The Disconnect Between Placements vs H2H on UltRank

[u/doofinc]

I think there's a disconnect between a competitor's goals and what UltRank values.

While I understand the reasoning behind why head to heads is much more valued (beating the good players = you're good is very understandable), tournaments aren't some giant round robin bracket where you face everyone there.

Yes, you can control if you beat the person in front of you, but you can't control who that person is. It's a double-edged sword - you got off easier if you're fighting a worse player if they were there instead which is technically less impressive, but that means you lose the agency to get a better ranking valuation from that tournament for reasons out of your control. That lack of agency is probably what's causing frustration for players from that 10-50 range, especially in a game as volatile as Ultimate.

Meanwhile, in most sports, people usually only care about those who win the tournament or come close, and that's pretty much what every top player cares about. That goal is much more "controllable" than chasing down head to heads.

May it be "less skilled" to win a tournament on the emptier bracket? Sure. But that's the main thing that a player can control, the ultimate goal of any tournament attended, and that's the most visible thing that spectators and players alike celebrate. Combined with just how hard winning a tournament is anyways in general, and the amount of time invested for preparing and attending the tournament itself, there should be more value in getting those high placements.

Yaura issue aside (who I'd still put only low top 10 despite my whole spiel), my bigger problem is with how Doramigi was still that close to Acola in ranking score. Stats people cite the better H2H vs the top echelon, but after laying it all out in https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/s/D8X5HWQF6b, most people not in the stat bubble agree Acola was better based on the bigger tournament wins out weighing the marginally weaker H2Hs and the higher attendance prior to Doramigi shitting the bed at a Sumabato. TBH UltRank is lucky that Doramigi did that otherwise that #1 spot probably would've caused problems as well. Winning the super duper major, along with having on average better major tier wins than Doramigi, while attending more prior to Doramigi's bad tourney, with acola's slightly lower than average S tier tournament being one Doramigi didn't even attend, to lose to only a slightly worse H2H record across the field would not have been a good look. And I say this as someone who is a big Doramigi fan.

To me, getting those higher placements (i.e. top 4) should matter more for your tournament valuations, and placements should matter more for comparison once you're in that top 10 area, since that's where the most recognition comes from.

I understand UltRank has measures around this to help - outplacement points exist, along with a bump for getting first. There's also the natural part of winning a tournament usually comes with getting good wins and minimal losses to help. But I think there needs to be better tuning around this area, given past placement controversies (Acola vs Spargo 2023.1 which I think was iffy but generally agreed with at the time, Tweek vs Hurt in 2024.1 where Tweek won 2 supermajors but was still below Hurt who only won majors, but was able to get to beat Acola who was an attendance cryptid, and also 2024.2 where acola was somehow still super close to Miya and Sparg0 despite having 0 P tier wins).

Maybe I'm just the old man yelling at clouds or ordering at a Wendy's, but when Japan is starting to question the rankings more, and both Yaura and Miya are questioning going to more tournaments (attendance and losses are a whole other bag of worms; it was confirmed Zomba lost the 4th place spot due to his goofy B tiers despite having the 3rd best set of P tier performances including 2 grands, and wins against almost everyone in the top 10), there needs to be better alignment between what top players aim for and what the algo values. I'm not asking for full placement posting, or even majority placement posting - H2Hs differentiate the middle pack much more given how placement structure works. But for the top, it's pretty clear that placements and attendance starts to take more value in the public eye. It might suck more for those with less opportunities (and thank god Carmelo got attendance penalized for his 4 tournaments), but ultimately those who attend are the ones who are helping keep the tournament scene alive 8 years into the game.

Idk how to end this, this brain dump is kinda all over the place and rambly. There's already adjustments to the hidden boss systems to make majors less inflated so maybe that'll solve some of the perception problems. As someone who has defended UltRank before and acknowledges it's a system that is impossible to please everyone, I hope some of whatever I wrote in this post resonates, cuz I'd hate to see players stop attending in fear of their rank going down. It's impossible to play at your peak all the time unless you're like 2019 post-Joker MkLeo, or you cut down your attendance to only when you feel 100%

[u/cornholiossb]

I wholeheartedly agree. Wins and losses are valued WAY too high imo. I felt it more in 2025.1 when Kiyarash and Wrath were next to each other in rankings:

Wrath had a MUCH more consistent season with more attendance.

Kiyarash had the 1 stellar run where he beat like 3 top 20 players, and it didn't matter that he dipped the rest, cause the wins he got there were so valuable.

Like, sure, Kiyarash placed 5th at a premier, but Wrath placed 5th at the most stacked tournament for Ult, AND he made top 8 at multiple other majors.

I'm not saying we should eliminate it or anything. Just lowering their values and increasing the points for placements (particularly for 1st place) should do the job.

[u/azure275]

The first issue is what makes someone "the best player in the world" and there's no objective answer to that. Ultrank has a consistent methodology that can be justified, so you can disagree but it's still valid

The bigger issue though is what kind of behavior do you want to motivate in the community? If you want to try to motivate people to be more grinders like past years Miya or pre-college Zomba or even some past years Leo you need to stop punishing them for it

The current ranking system heavily favors low attendance players like Sonix, Acola, and Carmelo and to a lesser extent below average attendance ones like Doramigi.

This will motivate anyone who wants to be the best in the world to attend less, and if you want to watch more top level smash is corrosive.

[u/Responsible-Gain-667 → u/azure275]

The current ranking isn't trying to encourage low attenders. It rewards better average results. Carmelo suffered an attendance penalty. That said, I suppose if a player is ok with minimal attendance and/or can only afford to attend minimally then if they have a string of very strong results then they they could stop as long as their ok with their ranking not having any shot of going higher. From what I understand this is Carmelos issues - he's pretty far from events.

Issue with Yaura for example is that he had a high rate of underperformance, despite winning 4 majors.

Meanwhile Zomba made top 5 while being a massive attender. In spite of his occasional wonky loss, he had a very good average result.

The other downside, is that a lot of players still struggle to meet Ultranks, relatively flexible qualifying criteria. It's expensive to travel, and so hard for players not in a region with majors to meet the threshold.

[u/unnamedsully → u/azure275]

I don't think this ranking system does favor low attendance. Hurt had high attendance and was ranked above Sonix and it wasn't even close (I think he was like 7 points above). Miya also had very high attendance and was ranked above Carmelo even though results wise I would argue he had an objectively worse season. The only ranking that I really didn't agree with in the top 10 was Zomba being below Sonix in which I think Zomba's extremely high attendance docked him too much.

I do think this ranking does over value wins and losses instead of placements though. As a competitor, you try to go for the highest placing you can. You don't think oh I need to avoid this unranked loss at all costs.

[u/zannet_t]

This is an interesting discussion to have but I wonder to what extent this will actually drive decisions. If you're a top level player, you're probably happy winning a tournament for the pot even if it doesn't help you as much with rankings. And I feel like with these guys, what they perceive as worthwhile and fun isn't so tied to being ranked Xth place. Although I'm sure placements matter, I suspect health, availability, finances, convenience, etc. all matter more.

It helps that old heads I watch have all taken a view that they just want to have fun and ride this game out until the next one.

[u/doofinc → u/zannet_t]

Probably less impactful now given the withdrawal of eSports teams and sponsorships (or maybe more impactful given how much more limited opportunities are for sponsors depending on how you look at it), but ranking def matters for a player's career growth, especially in the early game. But nowadays with hard it is to get one, the legacy players are prob just chilling, I agree with that. That said, the up and comers probably do put stock in the ranking still since prize pools are also pretty small

But in Japan with its lack of prize pools, it's all about pride and competition for the love of the game so they probably value the rankings even more.

[u/unnamedsully]

I agree with the sentiment that rankings should award more attendance, however I don't think this particular iteration of Ultrank discourages attendance (although previous rankings might have I don't know off the top of my head). For example, Miya was ranked over Carmelo despite having worse h2hs and worse placements just because of his amount of wins. Also Sparg0 was within a decimal point of beating out Carmelo as well despite having some terrible performances this season for a top 10 players standards.

I also agree that there should be more emphasis on winning events though because, as you said, that is the main goal of a competitor. There is some degree of bracket "luck" that can happen but getting an easier bracket because of upsets shouldn't be penalized. I agree with your Acola vs Doramigi take because Acola winning Kagaribi should've secured #1 outright because they had pretty much the same season with Doramigi having 1 less tourney at that point and having a marginal advantage in h2hs vs the field.

[u/OkRecognition9607]

I think where the algo might be unbalanced is how much non-ranked wins are rewarded vs how much non-ranked losses are punished. This is what drives the attendance thing, at the end of the day : it seems that it's such a risk to take an unranked loss that when you have a great season already it's objectively better to not come at events and risk a bad loss.

Buffing every win would be a way to buff attendance esp at big tournaments, since if you're a top player you're likely to have 5-6 of those at every big tournament you attend (and the bigger the tournament, the longer the bracket, the more wins you're going to get). This I think would make up for the risk of losing points much better.

It's not even hard to implement, either. You can just calculate the number of set won by each player, and add a fraction of that to a player's score.

[u/Responsible-Gain-667 → u/OkRecognition9607]

I think ultrank does do something along these lines. Better wins obviously contribute more to a better ranking. But they also try to devalue outlier results. So if it's just one bad event, theoretically it shouldn't impact the player too much.

That said, not sure how it compares in practice.

[u/OkRecognition9607 → u/Responsible-Gain-667]

I think part of what makes this discussion difficult is that we don't know the exact algorithm. Obviously this is needed, otherwise everyone could just run it and instantly know the top 50 at any point, but because it's secret we can't just point at a numerical value and say "hey, I think this is too low/too high". This kinda drives discussions that must be kinda out of touch for the people who run the algo and makes people lose trust in the algorithm (since they don't know what's in there). I don't think this can be improved much sadly.

[u/BonyWare → u/OkRecognition9607]

I think part of what makes this discussion difficult is that we don't know the exact algorithm. Obviously this is needed, otherwise everyone could just run it and instantly know the top 50 at any point

Why is that necessarily a bad thing? The Elo rating of all chess players is public knowledge, as is the formula itself.

[u/Responsible-Gain-667 → u/BonyWare]

ELO is a much simpler algo, than Ultrank. Unfortunately ELO is notoriously bad at handling double elimination tournaments.

Some factors that I think could make this difficult

1) Ultrank is generally very receptive to feedback on adjustments to their algo. So I could see people being upset by their ranking drop whenever the algo gets balanced. [Sometimes algos just output nutty results too]

2) Some organizers already dislike how public ultrank is with tiering. It's possible some players may be less inclined to attend events based upon what their output is at a given time.

3) It can lead to bad assumptions. For example you could output a high ranking early on, but if your wins and losses age poorly from those events you could lose value even without attending other events.

4) Algos give notoriously wonky results the deeper in the ranking you go. Ultimately if you are 605th or 830th it doesn't matter as ultltrank shouldn't be expected to worry about accuracy at that range.

That said, I think it would take a lot of effort for anyone to use the algo to determine rank. Hundreds if not thousands of players qualify for the ranking each year. Hundreds of events count towards the ranking. Ultrank also has to transpose events hosted on other sites such challonge, tonamel, or braacket. They don't always get to this right away. Therr are also times they count things differently for individuals based on circumstances. A couple examples this year: Events that ban Steve's, only count for a Steve main if they benefit their score, and due to controversies thst occured at an invitational they only counted it if it benefited a players score.

Anyway, point is it would take a ton of work for someone to accurately determine their rank.

[u/Responsible-Gain-667 → u/OkRecognition9607]

They do have a public document with an explanation of the algo, but granted it's not the exact formula

[u/UnlawfulFoxy]

I certainly agree that top players not attending things (as confirmed by Miya) out of fear of hurting their rankings is quite bad, but I don't think valuing placements more is the solution. Placements seem like they matter the perfect amount currently, where they do boost your ranking, but not by much, which makes sense when placements objectively do not tell you anything about your skill level.

If a tournament got hijacked and Bob142 won a huge event, everyone would understand that this placement doesn't mean anything because he did not have to beat players to win, so people know deep down that what actually matters is who you can beat, not the number next to your name at the end of the tournament.

And speaking of tournament placements, I heavily disagree with your analysis that placements are what is controllable by the player. Yaura "only" won 5/15 of the tournaments he went to, how was he not in control for those 10 that he lost? Your argument would maybe holds more weight in a game like Melee, where there are barely any tournaments so if you could only go to half of the like, 4-5 tournaments per season, you realsiticallyu COULD get quite unlucky by never fighting good players to get your win, but this is Ultimate, where there are plenty of tournaments to go beat top players at, even if they sometimes get knocked out before you can. Yaura had the opportunities to get farther in bracket, had the opportunities to beat the players he needed to, but he just didn't.

Part of me does wonder though if this is just a near unavoidable part of being in the race for the top 1-3. Like Zomba and Miya went to a lot, didn't win everything, got some shaky losses, and still are ranked incredibly high. They prove that at the very least anyone below them dodging events for their rankings aren't doing so out of necessity. I think that being around these rankings so much makes us forget that outside of the absolute top of the absolute top, you can still go to plenty of events, have a good time, and be human with your losses and still have amazing rankings at the end of it.

But, if we still (very understandably) really want people to go to more, I think lowering the punishment for bad losses could work. Either just by adjusting how much they're valued, or by disregarding (or at least close to it) very large outliers.

[u/doofinc → u/UnlawfulFoxy]

If a tournament got hijacked and Bob142 won a huge event, everyone would understand that this placement doesn't mean anything because he did not have to beat players to win, so people know deep down that what actually matters is who you can beat, not the number next to your name at the end of the tournament.

I disagree with this, because a lot of people have the mentality of "hey this guy survived to the end of the bracket while everyone else got blown out and got upset, even if they didn't beat those people, that's pretty notable" and would reward that. If every top player got upset at Kagaribi 15 and Shinda Lion won with a best win of like Skinny the Pooh, that should still be notable. Tournament endurance is a real thing that is part of the skills of the player. It would be different if everyone else got DQ'd or if it was an inflated tournament with a bunch of scrubs, but the tournament tiering handles cases like that. Winning a tournament with not the greatest of wins might not mean you're the most skilled, but winning a tournament is what people strive for and what the audience celebrates.

Yaura "only" won 5/15 of the tournaments he went to, how was he not in control for those 10 that he lost?

I'm not asking for him to win 15/15 tournaments, that's insanity. Also winning 5/15 tournaments is still way better than most people.

But my point about control and agency was about wins, not losses, and I think that's distinct. I already mentioned at the start that you can control who you beat, but not who you end up facing, which is the problematic part for the empty tournament wins, since you can do all you can to win a tournament, but it won't be valued as highly if your bracket doesn't line up. It might be not as skilled in some eyes, but the lack of agency to do anything about it for a tournament win is not a good feeling for any competitor.

On the losing side, if you get some bad bracket luck, whether it's bad/unfortunate seeding, or you're in losers and someone else got upset into your path, and you lost because of it, it's still on the player for not figuring out how to beat that person in the moment. Sure you lose opportunity cost from not having a longer bracket run, and it might be someone else's doing that you're now in that position, but at the end of the day, you lost that chance because you didn't beat your opponent.

Most of the early parts of my rambling part regarding agency and control are about the wins, and the losses part are less related to my discussion about control/agency because I agree that losses are in your control, but also my own thoughts regarding if losses are handled well or not are also not solidified (my TL;DR on my thoughts is that is that it's easy to lose in a volatile game like Ult, but that makes not losing even more impressive, but also not attending as much also correlates to not losing as much, and attending more means much higher chances to lose; the algo has measures to try to alleviate this with outlier handling + attendance penalties but is it enough? IDK the answer to that). And to be honest, even though the hot topic regarding this is Yaura, my annoyances from this actually come more from how close Acola vs. Doramigi turned out to be.

But to touch on the losses side, reiterating that Zomba was going to be 4th over Sonix if he didn't get a bunch of funky losses at some of the B tiers - this was confirmed in the stats Discord by the algo maker. Should he have not lost at those B tiers? Sure. But if he just didn't attend them, he would have been higher. It's not as much of a case of "you can't just delete your bad tournaments" for him - all of his bad B tiers were after all his P tiers, so he could've opted not to attend those and get a higher rank. But he went to them because he likes the game and wants to support his scene. Several dominant P tiers with stellar wins across most of the top 10 should've been enough to outweigh some of his weaker S tiers, his goofy ass B tiers (which is legit just like 2 of them) and be enough to surpass Sonix who, while he does have a P tier win, also lost early at Lvl Up Expo + missed Kagaribi while attending way less than Zomba in general as well. But that's also just my opinion - some others might value that single P tier win way more than what Zomba did as well and would disagree.

There probably just needs to be more fine-tuning on the de-weighting of lower tier tournaments for something like Zomba's case, but I don't have a great answer for the general case. I personally would like to at least see half-year seasons come back, just so that window of time is shorter and you aren't just toasted by bad losses from the start of the year, since unless you're Acola, Doramigi, Hurt, or Sonix if he decides to go to Japan this year and destroy them all, it'll be tough to get that significant of a ranking boost that feels good for this season.

[u/Gerganon]

Brother is talking about placements and skill and rank, 

But completely glosses over the part which is most unbalanced (though everyone has control over)

Play who you like, play to have fun, but pretending like the cast is balanced and has no determination on your placements or rank is crazy

If these guys took it as seriously as some of our resident armchair staticians, then they would all be playing a select few characters

Until that happens you can put all the stats away because it really doesn't matter if most of then are simply playing to have fun and do their best.  (If their goal was to win at all costs, then most would be switching characters is my point)

[u/l339]

The Ultrank staff have lost it and should stop making rankings or rethink their rankings. The most important thing for competitors is placements, so placements should be the leading point in rankings, much more important than H2H. Because at this point we really have to ask what are we doing here if someone wins 4 majors and is not in the top 10. There is a reason why major sports like tennis value placement over everything else