Climbing the ladder

Zeffy

Zeffy

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    Online Pokemon battles, whether via a simulator or Wi-Fi, provide a peculiar ranking system determined by several factors including, but not limited to, number wins and losses and overall number of matches. For the sake of brevity, we will call this the ladder, and the act of increasing (or decreasing!) your rank as "climbing the ladder," or simply laddering.

    Compared to tournaments, the ladder provides a different and almost realistic environment. People oft use similarly constructed teams in order to reach the top of the ladder as quickly as they can--there is even a set formula in building a team for laddering, but you can figure that out in your own time. Unlike tournaments, where one loss can mean the end, one loss in the ladder only amounts to a deduction in your ranking, if none at all. This means that no matter how much you lose while laddering, it is still possible to reach the top.

    Some points of discussion:
    - how often do you ladder?
    - what was your highest peak in the ladder? which tier? what team did you use?
    - is your ladder ranking a good basis of your skill in battling?
    - is there a huge difference in building teams for the ladder and building teams for tournaments?
    - is there a noticeable divide in the ladder? ie is the lower ladder a different environment from the higher ladder?

    Feel free to add more points of discussion as the thread goes along.
     
    Regarding the point to team building for ladder vs. tournament play.

    For team building in ladder, you want a team that can consistently do well vs. the top 10/12 pokemon in whatever tier you're playing. In tournament, there is more room to surprise your opponent and take them off guard, although at a higher level of play, I don't know how true this would be.
     
    I think I've only done one ranked battle on Battle Spot this gen, and have never been in a cartridge tourney. Did a good amount of ranked WiFi battles in Gen V though. These days I just ladder on Showdown.

    The highest I ever got on a ladder was like mid-1500s in OU during the XY meta, using some team that was like 5/6 copy-pasted from a Smogon thread. It was a little nice to get to that point on a ladder for the first time in my life, but didn't really like it either since I got there by basically using someone else's team. My ladder score always seems to be in the 1300s these days for all tiers, I can never get higher and stay up there =(

    So I wouldn't really know what the upper ladder is like, never been there.
     
    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 shit-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.
     
    Wait a minute, you're talking about the low OU ladder?

    YOU HAVEN'T SEEN UBERS/AG.

    There's no way you can't reach 1500 in Ubers if you run an anti-metagame team, unless it was made by your cat or 2 year old. By that I mean Surf Rayquaza, CB Scizor, Roar Latios, a random Toxic thrown on Reshiram or Primal Groudon, physical Primal Kyogre (a big fuck you to Blissey and Lati@s and can even help against +2 Xerneas), CB Staraptor/Talonflame, Gunk Shot Infernape, NP Thundurus and so much else. Seriously, you can even peak the Ubers ladder with STUNFISK.
     
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