Deadlock just shuffled everyone into new ranked leagues overnight, but players suspect matchmaking won't feel any different: 'If you were miserable before, you'll still be miserable now'

I've never played an invite-only beta test with such a fully-formed ranking system as Deadlock's, but I guess when everyone gets unlimited plus-ones, the audience is big enough to warrant it. Besides, the game's beta status didn't stop me lamenting my place in Arcanist IV—below average, assuming ranks fall into normal distribution—but a patch dropped yesterday that majorly shook up everyone's ranked placements, leaving me three full leagues ahead of where I was and terrified for my next solo queue.

To my surprise, though, the update wasn't to the matchmaker, but to the ranked badge system. As developer Yoshi put it on the Deadlock Discord: "Previously, badges were tied to fixed skill ranges on the backend, rather than percentiles. As new players joined and as the distribution shifted over time, it caused badges to clump up in negative ways. You can head over to your profile now to see your rebalanced badge."

Players did exactly that, of course, and the Deadlock subreddit is ablaze with players who had similar leaps to my own. Reddit user YunusES said, "Bro I got sent to fucking Phantom 4 from Emissary 4, I'm scared to even search for a game." Sharing a similar anxiety, user Papalmpy said, "I was Archon 1 and got shot up to Ascendant 1. Why does it feel like I'm about to get my ass destroyed?"

As plenty of people on social media are pointing out in response, though, the badge changes shouldn't signal a matchmaking change. Whatever your new rank is, it's just a different—ideally more accurate—digestion of the same match history data that determines your MMR. As Redditor axepeartree put it: "If you were miserable before, you'll still be miserable now."

Given that, when parsing match data from before this patch, Deadlock stat analysis website Statlocker showed a disproportionately huge number of players stuck in the very lowest rank, it seems like this update was a long time coming. Whether you went from Initiate to Eternus or Initiate 1 to Initiate 2, your bragging rights should be doled out more accurately now—ideal, given that Deadlock doesn't have an unranked queue.