I ladder quite frequently, though I've been off it more since the Greninja test. Besides recently doing since UU, this is exclusively on the OU ladder or its suspect ladders. My peak was during the Aegislash metagame where I got three accounts into the top fifty and my highest at rank 27 I think? (I actually find the whole "getting multiple accounts in" thing to be more fun than a single peak, but yolo.)
Anyway, some scattered thoughts:
- The lower ladder is just terrible. When I played XY, it was not that difficult to start out like, 30-0. Actually, my first Showdown laddering experience with my very first gen 6 team saw me go something like 30-3 or 30-4 to start. The mid ladder is full of very serviceable, if quite predictable, players. The lower ladder is super terrible though haha. That's fine though since it's so easy to get past even if that hour or two can be somewhat tedious.
- Speaking of which, while I enjoy laddering, it can get quite tedious and I find that I reach my peak when I only do a battle or two at a time. It's very easy to tilt. This is especially bad when Showdown lags, since then battles begin to spill into the 15-20 minute range, even in non-stall matches.
- Many upper-level Smogon players enjoy muk-talking the ladder, and I guess some of it is deserved, but a lot of the condescension comes from "lol a lot of the upper ladder is Chansey/Goth stall or GeoPass" (usually verbalized as "many/most players on the upper ladder suck") but hmm, if bad players can autopilot to the top of the ladder with Goth or BP, maybe those things need to be suspected. Also, that attitude self-perpetuates because then better players don't play on it. I'm not normally on the "Smogon is full of elitists" bandwagon, but the snobbery toward the ladder is rather grating. Upper-level tour play is not some be-all end-all; aim just used Pikachu-Belle in his SPL match which would be completely mocked if a lesser name had used it because Smogon (from an outsider's perspective) has a very weird and seemingly toxic culture with that kind of stuff. But that's a whole different conversation, so I'll just move on.
- To that point, an individual ladder ranking, taken instantaneously, means little. If you can get high consistently and do so without resorting to using Goth/stall/BP for most of your ladder climb, then chances are you're pretty good. (I threw stall in there because a bad player using stall will beat a bad player using offense, and while it makes laddering take forever, it's a consistent strategy there.) It's all approximate though. I would think of it like a scoring average in basketball. It certainly gives a good surface representation, but not much else.
Why are the beautiful sick and divided like myself?