Me and my friends love the game but the higher ranked friends are getting tired of having to create a new character to just play with the ones new to the game when the settings are set to my rank or higher. Is there a reason that they can not join?

the higher ranked friends have to host i noticed that today aswell

But that dose not seam right. It says my rank or higher but if the higher ranked friends have to host its not fair.

Friend invites in private games should override the rank system

It has not for us as of yet

yea i think that when it says my rank and higher its meaning joining options

Levels and Ranks are 2 separate things and have 2 different purposes, as explained below, from nerdiest-kids.com:

“if you have a friend who’s just starting out and you’ve capped out at level 20 you can still play together without the lower level player getting completely slaughtered. “Screw the true skills match-ups” is how Splash Damage is thinking. Rather, match-ups will be based on player ranks (you rank up once for every 5 levels of XP you gain), allowing for more even gameplay. But what if a level 1 player wants to play with the level 18?s or 20?s? You can totally do that if you feel you’re up to the challenge, but the real point is that the high level players can’t come down to the lower levels and slaughter the noobs one by one, which will eliminate a lot of frustrations that come with randomized multiplayer gaming.”

"Every time you get to a new rank – and there’s suddenly anything from five to 10 new abilities – it’s like it’s a whole new game. We were matchmaking you into matches through levels one through to 4 which ensured that you were with like-levelled players. You think you’ve learned everything you need to know about the game (all the cool tricks and the abilities) and then you make it to level five and that’s when you go to rank two, and all of a sudden you’re playing with guys from level five to level ten, and suddenly you see them doing all kinds of things."

"You start seeing these different body types, and watching acrobatic guys. You start watching engineers putting down turrets (for the first five levels they could only put down mines) and that changes everything. You start seeing operatives hacking those turrets and taking them over. Five levels later and you’ll start to see operatives being able to remote control those turrets. There’s a natural progressions; so every time you go up a level it’s like a whole new game. That, to me, is one of the most exciting things.”

- Richard Ham


Based on that, there appears to be 4 ranks:

R1: lvl 0/1-4
R2: lvl 5-10
R3: lvl 11-15
R4: lvl 16-20

As caboose stated it is your joining option not what is allowed into a game you host. It is that way to prevent higher ranked players from joining lower ranked games and WTF PWNING everyone with all their shiny abilities that you do not have access to yet.

This is actually broken. You would think that having the lower ranked person set the play option to 'My Rank or Higher' would allow a level 20 rank 5 player join the match but it does not do that. Having the lower rank friend start the match and send out invites to join the match from in game does not override this. It will return the following error message "You rank is to high to join this server". To get around this the highest level/ranked player in your co-op group must start the match, at which time all players regardless of rank will be able to join the match.

These ranks are incorrect:
R1: lvl 0/1-4
R2: lvl 5-10
R3: lvl 11-15
R4: lvl 16-20

Correct ranks are:
LVL 0-4 - Rank 1
LVL 5-9 - Rank 2
LVL 10-14 - Rank 3
LVL 15-19 - Rank 4
LVL 20 - Rank 5

Always have the highest lvl/rank start the game. File under #broken.