Evaluating Splatoon's Ranking System

If memory serves, Nintendo hasn't been very enthusiastic about traditional multiplayer mostly due to negative player interactions (I recall seeing people being autobanned from Smash Bros because of repeatedly attacking the same person). They just want their players to have fun, and I think that it's possible (likely?) that Nintendo wants the ranks to be inflated. I'm sure there's some correlation to the fun factor and improving your own rank, and the server does not need to use that letter grade to make matches.

I think there may be an inflated letter grade for the players to show off, but the server ranks players against each other by another metric that is only loosely tied to that grade.

I don't believe the reward system works as described, because I have personally seen rewards of anywhere from 8 to 12 points for victories in B and A ranked games. My guess is that rewards are based on the difference between your rank and the average rank of the enemy team; being lower rank confers a bonus, and vice versa.

The more important missing factor, however, is that the game penalizes players for disconnecting, making you eat the 10 point loss regardless of your team's performance. This makes sense, as otherwise, cheaters would disconnect or turn off their console as soon as they started losing. However, because the game is riddled with connection errors and network bugs, it is extremely common (and frustrating) for a match to go well for you, only to be kicked out near the end due to network errors and count a loss anyway.

If only one player disconnects, then their team will almost always lose, and the model remains unchanged. However, it's usually the case that a significant portion of both teams will disconnect. This results in a point deficit that this model does not account for. Example: normal games are 4v4, resulting in (ignoring my previous comment about rank-relative rewards) an even exchange of +40 points (to the victors) and -40 points (to the losers). However, if two players disconnect from each team, then only 20 points total will be rewarded to the remaining victors, while both the losers and the two "winning" disconnectors will lose 10 points a piece, resulting in a loss of 60 points, and a deficit of 40 points.

I would estimate that I have lost several ranks worth of points due to disconnects alone; just yesterday I lost around 50-70 points after a series of infuriating network errors. So my guess is that in the long run, disconnects more than compensate for the occasional +10 point bonus this blog post exposes.

Splatoon is an innovative take on the team-based shooter genre, and probably the most fun I've had with such a game since Team Fortress 2. But problems like frequent network errors and lag (probably exacerbated by the fact that matchmaking is cross-region and a significant portion of the active playerbase, especially in higher ranked games, is Japanese), flaws in the ranking system (sharing ranks between wildly different game modes, making players suffer the full loss penalty when their teammates disconnect) and matchmaking system (frequently pairing players up on imbalanced teams of e.g. 4 snipers, with no opportunity to change your weapon after the fact) do put a damper on my enjoyment.