I don’t like this since many times the letter grades aren’t an indicator of what really happened in the match. You can out play your opponent by locking him down in the corner and anti airing his every attempt to escape. But lets say you did that mainly with your normals so you had low combo counts and you didn’t activate your super – you’ll get rewarded with a D. I’ve always interlaced end-game ranks with the actual game score (like arcade mode score – not the match score aka who’s winning) so I’ve never really cared for them. You can get an A rank with really sloppy play if you know how to abuse the scoring system.
Anyway, I’ve always felt that the SF4 ranking system was flawed because your opponents are never really around your rank. I would love to see online ranked matches become something similar to actual ranking system found in sports. I used to play in nationally ranked table tennis tournaments and I loved how that system worked.
Spoiler
You are given an initial rating as an estimation of your skill level by: how well you play and how well you play against higher rated opponents. Your rating is considered temporary in your first 2 tournaments and will shift up or down depending on your performance. Tournaments are broken up into brackets (with each bracket being a different skill rating) and you play only within your bracket. Tournaments are played round robin with each match and loss counting towards your rating; so your rating will shift (up or down) to match your true skill level as time goes on (doesn’t take long I should mention).
Counter Strike Global Offensive has a very excellent ranking system in my opinion and utilizes the Elo rating system found in chess.
Spoiler
Originally posted by Wikipedia:
The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in competitor-versus-competitor games such as chess.
The difference in the ratings between two players serves as a predictor of the outcome of a match. Two players with equal ratings who play against each other are expected to score an equal number of wins. A player whose rating is 100 points greater than their opponent’s is expected to score 64%; if the difference is 200 points, then the expected score for the stronger player is 76%.
A player’s Elo rating is represented by a number which increases or decreases based upon the outcome of games between rated players. After every game, the winning player takes points from the losing one. The difference between the ratings of the winner and loser determines the total number of points gained or lost after a game. In a series of games between a high-rated player and a low-rated player, the high-rated player is expected to score more wins. If the high-rated player wins, then only a few rating points will be taken from the low-rated player. However, if the lower rated player scores an upset win, many rating points will be transferred. The lower rated player will also gain a few points from the higher rated player in the event of a draw. This means that this rating system is self-correcting. A player whose rating is too low should, in the long run, do better than the rating system predicts, and thus gain rating points until the rating reflects their true playing strength.
http://gaming-tools.com/counterstrike/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/cs-go-ranks.jpg
You aren’t given a rank until you win 10 ranked matches. During this time you play against opponents of unknown skill rank (ranks are purposely hidden during this period) and is assumed you play better and better players if you play well and keep winning. Once you win 10 matches, you will have your real rank and you only play against opponents around the same rank (ex: Silver 1-3) from now on. Ranks are only showed at the end of matches. As you keep winning, you will be placed against higher ranked opponents and your rank will reflect that as well. If you keep losing however, you will eventually face lower ranked opponents and if you lose to them – your rank drops down.
I love this system because you only play people around your skill rank and it’s really motivating to try to increase your rank. Something I personally love about the CS GO ranking system is that the ranks are tier’d (silver, gold nova, master guardian, eagle) so players skill level are further distinguished. All of the CS GO pro players are eagle rank, with regular tournament CS GO players being in the master guardian rank.
If SF5 has GGPO, SF5’s ranking system could be amazing with a system like that in my opinion. The equivalent ranks could be players like Daigo and Snake Eyez being Eagle rank, mid-high level tournament players being master guardian rank, intermediate players being gold nova, and novices being silver.
