Dead by Daylight and Skill Based Matchmaking
Dead by Daylight, the asymmetrical 4v1 horror game, has quite a challenge in trying to satisfy their entire playerbase. There are people who play the game to have fun with some cool horror characters. There are also people who treat this as a competitive eSports game where you have failed if you don’t kill all four survivors or if all four survivors don’t escape the match. That’s a very wide range of interests for a game I jokingly call “spooky Mario Party.”
One way they’ve been trying to address this is with experiments in MMR, or Skill Based Matchmaking as they’re now calling it. We don’t know a lot about the internal workings of the system. We just know Behaviour really wants it in the game.
Skill Based Matchmaking is why you can’t swap killers after you ready up anymore. Somehow, someway, Behaviour is collecting data on your skill level for each killer in the game and for your survivor gameplay. Based on my strengths, for example, my ratings as Nemesis or Plague, characters I consistently double pip on, are much higher than Huntress or Michael Myers, characters I enjoy playing as but don’t do well as. Characters I rarely touch because they don’t match my gameplay style (see: I can’t control them) like Nurse or Hillbilly are in a different category until they get more data. In a working MMR system, I’m going to face much better survivors as Nemesis or Plague than I do as Huntress or Michael Myers. As I perform better or worse as these characters, my rating changes and so do my opponents.
Yesterday, 9 August, Behaviour turned on the new Skill Based Matchmaking for another round of tests. 14 minutes later, it was disabled. The tweets are embedded below for proof.
Skill Based Matchmaking is back for another round of testing.
— Dead by Daylight (@DeadByBHVR) August 9, 2021
What's new?https://t.co/2oxwigX2lf pic.twitter.com/SkwcrnULBU
Update: False alarm! The team is investigating an issue with the system. We'll keep you posted when the test gets rescheduled.
— Dead by Daylight (@DeadByBHVR) August 9, 2021
In the meantime, feel free to give the blogpost a read for more info.
14 minutes is shorter than a lot of Dead by Daylight matches. I’m giving Behaviour the benefit of the doubt here and assuming they caught a massive issue right away rather than assume that maybe they sent this out before really testing it. The tests, even when they’ve gone poorly, usually last for a few hours or days, not a few minutes. Something broke straight away and they rolled back the update.
I’m not a hardcore competitive eSports player on this game. I also don’t mind the idea of a Skill Based Matchmaking system entering Dead by Daylight.
I rotate through a lot of killers because I like the variety. I’ll play a few matches of Nemesis, then shift over to a game or two of Trapper, then decide I really want to get my snoot booped and play Pig for hours, broken up with an occasional Huntress game for the daily challenge or Plague game to stop myself from ranking down too far. The kind of survivors I can have a fun match going against as Plague are the kind of survivors who will annihilate me as Pig. Having a more balanced pool of opponents sounds great to me.
My hesitation comes from how they define skill. I’ve already written about my disappointment in the Trickster rework, which was justified in a developer blog post where they explained,
Reviewing the data, The Trickster tends to fall on the lower end of the roster (even among the top few percent of Trickster players), so we feel comfortable making some improvements to him to bring him up a few spots.
I know that I was consistently pipping up in purple and red ranks as Trickster before the rework. My games weren’t the fastest (they never are), but I would typically snowball with two gens left and be chasing the final survivor as they frantically searched for the hatch. I’m not every player, obviously, and my experience may have been outside the average data. The only people who know what data was bad enough to justify what they did to Trickster work for Behaviour.
Behaviour will occasionally share stats on how well killers vs survivors perform on a map, or which killers are played the most, but we never get a deeper analysis of what they consider success or failure. A few years ago, they broke down kill rates and what they thought was good (I think they defined success as 3 kills, but we’re talking a Twitch stream from 2017 or 2018), but they surely can’t dismiss matches where all four survivors get hooked twice before escaping.
Actually, I know they do, since getting eight out of 12 potential hooks is usually a safety pip if you’re lucky. I’ve deranked from getting nine out of 12 hooks before, which means one survivor dead and three survivors one hook away from dying before the game ends. Meanwhile, on the end game screen, I scored 5000+ more points than the highest ranked survivor and get punished for it.
The issue in adding a Skill Based Matchmaking system to Dead by Daylight is trust. We’re not being told how the skill is determined on either side of the game. If it really is kill count, higher ranked survivors are going to face a whole lot of Ruin/Undying/Tinkerer Spirits and nothing else based on their skill level. That will hurt the game. Any system put in place that discourages people from playing the full range of 24 killers in the game is going to be detrimental to the game. Behaviour doesn’t (and shouldn’t) release every metric they’re using to set Skill Based Matchmaking, but they should come forward and say what elements of killer and survivor gameplay are going to determine your ranking.
When Skill Based Matchmaking is added to the game, the ranking system is going to change. Behaviour is going to reset everyone to rank 20 each month and you’ll earn rewards based on how far you climb in the rankings. Your skill rating will determine your matches, so your rank will only be visible to you. Rank will be a reward for playing often and well and have no impact on who you play with.
