Can you elaborate a little bit on the "progressive ladder" system? I don't play competitive online anything beside sploon so I'm not too familiar with any other kinds of ranking systems.
So, there's a few kinds of ladder systems that can be used for ranking a ladder. Splatoon uses what's called a "floating ladder." Floating ladders are, in general awful. Add in the team based scoring, and it becomes abhorrent. With the floating ladder there aren't ACTUAL ladder rungs in which you establish a fixed position. There's no blockades on either end of a given rank to make it harder to move up and harder to move down, and no favorability of upward or downard mobility. You float between the rungs. The present 11 rungs each with 100 points. C- through S+. In reality it's a single ladder rung of 0 to 1100. The way they accellerate or decelerate progression up the ladder and force downward movement on the ladder is adjusting the win/loss totals based on the ladder rung. And team matchup. But ultimately it's made very easy to slide between runs, and flail around up and down being forced to tread water to maintain position. Worse, because your own performance is only 1/8 of your score, the position you occupy is based more on other people's play within your rank than your own (unless you carry your teams or majorly fail your teams) so the result is very transient. The ladder itself is designed to facilitate moving up and down freely. This is also how it can mash together different ranks in a single lobby and just change your point totals to compensate, because it's all one really big rank, divided into different difficulty levels fairly loosely. It's a system that would work better if your battles were fixed to your rank only. I.E. In A you fight A only, in B+ you fight B+ only, in S you fight S only. that would have used the floating system to better effect. Actually in ANY ladder that would have a better effect, but it's more pronounced in this one. But other systems effectively need to be single rank only. This one fudges.
The "progressive ladder" favors upward movement over downward movement, or specifically, favors bracket challenges to advance. Each rung is more isolated and insulated. It has its assigned difficulty bracket, whether it's same letter only, or whether it's letter +/- 1 or whatever. As you rise in points within your bracket and reach, say, B-100, you are then presented either a single, or a series of challenge matches. The challenge matches are a "special mode" type of match that are presented specifically as advancement challenges. You play matches at the B level. if you win THOSE matches you get promoted to B. If you do not, you remain at B- minus some amount of points. Similarly in B, if you fall to 0 points, you are then presented a demotion challenge match or series of matches played at the B- rank. If you appropriately succeed there, you are NOT demoted, seen as still being a B. If you fail sufficiently your B- challenge, you are then demoted to B-. The idea is to keep each rung a clear definition of skill bracket. Difficult to drop from if you haven't ACTUALLY gone down in skill, but difficult to advance from if you can't prove you've earned it by playing at the next level of play sufficiently. That way your letter grade actually represents a complete skill bracket, and means you can continue challenging the more difficult next level more freely without the horrible losing streak effects and muddled brackets leading to mismatches we have now and being reset all the time to lower level play before you can face harder matches again.
A progressive ladder however requires periodic resets. Annually, or seasonally. Everybody's C-0 again and has to earn their way back up the ladder. This mitigates changes in the meta and the corruption of the player pools by bracket over time. Technically the floating ladder needs resets for the same reason but it's easier to say "it's self correcting." The negative here is some people will be upset having to earn their rank again. But skilled players generally move up the ranks again quickly while it flushes out the problems with weaker players in high pools, strong players in low pools, and peoples that got their rank in an old meta and aren't as competitive in the current meta. The risk of upsetting people over losing their rank is probably the reason Nintendo chose the floating system. But then the problem is the corrupt pools we have now where you can lose a well deserved rank due to bad luck being matched with people really in the wrong rank (or being in the wrong rank yourself.)
DDDD: SHEER TERROR. AND THIS IS PLAYER IS A HIGH SCHOOL GIRL :C
Yikes! They really are terrifying! There are some Japanese S+ eliters that I've had a blast going 1v1 with as a snipe-off. Even won against them. Then there are other ones that I can't even aim before I'm splatted! Even in S+ there's two totally different skill tiers!
After failing a repeated 1v1, squiffer vs sploosh-o-matic matches, I've somewhat adopted that Japanese player's strategy a few times myself. First with the sploosh and now with other weapons. It made me extremely salty that night (an amazing first with this game!) but I respect his fighting style.
Using mainly swim speed up gear, you burst-fire and swim to the enemy base, raid it, u-turn to mid, cover mid, u-turn to enemy base, repeat repeatedly. When meeting an opponent, do not engage directly. Fight near sizeable portions of good ink or lay down good ink around opponent while evading. Drop in and out of ink. Pop up at random ranges and angles to make yourself harder to track. Attack from angles at melee range.
I found him far more annoying and troublesome than the average run-n-gun shooters and bunny hop shooters.
Only other gunner tactic I had trouble with so far was one not afraid to superjump (to base or teammates). She often did this when base raiding or pushing forward. If you chased her down or cornered her she'd pull the ejector seat on her escapade before being splatted. Then she'd jump right back to the nearest teammate.
I adopted that strategy too.
Yeah I like the sploosh, but that technique is so annoying to deal with. I don't have much fun doing it myself with a sploosh though for some reason....I much prefer flanking with it than base raid style, and realized the actual melee weapons (brushes/rollers) are probably better suited for that. I think I liked sploosh as a cop out because I didn't want to button mash...but I'm becoming addicted to brushes now :D And after cursing them out enough, it's fun to be one ;) But yeah, I've seen a lot of similar sploosh strategies to the one you described, though they're run speed based more than swim speed. A run speed up sploosh is SOO annoying.
I'm not much of a base raider, but superjumping I'm big on. I main Custom Eliter, so I love utilizing my own beacons for a quick reposition from being with the ground troops :)
