Intentional De-Ranking - What is YOUR Opinion?

Here's my take on it, and I truly believe this is caused by an entirely separate and far more critical issue with Dead by Daylight.

1. Queue times are god awful (though this is not universal for everyone; region/time of day/patch pending).
2. Survivors claim to want more killer variety and play styles to encounter.

I can only answer the second reason I've given, and it's a direct consequence of the game's awful balance. Why do you think the same killers are encountered, using the same perks/play styles at high ranks? Well, most killers are underwhelming outside of the two most popular (nurse or billy), and most players playing at rank one are almost forced into optimal play to get any level of enjoyment out of a game that is so clearly unbalanced. Those are my two cents.

@PhantomMask20763 said:
Deranking is dumb in general. I dont belive in good players being matched with new/ casual players 

The current ranking system does the same.

BadMrFrosty said:

Here's my take on it, and I truly believe this is caused by an entirely separate and far more critical issue with Dead by Daylight.

1. Queue times are god awful (though this is not universal for everyone; region/time of day/patch pending).
2. Survivors claim to want more killer variety and play styles to encounter.

I can only answer the second reason I've given, and it's a direct consequence of the game's awful balance. Why do you think the same killers are encountered, using the same perks/play styles at high ranks? Well, most killers are underwhelming outside of the two most popular (nurse or billy), and most players playing at rank one are almost forced into optimal play to get any level of enjoyment out of a game that is so clearly unbalanced. Those are my two cents.

Mc_Harty said:

My friends barely play this game, so on the rare occasion that they do, we SWF and play against brown/yellow rank killers. I honestly don't see that big of difference compare to playing against red rank ones. Same on the killer side.

I mentioned que times are a problem (or at least a problem in my region), so I completely understand why killer and survivor derank. I don't agree with it, but I understand their frustrations.

Unless you are bad and somehow ranked up, and/or seriously know how to pull your punches, it's pretty scummy, IMO.
I get it if you have chill, and show it happily, but if you're doing it to smash, and grab, or get your rocks off on lower ranks, no.

At least killer methods are somewhat beneficial to survivors, but the end result is likely not fun.

Survivor methods generally screw people over. when they use their methods. DCing leaving the rest holding the bag, and such.
Plus they can indirectly depip via SWF. Usually this is just to screw over killers, and smash and grab.
I mean y'all could maybe farm, or something instead of being an ass to killers. Try and be fun, maybe?
There's a reason SWF gets so much hate.

So real talk time. I've de-ranked before. Like a lot. I went so far as to make it into an art form. I came up with all kinds of games and ways to make the experience more amusing. Here is a link to a thread discussing this very thing on the Steam forums:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/381210/discussions/0/1698294337786497895/

and a video example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gjBGvhG_vI

So this was all back on the old victory cube. At rank 1 back then, it got very old very fast playing against the same handful of survivors. It was pretty much loop, loop, loop all day long. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I couldn't cope. I could still maintain rank 1 easily. From my experience, if you actually wanted to play competitively as a killer, you really did have to play like a jerk. I felt the need to tunnel players to death, especially the first one caught. Otherwise gens got done too fast and survivors were too good at dragging out the chase.

That isn't particularly fun for anyone imho. So it was a choice between play like a jerk to actually win, try to play the way I prefer and be endlessly frustrated, or de-rank to a rank that was actually fun to play at. I only de-ranked to 20 once and that was to knock out the killer adept trophies. Good luck getting those at rank 1. Most of the time, I tried to keep myself around rank 10 or so. At that rank survivors weren't total newbie scrubs, but they also weren't super annoying in chases either.

I was the killer that players actually should hope to run against when I was maintaining my rank at rank 10.
I never felt the need to camp or tunnel. I would regularly allow 2 survivors to escape. If they played even half way decent they wouldn't even realize that I went easy on them. There really wasn't any incentive to stay at rank 1. Still isn't. So if the only incentive to play is earn bloodpoints and have fun then it made more sense to do that at a rank where both were more easily achieved.

Like I said though, that was the old victory cube that actually forced survivors to get better in order to rank up. Being a rank 1 survivor actually meant something then. Honestly, the skill level of survivors at rank 1 these days is about on par with rank 10 in the old days. So I don't feel a need to de-rank anymore. It's nice because I have more fun and I don't need to let survivors escape.

@Condorloco_26 said:
I think that once you hit R1 at any role, you shouldn't be allowed to derank past R5, not even at reset, save for maybe not logging in months. You hit R6, you won't derank past R10, and so on. After that, I would suggest to open the matchmaking gates to include said five - by - five ranking brackets, so longer queues wouldn't be a thing to worry about.

I like this idea. I feel it'd directly take care of the queue time issues people have, and indirectly give people more variety as well as while the people that only play omegablink noed/ruin nurse with an ebony or depip squad SWF would still be there, but there'd simply be more lobbies going on that people in red ranks could be sent into.

Personally I've always hated deranking/smurfing. Doing it to actually be able to play the game if playing at weird times or in "dead" regions of the world I can at least kind of understand, but doing it to get easier games or even content creators doing it for "better content" is just scummy no matter how you look at it if you ask me. Perhaps the devs could just widen matchmaking range in certain times and regions or something? Obviously there won't be as many people playing at 2am on a weekday as 7pm on a weekend.

@Condorloco_26 said:
I think that once you hit R1 at any role, you shouldn't be allowed to derank past R5, not even at reset, save for maybe not logging in months. You hit R6, you won't derank past R10, and so on. After that, I would suggest to open the matchmaking gates to include said five - by - five ranking brackets, so longer queues wouldn't be a thing to worry about.

People will just depip before reaching the rank threshold to prevent that from happening. There needs to be an incentive for people to stay in their ranks so they don't depip to either a) get "better" lobbies with more variety or b) smurf inexperienced killers or survivors

Opening matchmaking up like you suggested would definitely help solve the problem though. I also think there should be bonus bloodpoints given to red ranks or rank 1's for being at that level as a way to incentivize people to stay at those ranks.

@Tsulan said:
Now that the matchmaking went back to normal, I'm totally against depiping. 

Maybe once we get dedicated servers we get different modes.

We need 3 types of game modes:

• Casual: less punishing for both sides. More hook stages, gens, camp save zones around the hook, more rewarding to hit&down survivors than to kill them, etc.
• Ranked: harder to pip than now. More ranks like R6, longer seasons, end of season rewards. 
• Hardcore: no UI, no scratch marks, no terror radius, no aura reading, no survivor status information for both sides, etc.

That would actually be great. The only issue I can see would be queue times, esp for solo.

lasombra1979 said:

@Tsulan said:
Now that the matchmaking went back to normal, I'm totally against depiping. 

Maybe once we get dedicated servers we get different modes.

We need 3 types of game modes:

• Casual: less punishing for both sides. More hook stages, gens, camp save zones around the hook, more rewarding to hit&down survivors than to kill them, etc.
• Ranked: harder to pip than now. More ranks like R6, longer seasons, end of season rewards. 
• Hardcore: no UI, no scratch marks, no terror radius, no aura reading, no survivor status information for both sides, etc.

That would actually be great. The only issue I can see would be queue times, esp for solo.

@artist said:
its fine considering rank doesnt really mean much at 1-10. for me I'll derank to avoid getting the same 3 killers because it just gets boring. also I seem to get into more 200 ping games late night at rank 1

hardly ever happenned, atleast on EU, usually you get a lot of different killers at rank 1.
Dont know about NA or ASIA.

@PiiFree said:

That's a great idea.

They could also create skill brackets based on how often you reach Rank 1 and then put players together that have similar Rank 1 experience.

Even in Rank 1 there is a huge skill gap between lower and higher skilled players. Players like me that reach Rank 1 literally every season get matched together with players that JUST managed to reach Rank 1 - obviously this creates an uneven playground and even as Killer I must admit that it's tiresome. I don't like stomping players with next to no effort and only on very rare occasions I finally get stomped by actually skilled survivors.

Yes I've made a couple of posts asking for a meaningful ranking system based on skills and stats, for example what's your % of success losing a killer in a chase, how many safe unhooks you've made, what's your kill %, your hooking% etc.

That could be the base to balance the game on: meaningful ranks grouped in brackets. I imagine low rank brackets being more simple and forgiving for new survivors, and adding secondary objectives and difficult skill checks for high ranks, as an example.

But that sounds as a huge rework, and I don't think they would commit the resources needed.

@Jesya said:

People will just depip before reaching the rank threshold to prevent that from happening. There needs to be an incentive for people to stay in their ranks so they don't depip to either a) get "better" lobbies with more variety or b) smurf inexperienced killers or survivors

Opening matchmaking up like you suggested would definitely help solve the problem though. I also think there should be bonus bloodpoints given to red ranks or rank 1's for being at that level as a way to incentivize people to stay at those ranks.

A ranking based reward system is needed, I agree. Be that BP, shards, certain cosmetics, I don't know. There's so much that could be done about it. There's also the Devotion issue. Right now it means absolutely nothing. Sigh.