Xquirtle
Smash Journeyman
So if we look at a highly simplified scenario where the 4 million accounts that have been ranked online each only play 1 character and are evenly distributed across the cast of 74, that leaves us with a quite small player base of 54k per character. In this case, roughly 85% of your character's ladder is comprised of the default rankings of players that have never played your character. This is why GSP is so volatile in the middle rankings. The unranked / low games played characters are all piled up in one region of the ladder. Now... while this scenario does not represent reality, we can assume that a less extreme version of this exists. Most players probably play a vast majority of their games on a handful of characters, still leaving a most of each ladder to be filler rankings of unplayed characters.
My theory around this is that you have to engage in quite a few games to reach either end of the ranking system where GSP moves quite slowly (1-2k per game). This means that unless you just so happen to land right into the rating window where the default rated characters fall, you will likely end up on either tail end of the GSP ladder. So to sort of reiterate, if we imagine an MMR system where the default starting point is 1500 rating, but Nintendo then increases or decreases that based on your roster GSP or whatever, we end up with a rating window of say 1300 to 1700 where all of the fake rankings land. This window would comprise of millions of "fake" players, creating the volatility that we see in mid ranged GSP, and unless your long term skill actually falls into this window, you're going to be super low GSP or super high GSP.
So to bring it all together, if you tank your GSP on a character, you'll start to hit a massive slow down right around 85 - 90k. Suddenly you lose / gain barely anything. These bottom 85-90k rankings are all REAL players that lost tons of games and have insanely low hidden ratings, making it much harder to get lower than them. We see this same thing in elite smash since likewise, there are zero "fake" rated accounts in elite. Given that most characters hit the GSP bottom at around 90k which which is comprised of real players with a good number of games, and us only having a total of 4 million ranked players... I'd theorize that a huge portion of the player base is playing multiple characters (3-4) at very low GSP while a majority of their cast is defaulting to rankings in the millions until the pick the character up and lose games. I think this also adds explanation to why its hard to feel almost any skill difference over a majority of the GSP rankings.
tldr - we have a normal distribution of skill, but a massive injection of fake ratings into the center of the curve pushes real players to either tail end. Smash is a very hard game with a ton of new players, so its likely that a majority of the player base is REALLLLLLY bad, so they end up populating gsp <100k where we see GSP movement drastically slow down.
My theory around this is that you have to engage in quite a few games to reach either end of the ranking system where GSP moves quite slowly (1-2k per game). This means that unless you just so happen to land right into the rating window where the default rated characters fall, you will likely end up on either tail end of the GSP ladder. So to sort of reiterate, if we imagine an MMR system where the default starting point is 1500 rating, but Nintendo then increases or decreases that based on your roster GSP or whatever, we end up with a rating window of say 1300 to 1700 where all of the fake rankings land. This window would comprise of millions of "fake" players, creating the volatility that we see in mid ranged GSP, and unless your long term skill actually falls into this window, you're going to be super low GSP or super high GSP.
So to bring it all together, if you tank your GSP on a character, you'll start to hit a massive slow down right around 85 - 90k. Suddenly you lose / gain barely anything. These bottom 85-90k rankings are all REAL players that lost tons of games and have insanely low hidden ratings, making it much harder to get lower than them. We see this same thing in elite smash since likewise, there are zero "fake" rated accounts in elite. Given that most characters hit the GSP bottom at around 90k which which is comprised of real players with a good number of games, and us only having a total of 4 million ranked players... I'd theorize that a huge portion of the player base is playing multiple characters (3-4) at very low GSP while a majority of their cast is defaulting to rankings in the millions until the pick the character up and lose games. I think this also adds explanation to why its hard to feel almost any skill difference over a majority of the GSP rankings.
tldr - we have a normal distribution of skill, but a massive injection of fake ratings into the center of the curve pushes real players to either tail end. Smash is a very hard game with a ton of new players, so its likely that a majority of the player base is REALLLLLLY bad, so they end up populating gsp <100k where we see GSP movement drastically slow down.
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