The Purpose of Ranked Modes in Fighting Games
What makes them work, and what keeps them active
When I first started going to my Pokkén Tournament DX locals, the players there didn’t recognize me at first. I figured this would be obvious, since I was new to the bracket (although I had been attending other games at Wednesday Night Fights for a while) but instead, I was asked about if I ever played Pokkén’s online ranked mode. I thought this was very odd, to say the least. For one, at this point in time, Pokkén’s player base online was fairly healthy enough that you wouldn’t run into the same users in the ranked queue very often. I was also ranked around the middle of the ladder in the ranked queue: unlike Tekken, which uses its own kyu/dan system, Pokkén uses a straightforward system with rankings from E to S with five levels in each tier. I was ranked around B1 for most of my time online. The other reason why I thought putting a high value on ranked placements was weird was because I was beating most of these players- at my first WNF, I had even pulled an upset and eliminated the winner of the previous week’s bracket. This progress culminated in me placing in top 8 at Switchfest 2019, one of the last pre-pandemic Pokkén majors.
I had in fact played a lot of Pokkén’s ranked queue, but I ended up not playing it as much after a while once I felt its value diminish. The main contributor to this was the way the ranked system functioned- over time, it would weigh my losses at a disproportionate amount to how it would weigh my wins in terms of ranked points progression. This made me tunnel vision a lot while playing- instead of focusing on what my opponent was doing or why I was losing, I was simply focused on a vague concept of “I have to win” without thinking about how I would earn it. This also made those losses more frustrating, since my progress on several wins would be undone by a single loss and I would fail to understand what was happening. Of course, Pokkén DX being a delay-based title didn’t help much- having to fight both my opponent and the high latency made everything worse. For the rest of my time in Pokkén, I would play exclusively in the unranked queue for lower stakes and lower stress.
I wouldn’t touch ranked modes in any other fighting game until the GGPO+R update dropped for Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, and my goals in that game’s ranked queue were different than my goals in Pokkén. I figured that I would very frequently run into +R players who were better at the game than me, but +R ranked was also my best bet at quickly queuing up against other newbies. The fact that the rollback made the game way more responsive than other games I had been playing also let me focus more on the opponent in front of me rather than any dropped inputs. As a result, being able to practice against a wide variety of people with similar skill levels meant I was able to rapidly improve my gameplay without getting stomped by exceptionally strong players or getting too caught up in what my actual rank title was.
For a ranked game mode to have value, three conditions must be met.
1. There must be a substantial player-base. The ability to play against a variety of players and matchups is crucial to developing experience and game knowledge. This can often be out of the developer’s hands, especially as players come and go, but it can be bolstered by features like crossplay and regional matchmaking.
2. The skill-based matchmaking system should ideally pair you against players of equal skill level. In reality, you will often be matched up with players who are either slightly stronger or weaker than you, rather than someone who is exactly evenly matched, since the latter is much harder to pinpoint. Still, the ranked matchmaking queue wants to avoid matching you against players with significant skill gaps in either direction.
3. The amount of latency and input delay should be minimal. This is straightforward, but I’m not going to turn this into another article about rollback.
When ranked modes fail or feel unsatisfying to play in, it’s usually because one or more of these conditions have not been met. Furthermore, when one of these conditions fail, they tend to cascade and affect the others. For instance, bad netcode will cause people to drop the online features, which means there will be fewer people in the ranked queue. When the queue can’t connect you directly with players close in skill, it widens its search to everyone in the queue, so you end up playing matches with wider skill disparities. Even if the game has good netcode, the other two conditions can still diminish as the player-base gets smaller. This is usually why playing ranked at launch is great, since there’s a lot of new, early adoptees, but playing ranked later is a slog, as players who were just trying the game out have dropped it and moved on to something else.
Fighting game ranked modes historically haven’t always worked like ranked modes in other competitive games marketed as esports, like League of Legends or Overwatch. While players in the Grandmaster and Challenger tiers in League are all professional-level competitors, high-ranked players in fighting games don’t always attend tournaments. This also applies in reverse- not every strong tournament player touches their game’s ranked queue. Thus, while it’s totally possible for you to recognize strong players in a certain game’s bracket because you’ve seen their username on the leaderboards, it’s also likely that you’ll see people competing who you won’t recognize. This is, of course, not to say that you won’t see your Daigos and Punks at the top of your game’s ranked ladder, or that fresh names who are high on the ladder wouldn’t do well in bracket- it’s just an argument that ranked results aren’t one to one with tournament results. Just ask my local Pokkén scene.
The other main reason why ranked modes are difficult to play, and why ladder placements don’t necessarily translate to bracket results, is that the way rank is earned incentivizes an extremely specific focus on playing a lot and winning more than you lose. When the stakes on the line are an arbitrary emblem next to your username, your incentive when playing shifts from trying to figure out your opponent to simply winning so that your MMR count gets higher. This becomes frustrating when you lose points or even when you demote, because it can often feel like the game is suggesting you are somehow worse than you were a few moments ago just because you lost a handful of games- especially when losses are weighed more than wins in the MMR system. As a result, players have an unhealthy perspective when processing match losses. Rather than trying to understand why they lost (where they got outplayed, what mistakes they made, what tools they may have to learn and adapt) their main takeaways are more emotional and subjective (“I shouldn’t have lost that because I’m X rank or I’ve been winning Y amount of games.”)
The ‘win more than you lose’ format does at least mirror how losses are weighed in a double elimination bracket, but it significantly changes the player’s expectations. While the goal is similar, you can’t afford to lose twice at all in bracket, whereas in ranked ladders you can at least rematch immediately and earn back the points you lost. The open bracket nature of tournaments also brings together a wild combination of different skill levels, unlike a properly functioning online ranked queue. Because of this, bracket placements vary wildly, as someone who placed top 8 one week can be upset the next. Tournament standings also represent different results than an online rank does- simply winning two games in bracket means you’ve outplaced half of all entrants. Since the encouraged skillset and mentality of online ranked modes is different than that of tournament competition, neither format is the end-all be-all determinant factor of an individual player’s skill. Instead, ranked modes should be utilized as a tool where you can get consistent high-quality practice, with tournament brackets being where that practice pays off- or doesn’t.
Something I personally enjoy about the ranked Tower in Guilty Gear Strive is how it incentivizes player retention in the ranked queue and diminishes the overall emphasis on grinding points. While it is possible to be promoted and demoted between floors and skill ratings, you don’t have to display your rank on your player profile and you also aren’t barred from matchmaking against the floors you were just kicked from. If you were on floor 8 and you got demoted to floor 7 after a handful of bad losses, you can continue to play against the higher floors if you really want to. (Quick Start will also match you against players one floor above and below you if they’re also in the standby matchmaking queue.) Even once you make it to the Celestial floor, once you’ve won your qualifiers, you’re free to play against other Celestial VIPs until the ranks reset by the next month. The incentive of making it to Celestial and earning things like the VIP bounty poster retains players in ranked, and the floor ranks only being significant when climbing to Celestial in the first place, end up creating a ranked mode that has been way more fun and addicting to play in than any other fighting game I’ve tried. It satisfies the craving of players who genuinely enjoy grinding points while keeping the stakes low.
The next major hurdle for online fighting games is crossplay, and adding such features would be a major bolster to all online modes, including ranked. Implementing crossplay and making everything seamless is another challenge in itself, due to things like server costs and multiple hardware platforms simply running the game differently, but uniting the player-base would massively increase the amount of players in the ranked queue. Either way, GGST has the other major requirements of a solid ranked system satisfied: skill-based matchmaking and good rollback netcode. Even without crossplay, GGST has had one of the most successful fighting game launches in recent history, with over 300k units sold overall and one of the largest PC fighting game launches ever, so the player-base is substantially large regardless of platform. If other games in the future follow suit or even improve upon the groundwork laid by GGST, ranked matchmaking- and of course online play in general- has the potential to be a valuable game mode for more serious players.
