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Recently, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot revealed he had grand ambitions for XDefiant. Like CoD, CS2, and the myriad other popular shooters in the market, he wants to see it become a serious esport in the future. Unfortunately, with the game’s recent release of its Ranked mode, it may have taken one step forward and two steps back in that regard, as some players are already labeling the competitive mode a “trainwreck.”
Some players have already begun lodging complaints on Reddit, with user James_E_Rustle listing a few issues they’ve seen throughout their initial playthroughs. According to their post, the biggest problem they (and a handful of other players) have consistently encountered is teammates leaving mid-match. Typically, quitters who leave their squadmates hanging are given a penalty, such as a matchmaking cooldown, or, if done enough times, even a temporary ban. XDefiant does neither of those things.
In fact, it doesn’t dole out punishments at all if you quit a match, giving you free rein to leave if your team is losing badly. Of course, the game will fill in the vacated spot with another player, but the damage has already been done at that point, and your team may have already lost several rounds in a row. And since this isn’t the only issue that the XDefiant Ranked mode currently has (matches also apparently start even if the lobby isn’t full), some are avoiding playing it for now.
Of course, like any new mode, a few minor hiccups are to be expected, especially since the dev team is already juggling fixing several different problems, including the oft-complained-about spider bots. But even though some of the usual snags can be forgiven (see: the game’s ongoing hit reg issues), the current problems the XDefiant Ranked mode is peppered with make it unplayable. And since many had long been waiting for its arrival, only for it to be an unplayable mess, patience is running thin with the community.
Luckily, the XDefiant dev team has often quickly resolved these problems, so a fix may be underway for these Ranked mode issues. But until then, you may want to hold off on grinding out those competitive ranks, especially if you frequently play solo, because you’ll probably end up losing more MMR than earning it.
