Ranked Is Terrible For Newcomers

[Yeish]

I have never touched a Tekken game before (if you discount dabbling for 15 minutes once in my lifetime) and I am sitting at Brawler rank with a win rate of the current antarctic weather temperature.

My opponents do Korean Backdash as if they were born with it. And meanwhile each time I somehow sneak a win in, probably because they played blindfolded when they saw my name, I keep ranking up and my winrate exceeds FP32 with how many zeros you have to append to it.

Why would the devs do such a thing? Elo rating is designed to show the win probability between two players. By having such a large amount of total required wins instead, I keep climbing the ranks when I absolutely shouldn't. So even with 94% loss rate (Elo difference of 400? points) I will keep climbing the ranks and it won't stop.

I know the game switches from Warrior on to a classic system. But this launch phase feels absolutely dreadful to play. Why not do a hybrid as Granblue Fantasy Versus? You can't climb down in the first ranks, but you will need to outplay the opponents on that rank and a subzero winrate as mine is not going to cut it. At Brawler rank I feel like an imposter. I barely grasp how the game flows yet.

I will learn the game with time, but I can't help but feel this alienates the entire newcomer faction of the playerbase and I am not sure what the devs were expecting with this implementation. Realistically new players have to wait until the good players rank up and play something else and in the meantime they stop playing Tekken at all?

I have played fighting games offline with a bunch of people where pretty much nobody knew how to play at all and neither anybody knew the obscure retro games. Let's just say a winrate like mine is not the norm for equal newcomers. Tekken 8 screwed this seriously up.

[schguki]

games hard man start grinding

[Sharkofspace]

You are new to the game.

You will get utterly destroyed online until you learn how to play and improve.

That's just how fighting games are and always have been. Nothing is broken.

[Yeish]

Yeah, I understand that. But the ranked system the way it is implemented makes it so much worse than it has to be.

[Prometheus]

fight games in a nutshell. would be worse if you came to the party late.

[Rusty]

Then don't play it? Lol??

Pfft, what do you want me to do about it?????

[Nyash Warrior]

Bredren The game is FRESH so you'll get matched with all the vets from past titles until they rank up further. Use this time to fight their ghosts so you have an edge when all the "New" newcomers are in ranked.

[mercureXI]

Tekken requires newcomers to play for about a decade to learn all variations and moves from the 100+ moves for EVERY character.

Meaning you just can't defend efficiently until 2034.

Fun ? No ?

That's Tekken . . . Dumbest game design you can see on the market, but since the game is insanely mash happy, it sells well.

[Sharkofspace]

Originally posted by Yeish:

Yeah, I understand that. But the ranked system the way it is implemented makes it so much worse than it has to be.

It really doesn't. There is no change that could be made to the rank system that would change how you feel right now.

You aren't losing because of the ranked system, you're losing because you don't know what you're doing, and your opponents do. Blaming the ranked system will not accomplish anything.

[SiamezeFunk]

I come from Street Fighter 6 - nowhere near the top ranks, but decent enough, I guess, and I think like I at least understand that game and its mechanics, so I know what I'm doing wrong or that I need to work on my execution, etc.

Learning Tekken 8 (my first Tekken other than doing a couple of hours of brainless mashing in T7) was effing intimidating, and the game's tutorials (if you wanna call them that) do a really poor job of teaching you how to actually play. I know this is hard to do for fighting games since they are so complex on so many levels, but there's even simple and basic stuff that is missing from the tutorial and the in-game teaching tools - even if they are really good and valuable once you've figured stuff out a bit.

To be honest, I think Capcom, Bandai Namco, Arc, etc., they know that YouTube is a big source of information and guides on how to learn their games. And I think they deliberately outsource the job of teaching the game, obviously without saying so, to passionate players who are willing to put in the effort to create starter guides, tips & tricks videos and so on.
I feel though, that even with those guides, I still can use some of my basic understanding of underlying concepts (like frame data, footsies, punishes...) to gain a grasp of T8 much quicker than I could without my background of grinding SF6, even if a lot of skills are hardly or not at all transferable to Tekken. I can hardly imagine what it must be like if you don't have that. (Or maybe I can, at least a bit - I think it took me rougly 250 hours of playing and practicing before I felt like I remotely knew what I was doing in SF6 :D)

I think even a lot of the YouTube channels kind of assume you have a basic understanding of how fighting games work at a fundamental level and that you know a lot of the terms already, and so on.

You can do a search on your own of course, if you feel motivated to learn that way, some channels I can recommend as a starting point are MassiveZug or BoogardMG, but I'm sure there are others out there that work well, too.

Hope you find some of that helpful and if you wanna do some sparring or co-op training, feel free to message me and I'll gladly pass on some of my very basic understanding via Discord to you ; )

[Astroyohan]

Just how fighting games are until you learn them, imo the biggest problem with them are that massive wall that u gotta climb but when you're over it at least you'll know lol..

[VilzeTSF]

might be better in a few days for you when people start getting to their real ranks!

[Ratch]

Originally posted by Yeish:

I have never touched a Tekken game before (if you discount dabbling for 15 minutes once in my lifetime) and I am sitting at Brawler rank with a win rate of the current antarctic weather temperature.

Let's just say a winrate like mine is not the norm for equal newcomers.

Yes, it is. Welcome to getting good. Practice.

[Rusty]

Originally posted by siamEZefun:

I come from Street Fighter 6 - nowhere near the top ranks, but decent enough, I guess, and I think like I at least understand that game and its mechanics, so I know what I'm doing wrong or that I need to work on my execution, etc.

Learning Tekken 8 (my first Tekken other than doing a couple of hours of brainless mashing in T7) was effing intimidating, and the game's tutorials (if you wanna call them that) do a really poor job of teaching you how to actually play. I know this is hard to do for fighting games since they are so complex on so many levels, but there's even simple and basic stuff that is missing from the tutorial and the in-game teaching tools - even if they are really good and valuable once you've figured stuff out a bit.

To be honest, I think Capcom, Bandai Namco, Arc, etc., they know that YouTube is a big source of information and guides on how to learn their games. And I think they deliberately outsource the job of teaching the game, obviously without saying so, to passionate players who are willing to put in the effort to create starter guides, tips & tricks videos and so on.
I feel though, that even with those guides, I still can use some of my basic understanding of underlying concepts (like frame data, footsies, punishes...) to gain a grasp of T8 much quicker than I could without my background of grinding SF6, even if a lot of skills are hardly or not at all transferable to Tekken. I can hardly imagine what it must be like if you don't have that. (Or maybe I can, at least a bit - I think it took me rougly 250 hours of playing and practicing before I felt like I remotely knew what I was doing in SF6 :D)

I think even a lot of the YouTube channels kind of assume you have a basic understanding of how fighting games work at a fundamental level and that you know a lot of the terms already, and so on.

You can do a search on your own of course, if you feel motivated to learn that way, some channels I can recommend as a starting point are MassiveZug or BoogardMG, but I'm sure there are others out there that work well, too.

Hope you find some of that helpful and if you wanna do some sparring or co-op training, feel free to message me and I'll gladly pass on some of my very basic understanding via Discord to you ; )

Gotta agree. I only went through Arcade Quest because I was expecting it to have tutorials for every specific character, and said character's counter play for when you're fighting them. It tells you how to deal with a just barely green rank Kazuya and then nothing else, it's already over.

That said, if you're looking for a decent tutorial, there's one for Tekken 7 that covers all the basics. Obviously it'll be missing things like heat, but most of the info carries over into 8.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-WhR09Q6TU

[Ein]

The whole game is terrible for newcomers. Why do you think Tekken has almost no fan art? Because it's the same people who have been playing since Tekken existed.

[👑THE STORM QUEEN👑]

It will only become more and more difficult