Dead By Daylight Adopting Overwatch-like Queue Incentives
Can both speed and accuracy be influenced by better managing the role populations?
Matchmaking queue times have often been a point of contention for both gamers and developers. As heavier peak traffic floods a particular role in Overwatch, or dwindles for high MMR Apex Legends matches on oceanic servers, the balance between expedient queues and accurate lobbies begins to sheer incredibly thin. So, it’s no surprise that the asymmetric multiplayer genre also gets slammed with this exact issue during particular periods in the day. And finally, Behaviour Interactive is doing something to address this concern for Dead By Daylight.
On March 4th, popular Twitter account DBDLeaks purported in a tweet that Dead By Daylight is implementing a system that will reward an unspecific amount of Bloodpoints, an in-game currency for ability unlocks and upgrades, for playing a role that is under-served at any given point in time. The idea here is to balance the scales between the survivor and killer populations. More specifically, the early evenings often see a substantially longer queue for individuals looking to party up with their fellow survivors. Inversely, Killer queue can often be nearly immediate at this point in time, signaling that there simply aren’t enough players queuing for the killer role to satisfy the demands of waiting survivors. In this specific scenario, influencing the community to swap to the killer role could see matchmaking speed up by a significant amount. However, that isn’t all that could improve with the implementation of a queue reward system.
One pain point that was recently addressed by the developers at Behaviour Interactive, was the notion that the longer that a player sits in the queue, the more likely that their matches are to be inaccurate in terms of skill. Speculatively, when a survivor or survivors queue, the game is searching for individuals around their skill level. As time goes on though, the matchmaking framework becomes aware of how long matchmaking is taking, and begins to expand what it deems the “acceptable criteria” for skill level to be in an attempt to expedite the process. This can lead to matches where lower skilled killer players are being matched against survivors with much more experience and acumen — or visa versa. Many players argue that Dead by Daylight’s aftermarket MMR system created this particular queue-time problem for the game, but looking back to the old Rank-Based medal system had nearly identical holes; evening queue length would cause matchmaking to lower the acceptable floor for matchmaking opponents, resulting in “Red Rank 2” players matching against “Purple Rank 8” killers.
Whether or not Bloodpoints will sway the community enough to balance out role population still remains to be seen. Given the difficulty and anxiety of learning the killer role, there still exist a few barriers that players would have to jump to feel compelled to leave their more comfortable and familiar survivor role. But I think this is a step in the right direction. As matchmaking becomes tighter and more frequently “accurate,” I believe that balancing can be more effectively looked at for all aspects of Dead By Daylight.
