Hello. We aren‘t well known on smashboards, but we’re here to introduce something substantial that I think will be really helpful to the community in taking full advantage of Brawl’s online functionality. It’s a match making and rating system called Smash Ladder.
We can fully ensure everyone that this is a highly sophisticated system that has been very well tested. Those of you familiar with Pokemon might know about Shoddy Battle; Amazing Ampharos is a moderator there, and I, Colin, am one of the main programmers. Smash Ladder takes Shoddy Battle’s ladder system and its implementation of the Glicko2 rating system and adapts it to Super Smash Brothers Brawl. The rating system has been a very big success in the Pokemon community, and we’ve carefully adapted it to Smash to make it as functional as possible. Thorough documentation on the particulars can be found on the website.
The short version is that if you want a match, you can go on, hit find match, get a friend code, and be in a match in under 5 minutes with someone who should be roughly on your skill level. You will get a rating and a ranking, and you can compete against all the other players in the system. The rating system is really very good, and it has been proven to really show the skill of the players with experience. As per the rules, we have done our best to be as fair and open as possible while giving deference to the tournament community. The system will be compiling a great number of statistics to help the community decide fairly and objectively which stages need to be banned; initially only the very obviously broken stages will be banned. The specific other rules we are using are:
Time Stock mode: 4 Stock, 15 Minutes
No Items
Pausing Off
All other settings (handicaps, etc.) set to default
These are still open to discussion and input. The very long time limit is intentional since ladder matches aren’t constrained by the organizational needs of tournaments so it is only there to prevent infinite stalls and to make match lengths reasonably predictable for the pairing system. The item rule is definitely open to input from the community and can be changed if the weight of popular opinion from high level players wants to allow some items; we’re just taking a guess at how items will be based on the previous smash games and from the feelings we get from watching videos of brawl. There’s some more discussion of the rules on the actual site, but most people probably get the idea.
Now seems a good time to provide a link to the website. Obviously you can’t play yet since brawl isn’t out yet, but feel free to explore the parameters of the system. All ratings, etc. will be reset when the game actually comes out in North America so don’t worry about having “test matches”.
http://smashladder.com
To start, we are only going to include default stages so everyone can play right away (less the Temple for obvious reasons), but after a week we will most likely move to include the hidden stages as well.
Anyway, we hope you guys like this system and use it extensively; we feel strongly that it’s a very good ladder system that will help the smash community use Brawl’s online capabilities to reach new heights in competitive play and to have as much fun as possible. Thank you for your time reading this, and thank you for any consideration you may give this system. We leave you with a picture of it in action:
~ Colin and Amazing Ampharos
We can fully ensure everyone that this is a highly sophisticated system that has been very well tested. Those of you familiar with Pokemon might know about Shoddy Battle; Amazing Ampharos is a moderator there, and I, Colin, am one of the main programmers. Smash Ladder takes Shoddy Battle’s ladder system and its implementation of the Glicko2 rating system and adapts it to Super Smash Brothers Brawl. The rating system has been a very big success in the Pokemon community, and we’ve carefully adapted it to Smash to make it as functional as possible. Thorough documentation on the particulars can be found on the website.
The short version is that if you want a match, you can go on, hit find match, get a friend code, and be in a match in under 5 minutes with someone who should be roughly on your skill level. You will get a rating and a ranking, and you can compete against all the other players in the system. The rating system is really very good, and it has been proven to really show the skill of the players with experience. As per the rules, we have done our best to be as fair and open as possible while giving deference to the tournament community. The system will be compiling a great number of statistics to help the community decide fairly and objectively which stages need to be banned; initially only the very obviously broken stages will be banned. The specific other rules we are using are:
Time Stock mode: 4 Stock, 15 Minutes
No Items
Pausing Off
All other settings (handicaps, etc.) set to default
These are still open to discussion and input. The very long time limit is intentional since ladder matches aren’t constrained by the organizational needs of tournaments so it is only there to prevent infinite stalls and to make match lengths reasonably predictable for the pairing system. The item rule is definitely open to input from the community and can be changed if the weight of popular opinion from high level players wants to allow some items; we’re just taking a guess at how items will be based on the previous smash games and from the feelings we get from watching videos of brawl. There’s some more discussion of the rules on the actual site, but most people probably get the idea.
Now seems a good time to provide a link to the website. Obviously you can’t play yet since brawl isn’t out yet, but feel free to explore the parameters of the system. All ratings, etc. will be reset when the game actually comes out in North America so don’t worry about having “test matches”.
http://smashladder.com
To start, we are only going to include default stages so everyone can play right away (less the Temple for obvious reasons), but after a week we will most likely move to include the hidden stages as well.
Anyway, we hope you guys like this system and use it extensively; we feel strongly that it’s a very good ladder system that will help the smash community use Brawl’s online capabilities to reach new heights in competitive play and to have as much fun as possible. Thank you for your time reading this, and thank you for any consideration you may give this system. We leave you with a picture of it in action:
~ Colin and Amazing Ampharos
