In my last post where I complained about Spoon 3's ranking system, I left off by saying that I planned to play this season caring less about the ranking system and just trying to enjoy myself. Of course I didn't do that at all, I went into this season even more judiciously calculating exactly how many points I'd get for each series and my mindset about it only got worse. Though I did recently start being more deliberate about taking a break whenever I felt like my performance was starting to slip, in order to prevent long losing streaks. I'm not sure that helped my rank at all but I did at least feel better about the game after I started doing that.
If anything it feels like I got here just by playing the game a lot. The slight upward bias of the rank system really becomes slight in S rank, so it takes a lot of games to get out of it without incredible luck or being genuinely more skilled than everyone in the rank, if such a thing is even possible. At one point I calculated that over 46 matches (a good two hours of gameplay or more), exactly even on wins and losses, I made a profit of just 100 points, and of course you need about 700 to rank up. I was definitely playing Spoon to the detriment of other games that I've been meaning to get back into instead.
I actually managed to pass the first rank-up battle I entered instead of failing like five of them as I did last season. I attribute this partly to picking a mode/weapon combination I feel confident in and partly to the octobrush user "DIO" who I played with three games in a row and who seemed pretty good. DIO, if you're out there, thanks for the help, I'm a big fan of your work.
Would I do this again next season? Maybe, but the X rank pose thing isn't in the game anymore, so what's even the point? It would make sense to at least play some more now just to see what X rank is like, but I should probably finish what I was doing in Noctis, first.