As a solid 10.5er. I like the floor system. But yeah. Theeee nebulous realm of celestial and even to a lesser degree, floor 10, is pretty wack. Tbh. It kind of just made me take the game way less seriously. It was very hard to see progress when you're in that 10.5 zone. When you run out of floors to climb and you know a lot of the people in celestial are just widening the skill gap. After my 3rd attempt I just started playing in the park, and have fun. Now I'll normally just pop in when new characters arrive, try them out, have fun, play my old main for a bit, have fun. And then disappear again.
No offense, but I'm not sure failing 3 attempts qualifies you as "stuck in the limbo". If celestial is supposed to be hard to get in to, shouldn't most people who have a chance >not< make it? Coming from someone who failed like 6-7 tries one season before making it. It was frustrating, but...I don't know, to me it seems like getting to the "final level" should take those tries if I'm not strong enough. Sure, I could run into a weak player vs a pro, good matchup vs a bad. But, that happens in tournaments and the like also, so it gives me the impression that it's not inherently bad that there's some volatility to your entrance into such a level.
I’ve failed a lot more than 3 times and otherwise I completely agree with you. Floor ten fights mostly feel easy. You can use some gimmicks and not have completely clean strategies. When you get to the celestial waiting room it suddenly feels like you’re in a test and you slept through all the lectures.
@@pkyy9269 I never said I should of gotten in easier. I don't think I belong in celestial I'd probably say a lot of people in celestial shouldn't be. And I don't really feel like 6-7 tries is that much tbh. My point is I jumped into tower when testament came out and I pretty quickly got that little advancement arrow in floor 10 after not playing since Baiken released. Its just that my celestial attempts, I did not pick my fights to make the challenge easier. So I got destroyed. And the kind of destroyed that you didn't even learn from it cause the people I played were too far above me. And then I went back to floor 10. Where my fights were too easy. I could just see the immediate problems with gameplay loop of too easy, > go up get destroyed without real direction. Rinse and repeat. My point is that this is the problem with the floor 10 - celestial skill gap. Not that I should get in. I'm happy to go play longer sets in the park and not really care about the tower or celestial. I enjoy the adaptation part more. But my point is to bring awareness to the innate problems with the skill gap. The fun part of seeing growth staggered a ton. If I really wanted to, there's lot of things I could of done. Find people on discord. Really really sit and watch those replays. Ask opponents for advice. But I just wasn't keen on too easy, too hard, back and forth. TLDR; I don't mind celestial being hard and I don't feel like I deserve to be in it. It's more Floor 10 felt like I was finally an intermediate player and the next floor up is home to literally pros and everything else in between.
@@Trigun_Bebop I developed my thoughts a bit more after this comment, your point made is totally right. While I feel it does a strong job of reflecting like, volatility/skill pleateau-ing, it's far too wide and presenting that challenge to too many people. Imo, a "band-aid" would be to make it harder to qualify between floors in general, along with the qualification test being much harder to trigger. It may be hard to present new players with floor 2 and say "you'll be at 10 after several months of effort", however. I will say that floors are easily one of the >most< engaging ranked systems I've seen for an FG, based on it being such a hot topic with newer players and the community. Some of my friends update me all the time while theyre bouncing between floors like 4-6...although it would probably be easier on them if they didn't bounce around so much. Hopefully they can strike a balance. The fact that it's a concept that has people engaging/feeling good is promising, but there's definitely some improvements possible.
The problem of Auras requiring Grinding and Time is one that is just as true for the standard Elo ranking system. As long as you keep a positive win/lose ratio, you will move up, and then it just becomes a matter of time and how much grinding you're willing to do. I just don't think any ranking system that exists currently is suited to serious 1v1 online gaming, as they all only facilitate Anxiety and a desire for higher ranks, instead of Fun and a desire to learn.
The good thing about the floors (discluding celestial) is that since you can go to any floor you want, it helps a lot with my rank anxiety. Probably not like that for anyone, but for me it's not about the rank itself, it's about the players in low ranks.
We need a rank equal to our skill because that’s what gives you the will to get better. People played SF5 for years in hope to get grand master and many failed. I played a week to get to celestial and I dropped the game because what else can I get from it ? I should get up in the morning and grind rankeds without actually grinding anything ?
Once you get to Celestial they should of just introduced a typical ranking system Bronze-Silver-Gold..etc. While maintaining the floor system from 1-10.
You forgot one other problem with Celestial: once you get into Celestial even just once you can never go below floor 10 again no matter how much you lose. It makes learning new characters such a pain sometimes
That's when I go to the park. This used to be a big complaint of mine, but I've found that the park is a good place to learn a new character without getting clapped by floor 10 players.
@@StairMaster7 i tried this too but whenever I did the parks in my region were like Floor 10 2: Heaven or Hellboogaloo though that may have just been bad luck with timing or smthn
@@wilsh1630 This isn't really true, especially as the game ages and people on lower floors get more game knowledge overall. You can't just know matchups and character defense/offense situations strongly immediately, just because you're a higher rank.
@@pkyy9269 This^ I grinded day 1 GGS and the game was much easier back then compared to now. I come back after months of not playing and I have no choice but to fight Casual Celestials on floor 10 when I consider myself a Pseudo Celestial who will most likely never reach there again. My point is that you will more likely find a knowledgeable FG God than a newcomer on floor 10.
Here's my big issue: it's completely nonsensical at a conceptual level. In principle, the game's objective with a skill/rank system should be to consistently keep you in an environment where you win 50% of matches - thus, any changes in your rank result from changes in your skill, and the game then adjusts whom you play against to compensate and keep you on an improvement treadmill (which is a good thing - it keeps the amount that you have to improve in order to win in the short term as small as possible, so improvement is as noticeable as possible). Here's the problem. Celestial, as a concept, is borked from the start. If you manage to be good enough to earn your way into a higher rank, a 'promotion series' is a reasonable test, right? Except, the idea of a promotion series is to evaluate you against people at your CURRENT rank and see if you're better enough to deserve to be higher - usually by playing others also on the cusp of ranking up. What Celestial does, on the other hand, is put you up against people who ARE where they belong rank-wise (aka, as mentioned, people who belong in that skill bracket by having a 50% winrate there), and asks you to DEMOLISH them. You need to have a (short-term) 85% win rate AGAINST Celestial players to prove that you belong in Celestial... what?!? Yeah. The way they check if you're good enough to belong at a rank whose goal is to give you skilled players to reach 50% winrate against... is by seeing if you're good enough to destroy those very same people consistently. PLUS, as more people get in (aside from people who cheese/wintrade their way in), THOSE people already had to have an 85% winrate against the people who were in Celestial BEFORE. So now you have to outpace not a bar, but a moving target - you have to be better than, not the Celestial minimum, but than the average person who has ALREADY broken the Celestial minimum with an 85% winrate. You have to have an 85% winrate against other players who themselves had an 85% winrate against people in Celestial - it balloons into infinity, at least conceptually. Even if that's not what happens in practice, it's still a DESIGN that creates that untenable scenario unless players circumvent it entirely (with wintrading, cheese, or pure luck). That's not how you create an environment of the 'best of the best'. It's how you create a cycle of frustration based on random, arbitrary factors. You somehow have to improve enough, against players in floor 10, to have an 85% winrate against players with skill ABOVE floor 10 (and because of the entry requirements and lack of ceiling in Celestial, often WAY above floor 10 in skill). It just makes no sense. Just make it a top percentage of the player base or a 3/5 instead of 5/6 (make the requirements to get a ticket to challenge Celestial harder to compensate, I don't care, just make the actual challenge not completely disconnected from the skill level needed to actually succeed while IN Celestial).
To be fair you can just fight floor 10s for your celestial challenge. But yeah the ranking is pretty trash. So many bots that belong on floor 4 are in celestial these days that its a meaningless title
I think this is a really effective voice of the reason I can't bring myself to grind Strive. I don't know if Im getting better because the matchmaking is so back and forth.
Im definitely in the 10.5 stage where I win like 70% of my matches in floor 10 then go up to celestial get about 2 wins then either get bodied or lose just one more time and get kicked out. I'm only really doing to prove that I can do it which I know sounds stupid but Strive is my first fighting game so want to hit celestial just to prove that I've gotten better. Now I play other games like BBCF and UNICLR but still come back to Stirve every once in a while. Good luck to everyone stuck at 10.5 like me
Something I argued since 3 weeks post launch is that the tower is great... on paper. Its implementation however is horrible. It is just way to easy to get to floor 10. That results in the skill gap on floor 10 being absolutely humongus and by extension Celestial aswell. I am one of those 10.5 people most months and I pretty much resigned myself not to partake in the Celestial lottery anymore. Yes I could search for favourable matchups and players whose levels don´t reach the thousands... or I just go back down to floor 10 after triggering the celestial challenge and never get bootet out of a set because I hit a rank up again for the rest of the month without needing to acquire VIP status. I am good enough to win matches but thanks to the massive skillgap that is on floor 10 I still face opponents that are waaaaay better than me aswell. It is exactly the same experience as Celestial without having to interact with the damn promotion system.
As a Goldlewis player who gets into Celestial each month on both PS5 and PC, I firmly agree. I think it was Kizzie Kay that maybe suggested multiple Celestial Floors, or maybe some better identification system to be able to put people into different "neighborhoods" up there. Quite literally yesterday was I playing PC for the first time in a while, got to Celestial, and lost twice immediately to a level 1,600 Zato who didn't let me press more than one or two buttons a round. I wasn't super upset or anything, so I immediately tried to get back in, and did, and then fought whoever was willing, which turned out to be a level 110 Ky, who gave me all five wins. This all happened in the span of less than an hour. This kinda stuff really is weird, because on one side, as a guy who doesn't have the time to play each and every day, getting into Celestial each month is great. However, the knowledge that so many people of varying degrees get in and CAN get it makes it feel like less of an achievement and more like random chance.
The idea of "earning" your place in celestial is great, the only problem with it is that when floor 10 is empty some players just won't be able to play the game. That's why I sometimes just let people beat me 5 times, otherwise they really can't find anyone.
I stopped playing due to the 10.5 situation, I had gotten to celestial a good chunk of times but the idea of having to constantly bounce between 10 and the challenge every motnhg was so draining, between the loading screens the stupid elevator animation and the dull matches in floor 10 it just wasn't very fun
I like the tower system because it doesn't force me extrinsic motivation very much. I just want sick matches and to get better - and i definitely get that when I que for matches at my floor level. (I'm floor 8)
I feel like a ball being thrown around when playing in tower because I either find extremly boosted people or smurfs, I remember getting promoted all the way to 9th floor only to get demoted to 6th floor, getting promoted agIn to 7th, then demoted to 5th and promoted back to 8th ALL IN THE SAME DAY
The wild range of skill is what I get on rookie and silver rank in SFV. When G came out I was getting demolished by a bunch of accounts with names like “Mr. President”, “Gthang” and also guys who literally would only dp, and Maximilian.
Thanks for the info. I'm a former 10th fl (been 9th for a while). I'll keep that in mind if I ever get to the Celestial challenge. I take note of wanted poster, icons, & character lv when choosing opponents in Park & rare Tower matches, so I have a somewhat even match (hopefully). Good vid.
Also… just the 5/6 win challenge thing is already super dumb. 5/6 is the tower criteria for “beating a floor” in strive (like going from f7 to f8). So to get into celestial you need to prove that you are better than celestial? That is pretty dumb. And is the reason f10.5 is so huge. And this is exacerbated by the fact that people in the floors are not allowed to derank more than 3 floors. And a lot of celestial winners and 10.5 players just play in the parks anyway, where they will destroy newbs who thought that parks were meant to me more casual, not more hardcore. The whole tower system is broken and doesn’t serve its purpose. Ideally there would be a ranked match mode with a leaderboard, and the tower would replace the parks. Barring that, the floor drop limit should be removed, and floor rankings should be done on a per-character basis.
I think the techniques you mentioned to get into celestial is my biggest issue with the system. People need to stop running away from people who are ready to fight because they’re scared of how high level they are. You won’t get good trying to stay comfortable
This is kind of exactly how I feel about celestial floor. It’s really a mixed bag of skill levels even when you’re supposedly at the highest possible “rank” the game has to offer, and because of this I get kinda tilted when I’m up against someone who knows the matchup against goldlewis really well and I’m just getting completely washed out of existence. It feels demoralizing but to me it’s the only way to actually get better without entering tournaments (something I don’t have time to do). And when you do get those even matches it feels incredible. Today I played against a Potemkin who knew all of his little tricks and played around my mindless copy paste neutral when playing that matchup. Because of that, the match was way more exciting for me to try and figure a way around this guy which by the end resulted in me getting a perfect which was great cause that guy perfected me game 1. When it’s even, it’s exhilarating and fun. When it’s you washing someone, you feel godlike but you know that you shouldn’t be getting away with certain things. When you’re GETTING washed, there’s either no fun to be had or your fun comes from at least hitting them 1 time. Proper ranked would be the best for this game
Lollll LOVE this video bro. You earned a subscribe from me. Funny and informative and also very insightful. I made it into celestial this month and have been playing everyday but I feel I rarely win. I've just come to accept these terms even though it sometimes makes me salty but can't be the best until you mingled with the best
There's absolutely no extrinsic motivation in the game after reaching celestial, but getting back every month is a bit of a pain in the ass. The fact that there's no more extrinsic motivation helped me to play for improvement more instead of wins. Grinding matches for hours every night without caring about winning or losing is actually pretty zen-like in my opinion.
This not only happens in mid celestial but mid floor 10 too, where you're not quite good enough to get too celestial but if you fight anyone under 10 you destroy them.
As someone’s whose made it to celestial but not good enough to maintain it at the end of the month, I felt it when he said “hey come on man I’m just a little guy, I’m just having a little bit of fun *internal/external scream*”
When I got strive on pc, obviously my account was from 0 because it’s different from my ps one, but I literally only did the tutorial but which set me at floor 6 and I’ve never played ranked on pc ever. Just can’t be asked, but also that does mean some people decide not to fight me
I hate being in 10.5 hell. I learn the most when ever I'm in celestial, but that only happens for like 4 games at most and then I get sent back down to go beat up the local lv 700 celestial potemkin hanging around floor 10, just to repeat again, making my learning process so much slower and annoying
New player, got put in floor 4, got used as a training dummy and am now on floor 3 with noone to fight cause the game has 900 people world wide and apparently most of them are at the top. It's like playing CS GO for the first time and everyone else is Gold Nova or above.
You touched on this, but I think the floor system does a great job of keeping people of approximate skill together. At the end of the day for 90% of players, thats THE reason a ranking system exists. BUT yeah the massive skill range in floor 10 and celestial is a joke. Finding players approximately your skill in those floors is such a chore
As a low level 10.5 (so low level that it's more like 10.2), I can relate. I don't even mind fighting super strong players, I just wish I could do that without being bonked down in 2-3 matches. Learning is hard when you get distracted
my favorite part about getting kicked out every month is dealing with 10 floor players then trying not to let the stress of having to go back floor 10 get to me during promos Also you can just cheat as dcing doesnt count as a loss if you do it before your hp hits 0, so the value of celestial is diminished by that alone
Funny seeing this as it hits home. I only get to play about 4 hours a week, so I basically live on floor 10.5 and find that "win 3 out of 5 matches" some weird arbitrary BS. Keep me in 10 or just shoot me to heaven. Ugh.
I think another big part of that is that Strive characters have very polarized matchup charts. They lose hard to a lot of matchups and win hard with other ones. So that skill gap you mentioned is often accentuated by that.
As someone who’s surrounded by friends who say getting into (insert game level here, Celestial, Elite Smash, etc.) was easy as fuck while I, myself am not in them, I’m hurt. My floor 7 ass is in pain.
My main issue with celestial is the promotion system, because even on paper it doesn't work. If you really belong in the floor you are on, then you should theoretically be losing about 50% of your matches, because everyone you're playing against is equally skilled. So the idea that if you really belong in celestial you have to demonstrate an 80% win rate against celestial players is absurd, even on paper ir doesn't work. So unless you're some giga chad tourney player, you end up stalking the floor dodging bad match ups, only playing against your good matchups, and hoping you run into someone who either sucks, sandbags, isn't on their main, or is also on their promos, in essence, you undermine the entire metric all together.
There aren't enough people on my region for the system to work. So the players are divided between Celestial and people playing at floor 10 (regardless of which floor they're assigned to). Most of the time I'm having the experience of either getting obliterated or obliterating the other player too. But eh, whatever... I don't wanna be the "back in my day" guy but when I got into GG it was the Reload online lobby with absolutely no matchmaking and two to three players to play with at max. And other fighting games were just about getting into GGPO and challenging some KOF player who'd destroy you after picking random.
Personally as someone for who ggst is their first fighting game, I like celestial. It lets me challenge the best of the best, who I otherwise could only dream of playing if I was say playing street fighter. Lets me improve faster.
I have a different point of view of the celestial floor. I kinda love how it works, because in my opinion anyone who breaks through and does passes the qualifying state basically more or less has the tools to get better and learn even from getting mauled by the top players on the floor. And you can just grind to improve and learn because there is no penalty for losing. I don't really play much recently, but the few matches I spend playing in floor 10 are not a challenge 90% of the times. So when I get my first promotion to challenger I just go and fight whoever, at worst I get sent back to floor 10 and in 10-15 minutes I am on my challenge again. I feel no stress, and bonus point I probably had fun playing my 10 floor matches because I wasn't worried.
I was stuck in 10.5 for a while. When promo time comes around I try to play a wide variety of characters in celestial to improve my match up knowledge. I get a dopamine rush getting the rank up, same as landing a command grab. Feel bad going back to floor 10 though, since it's starting to get a little more one-sided.
Its funny my main complaint is that I have to use the lobby, the duel stations always bug out and I have to spend minutes to even sit at a fucking one. Using the training mode auto queue alleviates this but it will bug out and I have to requeue it up. Having a matchmaking mode that accounts for latency and skill would be a godsend.
I mean I like it. It forces you to get better. I went from losing 3 or 4 celestial rankings to being able to get in easily and even outside the game winning locals
Honestly? celestial aside, I prefer the floors to regular MMR/Strict Skill-based matchmaking, as someone coming into fighting games from other games; it's so fucking refreshing to have a grab bag of people around my skill level, some slightly weaker, some higher. I'm not punished for having a good mental and having a streak, so I can just queue and know it's entirely on me, if I win or lose, not the system deciding that I've won two games in a row, so now I get to have a loss streak.
Yeah the aura system gave me World of Warcraft Classic PvP ranking system PSTD flashbacks. PvP rating in WoW Classic worked in a similar fashion as this. Each week, you'd gain rating based on how much honor (a type of score that you gain from killing other players or engaging in PvP activities and is not necessarily related to win rate or win/loss ratio) you achieved the week prior. The only difference between the majority of the ranks was whether or not you were willing to grind an extra few hours a day. To reach rank 14 (the highest rank) on my server, you were looking at playing 16 hours a day every single day for like 3 months straight. And that number could theoretically be higher if you encountered a server where a bunch of people were all playing 17 hours a day every single day... >.> It was cursed.
I can say I have similar experience at floor 7.5. i know i am just bad but the I barely lose on floor 7 but barely win at 8. I really want to get better though.
you got a new subscriber but honestly everything you thought was bad i either thought was good or just dgaf, like i dont care abt auras but goddamn trying to break thru the cloud ceiling is so much fun for me i aint done it yet but i will someday
A Celestial Potemkin, with a 10.5 Ky here. I think the Celestial challenge is cheesy, and doesn't work at a fundamental level. Today, I ran into a level 44 Chipp... with VIP status. This was immediately after failing my 4th attempt at Celestial with Ky today, and it made me think "why should I work so hard to work my way into Celestial when this Chipp cheesed his way in?" I won 3-0 against the Chipp, perfected him in one of the rounds, and then resolved to play in the Parks henceforth. The boundary to get into Celestial is so arbitrary that it doesn't serve the purpose of being a "test" of whether or not you're good enough for Celestial. I've just stopped caring.
I think a revamp for C-Floor should be just once you hit the floor you can stay there as long as you like until the season ends. After that, the reward for staying there and winning sets on players is achieving the Auras by getting a set amount of wins on C-Floor. Instead of it being set on time played on the floor. For example: 100 wins on C-Floor light-blue aura, 200 wins dark-blue aura, and so on. Similar to the old square ranks on BB except its not based on win-rate and fighting similar square ranks. Also while you have these auras you gain a boost of exp points to lvl your character and only on the character where you've won the said 100+ matches you've won to gain the auras (it would be cool if your Bounty Poster also has an aura tide to that character). So it's tied to the character you won said matches not player wide.
Don't worry brother, you will earn your place in due time. It took me almost 100 hours of the same character to get somewhere decent (and still no higher than floor 10)
I always thought that the tower ranking would be way better with something like 25 floors instead of just 10. The gap between someone who can reach 10f and someone who can complete the celestial challenge (see: get into celestial by proving you're *significantly better* than the average celestial player?) is really weird. Having more floors would fix that issue in an easy way. Just another aspect of Strive's severely unintuitive and undercooked matchmaking system, I guess.
The way I figured out to beat this tower is this: if you want to really improve at this game, you need to be able to fight the celestial killers consistently, the 1000, 2000, 3000+ level people. The only place you can really find them is in celestial as I almost never see them in parks. Unfortunately, the 10.5 floor experience means wasting a day or two every month crushing the floor 10 people, or getting stuck in limbo between them. The trick is this: grind out the celestial challenge and cheat it if you need to using other challengers, and then fight those super killers and add them on steam directly so you can play them whenever without worrying about celestial challenge garbage.
Aura is given purely based on Total celestial wins that month. Blue aura is Top 300 wins Yellow aura is Top 200 Wins Red aura is Top 100 Wins I know this because I've gotten both red and yellow aura twice. I believe you can keep celestial VIP but have no aura if you are Top 350 wins, although this is from thirdparty knowledge.
Ive not touched anything other than the park in awhile. I feel too bad going up and down constantly and the load between moving up or down a floor is annoying
Honestly a greater issue I have with Strive that you touched on with your "games won vs rank" thing is that the game really doesn't want to tell you your W/L rate. It's not in your R code, and the game doesn't even tell you total matches played, which I can imagine is only for the express purpose that you can't actually check your W/L rate, which especially sucks when trying to figure out your weakest MUs. I can only imagine it's to protect the feelings of the playerbase, which sucks. Don't fucking hide the truth from me game, I can take it
I'm playing in the JP/Korea region and the difference between floor 10 and celestial is ridiculous. I barely make it to celestial every month (usually like a week before reset lol) and the experience s just horrible. I'll be fighting a random like myself on floor 10, rank up and then fight Gobou/BNBBN/Daru/DarkNecro or whatever other monster jp player that you can think of and know that there is no chance in hell I'll make it in. I would like it if they made it so they use an MMR like on the ratingupdate website, making the requirements for each floor more strict (especially for celestial) and getting rid of the 5 match requirement to remain in celestial. Granted this can be a double edged sword as the playerbase while healthy for a fighting game, is not as big, so it can cause long queue times for players with either really low or really high MMR.
As someone chronically stuck in 10.5 because of my staunch refusal to dodge anybody during my challenge, it sucks. I’ll either get my shit pushed in by people who are like 5 floors above me in skill, or I get a good run going and then God himself spawns onto the floor and hunts me down with a character I didn’t even know was in this game and have no matchup knowledge against.
