Well, that's what you see a lot of people believe. But it turns out us S+ players are blinded in our bubble. If you look at the statistics on the site I linked to, you see this:
Keep in mind that grinding to S+, if you're not S+ quality, can take A LOT of time. You keep kind of seeing the quality in S+ drop Every so often about 2-3 months after each Splatoon influx. I've noticed the quality in S+ REALLY drop the last few weeks (to weird amounts), and it makes sense because now's the time that the Christmas influx will have grinded out to S+. It's been borderline unplayable, and some of my buds have commented on the same thing independent of me (IE - I was complaining about it to myself, and they came to me complaining about it on their own).
This is correct. Anyone can get to S+ in this system, it just cares about who has the drive to do so. The fact that there is slightly more players in S+ than S shows this desire to push through. So the system does kind of work filtering out people who shouldn't be in S+... but only kind of.
Something that occurs to me now is that S+ is going to become an even worse place to play without the top-top players at least SOMETIMES deranking players who don't belong. Unless they make it harder to maintain S+ rank, the players within S+ are going to multiply.
I doubt it. They would have to get really lucky to actually rank up ten times before making it into X. Keep in mind that you have to go up to S+9 first. The most people who don't belong into S+ stay at S+0 all the time but never fill the bar. They go past the safe line, crack it, go back, go past the safe line again, crack it etc.
Yeah, but keep in mind the overall quality of S+ is going to be lower. You're basing this argument on the current S+ lobbies. Once most of the better players rank up to X, S+ lobbies should be easier to climb if you suck (and harder to climb if you're good because life is fun like that sometimes).
As for the quality of S+ lobbies becoming lower, you are right. However, I hope that the grinding aspect will keep the majority of players who are actually not eligible for X out. Albeit the level of play in S+ may become lower, you'll still have to live through 10 bar fillings on S+ until you become X. For those who are not good enough, it may become discouraging. As it stands today, only 1% of the playerbase even took the grind upon them to become S+10 and up. And those are usually not the bad players...Let's hope it stays so in the future.
Oh dear, no. You are right. Rank skipping really has to be gotten rid off then. Skips from C- up to A+ and so on are okay. But from then on, it should require you to earn your fame.
Only 1% of the player base is in S+ and a fraction of that is in S+ 10-50, and 90% of those players are in around S+ 150 +/- actually. So X rank will actually effect a very small amount of people.
The results screen is very likely carried over from S1, meaning it is organized by W-L ratio for the last X games (I forgot how many), not Power.
Ah true, though a good win-loss ratio and increasing power go hand in hand, so it still means I probably had a high power level. However after thinking about it, we're probably gonna have our power levels reset upon rank X's introduction, so I guess I won't be able to see what mine is currently.