How exactly does ladder stuff work? I never quite understood how you connect to other players, report results, etc.
You make an account, and then log into it. From here, you enter some small profile stuff like your NNID and your location (just city. You can tell how close people are to you because their Name/Loc is Blue to Red, the cooler colours are closer and thus are usually better connections), what smash games you are there to play (you can netplay all the games by now!) and your main, and in each game you have you answer specific stuff about the game. Im not sure about the others, but for smash 4 this basically just means do you have dreamland, since if neither player has dreamland it isn't available for CP. Then you enter the chat room, and either click someone's little smash icon to challenge them or press play to host a challenge. Then, you can either see when they accept/deny your challenge, or accept/deny a challenge when you get one. From here you have a little private window with the guy you are playing, and the client basically does everything for you in terms of stage selection in the proper competitive order, double blind picking, etc.
Its really easy to follow from here, with stuff like "Select 2 stages you would like to strike" (not verbatim but basically), "waiting for your opponent to choose character", its all done in the correct order. After each game, you report Win/Loss. If both players report the same result, the game continues. This happens 95% of the time or more. If someone does decide to be a salty sally, the game will say your submitted results are different and open a dispute. You could probably submit a replay or try and prove the result, but honestly most people of higher ranks don't try and cheat for points and I find im better off just playing some more and forgetting about my disputes.
There was the one time I must have been playing against a real life friend of a mod or something, because I basically lost a dispute with no explanation after timing someone out, after they freakin timed me out game 2 AND started camping immediately in game 3. Just being a ****, and he said 'good luck' like he knew it was gonna go his way. Again, this was my only bad experience, compared to dozes on FG every time I try it, so I would really suggest you check it out!
Oh, also, you don't have to do ranked. You can host a game for Bo3 Ranked, Bo5 Ranked, Bo3 Unranked, Bo5 Unranked, Endless Friendlies (Singles) and Endless Friendlies (Doubles)... Or just message people in chat for doubles.
Its worth checking out if you want a nice way to improve your smash game! Theres always room for more Mega players on there, as of right now there are only ~25
smashladder.com
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