Okay. I found this after I got to lvl 20 with my mainly engineer/soldier character and I wanted to make a new primary operative/medic character. The problem I have found is that when you play in a match and can chose whether to play with your rank or higher, it goes off of your highest level character's rank. So it is kind of hard to replay the game with a new lvl 1 rank 1 character, especially an operative, when you are fighting bots that are max lvl and rank.

Yeah, I smelt something fishy on my 2nd playthrough...

Well this can be simply solved by playing only "my rank" games with your other chars until they get higher. That being said I have two lvl 20s and a lvl 15 that im working on and all I play is "my rank or higher" games. It doesn't seem to effect what kind of people I play MP games with in fact the only real problem arises when I face hard difficulty bots with my lowbie characters. Man those guys and their stupid auto headshots!

lol agreed on the bots. But it does cause effects. Not completely bad but, difficult. Because when playing through a second time against bots, the bots will have high rank abilities. Such as medic self res, operative cortex bombs, and bots using the universal downed shooting. This is for both enemy and ally bots so it makes it feel more like I'm watching a fight between two high rank teams instead of playing myself.

I'd noticed this too. I wondered why I was getting spawncamped on Easy at Rank 3. :sadvaultboy:

Whenever I make a new character, I play them in campaign mode till I hit at least lvl ten. It goes by pretty quick since as the only human you're getting far more points than you would online.

I found out this is actually a minor glitch. When switching characters it sometimes continues to use the settings from the last one that you did missions on. So I have now found it to be no big deal and am now enjoying stabbing people in the back with my pistol knifing.

Have a good day.