The Ruin change makes sense if you assume they're planning to get rid of rank entirely.
TL,DR: I think BHVR may be planning to reboot the game's playerbase entirely by deleting ranked matchmaking and possibly driving off high rank players on purpose, in a bid to get more long term success with newer upcoming players. The death of Ruin is step 1 in this process.
So we've all seen BHVR's defense and rationale for the new Ruin by now. we've all noticed they keep using the example of new survivors over and over and over, and how they justify it based on that.
And we all notice how they completely ignore how this will completely destroy gameplay for killers and ultimately survivors too over rank 10, maybe 12 depending on which killer you play. why do this?
but notice something: the leaked patch notes a couple days ago revealed they were going to remove the ability to see player ranks even after the match is over. Now, that change hasn't made it into the PTB, but it was a legit leak, and we know this because all the other leaked patchnotes made it word for word, line for line.
Why remove the ability to see ranks at the end? could it be to cover up their failure to make matchmaking work? maybe. But it could also be because doing so would be step 1 of removing ranked matchmaking altogether.
See, if there was no way to see ranks, there would be no way to know when the matchmaking got even worse. and it's well known that there's already a serious disparity in the matchmaking at high ranks, with the shortage of killers at those ranks forcing purple and green rank killers to go up against red rank survivors a huge majority of the time. and all this is the result of seriously broken game mechanics.
So how to fix it? either redesign the game's mechanics, killers, and level designs from the ground up.... or remove ranked matchmaking altogether. there would still be disparity, but now it gets spread around so much that players might tolerate it.
it's just that one thing you'd have to do is make sure that the poor bastards getting matched against the opposite skill level dont feel too outrageously oppressed, or at least dont make it really obvious to them that their chances were hopeless. and one of the ways you'd want to do that, is get rid of perks that make it really obvious, like Ruin. because currently, Ruin is obvious within only a few seconds of getting on a generator. But the new Ruin? unnoticeable unless you let go of the generator and walk away, and often not even noticeable then, a point made by one of the devs here.
Now sure, it's useless against a survivor with experience. but if ranked matchmaking is ultimately deleted, then killers may be unlikely to meet such survivors even when the killer is high rank himself.
If that happens, the high rank killers may just not care about the game's basics being biased against them anymore, because they'll only rarely find survivors who understand the basics anyway.
Also, if many high ranking killers decide to leave the game within the next couple months, that will solve the problem of baby survivors fighting Rank 1 killers as well. And BHVR wouldn't be likely to be concerned about us leaving, since killers are already less than 1/5 of the players, and high rank killers are an even smaller percentage of them. So they aren't really a huge source of microtransaction revenue compared to noob survivors brought in by for example the Stranger Things DLC. And whatever they have planned to bring in more next.
Comments