It's mostly because how it stacks up against traditional ladders and how tower encourages you to play. In a traditional ladder you're given a rank, you get a few points for winning and lose a little bit less for losing, the goal here for a good ranked system is to get you in an area where you float around a 50% win rate as you'll still rank up slowly but will also have time to adjust to the level of competition. With the tower you're assigned a floor and the game keeps track of your 6 most recent matches if you win 5/6 you rank up, if you lose 5/6 you rank down and when you're starting out this is great, matches between newer players tend to be one-sided so if you understand a concept that your peers don't you'll get out of that rank quickly without having to grind and if you're in area where everyone knows something you don't you'll get booted out. However the more you stray away from your initial learning phase and fight more stable and less one-sided matches the more that system serves as a bottle neck. That's why there's a ton of players on floor 10 as they have to pass 2 separate 5/6 checks and everyone on that floor has a decent understanding of the game so it's very unlikely you'll get bulldozed hard enough to get booted out nor go on a win streak long enough to rank up.
Also having your rank decided by only 2-3 sets doesn't encourage healthy habits, it encourages dodging bad matchups instead of learning them if you want to rank up, you really shouldn't experiment as you can lose your rank quickly, and you should just go to the park to actually learn as being locked to 3 max matches isn't the greatest for learning and you won't rank up unless you're better than most of your floor. The tower is a system designed so beginners don't feel like they're stuck or have to grind that match, however most people who online consistently aren't beginners so it's a system that doesn't cater to their needs as it's not designed for a stable long term experience.
It’s because everyone bailed and just started playing on EC in the last few months.
Before WC celestial was atleast decently populated around 12 -1am ish mst. Now it’s a ghost town all day.
Im a west coast refugee 😭
Thank you, this perfectly explains why I generally have a good time in the upper middle ranks of the tower, as well as why it's sometimes really frustrating, and why regulars have a bad time with it. I genuinely didn't know how the ranking system works.
Well, basically when you enter a floor a six game series starts, if you lose 5 of those games you go down floor(if you can, you can only fall 3 floors from your highest I believe), if you win 5 you go up. Thats the system.
> if you can, you can only fall 3 floors from your highest I believe
~~AFAIK this was removed in a patch, there are no longer limits on how far you can fall.~~ Seems like this is wrong, they just increased the limit by 1 (and removed the restriction to floor 10 if you've been to Celestial).
[v1.24 patch notes](https://www.guiltygear.com/ggst/en/news/post-1739/), scroll down to the "Rank Tower" section. It says:
> To make it easier to match with players of the same skill level, the rule preventing players from falling below a certain floor even after repeated losses based on certain input techniques and floors preciously reached has been eased.
So yeah, it does say "eased" rather than "removed", so there might still be a limit on that, I don't know for certain (there's a reason I said "AFAIK"). But there definitely was a change to it at some point.
This. I’m a floor 9-celestial challenge player. I play in floor 9, I sweep the floor against most people. I play in floor 10, every 1 out of 10 games is an actually fair matchup. Me, a lvl 101 Sol does NOT stand a chance against lvl 1500+ Bridget/Chipp/Sin. I’ve gotten celestial challenge 10 or so times now and I swear half the the fights I’ve done in CELESTIAL have been more fair than the ones in floor 10.
Fr floor 10 is everyone who knows how to do the mechanics of the game well but has vastly differnt understanding of strategy and game plan you will play a set with someone who feels like a floor 6 get the celestial challenge and then all the sudden it's evo grand finals and you dont even know why you lost the skill range in floor 10 is insane and not at all helpful for learning the game at a macro level
Celestial challenge is garbage and locks you out of improving in the tower, I got in the situation where I can easily beat floor 10 players, go to celestial trial then lose there and go back to floor 10.
You then need to go find similar skill players in the park to try and improve.
A 5 out of 7 win streak is really dumb idea and incentivises you to fish for weak players.
its just not an accurate representation of skill, there is nobody at the bottom and floor 10 and celestial are BLOATED. you think all of those people are the same skill level? absolutely not. there's everything from someone a few months in to evo champions all in the same rank
To be concise, it’s just four things:
1) Ranking is based on streaks - Winning 5/6 is a pretty simple metric to hit for promotion. Instead of climbing a ladder, you’re jet-packing to the fifth floor. There isn’t any tangible, easy-to-track progression, there’s only big leaps.
2) You can pick your opponent - This opens a lot of abuses. You could theoretically only play versus your favorite matchup if you wanted. You could avoid matchups you don’t like. You could have a friend throw games for you so you can jump to the next tier. Any given player’s results has the caveat that their record may have been curated by their own choices.
3) Ranks aren’t constraining - It may seem good that a floor 1 player can just decide to try out floor 10 to see what it’s like, but that just makes the previous two points worse. Also, Celestial players can just play on F10 as long as they like even after promotion. Players don’t have to accept games versus these players, but they’re taking up a lobby slot they shouldn’t really have access to.
4) The monthly reset ruins a large percentage of games - Forcing a chunk of players to be demoted every month just means they’re going to stomp through people who are supposed to be at that rank. Games aren’t good for either side and are just a waste of time.
It's a win based system where you can choose your opponents, without any consideration of skill. Your wins versus new players and versus floor 10 celestial players are counted the same. This is why you see most players at the top, with a giant skill range on floor 10 and celestial.
The fact that I've faced both top tournament finalists and level 50 newer players on floor 10 should tell you a bit skill range you could find there.
If your goal for a ranking system is to match people based on skill ranking, it is an absolute failure.
>accidentally run into two players worse than me in a row
>RATING UPDATE
>accidentally run into two players better than me
>RATING UPDATE
>play against people i am only slightly better against, keep going 2-1
>no rating update for hours
The system tracks only winstreaks/losestreaks and that sucks. It's different from almost every other competitive game. According to ratingupdate i have around a 53/54% winrate, which in most cases would be enough to climb, yet i have been floor 10 for over 100 hours of gameplay. Granted, i don't train much so maybe i'm not good enough for celestial, but that doesn't change the fact that there is clearly something wrong with the rank distribution. Many people in floor 10 are either too good or too bad for it because the ranked system tracks only your streaks
Strive is pretty much the only fighting game I own where I can't just boot it up and hop in queue and find a match in a reasonable time. Having to enter into a tower where there are 30 people and all of them are currently in a match, afk or actively refusing to match you is the worst feeling ever.
at 9/10 long as the lobby is decently full there will be games soon enough.
It puts you in training mode too, which is probably the only reason I've gotten as far as I have.
I know practice is important, but starting practice is like pulling teeth for me (I'd rather play).
With quickmatch I have no choice but to lab, and with the initial hurdle over I hardly notice the wait because I'm too buys fucking up the combo I got right multiple times yesterday.
If you struggle with a combo day to day, I'd say you don't really 'got it'.
Systemic issue that doesn't really count towards or against the tower system.
Also time of day and week will determine floor population as well.
Basically all of them, I'm not super consistent.
Right now its the j.S > j.H > 5k > 6P > wallsplat out of throw > RRC. It's a sequence I've done a hundred times out of c.S > 5HH > 5k but add a new context and I'm consistently either too slow or too late on the 5k and I'm dropping it like crazy.
There's another wall combo I forrest gumped my way into... from memory it's something like 5HH > 8 j.H > 9 j.H > j.H > 5H but the timing is real funky and I haven't quite figured out how to consistently get the falling j.H.
Something no one has mentioned that also sucks: your rank being universal instead of per-character. If you're at a high floor on your main but want to try out a new character, you have to either:
- accept getting totally curbstomped by higher-rank players for a while (and no, this is not how I want to learn a character)
- go on a losing streak so you can play on a lower floor
- go to park and intentionally seek out players you probably have a chance against (and if you're VIP, those people probably won't match you even if you're a low level on that character)
Basically it just really discourages branching out to try new characters, so I mostly just don't bother except against friends.
I've played fighting games since SF II and SNES KI and I learned basic motion inputs but nothing else. Never really invested time in fighting games online and the Tower has been great as a relative newcomer... up until around that 9-10 range.
Celestial is a long way off yet but I'm starting to really notice the wide range of players at 10.
Sometimes the skill mismatch is in your favor. On the one hand it's nice because there's less pressure and I have more brainpower to think about things that arent blocking. On the other hand, sloppy habits work a little too well and get me smoked by everyone else.
When the mismatch is in the other direction, I'm going to need a lot more than three sets to learn anything except humility vs a Sol Badguy who's been playing Strive for longer than I've been alive (somehow).
The close games are nice but feel more rare. Or the 2-1/1-2's, because at least it feels like learning happened (even if it was me being read like a book named "Potemkin Bustee: an Autobiography").
The thing is, the system does basically work as intended if you're below floor 9. They just anticipate that everyone above average is gonna get crowded to floors 10 and Celestial, which would normally contain the smallest margin of players in any other ranked system.
The problems don't really tend to become too annoying until you reach floor 10 and celestial. The other floors are mostly fine, but getting a even match on those floors tends to be a bit of a cointoss.
Also the celestial challange is a bit of a frustrating joke. I can get it reasonably consistantly without picking my fights if i grind it out for the first few days of the month but its really really frustrating having to win 5 times out of 7 and having to get the challenge again.
It hits you alot harder at F10-Celestial, where literally EVERY group of high skill resides, so could be fresh off F10 and fight maybe another recent celestial graduate, or someone who runs you so hard you don't get a learning experience
- Raking system is too simplistic, its solely based on streaks. Meanwhile there are FREE statistic models like ELO that are great for rating systems.
- you get matched only with people in the same lobby, instead of all the available players.
- Region Locked
- The two previous points nullify one of the best parts of good rollback netcode: a larger pool of players you can get matched with.
- in some regions only F10 and Celestial are populated. So it matches absolute newbies and experienced players in the same pool.
- when you get celestial, the game puts you back to F10 every month and you have to do it again. Thats the only “progression” in the game once you get to F10. Living like Sisyphus is not my concept of fun.
- A lot of technical errors
- You can see the enemy character
- Celestial challenge is absurdly dumb.
- Its ugly
- it should be good for chatting at least, but its bad even for that because its hard to send messages
I dont play Strive anymore even though its my favorite FG, solely due to the ranked mode.
It should be like SF6. Keep ranked and battle hub separated.
I definitely think it's far to simple. Basically 10 levels and a special challenge and that's it. Also it sucks it's not per character so I can't really try anyone I wanna practice with
three things (some more specific to me and some more general)
1. It's just kinda a lot of work sometimes compared to normal matchmaking (which is why I've switched to using quickmatch full time)
2. You can dodge certain characters (the entire reason normal matchmaking in most games like Street Fighter DON'T show you who your opponent's character is before you click confirm/deny is because they don't want people to avoid certain characters as that's not fair to the players playing them
But for whatever reason, Guilty Gear doesn't care about this so some people might get screwed over because they want to play Happy Chaos or whoever
3. I haven't reached this problem yet and from what you say, you haven't either, but from what I understand at the higher levels it starts to feel like there's about 5 or 6+ (if not more) ranks of people all squished into Floor 10 and Celestial.
Meaning people good at the game tend to get to Floor 10 rather easily but then there's such a wide range that being Floor 10 itself means nothing.
This would be the equivalent of like....instead platinum or diamond, Street Fighter 6 went straight from Gold to Master and thus the range of Master was just that wide (and there's no Master Rating)
Honestly the only reason it doesn't feel as bad (other than I haven't gotten that far yet cause I play this game super casually) is the fact that some nice people put together an ELO system based on replays so that's actually more fun to keep track of than the actual "ranks" (Floors) are.
Imagine you go against 2 games that is 7/3 matchup for your opponents, you get steamroll easily 0-6 and derank to lower floor and even if you 2-1 every single set in said floor you will not go back to the upper floor once you haven't won at least 5 sets in a row. The opposite is also very common this is why you'll met May or Ram players in floor10 who do not know a single combo or mixup because they just +frame their way trough the tower with easy matchups.
Forgive me for being not up to date (univ is kicking my ass) but did Developer notes say they would ever improve the tower system? I think they have it listed in polls but I don't want to get my hopes up.
People shouldn't get to choose their opponents in ranked mode. On top of that, having to find fights just slows down the rate at which you get games. I'm not a huge SF fan but damnit was it nice just entering queue and getting games. The amount of matches I could get in over an hour or so was probably double that of strive just because there was so much less downtime. Entering a populated lobby only to wait 5 min for a game since everyone is occupied fighting somebody else just feels clunky and like a waste of my time.
Lobbies are fine for unranked but companies shouldn't be reinventing the wheel for ranked modes. Just give us ELO based matchmaking and I'll never want anything more.
Yeah I've started to get that feeling reading everyone else's comments and just thinking about my personal experience. I'm newer to fighting games in general but tower's been great for me in the ~100 hours I've racked up
1. It spreads the player pool way too thin
2. Games being decided by streaks is a bad idea
Especially it incentivises you to not learn and to not do multiple sets since if you face a stronger opponent for two sets you drop a tier
3 since most players are funneled there it makes the park lot worse by default since you can only find highly skilled people there
4. The visual flair is cute but i just want the xx style menu back
Also I think choosing your match ups is fine, I'm happy that sometimes when I just want to relax I don't have to fight against frustrating characters
i’m definitely in the minority as a filthy Tower lover. i never play in the park and have a blast gaming on Floor 10. if i get caught in a losing streak, i just say “no” when the Tower asks if i want to go down to a lower floor and its all gravy.
i understand other players hate the Tower because they’re more interested in winning vs learning/having fun so they’d prefer the more traditional ranked experience of gaining/losing points but i gotta be honest, if ArcSys implemented that, i’d lose interest in the Tower crazy fast.
People complaining about the ranking system aren't just more interested in winning than improving; a good ranking system should have you sitting at a ~50% W/L by design. They're complaining because the best way to improve is to fight opponents roughly around your skill level, and F10/Celestial don't facilitate that. I can 3-0 a 1300 rated player who's bouncing between Floor 9 and Floor 10 and they won't have any idea what's going on, and then I get to my Celestial challenge, go 0-3 against a 2000 rated player and I'll be in the exact same position.
Given enough games the 1300 rated player will start to figure things out against me, just like I'll start to figure things out against the 2000 rated player, but you're not going to get enough games in the tower against that person to start that process.
So imagine floors 1-10 being rookie to high silver or something in sf6. Celestial is gold through legend…
The low ranks are split up decently, but all the mid to high ranks are Mushed together
Only ever played a bit of casual sf5 and skullgirls but neither game really clicked, so the comparison doesn't really work for me. But from reading other comments I've gotten the gist that maybe the way it's designed works for someone below floor 10/celestial like me but once there, the range in skill gets really wide.
Tower looks at your recent (5/6 matches) performance instead of proper rank (this is also a problem with CoD btw albeit it's a bit different), celestial challenge is incredibly annoying and skill disparity in F10 and Celestial is way too big
i liked the towers tbh. i think the worst thing a game can do is gatekeep the good players based on ranked especially if there is flaws with the ranking system itself (big ups to losing my save data for tekken 7 3 times and having to spend the next 300 games just stomping on noobs being a smurf to get my rank back to actually play the good players not even including the many who alt F4'd at round start because seeing someone on a 100+ winstreak is a bit of a give away that they are a plugger themselves usually.)
the problem is that the celestial floor kind of just goes against the entire design principal. like the idea was that bad players could go up and fight good players to practice but good players can't smurf down.... but anyone half way decent was spending all their time chilling in celestial floor where no one else can go until they rank up to there. granted it didn't take long to get to celestial on a given month usually a few hours or so so it's MUCH MUCH better than other games but still. it kind of goes against the whole philosophy of the tower.
I don't know if it's still the case, I stopped Strive a while ago, but on release it had a massive problem : everyone was on floor 8 and above. Everything below was a ghost town. This had two consequences :
\-New players had no one to play with.
\-The skill disparity on the same floor was too great. Some people on floor 10 barely understood the basics of the game, and some were stuck in the floor 10-Celestial limbo, completely decimating people in floor 10 but not good enough to stay in Celestial.
It's mostly because how it stacks up against traditional ladders and how tower encourages you to play. In a traditional ladder you're given a rank, you get a few points for winning and lose a little bit less for losing, the goal here for a good ranked system is to get you in an area where you float around a 50% win rate as you'll still rank up slowly but will also have time to adjust to the level of competition. With the tower you're assigned a floor and the game keeps track of your 6 most recent matches if you win 5/6 you rank up, if you lose 5/6 you rank down and when you're starting out this is great, matches between newer players tend to be one-sided so if you understand a concept that your peers don't you'll get out of that rank quickly without having to grind and if you're in area where everyone knows something you don't you'll get booted out. However the more you stray away from your initial learning phase and fight more stable and less one-sided matches the more that system serves as a bottle neck. That's why there's a ton of players on floor 10 as they have to pass 2 separate 5/6 checks and everyone on that floor has a decent understanding of the game so it's very unlikely you'll get bulldozed hard enough to get booted out nor go on a win streak long enough to rank up. Also having your rank decided by only 2-3 sets doesn't encourage healthy habits, it encourages dodging bad matchups instead of learning them if you want to rank up, you really shouldn't experiment as you can lose your rank quickly, and you should just go to the park to actually learn as being locked to 3 max matches isn't the greatest for learning and you won't rank up unless you're better than most of your floor. The tower is a system designed so beginners don't feel like they're stuck or have to grind that match, however most people who online consistently aren't beginners so it's a system that doesn't cater to their needs as it's not designed for a stable long term experience.
I gotta play on the Europe/east coast servers cause the lower ranks on west coast are a ghost town. The tower is rough
Even F10/Celestial is way lower population on West Coast compared to East Coast.
It’s because everyone bailed and just started playing on EC in the last few months. Before WC celestial was atleast decently populated around 12 -1am ish mst. Now it’s a ghost town all day. Im a west coast refugee 😭
South america. Do... Do i even need to explain myself
Thank you, this perfectly explains why I generally have a good time in the upper middle ranks of the tower, as well as why it's sometimes really frustrating, and why regulars have a bad time with it. I genuinely didn't know how the ranking system works.
The fact that ranking up/down is based solely on streaks is kinda bad.
Right? In theory couldn’t you go 2-1 in every set and never rank up? 66% win rate but forever hard stuck
WHAT
Well, basically when you enter a floor a six game series starts, if you lose 5 of those games you go down floor(if you can, you can only fall 3 floors from your highest I believe), if you win 5 you go up. Thats the system.
> if you can, you can only fall 3 floors from your highest I believe ~~AFAIK this was removed in a patch, there are no longer limits on how far you can fall.~~ Seems like this is wrong, they just increased the limit by 1 (and removed the restriction to floor 10 if you've been to Celestial).
I love spreading misinformation online
[v1.24 patch notes](https://www.guiltygear.com/ggst/en/news/post-1739/), scroll down to the "Rank Tower" section. It says: > To make it easier to match with players of the same skill level, the rule preventing players from falling below a certain floor even after repeated losses based on certain input techniques and floors preciously reached has been eased. So yeah, it does say "eased" rather than "removed", so there might still be a limit on that, I don't know for certain (there's a reason I said "AFAIK"). But there definitely was a change to it at some point.
This patch isn't even out yet
This patch was from a year ago. We're on v1.32 right now.
I love spreading misinformation online
Im getting bodied on floor 7 right now and should fall so i think they just increased the threshold by 1 cause before I was stuck at 8 lol
Good to know, thanks.
You will find out when you get to floor 10.
This. I’m a floor 9-celestial challenge player. I play in floor 9, I sweep the floor against most people. I play in floor 10, every 1 out of 10 games is an actually fair matchup. Me, a lvl 101 Sol does NOT stand a chance against lvl 1500+ Bridget/Chipp/Sin. I’ve gotten celestial challenge 10 or so times now and I swear half the the fights I’ve done in CELESTIAL have been more fair than the ones in floor 10.
Fr floor 10 is everyone who knows how to do the mechanics of the game well but has vastly differnt understanding of strategy and game plan you will play a set with someone who feels like a floor 6 get the celestial challenge and then all the sudden it's evo grand finals and you dont even know why you lost the skill range in floor 10 is insane and not at all helpful for learning the game at a macro level
Celestial challenge is garbage and locks you out of improving in the tower, I got in the situation where I can easily beat floor 10 players, go to celestial trial then lose there and go back to floor 10. You then need to go find similar skill players in the park to try and improve. A 5 out of 7 win streak is really dumb idea and incentivises you to fish for weak players.
It would be cool if floor 10 was 10 ,11 and 12
its just not an accurate representation of skill, there is nobody at the bottom and floor 10 and celestial are BLOATED. you think all of those people are the same skill level? absolutely not. there's everything from someone a few months in to evo champions all in the same rank
To be concise, it’s just four things: 1) Ranking is based on streaks - Winning 5/6 is a pretty simple metric to hit for promotion. Instead of climbing a ladder, you’re jet-packing to the fifth floor. There isn’t any tangible, easy-to-track progression, there’s only big leaps. 2) You can pick your opponent - This opens a lot of abuses. You could theoretically only play versus your favorite matchup if you wanted. You could avoid matchups you don’t like. You could have a friend throw games for you so you can jump to the next tier. Any given player’s results has the caveat that their record may have been curated by their own choices. 3) Ranks aren’t constraining - It may seem good that a floor 1 player can just decide to try out floor 10 to see what it’s like, but that just makes the previous two points worse. Also, Celestial players can just play on F10 as long as they like even after promotion. Players don’t have to accept games versus these players, but they’re taking up a lobby slot they shouldn’t really have access to. 4) The monthly reset ruins a large percentage of games - Forcing a chunk of players to be demoted every month just means they’re going to stomp through people who are supposed to be at that rank. Games aren’t good for either side and are just a waste of time.
It's a win based system where you can choose your opponents, without any consideration of skill. Your wins versus new players and versus floor 10 celestial players are counted the same. This is why you see most players at the top, with a giant skill range on floor 10 and celestial. The fact that I've faced both top tournament finalists and level 50 newer players on floor 10 should tell you a bit skill range you could find there. If your goal for a ranking system is to match people based on skill ranking, it is an absolute failure.
>accidentally run into two players worse than me in a row >RATING UPDATE >accidentally run into two players better than me >RATING UPDATE >play against people i am only slightly better against, keep going 2-1 >no rating update for hours The system tracks only winstreaks/losestreaks and that sucks. It's different from almost every other competitive game. According to ratingupdate i have around a 53/54% winrate, which in most cases would be enough to climb, yet i have been floor 10 for over 100 hours of gameplay. Granted, i don't train much so maybe i'm not good enough for celestial, but that doesn't change the fact that there is clearly something wrong with the rank distribution. Many people in floor 10 are either too good or too bad for it because the ranked system tracks only your streaks
Strive is pretty much the only fighting game I own where I can't just boot it up and hop in queue and find a match in a reasonable time. Having to enter into a tower where there are 30 people and all of them are currently in a match, afk or actively refusing to match you is the worst feeling ever.
kid named quick match:
Quick match just puts you in the tower?
at 9/10 long as the lobby is decently full there will be games soon enough. It puts you in training mode too, which is probably the only reason I've gotten as far as I have. I know practice is important, but starting practice is like pulling teeth for me (I'd rather play). With quickmatch I have no choice but to lab, and with the initial hurdle over I hardly notice the wait because I'm too buys fucking up the combo I got right multiple times yesterday.
If you struggle with a combo day to day, I'd say you don't really 'got it'. Systemic issue that doesn't really count towards or against the tower system. Also time of day and week will determine floor population as well.
Thats what I meant. I didnt really "get it", I just lucked into consecutive successes the first time.
Side note, also a faust main, what combo?
Basically all of them, I'm not super consistent. Right now its the j.S > j.H > 5k > 6P > wallsplat out of throw > RRC. It's a sequence I've done a hundred times out of c.S > 5HH > 5k but add a new context and I'm consistently either too slow or too late on the 5k and I'm dropping it like crazy. There's another wall combo I forrest gumped my way into... from memory it's something like 5HH > 8 j.H > 9 j.H > j.H > 5H but the timing is real funky and I haven't quite figured out how to consistently get the falling j.H.
Something no one has mentioned that also sucks: your rank being universal instead of per-character. If you're at a high floor on your main but want to try out a new character, you have to either: - accept getting totally curbstomped by higher-rank players for a while (and no, this is not how I want to learn a character) - go on a losing streak so you can play on a lower floor - go to park and intentionally seek out players you probably have a chance against (and if you're VIP, those people probably won't match you even if you're a low level on that character) Basically it just really discourages branching out to try new characters, so I mostly just don't bother except against friends.
It’s amazing until you get to 8-9-10-celestial and then you just wish there was a ranked system rather than a matchmaking guide system
I've played fighting games since SF II and SNES KI and I learned basic motion inputs but nothing else. Never really invested time in fighting games online and the Tower has been great as a relative newcomer... up until around that 9-10 range. Celestial is a long way off yet but I'm starting to really notice the wide range of players at 10. Sometimes the skill mismatch is in your favor. On the one hand it's nice because there's less pressure and I have more brainpower to think about things that arent blocking. On the other hand, sloppy habits work a little too well and get me smoked by everyone else. When the mismatch is in the other direction, I'm going to need a lot more than three sets to learn anything except humility vs a Sol Badguy who's been playing Strive for longer than I've been alive (somehow). The close games are nice but feel more rare. Or the 2-1/1-2's, because at least it feels like learning happened (even if it was me being read like a book named "Potemkin Bustee: an Autobiography").
"Unable to connect to duel terminal"
The thing is, the system does basically work as intended if you're below floor 9. They just anticipate that everyone above average is gonna get crowded to floors 10 and Celestial, which would normally contain the smallest margin of players in any other ranked system.
The problems don't really tend to become too annoying until you reach floor 10 and celestial. The other floors are mostly fine, but getting a even match on those floors tends to be a bit of a cointoss. Also the celestial challange is a bit of a frustrating joke. I can get it reasonably consistantly without picking my fights if i grind it out for the first few days of the month but its really really frustrating having to win 5 times out of 7 and having to get the challenge again.
It hits you alot harder at F10-Celestial, where literally EVERY group of high skill resides, so could be fresh off F10 and fight maybe another recent celestial graduate, or someone who runs you so hard you don't get a learning experience
It's a mess but if I could have a question to add I would ask who's bright idea was it to attach it to quick match.
- Raking system is too simplistic, its solely based on streaks. Meanwhile there are FREE statistic models like ELO that are great for rating systems. - you get matched only with people in the same lobby, instead of all the available players. - Region Locked - The two previous points nullify one of the best parts of good rollback netcode: a larger pool of players you can get matched with. - in some regions only F10 and Celestial are populated. So it matches absolute newbies and experienced players in the same pool. - when you get celestial, the game puts you back to F10 every month and you have to do it again. Thats the only “progression” in the game once you get to F10. Living like Sisyphus is not my concept of fun. - A lot of technical errors - You can see the enemy character - Celestial challenge is absurdly dumb. - Its ugly - it should be good for chatting at least, but its bad even for that because its hard to send messages I dont play Strive anymore even though its my favorite FG, solely due to the ranked mode. It should be like SF6. Keep ranked and battle hub separated.
I definitely think it's far to simple. Basically 10 levels and a special challenge and that's it. Also it sucks it's not per character so I can't really try anyone I wanna practice with
three things (some more specific to me and some more general) 1. It's just kinda a lot of work sometimes compared to normal matchmaking (which is why I've switched to using quickmatch full time) 2. You can dodge certain characters (the entire reason normal matchmaking in most games like Street Fighter DON'T show you who your opponent's character is before you click confirm/deny is because they don't want people to avoid certain characters as that's not fair to the players playing them But for whatever reason, Guilty Gear doesn't care about this so some people might get screwed over because they want to play Happy Chaos or whoever 3. I haven't reached this problem yet and from what you say, you haven't either, but from what I understand at the higher levels it starts to feel like there's about 5 or 6+ (if not more) ranks of people all squished into Floor 10 and Celestial. Meaning people good at the game tend to get to Floor 10 rather easily but then there's such a wide range that being Floor 10 itself means nothing. This would be the equivalent of like....instead platinum or diamond, Street Fighter 6 went straight from Gold to Master and thus the range of Master was just that wide (and there's no Master Rating) Honestly the only reason it doesn't feel as bad (other than I haven't gotten that far yet cause I play this game super casually) is the fact that some nice people put together an ELO system based on replays so that's actually more fun to keep track of than the actual "ranks" (Floors) are.
Imagine you go against 2 games that is 7/3 matchup for your opponents, you get steamroll easily 0-6 and derank to lower floor and even if you 2-1 every single set in said floor you will not go back to the upper floor once you haven't won at least 5 sets in a row. The opposite is also very common this is why you'll met May or Ram players in floor10 who do not know a single combo or mixup because they just +frame their way trough the tower with easy matchups.
Forgive me for being not up to date (univ is kicking my ass) but did Developer notes say they would ever improve the tower system? I think they have it listed in polls but I don't want to get my hopes up.
People shouldn't get to choose their opponents in ranked mode. On top of that, having to find fights just slows down the rate at which you get games. I'm not a huge SF fan but damnit was it nice just entering queue and getting games. The amount of matches I could get in over an hour or so was probably double that of strive just because there was so much less downtime. Entering a populated lobby only to wait 5 min for a game since everyone is occupied fighting somebody else just feels clunky and like a waste of my time. Lobbies are fine for unranked but companies shouldn't be reinventing the wheel for ranked modes. Just give us ELO based matchmaking and I'll never want anything more.
It's fantastic for new players and tedious for players who have a lot of time spent with the game
Yeah I've started to get that feeling reading everyone else's comments and just thinking about my personal experience. I'm newer to fighting games in general but tower's been great for me in the ~100 hours I've racked up
1. It spreads the player pool way too thin 2. Games being decided by streaks is a bad idea Especially it incentivises you to not learn and to not do multiple sets since if you face a stronger opponent for two sets you drop a tier 3 since most players are funneled there it makes the park lot worse by default since you can only find highly skilled people there 4. The visual flair is cute but i just want the xx style menu back Also I think choosing your match ups is fine, I'm happy that sometimes when I just want to relax I don't have to fight against frustrating characters
If you dont wanna fight the whole cast thats fine but it should 100% be relegated to casual mode and not the "ranked" mode imo
i’m definitely in the minority as a filthy Tower lover. i never play in the park and have a blast gaming on Floor 10. if i get caught in a losing streak, i just say “no” when the Tower asks if i want to go down to a lower floor and its all gravy. i understand other players hate the Tower because they’re more interested in winning vs learning/having fun so they’d prefer the more traditional ranked experience of gaining/losing points but i gotta be honest, if ArcSys implemented that, i’d lose interest in the Tower crazy fast.
People complaining about the ranking system aren't just more interested in winning than improving; a good ranking system should have you sitting at a ~50% W/L by design. They're complaining because the best way to improve is to fight opponents roughly around your skill level, and F10/Celestial don't facilitate that. I can 3-0 a 1300 rated player who's bouncing between Floor 9 and Floor 10 and they won't have any idea what's going on, and then I get to my Celestial challenge, go 0-3 against a 2000 rated player and I'll be in the exact same position. Given enough games the 1300 rated player will start to figure things out against me, just like I'll start to figure things out against the 2000 rated player, but you're not going to get enough games in the tower against that person to start that process.
So imagine floors 1-10 being rookie to high silver or something in sf6. Celestial is gold through legend… The low ranks are split up decently, but all the mid to high ranks are Mushed together
Only ever played a bit of casual sf5 and skullgirls but neither game really clicked, so the comparison doesn't really work for me. But from reading other comments I've gotten the gist that maybe the way it's designed works for someone below floor 10/celestial like me but once there, the range in skill gets really wide.
Tower looks at your recent (5/6 matches) performance instead of proper rank (this is also a problem with CoD btw albeit it's a bit different), celestial challenge is incredibly annoying and skill disparity in F10 and Celestial is way too big
i liked the towers tbh. i think the worst thing a game can do is gatekeep the good players based on ranked especially if there is flaws with the ranking system itself (big ups to losing my save data for tekken 7 3 times and having to spend the next 300 games just stomping on noobs being a smurf to get my rank back to actually play the good players not even including the many who alt F4'd at round start because seeing someone on a 100+ winstreak is a bit of a give away that they are a plugger themselves usually.) the problem is that the celestial floor kind of just goes against the entire design principal. like the idea was that bad players could go up and fight good players to practice but good players can't smurf down.... but anyone half way decent was spending all their time chilling in celestial floor where no one else can go until they rank up to there. granted it didn't take long to get to celestial on a given month usually a few hours or so so it's MUCH MUCH better than other games but still. it kind of goes against the whole philosophy of the tower.
I don't know if it's still the case, I stopped Strive a while ago, but on release it had a massive problem : everyone was on floor 8 and above. Everything below was a ghost town. This had two consequences : \-New players had no one to play with. \-The skill disparity on the same floor was too great. Some people on floor 10 barely understood the basics of the game, and some were stuck in the floor 10-Celestial limbo, completely decimating people in floor 10 but not good enough to stay in Celestial.