Allergen advice: may contain salt
Spoon 3 reminds me a lot of Fortnite. Not that I've ever played Fortnite, it just reminds me of the Folding Ideas video Manufactured Discontent and Fortnite, in particular the point about how Fortnite is a live service game, a particular type of experience which uses all sorts of tricks to suck up all of your spare time and, therefore, money. Spoon 3 contains many of the same things Dan Olson points to in Fortnite as contributing to this: periodic seasons which reset things and add new content, little things you have to log in each day to do, and even a "Catalog" which is clearly literally just a Battle Pass. What's weird about Spoon doing this is that it just doesn't have the same predatory monetisation. There's no item shop, or premium battle pass, or fake currency you buy with your credit card or anything. There is a DLC, but it doesn't affect the online stuff at all, and there are Amiibo but they're kind of a niche product, and there's Nintendo Switch Online but I'm pretty sure most people just buy that once a year. Spoon 3 really, really wants to take up all of your time, and they completely succeed in my experience, but it's not totally clear what they want you playing for. Just to keep matchmaking fast? Make it feel like the game is better value for money? I don't get it. Anyway this post isn't really about that, mostly I just want to complain about Spoon 3's ranking system.
So in Spoon 1 - actually, I never played that game, I'm not going to talk about it. In Spoon 2, the ranking system was a little convoluted, but I didn't really mind it. A full explanation is too complicated for this, but suffice it to say that you were assigned a letter rank (from C- through to S+10 and then X) which (through arcane and opaque methods) roughly correlated with some range of Glicko-2 scores, your Glicko-2 rating being the game's real estimate of your skill that you weren't allowed to see until reaching X rank (like Elo from chess). The game showed you everybody's ranks during matchmaking and you could only be matched with people in the same letter, so ranking up from (e.g) B+ to A- was a harrowing experience.
It worked fine, really. I was never very competitive, having at one point watched a youtube video explaining that the way to truly Get Good at the game as to pick some aspect of your play you wanted to improve - winning 1v1s, making good use of your Special, whatever - and throw the match if you ever messed it up. In hindsight I must have misunderstood because that sounds like absolutely terrible advice. But I was fine with just playing to have fun in the same skill level as always, and though I vaguely dreamed of reaching X rank (specifically because it adds this cool emote you can do in the menu before a game) I only got to A+ (actually very far away) before they stopped running Splatfests and I lost interest in the game. At least it felt like rank truly meant something; the way to rank up was simply to get more skilled, and I wasn't truly interested, and that was fine.
Spoon 3's rank system is... different. And I will be explaining it in more detail. You have some amount of rank points which you can wager on a series of games. Once you win five or lose three games in the series, it ends, and you get an increasing amount of points for each win, along with bonus points for "medals", which are awarded to you for getting the most x in a round out of players on your team (I think?), where x is like, points scored, splats, and other categories of things I don't truly understand. The medal points are basically a pittance, but as far as I know your average return on points with an exact 50/50 winrate at any rank is slightly positive if you assume you're getting a reasonable quantity of medals. And it's much more positive at lower ranks, which makes it easier to climb ranks even if you're actually mostly losing overall. Oh, and once you reach a predefined target of rank points you can no longer enter a normal series but instead spend points to enter a Rank-Up Battle, which is an awful name because it's more than one battle. You need to win three battles before you lose three to rank up, otherwise you lose the points and nothing happens.
Most of the complaint around this system has been that rank doesn't really mean anything anymore. Glicko-2 doesn't feed into it at all, and because you can effectively fail upwards and rise through ranks without improving, rank measures more than anything just how long you've played the game (remember how I said Spoon 3 really wants you to play the game?). You're not shown other players' ranks in game like, at all, so speculation abounds as to how much rank actually effects matchmaking, if it is even taken into account. People seem to believe that your opponents in a rank-up battle are guaranteed to be from the rank above you, for instance, but I have not seen any evidence that this is the case (besides my own repeated failure at rank-up battles). Oh, and you can also go below 0 rank points and enter rank points debt, and this used to be hilariously difficult to climb out of but they added a button that drops you down a rank and resets your points. You also get demoted by one rank at the end of each quarterly season, which feels to me like it has little reason aside from being another of Spoon 3's weird little ways to get you to come back. The season's ending soon, you better rank up so you won't fall down quite so far...
Honestly, I've kind of come to hate this system. I don't like how it puts extra pressure on for random individual games and hinges much of your performance on getting wins with auspicious timing, and I don't like how I don't know if me ranking up actually represents me getting better or just me getting lucky. But, I don't care about getting better! I didn't before, anyway. If it was just the ranking system being dodgy, that wouldn't be so bad to me; I could just ignore it. But...
Reaching S+ in Spoon 3, which I think is technically easier than it was in Spoon 2, unlocks X Battle. X Battle isn't actually a different mode really, it's still the same gameplay, but like reaching X rank in Spoon 2, it uses a ranking system much closer to raw Glicko-2 and lets you see the numbers. I really like this idea of getting to play for the rating system itself - it was a lot of fun in TETR.IO, which just used plain Glicko-2 and showed you how it all worked. The horrible thing is that I'm trying so hard to reach S+, to rise through the ranks in this system I've come to really dislike, so that I can escape the system. It's ironic! I shouldn't have let this happen at all! I should have just accepted the ranking for what it is (meaningless) and gone into the game with the same here-to-have-fun attitude as I did in Spoon 2.
I've actually started watching videos from Squid School in an attempt to improve at the game, and actually, a lot of this stuff is interesting to me. I still seriously do not want to care about whether the weapons I like playing are "meta" (as an Undercover Brella player I get the impression the answer is "absolutely not") but a lot of the advice here has been more around improving a competitive mindset. Again, the ironic thing is that I think my mindset would be a lot better if I was improving just for the joy of improving, rather than because I really want to make it to S+ rank specifically. Some combination of nerves and bad luck has led to me failing... I think five? rank-up battles from S to S+.
I've gotten so close to freedom from this rank system so many times, and yet it seems I just can't handle the pressure I've put on myself. Except, and this is why this really is the eternal treadmill, any escape would be short-lived. Everybody gets demoted a rank every three months; and if you drop out of S+, you lose access to X battle. This isn't just a horrible process I need to complete once, but one I'd need to do every three months until I got bored of the game.
The current season ends in five days and, for complex reasons partly to do with the new Zelda game, I will not be playing Spoon 3 for most of that time. The day I started writing this I won two of three battles to rank up only to lose three in a row; so by now it looks like I won't make it to S+ this season or for a while, and it wouldn't really matter for anything if I did. I'll try to use the break from the game as a sort of mindset reset, and come back later next season... maybe trying not to think about the rank system and just enjoying the game for what it is.
