Guilty Gear Strive’s ranked tower is quite bad

So on the 2nd of February I made it back to heaven, using Baiken and only Baiken. As you might recall, I wasn’t doing too hot the first two days. While I am getting a better handle on her overall game plan now, I am by no means anywhere near competent at this point in time. So how is it possible that I made it back into the celestial realm on the second day of the new month already? I would have to thank Arc System Work’s rather senseless ranked tower system for that.

Lack of matchmaking

What if I asked you what the single most positive thing that you can think of about Guilty Gear Strive’s online experience is? Chances are you’re going to say “Its netcode” and I would absolutely agree with you on that one. Is it really the best thing about it though, or is it possibly the only good thing?

The biggest issue I have with Guilty Gear Strive’s online environment is that the game doesn’t feature any type of matchmaking. None! Instead we have this battle station system across all three online modes. The ranked tower, the park and the private lobbies. I don’t mind the park and the lobbies, that’s not what I take issue with, you can keep them as they are. The ranked tower however is quite possibly the dumbest thing I have ever come across when it comes to climbing ranks in any fighting game. I’d say any game even, but I don’t really play any competitive games outside of fighting games, do feel free to add to the genres in the comments though. The floor system might be ok for the lower floors, but I’d say starting at floor 8 or 9 it doesn’t make much sense anymore. And no, the irony of me referring to the floors in terms of skill levels is not lost on me either.

Case in point as I stated leading into this and as part of my one humble brag of the day quota, I made it to heaven with Baiken on the second day of February and I really shouldn’t be in heaven yet. In fact, that Sol player? The one I beat to get here definitely shouldn’t be up here either!

Sniping and dodging

Think of any other fighting game that has a ranked match system. Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, Granblue Fantasy Versus, doesn’t really matter; when you queue up and a match is found, what information are you given to make your decision if you want to play this person or not? That’s right, connection quality and in a perfect world, you might also be given information in regards to their match completion percentage and if they are on WiFi. In a nutshell, the only factors that matter when it comes to making a decision if you want to accept a match; what are the chances that the upcoming match will be playable? Three out of five bars, 50% match completion and a WiFi symbol, yeah probably not, right? Five out of five bars, 100% match completion and an ethernet cable, let’s fucking go!

The one thing you should never see before a match is, who you’re up against. Neither the player, nor which character they are using. Why? Because that would allow you to game the system, to dodge bad matchups, snipe favourable ones and not just allow, but promote boosting. Now for the million euro question, imaginary one million euros, but still— how great a job does Guilty Gear Strive do here? Let me put it this way, if Guilty Gear Strive was a Pizza, the pizza dough being its netcode, an absolutely godlike pizza dough to use as a base to build a pizza on, the rest of its online environment is bunch of fucking pineapples! Guilty Gear Strive does the exact opposite of what a competitive environment should look like.

I sometimes wonder how Axl players even climb the ranks in this game, because apparently everyone keeps dodging them. Think about that for a second and apply that logic to any other game. If you could dodge characters in Street Fighter V, our resident glue sniffing grappler friends playing Zangief would never ever accept a match against anyone that has even the slightest option to zone them out. Granted I am talking about your general degenerate online player here and not about pro players, but that is the point. Pro players will put themselves purposefully in situations that are unfavourable, to figure out how to beat that, they have to, that’s how they pay their bills. Your resident millennial anti vaxxer brexit voter on the other hand, he’s just butthurt when he loses some ranked points. You can punish rage quitting, but you can’t hold someone accountable for not doing something. I think that we should extend a helping hand to our zoning friends, so that we can fight the glue sniffing grappler populace all together!

In case my actual point got lost in all that stuff about pizza and sniffing glue, that’s a sentence I didn’t think would ever cross my lips… what I am trying to say is— it is straight up unfair for someone to not be allowed to play the game, because the developer decided it’s a good idea for others to be able to avoid that player, simply because they picked a character that is mildly annoying to fight.

Regional lobbies

Someone might need to explain to me how regional lobbies are useful to anyone in ranked. Again, for the park, keep it, it’s fine. For ranked matches? It’s not rare that someone will challenge you and when you get into the match you realise it’s a 280+ Ping with rollback frames north of 7. Why? Because people from one region can just go into another region’s server without any problems. That is also cool, because again, for the park, that’s actually a pretty cool idea.

The only separation in Europe we have is Europe and Russia. Africa doesn’t even exist in that list, which means that countries in Africa would most likely either join Europe or USA East Coast, that example in a vacuum is actually enough already to showcase that this is not a good idea. Players in the US know how bad connections can get from the east coast to the west. The US did however get split up on those servers, which is also stupid, but we’ll get to that. Now look at Europe, I am in Germany, so I am technically in a relatively fortunate position to play against everyone in Europe and get a relatively decent connection out of them… unless they are on WiFi. Now look at someone in Portugal though, who gets matched up with someone from Finland. Which is roughly the same distance as New York to LA. Now you add let’s say someone from Johannesburg in South Africa into the European server mix and things are starting to look a little silly.

These “servers”, hold on a second. Are they actually physical servers? Whatever, this type of lobby separation shouldn’t exist, especially if you are not showing people what kind of a connection they can expect before they hit accept. In the US where east and west are separated it’s equally dumb. Now I don’t know where the actual line is drawn where someone would consider themselves east or west, but let’s assume for example Kansas is the start of being considered west, whereas Missouri would still be considered east. Through this lobby separation, these two neighbouring states, which would have a great connection, would not be able to meet each other, unless they go into the other lobby. See how this whole system doesn’t really make sense?

Matchmaking

If Guilty Gear Strive could somehow get rid of its tower and instead introduce a real matchmaking queue to the game, preferably one that can be toggled on and off from anywhere in the game, which is actually one of the absolute best quality of life features in SFV that I can think of, a lot of the current ping lottery could be avoided. Let me be wherever in the game, Arcade mode, training, combo mode, survival, replays, wherever, have me queued up and when a match is found, show me the predicted ping, possibly match completion rate and if they are on WiFi. In fact, let me set a WiFi filter so that I don’t even have to check on that. At the same time, remove the option to be able to see who you are up against and let players make decisions based on the predicted match quality.

Crossplay

Lastly and this part really is important, add crossplay to the game already. The argument that it’s too expensive to realise really doesn’t have much ground to stand on at this point. It’s not just Street Fighter V anymore, even games with microscopic budgets, or so I assume at least, like Fantasy Strike and Power Rangers Battle for the Grid shipped with that feature from day one. Now I understand if Arcsys wants to ride out the current season first and that’s cool, it would be a bit jarring to put an entire system on its head while a season or character pass is going on. If at the start of season two we are still dealing with the same issues though, at least outside of Asia I wouldn’t be surprised if the console version’s dwindling player base is just gonna disappear into the aether altogether. Crossplay is not just a quality of life type of addition for the players, it might just extend the life of the game itself across all available platforms.

Uhmm… celestial?

Right, that’s how I led into all of this, didn’t I? This infinitely flawed system is the sole reason that I even made it back into heaven, on the second day of a new month and I know I keep repeating that. While I don’t mean to disparage that Sol player’s playstyle, I can’t really sugar coat it either; he got into heaven because he’s playing Sol and a lot of low level players simply don’t know how to defend against yolo Sols. I myself am just above low level, I wouldn’t quite say intermediate, but maybe low level plus. The only reason I am in heaven now is because that low level Sol player made it there and basically granted me a free ticket of admission. This system that allows for sniping, dodging and straight up luck, creates a compounding effect that elevates lower skilled players, myself included, into the highest possible rank the game has to offer. As you get to stay there indefinitely after you won the challenge for the entire month, the low level player now also no longer has any incentive to actually “try” anymore.

The flipside is that the people that spend the most time in heaven tend to be high level players, so if they now get matched against the low level lucky ones, they will beat them senseless, which leads to an attitude of the low level player calling the game bullshit, generating scrubquotes and blaming everything, but their own lack of knowledge and skill, because in their mind, both players are in heaven and thus clearly of equal skill level. I might be exaggerating, looking at the scrubquotes though, not really, but this is an issue and one that can be fixed with relative ease. One easy way I can think of is to change the entry requirement to winning three games in a row without a loss for example and make that a daily task instead of a monthly one. Every single day heaven is kicking everyone out and if you want to go back up there, you have to fight for it. The top 300, or however many people receive an aura can still get some further perks, but that should be about it. You can still tally the celestial wins at the end of each month and start fresh, but it would at the very least really help in sorting skill levels more accurately.

I dunno, I just really don’t like this tower system. Once you reach heaven it’s all kind of whatever. Trying to qualify for an aura means you might have to reach at least like 20 to 25 celestial wins per day, on console, the average is likely higher on PC. That is quite the time commitment, so most people would rule that out as a goal from the start. I just take my VIP R-Code for the month, the celestial badge and probably spend my time in either the park or player matches. You know, where I don’t have to deal with constantly changing battle stations, errors and whatever other hoops the game has you jump through, because there no longer is anything else to realistically gain in heaven that doesn’t work much better elsewhere. Come to think of it, could you tell me what was wrong with points, leagues, ranks and grades again? No? Me neither.

Closing words

I reference Street Fighter V a lot when it comes to this topic, that’s because I really like that game. Street Fighter V was an awful game when it launched though, we all know that. The memes are as endless as they are true. Eight frames of input delay, one sided rollback, virtually no single player modes outside of the two minutes story modes, trials and survival mode and… well, that list goes on right. They managed to turn it around, after several years, but think of the possibilities if none of this had been an issue to begin with.

That’s what really bothers me, we have seen all of this, we know what works, we know what’s a bad idea, so why is no one using this information? Why does it always have to be built from scratch with an asterisk saying “we are trying our best and will make it work at a later date”? You already knew, the evidence is public, why are you willingly putting yourself in this position?

What are your thoughts? I am honestly curious, because I’ve heard both sides of the argument in regards to the lobby system in Guilty Gear Strive and I am genuinely curious, what people’s views are on this system, seven to eight months into the game’s life. Let me know in the comments, either here or on the YouTube video (linked below). Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it. See you next time.