We can’t “shame” a player for hacking, but, oh surprise!, we can shame a player by his account level.
Remove levels, unless you’re trying to encourage such behavior.
Despite what we think/say, the truth is (most of the times) people don’t care about rules or the others, stop giving them reasons and opportunities to do it (in game).
Just a thought
Abbadon
Abaddon
[quote=“Amerika;109691”][quote=“Haise;109542”]I mean, you can hide level all you want, but it wont stop things like this from happening:
All hiding level does is really just make sure nobody verbally attacks you, which you shouldn’t really care about anyways since this is the internet.
EDIT: Probably should have blurred the names at the top. Whoops.
I am not shaming those players in any way. They were actually a very nice bunch of people. You can tell because they sat through me killing them 111 times.[/quote]
What you seemed to have missed out on others saying, including myself, is that people quit the game because you’re a high level. Sometimes before a match even starts. And when they get upset then others get upset but they might not say anything. It’s just a negative thing to have in the game. So even if I am not bothered by the repeated abuse then others will be. That’s what really ticks me off. I’m pissing off some guy I don’t know who is trying to have fun, even if they are not being rational, all due to a number that has very few good reasons for being shown. Yes, people should be thicker skinned but what you want to be and what actually is are definitely two different things.
I get way less hate for putting up good numbers than I do for my level by far.[/quote]
I can def see that perspective. It is very rarely that I get into a game and people quit cause of my level. Most just point it out and then call me a no life. You know, maybe we just REALLY don’t need to levels to be shown. That would be nice.
Sooo I had someone getting a little angry today because a lvl 29 was stomping him 
heheh
I completely agree. The amount of people that look at the scoreboard and immediately call for a shuffle vote before they even try to fight. It’s ridiculous. Just hide the levels, I see no benefit in showing them.
You’re not alone @Izzy , we’ve had this conversation a few times before. (I’m to lazy to search for those threads) Unfortunately, at the time it didn’t really go anywhere. As I remember, it devolved into the usual responses like: “quit your crying, get thicker skin, just ignore them, who cares what people on the internet say!” etc, etc.
It seems like now we’re seeing that it goes farther than just the harassment of a single player and we’re starting to see how it’s affecting and sometimes ruining matches for everyone in the game.
This kind of threads about the same topic won’t stop popping up like mushrooms in rain?
I rather see increasing of match making than level’s getting hidden and creating the illusion that the problem itself doesn’t exist.
“What you can’t see, is out of your mind.”
Even when you hide your levels, high levels still probably will get matched with low levels.
It will be as frustrating as it was earlier, but now you just can’t see levels.
Problem however will still remain: If you are higher level player matched with low levels, you still have to carry your team anyways and hiding levels won’t change that.
Of course people won’t get insulted for levels and some people won’t maybe disconnect out of the lobby at the early time, but also people who wants to balance teams by joining to opponent team at the beginning, those players are less likely to swap teams.
And yes, you could use an argument by saying: “But we have a shuffle option in the game”, but I would like to ask you then how many of passed shuffle votes you’ve seen?
What I would like to see:
Instead of hiding the problem, how about working with it and trying to fix it?
[quote=“Fiktio;110053”]This kind of threads about the same topic won’t stop popping up like mushrooms in rain?
I rather see increasing of match making than level’s getting hidden and creating the illusion that the problem itself doesn’t exist.
“What you can’t see, is out of your mind.”
Even when you hide your levels, high levels still probably will get matched with low levels.
It will be as frustrating as it was earlier, but now you just can’t see levels.
Problem however will still remain: If you are higher level player matched with low levels, you still have to carry your team anyways and hiding levels won’t change that.
Of course people won’t get insulted for levels and some people won’t maybe disconnect out of the lobby at the early time, but also people who wants to balance teams by joining to opponent team at the beginning, those players are less likely to swap teams.
And yes, you could use an argument by saying: “But we have a shuffle option in the game”, but I would like to ask you then how many of passed shuffle votes you’ve seen?
What I would like to see:
Instead of hiding the problem, how about working with it and trying to fix it?[/quote]
Levels in FPS is not something really old. A long time ago (10 years or so) there were no level shown, and even less matchmaking. For instance, I was playing a lot of COD1 (UO), but it was the same in battlefields and so on. Yet, there were no such problems. There were less complains, less shuffle vote (and usually, every-time a shuffle vote were launched, it was accepted).
I know, mentality have changed and from a challenging video-game era where difficulty was still a thing, we are in a fast-food video-game era where every people want everything now and pre-chewed. But not every new things are good, and unique doesn’t mean useful.
Of course several things has changed over many years and I’m not going to say is it good or bad thing, but games have changed as well and it’s not guaranteed that everything will work by the same way as they worked long time ago.
Games are different, communities are different and mind sets are different.
And that’s exactly what we have to deal with.
However I still think that people are focusing on the wrong thing.
There are a lot reasons why people wants to hide levels and also good amount of reasons why levels should stay. But I’m kinda surprised of that only minority of the community are focusing to the main problem: match making itself.
Servers filling with low levels, even when high level players went in first.
(Of course some people also join with server browser as well, but they can’t see beforehand how high level players are playing inside.)
That causes some issues in lobbies and servers, like those that are already mentioned in the thread. What’s the result?
Result is that a lot people would like to see levels removed/hidden.
But why in earth people are focusing only to the result of the problem, instead of focusing to the problem itself?
I’m sure that the game would be so much more enjoyable for everyone, if main problems could get fixed. Probably less people would complain about levels, when high players would have better opportunities to play with people that are near the same level with them, even if using quick match making.
And of course I’m not expecting that things will get solved by one swing of magic wand, but still in my eyes it would be a good thing if something could get done for the main problem.
One other interesting point by the way : I probably receive more flame for having the tag of my community than I do because of my level. Not that I am bad because I usually end in the top 2 of my team, but more because of the fortuity of the game start scramble putting me and most of my friends in the same team for whatever statistical reasons. Some of us just run without the tag just to avoid the potential flame… And we sometimes all did to avoid straight quits when it was visible on ranked.
Again, what I still don’t understand is why on earth, on this game specifically, people tend to flame high levels for no reason at all. Most of the game which have similar xp systems (cods, bfs, and pretty much all the available with a slight ounce of persistent non game affecting stats) forces you to make it visible. And I’ve never witnessed such flame and hatred to this extent until db on this topic.
So, why are they so angry at vets ? Jealousy for something not valuable at all ? Denial of the fact that being good at any AAA fps won’t directly make you good at dirty bomb ? I honestly don’t know.
Just let us hide the level, this will sort this kind of issues simply.
All this being said, community servers are great help to this no matter what. Someone seeing a tagged server name, they know what they’ll be dealing with there.
[quote=“B. Montiel;110137”]
Again, what I still don’t understand is why on earth, on this game specifically, people tend to flame high levels for no reason at all. Most of the game which have similar xp systems (cods, bfs, and pretty much all the available with a slight ounce of persistent non game affecting stats) forces you to make it visible. And I’ve never witnessed such flame and hatred to this extent until db on this topic. [/quote]
You named it. DB is hard to play and does not forgive your mistakes. High level players sure do less mistakes, and are perceived as too hard to counter. DB is quite fast-paced, and if people with insane aim skills coming from CS:GO or COD may succeed, average people coming from Nexuiz or Warsaw like games will still be better.
Unfortunately, Nexuiz- and Warsaw-like games are disappearing. And only on these games I can tell I have seen people with mad skills.
We probably don’t have enough lvl 10+ regular players left for them to work properly 
From the already dwindling numbers on the AUS servers, I really don’t want anything else to split the player base.
Just give us the option to set our profile info as “private” in game to hide the level. I get nothing out of it aside from occasionally joining pubs full of low levels and reading LUL DAT GUY EEZ HIGH LEVUL which is mildly annoying.
As @Retief says “Only showing level in the end of game screen seems reasonable to me” seems good.
Otherwise what would be the point at leveling yourself? if theres nothing than a case reward.
By the way, sorry for the @ Retief o:)
The whole level thing is just a crutch people like to hide behind when they’re getting pummeled. Being able to hide it, would be one less thing people complain about in game.
definitely we need to hide levels.
Why do you guys still bother.
SD made is point and this is not something they will change or not now. Cf Dev stream three weeks ago. I think they can’t care less about it. I am aware there are issues more important, but I believe that just hiding it for a start wouldn’t take too much implementation time.
tl;dr I agree with not showing the player level. We should care about newcomers and protect the new community from hate.
Right now, if I briefly open the scoreboard, and take a look at the names of the players, and their levels, I can tell the outcome of the match 4/5 times.
If you were to hide the levels, it’d make it more of a guessing game, and I don’t like that.
I don’t want to be clueless about how clueless my team is.
Inb4 “levels dun mean nuffink”
Why not remove levels and only show your competitive rank in pubs just like in competititve game, thats what this game is aiming about “competititve” right?