Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent much time sharing my thoughts on SSBMRank. I’ve talked about the history of the Top 100, what it does well, where its drawn ire, and what problems exist with commonly proposed alternatives. Today, however, I’m going to talk about some potential ideas I have to resolve some issues people find with it. By no means are they flawless, and I hope this column makes that clear, but I think they could help us think of any issues we have with the Top 100 in a more clear light.
In this edition of Monday Morning Marth, I’m going to offer four proposals:
- Predeterming an exclusive set of majors before the season while retaining flexibility on major eligibility.
- Increasing eligibility requirements in a way that only heightens them for people who exclusively attend majors.
- Letting panelists determine the value of exhibitions instead of explicitly banning them.
- Creating more standardied seasonal SSBMRank content to recognize player achievements that aren’t necessarily captured by the annual list.
Proposal 1: Decide Majors In Advance
I believe that there’s value in SSBMRank choosing a series of a given year to officially dub “majors” before they happen. While this would not strictly state that certain events don’t count, it would acknowledge a reality that already exists in the community: that some tournaments are worth more than others. For example, it is not stepping on anyone’s toes to suggest that Genesis isn’t exactly your average three-day event. My initial suggestion would be the six largest returning tournament series of the previous year, but the actual number may vary.
More than a change on the actual list, what this suggestion offers is more proactive unity between the rankings team and our largest tournaments. And more than that, it could give the two forces greater pressure in the event ecosystem over a small group of players who currently wield outsized influence over tournament prestige. I know this sounds like it’s accusatory or hyperbolic, but it’s neither of those. The fact of the matter is that a single DQ, instance of a player picking secondaries, or getting drunk, can be the difference between a tournament being a major or not.
future fourside goals:
– cure depression (for everyone)
– Chroma retires “Mickey mouse major” (celebrate success)
– lie about top players to drive narratives (to their faces)
– anyone else think Jack looks kinda like Scar?
– Mikey wins again— Fourside Fights (@FoursideFights) October 11, 2023
This is absurd. It’s not the rankings’ fault that this is the case, but think about the impact here. For our largest majors, certain players can be the difference between a top eight boosting an event’s watch time hours or falling short. Obviously, that’s not the only factor that should go into making decisions that impact the whole scene (viewership cannot be the sole determinant for everything), but it does matter.
If you don’t buy that viewership matters for most events, then think about it on a more personal level. The scene is better when tournaments generate hype and are treated as prestigious, rather than undermined by the players. Organizers do not enjoy mindless discussions about if one DQ or top player choosing to play secondaries diminishes the value of their tournament. As a matter of fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I don’t like it either.
Now, I’m not naive enough to say that this suggestion would totally stop every top player from DQ’ing or fooling around in any way. It could, and probably will, still happen. But what is the risk here – that the same “bad” outcome happens? I don’t think it could hurt to experiment with this idea; to at least try using the SSBMRank brand to apply pressure on top players and to support tournaments, even if it’s in a seemingly superficial way. I’d also note that this would give a procedural reason for panelists to functionally have the green light to punish sandbagging or not showing up at majors. A DQ at The Big House is not the same as a DQ at a regional, and our current system does not adequately capture this feeling. Maybe that’s because it reflects that the community truly doesn’t believe that, but I don’t buy that for a second. You can’t simultaneously point to the process as the will of the people without also acknowledging how an ambiguous process itself incentivizes the panel’s decision.
Besides, SSBMRank provides panelists a “majors and regionals” only head-to-head table to assess players on the ballot. It just happens to determines those majors and regionals after the fact. That’s not flagrantly unreasonable, but taking a proactive approach in this direction, rather than reactive, is not that out of line. The rankings could even take a flexible approach, incorporating more events as deemed fit throughout the year into its major hierarchy.
Keeping this in mind, there are two big downsides (or limitations) of this suggestion, both which roughly boil down to political reasons. The first one is that an overly liberal granting of major status could devalue the meaning of the word. Top players, hypothetically speaking, could organize a protest of a major that they don’t like and force the rankings to bend to their will. And yet look at the first-to-ten which happened last Friday. Is this not something that’s already happening right now; that the mere threat of top players showcasing how the rankings’ neutral approach clearly has limitations? I say this not to undermine the event, the decision made for SSBMRank, nor even top players. It just happens to perfectly illustrate that neutrality does not really exist when you have a brand that players and events are jumping at their heels to wield for their benefits.
The second one is that a more strict approach could lead to the rankings team having to deal with an angry tournament organizer who demands an explanation for why their event either didn’t count as a major or suddenly lost major status. Funnily enough, this happens today as well, but not typically from the TOs. Instead, it happens from the players who do well at less prestigious events. Usually, it’s the players who complain about their results “not counting” or “counting less.”
With that said, we should not mince words: the important point would be understanding where the rankings have leverage, where they don’t, and what is worth fighting a battle over. If the players suddenly decided that Genesis was not a major, SSBMRank could (politely) tell them to eat shit. But if a tournament organizer runs a really bad event for one year, tries bringing it back for the next year, and the players don’t want to return, SSBMRank is obviously not going to go to battle for a series that doesn’t have immediate buy-in. I can understand grievances that smaller grassroots may feel about being artificially kneecapped by someone else’s decision. But frankly, not every event is entitled to being a major. If you want your tournament to be one, prove it deserves to be one first, and make the case to the public, or even SSBMRank.
As clinically I can say it, SSBMRank is a very powerful brand that exists within the marketplace of Smash. It is not a holy entity that transcends community politics – in many ways, it defines them. The Top 100 can and should proactively wield its brand to support our largest tournaments and to shift the dynamic of their lopsided relationship to top players a little more in their direction. It may ultimately be a losing effort; it still could be worth it.
Proposal 2: Increase Activity Requirements for Major-Only Players
This year, SSBMRank took an approach for eligibility where you needed either three majors or two majors with “significant regional activity” to apply. I do not think this is an unreasonable approach – it fits in with past years of SSBMRank – but I also still believe the rankings should still encourage attendance at the top level. I believe there’s a way the rankings can accommodate people whose attendance is mostly through regionals while still heightening eligibility requirements to ensure a high floor for top player attendance. My initial idea: a points system for eligibility.
Using this year’s summer rank system as a broad basis for how this would apply in practice, I believe that a system requiring a total of “20 points” could have been fair, were majors to each count for four points and regionals to count for three points. In this example, someone could have attended two majors and four regionals in order to qualify as active in 2023. If you were worried about someone then only attending regionals and qualifying through that way, you could only require a minimum majors requirement, which already exists.
As of right now, and last I checked, if this applied to the current Top 50, the only people who would not make the end-of-year list via eligibility are Shroomed, Leffen and 2saint. You would still have situations where a player may technically qualify, but by slim enough margins and unique enough context to where panelists could reasonably choose to exclude them, such as Jflex and Swift. But this is just one arbitrary number that I imagined could be fair. It would require a bit of fine-tuning to scale well across the Top 100 for sure – just not as much as you’d initially think.
If the worst case scenario is that a Top 10 doesn’t have someone who won a major, we should not care (or find another way for SSBMRank to recognize that, via an honorable mention or something similar). If the best case scenario is driving greater attendance from other top echelon players across the board with little change to the panel process, it may be worth pursuing.
Proposal 3: Let Panelists Determine Exhibitions
This point may be contentious, especially in light of the first-to-10 between Zain and Cody Schwab. For people who value statistical precedent as well as the panel’s contributions, I sincerely empathize with feeling like this process is less legitimate. Were it any other year, I do not think this would have happened. Maybe you think I’m full of shit for saying that the panel should be allowed to determine the value of exhibitions after SSBMRank made a decision to supercede the panel process. At the same time, I only ask that you take this proposal on its merits, not whatever projected gripes you may have with the rankings system or the FT10.
Anyways, double elimination tournaments are our standard format for competition, but we’ve already seen events like Smash Summit skyrocket in prestige and importance for the community. Nobody would try to state that group stage/gauntlet stage matches don’t count, even if they might not be as impactful as double-elimination sets. Similarly, each exhibition may not carry the same level of stakes or be one-to-one with a typical tournament set, but it’s worth keeping an open mind toward the panel’s ability to determine that for themselves.
Remember: the players agreeing to something doesn’t necessarily mean it should be treated as valid by the broader community. In fact, I would argue that there’s distinct competitive legitimacy lines we can draw (and have drawn) here: no sets that come from online, no sets with banned stages, and no sets with items. But exhibitions are closer to gauntlet or groups stage matches than they are to the other types of sets we explicitly ban. I don’t think it should qualify as a hard “no” for panelists.
Perhaps you believe I’m selling out with this point. However, I believe there’s an opportunity to grow the scene via formats that aren’t neatly double elimination brackets or invitationals. It’s a shame that the general vibe behind cool events like the Octagon is that they don’t actually matter. Sure, an exhibition should not always determine specific positions on the Top 100, and you won’t find too many people claiming the aMSa’s win at The Off-Season 2 should be considered a major victory, but there’s clearly a difference between winning a tourney with a five-stock rule set and winning an exhibition. I don’t think allowing those to count will suddenly open a can of worms about counting off-stream money matches for SSBMRank. And if it does, who cares? Let the panel figure it out.
Proposal 4: More Seasonal SSBMRank Content
Remember the Melee Stats PR? That was fun. Nobody’s feelings were particularly hurt by it, we received a lot of love, and the MSPR got referenced in ARMY’s legendary “Who’s Next?” diss track. In my discussions with top players, one suggestion I’ve heard quite a bit is the idea that we should have a winter rank to complement a summer rank. Initially, I was open to this idea. I thought it was a good way to acknowledge player accomplishments within a shorter time span that could be acknowledged.
The Melee Stats team is proud to announce the newest edition of the MSPR: our seasonal Top 25 rankings, this time for the Summer-Fall 2018 period. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/7JSJJHs0bW
— Edwin (@edwin_budding) October 4, 2018
Then I realized: Summer SSBMRank already exists. Does the creation of a Winter SSBMRank to complement it really make sense? Aren’t both lists still going to be incomplete vibe checks of an annual Top 100? If anything, Summer SSBMRank has been a source of derision from the players themselves. At that point, I considered the possibility that maybe the idea of a seasonal PR is just a bad idea.
With that said, coming to that conclusion would miss the forest for the trees. What the players want here is some way of knowing where they stand or having an accomplishment recognized by the SSBMRank brand in some capacity that isn’t the annual list. It doesn’t have to be in a power ranking; it could be through monthly superlatives, player of the month awards, or something similar, just as long as it has the SSBMRank seal of approval.
Conclusion
SSBMRank should always exist as a panel-based system. But in my opinion, it needs to lean into some of its inherent responsibilities as a vehicle for developing the infrastructure of a Melee league and a healthy multimedia environment around it. The only way it can do that is if it proactively wields its current authority in a way that gives large events more power and incentivizes our best players to go to more events.
From my experience, a ton of discussions between “rankings people” and smashers from other areas of involvement tend to focus on one of these elements or dial in on the actual list itself. A common complaint players will bring up, in particular, is why they feel like their spot on the rankings is unfair to their effort, and a frequent response is often about articulating why their spot was actually correct and what the reasons are for it – and I feel like this misses the point of what the rankings should be above everything else: a fun vehicle to share the best stories in the scene.
Could I be wrong that my suggestions would help SSBMRank? Absolutely. This is only my idea of what fun looks like, and ultimately I’m just one guy. Anyone reading this has the right to decide it’s not fun for them, and whatever decisions are made with regards to the Top 100, I fully accept. But I hope what I offered above, as well as in the previous weeks, shows how much I truly cherish SSBMRank’s place in our scene, and what I believe could be potential steps toward growing both the Top 100 and the community itself.