Every day I feel more and more vindicated in my decision to never touch ranked. The S+ number system is probably supposed to be bragging rights, but can it really be bragging rights when the system is pure chaos?
I pretty much agree on Ranked being in a worse state than it ever was in Splatoon 1. Both games have the exact same issue of automatically pushing you out of lower ranks and eventually edging you towards S rank, but now with Splatoon 2 we can skip upwards faster and have a pretty easy time of not deranking. I've had way too many situations occur when I get put in Danger! (of course indicating the next loss is a 4th crack and a derank) and then literally crawled into OK and had it crack a game or 2 later. This essentially becomes a flytrap, people who get into ranks they aren't entirely ready for manage to luck out and stay there for ages, pushing others up to ranks they don't belong in, and they do the same thing to the people they play with, they scrape wins to OK every single time, lose, reset their progress and push more people upwards.
In Splatoon 1 you could say the same between how easy C- to B was with ranking where wins always gave you more points than defeats (C- kicks you out with +20/-10). The same thing happened there, but it took a lot longer because it you actually had to hit 100 points to score a rank up, and losing 5 matches would deplete 50 points for the most part. Now you can lose 5 matches and have 2 cracks, with the 6th match most likely being a 3rd crack, but you still only need 1 or 2 more wins to rank up, no progress was lost. So for the most part Splatoon 1's ranking system kept skill levels more balanced at first. I was a solid B/B+ for the first few weeks of Ranked, then bounced between B+ and A-, and around the time of 2.0.0 launching I climbed up to A+, and broke into S in September. I first hit S+ there in October or November (most likely November), and S+ totally felt like a place where the best of the best played.
As time went by and more people eventually got pushed into S (some might have gone for S+), they stopped playing Ranked, did Squads, turned around to their friends and said "I can help you get to S if you play Twin Squads with me, S and S+ don't have rank affected there so I can get you to A+99!" which started the trend of carrying lesser players into ranks they don't belong in, which pushes other people up to the next ranks they don't belong in. Some of those people carried to S attempted going for S+, they might have lucked out and got there, they might have cheesed a ranked mode to get there or they were able to learn how to play as an S and made to S+ after a long while struggling. The majority of carried players stopped at S and stuck to Squads, but the damage was still done for those who went back to solo. I can tell you now that I felt the quality of S+ degrading over time, and you were getting seriously unbalanced matches where all the amazing S+ players were on one team and up against lesser skilled S+ players who got lumped with the carried players who don't belong there.
As of right now, Splatoon 2 is at the point that the first game is now regarding Ranked. League Battles replaced Squads, which was a good thing, but we still have the issue of S+ being all over the place with skill. The ping based matchmaking doesn't help either because the Japanese were a hard counter to Westerners being able to get into S and S+ if they truly didn't deserve it yet. Splatoon 2's ranking system is more of a "how long you played" than Splatoon 1's (which was already like that). The only way to know you were an S or S+ was if you got there fairly early on in 2's lifespan (which I managed to do). I don't believe in the argument that S+ players aren't as good at this game as 1, because it handles the exact same, only differences being maps and weapon kits (all new specials and a few new subs). Overall the fact that S+ is easy is due to playing with Westerners non-stop and let's be honest here, we all know our player base generally lacks any real skill at this game.
The real mess shines through when you get paired with competitive players in a lobby and you're one of the only people that adapt and don't get dominated whilst your team throws themselves at them over and over, never learning. The rank system won't be fixed, and it's certainly not an improvement over the first. It's essentially little more than a "everyone's a winner" approach to letting the entire world and their dog hit S+ if they play long enough, it's not a matter of if, just a matter of when and that's just going to make Ranked super pointless and a waste of time. What's the point in being S+ if the matches will play like B ranks in a few month's time? It'll just be you dominating matches or getting dominated because one team will be so low skilled in comparison to the other, leading to dull and repetitive matches. It obviously means League Battles are the way to go, because they do placement matches and try to match players of similar Power together so matches are more balanced and less likely to swing one way with little effort on the winning team's part.
