I’m going to be perfectly honest here: I never thought I’d see the day when Guilty Gear Strive had a properly implemented ranked system. The game just turned 4 in June, so I assumed we’d be stuck with the Duel Tower forever.
Not so.
In the recently released version 1.48 of Guilty Gear Strive, a new and improved ranked system was rolled out alongside the Cyberpunk Edgerunner’s collaboration character Lucy. While Lucy is certainly the main draw of the new patch, the addition of Ranked Match is what coaxed me into actually reinstalling Strive.
I’ve gone on record, twice now, as being deeply disappointed in, and regularly frustrated by Guilty Gear Strive’s former ranked system: Duel Tower. Some of my issues have been addressed over the game’s lifetime, such as the addition of pre-match connection quality indicators, but the Tower still leaves a lot to be desired.
For my money, the single biggest problem with the Tower is that there is no nuance to its ranking system. There are 11 total floors, which act like 11 distinct rankings. The game takes a guess at which floor it thinks you’ll be best suited for, and then moves you up or down depending on how well you do. So far, so standard.
The problem arises when you look at how quickly the Tower will move players up, or down a floor. It only takes 5 to 6 consecutive wins, or losses for your recommended floor to change. This is fine in situations where players are demonstrably outside of the average skill level of their peers, but that’s rarely been my experience in Tower. For example, 3 back to back losses could see you get demoted a floor even if the games were fairly close. This will then see you stomping players of a lower skill level before the tower moves you back up to the floor you were on previously.
It’s also worth pointing out that 11 distinct rankings is fairly low. This doesn’t leave the tower with much room for more nuanced sorting simply because it only has 11 buckets to distribute players into. This also means that if the Tower is working as intended then you’re moving between groups of almost 10% of the total player population anytime you change floors. That’s a fairly absurd jump to make unless, again, the player in question is consistently outmanoeuvring all of their opponents with ease.
Speaking more specifically of my own experience, Tower mostly resulted in fairly 1-sided fights. I was either far better than my opponent, or I was playing someone who I had no chance of beating. My winrate might have been sitting around ~45-50% (which would be ideal), but the quality of the matches in question were subpar. Honestly, it was akin to my experience playing in open lobbies in other fighting games. Yet there was no alternative, so everyone, myself included, was forced to use the Tower regardless of how we felt about it.
That’s why I was so intrigued by the addition of Ranked Matches in version 1.48. Could this finally be an answer to all of the problems I’ve previously held with Strive’s asinine ranking system? Will it actually allow me to regularly play players of roughly the same aptitude, instead of that being a pleasant rarity in a sea of misery?
As it would happen, yes. Yes it does.
This is the best experience I’ve ever had playing Strive. No hyperbole. Over its lifetime, I’ve put 1000 hours into Strive, and this, right now, is the most pleasant experience I’ve had playing online ranked matches. The overwhelming majority of my matches have had a good cadence, and I feel like I can identify areas of improvement from losses instead of feeling totally dumbfounded. That’s a far cry from my previous experiences.
It’s probably not a secret how developer Arc System Works managed to achieve this: they simply copied every other ranking system that exists. Instead of 11 ranks, there are now 19, which provides the ranking system with far more nuance for how it divides up players. This allows for the game to make much more accurate assessments of relative skill, which leads to far more matches where either player has a reasonable shot.
Plus, it takes somewhere in the neighbourhood of 25 consecutive wins to move up to the next rank, so moving up or down no longer feels like doing the Cha Cha Slide.
It’s not just how the matches have felt that has made playing Ranked Match so pleasant though: it’s also reduced the time I spend in menus. I had to spend so much time finding, and connecting to stations while playing in Tower. This was only exacerbated if there were connection issues, which there frequently were.
However, in the new Ranked Match system, I simply choose my preferred matchmaking settings, which are saved between sessions, and press start. Then I wait until the game finds me a match.
I can not overstate how much better this feels to actually use. I can simply focus on playing the game, and making notes between sets instead of fighting with the game to get into my next match. I don’t even know if connection problems are as rampant as they were after the crossplay update because I’m not responsible for dealing with them anymore. All that shit is hidden, so I can focus on actually playing the game.
It’s glorious.
Arc System Works also addressed the complaints about how Tower used a unified rank for your entire account, and implemented rank on a per character basis. This just adds to the friction-less experience of using the new ranked mode, and is yet another reason why I’m very happy that it was finally implemented. I can now actually swap between Dizzy, and May, whom I have vastly different levels of skill playing, without needing to ruin the experience for other players while Strive struggled to figure out which floor I ought to be on.
I was a little skeptical at first, but I’ve gotta give it up: this new ranking system is awesome. And that’s not to say that it does anything unique from other ranking systems. Quite the contrary. It’s just a normal ranking system, with very little menuing required from players between matches. I love how I can just press a button and boom – it’s Guilty Gear time. That is refreshingly straightforward, and has made my recent time playing Strive an absolute joy.
What about you? Has Lucy or the addition of Ranked Matches piqued your interest? How’re you finding the new ranked system? Sound off in the comments if you feel like sharing.
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Frostilyte Writes 