i don’t know how you expect to make a point about the nine floors below 10/celestial by rehashing your experience/bewilderment with 10/celestial. there’s half a million people having a very different experience
if anything it seems like arcsys misjudged the skill floor for what is considered high level play. i would love to see demographic stats. i think more floors couldn’t hurt? idk
also i think it’s kind of endemic to this forum in particularto misjudge your own competence, i imagine you are much better at this game than you think you are. idk how to speak to that tho
Really don’t think anyone’s acting like it’s only top players up in this. I’ve gone on a ton about how much the tower’s helped with making the game approachable for newer players. Many of these issues are prevalent down there too, people will still duck matches and cherry pick opponents, you’re still stuck with the small lobby sizes that really limit your options, the game’s still rife with network errors, these are all issues that impact everyone in the player base.
I was on the lower floors too, it’s not like the game just drops you in at 10.
That’s like 16,000 players, I’m tired enough after adding those up so I won’t figure out the percentage but it’s higher than I expected. That’s not counting all the folks who are on 10 or flirting with celestial though.
Having ranked down a few times there is a very noticeable skill gap between each floor so it is doing a much better job of things than I ever would have expected. But whatever system they’re using to determine when a player ranks up/down is very weird and, very likely, frequently broken.
There is no goddamn way 10+Celestial is 20% of the player base. You can look up these numbers by scrolling the leaderboard and it takes forever, but the last numbers I saw said something like .2% of players were in Celestial.
I guess my point is in this scenario fixing the top wouldn’t have any negative consequences for anyone else. I also don’t think the rest of the tower is free of problems. the bottom floors, from what I’ve heard, basically don’t exist, so there’s probably a moderately similar problem to the top at around floor 4, because the game doesn’t seem to want to put anyone who has ever played a fighting game anywhere below that. I’ve heard of plenty of players who try to play at like 3 or whatever and find literally 0 players, so they have to go up, then they get smashed. that’s the same problem. they could have good matches on floor 4, because other players of their skill level are also jumping up or being boosted by weird skill compression algorithms, but they could also randomly play players at the higher end of that band and get rolled. if the game would just use the ranks it already has they could be more comfortable.
I think one of the reasons this happens is because arc sys designed a system for a game they thought would be less popular than it is. if you have a smaller player base you want to compress them so they can actually find matches. that’s also why you can freely jump up floors; if you don’t find anyone on your level you can at least choose to go lose to better players whenever you want, rather than waiting for the game to make that match after an arbitrary amount of time. I think that’s kind of smart. and then at the top you just get forced to play worse players if you’re really good, which would happen anyway for any game below, like, lol/fortnite/cod levels of popularity.
anyway i think it would be exhausting of me to push this further but i think there is a lot of value in what’s been set as a precedent here even if it is deeply imperfect
lower than I thought, but still too high. you also have to add in the floor 10 and celestial/10 bouncers, who have the same experience. would take it up to 10ish percent, probably?
I think that’s true, but I’m also not basing my judgments on nothing. I’ve played a lot of competitive games in my life, and I’ve played fighting games for many years. I know you’re going to say that that proves your point, implicitly, but it also means I have a wealth of playing experience to draw my skill level conclusions from. and like, I get smashed in literally every fighting game lmao, and I’ve never been above the “slightly better than average” rank in any competitive game in any genre that I’ve ever played. usually I’m lower than that. literally silver in street fighter v. like I said, I somehow ended up better in this particular game than I thought I would, something about it suits my play style I guess, but I also didn’t magically become a good video game player
I guess my high level analysis from bouncing around low rank floors is that no one at lower ranks actually engages with game systems at all, so the only thing making up what rank you are in is how consistent you are. I have never seen anyone RC, I’ve barely seen any FD, no one does any supers, it’s just super turbo up in here. Having “any kind of systems comprehension” compressed into maybe 3 ranks is honestly concerning.
Also doesn’t Celestial VIP reset every month? It should naturally get more exclusive over time.
the monthly reset is good, yeah. it’ll likely keep me out next month, but it won’t change my experience all that much, because I’m still going to hop around playing people of wildly differing skills.
I often bring up how when I was playing Dota everyone I played with kept talking about how much they sucked but then Valve accidentally made the hidden MMR publicly accessible and it turned out we were all in the top 5% of players. This is one of the many reasons I try not to go on about how much I “suck” if I fail at something; chances are I’m better than a lot of other folks and my self-depreciation will just make them feel shitty and hopeless, which is doubly sad cuz they probably don’t suck either.
But I do think there’s something very weird about this game and how it rewards certain types of players and characters. There are definitely many players on the upper floors whose FG fundamentals aren’t nearly as sound as yours, la-ciel, but the game favors gorillas who will thoughtlessly hit big buttons. It can be very, very frustrating to fall prey to folks who are very Ranked Match, who have one gimmick and will duck you once you figure it out, but this is a game where much of the top tier thrives playing that way. I’m not sure this is an actual issue of import but it definitely exists so I actually do suspect that floor 10 and up holds a double digit percentage of the player base. Maybe not 20%, but more than I ever would have expected. Maybe that’s a good thing for the health of the game? I dunno.
Maybe the very lowest floors being sparsely populated is an intentional choice. I am pretty sure the game gives you bonus ranking points if you start doing RCs and shit. Your rank seems to depend on more than just win/loss record.
if you are reasonably confident in your fundamentals I think one thing that will probably help you climb pretty easily is to just give yourself a couple RC rules that you follow every time, without having to make any decisions. like, pick one move where if it hits and you have meter, you RC every time and do the same combo every time. then pick one unsafe move where if it whiffs or is blocked, you RC it every time you have meter. then similarly if you have one or two matchups that you really hate, just pick one move that character does that you feel like fucks you up, and tell yourself that if it hits you and you have burst, you’re bursting. sol hits that 6S? fuck it, get off me, you’re gonna have to do it at least one more time asshole, don’t care what else you do. etc.
man I’ve definitely noticed this trend. like, let’s break ranked down by some standard metric that a lot of games use: bronze/silver/gold/platinum/diamond/king shit of fuck mountain. bronze/silver/gold players think fucking anything, some of them think they suck shit, some of them are absolutely convinced they fucking rule. plat players all think they rock, because they can shit on those lower ranks every time, they finally escaped. then the diamond players tend to think they are bad, because they almost certainly play a ton and they know they lose hard to the king fucks. shit is like an immutable rule.
I’m pretty sure the MMR is purely based on win/loss record. If it was any more complex it would at least count individual wins, but I’ve noticed I rank down hard after barely losing 6 out of 9 games against an opponent I’m closely matched against. And I’ve always proactively used my tension even back when I started in rank 4 and it didn’t count for much. Stuff like how many roman cancels you do just feeds into the spiderweb chart.
About the percent of players in Celestial, it’s certainly microscopic as a proportion of owners of the game but at the same time substantial as a proportion of players currently active at any given hour. Almost by tautology those players are always there every day. It’s the “everyone at the gym is more buff than me” effect.
I think if it’s based solely on w/l record it’s pretty busted, which is likely considering the state of the servers. If you don’t drop any rounds it seems to boost you up faster.
At a certain point I started keeping track of my w/l record during a session and when I got another shot at heaven seemed real fuckin random and not tied to the levels of my opponents, but if I went 0-6 over two sets on the 10th floor to some goldbricking VIP motherfucker I was likely gonna get dumped down to 9th, which was bullshit cuz I’d just steamroll folks down there and end up back on 10th two sets later. That’s fine with me – I like to win – but it probably was not fun for those people, I doubt they learned shit.
It definitely notices if you’re doing shit like RCs when determining your early placement
like for the people who don’t think the way this game fails completely at the high end is a problem, and that I’m exaggerating it, would you play a game that put you in a rank where over your last two play sessions your combined record was 3-43? what is even the point of me playing the game, it’s not like I’m learning anything when 90% of rounds start with me getting counter hit, or whiffing and being whiff punished, then instantly losing 60% of my health from a wall break combo.
what I’m trying to say is we need to do more SB sets
I figured out what was up with mine, the Oceania celestial lobby (maybe on PC only?) is bugged so if I want to get VIP I have to go play like south East Asia, US West or Japan or something and body people with 200 ping.
I think maybe I can do it in us west but playing on high ping suxxx
but playing on high ping suxxx