I thought I was good at Deadlock until its unexpected ranked distribution proved that I'm worse than mid

pcgamer.com:

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