Sharkmob has announced that they have disabled the Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt ranked mode following issues with matchmaking and several fixes failed to fix the problem. In a tweet they said:
Hello Bloodhunt Community! After careful evaluation, we have decided to pause Ranked mode temporarily until the new update arrives. We hope the new balance changes and gamepad improvements will increase the mode's popularity again and make matchmaking viable once more.
This next update was detailed last week and includes them overhauling the gamepad controls, fixing a number of bugs, and adding variable refresh rate on PlayStation 5. The update will be arriving sometime in June, but there is no more specific date about it at this time.
What's been wrong with Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt ranked mode?
The core of the issue with Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt ranked has been that the matchmaking has been taking too long and then occasionally creating poor matches. The developers believe some of this may be due to issues with gamepad controls and aim assist. Two weeks ago, one step they took to attempt to address this was disabling crossplay with PS5 to see if that improved the situation. Apparently, it wasn't enough on its own for either platform, even with them increasing the skill band in the same update to make matchmaking more lenient on who it is willing to match against each other. This past week they fixed a bug that was impacting over 2000 players and causing them to get long matchmaking times, although this was matchmaking in general and not tied directly to ranked.
Overall, the situation with lackluster aim assist, gamepad controls, and ranked play has been a rare mar on the successful launch of the vampire battle royale, which has hit upwards of 30k players on Steam. This puts it firmly in the middle of recent vampire launches, presumably beating out Vampire: The Masquerade Swansong given its middling review, but utterly dwarfed by the vampiric giant that is V Rising, which has managed to sell over a million copies in the first week and added offline play today.
