I'm Nathan. you can call me Lite, too. this is just a blog for stuff I like. desktop theme is by zuvia and tinkered with by auors. some links for mobile users: about / my book
hey
if you guys are planning on migrating from this site I am primarily on bsky
if we are mutuals feel free to ask for my discord as well
to understand why the strive ranked system is the way it is, you have to understand what it was created in response to:
1. ranked matchmaking in their previous titles was underpopulated given that the games themselves had a small playerbase on average. in xrd in particular, the previous game in the series, they observed that matchmaking was done entirely through the player lobbies because that would be the quickest way to find a population of players during times where the game’s playerbase was small or below peak.
2. when playing ranked matches in other games, both the elo and separate ranked points gained or lost can feel arbitrary or like a poor representation of the player skill.
let’s look laterally at a comparable matchmaking system from them’s fightin’ herds. tfh notably has no ranked queue at all and plans to implement it were scrapped because there would simply not be enough players to populate it. instead, matchmaking is almost entirely done through the pixel lobbies, which function similarly to strive’s lobbies and the sf6 world lobby. in the pixel lobbies, you can queue for a match where you stand or you can go to a specific cabinet that facilitates spectator queue. much like sf6, there’s also a couple of other non-pvp games you can play in the lobby, namely a pve mode where you fight monsters to grind in-game currency for avatar customizations. the most notable thing about the pixel lobbies is the fact that it tracks ranked based not on wins and losses but on a combined metric of total games played and total playtime. this feels like a much better way to gauge someone’s threat level at a glance, since you can’t look up someone’s placement on an elo leaderboard on the fly, and even that wouldn’t really be a good indicator of skill (players can farm/idle elo, ranking may have decayed between sessions or seasons, a new character may have a different rank attached to it, etc.) this also works better for tfh because there’s usually less than a hundred people playing at any given time, which means going directly to a populated lobby is faster for matchmaking purposes than waiting forever for someone to show up in a queue.
strive’s lobbies are based heavily on this system with the analysis from their previous titles in mind. since the 3d model look in xrd and other games is very expensive and strive doesn’t benefit from a licensing budget, they switched to a pixel/voxel look that was easier to design. you can decide at a glance from the lobby list which areas across the globe are populated so you can directly travel to an opponent rather than wait for a matchmaking queue to pop; although, in point of fact, the quick start ranked matchmaking DOES IN FACT WORK LIKE A TRADITIONAL QUEUE, notably breaking the quirk that higher floor players cannot normally matchmake against lower floor players. (i.e if you join the queue as floor 9 you can match against floor 10 players even though the UI says you’re in a designated lobby and despite the fact that they physically cannot join a floor 10 lobby.) you can rank up incredibly fast if you’re on a floor inappropriate for your skill level, as the game promotes you from floor to floor based on how often you can maintain a 5-game winstreak denoted by the arrow on your bounty profile, and it slows your promotion progress if you lose multiple games. once you get into celestial, you can play for semi-real stakes to earn a spot on the highest floor, but afterwards you can comfortably play without fear of demotion or loss of points. while elo is tracked in the game and can be viewed via third party tools, hiding it means it’s never “at risk” and players never have to worry about such a ranking being inaccurate when fighting against other opponents or after having taken a long break, an issue that many games like league of legends have (and an issue which sf6 shares.)
of course, the obvious issues with strive’s matchmaking service is that it often bugs out, and in year four (five if you count the betas) this is very obviously frustrating and I don’t really think it’s defensible. having said that, other matchmaking systems are still prone to similar bugs. kofxv notably launched with a queue only matchmaking system that did not work AT ALL for well over a year. even during peak hours you would be waiting twenty minutes or more for a queue to pop in a densely populated queue. sf6 and tfh also have odd bugs in their cabinet design much like strive does, they’re just reported on less frequently (and sf6’s cabinet system has other issues like instantly forcing the match to start without letting player 1 screen it.)
my main issues with queue based matchmaking in other games are equally divided between personal gripes and genuine design flaws. the biggest issue any queue based system faces is, what happens when your playerbase vanishes? sf6’s ranked queue is very snappy at finding matches that are accurate to your specifications, but this is largely because it’s the biggest game on the market and it can pull from a large sample size of players to pair you with. what happens when sf7 comes out or when a polarizing version/season/update pushes players away from the game as was often the case with sfv? issues such as these result in a sparsely populated matchmaking queue where queue times take much longer to pop and the quality of the match (both connection and closeness-of-skill) can no longer be guaranteed. I have experienced this issue firsthand in sfv (as a latecomer who had difficulty finding quality ranked matches) and in both mbtl and uni2 (modern but less popular titles with small playerbases which thus made ranked matchmaking difficult to use.)
the other main issue I have is the stress of gambling points on wins and losses. I find that losing can be a very valuable and productive experience in a fighting game, but I don’t feel that losing sets in a ranked matchmaking system feels like a good use of my time, for several reasons:
1. you are objectively getting better at the game the more you play, regardless of win/loss. this is not really reflected accurately when you lose points that are intended to be a measurement of your skill or matchmaking rating. elo is meant to be a measure of what the game thinks is your skill and experience, but this can be inaccurate if your elo has degraded past your actual skill or if the initial assessments have placed you too high, putting you in hardstuck situations in either direction that can feel pretty bad and result in frequent mismatched sets until the ranking readjusts, which can take quite a while.
2. sets in a matchmaking queue are incredibly impersonal. without the ability to play a longer set it’s difficult to learn or adjust against your opponent, and you can’t build a valuable relationship with the person on the other side of the screen. this in turn can lead to player frustration where you blame other things besides yourself for losses, or where you’re unable to appreciate why you won because your final goal is “number goes up” rather than personal improvement.
3. sometimes I feel like queues that allegedly have baked in mmr/elo/sbmm aren’t really accurately pairing me to good quality matches against people of my rank in the first place. this was a major reason why I stopped playing tekken 8, because I was booting up into matches as a total beginner against players who very clearly had a much greater grasp of their character and the game engine even though I was still in low ranks. I get this feeling to a lesser extent in sf6 as well, because…
4. sf6 has both an account-wide elo and individual character rankings. this is designed to make it so higher level players can freely experiment with new characters and still practice without stomping weaker opponents on a pseudo-smurf. however… not only does smurfing like this occur anyway, this doesn’t necessarily benefit players who are character specialists and have a hard time switching between characters, and the elo not decaying also means that players who take long breaks are still considered high ranked. when I came back to sf6 to try out terry after a period of only playing uni2 and strive, my new challenger terry was being placed against diamond and master players when I could barely grasp how to pilot my character. on the inverse, I would still get placed against obvious high ranked master level players while queuing with my main because they were on a new character and hadn’t been placed into master yet. it felt very difficult to take anything valuable from these sets and they were not very satisfying. (I do believe in the value of playing against players who are at drastic variances of skill from you, but I don’t believe a quick-set ranked queue is the appropriate venue for this.)
having recently ground up to s+4 in uni2 in two different copies of the game (and am now among the top 30 linne players worldwide as a result) I can safely say that I really don’t care for queue based ranked matchmaking, especially when there is an ingame unit of value assigned to it. I at least had motivation to grind uni2 ranked because I could turn those units into something valuable (i.e. the profile card options) but since I would lose those points in addition to my actual rank whenever I lost, that only made ranking down or losing sets more frustrating. I do think uni2 has a unique compromise with its queue system i.e using custom search to see a menu of all the players in the queue (which in turn made it far easier to find satisfying sets,) but since the queue is still sparsely populated and the list doesn’t update in real time there’s still a lot of dropped or missed connections. having also hit diamond with kimberly in sf6 fairly early on in the game’s lifespan, I can appreciate its improved matchmaking for what it is but I also still have several issues with it.
I don’t really think any matchmaking system is perfect and I think that most players are frankly either only playing with the goal of getting in as many games as they can within a short amount of time, or they’re just selfish and don’t want to think about their opponents or play a fighting game with improvement in mind, in which case I can understand preferring a service that prioritizes simply putting you in front of your opponent as fast as possible. however, I would strongly argue that such systems are just as prone to issues as lobby based matchmaking can be, both in terms of systemic problems and in terms of buggy engineering/netcode. I don’t really think anyone would be as frustrated with strive tower if the cabinets weren’t constantly broken, and I don’t really think it matters whether they hide or display the rank-up criteria or your elo. I know from personal experience that having access to ratingupdate as an elo checker has caused a ton of grief, having watched players have meltdowns over not hitting a particular elo within a given timeframe, or having seen arguments break out about which elos are an appropriate cutoff for events we hosted as a part of wwgg… and pissing contests such as those were precisely why the game natively doesn’t display it! a system where demotions function as a “recommended” mmr while still allowing you to seek out opponents of higher skill AND potentially get much longer sets in, while also even developing a sense of community, is much more valuable to me than a system that simply seeks to put me in front of a new opponent every three minutes. it greatly reduces the stress of each rank-up/rank-down and it allows me to seek out more meaningful sets against particular opponents, and I can always go directly to where the population is congregating rather than wondering why my queue hasn’t popped.
I also think the bounty levels are a much better indicator of skill than elo or a particular rank since it shows you exactly how much a person has played and you can extrapolate their skill the higher the bounty is, since your bounty increases exponentially when playing against better opponents. (I enjoy the rip rating in uni2 because it works in a similar way, although you can still lose rip.) I don’t think the functionality of the ranked tower is also as inscrutable as other people make it seem- I frankly think it’s fairly easy to intuit if you spend any amount of time looking at the screen and observing the icons and what they say/how often they occur. but even if they are inscrutable I think that’s preferable to knowing what’s on the line and then hyperfocusing on that and getting frustrated that you had to give it up after a loss in an unsatisfying set where you’ll never see the other person again. I also believe the previously described systems like sf6 and tekken 8 have had far more impenetrable behavior with regards to who it was matching me up against at times. I think sbmm is a really crucial feature in any competitive environment but if it’s putting you up against players that are out of your league very consistently then there’s probably an issue with how the game tunes its mmr, and it’s not like those queues are outright displaying this information either.
also, full disclosure, I really like the voxel design of the lobbies because the designs manage to be simple and expressive at the same time, and you also don’t have the ability to make shithead racist or transphobic caricatures like in sf6. (the sf6 avatar customization being insanely expensive and also pulling development time away from actual roster character costumes only serves to make it more frustrating, lol.) I miss the tofu avatars or the gbvs/dbfz chibis but I couldn’t make any of them look like me, so I don’t consider this a significant loss.
I think if I WERE to implement changes to strive’s tower system beyond the obvious bugfixes and lobby-netcode improvements, it would be to see a player’s region and connection type (wired/wifi) before the match, and I would love for the game to implement a performance test tool. as far as I know, killer instinct, +r, and sf6 are the only fighting games that have a performance test and (again to my knowledge) sf6’s tool isn’t actually built into the game. a lot of the bad connections in strive are due to people running the game on bad home networks i.e wifi or with obvious performance issues i.e base ps4 or potato pc builds which can both cause extreme rifting. some of the worst sets I’ve ever had in a fighting game were in tekken 8 because that game’s insane fidelity is just too much for most machines, and even good rollback netcode can’t mask extreme performance issues. I think I would also ask for spectate/rotation to be implemented in both tower and park cabinets because that’s a feature I do like sf6 including (although in sf6 it forces a ft1 without announcing the new player in the queue which is kind of annoying.)
hey bro why does your speech bubble become heart shaped when we talk ? bro why did the tail on your speech bubble curl around and make a little heart shape
stories that are deconstructions of the traditional fairytale & in which a central conflict is the romanticization of the idea of a certain kind of princess being rescued by a certain kind of prince but the ‘princess’ character harbors a dark secret that makes her believe herself to be unlovable if known and consequent internal guilt of being a sham princess and the ‘prince’ character does not fulfill the traditional image of a prince in a widely societally perceived way that causes them to struggle with internal guilt of being a sham prince
live NOW @ twitch.tv/litetheironman with more Xenoblade Chronicles! we made it to Satorl Marsh, and we’re on our way to the top of the Bionis, where the High Entia are said to live… come thru!
I love Dungeon Meshi, so I made an anatomy chart for Falin’s dragon form.
✨I’ll be selling this design as a print at Lightbox expo this October! It’ll be the only place you can get it, so consider grabbing tickets and visiting me!✨
live NOW @ twitch.tv/litetheironman! streaming more Xenoblade Chronicles! we’ve made it to Colony 6 so we’re gonna take a break and get around to all these sidequests that have been piling up before we move on to Satorl Marsh. come thru!
