I thought I was good at Deadlock until its unexpected ranked distribution proved that I'm worse than mid
A few weeks ago, Valve announced a new ranked mode for Deadlock, which grouped players into 11 ranks that each had six levels. To have a rank, players must complete seven games every week by the cut-off of Tuesday—so I played hours and hours of matches to achieve and then claw onto my rank, only to find out that I didn't do as well as I thought I had.
The first rank I got in Deadlock was Ritualist 3, which, for context, is just below the middle rank of Emissary. The ranks progress like so: Initiate, Seeker, Alchemist, Arcanist, Ritualist, Emissary, and Archon, with the top four ranks, Oracle, Phantom, Ascendant, and Eternus, being considered hyper-competitive.
Ritualist is nothing special, but I didn't think it was too bad for someone who's never played a Moba before. I was pretty happy to be sat at what I thought was mid-skill level and content to hang there for the time being. But according to this week's ranked distribution, I'm not as good as I thought I was.
Most competitive games will show a bell curve when it comes to their rank distributions, and while that's still true of Deadlock, it does seem to be higher than usual. Most of the time, competitive games are slightly bottom-heavy, with the average player finding themselves at a much lower rank.
In Overwatch 2, for example, it is generally thought that the average rank is Gold, which has the most players, and that while Platinum also has a lot of players, these people seem to be above the 50th percentile point. As the ranks go Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster, Champion (which is a new rank), and then Top 500, getting into the higher ranks is really rare.
With this in mind, I thought that Ritualist was exactly where I should be at the start of ranked because it sat around mid, but I was wrong. There are only around 18,724 players currently ranked below me, while there are a whopping 55,638 players ranked above me—imagine finding out that you're worse than mid on a Wednesday morning, appalling.
Archon has the highest population, with 17,386 players, but below this, Emissary has 11,704, Ritualist has 11,250. Above Archon, Oracle has 10,884, and Phantom has 11,987. So you can find out if you're worse or better than average more or less by looking at your rank in relevance to Archon. Here are all the ranks with player counts if you're curious:
- Initiate: 8,897 players
- Seeker: 3,974 players
- Alchemist: 5,853 players
- Arcanist: 5,913 players
- Ritualist: 11,250 players
- Emissary: 11,704 players
- Archon: 17,386 players
- Oracle: 10,884 players
- Phantom: 11,987 players
- Ascendant: 3,717 players
- Eternus: 414 players
The bell curve may be slightly higher in Deadlock than in other competitive games, but that's not actually that unexpected when you consider this is only week three of ranked play being available. The developers previously mentioned that ranked play will be pretty fluid as they get a hold of matchmaking. " As such, medals will only be updated once per week to allow for analysis of a wide set of match data together at once for a more accurate review of your skill," developer Yoshi says.
However, the curve could be coming down a little as there are a few more people below Archon than last week. "A lot of people have been demoted, as shown by a sharp increase in number of players below Archon," one player points out. "[On the other hand] Phantom has shown a huge increase in players. I suspect there are still people who only play the minimum number of games to 'preserve' their ranks."
The slightly weird distribution also means that behind Eternus, the rarest rank in Deadlock is actually Seeker 1, as pointed out by gammaton32 in a Reddit post. Hopefully, the ranks will settle down to something more stable and expected as time goes on. But honestly, I kind of like the idea of the second-rarest rank in the game being one of the worst—I'd definitely tune in to watch an Ascendant to Seeker 1 challenge stream.