Developer Behaviour interactive have announced major changes to the way matchmaking works in Dead By Daylight. These changes have now gone live across PC and console versions of the game.
This update for the popular asymmetrical horror game will introduce improvements to how groups of players are matched together, pairing those of a similar skill level.
The matchmaking update was previously being tested on the Xbox One version of Dead By Daylight though it has now been rolled out to other available platforms including PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.
You can read the full FAQ below, but here’s a quick breakdown. In short, Dead By Daylight is replacing the current Rank system for Ratings. Behaviour Interactive have admitted that Ranks were more indicative of how often users play instead of representing their actual skill level. Ratings will be more dynamic and, according to the developer, this system has allowed them to produce more balanced match-ups during their extensive tests.
We have been running smaller tests of the system on select Xbox One regions for the past few weeks, and the results have been encouraging. The rollout on all Xbox One regions is the next step in testing the system on a wider audience. If all goes well, we are planning on rolling out this feature for all platforms in a couple of weeks.
The next phase that you will notice goes live with the upcoming mid-chapter update: We are no longer allowing Killers to switch their character while searching for a match, or once in a lobby (excluding Custom Matches). This will allow the new Matchmaking System to track player skill with each killer individually and match them against more appropriately skilled opponents based on their killer selection.
To put it simply: If you are great with The Oni but you struggle with The Nurse, you will now be playing against stronger survivors when you play The Oni than you do with The Nurse.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
The most obvious thing you will see when the new system is active is that there will be a greater variation of Ranks in a single match. Rank 1s playing Rank 20s? It’s possible, don’t panic when you see this, as Ranks are not a true indicator of a player’s skill and are no longer used for matchmaking.
Additionally, this system comes with a revamped algorithm for matchmaking as a whole. This should improve wait times for finding matches, and we will continue to tweak this part of the system to improve them further over the coming months.
WHY REPLACE RANKS?
Ranks are not a great way of figuring out how good a player is at the game, because it primarily focuses on “How often you play” and not on “How skilled you are when you play”. Based on our matchmaking studies, there are a great deal of “low” ranked players (15-20) who can easily play just as well as “high” ranked players (1-5), but they simply don’t play enough games in a month to increase their rank before they reset on the 13th. And as an inverse, there are Rank 1 -5 players who perform at levels more typical of lower ranks but they play so many games that their rank is higher than expected. This results in unpredictable games: All five players may have the exact same rank but wildly different skill levels in practice, making matches unbalanced.
HOW ARE RATINGS BETTER?
The new Rating system is focused on measuring a player’s skill and predicting how they will perform against a given opponent. This way we can build matches that are more objectively fair for everyone in the game. We have analyzed over 3 million games (at last count) during our tests, and the matchmaking system is proving to be extremely accurate at predicting the outcomes of matches.
By using this new system, we will be able to place players into more balanced matches more often. When a match is unbalanced, the system will know exactly how unbalanced it is and adjust the player Ratings accordingly.
WHY ARE THERE STILL RANKS?
Matchmaking has been and continues to be one of the hottest topics we hear about, and we have been listening! To get this implemented as quickly as possible, we have decided to roll it out independent of a rework of the Rank system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have plans for Ranks, however! We are exploring different ideas like turning them into a monthly activity tracker and reward system, when we are ready, we’ll communicate more about that
In other Dead By Daylight news, the game’s future cross-play and cross-progression updates were detailed by Behaviour Interactive. Earlier this year Dead By Daylight also had a crossover event with Konami horror classic, Silent Hill, featuring a new survivor (Cheryl Mason), a new killer (Pyramid Head) and the Midwich Elementary School map as DLC.
Source: Dead By Daylight forums
