Rank hard stuck at Initiate 1?

[mtlancenese]

I understand how ranking systems work, I understand even me being in Initiate. I don't really care about the ranking but I have not even moved up to Initiate 2 for one game and then immediately went down. My total win rate is 45% from 60 hours of gametime. I played yesterday and won 4 out of 5 games and I didn't even bump up to Initiate 2? One of those games I carried with 30 kills and 70k souls. Even when my team loses, I am one of the top of the total souls collected. I'm not even this low of a rank in LoL and I barely play that game.

When I play in higher lobbies with friends, I still play well, positive K/D/high farm. I understand weighting wins/losses heavily but surely you can rank up without having to hyper carry 5 games in a row with 5 complete strangers.

 

[Leto]

Ranking seems more than a bit buggy at the moment, and I don't think fixing it is a priority for the dev team.

I take long breaks from the game, so my rank has reset a few times since the system was introduced. In previous instances I was always somewhere between high-alchemist to mid-arcanist. I haven't played since about February but after coming back a couple weeks ago, my rank has been permanently initiate 1 with absolutely zero change which strikes me as odd.

Maybe I'm just absolute dogwater, but it seems improbable given I've been playing other shooters and improving my aim and situational awareness in the time I was away from DL. I personally feel like I've been playing better than before, and the match stats reflect this, but my rank does not.

 

[Leto]

To add to this, I wanted to check out the match rank distribution. Not sure if we're allowed to link to any 3rd party tools so I'll just include screenshots of the charts.

Here's the lifetime rank distribution of matches:


And the last month:


Now this *could* be entirely due to new players, but it still seems kind of off? Unless there's thousands of people playing one match and never playing another, or only ever (and correctly) placing in initiate 1 and staying there, the second chart doesn't make sense to me.

But I guess time will tell ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[nulltype]

That graph implies something is pretty broken. It sounds like @mtlancenese's win rate is fine though. @Leto do you have a win rate greater than about 75%? If not, I would guess that the displayed rank could be broken, but the actual underlying matchmaking rank could be correct (if the matchmaking rank was incorrect, it should reflect in the win rate).

 

[Leto]

Since I started playing again two weeks ago I have a 53% win rate, which is not too outlandish.

You're right that it may be my displayed rank that is incorrect, but that begs the question of what ELO metric is actually being used for matchmaking at the moment. I know a lot of this is obfuscated but if ranks were accurately being kept track of, why would it just be displayed incorrectly? And match ranks are based on player ranks, so you can't really have one be wrong and the other correct.

Could very well be that the current internal metric for matchmaking has a mismatch with the public ranking system, which would explain the discrepancy in the chart as well. I.e. maybe people are being skill matched correctly but a good amount of players AND games are being mislabeled "initiate 1" on the frontend.

 

[ExistingExpert]

It is not just about Initiate 1, every mmr bracket is insanely hard to climb up from. This is my win-loss trend for the past 200 matches I have played (Screenshot is my profile from statlocker).

This means that I have a 63% win rate over my last 200 matches. How much have I climbed from this? From Arcanist 2 at the beginning to Ritualist 3 now. And I am not the only one. It takes a lot of wins to climb up from one division to the next. If you say you need 4 wins to climb one subdivision and you are in initiate 1 and then you quarter that number to account for any winstreak mmr the game may or may not give you, that is still a 66 WINSTREAK that you need to get to climb to the highest ranks. Deadlock has the most amount of ranks of any similar game paired with a very slow rank mobility system. This brings us to:

Issue 1: So many good players are stuck in the lower ranks that the best Seekers-Alchemists-Arcanists-Ritualists are consistently playing as well as Emissaries-Archons-Oracles-Phantoms which makes it impossibly hard for actual Arcanists or Ritualists to climb higher ranks.
Issue 2: When the game matchmakes these "good" low elo players in the same team, it is a huge stomp. How many times have you been stomped by a team that is clearly much more skilled than you, but then you check the match screen and see that both teams are the same "rank"? These games are the worst, it is fun for neither the winning team and it is definetly not fun for the losing team. These are the games that make deadlock lose its playerbase.
Issue 3: When the game matchmakes these "good" low elo players against each other, the match is balanced and one of them is bound to lose, but then all this does is push the loser even farther than his actual rank, because the game does not take performance into account for its mmr calculations, it only cares about win/loss (and even that barely affects things). This just exacerbates the situation.
Issue 4: MMR decay is insanely overtuned. If you leave the game for a while then come back, the mmr system will place you down in the lowest depths of the ladder. You will stomp every game you come across (unless you face others like you) and it will take ages for you to climb back up.
Issue 5: 4 stacks, 5 stacks, 6 stacks just turn off the matchmaker and these teams get paired with literally anyone the game can throw at them. This means that the people playing in huge parties usually gain a massive advantage (no further words needed), along with perfect hero selection (one tricking is trivial).

TL;DR: Game has too many ranks but very low mmr mobility paired with very high mmr time decay, this makes good players stuck in lower ranks and they make situation worse for everyone including themselves. Couple that with huge party stacks and que the matchmaking complaints.

 

[lolihero14]

Yes, it's time to realize that the ranking system here is just for show. Since the game is still in a closed alpha test, it does not need to enter a ranking system yet, as everything will still be turned over several times. Just don't worry about the rank, but just play and have fun playing the game

 

[ExistingExpert]

Yes, it's time to realize that the ranking system here is just for show. Since the game is still in a closed alpha test, it does not need to enter a ranking system yet, as everything will still be turned over several times. Just don't worry about the rank, but just play and have fun playing the game

The issue is that the ranking system is NOT just for show. It is the system most influential in determining the outcome of every single game you play. The part that is "for show" is just the ranks it displays on your profile (which I believe to be wildly inaccurate for most people). Behind the scenes the matchmaker has placed so many good players in the lower ranks due to mmr decay and low rank mobility that the skill variation in lower elo games is unfathomable, even if the matchmaker promises that it is even. This makes games boring for the seasoned players and absolute hell for newcomers.