What’s the point of deranking every season?

[cipsbsndj]

Alright, so today I went on pretty bad losing streak in S rank today (whoops), and my tilt-riddled brain started wondering, what’s the point of the game deranking the player after every season?

If I got to S+6 last season (I am very proud of that), then why am I put all the way back down in S? The game already allows me to derank myself once a season, so was the point of it being forced upon everyone? I’m definitely not the first person to complain about this, but I lost a lotta points today and I’m salty about it.

The deranking thing is not that big of a deal, but I still find it annoying.

 

[Dessgeega]

This game is all about the grind. Every aspect of Splatoon is designed to keep you playing indefinitely. Gear, licenses, weapon stars, salmon run scales, it all presumes you're going to devote many hours to the game. The deranks are just another design choice intended to keep folks playing.

What's funny to me is that it really only affects active players. Last season I went down to S and barely played anarchy for months because my focus was elsewhere, didn't bother to get back to S+. The season ended, and I was deranked from S with 430 points to... S with 300 points. WOAH!

 

[missingno]

There are legitimate reasons for a competitive ranked leaderboard to penalize inactivity. Ranks are relative to other players, and if you haven't been playing in a while then how you fared against people playing a long time ago may not accurately reflect how you'd fare against active players still grinding today. You especially want to avoid a situation where someone grinds to the top of the leaderboard early on when the meta is not as developed, then retires and keeps that spot without ever playing again, even though other players have probably gotten way better by now.

However, the way S3 is doing it is little more than engagement bait. Letter ranks are already a very badly designed system, to the point where they have no integrity worth protecting anyway. Nor is there a leaderboard for letters anyway. We do want top 500 X players to continue proving themselves if they want to keep their position, but there's no reason to be bumping Jimmy B+ down.

Plus, the Glicko-2 they have behind the scenes includes a much better mechanism for doing this - simply increase an inactive player's RD value over time, so that they will recalibrate when they return, and use a formula like GXE for leaderboard placement that will drop players with a high RD.

 

[DzNutsKong]

I genuinely think that the Anarchy ranked system isn't even meant to be a real ranking and is just meant to make ""less hardcore"" players feel like they can get places without going to X Battles where some people will think only top players and tryhards go, whatever that means. Turf War is meant to be the super casual mode where the worse team can win by design, and X Battles are the closest we'll get to a fully competitive ranked mode even if it's not perfect. You literally need to play Turf War to unlock Open to unlock X Battles so the devs clearly want it to feel like a midground of some kind and it only makes sense that it's designed like this. There are ideas that make sense if you give someone the most basic explanation of how they work but completely fall apart when someone familiar with this kinda stuff thinks about it for too long.