Thanks again, Hates. Once again you’ve given us an outlet to spew forth our muculent creative ideas. My experience in the past was typically fighting against the same (decent) players in extended player matches. This is the preferred way of learning character matchups, but what online ranked has provided recently is a wide array of chaos that I haven’t gotten to experience before. Much of my time is learning a generic way of fighting that works against a large pool of players. Since the match is only to 3 wins it really forces me to adapt quickly or gtfo. It’s an integral part of the learning process, but definitely not the whole picture. In fact, if this is the only way people train, you can bet they’ll grow complacent with their gimmicks and think that they are actually good.
As for win/loss ratio: it doesn’t mean much if disconnects don’t count as losses. I imagine they don’t count because NB realizes the instability of their online system. However, I’m still a stat whore. You’ll see me from time to time dividing my post-to-like-ratio to determine my forum success, and blindly in the past I considered that as part of my gaming experience. The win loss ratio shows our skill for online ranked while sitting in the comfort of our own home. It doesn’t determine your level of success while some announcer blasts his megaphone in your ear or how you handle a searing comment from your opponent right before a tournament match starts.
