smash, story time, in which I completely break a competitive game's matchmaker
One of my guilty pleasures when the-world-feels-too-hard is to dive into a game's achievements and game out how to get them to 100%. This is different from actually getting them to 100%, and mostly keeps my brain occupied on something other than whatever-it-is-that-day. It's self-care for planners, in a way.
One of Smash's achievements is 200 quickplay battles, AKA online matchmaking. I am thoroughly not the target audience, but I tried it to see how it would go.
Over this (~8-9 hour) experiment, I learned the following:
1. I am quite good compared to the average Smash player
2. I am very, very, very bad with Solid Snake
It turns out this combination completely breaks the how the game matches online play in possibly the best way possible.
re: smash, story time, in which I completely break a competitive game's matchmaker
In summary: I guess this was a useful experiment, but please keep me from ever playing Solid Snake again. Down that path lies madness, insanity, and many dodge-rolled-grenades that do 8-15% damage.
re: smash, story time, in which I completely break a competitive game's matchmaker
PS: I said I'd get to the ranking thing trying to please two distinct communities of players by assuming "better" players want solo-1v1-no-items. Without getting into specifics, splitting the categories was a better way to go (and I suspect the competitive category had a _lot_ less traffic).
An example that I think really succeeds at doing this is Splatoon and its sequel. And I wonder if some of its lessons will transfer over.