set up rules for character swapping in ranked maybe#1129

swapping after losing is obviously normal. Swapping after winning, imo, should either not be allowed or should be revealed to the opponent who lost. Obviously I’m here because something annoying just happened, so I’m a little heated but i’ll try to describe objectively what happened:

I currently comain etalus/forsburn.
Ranked round 1 is blind, i play etalus v zetter, i win.
ranked round 2, i lock etalus again, opponent swaps to absa, i lose.
ranked round 3 is where things went off the rails:

I go to swap to forsburn, and my opponent (reacting to my portrait saying “selecting character”) purposely deselects their character and refuses to ready up (leaving their portrait on selecting character as well). I know if they go back to zetter, i want etalus, and if they stick with absa, i want to go forsburn. I just lost the most recent round so i feel that i’m entitled to know who i’m picking against. But i’m stuck in this weird coinflip interaction.

Also my opponent hit me with the “maybe try a new character?” quick chat so i know that they’re abusing this on purpose, and also that they’re not being particularly nice but that’s beside the point. I don’t think this weird stuff is really the type of skill we’re trying to test in ranked, is all i’m saying. I know real tournaments have rules about who can swap and when, and i think that would probably be for the best in ranked as well. If it locked in the winner’s pick for the following game and showed it to the loser, even if that pick was random, I think it would curb frustration on this specific interaction.

this all goes away with char based rank, plus a few other oddities. there is a reason almost any fighting game in the past years opted for char based rank.

Wouldn’t mind that either, as long as there’s a safeguard against becoming an unwilling smurf when your fundies put all your new characters way above the default starting rank

this issue is pretty much solved imho by games like sf6. You still have placement matches with every char and the placements matches are heavily influenced by your other chars ranks. so it works quite well. better than with this game where people learn new chars and while doing so drop several ranks and when they decide to play their main again stomp everyone on their way back up.