including at chasing but also at many other things that hooks do not account for, even if there are exceptions where a lower-skilled killer can have ended up killing more survivors of the same team than a higher-skilled killer. That this is true is especially obvious if you consider the fact that the higher-skilled killer can simply also do whatever the lower-skilled killer did, and do so more effectively. If it's facecamping, the higher-skilled killer will be more successful doing so than the lower-skilled killer, since they can end chases more quickly and therefore get more hooks to camp and do so earlier, making it much more likely to end in comparatively more kills. Over large enough sample sizes (many matches), more skilled players will absolutely come out killing more often.

  Secondly, killers actually have gameplay options to end games without needing 12 hooks, and that is also precisely the reason why hooks cannot be the win condition that MMR looks at. If it were, killers that utilize those gameplay options and are the best at doing so would of course still kill survivors, but lose MMR since they are not getting many hooks doing so, thus getting ever-worse opponents that they are even more likely to dominate against playing in those ways. So you would also have to make survivor MMR be based on hooks rather than survival in order to avoid this issue. But if you let survivors win if they don't give the killer many hooks, you create a scenario where survivors can win simply by killing themselves and not saving each other. And even if survivors aren't playing to actively kill themselves to win in such a scenario, there are tons of things that can and do happen all the time that lead to matches ending prematurely without a killer having been able to get many hooks even if they wanted to.

  Sure, in order to resolve these issues we could redesign the game in major ways, get rid of hook timers, of unhook attempts, allow survivors to unhook themselves and recover from the dying state, hell, we could even get rid of hooks entirely and simply make it so that a downed survivor gets respawned elsewhere, and they get sacrificed after the third down. Or yet get rid of hook stages, such that players cannot die on hooks, instead they all automatically get sacrificed once the killer reaches a certain amount of hooks. In those scenarios, the game would much more strictly be about chases... but it would also be a completely different game. Some may prefer it that way, and there are certainly arguments for such a format, but there are also arguments against it and for the way the game actually works.

  As for the mori thing, there could actually be good ideas that revolve around that, and since the devs have said they want to include moris into the base gameplay cycle, there might actually be some such ideas ending up in the game at some point (doubtful though, given that their talks about such an inclusion of moris into the gameplay flow also mentioned keys alongside them, and as we now know, their idea for keys was... deleting their primary function, and that's it). Anyway, an idea could be that killers are able to mori any survivor they down after they get a certain amount of total hooks, perhaps coupled with getting rid of hook stages, such that all survivors stay alive in the trial and only once enough hooks have been reached they start to die to the killer being able to kill them by their hand. But yeah, this is not here nor there.

  in Behaviour doesn't understand skill Comment by zarr January 23, 2022

• @illusion said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2766065#Comment_2766065

  Yes, entirely too long, and it still misses the point. It has nothing to do with people wanting to be in higher ranks they don't belong in, it's about not being punished because you didn't "win". For survivors, when you "lose" you will get matched with worse survivor teammates in your next match which can lead to a snowball effect of losses. Unfortunately, the game has a severe lack of new and casual killers, so you often don't get easier killers, just worse teammates.

  Also, the system makes survivors play far more selfishly, because now it is all about escaping. It's no longer a 4 v 1 it is just a bunch of individuals, many of whom will throw you under the bus the first chance they get if it benefits them. We have gone from survivors that were overly altruistic to players letting their teammates die on their first hook because they don't want to risk going for a rescue, and they want to focus on the gen rush. Selfish gameplay is rewarded, not skill.

  It also forces killers to play a certain way, by only going for kills. It encourages face-camping and tunneling, and i think everyone knows how much survivors enjoy that. It should be obvious to anyone that a killer that gets 8 hooks and 2 kills if a much more skilled player than a face-camping Bubba that gets 3 hooks and 3 kills, but the Face-camping playstyle is what is rewarded.

  This, in addition to the already glaring balance issues, makes the game far less fun for a lot of people and is making it even more of a niche game than it already was. It will continue to lose players, and that is not good for any multiplayer game. But, by all means, keep defending it.

  For survivors, when you "lose" you will get matched with worse survivor teammates in your next match which can lead to a snowball effect of losses. Unfortunately, the game has a severe lack of new and casual killers, so you often don't get easier killers, just worse teammates.

  I find this to be baseless conjecture. As per MMR logic, if you lose rating as a survivor, you get lower-rated (worse) teammates, but also worse killers. The assumption that there aren't enough new or casual killers is just that. Not only that, if it would actually be the case, the system can (and for all we know perhaps might actually does) adjust for this, by pairing lower-rated survivors with higher-rated teammates, to face off against killers rated roughly between them, or thereabouts. And it could do this especially for players that are on losing "streaks". Either way, assuming it is actually an issue is pure speculation, and if it were an issue, it would still not be an issue with the system, but with the player pools.

  Selfish gameplay is rewarded, not skill.

  I think there are two major flaws in your argument here. First, altruism is needed to win. You cannot leave people to die on hooks, refuse to heal them, let alone throw them under the bus. Teamplay is a necessity to be able to consistently succeed (survive) as a survivor in this game. (Playing for hatch does not factor into this because it does not factor into MMR.) I would additionally argue that it does require skill to determine when it is best to go for altruistic plays, and when it is not beneficial to the overall team's survival chances to do so.

  Secondly, you use the word "rewarded". MMR does not reward anyone with anything. Those players that choose to play selfishly and anti-altruistically even if they would be more often than not winning due to this gain nothing from doing so but facing tougher killers and teammates that if anything also would have to be assumed to play in such selfish, anti-altruistic ways, and throw them under the bus in turn. Selfish, anti-altruistic gameplay does not consistently lead to surviving/winning, and even if it did, nobody would be or is being "rewarded" for it, they would if anything only increasingly suffer playing that way.

  It also forces killers to play a certain way, by only going for kills.

  I don't see how it forces anyone to do anything. There is no reward, we don't even see the rating, and even if we did, we have no actual reason to care about it. Play however you want, but realize that if you yourself want to play for kills, that is your own decision, and it is only fair that you will have to face opponents that don't make it easy for you to get those kills, because they too want to win (survive). You will probably have to play in effective and efficient ways to achieve this, such as by utilizing camping and tunnelling whenever opportune, yes.

  But if you don't care so much about kills and are happy with averaging around 2, the MMR logic dictates that you should be able to play however you want and still be able to reach that goal due to facing opponents that are also not so concerned with surviving (unless you are actively going out of your way not to kill, of course).

  It encourages face-camping and tunneling, and i think everyone knows how much survivors enjoy that.

  Camping and tunnelling are the objectively most effective killing strategies in this game, for better or worse. I think there's many actually good and enjoyable aspects of this gameplay, as long as everybody is more or less on the same page and level, but either way, the MMR system does not actually encourage these strategies, or any strategies at all. Only if you yourself want to win by using any means possible are you encouraged to use such strategies, because they are the best tools at your disposal to try and achieve wins. And this would be and actually was true long before MMR ever came to this game.

  If you want to win without trying hard and using the most effective and efficient ways of playing to get there, that is unfortunately a non-starter, since that would mean a system would have to continually feed you opponents that are so much worse than you that matches are completely lopsided, and this is not fair for your opponents who likewise have a right to be able to compete by playing to the best of their ability.

  It should be obvious to anyone that a killer that gets 8 hooks and 2 kills if a much more skilled player than a face-camping Bubba that gets 3 hooks and 3 kills, but the Face-camping playstyle is what is rewarded.

  This is a fallacy that I already countered in my entirely-too-long text up there. If you have a face-camping Bubba go against the same team that the other killer here does, a 3-hook 3k is actually not much or at all behind an 8-hook 2k, because either that team is so much worse than the killers here that they get 3-hook 3k'd by a facecamping Bubba, which in turn would mean an 8-hook 2k is not very impressive at all, or the team is equally as skilled or more skilled than the killers, in which case a Bubba ending chases so fast that they actually get 3 kills out of facecamping can arguably in fact be more impressive than an 8-hook 2k.

  Either way, as opposed to what is commonly believed, it is actually not easy at all for a Bubba to get 2+ kills against equally or higher-skilled teams that actually play to win, which is what we with a functioning MMR system (and matchmaker) would have to assume they regularly face. In tournaments facecamping Bubbas are far from averaging 3 kills, they in fact struggle to average 2, which would regularly not even let them increase their MMR.

  Beyond that, Bubba is always kind of a disingenuous argument to make, since he is the killer character that can facecamp in the most primitive ways. That should probably be getting addressed anyway, rather than accounted for by an MMR system, even if it would not pose much of an actual problem for that system if it functioned properly (i. e. did not pair lower-rated survivors against face-camping Bubbas, because those survivors throw themselves even at Bubba basement facecamps regularly).

  And finally, if the killer that got the 8 hooks in that round is actually more skilled than the Bubba player, they will always outperform that Bubba player over many matches, and this instance where the Bubba got a 3k against a team that the more skilled player only got a 2k against (with 8 hooks or otherwise) will be an outlier.

  That said, again, I do believe the system should additionally factor in hook stages, which are indeed important. A 9-stage 3k should result in less of an MMR increase than a 10/11-stage 3K, an 8-stage 2k in more of an increase than a 6-stage 2k, an 8-stage 1k in less of a decrease than a 3-stage 1k, and so forth.

  in Behaviour doesn't understand skill Comment by zarr January 23, 2022

• @Pulsar said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2766065#Comment_2766065

  I find it perplexing that people take issue with the idea that the system does not rate people fairly based on skills, not only because it ultimately doesn't have to 

  There's only so many matches with a 20 hour Meg that I can take.

  The Devs actually admitted that it basically just tosses people in whatever match it can find due to queue times. My average Survivor queue is 7 minutes. My average Killer queue is instant.

  The issue is that not only does MMR have nothing to do with actual skill in DBD (likely because of it's asymmetrical and RNG-heavy nature) but that it can't work until the queue times even out. Even if it were a perfectly functioning system, nobody wants to wait in a queue for 30 minutes.

  You can type another essay, but for literally everyone that I've spoken to on Xbox, not one single person has said the game was more fun after MMR.

  The matchmaker prioritizing queue times over rating similarities is definitely an issue. Matchmaking systems are difficult to get to work well when accounting for both queue time and making reasonable matches happen, most of all of course because they have to work with the actual players queueing to play in respective regions and at respective times. But I do believe the current system does have leeway to increase queue times in order to look for more closely-rated matches.

  My survivor queue times are not terribly long at all, and in fact during certain times consistently shorter than my killer queue times. In the early morning to late noon hours, my survivor queue times tend to be shorter than my killer queue times, during much of the day my killer and survivor queues are fairly similar, and toward late evening and night my survivor queues start to get longer than my killer queues. This has been a fairly consistent experience for me for years, and MMR has not drastically changed things. I was gathering evidence from streamers for another post, but might as well post an example here to sort-of substantiate my claims:

  Otzdarva (EU):

  Survivor queues: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1264522221

  Queue start: 24:34; queue pop: 24:44 - 10 seconds

  Start: 53:41; pop: 54:29 - 48s

  1:11:34; 1:12:55 - 1min21s

  1:30:07; 1:30:28 - 21s

  1:42:28; 1:42:38 - 10s

  1:55:54; 1:56:04 - 10s

  2:23:02; 2:24:13 - 1min11s

  2:34:59; 2:35:41 - 42s

  2:51:14; 2:51:25 - 11s

  3:04:38; 3:04:48 - 10s

  3:16:27; 3:16:37 - 10s

  3:38:36; 3:38:46 - 10s

  3:53:05; 3:54:58 - 1min53s

  4:11:59; 4:14:23 - 2min24s

  4:31:49; 4:34:32 - 2min43s

  4:47:46; 4:50:50 - 3min4s

  5:03:12; 5:07:05 - 4min7s

  5:24:11; 5:27:57 - 3min46s

  5:40:35; 5:44:57 - 4min22s

  This VOD covers a recent playing session of around 8 hours, and only towards the end do the survivor queues move away from a 30-second average (10-second median) value. And even at their longest they never surpass 5 minutes, which I think in the past has been the cut-off point beyond which the matchmaker all but throws rating (in the past of course ranking) considerations out of the window.

  Another reason why I think queue times still leave room to weigh ratings more heavily is that the crossplay off queue in my region always featured a significantly higher density of higher-skilled players ending up in lobbies, and yet queue times were not unreasonable. MMR has made things worse because now various of the people that used to play on cross off here are playing cross on (since they find they get well-enough-balanced matches there often enough now, as opposed to before MMR; or they mostly practice in customs because there's lots of tournaments going on), but still, the cross off pool showed me that it is possible to get multiple high-level players into a match frequently without prohibitively long queue times - there are seemingly enough of such players queueing at roughly the same times in the same regions, the matchmaker just doesn't tend to pair them as frequently because it gives them other pairings beforehand rather than waiting just a bit more to look for those better pairings.

  I don't agree that MMR has nothing to do with skill, some of the reasons for which are pointed out in my essay. The main skill aspect of the game people usually bring up that would matter the most are chase skills, and it is a completely obvious fact that survivor players that are better at leading killers on longer chases survive more often than survivor players that are worse at it, and that killer players in turn that are better at catching survivors quickly in chases kill more often than killer players that are worse at it. The correlation couldn't be much more close. Sure there are edge-case matches where this is not the case, but they are exceptions to the rule that will hold true consistently over large numbers of matches.

  My personal experience and that of various people I know/play with/watch is not that MMR has made the game less fun. I don't think it's perfect, there are improvemements I would make (harsher ratings, higher cap, stricter matchmaker, look at group-based survival instead, take hook stages into account), but I absolutely much prefer it to the willy-nilly rank-based MM of the past. But perhaps it really is an idea to introduce a "casual" willy-nilly/Emblem/BP-based queue alongside the "competitive" MMR queue. People usually argue that queue times would suffer, but if we reasonably suppose that a roughly equal amount of players of both roles would leave one queue to play in the other, the role ratios of people queueing would not change and as such neither would the queue times. At least something to test perhaps.

  in Behaviour doesn't understand skill Comment by zarr January 23, 2022

• I'm actually baffled how backwards a lot of people are taking this whole MMR thing. This is like the third or fourth entirely-too-long post I make about this topic, but I somehow find it difficult to express in simple, short terms just how backwards people are looking at this system.

  I think it wasn't a good decision to call the matchmaking system "skill-based", but not because it doesn't factor in skills (it does), but because people are getting way too hung up on that word and losing out of sight completely what we are talking about here. We are talking about a matchmaking system. People seem to believe this is some kind of ultimate judgement system, that rates players and somehow they are then only worth as much (or as skilled) as the system says, as if a good rating would be a reward, or as if it granted some sort of reward, and as if it would be unfair if it didn't correctly rate someone based on all of their skills.

  First of all, realize that the system is only meant and indeed only used to create matches, and specifically matches that are more even in terms of chances of success for all players involved. There is no reward for being highly-rated, your rating is not even shown, and the state of your rating does not signify anything but the pool of players you will (ideally) more often be paired with and against, namely players close to that rating. Even if the system did not rate players based on skill whatsoever (which it again absolutely does), why does anybody care whether it actually assesses skills? Sure, if there were an actual, notable reward for achieving a high rating, like cosmetics or Shards or whatever, I could understand a little better complaints about how the system would not fairly or accurately rate players, that they think it does not account for the types of skills they may have that may also be important... but there are no such rewards, the only thing that changes if your rating increases is the rating of the players you are supposed to be matched with.

  I find it perplexing that people take issue with the idea that the system does not rate people fairly based on skills, not only because it ultimately doesn't have to (and despite the fact that it ultimately does), but also because often when I hear other suggestions for matchmaking systems, they are stuff like "just throw everyone in one giant pool", or "use emblems", which are both basically describing the same thing, the old matchmaking system, and only go to show that people often don't actually care about consistently having opponents roughly around their own skill level, they if anything seem to want a completely willy-nilly matchmaking again. And so even if we do assume that the current matchmaking system does not actually match people based on skills, why is that then an issue for so many?

  More than that, the most common complaint I see about the current matchmaking system is players saying they have a hard time killing survivors. Yet the system is literally meant to make players average out to around 2 kills. So either they are saying they want to have a system in which they can average more than 2 kills (which would be silly of course), or they are actually fine with what the current system is designed around, only they think it does not actually fulfil its purpose since they do not average around 2 kills (which they however could already very well be).

  Either way, let's tackle the arguments of Scott here.

  "Killing/surviving does not really determine skill."

  In no game in existence MMR is simply about "skill" itself. I will refrain from touching on the hockey analogy because it is not important, but the gist of what Patrick said is completely true. Namely, MMR systems are concerned with winning. Not with winning in the most difficult, fancy ways, just winning by any means possible as long as those means consistently lead to winning. In any proper MMR system, people only advance if they consistently win. Consistently winning requires skill. The skills required to win correlate with winning. The MMR therefore factors in those skills. That doesn't mean the MMR system is about skill, it's about winning, and skills only factor into this if and insofar they respectively correlate with winning. It's an important distinction to make between skills that correlate with winning (which is: to contribute and lead to winning), and skills that are merely fancy, difficult things one can do, but that do not necessarily increase one's likeliness to win, and in fact can even do the opposite. You could separate them terminologically by speaking about survival/killing skills as the one that matter for MMR, as they pertain skills that correlate with winning. As such, you would specify "skill-based" MM as "survival/killing skill-based" MM, or "skill-correlated" MM.

  Sure, there are a lot of things in these games people can be skilled at, but if they are not things that lead to wins, they cannot and indeed should not be factored into MMR. You can be the best moonwalker in the game, but if you can't use that skill to actually increase your survival rate, it has nothing to do with MMR, and it would be absurd to argue it should. Basing matchmaking on skills just on the basis of how difficult they are rather than on the basis of whether those skills translate to increased chances of winning is completely backwards and misguided understanding of what MMR and its purpose is. What would high-MMR gameplay look like in a system that looked at difficult stuff for difficulty's sake? You would have 360 youtube montage survivors spinning around in one corner of the map, and a skybilly going for trick montages in the other. Endlessly of course, because nobody would ever do gens which is unskillful and purely, primitively survival-oriented, and Billy would never kill anyone but rather try to win an infinity-approaching amount of chases with tricksaws in a single game.

  I hate to break it to people, but hooks are not actually the win condition in this game, and in its current state absolutely cannot be. The win conditions are killing and surviving, and you would have to redesign the game in major ways that shift its entire character to change that. Yes, someone might be very skilled at chasing survivors and therefore gets many hooks, but if they cannot convert those hooks into kills or get enough hooks that this naturally happens, they are not skilled at winning, which is what matters for MMR. For MMR only actually winning is important because its entire purpose is only to match players such that their chances of winning are more even, because that leads to healthier competition and more satisfactory playing experiences where players' win/loss ratios are more balanced, i. e. where they are more likely to succeed at least around half the time, which is to kill/survive, which in turn is also what most people actually mostly care about.

  Now mind you, a player that is very skilled at chasing survivors is absolutely likely to often kill survivors, and so if they for some reason consistently end up only getting hooks and not kills, they are not converting their chase skills into wins, thus they are lacking other skills, such as macrostrategic skills (or they are going out of their way to not kill survivors, meaning they are actively hampering their own performance for difficulty's sake, which is again something MMR cannot and should not account for, just like it should not rate people higher that play perkless for some reason, or with a steering wheel, or put other such artificial limitations on themselves).

  Getting many hooks is certainly indicative that a player is skilled at chases, but if they are not killing survivors that way, they are evidently not skilled enough at them for it to make up for other skills which allow other players to kill survivors with less hooks. Camping, tunnelling and slugging exist, they allow kills to happen with less hooks, and they absolutely require skill to make use of against good opponents that know how to play against them, which you in an MMR system would be expected to go against. As long as it is possible to kill without hooking survivors 3 times each, hooks cannot possibly be a win condition, and therefore also not possibly what MMR concentrates on. Base MMR on hooks and low MMR will be a realm of 99% kill rates where bad and new players get demolished by campers, tunneller, and sluggers constantly. Base MMR on hooks without making survivor MMR also be based on hooks and both sides can win simultaneously, rendering MMR useless as tons of players will be inevitably gaining MMR and ending up at around the same ratings. Base survivor MMR on hooks and they can kill themselves and leave each other on hooks and guarantee "wins" that way, meaning you would have to get rid of hook timers, of the ability to kill oneself on hook, and remedy situations where all survivors are hooked or slugged, allowing them to unhook themselves and recover. Basically, you have to remove camping, slugging and an entire sphere of strategy from the game. Rework the game like that to make hooks the win condition and you alienate the character of the game as well as a lot of players because killing and surviving absolutely is what the game revolves around and what most people care about.

  Besides, why stop at hooks? What about the tons of skills that merely looking at "hooks" does not directly account for? Whether you won your chase with a fancy long-range hatchet shot rather than a point-blank one, or with a mindgame on a safe pallet rather than an unsafe pallet? Whether you used good chase perks, or chase perks at all? Add-ons that helped you? The map you were on? The killer you played? How many red stain mindgames you went for and succeeded with? How well you zoned? Shouldn't these things as well as the thousand other things that require skill be measured and accounted for by the MMR system? Aren't these things to hooks what hooks are to kills? Wouldn't we have to acknowledge that the system would become impossibly convoluted and impossible to design altogether, if we wanted to define, detect, evaluate and weigh the countless different skills that can go into the gameplay? Wouldn't we come to the realization that we can and in fact must simply look at the results that these things lead to and that we effectively, over large enough sample sizes, account for all those things by doing so?

  The higher MMR levels are not supposed to be some holy realm where the most fun, fancy, difficult, noble, interactive, exciting, etc. gameplay happens. It is not something players are even meant to want to achieve. It is not some ladder to climb that people should fight their best to make it to the top of. It's a system entirely in the background, and only meant to match players with more like-minded and like-abled players when it comes to winning, without them even thinking about it, and at the top levels of that it is simply and precisely about pairing players that care the most about winning and are the best at doing so. That doesn't mean they need to be the best at getting 12 hooks, or the best at getting cross-map hatchet snipes or whatnot, it means they are the best at killing or surviving consistently, with everything that entails, the most effective and efficient, absolute "sweatiest", most "tryhard" loadouts and playstyles, filthy busted-setup-abusing, DHDS genrushers, mean 4-slowdown Nurse/Blight camper-tunneller-sluggers. And yes, consistently winning (killing/surviving) in that environment where you face off against other players that are increasingly also better at those same things, does require a lot of skill. Players in tournaments are also absolutely some of the most skilled in the game, and they too play for killing and surviving more than hooks, and it is actually not easy to kill by camping/tunnelling/slugging/just-doing-gens in that environment, a wide variety of high-level skills are at play, and chase skills specifically are definitely highly important for success there as well, the most successful tournament players are likewise some of the best 1V1 players that consistently get some of the highest chase times in 1V1 competitions. And believe it or not, plenty of people even have fun and find it exciting playing to win by any means possible in highly competitive contexts, that competition and playing-to-win and winning is desirable in itself to them, camping-et-al included.

  If you personally do not enjoy how the game is played when everyone tries their hardest to win (to kill or survive), and if you consider other types of goals in the game to be more desirable or noble or even skillful (such as getting many hooks, even if it costs you kills you could otherwise get), then you are absolutely, completely free to play in those ways, MMR will not "punish" you for that one bit, on the contrary, you will even benefit from the MMR system, since you will be separated from those sweaty tryhards further above in the ratings that only play to win, as you will of course not be winning as consistently as they are. Instead, you will more often be paired against like-minded players that also do not care as much about killing and surviving, and you will have more desirable game experiences as a result, and games where you can actually average around 2 kills by going for many hooks (something that is indeed not possible at higher levels of play, the game at that level is not balanced around hooks but kills).

  "Consistently" is another keyword to counter an argument of Scott with here: he points to instances where lower-skilled players in a team may survive without having contributed much to that win, or where higher-skilled players die despite having contributed a lot to the round, or yet where a higher-skilled killer gets 9 hooks but only 1 kill, whereas a lesser-skilled killer gets 2 kills with 2 hooks... And the answer to this is completely obvious and apparently lost on so many: over large enough sample sizes, the higher-skilled player that contributes a lot to the rounds will survive much more often than that lower-skilled player that contributes little; the higher-skilled killer that ends chases so fast that they can get 9 hooks in that round will over large enough sample sizes kill much more survivors than that 2-hook 2-kill player that must rely on cheap tactics (primitive facecamping) that get more and more impractical to be successful with the better your opponents are. MMR is about consistently winning, and it's completely obvious that better players will win more consistently, the correlation between skills and winning is blatant, and the scenarios he and other people point to are edge-case exceptions to a rule that would over large enough numbers of scenarios always prove true and lead to the player rating rather accurately accounting for those skill differences. Sure, if that 9-hook killer goes out of their way to always make sure they don't hook survivors they've already hooked, they might not surpass the hardcamper in kill rates, but if that killer wants to win they will of course do precisely the opposite. If they on the other hand aren't going out of their way not to kill but in fact simply cannot consistently kill despite getting many hooks, they are simply lacking crucial other skills that also play a role in this game, since this game is not at all only about chases.

  The lower-skilled players that only do gens, hide, facecamp, suck at chases, etc. will hit an MMR barrier much earlier than those higher-skilled players, since they will at best stagnate playing in those ways over many matches. But that they gain MMR in rare exception matches where they are hard-carried by better teammates or stupid decisions of opponents is not actually a problem either: you actually want those players to gain MMR such that they face better opponents that are better at killing/surviving and as such punish those playstyles and that lack of skill. You don't want the locker hero or the facecamper Bubba to get easier and easier opponents every time they succeed, opponents against which they will be even more successful playing that way; rather, if they are successful playing that way, you want them to face tougher opposition such that and until they aren't anymore.

  I'm not saying the game could not be extensively reworked to actually become about hooks vs. preventing hooks rather than about killing vs. surviving, and I even agree that it being changed to at least shift somewhat more from being about kills to being about hooks is a desirable direction, but the reality of the game as it is simply is not that, and without major redesigning it cannot be. Simply tying MMR to amount of hooks without doing anything else would be absurd. And anyway, I do think camping/tunnelling/slugging have a place in the game, they are integral aspects of the "macrogame", the strategical side, they involve decision-making and play-making and therefore different layers and degrees of mental and mechanical skills of their own, and they on top of that add a "danger" factor to the game by being capable of in a short duration turning matches around and ending matches altogether, which makes the game more exciting, thrilling, differentiates the trial-to-trial gameplay experiences much more, and is a big part of what makes the game a horror-type game on top of that (including that it is about killing and surviving specifically, which are clear and thematic horror-type conditions, as opposed to... "achieving X hooking actions" and "preventing X hooking actions from happening" - again, people at large will never feel as if they won a game of Dead by Daylight if they all died, or if they had all survivors escape, no matter how much you tell them the hooks actually matter more).

  I do obviously agree with the last section of Scott's argument here though, namely that the matchmaking system actually has to match players with similar ratings if it is to make any sense at all to calculate ratings to begin with. And it currently doesn't really do that all that reliably. It does so reliably enough to still be a much better system than the rank-based system in my experience and that of the people I know and follow, but it's definitely far from perfect in that regard. It could also very well be improved by looking at group survival rather than per-survivor survival, but as per my earlier explanations, it doesn't actually necessarily need that for ratings to accurately-enough represent player skill over large enough sample sizes - survival/killing skills of individual players very closely correlate with individual survival rates/per-survivor kill rates over many matches. But perhaps the rating adjustments would be a little more reasonable if based on the average rating of groups, rather than that of the individual survivors in them, so that could be an actual improvement.

  Finally I want to note that looking at hook stages (not hook events) would account for kills and hooks simultaneously, and it would not require any changes to the game either. So yeah, I guess that's my suggestion for a compromise between the MMR system we currently have and that fits the reality of the game, and the MMR system some people wish to have that however does not fit the game's reality: Use hook stages to support the kill-based rating adjustments.

  in Behaviour doesn't understand skill Comment by zarr January 23, 2022

• Third Seal, Infectious Fright, Ruin, Undying + double Frenzy duration add-ons

  Use Frenzy to apply Third Seal on as many survivors as possible and start slugging. You can replace Fright or Ruin with a chase perk if needed, like Brutal or Bamboozle.

  Survivors will not be happy.

  in Legion build? Comment by zarr January 22, 2022

• The tweet is portraying a flaw of thought that many other people also fall victim to. They take a ridiculous scenario, an exception, and make it something that should be systematically accounted for, a rule.

  If a survivor is so much better than the killer they are facing that they can "run them for 5 gens", that survivor dying in that match is absolutely a crass exception to the rule that that survivor will be surviving. Play that same match a thousand times and 900+ times that survivor will be escaping alive. Note: Playing that same match again would not mean the survivor would again lead the killer on a 5-gen chase, they might not even be chased altogether, or only for 2-3 gens. There's an entire world of things that may happen in those matches... but since we know that the survivor is so much better than the killer that they can potentially lead them on 5-gen chases, the likeliness of the matches ending in that survivor surviving is overwhelming. This is what MMR accurately measures, over large enough sample sizes, and it very much accounts for those chase skills for that reason.

  Not only that, if other players in that match simply did gens and escaped, they are absolutely justified in gaining MMR. Sure, it didn't take much skill for them to do so, but in this case MMR is not about the skillfulness with which a victory is achieved, it's about achieving a victory at all, by doing the correct win-oriented things, which is playing effectively. And since it is still a victory it only makes sense for MMR to increase. Because if it increases, those players will face stronger opponents, and those easy, non-skillful ways to play will stop giving them victories. In this example it is clear that they will not keep having teammates that run the killers for all gens. Because the killers are better, because 5-gen chases are an extreme rarity to begin with even in the most lopsided matches, and because the other players might very well also just be people that do gens and aren't very skilled at chaseplay. Again, over large enough sample sizes, this will correct itself, and players that can only do gens and aren't good at much of anything else that actually takes skill will not keep climbing since they will not keep surviving.

  
  

  Big text warning for the rest, which is just additional discussion for anyone interested in it.

  
  

  Of course, if there are easy things that don't require skill but still consistently lead to victories even against equally or even higher-skilled opponents, those would pose problems for such a system that would actually prevent it from selecting for skill. But not only would those be problems of game design that have to be remedied by game design, rather than problems with the rating system and let alone problems that could realistically be solved by it, but I am not convinced that there is much of anything in this game that actually fits those criteria. Again, doing gens is certainly easy, but it's also certainly not capable of letting worse survivors consistently survive against better killers, or we would be seeing much higher survival rates and we would not be seeing killer players that win the vast majority of their matches, because doing gens is simple and easy and obvious and so if it alone would be capable of consistently leading to victories regardless of skill disparities, it would be a huge balance issue that would have huge impact on survival rates. But they're under 50% globally, and good killer players win 80+% of their matches. Even in tournaments where some of the best players face off and people are literally paid to do gens as efficiently as peak humanly possible, kill rates usually settle above 50%. Simply "doing gens" is not at all effective enough a strategy itself to undermine the impact of skill on the outcomes of rounds. Hiding even less so, for another thing people sometimes bring up. People that just hide will die even more frequently than people that just do gens.

  The other big flawed argument in this regard is of course camping/tunnelling/slugging, and how they could undermine the impact of skill on outcomes by leading to kills without requiring skill. First of all, they still require skill, not only because you actually still have to win chases to be able to down and hook survivors in order to camp, tunnel and slug them (and those strategies are all the more effective and regularly indeed only at all effective if you do so quickly, which is obviously tied to chase skills), but there's actually a whole lot of nuance to these strategies on both sides if you actually have equal players face off. That this is true is obvious to see when you look at the fact that even in tournaments, where killers are encouraged to use every trick in the book and camp/tunnel/slug with a vengeance whenever opportune, they are not simply dominating by doing so. Leatherface, the least skill-requiring camper character in the game, does not in fact get easy 4ks in these scenarios. On the contrary, it is precisely the most skill-requiring characters (Nurse and Blight most of all) that are the ones capable of consistently 4k-ing here. So it is obvious that primitive camping alone is also not effective enough a strategy to undermine the impact of skill on the outcomes of matches.

  When people argue "a Bubba getting a 2-hook 2k with facecamping is seen as more skillful by the system than a Nurse getting a 8-hook 1k", there are various flaws in the thinking. First of all, this is regularly only possible due to the matchmaker not actually pairing players of similar ratings. That is not a problem with the rating system, but with the matchmaking system which could in theory even completely ignore those ratings. The rating, as it is based on survival and kill rates, would dictate that the survivors in the match if we actually have a match where players are appropriately paired, would be able to counter the Bubba, since they play to survive and are good at it. Just like Bubbas don't get easy kills in tournaments where people are close in skills. One facet of this fact is that it is rather difficult for Bubba to get downs on equally or higher-skilled survivors to begin with. Sure, go ahead, facecamp that hook you got after multiple gens already popped, show me how you get more than a 1k out of that if the survivors actually play to survive (which, again, an appropriate rating level would dictate they do). The next flaw here is that they assume the Nurse is actually more skilled in this scenario. I guarantee that if a Nurse does not manage to get more than 1 kill against a team a Bubba could get more kills against, the Nurse is not more skilled. Over large enough sample sizes, a more skilled Nurse player would always outperform a Bubba player against like opponents (which they over large enough sample sizes have to be assumed to be facing). Another flaw is that they assume a 2k would allow Bubba to gain rating, usually that would basically just lead to their rating becoming stagnant.

  And the final flaw that is worth taking a more comprehensive look at is that they assume camping/tunnelling/slugging do not require skill, as opposed to hooking often, and that hooks should be the win condition. There's many issues with this assumption.

  First of all, camping/tunnelling/slugging do require skill. Like I mentioned earlier, for one obvious thing they still require players to win chases. But they also have various aspects of proactive play and counterplay themselves that are mentally and mechanically demanding, require players to make good decisions and plays. Sure, they may not be the types of skills one necessarily likes, but they are skills, and if a player is capable of winning consistently by being skilled at utilizing these strategies, that player should absolutely be gaining MMR. And that leads to another issue with the assumption, namely that in a scenario where we just base MMR on hooks, people that camp/tunnel/slug would be low MMR, get weaker opponents, yet basically kill everyone all the time and make for very lopsided and undesirable matches. The next issue is that people care about killing and surviving more than about getting hook stages or preventing hook stages. I doubt people at large would ever be satisfied with a system that tells them they lost even though they all survived, or even though they killed all survivors. The game simply is about killing and surviving, and the vast majority of players always have and always will play to that end and care most about those things.

  Yet another issue is that the game is simply not balanced around the idea of winning (killing) with many hooks. In scenarios where you have equally skilled players on both sides, camping/tunnelling/slugging are absolutely necessary to be able to win, you will practically never be getting 12-hook 4ks there, as opposed to less-than-12-hook 4ks. Sure, we could argue that the game should ideally be balanced around being able to kill with many hooks instead, but the assumption does not acknowledge that the game in fact just is not balanced for that. There are arguments for and against "many hooks" yielding a more desirable gameplay than the gameplay revolving around playing for kills by any means, including camping/tunnelling/slugging, and while I do agree that the game would likely stand to benefit from at least being shifted somewhat to revolve more around getting many hooks than merely kills, there could also be arguments that the game should be balanced for... being able to compete even without using perks, being AFK for 30 seconds, or cleansing all totems and looting all chests before touching generators. If the game were balanced such that that is possible it might be better, or it of course might very well not be, but the reality simply is that it is not balanced for such things, and winning with less-than-12 hooks is a possibility innate to its balancing, due to the existence of those aforementioned strategies, and as such has to be accounted for in the MMR. That is the name of the game, and while a player that plays to get and does get many hooks may certainly be more skilled at chasing than a player that plays to get as many kills as possible by any means, the latter player absolutely is more skilled at winning the game and just factually playing the game to win as it is designed to be played, and therefore entirely naturally gaining MMR. If you go out of your way to get as many hooks as possible instead of getting kills by any means possible, you are deliberately hampering your performance in terms of the actual win condition the game is actually balanced around. That doesn't mean you are a bad player, and if you still kill most survivors playing that way you will still climb MMR, but if you don't, you shouldn't climb MMR, because you are factually not good enough to be able to get enough hooks to kill survivors consistently playing this way. Indeed you wouldn't even want to climb MMR with such a playstyle, since you will get tougher and tougher opponents against which you get fewer and fewer hooks.

  More issues with making MMR revolve around hooks is that it would necessitate major redesign. Since survivor MMR would also have to be based on hooks lest we get a scenario where both sides can win simultaneously and MMR is rendered pointless altogether and/or where campers kill everyone all the time due to remaining at low MMR, we would need to get rid of hook timers and the ability to kill oneself on hook, since otherwise survivors could simply play to die on their first hook and not unhook each other, denying the killer hooks and thereby guaranteeing a "win". Then we would also need to resolve scenarios where every survivor is slugged or hooked, allowing the round to recover. And then even in general it is often impossible for killers to play for many hooks because they simply cannot find the survivors that haven't been hooked yet, or because those that have interact with them beforehand. There are tons and tons of scenarios that are largely out of the killer's hands that see games end prematurely without 12 hooks, even if the survivors are not actively killing themselves to prevent them from being able to get many hooks.

  Finally, MMR being based on kills rather than hooks is not even an issue for players that care more about hooks than kills, because they can simply keep playing for hooks, and if that doesn't allow them to climb the MMR "ladder"... so what? There's no reward up there, the top MMR realm contrary to what seems to be another common misconception is not supposed to be the valhalla where the best, most desirable gameplay happens and everyone should want to strive to be at. We aren't even being shown whether we are there. That realm is simply about having players that care the most about winning and are the best at winning, ideally being paired against one another, to create a very competitive gameplay environment. It's precisely about "tryharding", "sweating", playing as efficiently as possible without any regard for fun or fancy play, only concentrating on fulfilling game objectives and victory conditions. And while winning in such a highly competitive environment absolutely does involve a ton of skill and "doing gens" and "camping" is not a simple win-for-free card by any stretch, and while for a lot of players playing to win in tough competition is actually desirable and fun in itself, including the utilization of things such as camping, it also doesn't prevent anyone from simply playing in other ways that they consider to be more desirable, fun, skillful, and so on. On the contrary, such a system rewards you for playing in those ways by keeping your MMR at a level where you more often face more like and like-minded opponents that are not playing only to fullfil win criteria either, but that also care more about other stuff, are less objective/win-oriented, and as such yield matches where everyone has more fun due to having more time/opportunities to get many hooks, loot chests, try weird builds and plays, and whatnot.

  To quickly touch on another point: While they could and probably should base MMR on the group performance (how many survivors survived rather than did you yourself survive) since that would account for teamplay and the effects a player's impact has on the overall survival chances in a team better (and since that way rating adjustments on both sides could reasonably be based on the average MMR of the group, rather than individual ratings which can skew adjustments unreasonably sometimes), again, over large enough sample sizes even the per-survivor rating adjustments will come out to more than accurately enough measure average performance levels, and thereby skill, experience, "sweatiness" - in short, all of the things that contribute to survival and kill rates. Accurately enough because ultimately this is not about actually measuring skill or showing anyone how skilled anyone is, it's just about making matches happen that are more fair in terms of survival and kill chances, that create more actually-competitive gameplay, since that is objectively more healthy. If you dislike camping and tunnelling or genrushing, you should embrace the MMR system because that way campers and tunnellers and genrushers face tough opposition that can actually compete with that, rather than beat up on casuals like they have been for years. And if you yourself fall more on that casual spectrum of not wanting to play to win so much, you will face less campers and tunnellers and genrushers as a result of not being high MMR.

  The issue with "SBMM" that we still see lopsided matches happen is not due to flaws of how the rating system is meant to work - selecting for kill and survival rates is a great way to do MMR, any competitive format bases MMR on win conditions, and you may not like it, but the win conditions in DbD are killing and surviving. The issues could be part-systemic, in as much as the rating adjustments might not be harsh enough, allowing players to climb MMR merely by winning against lower-rated opponents, or despite not consistently winning against equal and higher-rated opponents. The MMR cap could also be much too low, leading to a pooling-up of players at that rating that aren't actually close in kill and survival rates. But the major issue is most likely simply the matchmaking system, and it regularly throwing players of wildly differing ratings into matches.

  Whenever I play solo survivor or killer, I see more tournament players in every single session than I had in years prior to MMR. There are still plenty of lobbies that seem just about as chaotic as those of the rank-based MM past, but it's blatantly obvious to me that the system is working to pair more closely-matched players much more often. I also find this obvious because all the streamers I watch have much more competitive games on average. Sure the best players still win most of the time, especially on the killer side, but they are actually having tough challenges sometimes rather than dominating constantly, and while in the past it was rare to even see a few survivors escape through exits total over a multiple-hour killer session, now they even have rounds where they outright lose, having 3+ survivors escape in one round. You had perkless 4k streaks of dozens of rounds in a row in the past, now those same players regularly can't even manage to string 10 4ks together even when using full loadouts.

  in What is skill or a win? The Lead Game Designer knows it the best Comment by zarr January 21, 2022

• I like the Bloodlust mechanic because as opposed to what many people think, it actually does have counterplay. You can micromanage the sprint action in chases in order to break chase state, and this will deplete Bloodlust or prevent it from building in the first place. Due to this, Bloodlust's existence adds a layer to the potential prowess of players in chases that doesn't otherwise play as much of a role (sprint micromanagament can also be used to recover Exhaustion mid-chase, or to prevent window blockers from spawning, but these are decidedly more niche than using it to play around Bloodlust).

  I do think adjustments to Bloodlust could be good though. As Peanits pointed out above, Bloodlust doesn't have too much of an impact on the game overall, and that is because it takes a fairly long time for Bloodlust to kick in, and breaking pallets and hitting survivors as well as various abilities reset it. Usually, a killer will not even once hit BL 2 or let alone 3 in a match, and if they hit BL 1, it's often shortly before they reset it again. I think BHVR is fine with BL 2/3 only coming into play in very niche scenarios, as a way of giving M1 killers a tool to deal with strong tile setups, but Bloodlust could also be a balancing tool in a potential future where they actually buff solos to bridge the SWF gap like they've been saying they want to, as well as a potential future where they actually tackle issues with camping/tunnelling. In such a future, I'd even think base movement speed buffs for killers could be appropriate, but an alternative is to rework BL such that it kicks in much more consistently. You could make it so that the killer's movement speed increases by a slight amount every 5 seconds when in chase state, gradually building up to the BL speeds we currently have.

  in What happened to the bloodlust experiment? Comment by zarr January 21, 2022

• 
  

  @SweetTerror said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2762141#Comment_2762141

  It was definitely interesting watching Justin say that while bots weren't off the table, it's definitely on the edge of said table. But then literally in the very next question concerning bots replacing players that disconnect, Patrick mentions how great it is to practice against bots.

  It feels like so many requested features just keep getting scrapped. Every question that was asked in the stream were questions that were voted on/chosen by the players, and yet 99% of the questions either didn't receive a clear answer, or were confirmed to be scrapped altogether. They say that they listen to their community, but these Q&A seem to suggest otherwise.

  That was even less than a non-answer by them. Sure, one can argue that bots can never replace humans, and that the actual online game mode should be strictly human multiplayer, and I agree with that insofar that I've found it absurd whenever I saw someone suggest to use bots to fill lobbies to help with queue times. But in this case we are talking about disconnected players once matches have already started, so literally the absence of a human. In that case, the bot is not "replacing" a human player, it's just filling a void. And sure, while I agree that a bot can even be sort of a detriment for survivors, such as for the example they used of giving the killer easy hooks and in turn Weasel/Resonance procs, ultimately if they are coded to at least actually repair gens like the tutorial bots are, they will definitely be less of a detriment than being a player short entirely, and this is especially true because even if they are easy hooks, they're not free hooks - the bot could literally be AFK, the killer still has to spend time going through the motions of going to them, downing them, picking them up, carrying and hooking them.

  I personally don't care terribly much about bot practice matches or having them fill in for disconnected players, but yeah, a practice mode where you can just load into a custom match on your own is something even I as a very experienced player would want and spend a fair bit of time in. ...But that's also one of the reasons why I assume this is not a thing yet - it would take players out of the queue pools. Probably not a huge issue, not least because it would presumably do so roughly equally for both roles, and as such not affect queue ratios and therefore queue times much, but yeah, this could very well be one reason why they don't even bother.

  in After 6 years, why can't we have a practice mode? Comment by zarr January 21, 2022

• I find this topic a bit funny, because you literally can hit "over" survivors with the tentacle. If an infected survivor is within your tentacle's hit zone, and a non-infected survivor is also in that zone, the infected survivor will get hit.

  And if the bodyblocking survivor is already infected too, hitting them with the tentacle should regularly still allow you to down either of them in time.

  Bodyblocking is definitely a strong tactic, especially if it happens in a well-coordinated team and particularly in the endgame, most of all of course against "M1" killers. In tournaments even Forced Penance is not a rare sight on M1 killers due to this reason. I would definitely suggest using STBFL on Nemesis. It's a great perk on various M1 killers due to raising their usually lower snowball potential and making up for their decreased lethality around hooks and in the endgame, as well as of course improving their chase game simply by reducing the distance a survivor gets on you after a basic attack. And Nemesis can use it particularly well because he can use the tentacle to conserve stacks when hitting the Obsession, as well as follow up STBFL hits more quickly with it. Sometimes deciding whether you want to build STBFL stacks or mutation meter early is a bit iffy, but from my personal experience of playing a lot of STBFL Nemesis, I can say it's not at all a huge issue, all the less so with the add-ons that increase mutation gain.

  Endgame-specific things are of course NOED and No Way Out. Also very valuable particularly on M1 killers who otherwise struggle to have much control in the endgame.

  in Body blocking against Nemesis works way too well Comment by zarr January 21, 2022

• If COH didn't enable people to heal themselves, it would be a garbage-tier gimmick perk that nobody in their right mind would ever seriously use, joining the many other such perks. Like Exponential, already a Boon that is much too situational/gimmicky to be worth running in most scenarios, and therefore barely seeing use. Sorry, not a fan, I like perk diversity, and the survivor perk meta has not had top-level viable additions in years and years, prior to COH, and COH is not even as ubiquitous as many of the olden top-tier perks still are.

  Mind you, while I take COH to be much less problematic than many people do, and actually find it can not seldomly benefit killers due to survivors running around hunting and blessing totems, I do still think nerfs are in order. Reasonable nerfs would be to make the healing boost not apply to med-kit heals, maybe reduce it more, such as to 60%, and/or make snuffing Boons more meaningful such that is worthwhile going out of one's way for, by making it destroy the totem, putting the Boon perk(s) on cooldown, or preventing the respective player from reblessing snuffed totems for the remaining match.

  I also think players should not be able to bless a new totem if the old one has not been snuffed, such that they can't simply relocate to more strategically worthwhile positions, and are forced to cleanse Hexes they want to get rid of if they have a blessed totem still up.

  More interesting concepts for nerfs could be Boon perks losing power on every consecutive blessing, such as a decrease in range, or a decrease in perk-specific effects (e. g. -20% on the healing speed boost on COH every time the perk user blesses a totem). Or to tie specific downsides to Boon perks upon them being snuffed. COH gets snuffed? The perk user immediately loses a health state/enters the injured state if they weren't already. Shadow Step gets snuffed? The perk user screams, revealing their location. Exponential gets snuffed? The perk user immediately recovers into the injured state, if they were in the dying state at the time (Exponential needs a buff if anything, and buffs being tied to the snuffing of certain Boons would introduce a neat Haunted Ground-esque quality).

  in CoH 100% healing speed wasn't the problem, it was the buffed self-care that the perk also has it Comment by zarr January 21, 2022

• @Peanits said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2760936#Comment_2760936

  If by teardown you mean an entirely too long explanation, sure.

  So back in 2019, we posted a roadmap to 60 FPS on console. Needless to say, this didn't end up happening. We were a little too ambitious and didn't manage it by the ETA we gave. That said, it's still ongoing.

  Simply put, to hit 60 FPS on consoles, the frame time for both the GPU and CPU need to be below 16ms (16ms is one second divided by 60). The good news? On the GPU side, we're already there. But the CPU side is going to take more work to accomplish. In 2021, we started the year with ~27ms on the CPU side of things. By December 2021, that number went down to ~22ms.

  This year, we're continuing our work on getting that number below 16ms. There's some things in this next update to help (The Nurse, skill checks), but we'll also be doing other things in the near future like reducing how often things tick when they're far away or off screen. These sorts of things take time to change as they can have knock-on effects in other places if we're not careful. For example, changing it so something doesn't animate if it's off screen might break a sound cue that normally plays when an animation starts.

  All this to say the 60 FPS dream is not dead. There's no ETA for when we'll hit the goal, but things should get smoother as time goes on.

  (On a related note, the reason why we don't do a "low graphics settings" mode for consoles to increase the FPS is because these settings almost entirely affect the GPU load, not the CPU load, so you'd still be bottlenecked and it would have no impact on performance. I know you didn't ask that, but I'm adding it anyway because we mentioned it in the stream.)

  p.s. Credit to @Pulsar for bringing it back up.

  It was cool to hear that you actually were/are going ahead with the Blueprint -> C++ rewrite of (parts of) the basecode!

  With regards to this part specifically:

  (On a related note, the reason why we don't do a "low graphics settings" mode for consoles to increase the FPS is because these settings almost entirely affect the GPU load, not the CPU load, so you'd still be bottlenecked and it would have no impact on performance. I know you didn't ask that, but I'm adding it anyway because we mentioned it in the stream.)

  I want to say that very basic testing of mine disagrees with this: Switching between the low and ultra graphics modes, I get about a 10% difference in average CPU load as per Windows resource monitor, and this is exacerbated whenever more is going on in the game.

  You of course have likely tested this more extensively and also with regards to the respective console platforms specifically, but I still want to bring it up to discussion again. For one thing, even if rendering times are already below the 16ms target on last-gen GPUs and even if graphics settings don't affect their CPU loads at all, they might still benefit from a low graphics mode due to it potentially increasing the frame stability (combating stuttering) and preventing frame drops in particularly eventful game scenarios, where those GPUs might in fact not be capable of hitting that target. For another it can be argued that a low graphics mode would only be fair for console players to have, since it might provide some advantages (such as less visual clutter/noise) that the PC players they are now playing with and against as opposed to them can benefit from. Some people might also simply prefer the look of the game at lower graphics settings. A low graphics option on consoles would further allow you to hit the 16ms target without having to make too many compromises on the visual niceties of the game, since you could call it the "60fps mode". I assume most of those compromises must have already been made for the goals to have been achieved on the GPU side of things, but I suppose this could enable you to undo them.

  With regards to PC platforms, I want to suggest that you implement exclusive fullscreen mode and distinct resolution settings in the in-game menu, as well as the ability to adjust VSync and the framerate cap. The game runs much better in exclusive fullscreen than windowed fullscreen, and being able to set distinct resolutions allows players to achieve better performance much more easily than the up-scaling technique of the current slider does. VSync and framerates are obvious further settings to be able to adjust (and VSync will actually start to be a relevant setting with exclusive fullscreen mode, as opposed to windowed fullscreen mode where desktop compositing already prevents tearing in the game).

  in 60 FPS on Last-Gen Console Comment by zarr January 21, 2022

• I don't think COH is as problematic as it is often being made out to, but I do think a nerf is in order and that this is not the right nerf. 75% means that now you will self-heal in ~18.3 seconds, rather than 16. Not very meaningful. And it still allows you to have ridiculously fast healing speeds with med-kits (9.14s, faster if specific med-kits, add-ons and other perks come into play), which can even enable you to heal mid-chase.

  I think a more appropriate nerf would be to not have the boost apply to med-kit heals. So just on vanilla self-heals and altruistic heals. I also think 60% would be more reasonable, leading to 20-second self-heals and 10-second altruistic heals within COH's range.

  Alternatively, they could actually go for mechanical changes to Boons, such as decreasing the range, or making snuffing them more impactful (snuffing could destroy the totem, or it could put the respective player's Boon perk(s) on cooldown, or it could make it impossible for the respective player to bless that respective totem again for the remainder of the trial). Hell, they could even make it so that Boon perks lose power every time they are relit, such as COH's healing boost being 100% on the first blessing, but losing 20% on every consecutive blessing. Or if they want to make this change more streamlined for all Boon perks, simply make it so that they lose like 4m range on every consecutive blessing.

  I know they've said changes for Boons as a mechanic are not likely, but there's definitely reasonable things that could be done there.

  in The way BHVR nerfed CoH Comment by zarr January 21, 2022

• I don't think showing ratings would be a big issue. Plenty other games have it, including traditional games and sports, and I wouldn't say they are on average more "plagued" by "toxic elitism" than DbD isn't also already. Elitism is more common with leaderboards, yeah, but not necessarily toxic, just good players being confident in their abilities and wanting to play with and be among more equally-proficient players. Plus in DbD it wouldn't even be (public) leaderboards, or at least that's not what's being talked about here, it would just be seeing your own rating, and perhaps that of the players in your matches. That's a rather limited realm to be "toxically elitistic" in. Basically post-game chat, which can be hidden or skipped, and which isn't even available on console platforms. Online you could just lie about your rating if you so desire, it wouldn't affect conversations and discussions much more than it does already. Same for post-game chat if they were to only show players their own rating.

  That said, I also don't think not seeing ratings is a big issue. If the matchmaking is not pairing similarly-rated players often enough, this would highlight it... but it would also just do that, there's no reason to assume it would lead to the matchmaking being changed: BHVR can already see the ratings, and the reasons why matchmaking is working in the way it is would still be there. Besides, we know the system revolves around killing and surviving, so you don't actually have to wonder much after a match whether you gained or lost MMR - if you escaped or killed at least 2 survivors, you will usually have gained MMR. Plus the system working well or not is also not dependent on showing player ratings, as again BHVR can already see all of these things, and so the system has to be assumed to already be working as well as it possibly can under BHVR's prerogative, which wouldn't change.

  Ultimately the decision would seem to just come down to whether people feel more good about seeing their rating increase/about having a high rating, than they feel bad about seeing it decrease/having a low rating, and I'm not sure what the right call there is. Personally I don't really mind much either way, but I always prefer having more insight, so I would probably vote to show ratings. For everyone in a match, and hell, even public leaderboards. Attach ratings to player names on the platforms and the forum. Tattoo it on their forehead.

  in Seeing your skill improve is not "toxic elitism" Comment by zarr January 21, 2022

• The answer given in the Q&A was definitely disappointing. Even regardless of the fact that mobile DbD (apparently) does have a bot mode with all killers available, what players are asking about more than actual training matches is just a training mode. That is, the ability to load into any map as any killer or survivor, on your own. Bots wouldn't even have to be there, or if they were, they wouldn't have to be coded to actually play well. Let them all die to RBTs, it's not like people go into training modes to "practice" overall match flow, for that they should just go into actual matches anyway, bots will never come close to that experience. They go into training modes to learn the basics of the maps and mechanics and perhaps some fundamental principles.

  It would be a trivial thing to allow players to load into custom matches offline on their own, giving them the opportunity to become familiar with and even study in detail the various maps, abilities, certain mechanics, add-ons, offerings and perks. Why is this not a thing yet? I think it's possible they dodge this question because the main reason is that they don't want players to be sitting in offline modes rather than queueing.

  in After 6 years, why can't we have a practice mode? Comment by zarr January 21, 2022

• Killing/surviving objectively are great indicators for skill, and any argument I've ever seen against it was based on some type of misunderstanding or flaw in thought. Abridged version: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2559015/#Comment_2559015

  First of all, let's get one thing out of the way: In a matchmaking system based on skill, we are not concerned with selecting for the most difficult gameplay, but the most effective gameplay. How could we possibly select for the most difficult gameplay, let alone base matchmaking on it? Sure, getting 12 hooks is more difficult than getting less than 12 hooks, but it's also more difficult to... fast-vault an Autohaven gym window from the backside 5 times in a row, or to lunge across the hole in the preschool building on Badham 5 times in a row. Should the skill rating be based on people being capable of pulling off fancy, difficult stuff like that, since it objectively requires skill and is mechanically difficult enough for most people not to be able to do so? Of course not, because selecting for difficult stuff just for the sake of difficulty makes no sense in a game where people play against each other to try and achieve victories. Rather, in a matchmaking system based on skill, we want to select for the things that are most effective at achieving a victory in the game (which in DbD means to kill or to survive). And every single thing people usually bring up that the system would not account for, does contribute to achieving a victory.

  An easy example: You are good at leading killers on long chases? That will give your teammates time to repair generators, thereby making it more likely generators get finished, exit gates powered, and for you to escape. Are there rounds where you will die even after having led a killer on a 5-minute chase? Sure, but they will be the exception to the rule. The rule absolutely is that if you are good at chases, you will survive more often than if you were worse at chases. Over large enough sample sizes, your rating being based on survival accounts for your skills in chases.

  You are good at catching survivors quickly in chases? That will lead to you downing and hooking survivors frequently, which in turn reduces their hook lives and prevents them from repairing generators, ultimately increasing your chances to kill them. Are there rounds where you will not kill 2 or more survivors despite getting many hooks due to ending chases quickly? Sure, but they too will be the exception, with the rule being that your fast chases translate to increased chances to kill. You would have to go out of your way to never hook anyone that has already been hooked, and if you want to win you will of course do precisely the opposite.

  Furthermore, if someone manages to achieve a victory with 4 hooks rather than 12, that merely means they played efficiently. Efficiency in achieving a victory is still absolutely a skill. Sure it may not be the skill you personally think is the most important, and that camping, tunnelling and slugging are not "good" skills, but it objectively is a skill to be able to consistently achieve victories in efficient fashion, particularly since in an MMR system it has to be done against tougher and tougher opposition that themselves are trying to achieve victories against you in efficient fashion.

  Beyond that, selecting for killing and surviving also yields the fairest matchups and yields the best player satisfaction levels, simply because most people in this game care about killing and surviving above all. The system trying to match people such that they have equal shots at these things results in creating the fairest matches that yield the least frustrations and most satisfaction overall.

  MMR is about winning, not about winning in the fanciest ways. Sure it's more difficult to kill 4 survivors with 12 hooks than it is to do so with less (although killing 4 survivors with 4 hooks is arguably much more difficult), but for the matchmaking system we only care about whether someone is actually winning, them doing so by using simple gameplay merely makes them efficient. In professional sports or even chess we do not rate victories based on fancy play either, on the contrary, top-level play in these things is often rather boring and unspectacular because it is optimized with winning in mind. The top-level/high-MMR realm is not supposed to be the fanciest, most desirable, most fun gameplay, it's supposed to be the most competitive gameplay, where players roam that care about winning the most and are the best at winning, and doing so efficiently and against ever-tougher opposition is absolutely tied to skill. If it were not requiring skill to be able to consistently win, why would so many people complain that it is so difficult for them to win?

  That doesn't mean camping, tunnelling and slugging cannot or should not be rebalanced, nor that the win conditions could not be reworked, but as the game is, killing and surviving by any means possible is the only logical thing MMR can select for, otherwise you get completely lopsided matchups where people that consider it to be the most difficult and desireable gameplay (and therefore "winning") to... cleanse all dull totems or get as many flashlight saves as possible, face off against others that actually try to kill them and more often than not of course then easily would. Not only that, you would create a system where both sides can win, which over time leads to everyone ending up at the same MMR levels, rendering MMR useless. And again, most people absolutely care most about killing and surviving - I guarantee that most players don't feel bad if they snowball 1 hook into a 4k, nor if they escape after having had terrible chases or only sat on gens. On the contrary, people are much more likely to feel bad if they die after having had long chases or put in a lot of gen work, or if they end up getting 0 kills despite having had short chases and many hooks. Selecting for killing and surviving is what players at large truly want the game experience to be like.

  ...And for the players that do not care about killing and surviving so much, but have other things they care about more and consider to be more worthwhile, MMR selecting for killing and surviving is beneficial too, since they will play in ways that less consistently result in killing and surviving and therefore be put against more like-minded players that also play in ways that do not consistently result in killing and surviving, and they will have more fun that way since the matches in those realms where people care less about killing and surviving will give them an easier time to achieve the things they want to achieve. You care more about getting many hooks than about kills? You will less often get kills, your MMR won't climb, you will get paired against lower-MMR survivors that are surviving less often due to not being filthy genrushers, which you will be able to get more hooks against; You care more about cleansing totems, looting chests or trying to get many flashlight saves in a round than about surviving? You will less often survive, your MMR won't climb, you will get paired against lower-MMR killers that are killing less often due to not being filthy camper-tunneler-sluggers, which you will have more time and opportunities to cleanse, loot and flashlight-save against.

  It would be possible to make hooks the win condition for MMR, and I agree that it would reward "good" skills more, since it would revolve primarily around chase skills, as opposed to camping/tunnelling/slugging. But not only do the latter still involve various skills, but tying MMR to hooks would have to go along with an entire rework of the game. First of all, the survivor MMR would also have to be based on hooks, otherwise you again create scenarios in which both sides can win, defeating the purpose of MMR. Then, you create the issue that survivors could in theory win by never unhooking each other, due to dying after 4 hooks and as such not giving the killer an opportunity to get more. So you would have to get rid of hook timers altogether, and then also deal with scenarios where every survivor is hooked or slugged, allowing them to unhook themselves or pick themselves back up.

  I'm not saying changes that aim to make the game revolve more around chasing rather than camping/tunnelling/slugging are bad - I think those strategies are not strictly undesirable and they play an important role in the game, but I do agree that they currently play too big a role when compared to the negative type of gameplay and experience they can yield, and that rebalancing is in order. What I am saying is that MMR as the game currently is cannot be tied to anything without accounting for the existence of these strategies. If you were to just make the system look at "how many hooks?", you would create a huge low MMR realm where people camp, tunnel and slug hard and get 4 kills all the time, since they consistently lose MMR and go against worse and worse opponents against which it is even easier to get kills playing that way.

  I do think the rating system itself could be improved a bit still, for one thing by looking at the survival rate of the entire group rather than that of individual survivors, and for another by making the rating adjustments harsher and/or removing the rating cap. However, I do believe that the system is already good enough to yield much more fair matchups on average with regards to player performance levels (skill, experience, "tryhardiness") than the old system; over large enough sample sizes, individual 1V1-based kill and survival rates will still correlate very closely with performance levels, infinitely more so than emblems/ranks did. You will get much more even matchups with much more like and like-minded players in terms of levels of skill, experience, "sweat", and you will get them much more consistently. Where I think the issue most of all lies is the matchmaking system, and it caring more about keeping queue times low than rating levels close. I for one would not mind waiting a couple of minutes longer in order to actually get matched with other player from within my rating brackets more consistently.

  I also feel like the matchmaker tries to pair high-rated and low-rated survivor players to face off against high-rated killer players, and while this may lead to balanced 2-kill matches in a vaccuum, if those killer players abuse the weak links in those groups, they are much more likely to end in one-sided 4-kill stomps. Whenever I play in duos, it is very apparent how often we get paired with low-hour and blatantly bad randoms, against high-hour, competent killer players. So much so that I have to believe it to be systemic. So if that is the case, I would implore BHVR to reconsider, if nothing else at least insofar that the lower-rated survivors in those lobbies should be above a certain rating threshold, or above whatever the current threshold is if there is one already in place.

  in Why I agree that kills are the biggest indicator of skill Comment by zarr January 21, 2022

• @Nicholas

  I have since created a thread to spread some awareness regarding the hit system (https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/303696/busting-some-hit-registration-myths), and BHVR even replied, but unfortunately they still seem dead-set on the "favour the shooter" (which in DbD's case of course means "favour the killer") paradigm. They indeed appear to prefer for survivor players to have to account not only for their own but also the killer's latency (for which there is still no indicator), than for killer players to have to account for even just their own.

  At least they have implemented Dead Hard validation since our last posts here, so that's a step. But yes, given that they had more than a year ago talked about wanting to take another look at how to handle hit authority altogether and to rework the larger hit system with dedicated servers in mind, it's still a rather small step.

  Thanks to my tests I can however now confirm that general hit validation is actually a thing. Contrary to my earlier belief, killers can actually experience overruled hits at very high latencies, and although it's still much of a toss-up and ridiculous hits regularly happen even then, it's false to say it doesn't exist at all. The threshold actually does seem to fall around the 300ms mark. Which of course still means it's useless at combating the killer latency advantage in realistic scenarios. Basically, the general validation implementation can prevent lagswitching killers (1000+ms) from getting hits, and... that's about it. People usually don't have latencies in the 300-600ms range, and even if they do, the general validation system is still not working well and killers still benefit from such exceptionally bad connections.

  DH and stun-specific hit validation still work flawlessly though, I'm grateful we at least have those now.

  in Does anyone know the ping threshold for Hit Validation to kick in? Comment by zarr January 18, 2022

• It obscuring vision less but in turn preventing Intoxicated survivors from being able to fast-vault pallets is a trade-off I could agree with, although I also agree with what has been said about the obscured vision being one of the more interesting aspects of his kit.

  On a related note, I would find it cool if the Invigoration effect increased players' FoV for its duration, like the Refined Serum add-on used to do.

  in does clowns bottle really need to make you almost blind ? Comment by zarr January 18, 2022

• People often wrongfully assume the "game delay" meta is and must be a product of the game otherwise being "too fast". But the fact of the matter is that the game simply inherently is about time, and the longer a trial goes on, the more likely it is for the killer to succeed, with success chances approaching infinity as time does. Even if a gen took 5 minutes to complete, game delay perks would still be the objectively best choice for killers. Would they need them to succeed? Of course not. But you do not need them to succeed even as it is (in fact, if you're a good killer player, you can go into pubs perkless and be AFK for half a minute during the most crucial seconds of a match and still average 3+ kills...).

  I've said it before, but I do really enjoy the fact that now there is a relatively wide variety of viable delay perks that all see frequent use, and that's especially because many of them encourage completely different playstyles. With Ruin and Thanatophobia you want to spread around pressure as much as possible, you pair them with stuff like Tinkerer, Haunted Ground, Butcher, Discordance, Infectious Fright. With Pop and Resonance you want to commit to and end chases as fast as possible, therefore are more likely to be using a chase perk or two alongside them, as well as stuff like Agitation and Barbecue. They also encourage leaving the hook ASAP. Corrupt and Deadlock are passive delay perks, but they also come with their own types of play and counterplay, such as trying to hide out Corrupt, or 99ing a gen to keep other gens from fetching Deadlock. Pentimento, Plaything, Undying and Thrill are perks that make game delay revolve around totem gameplay of course. No Way Out prolongs specifically the endgame and can lead to matches being turned around entirely in it, particularly alongside NOED of course. Dead Man's Switch that's hopefully coming with the next update is promising to add yet another option to the arsenal, with its own unique gameplay.

  So I for one don't mind the killer perk meta being one of game delay, and don't see it as being indicative in and of itself of an issue either. I do think it could be beneficial for the game to replace some of them with base-game mechanics (such as an "early-game collapse" to replace Corrupt, blocking all gens until the first chase begins), but that would have to go alongside with more comprehensive rebalancing.

  What I would definitely like to see is various of the weaker delay perks be buffed. Here's a post of mine outlining some such buffs: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2702588/#Comment_2702588

  in Most popular killer perks from 100 matches. Comment by zarr January 18, 2022

• They are definitely vastly more fine than it is regularly being made out to. The mechanic in and of itself is entirely unproblematic, which Shadow Step and Exponential go to show - people barely even use them, because they are simply not good enough to compete for slots with better perks. If anything they mostly only see use alongside Circle Of Healing, because then the survivor is spending time setting up Boons anyway - may as well get additional value doing so. But without using COH they also wouldn't even consider using the others.

  If BHVR actually nerfs COH in all the ways you can usually see suggested, it too will stop to see frequent use. COH is the first survivor perk in years to have had a notable impact on the survivor perk meta again, so I for one am not a friend of the idea of nerfing it into yet another not-nearly-good-enough perk to throw onto the pile of the many other such perks and going back to seeing the same handful we have been for years.

  The Boon mechanic itself is in fact even beneficial for killers: Survivors have to spend time running around, searching for totems, and blessing them. All that just to get their perk effect up, when non-Boon perks of course do not come with that requirement. And then in order to make use of that effect, they have to yet again spend time traversing the map. And if the killer snuffs their totem, they have to spend even more time setting it up again. All this time away from generators and running around the map is something that prolongs the round and creates more chaos for killers to capitalize upon.

  Of course, snuffing a Boon takes time too, it is regularly only time-efficient if you do not have to go out of your way too much to do so, and I do think snuffing should be a little more impactful for that reason. Destroying the snuffed totem may be a bit much, but they could definitely put a cooldown on the respective player's Boon perk(s) afterwards, or even make it so that that player cannot bless that same totem for the remainder of the trial.

  And yes, since Boon effects benefit the entire team, the time spent setting them up can be made up for over the course of a trial, but it's not as clear-cut as people like to assume either. People (wrongfully) assume Self-Care is a bad perk, and well, you spend a lot more time finding and blessing a totem and then healing yourself with COH than you do just Self-Caring on the spot. And while you and other survivors can of course then keep coming back there to heal, in any scenario where a survivor is spending more than 8 seconds traversing the map to get to the Boon radius, they are not healing faster than they would be with Self-Care (8 seconds running to the Boon, 16 seconds healing, 8 seconds running back). The only upside the Boon in this scenario has is that other survivors do not have to have Self-Care equipped, freeing up perk slots... but that is obviously not something non-4-player SWFs coordinate, and so on the contrary, not only will you still have people spending slots on perks they would not necessarily need, but they may even spend slots on Boon perks themselves, which then have diminishing returns and can be even more "wasted" slots (and time). Add on top of this that the literal "circle of healing" is also a circle killers can expect survivors to run off to and heal within and as such try and capitalize upon, and it's clear that even COH is not unthinkably broken or anything.

  And I mean, plenty of killer players are still winning many of their matches handedly even when COH is in them, me included, so it's not at all something that "breaks" the game just by being there. And this is of course something BHVR can see too: they can look at various stats of matches in which COH is present and in which it is not, and if they are not seeing great disparities between them, there is no global balancing issue with the perk, at least not one as severe as people claim. It is also telling that in a tournament where everything was allowed, COH did not see much of any use, and that even when people were bringing 4 toolboxes rather than med-kits.

  Nerf COH too much and people will just go back to Self-Care, med-kits, or not healing at all, and those things can not seldomly be more time-efficient for survivors than COH.

  COH is a super good perk, absolutely one of the best. But the overreaction to the perk is mostly because people had grown to vastly underestimate the value of healing up. I guarantee that if Self-Care had never fallen out of the Western meta and had been as ubiquitous as it still is even now in the Asian meta, the reaction to COH would have been more tempered, at least insofar that people wouldn't be so surprised how impactful being able to consistently heal up is.

  Perks have to be super good and among the best if they want to seriously compete for slots against other such perks. And COH actually fits that mark reasonably well - as it is tied to the Boon mechanic, it is not a power creep, and indeed has not become a staple in the meta, it is not meta-defining. I still have matches at high MMR in which not a single COH is present, and the same cannot be said to nearly the same extent for the usual, old suspects of DH/SB, BT, DS.

  That said, I do see issues with the perk.

  For one thing, SWFs as so often benefit disproportionally much, since they can coordinate loadouts to have a dedicated "Booner", and further coordinate where to set up the Boon and how to best make use of its effect(s). For that issue, I point to my wish that SWFs see loadout restrictions. Only 1 person being able to bring COH in a 4-SWF coupled with the snuff buff (destroy snuffed totem/apply bless cooldown after snuff/make player unable to rebless snuffed totem) would make it a lot more difficult for SWFs to benefit from it.

  Another issue is that it can enable ridiculous healing speeds when coupled with med-kits. The fix for this issue is simple: remove the 100% healing speed boost to any healing action other than its own. Whether it should still apply to altruistic heals is another question. I think if we implement a snuff buff and remove the synergy with med-kits, we should first look at how the perk performs before applying this further nerf. One reason why it not applying to altruistic heals is a little iffy is that then healing oneself within the Boon area is objectively better than healing each other, and that's just a bit of an odd and unintuitive interaction.

  in Am I the only one who thinks boon totems are fine? Comment by zarr January 18, 2022

• The increased vertical Field-of-Vision gained through the use of narrower-than-native aspect ratios is objectively an advantage, and it is unintended; intentionally abusing it is cheating. But it doesn't matter whether we consider it to be fair or cheating or whatever, as long as BHVR does not officially address it as cheating and bans for it, people will use it, and they won't care whether you like it or not. Voice communications are cheating too, by the same technical definition, but BHVR outright said they won't/can't ban for it, so it's just accepted as part of the game.

  It's funny to see it be made out to be a "sided" issue though. Players of both roles objectively benefit from it, so framing it as yet another issue killers suffer from is yet another tell-tale sign of silly biases.

  It should be trivial to remedy this, and various games already have done so. You can maintain FoV through all aspect ratios, by stretching the image to fit or rendering in black bars. I have no clue why BHVR is not doing this, but maybe their calculation is simply the following: nobody is stopping to play just because increased vFoV exists, but non-0 people might stop playing if it doesn't exist anymore. Why spend effort on something that at best won't change player numbers while at worst costs you players?

  Then again, they also haven't made true fullscreen mode, distinct resolutions and advanced graphic settings part of the in-game menu yet, which are also easily achievable and something that only benefits the game. Plus ultrawide/multi-screen users suffer from the current VERT+/- function, so maybe the game would stand to gain players from changing it after all. Those things would suggest BHVR is simply lazy or not comfortable changing technical stuff, for some reason...

  in Stretched Res Discussion: Comment by zarr January 18, 2022

• For the "VPNs for privacy/security reasons" argument, that is all well and good, but that is not the issue with VPNs being talked about here as good ones typically do not affect your ping much at all (and expensive ones can even improve it due to superior routing). The issue is people using them to region-hop, setting the VPN to far-away countries to the servers of which they obviously will have high pings.

  Ping limits are probably not something we will see, as that would also prevent players from being able to play that have high pings due to no fault of their own (although I do think nobody with 300+ms should be allowed to play time-sensitive online PVP games - sucks for the people that legitimately have high pings like that, but those are luckily rare enough these days).

  Another thing they could do is show pings in lobbies. Sure people with high pings like this will get dodged more often, but at least they still get to play at all.

  The best solution of course would be to change the hitreg netcode such that latency does not benefit killers, therefore also making it unattractive for anyone to induce latency by means of VPN... The very least BHVR could do in this regard is reduce the threshold before their general hit validation implementation is activated (currently only at all active beyond 300ms, when it should already be at 100ms, and ideally of course regardless of latency). They would also have to polish that implementation a good bit though, since even at latencies well beyond 300ms, killers with the current state of that implemetation still get ridiculous hits regularly.

  in Can we please please please do something about all of the players using VPNs? Comment by zarr January 13, 2022

• @Gwinty

  You're right, while it would be the cleanest way to actually ship appropriately-compensatory buffs, those 4-6 weeks before any such buffs arrive would be fairly rough. I don't think it would be so rough to lastingly hurt the game, but I do agree that there should probably be some buffs packaged with the camp/tunnel nerfs from the get-go.

  Fair on the unhook invincibility ("basekit BT") - I think it would be sensible to disable the unhooked survivor's collision for as long as the invincibility lasts, so as to ensure that they cannot bodyblock the killer. That said, bodyblocking the killer in these scenarios obviously comes at the risk of the killer chasing after that survivor instead, even waiting out the invincibility, and since not all of these things would necessarily be implemented together, the survivor would not necessarily have DS either. These are things to consider in the context of just how much one would want to get rid of tunnelling and the gameplay it entails on both sides. Although I agree that it probably is for the better to just have both basekit but disable the unhooked survivor's collision, ensuring the killer can freely chase after the unhooker.

  The movement speed increase is indeed a big one. For one obvious thing, Bloodlust speeds would have to be adjusted to match. For another, there would definitely be a learning period of a couple of weeks for survivor players to get used to what these new movement speeds entail in chaseplay on the various tiles. That said, we already have things that increase the base movement speed of players on both sides (NOED, Hope, Play With Your Food, to name the more common ones), so it's not a completely foreign concept for players to be able to gauge distances and catch-up speeds based on different movement speeds (not least because there are 4.4 and 4.6m/s killers, of course). The exact speeds here would have to be experimented with, it would not necessarily have to be as significant as +0.2m/s across the board, but ultimately while the map and tile layout is designed with the current speeds in mind, we know that slightly increased speeds would not break the game, and it would obviously make killers much more threatening in chases.

  Being able to fake pallet breaks and window vaults is something I've been wanting for years, as it would add another cool layer to the mindgames in chaseplay, and do so strictly benefitting killers of course. Killers that have to break pallets and vault windows are generally the weaker ones, so buffs to these aspects are particularly interesting as means of lifting those killers up without all too significantly affecting the stronger killers.

  I wouldn't say hook grabs are rare, and in fact they are one of the mechanics that encourage hard-camping the most, since they allow killers to prevent hook trades that would otherwise regularly be guaranteed, and turn that into scenarios where they can quickly be put into winning positions just due to that. It can also be noted that survivors regularly do not even attempt to contest camped hooks merely due to the threat of hook grabs, so even if we were to only rarely see them, they would still be an impactful camping mechanic due to that deterring effect. Hook grabs are just a bad mechanic, they lead to awkward dancing around the hook with killers refusing to hit survivors and survivors scared to commit to unhooks, they revolve much more around luck than skill not least because they are affected by latency which can randomly screw over either side on grabs, and they have been bugged forever in that the hooked survivor cannot be unhooked by a third survivor for the entire duration of the grab animation. Removing them would already do a lot to combat camping gameplay, and notably, it would do so most of all for the least desirable forms of that gameplay (hard-camping).

  Your two suggestions are also interesting. Giving the hooked survivor more agency in a camping scenario is a good idea, because one of the worst design aspects of camping gameplay is precisely the lack of agency of that hooked player. Not sure whether your suggestion as it is would do the trick, but it could, and I like the direction. The mori suggestion is also something I like. It would be a cool modifier for my "X amount of hooks = automatic sacrifice of entire team" format, because it means the game won't instantly be over, rather the killer will get a huge boost in the ability to end the game by being able to mori anyone they down on the spot, and in that format we would obviously always have 4 survivors still alive by that point. I don't know whether I would limit this to the endgame however. I do think killers should be put into a stronger position in endgame scenarios (basekit NOED (without the speed boost, with a global totem counter for survivors), gate switch progress regressing over time, BT/DS disabled in the endgame, ...), but I would like to see those moris become available earlier already. Obviously the mixing of various different changes is something one would have to experiment with altogether, we are of course just brainstorming here.

  in How to encourage good gameplay Comment by zarr January 13, 2022

• 
  

  @BenZ0 said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2747181#Comment_2747181

  Well I still dont mean the vault action, even though this is also annoying. If a survivor is standing very close to a pallet and you go for a demon dash hit, sometimes your camera automaticly flicks ot the pallet and destroys it, even though the survivors didnt do anything, simply just standing near to it. This also happens on breakable walls btw.

  Fair enough. Yeah, that's a thing, cases of a pallet/wall hitzone overlapping with that of a survivor, and the killer's attack happening to "scan" the former first. Not sure if that can be solved in a good way. Maybe shrinking the hitzone of pallets/walls if a survivor is close to them.

  in BHVR if there is dead hard validation why no hit validation for powers? Comment by zarr January 13, 2022

• Nemesis is easy and comfortable to play, and not weak, you can go for long killer sessions more or less on cruise control playing him. Still has room for skill expression, but yeah, there's just less stuff to think about and his mechanics don't make for very complicated interactions. That does come at the cost of a lower ceiling than various other killers, both in terms of the performance potential and the potential to have really exciting gameplay... But it's still pretty fun, especially if you know about the tricks he has.

  But yeah, that's the reason I suspect he sees more regular play. I enjoy playing Nemesis, but I would definitely still prefer if he had some more engaging mechanics.

  in why are there so many nemesis’s Comment by zarr January 12, 2022

• I agree, a "team"-based performance rating would account more fairly for some important aspects of survivor play. The killer rating could in fact also benefit from being based on the performance against the entire team, so depending on how many survivors they've killed rather than looking at 1V1s against individual survivors.

  Although I will say that even with the per-survivor escape/kill rate, the rating will still reflect performance levels well enough over large enough sample sizes, with edge-case scenarios such as a survivor sacrificing themselves to lead to more survivors escaping than otherwise would have escaped averagering out. The actual problem the MMR system has is not really that the per-survivor ratings don't capture performance levels well enough, it's that the rating adjustments aren't harsh enough, and the matchmaker not strict enough. People gain MMR more easily than they lose it, there is an MMR cap in place, and the matchmaker seems to care much more about keeping queue times low than keeping ratings of players close. These things are what BHVR should first be tweaking.

  That said, the team-based ratings could perhaps actually help a bit with the issue of killers gaining MMR too easily:

  The rating adjustments would scale off of the average rating of the survivor team, rather than the individual survivor ratings. For example, if you have a 1000MMR killer facing survivors with 500, 1000, 1200, and 700MMR respectively, rather than the killer gaining a lot of MMR from killing the 1000 and 1200 survivors, the adjustment would depend on the team's average rating, which is 850 in this case. This makes it less possible for killers to gain a lot of MMR just because they killed 1-2 higher-rated players in an otherwise rather outmatched survivor team.

  But I do think that ultimately these changes would not be necessary if the rating adjustments in their current form would just be harsher (losing more for losing against higher-rated opponents, gaining less for winning against lower-rated opponents), the cap would be removed, and the matchmaker more strictly tried to match players closer within their rating brackets. I for one would not mind having a few minutes longer average queue times at top MMR brackets if it meant that much more often I would actually get matched with 4 other players from within those brackets.

  in [Removed] Comment by zarr January 12, 2022

• @BenZ0 said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2746452#Comment_2746452

  I am not talking about while survivors vault. I mean if someone is simply standing next to it.

  But the pallet vault interaction can already have been initiated even though the survivor still looks to be standing at the pallet. Those instances do make for silly-looking situations where the survivor will seemingly just stumble through the pallet break, but they are expected behaviour given that these abilities prioritize pallets.

  in BHVR if there is dead hard validation why no hit validation for powers? Comment by zarr January 12, 2022

• I agree with other people that have said to nerf camping/tunnelling, see where kill rates fall to, and then go in with various buffs to bring them back up (general buffs and buffs specific to the killer characters that struggle to perform). Mind you, I for one don't want to nerf those strategies "out of the game", just make them less effective. But if we don't change anything about them at all and instead just try to "encourage" players not to employ them, not only will players still employ them, but they may even collaterally benefit from those changes. And those strategies are not only undesirable to certain extents and therefore a game experience issue, they are also too effective in public matchmaking and therefore a live game balancing issue.

  There are various things that can be done to alleviate the problems with those strategies. Remove hook grabs. Increase the invincibility duration for unhooked survivors (basekit BT). Basekit Kindred (perhaps without the killer aura). Basekit DS (disabled in the endgame). Have unhooked survivors be healthy. Use the cage mechanics of Pyramid Head to rework hooks, namely teleport the survivor to a different random hook location if the killer is within a certain range of the hook for a certain amount of time (wider range and shorter time than PH's cages though, because those can still easily be camped). Various killer-specific adjustments (think Leatherface). Hell, remove hook timers altogether.

  Killer buffs to compensate would naturally revolve around other elements of the gameplay. Increased movement speeds. Increased base generator regression. Increased pallet break and window vault speeds. Maybe the ability to cancel and thereby fake pallet breaks and window vaults. Faster wall breaks, "bursting" through them. Basekit BBQ (no points, no range condition). Basekit Ruin (no Hex totem, .25 c/s regression, gens can still be kicked to increase that regression to .5c/s). Basekit NOED (Lethal Blinks and Grudge hits not counting as basic attacks). Basekit Pop (on the farthest-away gen from the hook that has progress, highlighted for the killer). "Early-game collapse" (block all generators until the first chase begins). Various killer-specific adjustments.

  These just as assortments of random ideas.

  One idea that actually does go the route of "encouragement" would be to apply repair speed debuffs whenever a killer is in a chase, and repair speed buffs whenever a killer is within a certain range of a hook. For the range, around 20-30m seems reasonable. The repair buffs would only start to apply 5-10 seconds after a respective hook has happened, to give the killer time to leave. If the killer is chasing a survivor within that range, the buff and debuff would cancel each other out. A debuff of 25% could be alright, making generators take 26.6 seconds longer to repair if the killer is chasing for the entire interaction. In order for the repair buff to cancel this out in cases where the killer is chasing survivors around the hook, the buff would have to be 33%. That translates to 20 seconds faster generators if the killer is camping for the entire interaction, which is good because at that point hook stage and generator align at 60 seconds.

  A similar thing could be done to discourage tunnelling: Give an unhooked survivor a repair speed debuff until they are hooked again, but if the unhooked survivor is being chased and/or hooked again before any other survivor has been hooked, give all other survivors a repair speed buff for as long as that survivor is being chased/on the hook.

  As for an idea that would actually get rid of camping/tunnelling/slugging altogether... Make the entity swallow up a survivor as soon as they go down, respawn them at a random location far away from the killer on the map in the healthy or injured state. On their third down, survivors get sacrificed instead of respawned. If you want to keep slugging in, make it so that the killer has to manually call upon the entity to swallow downed survivors. Obviously this would change a whole lot about the game and require a lot of other changes, but it would make for an a lot more chase-centric, low-downtime, action-packed gameplay flow for everyone involved. I doubt BHVR would ever do this because it changes too much about the character of the game, and there are legitimate arguments that it would lose some key qualities, such as the strategic elements of camping/tunnelling/slugging and their counterplay, as well as their "thrill" and "danger" factors of being capable of turning games around and/or ending them within a short period of time, but still, many people would regard this mode as superior and desirable, and it's technically easy to achieve.

  A less extreme modification that would still do a lot to make the game less campy/tunnelly/sluggy would be to make it so that the killer wins automatically after getting X hooks. The exact amount of hooks could be unique for every killer, which would make balancing a lot easier too. So say a Nurse wins with 12 hooks, a Wraith with 8. There are no hook stages and survivors do not get sacrificed after 3 hooks either, rather all survivors get sacrificed after the respectively necessary amount of total hooks has been reached. In order to prevent the targeting of weak links, you could make it so that at least two survivors have to have been hooked in order to reach the goal. A tie would be if the killer gets half the amount of required hooks. Anything above or below that would count as a "soft" win for the respective side. If all survivors are hooked/slugged simultaneously, allow them to unhook themselves and pick themselves back up.

  Again, just ideas to demonstrate that it isn't impossible or even difficult to fundamentally change these things.

  in How to encourage good gameplay Comment by zarr January 12, 2022

• Special attacks that can break pallets registering on pallets rather than on survivors sliding over those pallets doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with validation: if a survivor has started into the pallet vault interaction, a special attack will prioritize the pallet break, and I'm pretty sure this still relies on the killer perspective - the survivor has to have started into the pallet vault interaction on the killer's end in order for the attack to prioritize the pallet. I couldn't yet confirm this because it's not always obvious from the killer perspective whether a survivor has started into the interaction (the "interaction" starts before the survivor is actually sliding over the pallet), but I could confirm that it doesn't depend on the survivor perspective, since there were still instances of the survivor getting hit despite on their screen long having had initiated the vault interaction. So it has to either be based on the killer or server perspective.

  In the past these special attacks (mostly just Billy's chainsaw at that time) could still register on survivors well into the pallet vault, but there were also issues of rare instances where the attack would register on neither of them. BHVR went a bit back and forth on it, and for some time these attacks would register on both the survivor and pallet, but I think with more and more abilities that can break pallets entering the game, the devs at some point decided that it would be unfair to favour the killer entirely, so now the attacks prioritize the pallet. (Or maybe it's that way simply because they decided it was the easiest solution to deal with any issues that may otherwise arise for all those abilities in those instances.)

  Either way, here's a tip: If you angle your attack away from the pallet such that it is not within the "break zone" of said pallet, the attack will still register on the survivor even if they've long started into the vault interaction. Depending on the angle you approach the pallet from this might not be possible of course, but not seldomly it is, and especially as Blight who can obviously change the angle of his attack mid-rush.

  The thing where Dead Hard validation can prevent an attack from breaking a pallet it otherwise could have is something BHVR is apparently looking into.

  in BHVR if there is dead hard validation why no hit validation for powers? Comment by zarr January 12, 2022

• @BenZ0 said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2745554#Comment_2745554

  Ye exactly, I have been told it is different on the survivor side thats why I said that.

  Btw I just met her again a few min ago, again same thing, she was teleporting around. She tried to abuse that by lagswitching to hooked survivors and teleport away, I played smart and could even down her but sadly I was dumb enough to pick her up, I was stuck in a infinit animation and she wiggled off and then just teleported herself to the exit. I still got a 2k though even though they where playing with an literal hacker. She also wrote in the endgame chat so she is most likely on microsoft store or epic games.

  I wish BHVR would just ban ppl like that but well...

  I have that on record again so if you want I could upload it for you so you can take a look on the second game and confirm that.

  I have seen (and faced) my share of lagswitchers, so I for one don't need confirmation. And mhm, they can make it impossible to pick them up or to hook them. You were lucky you didn't go for a grab while her phantom was on the gen, or you would have gotten stuck in that grab animation too.

  It's unfortunately not really possible to ban for this. Cheaters use means to manipulate their connections, but those same connection issues can arise without manipulation. Of course, the cheaters do so in controlled manners so as to actually be able to benefit from them, but differentiating whether it's an exploit or a genuine connection issue is difficult. Not impossible, but it would require advanced analytics and an overall effort that I don't think BHVR deems worthwhile given that it's thankfully still a rare occurrence to have people "laghack" like this. And there would still always be the risk of false positives, and obviously banning innocent players is something you absolutely don't want to do, not least because then you open an entire can of worms of needing an unbanning process, which is a lot of additional effort and something legitimate cheaters can also try and exploit.

  What they could do is make the server harsher in terminating bad connections. As I've said, lagswitches rely on inducing ridiculous amounts of latency, to the point of not sending much or any info for seconds at a time. Even if a player legitimately has a connection failure like that, booting them off the game is justified. Currently it takes like 5-10 seconds for a player to get booted off in a no-info case (I know this because my ISP resets my connection once a day at a set time, and sometimes it has happened that I was in a DbD match during that time, and depending on how much time it took to reconnect, sometimes I would stay on the server and sometimes I would get booted) - they could reduce that time to 1-2 seconds. And in other cases where players will limit their bandwidth so much that they cannot send complete client info and packet splitting and queueing occurs, the server never boots them off (this one I tested in custom matches) - the server should boot off players that experience low bandwidths like that for prolonged periods; game packets are small (the per-second network usage of online games is fractions of a megabyte), there aren't people anymore that actually have connections that bad (and if there were they shouldn't be playing online games to begin with).

  in So ugh... why are players allowed to play with such a ping? Comment by zarr January 12, 2022

• @BenZ0 said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2745485#Comment_2745485

  true about the tbag but lag switching isnt possible anymore, it works only if you are the "host" of a lobby which dbd doesnt use anymore. However there are other ways to do that, but its difficult.

  @Laluzi said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2745498#Comment_2745498

  Are you sure it's not possible? Because every once in a while, I'll still get a survivor whose ping suddenly shoots through the goddamn roof every time I try to pick them up and returns to normal at any other point in the match.

  Lagswitching is still possible. Only it is not really possible to be exploited on the killer side anymore since they will get overruled on pretty much all of their hits at ridiculous latencies like that (thousands of milliseconds worth).

  Players can still abuse lagswitches on the survivor side, and this Jill was definitely doing it. What you are seeing here is Jill activating her lagswitch while she's on a gen, and then while running. What this does is that the server is not receiving info on her client state anymore for some time, and it will simply keep her in whatever state she was in last and continue that action like it normally would (extrapolation). So the Jill you are seeing repairing that gen and running in a straight line is a phantom, on her end she moved somewhere else entirely after activating the switch.

  As you can see, you still get the hit confirmed on her, but obviously this is still giving her an advantage. Lagswitches on the survivor side can also be abused to lock killers into animations.

  You were facing a cheater. Servers should just timeout players after more than a second of not receiving client info (or only partial info, because I'm pretty sure some of these people are also using things to limit bandwidth in order to induce latencies due to packet queueing). Currently I think it takes like 5 seconds of no info for the server to terminate the connection.

  in So ugh... why are players allowed to play with such a ping? Comment by zarr January 12, 2022

• The counterplay to this is to let go of gens at the start of the hooking animation, wait out the crows, then go back on the gens. Artist will take 12 seconds to recharge her crows. You tank the second set of crows, giving you another 12 seconds to keep working. Then you are finally forced to let go by the third set of crows, but at this point 30+ seconds will have already passed between the recharge time and the time taken to set up and fire crows, only leaving at most 15 seconds left on DMS.

  That said, most people will not know about or employ this counterplay, and therefore camping DMS Artist might still be enough of a problem to warrant adjustments. Artist can also employ counter-counterplay by delaying her initial crow launch or firing singular crows (although that obviously comes at the risk of survivors simply sticking to gens rather than waiting out crows).

  I would find it unfortunate to see this perk lose its chance to have a meta impact merely due to an interaction with one killer. I hope that if there will be adjustments due to this, they will strictly affect this interaction.

  in here's what gameplay of dead man's switch on the artist will look like Comment by zarr January 11, 2022

• 
  

  @CashelP14 said:

  Sorry mate I got to disagree with this one.

  Your treating every swf as if they are a full team of veteran players. Lower ranks (where the game is considered killer sided) shouldn't be restricted whenever they aren't good enough to use the benefits of a swf. In tournaments they have these sorts of restrictions because they know everyone is a veteran player.

  Lastly I believe it kills the variety that of this game. Sometimes swf teams get bored of just looping the killer and doing gens and want to do something differently. Usually this involves them running very similar builds.

  They will never be able to buff solo q to the level of swf no matter what happens but I like the direction they are trying to take. Same way no matter what happens they can never have all killers viable at high ranks, no matter how much they buff them. You'll always have the top 5, basically everyone in the middle who'll win most of their matches and the bottom ones that just won't be good enough.

  Apologies but I've read plenty of discussions before on swf perk limitations like this and they've never been able to convince me it's a good idea.

  It's not treating every SWF as an elite group because the restrictions still allow for teams to use really good builds. The 1-copy perk/item/add-on limit does not actually decrease the ceiling of SWF so much that non-elite groups would suffer much. Do you think those teams need 4 copies of the strongest perks and items to succeed? I don't, and I actually think many of them never even do use such builds. As I've pointed out earlier, a 16-perk setup could consist almost entirely of proper meta perks (Adrenaline, Balanced Landing, Circle Of Healing, Borrowed Time, Dead Hard, Decisive Strike, Deliverance, Iron Will, Kindred, Lithe, Lucky Break, Prove Thyself, Resilience, Spine Chill, Sprint Burst, Unbreakable), and then you can still add on top of that a toolbox with a BNP, a med-kit with a Styptic, a different med-kit with a Syringe, a key with Blood Amber or a Rainbow Map. The restrictions will bring down the top of stacking the absolutely strongest things, but it won't mean that SWFs are forced to bring weak builds, whatsoever.

  I think SWF teams can still have a ton of fun and a lot of different fun builds without being able to stack perks. And for the much more common case that SWF teams actually use normal builds, it will of course actually lead to much more variety.

  But it's fair enough that you prefer the direction the devs are trying to take of buffing solos and killers. There are arguments for and against both directions, but personally more than anything else my conviction is based on the fact that the devs have already been talking about wanting to pursue their direction for more than two years now, and practically nothing has happened in that regard. Moreover, their direction would require significant changes to the game, for survivors at large and a lot of different killers. Given BHVR's pace, I just can't see that this would be feasible. It would likely take years, years during which the game is still of course constantly getting new additions of more killers, perks and who-knows-what changes to complicate the process. Nerfing SWF on the other hand, with loadout restrictions like these, is something they could implement within 1 patch cycle of one and a half months.

  in SWF loadout restrictions Comment by zarr January 10, 2022

• @Predated said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2741832#Comment_2741832

  Except, it does hurt a LOT. Not being able to run certain combinations for fun is quite harmful and makes the game boring. You would have to neuter combinations like Ruin/Undying/Tinkerer/Pop too.

  "People playing in SWF have various advantages, even without voice comms, and taking away the ability to stack the best stuff or coordinate some broken combinations on top of that is only sensible, even for SWFs that are not looking to arm themselves to the teeth (who of course will be less affected to begin with by restrictions to the ability to do so)."

  This entire sentence is true, for solo Q. You can still stack everything and coordinate very broken combinations in the pre-game lobby. That's why there is a chatbox in the lobby.

  "Your argument would have to be that it's actually fine to have a group with 4 DH, DS, BT, UB, BNP and whatnot. I think that's an imbalanced set of loadouts regardless, and SWFs are the only groups that can actually consistently put together loadouts like that."

  If 4 solo q people can play it without many issues, then 4 people in a SWF lobby can too. The average 4 man solo q(assuming matchmaking didnt replace someone with a potato) is more threatening than a 4 man SWF, because 4 man solo lacks the incentive to play altruistic. Altruism is your best friend as killer.

  "I think there are much fewer killers that currently can compete with the SWF performance ceiling than killers that cannot. So if we close the solo/SWF gap by nerfing the SWF ceiling, we only have to adjust those few killers to account for this. If we close it by bringing solo closer to the SWF ceiling on the other hand, we of course have to adjust those many killers that currently cannot compete with that ceiling."

  Or, yknow, maybe something silly: ADD SOMETHING TO THE KILLER BASEKIT THAT DOESNT AFFECT THE HIGHER RANGE.

  Like Fire-Up. Fire-Up being basekit helps all lower rank killers quite significantly, while it barely even helps higer ranked killers. Blight, Nurse, Spirit, Hag, Artist and even Huntress barely really need to increase pallet breaking or window vaulting speeds, while killers like Myers, Ghostface, Clown, Pig and Trapper would massively benefit from even the slightest increase in both, especially later in the game.

  Except, it does hurt a LOT. Not being able to run certain combinations for fun is quite harmful and makes the game boring. You would have to neuter combinations like Ruin/Undying/Tinkerer/Pop too.

  I agree that not being able to coordinate fun builds as liberally anymore as one can currently is a downside (though I also don't think it hurts "a LOT"), but it's a small price to pay for getting rid of the ability of groups to abuse completely busted loadouts and combinations. It is particularly small a price because groups can still coordinate various fun builds with this restriction in place. Which builds that rely on perk stacking even are there that are actually purely for fun and pose no risk of getting abused? I would not even classify 4 Head On as purely for fun, since it's not fun for killers to keep getting stunned. Of course some things come to mind, such as stacking Slippery Meat and Up The Ante, but it's a compromise I for one would be more than willing to make, not least because it is very rare for people to actually run stuff like that, from my experience through the years; even most casual SWFs usually run useful perks and play normally. So I don't really see it hurting a lot of players either.

  Besides, as I've mentioned, these restrictions would open up design space for the devs to make individual perks more impactful in their own right, further decreasing the necessity of being able to coordinate to get use out of certain perks.

  I don't get why you would have to change anything about combinations like Ruin/Undying/Tinkerer/Pop. How does this relate to fun builds? And if it's that you think 4-player SWF teams would not be able to compete against builds like that with these restrictions in place, I simply have to disagree.

  This entire sentence is true, for solo Q. You can still stack everything and coordinate very broken combinations in the pre-game lobby. That's why there is a chatbox in the lobby.

  I rather deal in realities of the game. People in reality as good as never coordinate anything in pre-game lobbies. People practically never even tell others simple stuff like "I have DS", which would be easy and crucial loadout information to share... but suddenly they will coordinate entire harmonious perk setups, and do so in a mere minute?

  In reality, only SWF groups actually coordinate builds, and in the 0.X% of lobbies where solo groups actually attempt to coordinate builds, they not only will not be able to do so very effectively because of the time limit even if every single survivor just so happens to be on board with changing their build, but they also will still not be able to use those builds in coordinated fashion like SWFs can even if they would succeed in making the builds happen. This is a non-issue.

  If 4 solo q people can play it without many issues, then 4 people in a SWF lobby can too. The average 4 man solo q(assuming matchmaking didnt replace someone with a potato) is more threatening than a 4 man SWF, because 4 man solo lacks the incentive to play altruistic. Altruism is your best friend as killer.

  Sorry, this doesn't really make sense. Even apart from it being common sense that SWFs have various huge advantages over solos, we have hard data on SWFs in fact being more successful in the game, that's the very reason the devs specifically are addressing the problem of the solo/SWF gap to begin with.

  I don't disagree that SWFs can be overly altruistic, but not only do I think that solos are usually comparably as altruistically minded, and not only can SWFs be altruistic in coordinated manners and as such regularly succeed in their altruism as opposed to solos who regularly fall apart due to it, but one shouldn't really balance the game just on the expectation that people will be somehow inclined to play in unoptimal ways rather than abuse the advantages SWF provides as much as possible. That doesn't mean SWF has to be balanced for the idea that every single group will do so, but we are not bringing the ceiling that much down here either.

  Or, yknow, maybe something silly: ADD SOMETHING TO THE KILLER BASEKIT THAT DOESNT AFFECT THE HIGHER RANGE.

  While this is a more or less fair point in and of itself, I don't quite think it's as easy as you make it out to be to find things that actually only benefit the killers that aren't already more than strong enough. Not least because there are also pretty considerable differences in strength between those non-S-tier killers still, so even if you were to find general killer buffs that don't affect the top-end killers and put some of the other killers into a good spot, they could at the same time be too little or too much on yet other killers.

  I will say that the sentiment behind the Fire Up idea as a general buff is good. Weaker killers are generally those that have to kick pallets and vault windows, so buffing those things would be a fairly sensible route. Then again, not only would a killer like Blight still tangibly benefit from this as well, so it's not entirely "clean" either, but this also limits design space for future killers, since they will then always have to be created with these base buffs in mind, another problem that doesn't exist if we just nerf the SWF ceiling and its killer equivalents.

  in SWF loadout restrictions Comment by zarr January 10, 2022

• @Predated said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/304057/swf-loadout-restrictions

  I didnt read it all, since I already spotted too many issues with the suggestion, so here's all the counter arguments:

  1. what about SWF's who dont use comms and just play together?
  2. what about SWF's who are just screwing around a bit with random builds?
  3. nerfing SWF is only going to make balancing killers harder.

  What you really want to do, is buff Solo Q up to the potential of SWF.

  If you do nerf SWF closer towards solo q, you're going to have the following issue:

  Lets say optimal SWF is a solid 10 and a full Solo Q squad is a 6. If you were to design any killer right now, they would need to fit between 7-10. Meaning any killer has still somewhat room for nerfs and buffs, even if the numbers are already small.

  If you were to drop SWF to 8, you would need to drop all killers that are between 8-10 back to 8. This would mean Nurse, Hag, Spirit, Artist and Blight too. But how are you going to nerf those to now compensate for the lack of potential power on SWF without absolutely gutting those killers?

  The smaller the number already is, the harder it is to adjust. If something is 0.5% too fast, 10% is easier to nerf to 9.5% with less impact, than 1% has to 0.5%. You would want to buff survivors, so you can make balancing killers a lot easier.

  For 1., and 2., these restrictions shouldn't really hurt much. People playing in SWF have various advantages, even without voice comms, and taking away the ability to stack the best stuff or coordinate some broken combinations on top of that is only sensible, even for SWFs that are not looking to arm themselves to the teeth (who of course will be less affected to begin with by restrictions to the ability to do so).

  Your argument would have to be that it's actually fine to have a group with 4 DH, DS, BT, UB, BNP and whatnot. I think that's an imbalanced set of loadouts regardless, and SWFs are the only groups that can actually consistently put together loadouts like that.

  For 3., I don't think I agree. I think there are much fewer killers that currently can compete with the SWF performance ceiling than killers that cannot. So if we close the solo/SWF gap by nerfing the SWF ceiling, we only have to adjust those few killers to account for this. If we close it by bringing solo closer to the SWF ceiling on the other hand, we of course have to adjust those many killers that currently cannot compete with that ceiling.

  in SWF loadout restrictions Comment by zarr January 10, 2022

• @Synzicle said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2740998#Comment_2740998

  Read the whole thing it's well thought out and fair. I tend to say survivor by daylight because based on a lot of what him, and many others say on the forums, when ever a change is suggested against them it's met with an instant shut down regardless of how reasonable, thought granted many unreasonable, suggestions there are. It also seems by a lot of their suggestions that's all they want killers to be, a punching bag for them to meme against. Mainly it's said with satire and of course some delicious salt. I always thought it would be cool if they treated survivors like killers and gave each one unique abilities such as DS and SB based on their lore. This would also lead to knowing how to play against each survivors strengths and weakness similar to how survivors face off against killers .Granted that would take an entire survivor rework, your idea is a bit more feasible. I do agree that more killers need to be brought up to speed and behavior just won't....why that is I can't say.

  Now that's a more reasonable take.

  Online outlets for this game and multiplayer games in general can and do tend to bring out some of the more narrow-minded views of players, as well as heated arguments in the context of which even more ridiculous stuff is regularly being said. But I also always keep in mind that, for one thing, a lot of people are most likely actually using these things as outlets, to vent their frustrations with the game, often even in the actual heat of the moment after having just come out of a match, and for another, they often most likely don't even really mean the things they say as literally as they frame them. In a non-text-based discussion, they would probably be more reasonable, concede more, contest less, be less disagreeable.

  And oftentimes players don't even really know what they want. The players that say things along the lines of wanting their opponent to be a "punching bag" would quickly grow bored if they actually didn't face opposition they can feel good about having performed well against due to it having been a challenge, killer or survivor. I've seen a lot of complaints where I'm reasonably sure the person in question would likely not even be playing the game anymore if the things they are complaining about didn't exist.

  So yeah, my advice is to take such stuff less seriously, because even for themselves it is often not as serious as it may sound, whether they realize or not. I for one try not to engage with stuff like that much, not least because one can be reasonably confident that it won't have much of any sway on the devs' decisions anyway.

  Unique abilities or perks for survivors could indeed be cool, and there have been various suggestions for stuff like that from what I've seen through the years, but it doesn't seem to be something BHVR is looking to do. One understandable reason is that it would likely lead to a meta of using certain characters and team compositions. One of the cooler suggestions I've seen and that I doubt would really tank player character diversity (if anything it would positively affect it) is that survivors get special benefits on their respective teachable perks that other survivors using those perks do not. The same would work just as well on the killer side, of course. I'm all for perk buffs, so many of the perks in the game are blatantly subpar and barely see use, and this teachable-specific way to buff a ton of perks could be an interesting approach to do that, since it strengthens the "personality" of different survivors and killers alike, creates soft gameplay "roles" for different survivor characters, and encourages more diversity in the selected characters. And it does so without even affecting global balance all that drastically, since those perk buffs being tied to specific characters of course means there can only be a limited amount of those buffs having an effect in any given match.

  Either way, yeah, stuff of that nature is not really something I can see happening, as opposed to this comparably simple SWF adjustment.

  @KateMain86 said:

  Not all SWF groups are the same. Some of them aren't sweaty try hards. When I do SWF, we never super coordinate anything other than trying to deal with a toxic camp/tunnel killer. A lot of people who do SWF aren't there trying to give the killer a hard time. In fact I imagine you probably only see super try hard SWF in red ranks anyway. If they ever put any kind of restrictions on SWF I honestly think you would see a dramatic decrease in players. It isn't fair for people who want to play together. The other thing to consider is don't take the game so seriously. If you go up against a SWF then do your best and move on. You won't get SWF every time. A lot of SWF teams are actually fun to play with.

  This is well and true, but with regards to this SWF restriction specifically, it also shouldn't really matter. Precisely because many SWFs aren't using or looking to use the most stacked and coordinated loadouts it's not a very painful restriction for them. And precisely because they don't take the game so seriously they will if anything even come to enjoy this restriction, because it encourages them to experiment with builds more and think more about individual perk and item choices, and do so specifically in the context of playing with friends, where people will develop "trademark" perks and items that the group has decided they get to use most of the time, and stuff like that. Will be sort of a SWF bonding experience making their loadouts work and deciding who gets to use what, ha.

  I think for "casual" SWF this should if anything make things more fun both for themselves and their opponents, and it won't really feel like a "punishment".

  Besides, there's totally enough of a pool of viable perks (and items/add-ons) to choose from to still be able to have solid builds even if they have to be distinct.

  Adrenaline, Balanced Landing, Circle Of Healing, Borrowed Time, Dead Hard, Decisive Strike, Deliverance, Iron Will, Kindred, Lithe, Lucky Break, Prove Thyself, Resilience, Spine Chill, Sprint Burst, Unbreakable - that's a 16-perk lineup of some of the most popular and best perks, so we aren't even forced to break into "tech" perk territory to equip a team with this restriction in place. We just won't be able to stack 4 of the absolute best things.

  @RakimSockem said:

  That was a lot of reading to do including the comments but I of course have pieces that I agree with and pieces that I don't.

  1. As someone mentioned, if you limit a team of a 4 man SWF to having no perks in common, that will encourage many killers to tunnel out players who have perks that they deem problematic. You can see it all over the forums anytime Dead hard, unbreakable, DS, BT, CoH, etc are mentioned. It's as simple as "I saw David get the save and the person I hit had BT. That means if I get David on hook, no one can safely save him if I proxy camp him because no one else has BT." or "Feng hit me with D-strike. Now I don't have to worry about tunneling anyone else because no one else has it" There are certain perks that are pivotal to countering the tunnel/camp meta and having them immediately snuffed out because only 1 person gets it throws the balance completely out of whack.
  2. I agree that the potential and the ceiling an expert 4 man SWF has is really high. I think my only issues with your suggestions is I don't think there's enough expert 4 man SWF teams out there to justify this level of change. The majority of SWFs I encounter (and this is both ones that I've played against and ones that I've played with) are comprised of maybe 1 or 2 at most good players paired with some babies who haven't even learned to look behind them when they run. To limit a team like that to never having more than 1 copy of BT (which is really made as an anti-camping perk for altruistic people) doesn't seem justifiable imo.
  3. I don't really have a suggestion of my own except maybe only limiting certain perks to 2 people instead of 1 and leaving the rest of the perks alone (Because why stop a team from running We'll Make It on 4 people if they want quick heals off of hook saves or 4 people running head on to try and meme around and get a few cheeky stuns which will only work like twice before the killer catches on)

  Thanks for reading it all!

  1. As in earlier arguments, while I do concede that there's merit to this and that adjustment to the restrictions could be made specifically with camping and tunnelling in mind (so pertaining BT and DS, basically), we also have to remember that we are talking about a 4-player SWF team playing in pubs here. They will still be in a super good spot even with just 1 copy of each of those perks, not least because they can also make better use of perks like Deliverance, Kinship, Renewal to deal with camping and tunelling, on top of course again of their coordinated ways of dealing with them better, by sticking to gens if someone is being camped, or attacking the hook together, bodyblocking for a teammate that is being tunneled, and so on. They will of course have to be more cautious, it will be more difficult, but I don't think the balance in public matchmaking is really such that 4-player SWFs would suffer without multiple BT and DS.
  2. As outlined in my reply to KateMain86, SWFs will still be able to put really potent loadouts on the board. So the more "casual" SWFs not only won't be hurt much by this because they aren't usually stacking the strongest stuff times four anyway, but also because they will still have solid builds, in many cases likely not even all that different from the builds they used to have. But for the also existent SWFs that do stack DS, DH, IW, UB, BNP, and all that good stuff, things will change, and many of these SWFs are also not expert-level players but "boosted" by these loadouts to differing degrees, winning against killer players they perhaps shouldn't be, or at least doing so much more comfortably than they should be.
  3. Exceptions to the restrictions are possible, though as I've also pointed out earlier, if it should actually turn out that even full SWF teams still need multiple copies of certain perks in order to be able to compete against camping/tunnelling, there should be base game changes regarding these things instead (which there should be anyway, in my opinion). For everything else, I would still insist on the hard limit of 1 per player, because it would encourage more perk diversity, and come without the baggage of having to decide for every single perk whether it warrants being restricted. You are of course right that there are perks that aren't problematic even when present 4 times in a match, but I also don't feel like it's a problem that SWFs won't be able to use them 4 times.

  in SWF loadout restrictions Comment by zarr January 10, 2022

• @CashelP14 said:

  I'll be honest I found this very hard too long to read but from what I've read you did a really good job.

  Well done on doing a really good test that clears up a lot of things for other people 👍

  Also I'd really like to know how long this took to properly test, and especially type out that whole discussion lol

  The main testing didn't take very long, just a few 10-30min sessions. But we also had some fun with it and such. But then I had to go through recordings and make clips and all that. And yes, type out a bunch of stuff. Glad you appreciate the effort!

  The main post is definitely a little big, would probably be better if there was a way to collapse/expand sections such that the overall format is easier to follow. But I'm sure people that are interested enough in this stuff don't find it hard to go through, I know I wouldn't.

  Cheers. 👍️

  in Busting some hit registration myths Comment by zarr January 9, 2022

• 
  

  @Zozzy said:

  None of this makes sense to what happens in game. The gif from the killers perspective with the pallet hit is what i see all the time (specifically against console users) but i do not get the damage state and instead get teleported and stunned. Perhaps the game acts differently at your exaggerated pings compared to the more sane and common pings of 20-80 ms?

  I also get the killer is lagy but survivor isn't one with an almost instant stun the moment they tap the pallet. But again, i am at 20 ping so this doesn't make sense unless the game is lying about my ping.

  Can you do a console vs pc test to see if something is iffy with the conversion between the platforms? I don't have many issues against pc users. Generally they are around the same ping as me, but console users are horrible to play against and usually fluctuate around 60-90 ping thanks to wifi.

  This also doesn't explain the instances where you hit a survivor and there is a lengthy pause before they deadhard on your screen

  Window hits are what ever.. The day they validate basic hits is the day killers start to quit faster than they already are. A 300ms ping killer is so rare and requires a vpn or program to get matched with them that it isn't worth punishing everyone else.

  What you may not really think about are the timings of these interactions, and that they regularly matter much more than latency. Say you have 20ms and the survivor you are facing 80. Lunges last 300 milliseconds, Dead Hard 500 millseconds, pallet pulls 600 milliseconds. A 60ms difference in to-server latency between you and the survivor does not really mean all too much for interactions like this, if the survivor enacts them in a timely enough fashion. And of course, they can even have done so before you started to attack. You shouldn't expect to always get these hits just because your latency is low, if your opponent's latency is also fairly low. But you should be aware that if the timing is tight enough for those 60ms to matter, the server will favour you as the lower-latency player on validation, and the other player will get screwed by their higher-than-yours latency as a result. You often won't even be able to tell you hit them through DH or an early pallet pull in these cases, on your end the hit may look fairly benign. So there exists a sort of "selection bias" in your perception of overruled hits by its very functioning, since you will mostly only notice when an attack of yours that should connect from your perspective doesn't connect, and those instances will be annoying for you, whereas you won't really notice when an attack of yours that shouldn't connect from your opponent's perspective does connect.

  Speaking from my experience as a low-latency player too, I am if anything surprised what kind of close-call hits I still regularly land through pallet drops. Overruled hits on DH are a more common occurrence for me too (though not very common either), but that's not surprising to me because the reaction time + to-server latency of survivors will just often be below the timing of attacks + my to-server latency.

  I don't know anyone personally that plays the game on console, but I'll see what I can do. Whether cross-platform scenarios change anything about these things is not an entirely uninteresting thing to look into. Noted.

  "Lengthy pause" DHs are something I would have to see on a case-by-case basis to be able to tell what might be going on. Don't think we got any instances like that, at varying pings on both sides.

  Luckily very laggy players are indeed rare. This game would be nigh-unplayable on the survivor side if 100+ms players were the norm. But yes, that is not the case, and so while it is a very bad experience if it does happen, the completely unfairly killer-sided hit system has not prevented me or the many other people from playing this game a lot. If players are at around 50ms and below, things are actually mostly totally fine. It's not a do-or-die issue. But it's still a very important issue, not least because it allows for fairly easy exploiting that is otherwise pretty much impossible to prevent for the devs.

  in Busting some hit registration myths Comment by zarr January 9, 2022

• @Dino7281 said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2740998#Comment_2740998

  Hey, I don't have issue with your idea in general, it's just that I don't like SWF only changes. So I would rather expand your idea so it can be used for all survivors. As I said it would bring diversity to the game, which is something lot of players would like to see, but tunneling / camping would have to be adressed.

  Nerf to camp / tunnel would be actually better alternative than try to limit killer's perks and it would improve overall health of the game.

  What we could do se give soloQ a priority for perks in lobby. What that means is that everyone just setup build and when they get into a lobby identical perks would get removed starting with SWF players, otherwise random player. SoloQ players would be more likely to use perks they want and SWF would have to adapt. So it would be change for everyone, but it would affect SWF more.

  Yeah, sorry, your original post was rather dismissive, but you have since clarified or expanded on some of the points. I was just typing my response to Synzicle before addressing yours, and was then too lazy to go back and change the tone of that statement. 😅

  I do think this loadout restriction system being applied to survivor groups at large and being balanced against adjustments to camping and tunnelling could turn out rather well. But that is obviously a much more complicated undertaking, for one thing making the loadout restriction system work for random lobbies that only have a minute to adjust perks, and for another of course dealing with the entire microcosm of the gameplay element that is camping. Not impossible, and with regards to the latter definitely something I want to see in the future regardless, but it's less readily-workable than the SWF loadout restrictions I suggest, which I do think would do a lot of good for the game and do it fast.

  Here's a few more arguments I randomly attach to this post (they are tangentially related to points we discussed earlier, but they are not strictly directed at you):

  I think buffing solos with SWF balance in mind power-creeps the game in a way that if anything leaves new players behind even more. New players often won't be able to make good use of the information the game gives them, hell, in many cases they will if anything be overwhelmed by the information while they are trying to still maneuveur the very basic principles and mechanics of the game. I know that's been the case for me whenever I entered a Tom Clancy game (just that it turned out like 90% of the information it gave me was inconsequential to my succeeding, lol). And so we create a situation in which newer players in the best case are not benefitting from this info all that much, while in the worst case even being negatively affected by it, and we then also buff a lot of killers to "compensate" so they will face even tougher opposition.

  I think in general (so also with regards to all skill and experience levels) it is more reasonable to acknowledge that SWF's ceiling is too high and to balance SWF with the rest of the game in mind, rather than try to balance the rest of the game with that unreasonably high SWF ceiling as a standard in mind. That would lead to a power creep that is problematic well beyond the "new player" brackets. I mean, are we really looking to buff all killers to be as strong as Nurse and Blight, who can compete with that absolute top ceiling?

  Tournaments show that quite a lot of the killer lineup can actually compete even against highly-skilled and coordinated 4-player SWF teams in an environment where those teams have loadout restrictions in place. Average kills fall slightly above 2, wins for either side are completely commonplace. So we already have evidence that these simple SWF nerfs would get us to a much more reasonable state of balance for a lot of the game, without having to buff a dozen killers in elaborate ways that would have to be both notable yet still sensible when accounting for solo environments too. It's just a much easier, faster and already proven way to get closer to our goal of closing the gap and making the game more balanced as well as easier to balance from there on out.

  And I mean, BHVR has been talking about wanting to bridge the solo/SWF gap for more than two years now, and little to nothing of note has happened with regards to that in that time. And then there's killers like Legion that for years have been more than deserving of buffs even regardless of SWF/solo concerns and are left in a rather sad state for seemingly little reason. Why do we believe that BHVR will suddenly start shipping multiple notable solo buffs that actually improve that experience tangibly and consistently, and also then ship multiple such buffs for a whole range of killers too? They are still nerfing add-ons of mid-tier killers in an update that is yet to hit live, in what year would we ever expect such a wild reality of a tangibly more competitive solo experience and a more powerful killer lineup across the board? To that I say: "Just nerf SWF already, lmao."

  I also want to note that most good SWFs don't really need perks to succeed in the public matchmaking environment, let alone multiple copies of the strongest perks. In fact, I think it is much more reasonable to assume that way more survivors are propped up by SWF loadout coordination to succeed against better killers, than good survivors are helped by it to compete against equal killers. Good SWFs would still comfortably do well, lesser SWFs would stop being favoured as much by the mere stackedness of their loadouts. And since most SWFs fall more on the "lesser" side of this, the killer experience would stand to benefit a lot. And I also don't think "lesser" SWFs would start losing to equal and worse killers a lot more due to this change either. They would have a harder time naturally, it would do a whole lot to bring more balance into those scenarios, but nerfing SWF is of course precisely the point.

  in SWF loadout restrictions Comment by zarr January 9, 2022

• @Zozzy said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2740379#Comment_2740379

  Wow, you actually said to just bait out the deadhard. i see what i am talking to now.

  Validation has taken the problem from the side that has options like dropping the pallet one loop early or using the deadhard early for distance to reach safety (all positive things for them and their team) and unintentionally put it on the side that needs accurate information to react to what the survivor is doing and who's only option is to respect every pallet and never take risks leading to 5 gen chases.

  Survivors have always been able to react to my attack with deadhard because my ping is stupidly low so it is nothing new to me. The problem is i am being punished by lagy survivors and their trash ping is now my problem when it never was before. Validation is a one way street that is only beneficial to the survivor side.

  Where is grab validation? Gen grabs should be rewarded with 8k points because they are so impossibly rare to the point where i was watching a streamer who sat on a gen and watched the killer stretch out their arm before letting go of the gen. The game reversed the grab and changed it to a hit allowing them to finish the gen in the killers face for adrenaline. How is that in any way fair to the killer?

  Wow, you actually said to just bait out the deadhard. i see what i am talking to now.

  What? Genuinely do not understand what you mean with this. You can never react to Dead Hard because if it plays on your end you can obviously not hit the survivor until it ends. Instances where your hit is overruled and Dead Hard then plays are again instances of the server identifying that the DH happened earlier and made the hit impossible, ergo they are fair (or as fair as an online multiplayer game can be).

  Validation has taken the problem from the side that has options like dropping the pallet one loop early or using the deadhard early for distance to reach safety (all positive things for them and their team) and unintentionally put it on the side that needs accurate information to react to what the survivor is doing and who's only option is to respect every pallet and never take risks leading to 5 gen chases.

  It's becoming rather clear that instead of trying to engage with my arguments and experiments in an actual facts-based discussion, you are more interested in repeating biased talking points. You apparently want network latency to favour the killer side on hits completely, even their own latency. Or you don't want to understand that it does. Makes me wonder whether your ping is actually "stupidly low". (And if it is, you would not even notice hit authority being moved to the server much.)

  I really am not in the mood repeating statements that I already repeated for you and that would not have to be repeated at all if you had simply read the original post. But one last time:

  Validation has not taken the problem from one side and put it on the other. Validation is not based on the survivor perspective. It is based on the server perspective, which does not favour either side.

  This was not unintentional. BHVR very intentionally worked on these event-specific hit validation methods and they are very aware of the effects they have. Overruled hits on the killer side in cases where the server determines that those hits where not valid due to latency, are what validation is supposed to do. Literally one job.

  Survivors have as few ways to play around latency as killers do, and as I've said, arguably even fewer. I implore you again to look at my clips. Tell me, what can a survivor do in order to avoid getting hit 2 meter after having vaulted a window or pallet, or from 6m out in the open, against a laggy killer? Committing to interactons such as these that early is a detriment and risk for survivors even if they would save them from ridiculous laghits, because having to commit early opens them up much more to be cut off and mindgamed. But it does not even save them from ridiculous laghits to begin with.

  I refer you again to my post in which I already addressed ways in which killers can attempt to compensate for latency that are similar to those survivors have available, this time even with a link: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2737212/#Comment_2737212 (It's in my response to Pulsar.)

  Survivors have always been able to react to my attack with deadhard because my ping is stupidly low so it is nothing new to me. The problem is i am being punished by lagy survivors and their trash ping is now my problem when it never was before. Validation is a one way street that is only beneficial to the survivor side.

  I will again repeat that not only is validation not a "one-way street" that rewards survivors for their own latency (again, it is based on the server and therefore punishes players for their own latency; please refer to the original post which is showcasing this fact with easy-to-understand video evidence), but in fact the game without validation is a one-way street, of rewarding killers not only for a survivor's but also their own latency, since every hit that is not validated for on the server is based completely, exclusively and authoritatively on the killer's perspective. In a server-authority environment, not only are all players equally punished for their own latency rather than rewarded for it, but players also only have to account for their own latency, rather than having to try and account for both their own and their opponent's (like survivors, again, do have to currently because hits outside of DH and pallet stun interactions are completely based on the killer's perspective, and for the past 5 years even hits through DH and stuns were).

  Where is grab validation? Gen grabs should be rewarded with 8k points because they are so impossibly rare to the point where i was watching a streamer who sat on a gen and watched the killer stretch out their arm before letting go of the gen. The game reversed the grab and changed it to a hit allowing them to finish the gen in the killers face for adrenaline. How is that in any way fair to the killer?

  This is a fair point, and I address grabs and how latency affects them as an issue in the original post. Mind you, as my tests show, it can still negatively affect survivors on grabs too, and of course, basing grabs entirely on the killer's perspective again like they were in the P2P architecture is not a solution since latency then again would only affect survivors negatively on grabs too. But I do agree that how grabs are currently handled is not ideal, and I even suggest a clear improvement for the killer side of that issue in the original post. Being locked into a grab animation and it if it fails then being turned into a basic attack that might very well not hit the survivor is indeed not fair for killers. Failed grabs should at least be turned into actually-successful basic attacks automatically.

  in Busting some hit registration myths Comment by zarr January 9, 2022

• @Synzicle said:

  Again, you said nothing useful. You're just trying to argue now because you have no ground to stand on. I'm sorry that you fail to see facts on the table I laid out for you and you cherry picked 3 numbers stating that is shows growth with out showing that they lost more than they gained. I get it you think the game is fine and should continue to lose over 1k people a month for almost 3 months straight now. Shows the game is perfectly fine and that killer mains should just accept the fact that they are nothing more than punching bags for you and that they should be honored to do so.

  Enjoy pretending Survivor by Daylight is growing and perfectly fine.

  I avoided your guys' discussion so far, but let me butt in here I guess, if only to try and steer it more closely back to the topic of the original suggestion.

  First, with regards to the player activity stats, you are both kinda right. XStormyXDayzX is right that on average, the game has been growing over the years, including the past year. There are surges and dips in activity throughout years, and many of them are entirely to be expected as pointed out, as they coincide with holidays, content releases, and such. But the growth when you look at year-round averages is there, and with DbD now being on pretty much any platform you can game on as well as multiple PC clients (and soon perhaps even Linux), and with there being crossplay across all of them apart from mobile, it would be silly to talk about the game being in any danger of losing too much player activity.

  On the other hand, player retention is important of course, and as you point out, DbD does not retain enough players to make up for players that play less or not at all anymore, otherwise we wouldn't see averages settle as much lower as the peaks. That said, the player retention rate might very well not be at all concerning for BHVR. Not only did we have some of the biggest surges in player activity yet last year from which a more steep downtrend is to be expected, but we've also had Covid affecting things throughout the last two years in unusual ways. Maybe BHVR is more concerned about the continued if slight decline in average player numbers (on Steam) throughout the last 4 months, and maybe particularly so because not even their Christmas event and log-in rewards brought numbers out of the reds, and the existence of Propnight and VHS is probably not entirely "unconcerning" for them either...

  But ultimately, I don't think player activity is really an argument here either way. It would be speculation entirely on our end whether player retention is an issue affecting one role more than the other, and if anything, if BHVR is not doing big things that would boost killer player retention, we kind of have to assume that killer player retention is not actually a big problem or at all a problem, because BHVR does have the data to draw conclusions regarding these things, and indeed a big interest in solving such problems if they do exist and do threaten the game's popularity and longevity, because they of course care about those things (which is: profit) more than about... "killers" or "survivors".

  I also have never bought into anecdotal arguments regarding queue times. This is something that has always changed between ranks (now ratings), regions, times of day and night, events, rifts, and so on. My personal experience is that survivor queues are in fact not very long, and indeed faster than my killer queues at certain times, such as in the early mornings to late noon. And having played this game for years, my experience with per-role queue times has been such pretty consistently: earlier in the day, survivor queues are faster; during much of the day, queue times are comparable on both sides; later in the day, killer queues are faster. That as a general experience. I also think queue times are a self-regulating issue to a certain extent, because there are actually a lot of players (me included) that will switch roles based on queue times, thereby obviously helping stabilize that issue around more reasonable averages. And anyway, whenever I have asked people for evidence of their claims that survivor queue times are actually so super long and killer queue times so super short, they haven't taken me up on that. And when I provide evidence from multiple streamers showing their survivor queue times averaging around 1min and regularly even being shorter than their killer queue times overall, that apparently doesn't matter. I think queue time arguments are indeed more often based in bias than fact. And this is again something BHVR can easily see and in all likeliness do very much look at, and so when people are sounding alarms about long queue times that BHVR can see is just not the case, that is not helping whatever case the people making those claims are concerned with, I'm sure.

  So, let's ignore player acitvity and queue times and whether those would indicate anything that is relevant for my suggestion.

  I have to say you seem too intelligent to be as unsensible as some of your statements regarding this game are. "Survivor by Daylight", "killer mains [...] are nothing more than punching bags" - I mean, come on dude. I appreciate the fact that you are the first and only person here posting so far that doesn't fundamentally dislike my suggestion and rejects it, but I will tell you that my suggestion is not based on the idea that survivors are super OP and the game hell for killers. In public matchmaking, I actually believe the game is favourable for killers, and even the average escape rates of 4-player SWFs even at higher MMR brackets are likely not very problematic either. That said, the performance potential of SWFs, the ceiling, is absolutely problematic, and while it is far from the average SWF experience, it is absolutely an experience that does happen, and it is a ridiculously imbalanced experience in the public matchmaking environment. That is the conviction my suggestion is based on. There are also killer performance ceilings I would like to see adjusted (mostly Nurse/Blight/certain add-ons, but also the effectiveness of certain strategies), but I do think SWF is a significantly bigger balancing problem that has more of a negative effect on the game, and as such I consider SWF adjustments to be more important and urgent, especially now with MMR in place where killer players at the top-end will be matched against SWFs with a notably increased frequency as compared to the rank-based MM past.

  
  

  @Dino7281 said:

  https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2740138#Comment_2740138

  I would do it for everyone so it doesn't feel like "punishing" change, but it would bring diversity instead, which might be actually good thing with enough buffs to weak perks.

  It would be issue to implement something like that for a killers tho...

  Another problem is that you would have to make exceptions for some perks like it is on tournaments for BT for example. I wouldn't limit all perks to 1, some core perks might be better for 2 per team instead imo.

  For example We'll make it, BT, Kindred etc. just support perks should be limited to 2 instead imo. But this would be hard for new players when it wouldn't be just simple rule = everything once perk team.

  But if this was implemented they should actually fix tunneling / facecamping imo, it would be kinda issue without BT / DS.

  Can you please tell me how do you that quote thing on left? I have never found out how :D

  I would do it for everyone so it doesn't feel like "punishing" change, but it would bring diversity instead, which might be actually good thing with enough buffs to weak perks.

  Fair enough, but then this point is of course not a critique of my suggestion or its validity, but you are expanding its rationale over more of the game. And I can agree that it could be good. Maybe introduce a sort of point system for loadouts, we've seen suggestions like that in the past and I'm not fundamentally opposed. I would certainly agree with buffs for perks. While there are totally more than 16 that are more than good enough to make for a very well-equipped 4-SWF team, I do obviously agree that too too many perks (on both sides) are just not nearly good enough in the total pool of perks. That's a big gripe of mine with the game too, in fact.

  Another problem is that you would have to make exceptions for some perks like it is on tournaments for BT for example. I wouldn't limit all perks to 1, some core perks might be better for 2 per team instead imo.

  This is also fair. In tournaments, some key perks are indeed sometimes allowed 2 times, most of all of course BT. If the availability of multiple copies of certain survivor perks turns out to be too integral to the game's balancing even in 4-player SWF scenarios, then that should be something to further tweak the system according to.

  That said, for one thing I actually am not convinced there are any perks 4-player SWFs require multiple copies of to be able to compete against most killers, let alone in the public matchmaking environment, and for another I would prefer if perks that are identified to actually be that integral to the game's balancing would instead be reworked into base game mechanics. And that is especially the case regarding the balancing around camping and tunnelling, which I do also think warrants being addressed.

  To quote individual sections, copy and paste them into the reply window, highlight them, and then click the little black symbol on the left of the text. There, click the quotation marks icon and select "Quote" - done!

  Like so:

  

  Something perhaps useful to know: To jump your cursor out of the quoted section, use the arrow down key on your keyboard, or press the enter key twice.

  in SWF loadout restrictions Comment by zarr January 9, 2022