What if de-rank wasn’t based on mission failure, but knock downs in a mission - 3 knockdowns in one mission equals a de-rank.
This would account for the odd silent Bursters, cluster of Bursters or silent Trapper net followed up by the coincidental flamer/bomber less than a second later type situations.
It is unfair to the people who have to clutch for them to potentially get hit with a de-rank, mission failure should not be the metric that causes a de-rank.
To account for players who quit immediately after getting knocked down: 3 quits = 1 de-rank. The trigger for de-rank should be quitting after knockdown or in downed state.
(Because I know someone will bring up “derank on death means more players will just Alt-F4”)
One or two, sure - situations happen. But more than three? A patttern starts to show, perhaps the difficulty the player is on is too high for them.
Then, take that 3 strikes principle and apply it to the rest of Darktide difficulties, with NO inactive time based rank decay.
So TL;DR:
3 downs in a mission (resets each mission) = 1 derank.
3 quits after a down = 1 derank (doesn’t reset each mission)
Last man standing does not count as a down, so if player got knocked down earlier to bursters, trapper nets etc the last, mission ending knockdown wouldn’t count.
NO rank decay
Then, to progress in rank it could be 1 mission with no knockdowns = 1 rank progression.
This streamlines climbing ranks Uprising through Auric for returning veteran players as currently climbing ranks is dependent on mission success - and as we all know, the factors of mission success can largely be out of a single player’s control (DCing players, exponential increase in difficulty with each player down).
If implemented like this, current players wouldn’t need to start climbing ranks over again, they would just continue as is, following the new de-rank system.
I agree on removing de-ranking, but about the difficulty I’d say there should be a way to get players through the difficulties more linearly. Maybe if there’s a way to code this, the game could account for really good personal performance in Havoc 20 - 30 and then unlock access easier to higher ones, mostly so people whose skill is way beyond lower Havocs can just jump into the more fun ones for them.
We have many people pointing out there’s an increase in players on Auric and Damnation that are constantly making blunders they should not be making, in other words they’re at a difficulty that perhaps they’re not ready for and that’s unfair to the players who then have to carry them throughout the mission.
Your idea isn’t bad at all, just that maybe no down at all to progress would incentivise playing too safe or selfishly in some cases, and sometimes downs could be due to say even someone pushing a burster into you.
this. get rid of deranking. it’s these hamster wheel mechanics fatshark apparently can’t let go of. supposed to motivate players, but actually kills motivation. and on top of having to go through the hoops of party finder, just no.
Well this is surprising. From reading highly upvoted posts/topics on this forum I concluded that most players were tired of inexperienced players jumping straight into Havoc and Auric expecting experienced players to carry them. Going off of the poll on this topic, I guess that’s not the case.
Suppose there’s no point to learning Darktide fundamentals with Krypto the superdog and big stick infinite bleedgryn+stagger.exe to save players from trouble.
If Fatshark was willing to actually do balancing people would get vaporized like they should be when entering difficulties they’re not ready for. Maelstrom would then become a gatekeeping tool to ensure people can handle it.
Your idea has merit, I am just thinking about the potential ways it could unfairly de-rank someone, like the examples I said. But at the core your idea would move it a bit more towards personal skill too so that’s good, maybe if the game would be somehow more aware of the context of said downs.
I said it when the progression rework details were announced: remove derank and make that the new system, tweaked for Havoc of course.
Fewer, if more than 1, wins to advance in assignment lvl. No derank on a loss, just no advance (personal progression loss, if that is implemented).
And they have shown us they have the coded mechanic to do it, rather than some nebulous new system that might be a coding challenge.
I’d personally be ok with 3 wins to advance a same-rank assignment (if they actually fixed all the bugs/server instability, so likely never and just stick with 1). Fewer on a higher assignment. No chance at progression loss on lower as it is now.
I admit having more than 1/1 win to advance ratio would make the grind longer, but I’m personally fine with that. I doubt that’s popular though. But it would also make the concept of a “season” they seem to want to push more prevalent, I think.
Solves nearly all the problems most explicitly associated with the trickle-down effect derank has on the whole game mode (toxicity/blame, build policing, party finder promposals, immediate disbands on a loss, etc).
Personal performance combats some of the toxic aspects, but is still very punishing for the bugs/server problems and just a bad RNG roll. I think it might end up feeling worse than the group punishment we currently have, but that’s speculation.
But what would stop new players from hopping into Auric or Maelstrom? The current progression system is setup to not filter out inexperienced players. As it currently is, players can stumble and get carried their way through all difficulties up to Auric, as tedious as that may be.
I’m optimistic there’s a means to track player knockdowns, it may just need some dev configuration.
Yes, good point bugs are a real issue and can negatively skew a players performance unfairly. That’s why I suggested the de-rank only occur after three knockdowns, with last man standing receiving a free pass. I do see how that could be exploited by a Shroud Zealot or Infiltate Vet who are able to effectively opt out of combat, so perhaps they would need to be tracked differently.
Why is the derank occuring? Are you often the last player standing?
It would be nice if we could block players at the end of a match for a short period of time, such as a week or 2. If players do this, the people getting hard carried would quickly run out of other players who can carry them and start to only match with people with less skill and end up needing to drop the difficulty.
I already sort of do this by cleaning out my block list periodically and adding players who I come across who are well outside their depth. It’s not perfect but it does help me not get matched with the same bad player multiple times a day.
That’s one way to do it I suppose, would be better if Fatshark just de-ranked players that constantly go down. A few times can be attributed to the plethora of engine stability issues and/or bugs, but at a certain point it’s just time to lower the difficulty.
Unfortunately there are just some people who require a nudge to tell them it’s time and it’s unfair to players who do the correct things - stay in coherency, loot chests, ping high priority enemies, block, dodge, push bursters/hounds to have players who spend 50% of the mission needing to be rescued, because the Specialist spam is “designed” for 4 players, with each player down the game becomes exponentially more difficult.
I suppose another way is just to spend time at a difficulty that a player can clutch until they can reliably solo play the multiplayer team focused game.
My speculation that personal performance would end up feeling worse mainly comes from a scenario I envision where 1 or more person goes down 3(+) times but you still complete the mission. Probably not happening a lot in mid-high havoc, but still came to mind.
Any provision for such a thing in your system? Could be a non-issue even if it happened.
I get what you’re going for, but I would be worried that it’s not always possible to programmatically decide who was the issue. Going down because someone else shoots the pox burster you’re trying to push… Or getting knocked off a ledge because of a barrel. It would really suck if you are playing at your level and be deranked because the really bad players just happened to make you worse.
Yeah, that’s a good point too. Perhaps instead of resetting on a new mission, the tracker for knockdowns could continue to gather data for an average knockdown score.
At a certain threshold, the de-rank occurs. Knockdowns could be weighted differently, first knockdown carrying the highest weight and last man standing carrying no weight to the score at all.
@Meatshield01, would this ^^ address those variables?
Of course, Infiltrate and Shroud could carry more weight towards the score, so objectively bad players using the ability to turn off combat in order to circumvent the last man standing exemption would be less able to do so.
That way, this system could function in Havoc where player knockdowns carry exponentially stronger repercussions, often leading to unrecoverable conditions even for players that are making all the right decisions. Good players carrying their own weight would be de-ranked the slowest.
It’s not a perfect system, but the way I see it there’s a need for de-rank because a non-negligable amount of players exist who will blame defeat on outside circumstances no matter what. They refuse to lower the difficulty but will go for the highest difficulty available, and it’s better than lumping all the players in a team together to penalize them all with a de-rank.
That contributes heavily to creating an inconsistent and often negative experience in higher difficulties for other players who may have limited time available to play Darktide.
