Ranks stand in the way of DBD's greatness
This is not truely a competitive game where a MMR system is meaningful.
Ranking does nothing positive for the community, it only makes matches much harder to get into.
There is no incentive to ranking up, it is only detrimental to my experience.
This rank reset I moved down by one rank.
While my killer queues are instant, survivor is consistently above 2 minutes (often more) which destroys my momentum wether I am gaming or trying to stream my matches.
A bigger underlying issue is that people get tired of waiting, decide to either play something else or depip by AFKing or leaving games which further drives the quality of games down while vastly improving queue times.
Punishing players for leaving matches is not a constructive way to fix this issue, a honor system could help if it, along with holding ranks, was properly incentivised.
Ranks hurt player retention a lot more than you would believe, I am a believer in this game's greatness, I constantly invite new players to join us, it is a very difficult sale when they join mid season and are stuck in rank 20's and wait upwards of 10 minutes just to get a game everytime and maybe, climb out of sub 15 hell. (I've heard this a lot about killer queues sub 15, I have not experienced this firsthand)
Because ranks are so detrimental, and that many, many people decide to tank them, they have no meaning other than filtering you into a portion of the community that is often both less enjoyable to play in and where it is much harder to find games.
I beg that you consider the following:
If you insist on keeping ranks:
Incentivize HOLDING a rank rather than reaching them by adding a permanent bloodpoint multiplier & a small seasonal token
- 1.2x BP for greens, 1.4x BP for purples, 1.6x BP for red ranks applied at the score tally screen, you get the idea.
- Seasonal rewards every month, nothing crazy, just a small token that you made it somewhere like 200 auric for reds, 150 for purples, 100 for greens.
If you decide to entirely eliminate ranks:
Push forward unranked mode with the following recommendations:
- Support it by a robust hidden lifetime ELO system that does not ever reset so it cannot be driven down significantly by a small sample of say, 30-40 thrown games.
- Let your hidden ELO system influence matchmaking to a certain extent but keep it a soft filter so that as time passes, it becomes much more permissive to variation.
Under no circumstance should a player have to hold a queue for more than 30 seconds when there are 25,000 concurrent players, this should be a driving factor in your design.
I welcome your comments and ideas.
Best regards.
ntx#7028
Comments
Given that ranking basically only exists for matchmaking purposes, I wouldn't mind most of these ideas being implemented. I feel like it would help a lot with promoting a more healthy attitude towards ranks if they were either hidden or a bit more set in stone. In my opinion it should be both harder to rank up and harder to derank than it currently is, in order for rank to be a more accurate reflection of player skill.
Of course, I'm pretty sure that the number of current players is a global stat, not a regional one, which means it's not a reliable indicator of how fast queue times should be. So there are probably a lot of internal complications when it comes to changing the rank system. But hiding ranks altogether or introducing seasonal rewards would go a long way in terms of improving the general community attitude towards ranking, if not the system itself.
I think giving out auric cells as rewards would be a bad idea from a financial standpoint, though. I would prefer something like a unique charm, or a bloodpoint boost as you suggested, or maybe a reward of shards rather than cells.