Dead by Daylight devs are addressing a common concern from around the player base: matchmaking wait times and larger subsequent rank differences between matched players. Behaviour Interactive announced a big update to Dead by Daylight's matchmaking system via the community forums, one that should make everything fairer for players.
As Behaviour Interactive reported in its forum post, wait times for matches have actually exceeded the developers' targeted limits. Combining that with unfair matches, the developer acknowledged there was a problem, saying the troubles are in part because Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical game; opposing sides have two different objectives in every match, instead of each side trying to accomplish the same feat.
To improve matchmaking fairness without further extending wait times or getting pings, Behaviour Interactive is introducing two updates to the asymmetrical horror game: firstly, a new system will be implemented to "better reflect a player’s skill level." Going forward, the game's matchmaking system will use a hidden skill rating variable; naturally, the rating increases when players do well in matches and decreases when players do poorly. The hidden skill rating will also help the system actually predict the outcome of a match based on each opponent's ratings. That way, if one player is matched to someone with a higher skill rating than them and ends up losing the match, their own skill rating won't decrease as much as it would have if they'd been evenly matched.
The second update is a change to the game's matchmaking system, switching over to “batch matchmaking”. Basically, the current system takes a player and begins searching for another of their same skill--but if it can't find one, it just gradually expands its search parameters until an opponent can be found, which can make for an uneven match. That's a problem for the majority of players (not to mention the strange branch of e-sports that has sprung from the game's community). The new batch matchmaking system will instead group large groups of players together before comparing their skill levels and assigning matches between the killers and survivors simultaneously throughout the entire group.
With those changes, hopefully, Dead by Daylight's matchmaking will show significant improvement; Behaviour Interactive's goal is to roll out its changes gradually over time. As of the game's mid-chapter Reckoning update, the developer has begun tracking still levels--though it's still just a test, for now, to be used on live servers only once the change proves to be effective.
Dead by Daylight is available to play now on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and mobile devices.
Source: Dead by Daylight Forums