I'd agree that S+ is kind of a special case (and was designed as a special case.) The thing with S+ is because it's everybody at the top, fighting only other people at the top, and because every round, someone has to lose, and because of the punishing scoring, the only players that can actually consistently stay in S+ are basically the "best of the best" - the ones that can consistently beat even the other people at the top, and rarely ever lose. So by nature of being the ceiling it will be a much more consistent rank than the others.
That said, I have also seen some awful S+'s. A pair of S+'s on my team that I felt like I was the one carrying them (and we lost to a bunch of A's & an S), the S+ sniper I ran circles around. Snipers I can consistently countersnipe. Which is a little of an echo of my prior post - which rank is my real rank? I KNOW I'm no S+ and never will be, nor did I even intend to be. The good S+s' run absolute circles around me. BUT the fact that I CAN take on and beat some S+s' is interesting. I'm sure they're poor S+ examples...but should I be able to do better than ANY S+? If the brackets were properly separated the answer would be no. Conversely on my B+ alt, I've seen such devastating teams, identical to A+/S/S+ - heck I WISH I could have had some of those B+'s on my team in A+ & S. We'd have dominated! What are they doing there? How did they not move on? But yet there seems to be a large pool of these "top skill" people in B+ that I kept getting parired with them. Lots of alts, so that there's this S meta running within B+ - and it seems like if you're high skill in B+ it just pairs you with other alts in B+. So the high skill people can linger in the lower ranks forever because they're actually playing games mostly at their own skill.
Not to diminish Momo's points on scumming/carrying/alts - but the matchmaker still plays a huuuge role in the chaos by sandbagging good players in lower ranks. I did finally get up to A- on the alt last night, but it was not thanks to anything I did, rather the system finally started giving me "normal B+" matches after the RM rotation came up and I aced through every match landing the KO myself. A huge disparity from the slaughter fests from the prior rotation and the previous nights rotations.
(And FWIW, for those that say "you need to get better and carry your teams in low ranks", it's not that. I was going undefeated as a sniper (k/0) numerous rounds during the B+ losses to teams that played like A+/S. Hard to "git good" if you're already undefeatable while being hunted and posting one of the top k's in the lobby.)
Technically I'm very much against alts and always have been. But I finally broke down and did it after facing SO many alts on my main account and ending up playing too many bad rotations taking me away from S too many times. The lesson I've learned is that I'm starting to question if anyone in B+ actually IS a B+. it seems like the C's are made of noobs & scrubs with some alts passing through. The B's, especially B+ seem to be made predominantly of A and S alts. The A's seem to be made largely of S+ alts (or at least that's who I seem to get paired with.) Through B+ I've seen so many "under lv25" and "under lv20" B+ players (in addition to myself) that it's fairly obvious this is not their first time through... The ones moving through B+ faster than myself (a level 15 B+....) are almost surely S+ based on the "speed run alt levelups" videos. I got to A- at LV20 (though I detoured a bit with some squads that went poorly), so that's kind of a good maker for how fast an A+/S can get through B+. Faster is probably a really good S or an S+. (In the A's I can identify an S+ largely by watching their killcam. I spent a lot of time playing TW and learned to guess their ranks - often I'd check the plaza and my S+ guesses were indeed S+. There's a movement pattern to S+ players unlike any lower rank.
I'm not sure what produces the disparity there. It could be simply the superior net connections. It could be the mindset. And of course we all know the bulk of the really great players are in Japan (not to say all Japanese players are excellent....I have too many teammates who are Japanese who clearly are the opposite of excellent. Even japanese players can carry the RM backward in A.... :) ) Maybe the Japanese just played more games. It seems like a lot of western players hate TW and play splatfest only for snails whereas a lot of Japanese enjoy it. ABC/Manocheese already said in the other thread he'd have played more if he knew he was close to #1. That difference probably isn't the most conclusive for the actual ranked problems. Though as someone suffering through bad sandcastle round after bad sandcastle round, including some top 100's apparently, I'm not sure WHAT to think!
