IIRC ranked doesn't really level you up very fast if you lose.
Ranked levels you up much faster than TW actually. The slog from lv10 to lv20 is largely because the points were designed to convince you to dip into ranked. It's the only reasonable way to get to 20 in a relatively short way. If you WIN some of course, but even by C+ and B- it's waaay faster assuming some win frequency than TW. And of course after lv20 ko's yield 10pts versus 3-5 in TW. Of course KO's are rare enough in the A's and above. But generally getting to 50 was quite the slog doing it mostly in TW :)
Lastly, 100000p inked is VERY little. I have 16 weapons above 100000p
LOL....16??? I have 6 (including Dynamo which technically isn't, yet, but will be in another day or two of Zones) - and I play a *LOT* of Splatoon. Do you actually sleep ever??
and some of my Japanese friends have 3 weapons maxed out at 999999.
My main and therefore main inked weapon is custom eliter.....I'll plead that as my excuse for it being only 30k and not 99k. ;)
If I had to gauge myself using the system's grading system but ignoring the comparison to other players (Eg. Above average players who managed to get to S and just stay there by not playing) I'd say I'm probably around A+. For me being an S+ means being the ultimate cream of the crop, having robust understanding of every weapon (I'm still learning lots of new stuff every now and then in Splatoon), having lots of experience with the myriads of situations that can happen on top of the many possible team varieties.
To me S+ would indeed be the cream of the crop, and SHOULD involve being the cream of the crop in every map and mode. Though I would personally not assume a robust understanding of every weapon. In fact it's perfectly fair to say that I'd only assume an S+ need be a master of a single weapon with which they can perform in any situation.
However the REALITY is that S+ will, for many, mean having a preferred mode on preferred map rotations and ignoring all others. Ranked is not competitive/clan/tournament play where you're going to play the entire ladder as assigned. For that reason I ALWAYS assume clan/competitive players are superior to simply "S+" -as it happens there's a LOT of clan players these days in the A's. Their ranks are artificially low in some cases because they simply don't play much ranked -much of their ranked mode play is in private battles with pre-organized teams. How many of these do have a second account that is S+, however I can not say. I truly doubt your skill with one of your top weapons is merely "A+" given your penchant to think of the map and the available options on a level that I would generally leave for S+ and clan tier players. ;)
An example of situations, I think I mentioned it earlier but I was using a C-Liter the other day in TW and kept getting rushed by Splash-O-Matics, my team was unable to recognize that I was struggling to keep our base turfed for myself to move around. This knowledge came in handy when I played in ranked and had E-Liters on my team and I was a Slosher. IIRC it was Urchin Underpass and as you know enemies tend to ink that slope + perch on your side whenever they can. What I did was always return to ink it while the E-Liter still maintained his presence in that area.
Cause if he can't move around well there, he's unable to provide support and this is the kind of thing I think a lot of players who often play solo don't understand. They think E-Liters can do everything on their own. We both know it's not true ;)
So yea, my Slosher obviously wouldn't get a very amazing K/D in this case since I'm also heavily in support but as you can guess, we won more hehe.
Oh yeah that particular location is SUCH a pain to deal with, and, as you say, I'm generally left re-inking things myself Not that eliter is THAT bad for doing so but it leaves me on an empty ink tank and uncharged as the enemies come around. Often my only available action at that point is jump to spawn and fall back into the base and wait for them to ENTER the base to take them out. That's one place where it's sometimes better to run hydra than eliter - especially the CHydra where it can really keep that position held. TC I still go for eliter though. I'm having nightmares about that right now - I lost 3 TC rounds back to back by ko in under 1 minute in solo yesterday there for those very reasons.
I played with sloshing machine again yesterday in TW - I still suck with it. You tempt me to try slosher again. Especially with a new one coming on the horizon with unknown kit!
But the play you described is definitely more of a high level play with proper teams (and clans) that sadly solo lacks. It's unfortunately a mode where the players that will move up the fastest are the ones that main a midrange shooter, push the objective themsevles, and can ultimately plug any gap in the team. Those of us that prefer more specialized weapons will always have a harder time filling holes in bad teams :)
Oh man, I know how you feel when I see similar scores on those weapons, I literally cannot comprehend it haha. It's like seeing an Aerospray with less than 400p or something. Hehe, allow me to match your brag by saying I had 19-0 on TW Triggerfish vs probably 3-4 kids and I was using the L3D. If I were of S+ caliber I think that number would have easily exceeded 20 :x
Yeah, to be fair I stink with mid-range shooters. They kind of bore me so I never put much into playing them and generally have low time spent with them. They may be "the meta" but they're the reason I don't buy other shooters and did buy Splatoon :) hehe, 19-0 on TW is probably fair....TW doesn't lend to endless splats like other maps. And in triggerfish your enemies just go around the giant circle as you go around
But I'll still take my sniping record in A+ TC, thankyouverymuch ;)
And, yes, a lot of people can't get over k/d. It's a hard thing to get over. It's the ONLY numeric measurement of performance the game actually gives you, so it's hard to ignore. Add to it that every OTHER shooter scores you ONLY on that number, as it's the definitive tally of your success, and it feels kind of out of place that they display it here at all. It's a mixed signal. The objective isn't splat dependent, yet they give your numeric score in splats. Conventinal wisdom is that splatting the opponent is the best way to take the objective and push it, yet I'm seeing more matches that prove that wisdom wrong.
It can be useful as a metric, but only when accompanied by a sense of what it means in your situation.
I sort of get what you mean. Personally I wish ranked would also show amount of ink turfed. It's not as necessary like in TW but it gives me some additional information to deduce what might have happened. Showing me their ranks does nothing but gives me ammo to blame the system when my team is AAAA and the enemy's is SSSS or something.
To be fair, until now, the rank imbalance affected your score, so it was important to show it. In squads, it still does, so they can't arrange the graphics too differently. I wish it showed turf inked as well. Though in the C's that might encourage the players that go play TW in ranked. A better bet would be for it to have a letter grade or something for performance with computed results from turf, splats, deaths, distance covered with objective, proximity to objective etc. But that would involve a much more sophisticated tracking system for matchmaking etc than we have.
Yea I know what you're talking about on Underpass. For me that's why it's important to keep the left wall inked where I go to occasionally and obviously the square perch will be a common position. Whilst the two openings on the left side high alley don't allow you to be able to target everywhere, the important part here is to not just target but to lay down ink lines which force enemies to reveal themselves (by inking). This is precisely why my no-damage C-Liter build works because I can happily keep laying ink down when enemies aren't in range yet.
Yes, particularly in TW, it's common to use ELiter primarily as a turfing tool. But a map that relegates an eliter to primarily an inking tool is like a map that limits Aerospray RG to primarily a killing tool :p It works, it causes issues for the enemy but it's simply not the most useful tool for the job and is really a poor fit. It fares a LITTLE better in TC. But like the TC matches I played there last night, the enemy can easily push and rush me, and with a team that doesn't seem able to fight back well without getting splatted, and never pushes the tower (or can't) there's little you can do to turn it around with just your eliter. Played in high level matches it works out ok. I generally have a lot more to do when playing there with S's S+'s on both teams. Zones and RM are just a disaster there though with eliter.
I'm sorry but I don't really know the definition of floating ladder so please explain it to me in your next reply.
Aside from that, I wouldn't say that's entirely why people create alts to begin with. If anything it's because online play is free on the Wii U so just creating another account (with free email no less) is just a matter of hassle as opposed to money. And also, whilst I agree it still sucks, you can take heart in the fact that those alts would rise up the ranks quickly and not be around again, unless they keep making new accounts just to grief lower rank players...
As luck would have it, I recently answered that same question for someone else: :)
http://squidboards.com/threads/im-sick-of-________.7261/page-16#post-160756
Those alts sometimes rise up quickly, or sometimes they either intentionally stay lower or are using a secondary weapon that is lower (and sometimes the matchmaker sabotages them and keeps them lower like it does so many people.) The trouble though is what they introduce is a type of movement and tactics that are unseen aside from alts in the ranks they occupy. This means teams are almost completely incapable of handling them. I play a lot of squads so I play a lot of S/S+ matches. I'm not GREAT at dealing with it all the time, but I'm generally a lot better at dealing with it than the rest of my team. And I sure as heck can't take them solo with a team that can't handle them at all. It's definitely a problem, particularly in the A's but that's part of what's creating that B nightmare where teams can deal with it even less, and have less chance of a player like me that knows more of how they play.
And, yes, they DO keep making alts. Many players with alts have more than one alt. In another thread someone pointed out that the current trend among the S+ pool is to create an alt for each weapon and try to reach S+ with it. When they get to S+ with that weapon they create a new alt and learn a new weapon with it. So they're taking S+ knowledge, tactics, map awareness, and movesets into lower ranks where they're not the ace with that weapon that they were with other weapons, but they're still playing a whole different playstyle than everyone else in those ranks knows. Depending on how frequently and with how many weaposn they do this you could easily have a dozen or more players scattered through various ranks that are all actually the same S+ player.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic but I don't really believe in losing streaks. What I mean is, if you're losing more than 3-4 matches in a row, you probably need to take a break and gather your wits about you otherwise it's most likely going to be a slippery slope. But yea, I can't say I disagree with a smaller point count as it could most likely lead to more accurate rankings (I get the feeling this is related to what you meant by floating ladder...)
Hehe, oh losing streaks are real. Many threads we've tried to figure out it. The best I can say is for one reason or another some players, I'm one of them, seem to get slotted into some "player value hell" where we're constantly matched on teams destined to lose. back to back, no matter the lobby. And then suddenly it does a 180 and the matches become easy again all the way up, before flipping back the other way. One of my many theories is, how they always say they match based on playstyle etc. I wonder if some us perform in such a way or win with such teams that the system slots us as "team carrier role" players and often assigns us the underdog team because it's determined we "even the odds" against the more solid team (which seldom works.) There's also a day/time of day factor. I've found, often, Sunday evenings, the A ranks are brutal and seem to consist mostly of alts. Not all weeks but it seems more often to be sunday than not. Suddenly the A's consist of S/S+ strategies and speeds, and I get very good teams who are just not as good as the amazingly good other team. Then a day or two later it reverts back and the A's are back to A's with teams that don't know how to push against perfectly normal other teams. There's a weird dichotomy in the ranks. Sunday I won 3 of about 20 matches. These weren't bad games, my team didn't play badly, they played quite well. They defended an early lead most of the game then got overwhelmed, me along with them. I wasn't playing badly in fact I was playing better than usual, picking up a few tricks for CQC elitering, and in the few I won, I was the one that put the score on the board. But the opponents were simply better than us in almost every round. Keep in mind these were good games, with "fun losses" aside from the loss in rank points. Which is what's so sad about the loss of rank points. It doesn't reward extremely well fought games any different from getting steamrolled. Then the past two days I win/lose about half of the few I've played - they are much slower games played at lower level than those Sunday games (int he same rank!) and my teams seem fairly clueless and unable to push. Which group represents A? They're definitely two different tiers.
In one set I'm an equal member of a competent team that is clearly an inferior team overall to the other. In the other set I'm the "carrier" for the incompetent team (with eliter??) against a very averagely capable opposing team. Where it's interesting is that it's not random in different lobbies. It will consistently match me the same way until it decides to reverse how it matches me. the losing streaks are real but for some reason not all players seem to be affected by it. I can only assume there's something about the metrics for certain players that triggers that loop or somehow otherwise "confuses" the system about how it should be matching you. if you're one of those people it's really best to just accept that it is what it is and ignore what it does with you as best you can.
Smaller points just make sense. it makes any rank change consist of far larger sample data and gives time to offset any win/lose streak with an equal streak the other way to get a better balance of where your trends really sit. As is it consists of FAR too little sample data and allows rank changes far too easily to forge momentum in the wrong direction.
Oh and hey, I think I should let you know that before Splatoon I was a pretty hardcore SF4 player (hehe) and to use SF as an example regarding my earlier comment on losing streaks. If you play a FT10 match vs someone and you lose 3 matches in a row, you definitely have to give it some thought and adjust/adapt otherwise you're probably going to lose the rest and end with a result like 1-10 or something.
I'm AWFUL at fighting games :) But just using the matchmaking system example SF is a lot more balanced in that it does retain your player/weapon value differently. it also has more sophisticated player metrics than a mere win/lose/playstyle so the odds of getting such bad matches are lower. Additional it's of course not team based, so if you lost the match, you lost the match, not being let down by others messing up. that also makes it easier for it to assign better matches because your results are your own, not 1/4 of the actual result ;)
I'm not sure how I should have taken your message but thanks anyways. Maybe I'll someday find enough motivation to start playing ranked again...
Honestly, especially with maining a weapon other than a midrange shooter, you're going to be fairly dependent on your teams, and as a result, your rank will also be more heavily weighted by your teams performance than simply your own. Lots of people will tell you "if you're good enough you can do it" and to a degree that's true, but it tends ot involve playing well above your rank level (I.E. to get out of A+ you have to play at S+ level if you're trying to carry your teams and make yourself be the difference.) That becomes very unfun. I hate the threat of dropping to the B's, but between the A's I simply can't get myself to care much anymore, knowing how the ranking will ultimately behave.
