At a higher rank, you lose more points unless you can pull of longer kill streaks.

For example, I have 60,000 points on Pop Maps.

On every death of a lower level player say 10,000 points. They get 50 points, but only 16 are taken from my score. However, when I kill them, I only get +2 points.

Therefore if I get wrecked 0-12 by a bunch of lower ranked players my ranks go down so hard.