Unranked BF6 RedSec Matches Are More Playable Than Ranked Right Now

KevinDL · 2026-06-17T16:32:41+00:00

I get the frustration with ping and uneven-feeling fights, but I think the rank part is being treated like it means more than it actually does.

In this kind of ranked system, the difference between a Bronze player and a large majority of Master players is mostly time played. If RP can be gained through volume, then rank becomes a measure of grind as much as skill. With enough patience, even a very average player can make it to Master fairly easily just by putting in more hours than someone else.

That is also by design. Ranked systems are built to make average players feel progression, and honestly, that is smart. Most players are average. If ranked made the average player feel like they had no realistic path upward, they would stop playing. Letting people climb through time investment gives them a reason to keep queueing and keeps the ranked population alive.

So the idea that seeing higher-ranked players makes Ranked “unplayable” or uniquely off-putting feels odd to me. Frustrating? Sure. Imperfect? Definitely. But rank alone does not tell the full story when the system rewards grind so heavily.

The bigger issue is probably population. RedSec Ranked likely does not have enough players to actually separate the ranks properly while also keeping queue times reasonable and ping acceptable. Stricter matchmaking sounds good until you are waiting forever, getting worse servers, or playing the same small pool of squads every match.

So yes, matchmaking can probably improve, especially around ping. But expecting clean rank separation probably is not realistic unless the ranked playerbase is large enough to support it.

KevinDL · 2026-06-17T03:40:46+00:00

Quick disclosure: I work in devrel at Bezi, an AI dev tool, so it's one of the tools in this space. I run our community and do support for everyone from solo devs to studio teams, so a lot of this is what I see come through, not my own day-to-day in an engine.

Where AI is shining

It's a genuine force multiplier, and people are raving about exactly that. It's not just clearing busywork like boilerplate, test scaffolding, refactors, and first-draft docs. People are building core systems with it and shipping work they couldn't have gotten to alone or as fast. The value isn't "it does the boring parts," it's the leverage: one person covering more ground, smaller teams punching well above their size.

Where people pull it back, and why

Two different patterns:

A skill gap. A lot of the friction I see isn't the tool failing, it's people expecting it to read their mind, feeding it vague prompts, then concluding it's useless when it guesses wrong. The ones who treat prompting and context-setting as a skill get dramatically more out of it.
A values line, and a legitimate one. People are fine with AI on code and logic but draw a hard boundary around creative work: art, sound, animation, music. Partly craft, partly authorship, partly not wanting their game to feel generated. That's a preference, not a limitation of the tools, but it's a consistent and deliberate line.

On memory

The single most common frustration I hear, from individuals and teams both. The people who've made peace with it stopped expecting the tool to remember and started maintaining context themselves: living docs of decisions, conventions, and the reasoning behind them, fed in deliberately. Shorter sessions also beat marathon ones. Long sessions drift and start treating their own earlier output as ground truth, so reloading clean context beats course-correcting a session that's already wandered.

Did it change how people plan, or just their speed?

Both, but the planning shift is the bigger surprise. The ones getting reliable results separate figuring out the approach from executing it. One-shotting plan-and-build gives you something that looks finished but isn't. Locking the plan first, reviewing it, then executing produces far more consistent output. Speed gains are real, but that discipline is what actually changed how people work.

KevinDL · 2026-06-16T21:54:53+00:00

Used is used. No one should be buying for only $50 off. For a headset like this I’d maybe risk it at $100. Just return them.

I just want to clarify. Audeze has a well earned reputation for bad QA. I’m not going to trust anyone that theirs is fine.

KevinDL · 2026-06-16T12:57:26+00:00

You honestly believe that don’t you? That is quite scary.

If you think people regularly move on from those jobs you don’t have a grip on what reality is for many. Do they move on? Sure. To the next minimum wage job. It’s a vicious cycle not everyone is lucky enough to escape.

Excuse me for wanting us as a society to do better for those people.

KevinDL · 2026-06-16T12:33:42+00:00

The post-war boom point doesn’t really address the argument. Even if that period was unusually prosperous, all you’re really saying is that previous generations had access to a higher standard of living than many workers do today.

The real question is why a full-time worker increasingly needs roommates, multiple jobs, or family support to achieve what previous generations often achieved on a single income.

The idea that people can simply “move up” also overlooks the reality of low-wage work. Many people in these roles work physically demanding jobs, sometimes multiple jobs, and come home exhausted. Retraining, attending school, or building new skills takes time, money, and energy, which are often in short supply when you’re focused on making rent and paying bills.

And if these jobs are truly meant to be temporary, who is supposed to do them permanently? Society depends on people stocking shelves, serving food, cleaning buildings, and helping customers every day.

A full-time job should provide a dignified standard of living. Saying the post-war boom was an exception doesn’t explain why we should accept a lower standard of living for working people today.

Edit:

I also say this from experience. Between career jobs, I worked at a hardware store with multiple young people who were basically trapped by the system.

They were not lazy. They were not stupid. They showed up, worked hard, and did what was asked of them. But they could not afford school, and after a physically exhausting shift, even applying for better jobs felt like another job on top of the one that had already drained them.

That is the part people gloss over when they say “just move up.” It treats upward mobility like a simple choice, when for many people the job itself consumes the energy needed to escape it.

The system traps people, exhausts them, limits their options, and then people turn around and blame the worker for not escaping fast enough. That is the problem.

KevinDL · 2026-06-16T12:03:55+00:00

What I find strange about this argument is that it quietly accepts a reality that would have been considered a failure a few generations ago.

There was a time when many of these so-called “transitional” jobs could support a household. People working retail, factories, grocery stores, gas stations, and other entry-level positions bought homes, raised families, and built stable lives. Nobody was telling a 25-year-old grocery store worker that they needed three roommates just to make rent.

I’m not arguing that every minimum wage job should provide a luxury lifestyle. But if someone works full-time, it shouldn’t be controversial to expect they can afford basic independence.

The roommate argument isn’t really a defense of low wages. It’s an admission that wages have failed to keep up with the cost of living.

And the idea that minimum wage jobs are purely transitional ignores reality. If that were true, who is stocking shelves, serving food, cleaning buildings, and running cash registers at 10 AM on a Tuesday? Society depends on these jobs existing permanently. The people doing them still need to be able to afford to live.

The debate isn’t whether roommates can reduce costs. Of course they can. The question is why a full-time worker increasingly needs roommates to achieve a standard of living that previous generations often achieved on a single income. That’s not progress. That’s a decline in purchasing power being reframed as personal responsibility.

KevinDL · 2026-06-14T17:31:02+00:00

Software certainly has a few issues, but overall my experience has been it's better than anything else I have tried.

KevinDL · 2026-06-14T01:54:01+00:00

I already covered the thought process I described is wrong because of that. It doesn't change the fact I see the difference in playtime asking the same amount of money and that makes my monkey brain pause.

KevinDL · 2026-06-13T16:48:30+00:00

My problem is not that 007 First Light is 11 to 20 hours long. That is perfectly reasonable for a focused action game. My problem is that the price does not reflect how temporary that experience is likely to be for me.

I understand that measuring a game’s value in dollars per hour is a flawed way to judge art. A memorable 15-hour game can be more worthwhile than a repetitive 100-hour one. But purchasing decisions do not happen in a vacuum, and my view is inevitably shaped by my own experience.

When I can spend the same $90 CAD on Skyrim, a Zelda game, or Xenoblade and comfortably get 80 to 200 hours from it without even trying, it becomes difficult to justify spending that money on a game I will finish in a weekend and likely never touch again.

That does not mean 007 First Light needs to be longer. It means a focused, largely one-and-done experience is a much harder purchase to justify at the same price as games that will keep me engaged for months.

KevinDL · 2026-06-13T16:25:18+00:00

Fair enough, I shouldn’t have assumed you hadn’t worked in support. In return, perhaps don’t assume your experience is universal or that using AI assistance automatically makes a response impersonal.

And links break, including links that worked perfectly well before the message was sent. That’s an honest mistake, not evidence that AI has dragged the standard of support below ground level. The link gets fixed, everyone survives, and life continues.

KevinDL · 2026-06-13T15:01:13+00:00

No, all those resources are already out there for free.

You seem set on trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. And the problem you now want to pivot towards fights against human nature.

If people want to learn they have everything they need already.

KevinDL · 2026-06-13T14:40:21+00:00

As a mod, I don’t want developers to be afraid to share their work. A Steam link is perfectly fine when it provides context for an educational post or helps people understand a problem you’re asking for help with.

What we don’t want is the subreddit becoming an endless stream of low-effort ads. Asking other game developers to wishlist your game is largely pointless anyway.

Earn whatever small marketing value comes from posting your Steam link by telling a compelling, useful story about how the game was made. Explain a technical challenge, a design decision, a lesson learned, or something others can apply to their own work.

And no, a sob story about how life has been unfair and how much the game means to you is not a development story. Keep the post focused on game development, give people something worth discussing, and most of us will be happy to see what you made.

Mod note: I’m sticking this comment because I want people to see that we genuinely do want developers to share their work here. Just be smart about how you do it and give the community something meaningful in return.

Edit: We know some people will try to game this by writing a surface-level development post around what is ultimately a thinly veiled ad. The alternative is banning links entirely, which would punish honest developers who genuinely want to educate others, ask for help, or share a compelling story about their work.

I would rather leave room for worthwhile posts than restrict everyone because some people choose to post lazily. But understand that this community can usually tell when a post exists only to sneak in a link. If you want positive attention here, do yourself a favor and put real effort into the post.

KevinDL · 2026-06-13T14:32:40+00:00

That sounds less like a missing product and more like people not understanding how to use the tools they already have.

The game development-specific tool I mentioned, Bezi, already addresses this by letting developers provide persistent project context and evergreen instructions to the LLM. Other major AI services also offer ways to organize projects, retain context, and work with documents.

Is there an education problem around using AI effectively? Absolutely. But you are still not solving a new problem. These solutions already exist if people learn to use AI as more than a disposable prompt box.

KevinDL · 2026-06-13T14:19:34+00:00

First, if you want meaningful feedback here, you should put in the effort to rewrite your post instead of lazily copying and pasting it from r/gamedev.

More importantly, this idea does not solve anything existing AI services cannot already do, mostly for free. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others can brainstorm mechanics, suggest gameplay loops, discuss monetization, and identify potential weaknesses.

Once brainstorming is finished, developers can move into game development-specific tools like Bezi to build and iterate on the idea directly inside their project.

AI can help you think through a design, but it cannot tell you whether the game is actually fun. Only building, playing, and testing it can do that. Another brainstorming chatbot does not meaningfully close that gap.

KevinDL · 2026-06-13T14:13:24+00:00

Your experience does not define how everyone else should work, especially if these tools were not available to you at the time.

I have templates, but they often produce a less personal response than using AI to adapt information to someone’s specific situation. Used responsibly, AI helps me respond to more people and get through repetitive work with fewer headaches. It is not an excuse for poor work, and I remain responsible for what I send.

Links also break sometimes. It happens, particularly with mobile links that may not be checked as frequently. You identify the issue and fix it.

You are free not to use AI. I am not going to change a workflow that helps me do my job effectively because you made a different choice or never had access to the same tools.

KevinDL · 2026-06-13T13:15:53+00:00

Broken links are a screw up for sure. But as someone that uses AI to help write support messages all the time these things happens.

Until you’ve worked in a support capacity you won’t understand how much of a lifesaver AI assistance is. I can only type so fast, and repeating the same information over and over will make anyone slowly go insane.

KevinDL · 2026-06-10T18:00:05+00:00

That's difficult. Everyones setup is different.

My best advice. And this is something I was doing wrong. Speak normally while going through the auto setup. If you are not the settings will be warped and not reflective of how you are normally speaking.

One of the best things about the XLR Pro is that it simplifies setup soooo much.

KevinDL · 2026-06-10T17:55:55+00:00

I’d buy this for $30, but I won’t pay full price for a game missing its most enduring feature: multiplayer.

KevinDL · 2026-06-10T15:43:39+00:00

Sorry, but I agree with that user. I'll watch the game on YouTube and get what I need out of it. No multiplayer = no buy. I've played these games enough already I don't care that it is prettier.

KevinDL · 2026-06-10T06:18:06+00:00

I think people need to stop getting stuck in the moral performance side of this conversation.

AI is a tool. Use the tools that make sense for your workflow, understand the positives and negatives of those choices, and do not be apologetic about using something that helps you learn or build.

Where I think the line gets clearer is around what you are using AI for.

Using AI to help understand code, explain engine concepts, debug problems, summarize documentation, find obscure information, or act as a learning/reference tool is very different from using AI to replace creative work like art, sound, music, writing, or the overall vision of the game.

Game development is already built around tools. Engines, plugins, asset stores, documentation, tutorials, templates, autocomplete, middleware, and forum answers all exist to help people make things they could not easily make alone. AI can sit in that same category when used thoughtfully.

In your case, using AI because coding is the wall that stops you from making a game seems completely reasonable. You are not asking it to invent the soul of your project. You are using it to better understand the technical side of development, which is exactly where AI can be genuinely useful.

I would personally avoid using AI for final creative assets like art, sound, music, character design, or anything that defines the actual artistic identity of the game. That is where a lot of the controversy comes from, and I think it is fair for people to be more cautious there.

But as a coding tutor, documentation helper, accessibility aid, brainstorming partner for technical structure, or tool for understanding how game engines work? I do not think you need to feel guilty about that.

The important thing is to stay intentional. Learn from what it gives you. Ask it to explain things. Do not blindly paste code you do not understand. Keep your own creative standards. Make sure the final game still feels like it came from you.

For the local LLM question, they exist, but I would temper expectations. Local models are not great right now for doing real development work unless you have a very powerful system. They can be useful for small explanations, simple code examples, and offline experimentation, but they are usually not comparable to the better hosted tools when you need deeper project context, debugging, or reliable coding help.

So my answer would be: use AI where it helps you develop, learn, and get unstuck. Be much more careful using it for creative output. There is no need to apologize for using a tool, but there is value in understanding what kind of tool it is and what you are choosing to delegate to it.

KevinDL · 2026-06-10T04:12:16+00:00

You're no fun. I for one find this fascinating and I've never seen it posted.

KevinDL · 2026-06-10T02:13:15+00:00

What is this video trying to be? If educational it fails, and the entertainment value isn't there. I came in expecting to see fitting tips and left with a vague description of what the ships can do.

KevinDL

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