I think the Battle Hub may be a reason for people not wanting to play ranked. If someone is not concerned about their MR(which resets anyway) there is not really any real reason to play in a FT2 environment unless you just really like FT2. I think Capcom have actually done a really good job with unranked modes which has had a negative effect on ranked. So many people choose the Battle Hub as their default mode and to be honest why wouldn't they if they don't care about MR(as seen with the amount of masters with 30 hours in ranked and then 800 in Battle Hub). In the hub you can play in tournaments, play sets as long as you like and chat to people. There are also events like fighting CPU Akuma and always getting rewarded with drive tickets. In comparison in ranked you get a number which a lot of people simply don't care about.
I didn't care for battle hub until they added the AI rank. Now whenever I want to play a bit, I just hop on BH and play with master AIs and call it a day. plus it saves me from having to buy ps plus just to play sf6 online.
That's a really good point I had not thought of. Personally, I don't like Battle Hub at all, but the way you put it makes me understand why so many other people might prefer it.
That's good though. Ranked will always be lower population or should be lower pop than a casual experience. Ranked should have a reason to be played but if the casual play being good is the reason then that's a mighty good reason.(I don't think that's the case though)
@@Chris_F I disagree. I think it's a great system for serious players because master rank is basically where actual ranked starts. If you are the kind of player who actually cares about their rank and climbing, then you know that MR is going to reflect your skill relatively accurately because of the ELO system. I don't mind master being easy to get to; rookie through diamond are essentially the tutorial to getting to the actual ranked points, MR, rather than the feel-good, constant progress points, LP. I do agree that the wall most people hit in Plat 1 is probably not fun or healthy for new players, this is my first fighting game and I took a break for a month or two after getting frustrated in Plat 1.
Making it so that you start Master at 1200 won't make a difference in the sense that you want it to. Because it's is an Elo system, the starting Elo is the middle point, it is currently 1500 because you start at 1500. If you started at 1200 then the middle point would be there, and the people who currently reach 2300 would instead reach a max of 2000. ( And those who currently gets sent to 800 MR conversely becomes 500 MR) It is important to remember that it will simply spread players out along a bell curve distribution starting at the middle point. I personally love how good the MR system is at rating a player (compared to the other players in his region, let's not get into regional MR differences). And I would dislike any change that hurts that. Maybe the resets hurt the players who fall below 1500 because they are repeatedly brought back up just to be sent right back down, I wonder if the new system they are implementing next phase will help with that at all. I think moving the entire ranked system to a Elo system would help matchmaking at all levels, (Though then setting 1500 as the middle point might not be granular enough and it would make sense to increase it and fiddle with the loss/gain per match, just keep it zero sum) but that would require abandoning ideas like derank protection and others.
I've read some comments here about demoting people from master below a certain MR, that would also not work. For example, let's say we set the cutoff so that anyone below 1300 gets demoted. Then the players right at 1300 would only have people better than them left in Master, so now them losing is guaranteed so they fall under 1300. Now the people that used to be 1400 have the same issue, only better people remain so they fall out. And so on and so forth until master is empty or an equilibrium is found. But then we also add the issue of people that got demoted then getting back to master, would they start over at the cutoff point at 1300 again and then immediately get knocked down again? Or would they start over from 1500 so that 200 new points get added into the system and it's start inflating to the point where MR doesn't measure skill well anymore and instead just reflects grind? It is vital to the function of the MR system that the average point amongst players is 1500. And as it works now it is always and forever perfectly 1500.
@@jesperpersson465 lower master ranked players get matched against diamond players all the time, and that's common in different games too. Demotion wouldn't mean 1300mr players would only play against 1300mr+ players, they would also play against diamonds, so that could be a way to survive in the low end of master rank while also giving the diamond players an opportunity to climb faster if they're "ready" for it.
@kyoruh Currently you do not gain MR when playing diamond players, but if you did that would make the system stop being zero sum, so MR would be constantly created when 1300 players play Diamonds. This would lead to MR inflation and make MR unable to be a measure of skill. It would essentially be identical to the current LP system that no one in master cares about.
@@jesperpersson465 ive noticed that even as it is now, anything under 1600mr isnt a very good indication of skill either. I play ppl right around 1500 every single day that should def be around platinum rank
Maybe adding a second set placement matches once you get into master would work? Like if you go 1-9 after reaching master from diamond 5 you go back to diamond before getting the master title
There is a problem with people looking for ranks as an end-goal and not as a tool for matchmaking. People reach their goal and become either satisfied or afraid to lose it, then that creates the rank anxiety and makes them quit at Plat 1, Diamond 1 and Master 1500MR.
Yeap, ths is the main issue here. Unranking causes anxiety. I think they did a good job with not deranking between leagues up to plat, but this just delayed the inevitable problem from showing up again.
theoretically it's possible but in actuality i'd be surprised if many people really get to master with a truly negative ranked only win rate. it's just not very likely at all.
I don’t think I would have played as long as I’m playing now if it wasn’t for this ranked system. I find it way more motivating than the ranked systems of other games which has the end result of making me feel like I’m not improving. The only drawback is that people want more than a number in master rank because they want their effort to show with some logo other than the master logo. The people who say MR should start at a new number don’t know how math works or ELO ratings work. It would not have the solution you want it to have.
oh man..... at 9:10 he says "I think starting at 1500 is too high, people should start at 1200" I really, really hope you do realize that it doesn't make any difference whatsoever.... 1500 is a completely arbitrary number as 1200 would as well. MR ranked is "0 sum" the numbers only mean anything on relation to each other. if you change the starting point to 1200, all that's going to be accomplished by that is that all people flocking around 1500 now would be flocking around 1200.... that's it. simple maths, and it doesn't matter at all. one thing that could work out a little better would be to try and access the performance at lower levels once you hit master.... I mean, if you sailed through Diamond super easily with 80% win rate and all, just start that guy at 1650 or something..... if you grinded diamond for months and got there with 46% win rate, place this guy on 1300.... simply changing the 1500 baseline for 1200 or 1000 or 50 trillion doesn't matter while it remains a 0 sum ranking.
If I'm understanding it correctly, the issue is that the game starts you at 1500MR, but that's the middle of Master rank, as opposed to the other ranks, where you get promoted to the very bottom of the next rank. Players are getting artificially inflated MR when they first start that doesn't really correlate to what their rank should be, and then when they play against players who have been in Master for a while and have earned that rank, they get beaten over and over again.
@ this is not an issue, just a proper elo system…. If you start with 0 MR, then the system is not a “0 sum” system making it meaningless. If you start it at any other arbitrary rank different than 0, then it would be the same every time and it wouldn’t matter. At the end of the day, the correct thing to do would be complete get rid of the LP system, make the placement matches give you a proper amount of MR and then name the ranks after the MR amount But this is what Capcom was trying to avoid with the LP system… they made it so it was easier to climb so people wouldn’t feel stuck…. But then they created the other issue Chris f presented here. You can either make an easy to climb ranking or a good one, it cannot be both… SF6 tried to be both and failed …. MR resets just makes it even worse
@@NickJJU the starting rank will always be ""the middle"", the number we call it doesn't matter unless people can demote from Master, which is a different discussion altogether.
Yeah I didn’t think that through enough but I agree that your winrate before getting to master should determine you’re placing in the MR system. No reason why both a 45% WR player and 80%+ WR player should both start at 1500
imo conclusions are not correct. Or not precise. Firrst we make assumptions that players listed as unranked master players quit the game. We can't be sure players are quitting. We only know that they have unranked master character as their highest ranked character. Unranked master characters means people did not play character THIS PHASE. Not that they did not play at all. Also unranked character in master are still technically 1500 MR I think. So let's say I have master 5 characters, but I only play Ryu this season and I am 1400 MR with him. Wouldn't I be counted as one of those who have highest ranked character as one of my characters I did not play this season? The only factual thing we can get from this chart is distribution - and yes. Here I have the same conclusions. System pushes you to actually reach platinum (if you are beginner) and master (if you are intermidate player). And I think that's actually fine because this ego boosting and dopamine from seeing constant progress can keep people in the game. There is no way we can know if all people belowe platinum are quitting the game, or just all those players already got to platinum and are still playing. Platinum 1 being such high percentage does not mean those people quit. It can mean they are stuck there. The other fact we can see is number of active accounts. 642k active accoubts. 1,5 mlion total. That's actually amazing retention rate for a fighting game. This game is 1,5 year old and keeps such high percentage of total player base as active? This is way better than people give credit for. Of course things could be done better. This whole naming convention for ranking makes no sense. Matchmaking being elo (mr ) based is fine, but I think game could give you better self ego boosting rewards for reaching higher mr numbers than just rewarding legend for top 500 players.
Unranked master players are not auto 1500. You have to play at least one ranked game to get 1500. Before that you just dont have a rating for that Phase. Every thing else you said sounds good though.
@@slidelikeMbison Yeah. I am not sure about that. Because I remember trying to scrap some CFN data back in the days and it was awkward to have unique accounts
I think the MR conversation is really tricky and I disagree with Ryan Hart's tweet on splitting up MR into separate ranks. The upper and lower barriers of MR is somewhat dependent on the quantity of people playing in the MR system. It's why it's hard to compare the MR of someone from the UK to the MR of someone from Japan for instance, because there is a far larger pool of players in Japan. MR doesn't come out of nowhere. For you to gain MR points, someone else has to lose the same amount that you gain. I think that's why I'd disagree with the idea of starting new Master players at 1200 MR too, because it wouldn't actually change the system, it would just move the goalposts. After the change normalises, 1200 would just become the new 1500 and people that are new Master players would get knocked down to 900 MR instead of getting knocked down to 1500 MR.
Yeah the MR thing is tough, that wasn’t really the main point of my video but it seems like that’s what most of the comments are about. Wish I put more thought into that part before making this video
The beginners problem can't be solved by moving the ranks, there's just not enough beginners, it was exactly the same after a few years in sfV. For the overall rank system I think it's just a "title" problem. Capcom wanted to have rookie to diamond to allow people to get an overall understanding of the game before getting them in a true elo system. In my opinion it's great to have a 0 sum elo system for the majority of the player base (I play chess) and I think what upsets high level players is having the same title as intermediate/advanced players. It's an ego thing. To solve that Capcom could just add platinum and diamond to the elo system, maybe add an extra "super master" rank and make them depend on the % of the player base not the mr points to avoid disparity between regions. So rookie to gold would be the same "ego boosting" that it is currently and starting at platinum people would have to grind to get a better rank, just like in any sports or serious games
Thats actually a good point. I don't see street fighter as a very casual game. Not very casual = not many new players/low level players. Eventually, only hard-core players will want to continue playing the game. This is not exclusive to street fighter 6, but i think a fighting game like street fighter 6bjust accentuates it even further. The new player to hard core player ratio is just too big. And I'm not even sure if it'd a problem or not. I think it's just how it is
I made it to Master way faster than I expected, never having made it to a similar rank in almost any other competitive game. I make almost no progress now. There is clearly a chasm of difference between 1200-1400 and 1500+. I play lots of casuals now in an effort to learn adaptation.
I think a part of it is if you have a healthy local scene, the ranked grind is a lot less worse when I meet up with insanely good players in my area twice a month. Every local I find myself playing better and better.
I don't know that this is the best solution either. Rookie and iron might make sense, but putting new players with players that are above their skill level is also going to be discouraging if they are consistently losing off the bat.
Idk if I agree with this sentiment. While it’s not that big of a difference. Being able to see your progress as a brand new players is really rewarding. Even if it ultimately means nothing in the long run.
@@BigQ52yep Rookie is really for folks that have barely laid eyes on a fg. Literally they don’t know difference between lp, mp, and hp. In Iron they may know how to do specials and conceptually understand faster buttons, are safer but less damaging. They’ll know jump ins are strong and can maybe do an anti air or two in a match. In bronze they anti air a tiny bit more. They know dp and fireball motions pretty well. They can zone a tiny bit, they use all their basic buttons. String basic combos together etc.. Honestly we need to stop acting like we’re smarter than Capcom. There is a reason SF6 is the fastest selling SF in history.
There's a need for a new player to feel progress, so these ranks are needed. There's almost no difference on skill level, but you need it for the progress.
I don't mind having so many people in masters, I like the idea of people getting pushed into it and then a better rating system takes hold. I think this is a different problem than what rank people are in. Calling someone a rookie doesn't make them one. I'm not saying there isn't an issue but idk how this is solved just by grouping. If it would help retain players6 then I'm all for it. Edit, - yeah Ryan hart wants online rank to be more meaningful than would help anyone. Not really sure what the point of that is. We have tournaments, we'd still not consider a top ranked player the same as a tourney winner. I appreciate you showing that as it helped me understand your goals here.
My main issue with master is it being the highest rank. Legend has its own set of problems (the “go to Japan and get legend” meme is real) but making it its own rank would probably stop people from thinking they hit the “best” rank at master
The only solution is 100s of thousands of more active players. Capcom doesn’t market this game the way they do a Resident Evil. Marketing, simply needs more investment if Capcom wants more players. But it seems to being doing good enough. The best way to market better would be to make Capcom Cup like a 5m grand prize with much larger prizes for lower places and the CPT World Warrior circuit. That would get massive headlines and droves of players would get into it. It could drive mass media coverage as well. This is IMO they need to make it a sport, money is the answer. Word of mouth will only get so far.
@@ismaeljrp1 Tournaments and marketing are irrelevant for this conversation. We're talking about Ranks; something that's already established and used more often than tournaments.
@ At the core we are talking about a lack of players. Which only gets resolved with a better game, more PR, marketing and advertising budgets to push sales.
Fighting games are difficult to want to keep playing because newer players and casuals are literally getting their ass kicked. Trying to retain this type of player leads to overwatch 2 type of scenario
@@Chris_F dumbed down the game, catering to casuals essentially causing the downfall of the games competitive scene People complained fighting games are hard to get into because of poor tutorials and no feedback when getting whooped (barrier of entry isnt friendly to beginners). They fixed some of that, but people don't like difficult things so they would lose this player base anyways and they would just move onto the next game. People that actually want to be good will do their due diligence and research or seek help This is coming from someone that's been playing fighting games since sf2 in my spare time (im a professional boxing coach). Top 64 at evo 2011 in mvc3 and top 500 at evo2024 in sf6 who was also competed in overwatch 1
I think MR hurt retention because people don't want to go down once they hit a goal. Also you know people are getting better, making the matches harder. I preferred the LP system.
As someone who has played mostly FPS games before, street fighter 6 being the first fighting game. I think you do spend most of your time in the silver to gold ranks when starting out in a shooter. That’s where you have time to learn the game and understand the smaller individual things that make you better. I got thru to gold and then platinum so quick in street fighter. I still feel like I worked hard and learned a lot, but I noticed that once I hit plat, there are people who are a lot better than me. I’m almost never playing anyone in plat 1 in the Us. I’m playing plat 4-5 and even diamonds. There’s nobody at my rank but the higher tiers of plat feel way better than me. It feels like I wasn’t given a good enough buffer zone to learn some mechanical things that are required for the game. I don’t think I want to quit after hitting plat, but it’s been very discouraging losing 5-6 in a row and being demoted to gold, and when I get back to plat, I just feel like I don’t have the right skill set developed for the game anymore.
Same here…I’ve been hard stuck in platinum with most characters I play except E.Honda which I got placed into Diamond two… I’ve started making progress now but only after realizing I had a spacing issue, needed to learn delay tech and optimal combos I can do consistently.
It's crazy...I started in silver and breezed thru to platinum. Platinum 3 is another tier Platinum 5/diamond1 is another tier as well Diamond 2,3 is another tier, D4/5 would be the last tier imo till you get to master...I haven't gotten to master so I don't know what's out there as far as rank is concerned, hope this helps
go to your locals. being able to learn from players way better than you in person will push you over the edge and get you comfortibly in the plat to diamond range. just be prepared to lose. a lot.
An interesting idea about MR is maybe your MR is hidden when you become Master until you've played 50 matches. Call it the Master Placement matches. At that point, then you get to see your MR (and others too) and even if you're at 1200-1300 now, you won't feel negative.
Long post warning...Sorry in advance While I agree with many of the points you make I think your exclusive focus on ranked is causing you to miss some critical details about the game overall. Unranked Masters being that high is not because those people aren't playing the game, by definition they have to be or they wouldn't be represented in the active player graph at all. It just means that they don't play ranked much anymore in favor of casual, battle hub, and custom rooms. If you ask most people who stop playing ranked or play way less often once they reach master you'll get two main answers. One is they prefer longer sets and find ranked having a maximum FT2 extremely unsatisfying and now play most of their matches in the battle hub, casual, or custom rooms where it may take slightly longer to find a match but once you do you can play FT3, FT5, FT10, and FT20 if you want. The other is the lack of character variety in ranked. As a master play who doesn't play ranked let me tell you who my most played against characters for November are; Dhalsim, Lily, Aki, and Manon (Sim is mostly because of his character specific birthday tournament). What do you think are the chances that these would be my most played against characters if I was grinding ranked? I got it at 0%, I almost certainly would be facing the shotos over and over again with a side of Bison, Cammy, and one or two other characters. This is fine for some people but others get fed up with facing the same few characters over and over again preferring the character variety you find in the battle hub. Just in the last month we've had a Jamie, Dee Jay, Honda, Aki, and Dhalsim character specific tournaments in the battle hub and after each of those tournaments I've gotten together with a friend that was also in the tournament and did a FT5 mirror match. I've had more fun there than I ever did playing an undying army of shotos in ranked. It also has to be stated that ranked has zero communication between players unlike the battle hub and custom rooms. Almost all my friends I've made in game have come from the latter and the few I've made in ranked were mostly from custom room invites anyway. Some people may prefer it this way but for others playing against faceless opponents that you can't communicate with feels souless. It barely feels different from playing against a random V Rival but at least then you can explore different character match-ups. There's tons of people who would theoretically be anywhere from 1100MR to 1900MR if they played ranked but we don't because we think ranked sucks. The only thing I take from Unranked being the highest is that many people leave ranked asap once their goal is met and they no longer have to play it. Playing other modes is just as valid way to play the game. There's also a huge player base who aren't represented on the graph at all. For every random Juri player that reaches master and decides to grind MR to see where they fall there is another that decides that they're going to now get Aki to master and then Chun Li to master after that and then Dee Jay to master after that etc. These people are not covered by the graph because they're not playing their highest ranked character anymore but you could double the length of the bars from high platinum and the entirety of diamond with players that are grinding sub characters to master. In fact you frequently hear complaints from true platinums and diamonds about how their rank is invested with master players grinding up another character. For some people it's more appealing to explore new characters than it is to grind MR. They won't show on the graph but they're still playing frequently.
not to mention a big problem is that at the start of the game people have the option THEMSELF to choose at what rank they wanna start (by saying I am new or already played a game) if they choose the second option they get catapulted into plat to high plat and let me tell you they dont play like plat or borderline diamond at all. That would maybe also explain the high quit rate at plat since they start in plat try the game lose or win a few rounds and then quit
it actually sucks to be a new player and wait so much to find a match in the lower ranks, it usually takes me about 3+ minutes to find one. Not to mention having to fight the same people multiple times.
Another issue is having characters individually ranked. When a new character drops, diamond gets filled with masters and platinum gets filled with diamonds, most of whom have better fundamentals than the intended level of those ranks even if they are learning the character. Probably a similar thing is happening at 1500mr with first time masters vs people on their nth character. I don't know the fix, but it also contributes to people thinking all new dlc are pay to win because they're encountering higher ranked players picking up a new character.
The problem with a lot of fighting games is trying to teeter on not alienating new players by making them feel bad but also pushing them forward. I honestly think SFV ranked was better for lower levels compared to 6 EASILY. You could really tell the difference between a gold and an ultra plat. Once you hit diamond that was out the window because it was Dia-Warlord but the lower was better because you actually lost points. 6 now, not to be rude but you see people in diamond that legitimately play like silver SFV in 6. The gain 60 but lose 40 in 6 just doesn’t work always pushing people up. I think the best scenario which would piss a lot of people off would be to make gains and losses more like SFV, make the grind a bit harder, buff winstreaks hard to get people out of lower ranks that shouldn’t be there (V did this very well). However, with that a lot of players will reject the game thinking they are not improving because the number isn’t going up. Tons of people do not have the mindset to realize you can improve from losses and wins and it is a long long process in fighting games. Not everyone will pick it up and be gifted.
Why did i quit at platinum ? Well it was quick to rush there but i m too lazy to grind allllllllllllllll the way to Master when it was so easy and quick to go to platinum. Can go to master but ranked is such a pain in the ass i can t find the motivation, got more fun playing casual or with friend.
Interesting discussion. Capcom recently announced that the MR points after a reset will be based on your previous MR. If you ended the period around 1300 MR, you will start back around that level.
bronze player here from EU; it's true the wait times are pretty bad. If it's evening/night and lots of ppl are on it's always a 5 min or less wait but if it's morning or middle of the day you looking at a bunch more: this morning I labbed while having matchmaking turned on for about 20 minutes and only got 1 match
@@touchMelilbro Do you make use of the expanded matchmaking scope or do you stick to the default 'limited' option? Changing that should give you games against opponents from Europe West, which is quite a crowded region. You may have better luck with that.
Master from EU here, peaked at 1800, i'm fairly new to street fighter as sf6 is the first I actually play not ''casually''. The main thing that made me stopped playing ranked in EU, is the matchmaking. I absolutely hate the fact that I often get put against people with 300/400 less MR than I have. If I win, which is the case 80% of the time, I get 2 points, if I lose, I lose 15, in a game that can feel random at times (I feel like momentum is too strong across the whole cast in this game, imo strong momentum should be character specific and handled with a weakness vs strength point of view balance wise). Matchmaking and the mr system is what made me stopped playing ranked. As volatile as the game is, I feel like forced ft2 before points get lost/won would help a lot. Matchmaking still needs to get fixed tho.
I think the problem is that we see MR as absolute value while it is not. It is relative. Let's imagine a region that has only 1000 players but they are all Punk level - absolute world class. All of them would be around 1500 MR while being the best players in the world. In EU playerpool is smaller so matchmaking is not able to always put you against people with similar MR. And in EU 1800 is very high MR, you are basically top 200 ranked player in region so it is just normal that majority of your matches will be vs lower rated opponents. Yeah I know that probably it sucks to see having positive win rate on ranked session and still losing points, but again. It's all relative. In elo based system it's extremely hard to gain ranking points when you are in the higher on the ranking list. To put this into perspective Magnus Carlsen won a top level chess tournament vs similar (but lower) rated opponents. He won majority of his games, lost only one. At the end of the tournament he lost few points in his elo rating. I agree for sure on few points. Game could do much better job on making you feel good about your ranking, when it is relative. Seeing yourself as 1800MR and not being impressed while you should be is a shame. Also yes, it is definetly weird and bad choice to make people lose MR after winning a set (you can win 2-1 vs lower rated opponent and still lose MR)
On the mr distribution, while i agree that most players going into master are closer to 1200ish, the fact that everyone starts at 1500 makes me think that changing the defult mr to 1200 might move the numbers around but not actually solve the issue
I just got into Plat 2 after grinding through Plat 1, seeing how many people are in that rank makes total sense for how volatile matches felt and the grind
So I got to Master last week, getting through Diamond 3-5 in 3 days with large winstreaks, and I think I'll be dropping the game. Simply put, seeing what I need to progress further just killed any motivation I had. My execution sucks, I can sometimes do a delay throw tech on a good day, I never go for combo extensions using DR because I drop them 9/10 times. I got to Master purely off the back of patience and spacing. The vision of spending hundreds of hours drilling option selects, optimal combos, learning matchups and practicing until I can pull those off in a real match when even the recording setups are a pain for me... Yeah I don't intend to play in any tournaments, I would rather devote that time to my other hobbies rather than bash my head against a wall for months, while being dunked on by more experienced players, until MAYBE I can reach a point where I'm able to hold my own at any semi-decent MR.
Took the words out of my mouth lol. It's a bummer because I know the game could be crazy fun again if I put in that kind of effort, but it's such an undertaking I don't think I'm willing to engage after the release of hitting master in the first place. Maybe that'll change. But the longer I wait the more I lose my skills lol.
One of the things I think SF6 lacks is a weekly/monthly casual competition for players at a similar skill level. Dota 2 has a weekly tournament setup called Battle Cup that places teams in one of 7 skill levels in a single elimination tournament to play 3-4 matches for an account badge. It costs $1 per player to enter and is genuinely some of the most fun I've had with the game. I keep thinking about how the Sajam Slam was one of the coolest tournaments/leagues of the past year because of the range of skill levels and even matchups. Giving a tournament to the Rookie/Iron/Bronze/Silver/Golds of the world where they could win, even for just bragging rights, would give folks a reason to play. One logistical problem that would need to be worked around is a Master rank player smurfing a new character in lower ranks, but Dota 2 worked around that by estimating an account skill level.
Proper criticism aside, SF6's ranks are soooo much better than Strive's systems. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gotta hold down my spot in the Platinum mines
I think the ranking system in SF6 is plain stupid. I started in SF5 and I needed years to get into the Diamond Rank. Although one has to consider that a lot of skill and knowledge will automatically transfer to the successor game, I do not understand the developers decision to make the Master Rank so easily accessible. It does not take a lot of dedication to get to Masters, and I've that many streamers changed into a minigame called "Bring every character to master rank"...which in SF5 would be insane. Once people grinded themselves into masters the MR experience is pretty tough, so I guess thats why most people quit there, leaving their character below 1500. You really have to be dedicated to the game to climb the 1800-1900s, but those players never really contributed to the overall performance or the state of the game. That is a very exclusive club that - although they buy the costumes and all the season passes for sure - the financial benefit from those players is negligable. Pushing new players or beginners to fast through the ranks does not work at all in 1v1 game that is based 100% on skill, since every little jump that you do in the ranks that brings you "too far" will ultimately lead so a few hours of negative gaming experience. I fully support Chris F' view. One thing that I think needs to be considered though: The system itself might explain the strange distribution. I guess that every players in SF6 somehow is able to reach Platinum 1+ after a relatively short time. This is due to some mechanics that are superior in lower ranks (Drive Impact, here we go). So even the new players will have a Platinum Char, that counts as their highest and is parked there for eternity.
I’m a Master rank in the UK and I feel like the climb to master was too easy. In SFV I think I got to Ultra Platinum, so to get to Master in 6 kind of shocked me. The highest MR I’ve reached is 1700, but then I’ve had losing streaks that take me back to 1500. The MR system seems to work fine, it’s the climb I think they need to make more of a challenge, which will keep the lower ranks populated, make the grind take a bit longer and even making people who quit at a certain rank stick with it a while longer. Who knows, maybe they’ll find a reason to stay and keep playing?
Something that I don’t think gets mentioned enough is how big that plat 1 wall is. The difference between a player in the g5/p1 range vs a player in p1/p2 range is massive and it feels really bad to level up a lot and not change actual rank at all. I legit learned a lot more going from p1 to p2 than my entire time in silver and gold
A few things I’d like to point out/comment on: first, if we’re looking at a graph of active players, then the bar showing plat 1 isn’t showing people who got there and quit, it’s showing people who are either in the process of ranking up, or are (like me) just hard stuck. Second, the problem with pushing people into the lower ranks to “make them healthier” is that it requires keeping people in those ranks; in other words leaving more players hard stuck in bronze, silver and gold. And maybe it’s just me, but I can’t imagine many people would feel motivated to continue if they’re unable to even reach the middle ranks, and if enough quit then you’re back to where you started. Finally, in response to you asking if silver and gold currently are nothing more than time sinks, to be fair, every rank is a time sink to some extent. Time = experience, and experience is fundamental to improvement, the only question is how much, with some needing more than others. As for what purpose Silver and Gold serve in SF6 atm, I’m no expert, but from what I’ve heard and from my experience, they’re the advanced beginner/lower intermediate ranks where players, ideally, learn a general game plan and test it, gradually growing more confident and competent as they climb. Unfortunately, I think at least some choose to instead “speed-run” this process by using cheese strats instead of properly learning the game, which leads to a harsher experience later on when those strats no longer work, which might partially explain the plat 1 situation.
FYI aside from the oddness of the population bumps in Gold 1, Plat 1, etc caused by derank protection and pure player psychology, the chart is actually very similar to Valorant. The main actual problem is that from the charts it is clear that although SF6 has insanely good retention, the number of new players is falling off. Capcom can broaden the skill bands to reduce matchmaking times, but this just makes ranked a scarier place for new players. Only new blood can recapture the feeling of beginner players learning together. There are several ways to address MR. As others have noted, Elo is intended to be zero-sum to accurately calculate player skill. But skill can be separated from rank so the fix is easy: Just give all players a "hidden" MR once they hit platinum and let Elo do its magic. After a couple of hundred matches, MR can be made visible to players whether you've hit Master or not since it will be broadly accurate. In fact, there would be something to be said for making MR visible to players from Platinum upwards. Generally Platinum is the point where players are pretty likely to continue playing regularly, and it would avoid the "cliff" from Diamond to Master.
I’m from Taiwan, and the matchmaking regions I’m paired with are mainly Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, with some matches against players from Japan and Korea, as well as occasional players from Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Here, the matchmaking time from Rookie to MR1500 is usually about one minute. In the Asian region, the popularity of SF6 is probably second only to Japan. Most beginners here quickly progress to Platinum 1 and tend to stay in the range between Platinum 1 and Diamond 1. Additionally, we have a large number of players who reach Master Rank, frequently switch characters, and play matches in the Platinum 5 to Diamond 5 range. Once they climb back to Master, they switch characters again to repeat the rank climb. Some even switch accounts or platforms to start over. As a result, in the Asian region, it’s the mid-level players who have the worst matchmaking experience, rather than the beginners. I asked GPT to help me with the translation.😂
I don't understand how you make the leap from looking at the distribution chart to projecting ranked queue times for low ranks. 1. The distribution says nothing about the actual queue times. A game with a perfect rank distribution but a smaller playerbase and worse netcode for distant connections will have less eligible ranked opponents period. 2. Why are we including the huge peaks on Plat 1 and MR-less Master in the hypothetical ranked pool in the first place? The overwhelming majority of those players are obviously not even playing ranked in the first place, thats why they're there.
This is how the ranks should be, anyone got any alternatives please post. Rookie-Iron-Bronze, 1 rank Silver-Gold, 1 rank Plat-Diamond, 1 rank Master-1100-1300, 1 rank Master-1301-1500, 1 rank Master-1501-1700, 1 rank Master-1701-1900, 1 rank Master-1901-Legend, 1 rank This would be better
I will speak on this topic because I have great insight i was a top ranked madden player who only played fighting games casually. No combos no online just story mode. I gave up madden and started my SF6 Journey I started in Iron Rank. I am now a platinum level 3 as of yesterday. For a new player to fighting games, bronze, silver and especially gold were not easy. I had to watch hundreds of hours of videos and practice so hard. It was extremely difficult making it out of silver and gold and that's with win streak bonuses. I however did it and I'm in platinum. Platinum however was another level of hard I was stuck at platinum 1 for awhile and now im understanding the game more and growing. Master should not be easy to obtain but at the same time speaking as a newbie to the FGC lower ranks are not easy for beginners. The problem is the placement matches granting high ranking and then players doing half the work to get to masters or being placed in a rank they honestly are not skilled enough to be in. Just my assessment.
Something to keep in mind, you can't accidentally do cool stuff in fighting games. You don't just boot up the game and hit an ed dream combo into some mixup for the game win. That comes after a lot of practice. In a shooter you can shoot randomly and miss a lot, but when you hit a headshot you are like: wow thats cool. Maybe you throw a nade and kill 3 people and feel awesome. You are doing things just like the pros. But nobody in below master rank is like, oops I pressed some button, did a crazy optimal combo and won the game. It looks and feels worse to play fighting games at the lower level which is also why retention is lower. Everyone sees the cool stuff, but the only people that can use it are above gold rank. Once people realize the work that goes into learning it + seeing you have to pay a yearly fee to keep getting the new characters, a lot of people will just leave to other FOMO games. Also the rank distribution is like this because of the win streaks being a thing until a certain rank. And generally the more you play the better you become. The new players are always a smaller percentage of the active playerbase, and this does reflect that. To me this doesn't seem like a problem or flaw, it's a result of how the rank system is designed. Sidenote: I have two characters in Diamond 3 and 4, once I hit master you can be sure I will ditch those characters and try others. Because there are many characters in the game and so far I've only played a couple. Why would I limit myself to master points grinding instead of trying new things?
I recently reached Master with Guile, and it was an achievement for me. Like you said, I felt a bit demotivated after dropping to 1200 points. I feel like that's what Capcom wants, but very few players actually stick around. Anyway, that's not the point of this comment. When I had Guile in Bronze, I also played with Ryu and left him in Bronze, then I continued with Guile. Now I picked up Ryu again, and I was basically smurfing. I realized that ranking up is way too fast; in just two days, I got to Platinum 1. I feel like the system where the more you win, the more points you earn isn't really healthy. I don’t mind being pushed to reach Master where the 'real ranked' begins, but it’s not cool that if you catch on quickly, you get thrown into Platinum with the 'big kids'. Another thing I’d add is that if you’re Diamond 5 and beat a Master, you get 250 points, and that’s A LOT. I didn’t stay in Diamond 5 for long because I beat two Masters (and one of them felt like they were playing on bot difficulty level 1-I even think they lost on purpose), and they sent me straight to Master. It felt more like they handed it to me rather than earning it genuinely, so the achievement didn’t feel as authentic.
It’s not a common talking point but, the FGC is a pretty toxic environment. And no matter how much people want to deny, hacking is a problem, and it’s becoming more sophisticated & harder to spot, Especially when one single exchange can be the difference between losing and winning.
I'm a veteran at fighting games (highest MR achieved at SF6 was 1900 before the last reset). I'm sometimes looking at the Street Fighter Reddit, and it's crazy the number of people who think that they are "done" with the game (in the sense that they think they mastered it) once they hit the "Master" Rank. "Master" Rank means nothing in this game.
The problem with the ranking system is that it convinces people they're good by letting them rank up. Then they get destroyed so hard in master rank that they never bother trying again. Either convinced they're not good after all, or that they need more practice. Both of which puts them in the hub, and there's not much reason to leave it.
When I started playing with Guile, it took me around four months to go from Bronze to Gold. It wasn’t super fast, but it wasn’t too slow either. Then, from Platinum to Diamond, it was a journey of many hours. My real elo hell was Diamond 3, where I was stuck for about six months. After that, reaching Diamond 4 and 5 was much quicker
I ranked my first char from rookie to master in S1 (Zangief). The ranks before Platinum were a blast to play cause they give bonus points if you're on a streak. That bonus dissapears from Platinum and up and that made those ranks feel really stale. I have friends that only ranked their characters to platinum because of that.
SFVI's ranking system is an abject failure, thanks to: Overly generous placement system, allowing you to basically start in high Diamond and reaching Master in an hour's time Players employing cheating scripts, taking advantage of the braindead Drive System mechanics, specifically Drive Impact and Perfect Parry Lack of ranks beyond Master Ranked Phases, MR, and Legend reset strips the sense of achievement from reaching a certain MR or if you can make it to Legend Not being able to derank from Master, specifically LP win/loss ratio turns ranking up into simply a matter of time and not skill The only thing that SFVI does well in terms of Ranked is providing you with different ranks for each character. SFIV and SFV did ranked a million times better than SFVI does now. The only problem with SFV's Ranked was that you only had one rank representing any character you chose.
You know I sucked at ranked tonight and I went searching for validation. The highest I’ve gotten was in the 1600MR range a couple of times. I’ve recently plummeted. Ranked just makes me feel horrible, honestly. The good moments feel like they don’t last long and the horrible moments feel like they last for a loooooong time. So honestly, I think I’m done with ranked. I don’t feel good the majority of time playing it. I don’t feel like the MR points represents me as a player. I have way more fun playing in casual matches, which is when I play my best and with friends. I have more fun and play better in tournaments as well.
One thing that doesn't help this situation is that when you reach master as one character you will always get guaranteed diamond from placement matches as any other characters you play. An issue I have with this game is that legend rank players reach over 2000 and then stop playing ranked, which is really unfair imo, no one else can fight them to knock them down and gain a decent amount of points for beating someone with higher points. It means you end up having to play against people with less mr and getting 3 or 4 points per win while risking losing 10 to 15 points for one loss. There needs to be a way to make this better. Thanks for the vid BTW Chris 👍
I totally agree with this. I would be considered intermediate. I'll take an occasional game from tourney players, but I can't compete. Atm, the only thing fun for me is taking all the characters to master, then stopping.
I think perhaps there are too many win streaks early on but I for one was thankful to get in to master and be in an elo system instead of ranked points. I actually find it less frustrating because I lose less points fighting players stronger than me so I find it actually encourages you to challenge stronger competition
The big issue is point distribution. You get a lot in lower ranks and too little in higher ranks making it feel like you pushing too hard for too little the closer you get to Master Rank. By the time you reach master rank you're tired, so you have no reason to keep pushing. If you want people to keep playing, make the point system a little better even in diamond rank. Many will most likely disagree, but players love seeing progression and hard work, when they're given too little, the passion to keep progressing will diminish.
My friend recently bought the game and placed at Rookie. He had to wait around 10-15 minutes for an opponent. If he’s lucky, he gets a 2-bar Wi-Fi guy from another side of the Earth. He’s now in Silver and the wait time is reduced to maybe 5-8 minutes, but it’s still very long.
The two biggest issues: 1. Climbing is too fast. 2. You can get to master losing most of your games. There were quite a few people when I last checked that were in master rank with sub 45% W/L ratios. You get too much for a win and not enough for losing in all ranks below the top. This is what's making the plat push such a breeze and those ranks below it almost meaningless. Add in the fact people are one and done'ing, this adds to a lot of people's inflated MMRs. If this game's ranked was a guaranteed FT2, it would be much better off here. This is the only game in existence where I've seen players get to the top rank in a couple hours time. Granted this isn't accomplished by just pros either. The retention, this goes with rewards. Even gacha games give rewards on ranked reset these days, yet you don't really get anything here so there is no real incentive to push ranks. Maybe give out drive tickets or something like that depending on where you rank on master MR reset.
The best way to fix this is by eliminating LP boost for hot streaks in silver and beyond. By Adding 2 more MR ranks between Diamond and Master. (Same as Valorant/League)
they should redistribute your MR during the reset based on where you ended, top players go to 1650, low MR players go to1350 and inbetween you stay the same rank?
I'm going to note that SF6's player retention overall has been incredibly high actually. For a player retention issue, this is evidently not a big problem. (Looking up numbers, it's even better than I expected, SF6 is GAINING active players.) But, it is true that finding matches in low ranks, especially in off hours or some regions, can be tough.
SF6 is my first ever fighting game and i started all the way down at rookie, slowly climbing up to master took me a a few months and while it felt good. The second i started trying to grind mr i was faced with the harsh reality that i was terrible at the game, sure you need to have some basic skills to get to master, but actually getting there is like when gon and killua find out about nen in HxH. its like a whole different lvl of player, especially with the lack of players in my regions compared to something like japan. I currently play out of Puerto Rico and the player bass in the surrounding area isn't huge so the mr ratings in match ups would be so uneven. multiple times me as a 1400mr ken was fighting legend ranked players including people like bananaken and todokai which on one side was fun but on the other made me realize im actually nowhere near the lvl of a true master player and after weeks of trying to go up in mr i slowly became unmotivated. it wasn't till recently with the release of terry that i came back and have decided i want to try to seriously get better and improve. But yeah i do think this ranked system is incredibly flawed, if this was any other game i should probably be somewhere around the middle ranks
I started Sf6 from scratch, and is the first SF Game that i take somehow seriously and also the first FG for that matter. With 35 hours of ranked and 30 of casual i am at platinum 5 (almost Diamond 1). And i think i could get to Diamond 3 without too much effort (meaning with my current level of play and playstyle). From then on i think i would have to put time again on improving specific areas of my game to advance further. Again It is the first fighting Game that i take somehow seriously and It felt that i ranked very very fast. I am from Europe and i never had to wait to much to get into matches. Maximum 1 minute and normally within 20 seconds i am already playing. I am quitting the game because i play alone, and It gets boring for me as i dont have friends to play with. So mindlessly going to ranked has its appeal but It is not enough to keep me interested for the long run i guess. Also It is worth to mentioning that It is a demanding game and i play after work so many times i am too tired to put extra effort on a game
I play in EU west and i personally cant complain about match searches at master rank or lower ranks it comes in usually in less then a minute. I also am one of those master players that stoped playing the game once I reached master with half of the roster. I simply lost interest due to the fact that i achieved more or less what i wanted and theres not much content for me besided grinding rank which will take alot of time investment and character specialization, and it gets really boring after a while. I cant offer many solutions besides releasing more content or interesting events but even still im not sure if that would help. I am also of the opinion that there should be less lower ranks as it seems pointless , i cant tell the difference between a bronze and a silver player? Aso master doesnt feel like master, they need to make you start at 1000 rating or something and if you end up loosing alot you should be demoted back to diamond. I disagree massively with the mentality of everyone should get master , because if everyone is master then no one is master.
The starting point of an Elo system like MR 1500 does not change relative skill levels. It only changes the average. Starting at 1000 MR would lower the current low MR of 1000 to 500. There are other ways to fix the large initial drop for many new players entering an Elo system. Did you stop enjoying improving on those characters you got to master? Gaining MR is the only way outside of tournaments to show that you improved?
@@michaellawrence9922 I stoped enjoying the grind because for me personally there was no motivation for reaching higher mr ratings like 1600 or 1700 besides playing better players. My goals were to play some pros and enter some tournaments and I did those things but the grind gets very repetitive and i just lost interest after 1 year of playing. The next best achievement would be top 500, but unfortunately that would take hours of grinding the same character and if your not in japan it becomes exponentialy harder so its a very unreachable goal for me.
Def agree that the game needs to offer more incentives for players through rewards. This would motivate people who aren’t grinding MR for FT2 tournament experience to keep playing ranked
Hey Chris, i am from the middle east and honestly the rank experience in our region is horrific. At times i get games within a couple of minutes for a decent hour then it’s like everybody around the region disappears and majority of the time i wait 30 minutes for a game. (I don’t get paired to play a lot of the neighboring countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE etc.) and when i do the majority of the time the connection is horrible. Sometimes i feel like quitting because of it but i love the game to much to do so and i plan on getting better despite the struggles. (Sorry for the long post.)
In my country we have to find a suitable vpn, find the best nearby country to connect to, still wait 3-5 mins for a match (at 14-1500 mr), and then play matches anywhere between 60-130ms, and hope the vpn's connection is stable and doesn't drop for a second, causing a dc. The top player in our region plays without vpn because of the stability issue. He waits 20 mins for matches at 2k+ mr.
Ranked does seem inflated. But i also think the game got boring for many bc there are only four new characters a year. I’d guess capcom could attract people back to the game if it did 6 characters a year for the first few years to try and keep it fresh.
I feel like I hit a wall when I reached platinum. All of a sudden everyone is so much better than me and I'm losing everything. This is most likely caused by people that camp in that rank afraid to lose points and go down to gold when they're actually experienced enough to rank up a bunch. I'd say that I should be gold but gold players are way too easy. Really frustrating and making not want to play the game. I will add that the lack of a clear path to improve makes people drop fighting games more than others. I almost dropped the game in silver because I didn't know how to win and I feel the same issue again in plat. In pretty much every other competitive game it's very clear what skills are lacking and what you should work on
I've hit plat 1 some weeks ago but there is such a huge wall, every match feels so heavy, managed to hit plat 3 recently but it was so much more difficult than climbing previous ranks that I'm needing to take a break to relax from ranked now. But as a new player I felt that it was kind of ok for fighting games to have most of the player base on intermediate/top ranks, almost all of them are paid, which probably reduces the lower ranks (Overwatch rank distribution used to peak at platinum, now that it is free it peaks at gold), and a good portion of the fighting game player base is made of people who play them since years. Maybe Capcom just wasn't prepared for the surge of new players?
I played causals mainly with 550 hours vs only 70 hours on ranked. 100 hours in the lab. Mastered Jamie as my main, on the grind getting Aki to the same level at the moment. The reason I dont like played rank much is that I found the higher rank my opponents are more likely spam gimmicks to the point the whole fight feels like a formula, did the combos right, better guess at the rock paper scissors then it's a win. But in casual there appears to be more experimental plays and approach, for myself without thinking I might losing my points I am more willing to find solutions or creative ways to counter certain moves. That being said I have more fun in casuals and I often paird up with ppl in the same rank. In case I paired up with much lower rank players, once I found my oppents are really new not a smurf I usually chill and give them a not so easy win. I am also trying to find the fun of playing the game instead of endless grind just for a title to display on my screen.
Good insights, charts & comparison to other games. Wow, a lot of comments already. I had no online for 9 months (Capcom ID link error), did bad in placement, & rarely got to play these past 3-4 months. So I'm silver 2. I'm w.coast US & get matches quick. And play other game modes & games. Interesting you can go up w/a 40% winrate. SF5 took me 5 years to reach gold. SF6 is different in no ranked trophy. Hope to rank higher in this. I avoid Casual in SF6, which matches w/any rank. BH is cool. A factor for some stopping at Master is individual ranks per character, so people can try new ones. Nice vid.
It might seem a bit simplistic to get caught up on words and names, but I think just using the term "master" alone and not making Legend a true separate rank just set things up for people to consider it a finish line. And not allowing you to derank from it just made things worse. I would like to combine aspects of sf6 and sf5 systems (and I didn't like sf5 as a game very much). The use of placement matches and also having separate point totals per character in sf6 encourages people to play more of the cast and not constantly restart in lower ranks when they switch, but sf5 did better in keeping more ranks and each of them distinct and allowing deranks. Just combine those things. Having over a quarter of the active player base in Master just sounds silly for a game with such a high player count that's less than two years old. It's going to look much worse down the road. Near the end of sf6, I wouldn't be surprised if over half of the active player base at that time has a Master character.
I also agree. While I do wait between matches, I'm just in training mode, where I would be anyway. So it's not so bad. I can see veterans being more angry. I always need to brush up on things during training waiting periods. I'm not leaving the game. I'm too impressed with it. It's fun, I'll keep playing.
For sure needs a rework. I matched with Legend players in Diamond 5, just a waste of time for both of us. Then I matched with 1300 MR master players, very free 250 LP. Made Diamond 5 the worst for me
I think that all of these games should do away with these ranked systems that give you some badge or whatever. Just use ELO or some other system where you have a number that goes up or down based on wins and losses. The system boosts everyone up to the higher ranks so actually having those ranks means less and then the players just quit once they get there because they probably feel like "welp I'm Plat/Diamond/Master guess I'm done." They treat the badges/tiers like grades in school. They're not interested in actually learning the material, they just want their account to show the Master emblem and that's also why you get plugging/cheating in the same way that a student will cheat for a test. Doesn't matter that the teacher graded everything on a curve or that they cheated off of their neighbor as long as their report card says they got an A.
It could be that SF6 is actually better than other fighting games in helping people win games. Sometimes people win on gimmicks and that gets them to Plat 1 or Diamond 1. Other times people grind fundamentals. The long term solution to retention is making losses feel acceptable rather than punishing to one's rank, while making people want to reflect on their wins. I think the solution lies in adjusting LP boost/drops against differently ranked players, and also being able to demote Plat 1 - Dia 1 - MR 1500 and below 5 steps down every season. You could put the winstreak bonus back until Master with this system.
I know others have talked about losing Master rank if you fall below a certain MR but if we're going to do that we should do the same to unranked Masters. I personally don't believe we should do either but I would hope Capcom does something to entice players to rank. I love grinding for MR but maybe a few new titles would help.
Some people mentioned giving out drive tickets for new MR achievements. They already give out 1,000 drive tickets for silly stuff like character bdays so I don’t see why they can’t give it to players who work hard to improve!
Also this is not very surprising to me after having played this game from release date, I mistakenly thought that the ranking system of this game was good cause it made the players climb up faster and if they're good enough they'd be promoted to the master league and really put in the time to learn the game and fight for MR but this is not happening at all most people I know are behaving like you describe in the video they get to Master rank and stop playing completely or they have a bad time losing their initial 1500 mr points and get discouraged to keep playing, only players like me who tolerate and expect big losing streaks remain, but it's too much to ask from everyone to get used to lose 20 matches in a row to maybe have fun at 1200 mr.
Getting to master rank was absolute pain for me, but playing in master rank has made me improve. I have a higher win percentage in casual match where I play more diamond and plat players which shows me that ranks at least good at separating.
I'm one of the lucky ones in Platinum, so I don't have to wait long for matches. Personally, I think a lot of people quit at Platinum because it's the first rank that doesn't protect players. From Platinum onwards, the reward for playing is confronting losing and realising you have to learn how to play the game to get better.
WOW! So until know the FGC knows about fighting games have bad retention. Incredible! So CAPCOM will launch Street Fighter 6 : Arcade Edition with season 1 and 2 included in the game and the flow of new players will increase the low ranks! Then , after TWO years of Arcade Edition....and the data is again toward the high ranks....what do you think will happen? OF COURSE : Street Fighter 6 : Champion Edition with 4 season passes included, and so and so. Could be interesting how do Tekken, Mortal Kombat, ARC SYS games are doing in this aspect. And yes, the rank system is probably screwed, cause is prone to give easy points, no deranking a lot at beginner levels and there are the results. BUUUT, perhaps, that´s why SF6 is so successful not as a fighting game, but as a game. And as MATSUMOTO always say in every interview he makes : "We want SF6 being played by more people!" The AGE where fighting developers only cares about PROS and hardcore sweaties is over. Now they are looking at mid and low levels, casuals and even spectators when making decisions for the game. Sad but truth! Sad for all that pros and sweaties that represents 1% of the consumers. As Thorgi´s arcade said in one of his vids "Just look at the completion % from that PS bronze trophy from SF5 that´s about WINNING YOUR FIRST VICTORY in RANKED .......8.4%" . That´s means a lot. Great vid!
I was fortunate enough that I had a diamond rated player as a friend when I started, so when I hit the ranking I quickly got up to the more populated levels. It would have been rough otherwise
I have been saying that the ranked system needs a revamp. The curve is way off compared to other games due to inflating people's rank since you can climb with a below 50% win rate.
Part of the problem is not all those 26% master players are even playing thier master ranked character anymore. They are playing lower level characters and driving new players away from the game and keeping a lot of mid level players hard stuck at platinum 1. There are actually tons of players are playing in the low ranks its just that barely any of them are actually low rank, which drives true low ranks away from the game entirely.
If we make the first half of Master into the real diamond ranking and yank everyone down 5 steps then merge iron and rookie then it'd be a lot cleaner.
This all stems from the current system giving you more points for a win than it takes away from a loss. A 50% win rate should not get you to climb all the way to Master rank. Once you hit Platinum the point gains and losses should be equal, so that people who want to climb need to improve.
I am just spitballing here. What if we had a system in place where, up to a certain point, players rank up in relation to their own performance and improvement, rather than their win-loss rate? Instead of having this arbitrary point system that goes up and down, the game presents goals for each rank. After reaching said goals, players are given a challenge and completing said challenge, results in a rank up. Once you hit a certain rank, it's all points based on win-loss or ELO or whatever. I just find it incredibly weird that a player who is just learning the game has to purely rely on their ability to win consistently in order to rank up. While learning the game, ranking up should reflect your learning.
Interesting idea but tbh I don’t think the devs are going to spend that much time thinking about how to implement your idea. Not saying it’s a bad idea though!
I'm in north Africa in D5, in the afternoon I might get a match every 2-5 minutes, during the day it's totally up to luck and I'll probably fight the same people a few times. Worth noting that I mainly get matched with EU people.
Played fighting games casually since the 90s. SF5 was the first one I tried to be good at. Got Gold after 10 months. Almost as long to get to platnium. Never got higher. Got master Rank in sf6 in about 10 hours hours of ranked and 30 in casuals. I believe it's just because there were so many players at the time. I just had to punish a LOT of unsafe stuff. They would just cycle through one unsafe thing after the next. I stopped playing ranked because I wanted to improve my fundamentals. I practice and go up against master ranks in battle hub. My win rate against them is abysmal.
I think starting at 1200 doesn't really solve the issue. I think fighting games in general have a retention problem because of the 1v1 focus and having to take responsibility for your losses. So even if they had a harsher ranking system like SFV's, people would just stop playing once it feels like they can't level up any further. I'm not sure what the solution is from Capcom's side as this is an issue every fighting game deals with once it's not new anymore. All I know is I'm having a lot of fun with SF6, so even though my MR is trash, I'll continue playing it because it's just fun pressing buttons in the game. Edit: Now that i think about it, the placement system is the issue. Some players never reach the lower ranks whereas SFV everyone started at Rookie. I think it's too late to remove the placement system now, but maybe for SF7 they shouldn't have one so there's a healthy player base at all ranks.
The problem is Master is free in SF6, at most, Master in SF6 is equivalent to late Platinum/early Diamond in SF5... You really had to work a lot in SF5 to get past Platinum... in SF6, the game kinda only begins when you get to Master...
I'm not arguing with you, I think all your points are valid. But i also think that no matter how you rework a game, it's going to lose players eventually, at some point. It's just how it is. And this isn't exclusive to street fighter 6. For me personally, it didn't even take me getting to master rank to quit playing. I essentially stopped playing when I got to diamond 2-3. I felt like I learned everything I needed to and that's why i quit. It wasn't really about ranks. It was about proving to myself I could play street fighter at a somewhat competent level too. Not sure if this relates to anybody, but yeah. I think at the end of the day, it's just a 2d fighting game 🤷♂️ there's not much to do after winning a couple games and then losing a couple games
On a different note, battle hub and lobbies + searching for casual matches in training mode all feels more fun and rewarding than the ranked system imo but just a thought !
I'm in Europe and started out in Iron back when the game launched. I've been taking it slow, trying to learn how to play fighting games properly and am in Diamond now. I've always been able to get matches in seconds, be it in Iron or Diamond, although admittedly back when I was a lower rank there was probably a larger playerbase because it was closer to launch. That said, one thing that these types of games have going for it is that it's 1v1. You really don't need a very large amount of players to have a healthy playerbase. If you live in places like Europe, the US, East Asia, you should be okay. If you live in places like Africa or Australia, you'll probably have more trouble. But honestly, they have playerbase problems with every game, not just this one.
I will say I haven’t touched rank in a couple months because of how much the rewards diminish so hard. I wish the ELO system isn’t exclusive to Master, just to say you only know where you truly are you have to spend so many hours just to get out of platinum alone is so frustrating. I personally think a ELO system for the entire system would tell everyone where you are at skill wise, and rank is just a reward for putting the time in would just be so much better
I think the Battle Hub may be a reason for people not wanting to play ranked. If someone is not concerned about their MR(which resets anyway) there is not really any real reason to play in a FT2 environment unless you just really like FT2. I think Capcom have actually done a really good job with unranked modes which has had a negative effect on ranked.
So many people choose the Battle Hub as their default mode and to be honest why wouldn't they if they don't care about MR(as seen with the amount of masters with 30 hours in ranked and then 800 in Battle Hub).
In the hub you can play in tournaments, play sets as long as you like and chat to people. There are also events like fighting CPU Akuma and always getting rewarded with drive tickets. In comparison in ranked you get a number which a lot of people simply don't care about.
I didn't care for battle hub until they added the AI rank. Now whenever I want to play a bit, I just hop on BH and play with master AIs and call it a day. plus it saves me from having to buy ps plus just to play sf6 online.
That's a really good point I had not thought of. Personally, I don't like Battle Hub at all, but the way you put it makes me understand why so many other people might prefer it.
@@christopherantoin
If people are engaging with that more, what meaning does ranked have outside of just a number.
That's good though. Ranked will always be lower population or should be lower pop than a casual experience.
Ranked should have a reason to be played but if the casual play being good is the reason then that's a mighty good reason.(I don't think that's the case though)
Ranked gives you tryhard combat
It doesn't matter where you start people in masters, it's a zero sum elo system, you will always see the same curve
Yeah that’s true, but it’s def too easy to get to master
@@Chris_F I disagree. I think it's a great system for serious players because master rank is basically where actual ranked starts. If you are the kind of player who actually cares about their rank and climbing, then you know that MR is going to reflect your skill relatively accurately because of the ELO system. I don't mind master being easy to get to; rookie through diamond are essentially the tutorial to getting to the actual ranked points, MR, rather than the feel-good, constant progress points, LP.
I do agree that the wall most people hit in Plat 1 is probably not fun or healthy for new players, this is my first fighting game and I took a break for a month or two after getting frustrated in Plat 1.
Making it so that you start Master at 1200 won't make a difference in the sense that you want it to. Because it's is an Elo system, the starting Elo is the middle point, it is currently 1500 because you start at 1500. If you started at 1200 then the middle point would be there, and the people who currently reach 2300 would instead reach a max of 2000. ( And those who currently gets sent to 800 MR conversely becomes 500 MR)
It is important to remember that it will simply spread players out along a bell curve distribution starting at the middle point.
I personally love how good the MR system is at rating a player (compared to the other players in his region, let's not get into regional MR differences). And I would dislike any change that hurts that.
Maybe the resets hurt the players who fall below 1500 because they are repeatedly brought back up just to be sent right back down, I wonder if the new system they are implementing next phase will help with that at all.
I think moving the entire ranked system to a Elo system would help matchmaking at all levels, (Though then setting 1500 as the middle point might not be granular enough and it would make sense to increase it and fiddle with the loss/gain per match, just keep it zero sum) but that would require abandoning ideas like derank protection and others.
I've read some comments here about demoting people from master below a certain MR, that would also not work.
For example, let's say we set the cutoff so that anyone below 1300 gets demoted. Then the players right at 1300 would only have people better than them left in Master, so now them losing is guaranteed so they fall under 1300. Now the people that used to be 1400 have the same issue, only better people remain so they fall out. And so on and so forth until master is empty or an equilibrium is found.
But then we also add the issue of people that got demoted then getting back to master, would they start over at the cutoff point at 1300 again and then immediately get knocked down again? Or would they start over from 1500 so that 200 new points get added into the system and it's start inflating to the point where MR doesn't measure skill well anymore and instead just reflects grind?
It is vital to the function of the MR system that the average point amongst players is 1500. And as it works now it is always and forever perfectly 1500.
@@jesperpersson465 lower master ranked players get matched against diamond players all the time, and that's common in different games too. Demotion wouldn't mean 1300mr players would only play against 1300mr+ players, they would also play against diamonds, so that could be a way to survive in the low end of master rank while also giving the diamond players an opportunity to climb faster if they're "ready" for it.
@kyoruh Currently you do not gain MR when playing diamond players, but if you did that would make the system stop being zero sum, so MR would be constantly created when 1300 players play Diamonds. This would lead to MR inflation and make MR unable to be a measure of skill. It would essentially be identical to the current LP system that no one in master cares about.
@@jesperpersson465 ive noticed that even as it is now, anything under 1600mr isnt a very good indication of skill either. I play ppl right around 1500 every single day that should def be around platinum rank
Maybe adding a second set placement matches once you get into master would work? Like if you go 1-9 after reaching master from diamond 5 you go back to diamond before getting the master title
There is a problem with people looking for ranks as an end-goal and not as a tool for matchmaking. People reach their goal and become either satisfied or afraid to lose it, then that creates the rank anxiety and makes them quit at Plat 1, Diamond 1 and Master 1500MR.
Yeap, ths is the main issue here. Unranking causes anxiety. I think they did a good job with not deranking between leagues up to plat, but this just delayed the inevitable problem from showing up again.
I’m ok with the win streaks in rookie through gold but it’s crazy that you can rank up with a negative win rate before master, that should change.
Absolutely
I'd say if you have a 48-49% winrate its still fine but you'd have to grind asf and win against players who give you more points
You can have a trash win rate if you frequent battlehub, that doesnt reflect on the ranked performance though
theoretically it's possible but in actuality i'd be surprised if many people really get to master with a truly negative ranked only win rate. it's just not very likely at all.
I don’t think I would have played as long as I’m playing now if it wasn’t for this ranked system. I find it way more motivating than the ranked systems of other games which has the end result of making me feel like I’m not improving. The only drawback is that people want more than a number in master rank because they want their effort to show with some logo other than the master logo.
The people who say MR should start at a new number don’t know how math works or ELO ratings work. It would not have the solution you want it to have.
Same
oh man..... at 9:10 he says "I think starting at 1500 is too high, people should start at 1200"
I really, really hope you do realize that it doesn't make any difference whatsoever.... 1500 is a completely arbitrary number as 1200 would as well.
MR ranked is "0 sum" the numbers only mean anything on relation to each other.
if you change the starting point to 1200, all that's going to be accomplished by that is that all people flocking around 1500 now would be flocking around 1200.... that's it. simple maths, and it doesn't matter at all.
one thing that could work out a little better would be to try and access the performance at lower levels once you hit master....
I mean, if you sailed through Diamond super easily with 80% win rate and all, just start that guy at 1650 or something.....
if you grinded diamond for months and got there with 46% win rate, place this guy on 1300....
simply changing the 1500 baseline for 1200 or 1000 or 50 trillion doesn't matter while it remains a 0 sum ranking.
If I'm understanding it correctly, the issue is that the game starts you at 1500MR, but that's the middle of Master rank, as opposed to the other ranks, where you get promoted to the very bottom of the next rank. Players are getting artificially inflated MR when they first start that doesn't really correlate to what their rank should be, and then when they play against players who have been in Master for a while and have earned that rank, they get beaten over and over again.
@ this is not an issue, just a proper elo system…. If you start with 0 MR, then the system is not a “0 sum” system making it meaningless.
If you start it at any other arbitrary rank different than 0, then it would be the same every time and it wouldn’t matter.
At the end of the day, the correct thing to do would be complete get rid of the LP system, make the placement matches give you a proper amount of MR and then name the ranks after the MR amount
But this is what Capcom was trying to avoid with the LP system… they made it so it was easier to climb so people wouldn’t feel stuck…. But then they created the other issue Chris f presented here.
You can either make an easy to climb ranking or a good one, it cannot be both… SF6 tried to be both and failed …. MR resets just makes it even worse
@@NickJJU the starting rank will always be ""the middle"", the number we call it doesn't matter unless people can demote from Master, which is a different discussion altogether.
I don't understand why people have a hard time understanding this.
Yeah I didn’t think that through enough but I agree that your winrate before getting to master should determine you’re placing in the MR system. No reason why both a 45% WR player and 80%+ WR player should both start at 1500
imo conclusions are not correct. Or not precise.
Firrst we make assumptions that players listed as unranked master players quit the game. We can't be sure players are quitting. We only know that they have unranked master character as their highest ranked character. Unranked master characters means people did not play character THIS PHASE. Not that they did not play at all. Also unranked character in master are still technically 1500 MR I think. So let's say I have master 5 characters, but I only play Ryu this season and I am 1400 MR with him. Wouldn't I be counted as one of those who have highest ranked character as one of my characters I did not play this season?
The only factual thing we can get from this chart is distribution - and yes. Here I have the same conclusions. System pushes you to actually reach platinum (if you are beginner) and master (if you are intermidate player). And I think that's actually fine because this ego boosting and dopamine from seeing constant progress can keep people in the game. There is no way we can know if all people belowe platinum are quitting the game, or just all those players already got to platinum and are still playing. Platinum 1 being such high percentage does not mean those people quit. It can mean they are stuck there.
The other fact we can see is number of active accounts. 642k active accoubts. 1,5 mlion total. That's actually amazing retention rate for a fighting game. This game is 1,5 year old and keeps such high percentage of total player base as active? This is way better than people give credit for.
Of course things could be done better. This whole naming convention for ranking makes no sense. Matchmaking being elo (mr ) based is fine, but I think game could give you better self ego boosting rewards for reaching higher mr numbers than just rewarding legend for top 500 players.
Unranked master players are not auto 1500. You have to play at least one ranked game to get 1500. Before that you just dont have a rating for that Phase. Every thing else you said sounds good though.
@@slidelikeMbison Yeah. I am not sure about that. Because I remember trying to scrap some CFN data back in the days and it was awkward to have unique accounts
I think the MR conversation is really tricky and I disagree with Ryan Hart's tweet on splitting up MR into separate ranks. The upper and lower barriers of MR is somewhat dependent on the quantity of people playing in the MR system. It's why it's hard to compare the MR of someone from the UK to the MR of someone from Japan for instance, because there is a far larger pool of players in Japan. MR doesn't come out of nowhere. For you to gain MR points, someone else has to lose the same amount that you gain. I think that's why I'd disagree with the idea of starting new Master players at 1200 MR too, because it wouldn't actually change the system, it would just move the goalposts. After the change normalises, 1200 would just become the new 1500 and people that are new Master players would get knocked down to 900 MR instead of getting knocked down to 1500 MR.
Yeah the MR thing is tough, that wasn’t really the main point of my video but it seems like that’s what most of the comments are about. Wish I put more thought into that part before making this video
The beginners problem can't be solved by moving the ranks, there's just not enough beginners, it was exactly the same after a few years in sfV. For the overall rank system I think it's just a "title" problem. Capcom wanted to have rookie to diamond to allow people to get an overall understanding of the game before getting them in a true elo system. In my opinion it's great to have a 0 sum elo system for the majority of the player base (I play chess) and I think what upsets high level players is having the same title as intermediate/advanced players. It's an ego thing. To solve that Capcom could just add platinum and diamond to the elo system, maybe add an extra "super master" rank and make them depend on the % of the player base not the mr points to avoid disparity between regions. So rookie to gold would be the same "ego boosting" that it is currently and starting at platinum people would have to grind to get a better rank, just like in any sports or serious games
Yeah after reading this I agree!
Thats actually a good point. I don't see street fighter as a very casual game. Not very casual = not many new players/low level players.
Eventually, only hard-core players will want to continue playing the game.
This is not exclusive to street fighter 6, but i think a fighting game like street fighter 6bjust accentuates it even further.
The new player to hard core player ratio is just too big. And I'm not even sure if it'd a problem or not. I think it's just how it is
it used to be “once you hit master, then you start playing the real game.”
now you have to hit master to actually play a game 💀
I made it to Master way faster than I expected, never having made it to a similar rank in almost any other competitive game. I make almost no progress now. There is clearly a chasm of difference between 1200-1400 and 1500+. I play lots of casuals now in an effort to learn adaptation.
I think a part of it is if you have a healthy local scene, the ranked grind is a lot less worse when I meet up with insanely good players in my area twice a month. Every local I find myself playing better and better.
Absolutely! Online ranked and high MR play is great for practicing for tournaments but nothing levels you up as a like offline locals
@@Chris_F i doubt the majority of players have access to a local though
Rookie, Iron and Bronze should be one group probably, not that big of a difference
I don't know that this is the best solution either. Rookie and iron might make sense, but putting new players with players that are above their skill level is also going to be discouraging if they are consistently losing off the bat.
Idk if I agree with this sentiment. While it’s not that big of a difference. Being able to see your progress as a brand new players is really rewarding. Even if it ultimately means nothing in the long run.
@@BigQ52yep Rookie is really for folks that have barely laid eyes on a fg. Literally they don’t know difference between lp, mp, and hp.
In Iron they may know how to do specials and conceptually understand faster buttons, are safer but less damaging. They’ll know jump ins are strong and can maybe do an anti air or two in a match.
In bronze they anti air a tiny bit more. They know dp and fireball motions pretty well. They can zone a tiny bit, they use all their basic buttons. String basic combos together etc..
Honestly we need to stop acting like we’re smarter than Capcom. There is a reason SF6 is the fastest selling SF in history.
There's a need for a new player to feel progress, so these ranks are needed.
There's almost no difference on skill level, but you need it for the progress.
Don't they match them all against each other anyway? Who cares if they put them in the chart under the same color banner.
I don't mind having so many people in masters, I like the idea of people getting pushed into it and then a better rating system takes hold.
I think this is a different problem than what rank people are in.
Calling someone a rookie doesn't make them one. I'm not saying there isn't an issue but idk how this is solved just by grouping. If it would help retain players6 then I'm all for it.
Edit, - yeah Ryan hart wants online rank to be more meaningful than would help anyone. Not really sure what the point of that is. We have tournaments, we'd still not consider a top ranked player the same as a tourney winner. I appreciate you showing that as it helped me understand your goals here.
What's wrong with ranks mattering?
Agreed. Our energy over ranked would be much more effective if we put it towards boosting our weeklies and monthlies instead
My main issue with master is it being the highest rank. Legend has its own set of problems (the “go to Japan and get legend” meme is real) but making it its own rank would probably stop people from thinking they hit the “best” rank at master
I've had to wait 10 minutes recently .... In Diamond 5.
Broooo I felt
Diamond 4-5 is one of the worst places to be waiting for ranked matches. My condolences.
The only solution is 100s of thousands of more active players.
Capcom doesn’t market this game the way they do a Resident Evil.
Marketing, simply needs more investment if Capcom wants more players. But it seems to being doing good enough.
The best way to market better would be to make Capcom Cup like a 5m grand prize with much larger prizes for lower places and the CPT World Warrior circuit.
That would get massive headlines and droves of players would get into it. It could drive mass media coverage as well.
This is IMO they need to make it a sport, money is the answer. Word of mouth will only get so far.
@@ismaeljrp1 Tournaments and marketing are irrelevant for this conversation. We're talking about Ranks; something that's already established and used more often than tournaments.
@ At the core we are talking about a lack of players. Which only gets resolved with a better game, more PR, marketing and advertising budgets to push sales.
Fighting games are difficult to want to keep playing because newer players and casuals are literally getting their ass kicked. Trying to retain this type of player leads to overwatch 2 type of scenario
As a Silver 4 - 5 I can verify this comment lol
What’s the overwatch 2 scenario? I never played that game
@@Chris_F dumbed down the game, catering to casuals essentially causing the downfall of the games competitive scene
People complained fighting games are hard to get into because of poor tutorials and no feedback when getting whooped (barrier of entry isnt friendly to beginners). They fixed some of that, but people don't like difficult things so they would lose this player base anyways and they would just move onto the next game. People that actually want to be good will do their due diligence and research or seek help
This is coming from someone that's been playing fighting games since sf2 in my spare time (im a professional boxing coach). Top 64 at evo 2011 in mvc3 and top 500 at evo2024 in sf6 who was also competed in overwatch 1
Don't worry, capcom will release a 20$ avatar skin to fix it
Best, and most accurate comment.
I think MR hurt retention because people don't want to go down once they hit a goal. Also you know people are getting better, making the matches harder. I preferred the LP system.
As someone who has played mostly FPS games before, street fighter 6 being the first fighting game. I think you do spend most of your time in the silver to gold ranks when starting out in a shooter. That’s where you have time to learn the game and understand the smaller individual things that make you better.
I got thru to gold and then platinum so quick in street fighter. I still feel like I worked hard and learned a lot, but I noticed that once I hit plat, there are people who are a lot better than me. I’m almost never playing anyone in plat 1 in the Us. I’m playing plat 4-5 and even diamonds. There’s nobody at my rank but the higher tiers of plat feel way better than me.
It feels like I wasn’t given a good enough buffer zone to learn some mechanical things that are required for the game. I don’t think I want to quit after hitting plat, but it’s been very discouraging losing 5-6 in a row and being demoted to gold, and when I get back to plat, I just feel like I don’t have the right skill set developed for the game anymore.
Understandable I feel the same until I started learning frame data and more combos
Same here…I’ve been hard stuck in platinum with most characters I play except E.Honda which I got placed into Diamond two… I’ve started making progress now but only after realizing I had a spacing issue, needed to learn delay tech and optimal combos I can do consistently.
It's crazy...I started in silver and breezed thru to platinum. Platinum 3 is another tier
Platinum 5/diamond1 is another tier as well
Diamond 2,3 is another tier,
D4/5 would be the last tier imo till you get to master...I haven't gotten to master so I don't know what's out there as far as rank is concerned, hope this helps
go to your locals. being able to learn from players way better than you in person will push you over the edge and get you comfortibly in the plat to diamond range. just be prepared to lose. a lot.
@SamuraiBeavs If you want I can view your replays to point out what you're doing and how you can improve, or even run some sets if you need.
An interesting idea about MR is maybe your MR is hidden when you become Master until you've played 50 matches. Call it the Master Placement matches. At that point, then you get to see your MR (and others too) and even if you're at 1200-1300 now, you won't feel negative.
Long post warning...Sorry in advance
While I agree with many of the points you make I think your exclusive focus on ranked is causing you to miss some critical details about the game overall.
Unranked Masters being that high is not because those people aren't playing the game, by definition they have to be or they wouldn't be represented in the active player graph at all. It just means that they don't play ranked much anymore in favor of casual, battle hub, and custom rooms. If you ask most people who stop playing ranked or play way less often once they reach master you'll get two main answers. One is they prefer longer sets and find ranked having a maximum FT2 extremely unsatisfying and now play most of their matches in the battle hub, casual, or custom rooms where it may take slightly longer to find a match but once you do you can play FT3, FT5, FT10, and FT20 if you want.
The other is the lack of character variety in ranked. As a master play who doesn't play ranked let me tell you who my most played against characters for November are; Dhalsim, Lily, Aki, and Manon (Sim is mostly because of his character specific birthday tournament). What do you think are the chances that these would be my most played against characters if I was grinding ranked? I got it at 0%, I almost certainly would be facing the shotos over and over again with a side of Bison, Cammy, and one or two other characters. This is fine for some people but others get fed up with facing the same few characters over and over again preferring the character variety you find in the battle hub.
Just in the last month we've had a Jamie, Dee Jay, Honda, Aki, and Dhalsim character specific tournaments in the battle hub and after each of those tournaments I've gotten together with a friend that was also in the tournament and did a FT5 mirror match. I've had more fun there than I ever did playing an undying army of shotos in ranked.
It also has to be stated that ranked has zero communication between players unlike the battle hub and custom rooms. Almost all my friends I've made in game have come from the latter and the few I've made in ranked were mostly from custom room invites anyway. Some people may prefer it this way but for others playing against faceless opponents that you can't communicate with feels souless. It barely feels different from playing against a random V Rival but at least then you can explore different character match-ups.
There's tons of people who would theoretically be anywhere from 1100MR to 1900MR if they played ranked but we don't because we think ranked sucks. The only thing I take from Unranked being the highest is that many people leave ranked asap once their goal is met and they no longer have to play it. Playing other modes is just as valid way to play the game.
There's also a huge player base who aren't represented on the graph at all. For every random Juri player that reaches master and decides to grind MR to see where they fall there is another that decides that they're going to now get Aki to master and then Chun Li to master after that and then Dee Jay to master after that etc.
These people are not covered by the graph because they're not playing their highest ranked character anymore but you could double the length of the bars from high platinum and the entirety of diamond with players that are grinding sub characters to master. In fact you frequently hear complaints from true platinums and diamonds about how their rank is invested with master players grinding up another character. For some people it's more appealing to explore new characters than it is to grind MR. They won't show on the graph but they're still playing frequently.
Well said man!
not to mention a big problem is that at the start of the game people have the option THEMSELF to choose at what rank they wanna start (by saying I am new or already played a game)
if they choose the second option they get catapulted into plat to high plat and let me tell you they dont play like plat or borderline diamond at all.
That would maybe also explain the high quit rate at plat since they start in plat try the game lose or win a few rounds and then quit
it actually sucks to be a new player and wait so much to find a match in the lower ranks, it usually takes me about 3+ minutes to find one. Not to mention having to fight the same people multiple times.
Totally agree and this was the main point of my video (not the MR stuff)
Another issue is having characters individually ranked. When a new character drops, diamond gets filled with masters and platinum gets filled with diamonds, most of whom have better fundamentals than the intended level of those ranks even if they are learning the character. Probably a similar thing is happening at 1500mr with first time masters vs people on their nth character.
I don't know the fix, but it also contributes to people thinking all new dlc are pay to win because they're encountering higher ranked players picking up a new character.
The problem with a lot of fighting games is trying to teeter on not alienating new players by making them feel bad but also pushing them forward.
I honestly think SFV ranked was better for lower levels compared to 6 EASILY. You could really tell the difference between a gold and an ultra plat. Once you hit diamond that was out the window because it was Dia-Warlord but the lower was better because you actually lost points.
6 now, not to be rude but you see people in diamond that legitimately play like silver SFV in 6. The gain 60 but lose 40 in 6 just doesn’t work always pushing people up.
I think the best scenario which would piss a lot of people off would be to make gains and losses more like SFV, make the grind a bit harder, buff winstreaks hard to get people out of lower ranks that shouldn’t be there (V did this very well). However, with that a lot of players will reject the game thinking they are not improving because the number isn’t going up. Tons of people do not have the mindset to realize you can improve from losses and wins and it is a long long process in fighting games. Not everyone will pick it up and be gifted.
Why did i quit at platinum ? Well it was quick to rush there but i m too lazy to grind allllllllllllllll the way to Master when it was so easy and quick to go to platinum. Can go to master but ranked is such a pain in the ass i can t find the motivation, got more fun playing casual or with friend.
Interesting discussion. Capcom recently announced that the MR points after a reset will be based on your previous MR. If you ended the period around 1300 MR, you will start back around that level.
bronze player here from EU; it's true the wait times are pretty bad. If it's evening/night and lots of ppl are on it's always a 5 min or less wait but if it's morning or middle of the day you looking at a bunch more: this morning I labbed while having matchmaking turned on for about 20 minutes and only got 1 match
i should mention that im east eu in romania, and tbh i dont mind it that much since the game i played before had way worse matchmaking/ranks lol
@@touchMelilbro Do you make use of the expanded matchmaking scope or do you stick to the default 'limited' option? Changing that should give you games against opponents from Europe West, which is quite a crowded region. You may have better luck with that.
@@caspertrog1046 ill that a try, thanks. Didnt try it yet because i thought the range would be bigger than europe
Master from EU here, peaked at 1800, i'm fairly new to street fighter as sf6 is the first I actually play not ''casually''.
The main thing that made me stopped playing ranked in EU, is the matchmaking.
I absolutely hate the fact that I often get put against people with 300/400 less MR than I have.
If I win, which is the case 80% of the time, I get 2 points, if I lose, I lose 15, in a game that can feel random at times (I feel like momentum is too strong across the whole cast in this game, imo strong momentum should be character specific and handled with a weakness vs strength point of view balance wise).
Matchmaking and the mr system is what made me stopped playing ranked. As volatile as the game is, I feel like forced ft2 before points get lost/won would help a lot.
Matchmaking still needs to get fixed tho.
That’s a huge problem, I totally agree
I think the problem is that we see MR as absolute value while it is not. It is relative. Let's imagine a region that has only 1000 players but they are all Punk level - absolute world class. All of them would be around 1500 MR while being the best players in the world.
In EU playerpool is smaller so matchmaking is not able to always put you against people with similar MR. And in EU 1800 is very high MR, you are basically top 200 ranked player in region so it is just normal that majority of your matches will be vs lower rated opponents. Yeah I know that probably it sucks to see having positive win rate on ranked session and still losing points, but again. It's all relative.
In elo based system it's extremely hard to gain ranking points when you are in the higher on the ranking list. To put this into perspective Magnus Carlsen won a top level chess tournament vs similar (but lower) rated opponents. He won majority of his games, lost only one. At the end of the tournament he lost few points in his elo rating.
I agree for sure on few points. Game could do much better job on making you feel good about your ranking, when it is relative. Seeing yourself as 1800MR and not being impressed while you should be is a shame. Also yes, it is definetly weird and bad choice to make people lose MR after winning a set (you can win 2-1 vs lower rated opponent and still lose MR)
On the mr distribution, while i agree that most players going into master are closer to 1200ish, the fact that everyone starts at 1500 makes me think that changing the defult mr to 1200 might move the numbers around but not actually solve the issue
9:15-10:15 that was so spot on.
I just got into Plat 2 after grinding through Plat 1, seeing how many people are in that rank makes total sense for how volatile matches felt and the grind
So I got to Master last week, getting through Diamond 3-5 in 3 days with large winstreaks, and I think I'll be dropping the game.
Simply put, seeing what I need to progress further just killed any motivation I had. My execution sucks, I can sometimes do a delay throw tech on a good day, I never go for combo extensions using DR because I drop them 9/10 times. I got to Master purely off the back of patience and spacing.
The vision of spending hundreds of hours drilling option selects, optimal combos, learning matchups and practicing until I can pull those off in a real match when even the recording setups are a pain for me... Yeah I don't intend to play in any tournaments, I would rather devote that time to my other hobbies rather than bash my head against a wall for months, while being dunked on by more experienced players, until MAYBE I can reach a point where I'm able to hold my own at any semi-decent MR.
Yeah it definitely becomes like a job if you want to progress in Masters. It's not a simple game. Too many things to think about.
You don't really need to learn matchups if you just want a comfortable mr but by the way you're looking, you might be at around 1200 mr im ngl
Took the words out of my mouth lol. It's a bummer because I know the game could be crazy fun again if I put in that kind of effort, but it's such an undertaking I don't think I'm willing to engage after the release of hitting master in the first place. Maybe that'll change. But the longer I wait the more I lose my skills lol.
One of the things I think SF6 lacks is a weekly/monthly casual competition for players at a similar skill level. Dota 2 has a weekly tournament setup called Battle Cup that places teams in one of 7 skill levels in a single elimination tournament to play 3-4 matches for an account badge. It costs $1 per player to enter and is genuinely some of the most fun I've had with the game. I keep thinking about how the Sajam Slam was one of the coolest tournaments/leagues of the past year because of the range of skill levels and even matchups. Giving a tournament to the Rookie/Iron/Bronze/Silver/Golds of the world where they could win, even for just bragging rights, would give folks a reason to play.
One logistical problem that would need to be worked around is a Master rank player smurfing a new character in lower ranks, but Dota 2 worked around that by estimating an account skill level.
Proper criticism aside, SF6's ranks are soooo much better than Strive's systems. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gotta hold down my spot in the Platinum mines
Strive might be my least favorite ranked mode ever
I think the ranking system in SF6 is plain stupid. I started in SF5 and I needed years to get into the Diamond Rank. Although one has to consider that a lot of skill and knowledge will automatically transfer to the successor game, I do not understand the developers decision to make the Master Rank so easily accessible. It does not take a lot of dedication to get to Masters, and I've that many streamers changed into a minigame called "Bring every character to master rank"...which in SF5 would be insane. Once people grinded themselves into masters the MR experience is pretty tough, so I guess thats why most people quit there, leaving their character below 1500. You really have to be dedicated to the game to climb the 1800-1900s, but those players never really contributed to the overall performance or the state of the game. That is a very exclusive club that - although they buy the costumes and all the season passes for sure - the financial benefit from those players is negligable. Pushing new players or beginners to fast through the ranks does not work at all in 1v1 game that is based 100% on skill, since every little jump that you do in the ranks that brings you "too far" will ultimately lead so a few hours of negative gaming experience. I fully support Chris F' view.
One thing that I think needs to be considered though: The system itself might explain the strange distribution. I guess that every players in SF6 somehow is able to reach Platinum 1+ after a relatively short time. This is due to some mechanics that are superior in lower ranks (Drive Impact, here we go). So even the new players will have a Platinum Char, that counts as their highest and is parked there for eternity.
Absolutely agreed,that being said , Reddit would be pulling their hair out at this video 😂
Excellent video as usual Chris
Could not care less about opinions on Reddit tbh
I’m a Master rank in the UK and I feel like the climb to master was too easy. In SFV I think I got to Ultra Platinum, so to get to Master in 6 kind of shocked me. The highest MR I’ve reached is 1700, but then I’ve had losing streaks that take me back to 1500. The MR system seems to work fine, it’s the climb I think they need to make more of a challenge, which will keep the lower ranks populated, make the grind take a bit longer and even making people who quit at a certain rank stick with it a while longer. Who knows, maybe they’ll find a reason to stay and keep playing?
Something that I don’t think gets mentioned enough is how big that plat 1 wall is. The difference between a player in the g5/p1 range vs a player in p1/p2 range is massive and it feels really bad to level up a lot and not change actual rank at all. I legit learned a lot more going from p1 to p2 than my entire time in silver and gold
A few things I’d like to point out/comment on: first, if we’re looking at a graph of active players, then the bar showing plat 1 isn’t showing people who got there and quit, it’s showing people who are either in the process of ranking up, or are (like me) just hard stuck.
Second, the problem with pushing people into the lower ranks to “make them healthier” is that it requires keeping people in those ranks; in other words leaving more players hard stuck in bronze, silver and gold. And maybe it’s just me, but I can’t imagine many people would feel motivated to continue if they’re unable to even reach the middle ranks, and if enough quit then you’re back to where you started.
Finally, in response to you asking if silver and gold currently are nothing more than time sinks, to be fair, every rank is a time sink to some extent. Time = experience, and experience is fundamental to improvement, the only question is how much, with some needing more than others. As for what purpose Silver and Gold serve in SF6 atm, I’m no expert, but from what I’ve heard and from my experience, they’re the advanced beginner/lower intermediate ranks where players, ideally, learn a general game plan and test it, gradually growing more confident and competent as they climb. Unfortunately, I think at least some choose to instead “speed-run” this process by using cheese strats instead of properly learning the game, which leads to a harsher experience later on when those strats no longer work, which might partially explain the plat 1 situation.
FYI aside from the oddness of the population bumps in Gold 1, Plat 1, etc caused by derank protection and pure player psychology, the chart is actually very similar to Valorant.
The main actual problem is that from the charts it is clear that although SF6 has insanely good retention, the number of new players is falling off. Capcom can broaden the skill bands to reduce matchmaking times, but this just makes ranked a scarier place for new players. Only new blood can recapture the feeling of beginner players learning together.
There are several ways to address MR. As others have noted, Elo is intended to be zero-sum to accurately calculate player skill. But skill can be separated from rank so the fix is easy: Just give all players a "hidden" MR once they hit platinum and let Elo do its magic. After a couple of hundred matches, MR can be made visible to players whether you've hit Master or not since it will be broadly accurate.
In fact, there would be something to be said for making MR visible to players from Platinum upwards. Generally Platinum is the point where players are pretty likely to continue playing regularly, and it would avoid the "cliff" from Diamond to Master.
I’m from Taiwan, and the matchmaking regions I’m paired with are mainly Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, with some matches against players from Japan and Korea, as well as occasional players from Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Here, the matchmaking time from Rookie to MR1500 is usually about one minute. In the Asian region, the popularity of SF6 is probably second only to Japan.
Most beginners here quickly progress to Platinum 1 and tend to stay in the range between Platinum 1 and Diamond 1. Additionally, we have a large number of players who reach Master Rank, frequently switch characters, and play matches in the Platinum 5 to Diamond 5 range. Once they climb back to Master, they switch characters again to repeat the rank climb. Some even switch accounts or platforms to start over.
As a result, in the Asian region, it’s the mid-level players who have the worst matchmaking experience, rather than the beginners.
I asked GPT to help me with the translation.😂
I don't understand how you make the leap from looking at the distribution chart to projecting ranked queue times for low ranks.
1. The distribution says nothing about the actual queue times. A game with a perfect rank distribution but a smaller playerbase and worse netcode for distant connections will have less eligible ranked opponents period.
2. Why are we including the huge peaks on Plat 1 and MR-less Master in the hypothetical ranked pool in the first place? The overwhelming majority of those players are obviously not even playing ranked in the first place, thats why they're there.
They are battle hub and avatar players. That is obvious to me.
This is how the ranks should be, anyone got any alternatives please post.
Rookie-Iron-Bronze, 1 rank
Silver-Gold, 1 rank
Plat-Diamond, 1 rank
Master-1100-1300, 1 rank
Master-1301-1500, 1 rank
Master-1501-1700, 1 rank
Master-1701-1900, 1 rank
Master-1901-Legend, 1 rank
This would be better
I will speak on this topic because I have great insight i was a top ranked madden player who only played fighting games casually. No combos no online just story mode. I gave up madden and started my SF6 Journey I started in Iron Rank. I am now a platinum level 3 as of yesterday. For a new player to fighting games, bronze, silver and especially gold were not easy. I had to watch hundreds of hours of videos and practice so hard. It was extremely difficult making it out of silver and gold and that's with win streak bonuses. I however did it and I'm in platinum. Platinum however was another level of hard I was stuck at platinum 1 for awhile and now im understanding the game more and growing. Master should not be easy to obtain but at the same time speaking as a newbie to the FGC lower ranks are not easy for beginners. The problem is the placement matches granting high ranking and then players doing half the work to get to masters or being placed in a rank they honestly are not skilled enough to be in. Just my assessment.
Something to keep in mind, you can't accidentally do cool stuff in fighting games. You don't just boot up the game and hit an ed dream combo into some mixup for the game win. That comes after a lot of practice. In a shooter you can shoot randomly and miss a lot, but when you hit a headshot you are like: wow thats cool. Maybe you throw a nade and kill 3 people and feel awesome. You are doing things just like the pros. But nobody in below master rank is like, oops I pressed some button, did a crazy optimal combo and won the game. It looks and feels worse to play fighting games at the lower level which is also why retention is lower. Everyone sees the cool stuff, but the only people that can use it are above gold rank. Once people realize the work that goes into learning it + seeing you have to pay a yearly fee to keep getting the new characters, a lot of people will just leave to other FOMO games.
Also the rank distribution is like this because of the win streaks being a thing until a certain rank. And generally the more you play the better you become. The new players are always a smaller percentage of the active playerbase, and this does reflect that.
To me this doesn't seem like a problem or flaw, it's a result of how the rank system is designed.
Sidenote: I have two characters in Diamond 3 and 4, once I hit master you can be sure I will ditch those characters and try others. Because there are many characters in the game and so far I've only played a couple. Why would I limit myself to master points grinding instead of trying new things?
One thing that we need to see is the month on month stats.
That will allow us better see the progression of a new player
I recently reached Master with Guile, and it was an achievement for me. Like you said, I felt a bit demotivated after dropping to 1200 points. I feel like that's what Capcom wants, but very few players actually stick around. Anyway, that's not the point of this comment. When I had Guile in Bronze, I also played with Ryu and left him in Bronze, then I continued with Guile. Now I picked up Ryu again, and I was basically smurfing. I realized that ranking up is way too fast; in just two days, I got to Platinum 1. I feel like the system where the more you win, the more points you earn isn't really healthy. I don’t mind being pushed to reach Master where the 'real ranked' begins, but it’s not cool that if you catch on quickly, you get thrown into Platinum with the 'big kids'.
Another thing I’d add is that if you’re Diamond 5 and beat a Master, you get 250 points, and that’s A LOT. I didn’t stay in Diamond 5 for long because I beat two Masters (and one of them felt like they were playing on bot difficulty level 1-I even think they lost on purpose), and they sent me straight to Master. It felt more like they handed it to me rather than earning it genuinely, so the achievement didn’t feel as authentic.
It’s not a common talking point but, the FGC is a pretty toxic environment. And no matter how much people want to deny, hacking is a problem, and it’s becoming more sophisticated & harder to spot, Especially when one single exchange can be the difference between losing and winning.
Online can suck but going to locals is the best!
@ Totally agree, what multiplayer was always supposed to be
@ the way it all started
@@Chris_Fcompletely agree. Online is online, but locals are absolutely awesome. The FGC is incredibly inviting and wholesome in my experience.
I'm a veteran at fighting games (highest MR achieved at SF6 was 1900 before the last reset). I'm sometimes looking at the Street Fighter Reddit, and it's crazy the number of people who think that they are "done" with the game (in the sense that they think they mastered it) once they hit the "Master" Rank.
"Master" Rank means nothing in this game.
The problem with the ranking system is that it convinces people they're good by letting them rank up. Then they get destroyed so hard in master rank that they never bother trying again. Either convinced they're not good after all, or that they need more practice. Both of which puts them in the hub, and there's not much reason to leave it.
100% agree
When I started playing with Guile, it took me around four months to go from Bronze to Gold. It wasn’t super fast, but it wasn’t too slow either. Then, from Platinum to Diamond, it was a journey of many hours. My real elo hell was Diamond 3, where I was stuck for about six months. After that, reaching Diamond 4 and 5 was much quicker
I ranked my first char from rookie to master in S1 (Zangief). The ranks before Platinum were a blast to play cause they give bonus points if you're on a streak.
That bonus dissapears from Platinum and up and that made those ranks feel really stale. I have friends that only ranked their characters to platinum because of that.
SFVI's ranking system is an abject failure, thanks to:
Overly generous placement system, allowing you to basically start in high Diamond and reaching Master in an hour's time
Players employing cheating scripts, taking advantage of the braindead Drive System mechanics, specifically Drive Impact and Perfect Parry
Lack of ranks beyond Master
Ranked Phases, MR, and Legend reset strips the sense of achievement from reaching a certain MR or if you can make it to Legend
Not being able to derank from Master, specifically
LP win/loss ratio turns ranking up into simply a matter of time and not skill
The only thing that SFVI does well in terms of Ranked is providing you with different ranks for each character.
SFIV and SFV did ranked a million times better than SFVI does now. The only problem with SFV's Ranked was that you only had one rank representing any character you chose.
You know I sucked at ranked tonight and I went searching for validation. The highest I’ve gotten was in the 1600MR range a couple of times. I’ve recently plummeted. Ranked just makes me feel horrible, honestly. The good moments feel like they don’t last long and the horrible moments feel like they last for a loooooong time. So honestly, I think I’m done with ranked. I don’t feel good the majority of time playing it. I don’t feel like the MR points represents me as a player. I have way more fun playing in casual matches, which is when I play my best and with friends. I have more fun and play better in tournaments as well.
One thing that doesn't help this situation is that when you reach master as one character you will always get guaranteed diamond from placement matches as any other characters you play. An issue I have with this game is that legend rank players reach over 2000 and then stop playing ranked, which is really unfair imo, no one else can fight them to knock them down and gain a decent amount of points for beating someone with higher points. It means you end up having to play against people with less mr and getting 3 or 4 points per win while risking losing 10 to 15 points for one loss. There needs to be a way to make this better. Thanks for the vid BTW Chris 👍
I’m not sure how to improve the upper end but I agree that there is def something that can be done. Thanks for watching!
I totally agree with this. I would be considered intermediate. I'll take an occasional game from tourney players, but I can't compete. Atm, the only thing fun for me is taking all the characters to master, then stopping.
I think perhaps there are too many win streaks early on but I for one was thankful to get in to master and be in an elo system instead of ranked points. I actually find it less frustrating because I lose less points fighting players stronger than me so I find it actually encourages you to challenge stronger competition
The big issue is point distribution. You get a lot in lower ranks and too little in higher ranks making it feel like you pushing too hard for too little the closer you get to Master Rank. By the time you reach master rank you're tired, so you have no reason to keep pushing. If you want people to keep playing, make the point system a little better even in diamond rank. Many will most likely disagree, but players love seeing progression and hard work, when they're given too little, the passion to keep progressing will diminish.
My friend recently bought the game and placed at Rookie. He had to wait around 10-15 minutes for an opponent. If he’s lucky, he gets a 2-bar Wi-Fi guy from another side of the Earth. He’s now in Silver and the wait time is reduced to maybe 5-8 minutes, but it’s still very long.
That sounds demotivating as hell
The two biggest issues:
1. Climbing is too fast.
2. You can get to master losing most of your games.
There were quite a few people when I last checked that were in master rank with sub 45% W/L ratios.
You get too much for a win and not enough for losing in all ranks below the top. This is what's making the plat push such a breeze and those ranks below it almost meaningless. Add in the fact people are one and done'ing, this adds to a lot of people's inflated MMRs. If this game's ranked was a guaranteed FT2, it would be much better off here.
This is the only game in existence where I've seen players get to the top rank in a couple hours time. Granted this isn't accomplished by just pros either.
The retention, this goes with rewards. Even gacha games give rewards on ranked reset these days, yet you don't really get anything here so there is no real incentive to push ranks. Maybe give out drive tickets or something like that depending on where you rank on master MR reset.
The best way to fix this is by eliminating LP boost for hot streaks in silver and beyond.
By Adding 2 more MR ranks between Diamond and Master. (Same as Valorant/League)
reaching master is like earning a certificate for passing a street fighter 6 ed course. It doesn’t mean you’re actually good, MR points do.
they should redistribute your MR during the reset based on where you ended, top players go to 1650, low MR players go to1350 and inbetween you stay the same rank?
I'm going to note that SF6's player retention overall has been incredibly high actually. For a player retention issue, this is evidently not a big problem. (Looking up numbers, it's even better than I expected, SF6 is GAINING active players.) But, it is true that finding matches in low ranks, especially in off hours or some regions, can be tough.
SF6 is my first ever fighting game and i started all the way down at rookie, slowly climbing up to master took me a a few months and while it felt good. The second i started trying to grind mr i was faced with the harsh reality that i was terrible at the game, sure you need to have some basic skills to get to master, but actually getting there is like when gon and killua find out about nen in HxH. its like a whole different lvl of player, especially with the lack of players in my regions compared to something like japan. I currently play out of Puerto Rico and the player bass in the surrounding area isn't huge so the mr ratings in match ups would be so uneven. multiple times me as a 1400mr ken was fighting legend ranked players including people like bananaken and todokai which on one side was fun but on the other made me realize im actually nowhere near the lvl of a true master player and after weeks of trying to go up in mr i slowly became unmotivated. it wasn't till recently with the release of terry that i came back and have decided i want to try to seriously get better and improve. But yeah i do think this ranked system is incredibly flawed, if this was any other game i should probably be somewhere around the middle ranks
I started Sf6 from scratch, and is the first SF Game that i take somehow seriously and also the first FG for that matter. With 35 hours of ranked and 30 of casual i am at platinum 5 (almost Diamond 1). And i think i could get to Diamond 3 without too much effort (meaning with my current level of play and playstyle). From then on i think i would have to put time again on improving specific areas of my game to advance further. Again It is the first fighting Game that i take somehow seriously and It felt that i ranked very very fast.
I am from Europe and i never had to wait to much to get into matches. Maximum 1 minute and normally within 20 seconds i am already playing.
I am quitting the game because i play alone, and It gets boring for me as i dont have friends to play with. So mindlessly going to ranked has its appeal but It is not enough to keep me interested for the long run i guess.
Also It is worth to mentioning that It is a demanding game and i play after work so many times i am too tired to put extra effort on a game
I play in EU west and i personally cant complain about match searches at master rank or lower ranks it comes in usually in less then a minute. I also am one of those master players that stoped playing the game once I reached master with half of the roster. I simply lost interest due to the fact that i achieved more or less what i wanted and theres not much content for me besided grinding rank which will take alot of time investment and character specialization, and it gets really boring after a while. I cant offer many solutions besides releasing more content or interesting events but even still im not sure if that would help. I am also of the opinion that there should be less lower ranks as it seems pointless , i cant tell the difference between a bronze and a silver player? Aso master doesnt feel like master, they need to make you start at 1000 rating or something and if you end up loosing alot you should be demoted back to diamond. I disagree massively with the mentality of everyone should get master , because if everyone is master then no one is master.
The starting point of an Elo system like MR 1500 does not change relative skill levels. It only changes the average. Starting at 1000 MR would lower the current low MR of 1000 to 500. There are other ways to fix the large initial drop for many new players entering an Elo system.
Did you stop enjoying improving on those characters you got to master? Gaining MR is the only way outside of tournaments to show that you improved?
@@michaellawrence9922 I stoped enjoying the grind because for me personally there was no motivation for reaching higher mr ratings like 1600 or 1700 besides playing better players. My goals were to play some pros and enter some tournaments and I did those things but the grind gets very repetitive and i just lost interest after 1 year of playing. The next best achievement would be top 500, but unfortunately that would take hours of grinding the same character and if your not in japan it becomes exponentialy harder so its a very unreachable goal for me.
Def agree that the game needs to offer more incentives for players through rewards. This would motivate people who aren’t grinding MR for FT2 tournament experience to keep playing ranked
Hey Chris, i am from the middle east and honestly the rank experience in our region is horrific. At times i get games within a couple of minutes for a decent hour then it’s like everybody around the region disappears and majority of the time i wait 30 minutes for a game. (I don’t get paired to play a lot of the neighboring countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE etc.) and when i do the majority of the time the connection is horrible. Sometimes i feel like quitting because of it but i love the game to much to do so and i plan on getting better despite the struggles. (Sorry for the long post.)
To clarify my rank game search i have my settings set to 2-5/expanded/ cross play enabled and still struggle 🤷🏽♂️
In my country we have to find a suitable vpn, find the best nearby country to connect to, still wait 3-5 mins for a match (at 14-1500 mr), and then play matches anywhere between 60-130ms, and hope the vpn's connection is stable and doesn't drop for a second, causing a dc.
The top player in our region plays without vpn because of the stability issue. He waits 20 mins for matches at 2k+ mr.
Which region?
Ranked does seem inflated. But i also think the game got boring for many bc there are only four new characters a year. I’d guess capcom could attract people back to the game if it did 6 characters a year for the first few years to try and keep it fresh.
I feel like I hit a wall when I reached platinum. All of a sudden everyone is so much better than me and I'm losing everything. This is most likely caused by people that camp in that rank afraid to lose points and go down to gold when they're actually experienced enough to rank up a bunch. I'd say that I should be gold but gold players are way too easy. Really frustrating and making not want to play the game. I will add that the lack of a clear path to improve makes people drop fighting games more than others. I almost dropped the game in silver because I didn't know how to win and I feel the same issue again in plat. In pretty much every other competitive game it's very clear what skills are lacking and what you should work on
I've hit plat 1 some weeks ago but there is such a huge wall, every match feels so heavy, managed to hit plat 3 recently but it was so much more difficult than climbing previous ranks that I'm needing to take a break to relax from ranked now.
But as a new player I felt that it was kind of ok for fighting games to have most of the player base on intermediate/top ranks, almost all of them are paid, which probably reduces the lower ranks (Overwatch rank distribution used to peak at platinum, now that it is free it peaks at gold), and a good portion of the fighting game player base is made of people who play them since years. Maybe Capcom just wasn't prepared for the surge of new players?
I think it should get harder around plat, getting to master shouldn’t happen with about 40% winrate
I played causals mainly with 550 hours vs only 70 hours on ranked. 100 hours in the lab. Mastered Jamie as my main, on the grind getting Aki to the same level at the moment. The reason I dont like played rank much is that I found the higher rank my opponents are more likely spam gimmicks to the point the whole fight feels like a formula, did the combos right, better guess at the rock paper scissors then it's a win. But in casual there appears to be more experimental plays and approach, for myself without thinking I might losing my points I am more willing to find solutions or creative ways to counter certain moves. That being said I have more fun in casuals and I often paird up with ppl in the same rank. In case I paired up with much lower rank players, once I found my oppents are really new not a smurf I usually chill and give them a not so easy win. I am also trying to find the fun of playing the game instead of endless grind just for a title to display on my screen.
Good insights, charts & comparison to other games. Wow, a lot of comments already.
I had no online for 9 months (Capcom ID link error), did bad in placement, & rarely got to play these past 3-4 months. So I'm silver 2. I'm w.coast US & get matches quick.
And play other game modes & games. Interesting you can go up w/a 40% winrate. SF5 took me 5 years to reach gold. SF6 is different in no ranked trophy. Hope to rank higher in this.
I avoid Casual in SF6, which matches w/any rank. BH is cool. A factor for some stopping at Master is individual ranks per character, so people can try new ones. Nice vid.
Nice to hear you finally were able to play the game. That must've been frustrating.
It might seem a bit simplistic to get caught up on words and names, but I think just using the term "master" alone and not making Legend a true separate rank just set things up for people to consider it a finish line. And not allowing you to derank from it just made things worse. I would like to combine aspects of sf6 and sf5 systems (and I didn't like sf5 as a game very much). The use of placement matches and also having separate point totals per character in sf6 encourages people to play more of the cast and not constantly restart in lower ranks when they switch, but sf5 did better in keeping more ranks and each of them distinct and allowing deranks. Just combine those things.
Having over a quarter of the active player base in Master just sounds silly for a game with such a high player count that's less than two years old. It's going to look much worse down the road. Near the end of sf6, I wouldn't be surprised if over half of the active player base at that time has a Master character.
I also agree. While I do wait between matches, I'm just in training mode, where I would be anyway. So it's not so bad. I can see veterans being more angry. I always need to brush up on things during training waiting periods. I'm not leaving the game. I'm too impressed with it. It's fun, I'll keep playing.
It def is fun and I’m one of the players who enjoys MR pushes
For sure needs a rework. I matched with Legend players in Diamond 5, just a waste of time for both of us. Then I matched with 1300 MR master players, very free 250 LP. Made Diamond 5 the worst for me
I think that all of these games should do away with these ranked systems that give you some badge or whatever. Just use ELO or some other system where you have a number that goes up or down based on wins and losses. The system boosts everyone up to the higher ranks so actually having those ranks means less and then the players just quit once they get there because they probably feel like "welp I'm Plat/Diamond/Master guess I'm done."
They treat the badges/tiers like grades in school. They're not interested in actually learning the material, they just want their account to show the Master emblem and that's also why you get plugging/cheating in the same way that a student will cheat for a test. Doesn't matter that the teacher graded everything on a curve or that they cheated off of their neighbor as long as their report card says they got an A.
Rank inflation using SFV as a basis of comparison is real.
It could be that SF6 is actually better than other fighting games in helping people win games. Sometimes people win on gimmicks and that gets them to Plat 1 or Diamond 1. Other times people grind fundamentals. The long term solution to retention is making losses feel acceptable rather than punishing to one's rank, while making people want to reflect on their wins. I think the solution lies in adjusting LP boost/drops against differently ranked players, and also being able to demote Plat 1 - Dia 1 - MR 1500 and below 5 steps down every season. You could put the winstreak bonus back until Master with this system.
I know others have talked about losing Master rank if you fall below a certain MR but if we're going to do that we should do the same to unranked Masters. I personally don't believe we should do either but I would hope Capcom does something to entice players to rank. I love grinding for MR but maybe a few new titles would help.
Some people mentioned giving out drive tickets for new MR achievements. They already give out 1,000 drive tickets for silly stuff like character bdays so I don’t see why they can’t give it to players who work hard to improve!
Also this is not very surprising to me after having played this game from release date, I mistakenly thought that the ranking system of this game was good cause it made the players climb up faster and if they're good enough they'd be promoted to the master league and really put in the time to learn the game and fight for MR but this is not happening at all most people I know are behaving like you describe in the video they get to Master rank and stop playing completely or they have a bad time losing their initial 1500 mr points and get discouraged to keep playing, only players like me who tolerate and expect big losing streaks remain, but it's too much to ask from everyone to get used to lose 20 matches in a row to maybe have fun at 1200 mr.
Getting to master rank was absolute pain for me, but playing in master rank has made me improve. I have a higher win percentage in casual match where I play more diamond and plat players which shows me that ranks at least good at separating.
Pushing yourself to improve past “just ok” is the most fun part of fighting games for me so I can’t relate to people who stop at master
I'm one of the lucky ones in Platinum, so I don't have to wait long for matches. Personally, I think a lot of people quit at Platinum because it's the first rank that doesn't protect players. From Platinum onwards, the reward for playing is confronting losing and realising you have to learn how to play the game to get better.
WOW! So until know the FGC knows about fighting games have bad retention. Incredible!
So CAPCOM will launch Street Fighter 6 : Arcade Edition with season 1 and 2 included in the game and the flow of new players will increase the low ranks!
Then , after TWO years of Arcade Edition....and the data is again toward the high ranks....what do you think will happen? OF COURSE : Street Fighter 6 : Champion Edition with 4 season passes included, and so and so.
Could be interesting how do Tekken, Mortal Kombat, ARC SYS games are doing in this aspect.
And yes, the rank system is probably screwed, cause is prone to give easy points, no deranking a lot at beginner levels and there are the results. BUUUT, perhaps, that´s why SF6 is so successful not as a fighting game, but as a game.
And as MATSUMOTO always say in every interview he makes : "We want SF6 being played by more people!"
The AGE where fighting developers only cares about PROS and hardcore sweaties is over. Now they are looking at mid and low levels, casuals and even spectators when making decisions for the game. Sad but truth! Sad for all that pros and sweaties that represents 1%
of the consumers.
As Thorgi´s arcade said in one of his vids "Just look at the completion % from that PS bronze trophy from SF5 that´s about WINNING YOUR FIRST VICTORY in RANKED .......8.4%" . That´s means a lot.
Great vid!
I was fortunate enough that I had a diamond rated player as a friend when I started, so when I hit the ranking I quickly got up to the more populated levels. It would have been rough otherwise
I have been saying that the ranked system needs a revamp. The curve is way off compared to other games due to inflating people's rank since you can climb with a below 50% win rate.
Part of the problem is not all those 26% master players are even playing thier master ranked character anymore. They are playing lower level characters and driving new players away from the game and keeping a lot of mid level players hard stuck at platinum 1. There are actually tons of players are playing in the low ranks its just that barely any of them are actually low rank, which drives true low ranks away from the game entirely.
If we make the first half of Master into the real diamond ranking and yank everyone down 5 steps then merge iron and rookie then it'd be a lot cleaner.
This all stems from the current system giving you more points for a win than it takes away from a loss. A 50% win rate should not get you to climb all the way to Master rank.
Once you hit Platinum the point gains and losses should be equal, so that people who want to climb need to improve.
Agree that 50% or slightly lower should not get you to master
I’m 50% wit 1700 MR. Am I the anomaly?
I am just spitballing here. What if we had a system in place where, up to a certain point, players rank up in relation to their own performance and improvement, rather than their win-loss rate? Instead of having this arbitrary point system that goes up and down, the game presents goals for each rank. After reaching said goals, players are given a challenge and completing said challenge, results in a rank up. Once you hit a certain rank, it's all points based on win-loss or ELO or whatever.
I just find it incredibly weird that a player who is just learning the game has to purely rely on their ability to win consistently in order to rank up. While learning the game, ranking up should reflect your learning.
Interesting idea but tbh I don’t think the devs are going to spend that much time thinking about how to implement your idea. Not saying it’s a bad idea though!
I'm in north Africa in D5, in the afternoon I might get a match every 2-5 minutes, during the day it's totally up to luck and I'll probably fight the same people a few times. Worth noting that I mainly get matched with EU people.
Played fighting games casually since the 90s. SF5 was the first one I tried to be good at. Got Gold after 10 months. Almost as long to get to platnium. Never got higher.
Got master Rank in sf6 in about 10 hours hours of ranked and 30 in casuals. I believe it's just because there were so many players at the time. I just had to punish a LOT of unsafe stuff. They would just cycle through one unsafe thing after the next.
I stopped playing ranked because I wanted to improve my fundamentals. I practice and go up against master ranks in battle hub. My win rate against them is abysmal.
I think starting at 1200 doesn't really solve the issue. I think fighting games in general have a retention problem because of the 1v1 focus and having to take responsibility for your losses. So even if they had a harsher ranking system like SFV's, people would just stop playing once it feels like they can't level up any further.
I'm not sure what the solution is from Capcom's side as this is an issue every fighting game deals with once it's not new anymore.
All I know is I'm having a lot of fun with SF6, so even though my MR is trash, I'll continue playing it because it's just fun pressing buttons in the game.
Edit: Now that i think about it, the placement system is the issue. Some players never reach the lower ranks whereas SFV everyone started at Rookie. I think it's too late to remove the placement system now, but maybe for SF7 they shouldn't have one so there's a healthy player base at all ranks.
The problem is Master is free in SF6, at most, Master in SF6 is equivalent to late Platinum/early Diamond in SF5...
You really had to work a lot in SF5 to get past Platinum... in SF6, the game kinda only begins when you get to Master...
I'm not arguing with you, I think all your points are valid. But i also think that no matter how you rework a game, it's going to lose players eventually, at some point. It's just how it is. And this isn't exclusive to street fighter 6.
For me personally, it didn't even take me getting to master rank to quit playing. I essentially stopped playing when I got to diamond 2-3. I felt like I learned everything I needed to and that's why i quit. It wasn't really about ranks. It was about proving to myself I could play street fighter at a somewhat competent level too. Not sure if this relates to anybody, but yeah.
I think at the end of the day, it's just a 2d fighting game 🤷♂️ there's not much to do after winning a couple games and then losing a couple games
On a different note, battle hub and lobbies + searching for casual matches in training mode all feels more fun and rewarding than the ranked system imo but just a thought !
I’m a huge fan of battle hub! Lets me work on matchups really easily
I'm in Europe and started out in Iron back when the game launched. I've been taking it slow, trying to learn how to play fighting games properly and am in Diamond now. I've always been able to get matches in seconds, be it in Iron or Diamond, although admittedly back when I was a lower rank there was probably a larger playerbase because it was closer to launch.
That said, one thing that these types of games have going for it is that it's 1v1. You really don't need a very large amount of players to have a healthy playerbase. If you live in places like Europe, the US, East Asia, you should be okay. If you live in places like Africa or Australia, you'll probably have more trouble. But honestly, they have playerbase problems with every game, not just this one.
I will say I haven’t touched rank in a couple months because of how much the rewards diminish so hard. I wish the ELO system isn’t exclusive to Master, just to say you only know where you truly are you have to spend so many hours just to get out of platinum alone is so frustrating. I personally think a ELO system for the entire system would tell everyone where you are at skill wise, and rank is just a reward for putting the time in would just be so much better