Why doesn’t the LumiRank care about our feelings?

bp
18 min readNov 21, 2024

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The Panda Gaming Rankings, OrionRank, UltRank, LumiRank; even when the name stays the same, it feels like Smash Rankings are always doing something different. But every time, expectations are shattered as the algorithm ranks our favorite players 10 spots too low and some guy with an Aegis secondary gets first. Right now we’re in a half-season type of ranking and this makes it easier to look at all the data and come to some conclusions, so, as a ranking fiend, I’m gonna go ahead and do just that.

Why doesn’t the LumiRank just hold me like this?

Now, I could just post one opinion and call it a day, but I think the ranking won’t care about me unless I care about it first. I want to understand LumiRank 2024.2, learn what it likes, what it doesn’t like, its deepest secrets, its darkest fears. I want to be there when Christmas bonuses come in and when the stock market crashes on that mediocre investment. I want to be there when the rain starts to pour, like I’ve been there before. And when it’s all said and done, I want to know where this goddamn ranking is putting MkLeo.

I’ve made a Google sheet with the placings, wins, and losses of a top group of players and we’ll be using that to try and predict LumiRank. But first, some serious thoughts I had on my understanding of the ranking and how things are valued. It’s never too late to start caring.

My first of two takeaways is that invitationals seem way too good for upping the win count on relevant players. I’ve also heard that invitationals have a bonus point multiplier, and that’s crazy because they seem like one of the best ways to succeed already.

It seems extremely exploitable too, and the invitationals happening now feel like they’re teetering on the edge of just cheating the ranking. The pre-major invitational major is a great idea for viewing, but it’s a little broken and biased if the value is that good. People complain about Cirque for various reasons, but they’re the only event really doing it right now and it’s gonna drive top players to travel there for that double major weekend (and if they don’t, they miss out on 2 majors!).

Illicit transaction.

No open qualifiers is another sticking point that feels a bit like choosing who gets on the ranking when a major is straight up closed to players not invited. The invitationals of old would have several open qualifier spots across several events in various places, but post-Smash World Tour, it feels like more and more we see 1 or 0 qualifiers and it’s just another major that only the same 10 people can attend.

And then you have the “cool people only” invitationals just starting to happen and that’s maybe a little problematic. I suppose the pro-ban community needs some way to sneak their ruleset by Nintendo. Maybe if an invitational exists for “the viewing” it shouldn’t count for “the ranking”, but it’s all complicated and the big increase in invitationals these days doesn’t help anything.

I’ve personally always viewed invitationals as less prestigious to the point of which I don’t count any invitational as a “true major” (except the one Axe won), but maybe we’ve been living in a world where that’s what the rankings are gonna be about from now on. Maybe we’ll get “Invitational Week” next year where some guy invites 16 people to play 7 invitationals in a week and they’re all majors. It sounds like it shouldn’t happen, but what if it does? For now, we can just worry about the current ranking, and I guess we’ll know what’s up if Light manages to rank real high, because that dude seems to be getting all his big wins at invitationals.

My second takeaway is that the value of the “P-tiers” seem obscenely large now that I actually look at it. You can look at the public LumiRank TTS yourself right now and see it.

It has only occurred to me just now that this username might be “Mesu x elf” and not “Me sux elf”.

ReWired Fest 2024 featuring Light, Lima, BeastModePaul, and Beastly as its four most notable? 1,260 points.

Maesuma’LANDMARK #4 where the 16th seed is 96th in the world, Noi? 2,315 points.

Luminosity Makes Moves Miami 2024 where the 32nd seed is 95th in the world, ChunkyKong? 5,715 points and it’s the 5th largest event by points.

What about the 4th largest, Riptide 2024? ChunkyKong also attended and is the 33rd seed. Well, 9,668 points.

A single player’s seed in events 2 months apart is not the best comparison, ChunkyKong could have made it to 33rd without playing a higher ranked player at Riptide and 17th at LMMM (though he was upset both times and didn’t make it that far), so that additional value may be warranted, but it seems like these P-tiers kind of blow the S-tiers and A-tier out of the water and while I’m not against events reaching crazy point values, I wonder if an A-tier doesn’t really matter when there’s P-tiers.

I know there’s some balance to it, crêpe salée’s rank 32 last season came mostly through B-tier events, but every player in the top 16 of 2024.1 has at least 1 P-tier top 8. It’s likely things will change this time around with Tweek and Light doing well but only peaking at 9th, but the ranking could really go anywhere with this. Placings are just numbers though, and an algorithm maybe doesn’t care so much about the difference between 7th and 9th or even 1st and 2nd like a person would (check those Melee ranking discussions).

With all of that in mind, it’s time for some ranking speculation.

To whittle down the amount of players into a more manageable group, I set criteria as follows.

  • Top 8 @ P-tier
  • Top 4 @ S-tier
  • Top 2 @ A-tier

This misses out on some players with resumes that potentially could rank them upwards of top 30, but a cutoff has to made somewhere. 31 players do meet this standard and thus 31 players will be listed. I think looking at every player would result in a different expected top 31 players, so you can slot in the missing players on your own if you’d like.

Very important, the dataset ranges from the beginning of the season up to Luminosity Makes Moves Miami 2024 and does not include tournaments such as:

  • The Throne 2 (A-tier)
  • Don’t Park on the Grass 2024 (A-tier)
  • UltCore 4th (S-tier)

It’s just when I collected the data.

Also, a couple players have a red 2/4 or 3/4 in their picture, which is for attendance, but don’t worry, they changed the requirements so only zackray would miss out on being ranked (and some of these guys already had C-tier attendance to meet the old reqs).

The Google sheet can be viewed here. For the rest, I’ll explain as we go.

31

As the world fell around him, one man kept pushing forward, just him and his bag of infinite grenades. For many, this is the first time they’ve heard of Ryopei, though he gained prominence earlier in the year at large regional ITSUKUSHIMA#4 where he defeated Rizeasu, Nizemamo, and Futari no Kiwami Ah! enroute to a 4th place finish.

Despite the strong placing, Ryopei ultimately lucked out a bit and as a result has no wins against anyone in this group, locking him to the bottom spot. It’s a run that reminds me a bit of Emma Raducanu’s US Open win, where Toriguri and Gorioka are like Maria Sakkari and Belinda Bencic. However, unlike the US Open, 3rd at DELTA will (probably) not be awarding 2,000 points.

Last season, rank #78 Miru also made a big reach getting 2nd at the A-tier Maesuma’U22, but also grabbed wins over Hurt and Asimo. Ryopei doesn’t have the same win quality and I’m really not sure where he’ll rank overall.

30

Qualifying onto this list with a 2nd place finish at Ultimate Fighting Arena 2024, it’s unfortunately all Sisqui really has in terms of big results. The outlook for Europe in general actually doesn’t seem too great, even as lesser-known talents like KID and drybie claim their wins over NA.

Having a good presence at the worldwide top level is huge for the rest of a region, but with both Glutonny and crêpe salée having relatively low activity, Europe now seems to be lacking in that regard. To make matters worse, not including King Con, Sisqui is the only European to lose to Marss this year. Just unfortunate.

29

Just mentioned earlier, even once you look into C-tiers and D-tiers, crêpe salée has not been very active. I was curious in particular how different his rank #32 2024.1 season went and found a huge difference in attendance at smaller events to really solidify a “#1 in Europe”. Unless I’m missing something, crêpe salée’s attendance this season is not far off from the minimum and without the same showcase of wins over Europe’s top talent this time around, I’m not even sure if the title of 2nd highest ranked European is secure.

28

After a promising start with a 4th place finish at P-tier KOWLOON #12 With Kagaribi, Lv.1 appears to have leveled down. To be clear, Lv.1 is still playing well and has the top 8 finishes to back this up, but his win list is pretty barren as he gets lost in the ocean of Japan’s depth. One zackray win at a P-tier does feel relevant enough though, and this doesn’t account for his depth wins like Kuroponzu or Jogibu.

27

Hurting a bit for some big runs, but there’s solid attendance and the win/loss quality is pretty alright. Defeating Light at Supernova feels like a pretty big deal here, but it’s just another day for this KENerational talent.

26

Similarly to crêpe salée, Glutonny’s attendance is more like a starving man’s. That being said, you can’t just discount wins over MkLeo and Tweek. It is here where things like P-tier set wins vs S-tier set wins starts to come into play though and Glutonny only has A-tier wins compared to his ranking peers. How much more higher tier wins are valued, I’m not certain, but it feels like it’ll be significant and with a potential additional attendance penalty, I don’t feel confident in a place much higher.

25

4 of the 5 big wins come from 1 event, but if you beat all those players at one of the biggest events, it’s gonna be a good thing for your ranking. The remaining events are up and down with their placings, but the losses are majority recognizable players. A few aren’t, but some people act like losing to Titan drops you out of top 50 and that surely cannot be how it works.

24

I don’t think regular Paul could do this well.

23

Low attendance is probably the main factor here as Riddles has the performances to rate highly otherwise. The majority of wins do come from the Riptide 2024 run, so maybe another drop if you value consistency over multiple events, but these are wins that matter.

22

The first of the group to sport a win on one of the top 4, Yoshidora’s generally strong placings are hindered by his low attendance. It’s been quite some time since he last beat acola and I feel he’s set up for some nice future performances; just need to get rid of this pesky Asimo fellow.

21

Akakikusu has one of the more lopsided top win-to-total loss records, but the placings are good and these are two big wins at big events. It’s another situation where the losses aren’t great, but I don’t think they drop him down as much as the wins bring him up. Depth is also a factor, where to reach those placings, you’re gonna have to win some sets against good players, even if they aren’t specifically in this group.

20

With a qualifying placement at Sumabato SP51 and a particularly noticeable set of wins and losses, Maister is essentially Japan depth now. The season feels really good, but there are 2 things missing: a top-4 win and P-tier wins in general.

19

Much like Ryuoh or Riddles earlier, Syrup made one key run at a P-tier to grab the wins for this rank. Miya and Tweek are honestly huge pick-ups, but I do wonder how a season like this will get treated. Good B-tier attendance means he probably avoids a penalty there, but while B-tier losses shouldn’t matter as much, he’s got a real weird set of them. In some ways, it feels like the biggest difference between Syrup and Ryuoh is the A-tier vs B-tier attendance and I don’t know what kind of consequences are in store for either.

18

Rather than talk about Zomba now, I’d like to talk about Zomba last season where he answered the Game 5 Hype Song question with “guy like me won’t go to game 5” except Liquipedia indicates he played 19 game 5 sets against top 100 players that season and although he started 8–2, he finished 1–8 to go 9–10 in game 5 sets overall. Alexa, play Karma by Taylor Swift?

17

Remember when Zomba beat Sonix, Sparg0, Tweek, and Glutonny at a P-tier and ended the season ranked 14th? Well, Kola beat Sparg0, Shuton, Asimo, and Light at an A-tier and the rest of his results are kind of… not encouraging?

Aside from the fact you probably wouldn’t be old enough to own a driver’s license, there’s nothing wrong with being Zomba Jr., but I see a difference with where people place Kola on their own rankings and I hope they won’t be disappointed as he returns to top 20 form. As it stands, I think 17th is a pretty reasonable spot.

16

Onto another A-tier merchant, Lima found big success during Cirque weekend, grabbing double 2nds at A-tiers and almost all of his relevant wins. This is good (in general), but I think it’s also not good (for top 10). Sparg0 and Miya wins are pretty noticeable, so who knows what’ll happen, although last season Snow had Miya(#2) and Hurt(#4) wins at A-tiers and it got him 18th.

15

zackray has the P-tier placings and P-tier player wins and crazy good consistency, but not only does he almost certainly get hit with an attendance penalty, he might not even make the ranking at all (needs one non-invitational ranked event before December 16th).

14

Before I collected the data, I had it in my head that Yoshidora would be above Hurt. I think the idea that Hurt wasn’t performing as strong as last season got stuck to my brain and I continued to place him lower as he continued to not reach his former placings throughout September and October. The truth, however, is that Hurt has been quite good. 2 P-tier 5ths and a solid group of wins could go a long way here and he might even be higher than where I’m placing him. For now, his list of wins is only reaching the heights of his competition thanks to B-tiers and I’m not confident those will push him over the edge.

13

We’ve made some comparisons earlier, how about 2024.1’s #16, Tea, with big P-tier placings and not much else? In this regard, I might actually be overrating SHADIC a small amount, but I don’t fully understand every value and I feel that the P-tiers do matter a lot. SHADIC also has strong loss quality, but at the same time could use a bit more attendance.

12

Like many people, I’ve had my own thoughts on who belongs in the top 10 and who doesn’t, and MkLeo was in that personal top 10 as far back as the Luminosity Invitational. That being said, with the stats gathered, I’m thinking more about the value of an event’s tier. MkLeo has avoided the big upsets he faced in season 2024.1, but his wins don’t feel that much different. Beating Sparg0 at an A-tier is a great win, but I’m pretty sure he did that 3 times last season.

We’ll see how things shape out, a Sparg0 win is probably more valuable assuming he claims a higher ranking this season, so MkLeo isn’t out of the top 10 picture at all. The more you value loss quality and A-tier/B-tiers, the higher he’d rise too, though it’s debatable on those being huge factors, especially once you’re past all the ranking outliers that show up in the 30s.

11

Other people seem to have written off Doramigi for awhile now, and I’m not sure why.

It’s a good time to talk more about what I think about losses. I’ve seen other people state that Doramigi’s losses to Fui, MildnaH.O, Shirayuki, and Kuhaku disqualify him from this ranking cluster, but after seeing how previous rankings have shaped up, I think that’s the wrong way to look at losses. I would say that taking losses ultimately matters the least of any metric, particularly if you are getting the wins. Loss quality is still important, sure, but I think it might be closer to an idea like: where losing hurts you the most is that it prevents you from getting more wins. And Doramigi has a P-tier Sparg0 win, a P-tier Shuton win, and so on.

49th at Smash Con 2023, 33rd at Sumabato SP51, who cares? My ideas on losses may not end up being true, but I think Doramigi is absolutely still in consideration for top 10.

10

Snow has the most losses of anyone in this group, but we already talked about how I think losing is more ok than one might expect. If you’re out here beating acola, Sonix, Raru, Shuton, and Hurt across 3 different P-tiers, I don’t know what kind of ranking might put you out of top 10, but if there is I’d leave a strongly worded post on social media (if I used any on a regular basis). Of course, top 10 is actually like 14 players, so we’ll see how the tables turn.

9

Shuton is held in a much higher regard in the opinions I’ve seen and with his strong consistency and overall solid P-tier performances, I can understand why. It is kind of a shaky spot for Shuton right now though and he could absolutely use a few more top player wins to secure his position.

8

Somewhat similar to Shuton, Tweek has the consistency but does end up missing out on a big P-tier run. However, while not a P-tier, Luminosity Makes Moves Miami 2024 is worth around half the points (which is pretty good) and a 1st place finish there absolutely looks good. Tweek also has more top-level wins; it comes with the risk of getting them at lower tier events, but for now it feels like just enough to hold position in the top 10.

7

Alongside the top 4 and zackray, Light is one of just 6 players with an overall winning record against the group here and this is a big deal. What’s also a big deal is how many of these wins came at A-tier events worth 3,000 or 4,000 points, and not the 13,981 point P-tier (that also gains value as players improve their seasons). I still think Light is a complete lock somewhere within the top 10 and the lynchpin holding it all up are 2 Miya wins, one at a P-tier, one at an S-tier.

6

I’m not too confident in this placing, but my gut continues to tell me that the P-tiers matter and Raru feels like the first to put all the pieces together: the P-tiers, strong attendance, and a solid list of wins. Raru does have some standout losses, but lets say hypothetically speaking if you were a top 10 player and you lost to a guy named Tempaman, are you no longer top 10? Are you gonna deny Tempaman a top 10 win just like that? Hmm???

5

I just said this but: the P-tiers, strong attendance, and a solid list of wins. Don’t let Tempaman down like that, ok?

4

acola and Sonix are honestly pretty much equal. There’s a lot you can point out to argue for either side: A Sparg0 win for acola, more P-tier wins for Sonix, 13th at an invitational, it does overall feels slightly more favored for acola, especially if you also factor in his slightly higher attendance of 1 more event, but it really could go either way.

3

While 3 and 4 are very close, I think there is some separation from the top 2. Visually it’s the easiest to see in the placings, and I think that sort of thing is going to matter when the margins get thinner and thinner.

2

Lining up the stats of the top 2, they’ve actually got a lot of the same wins. I feel Sparg0 has the edge with his Sonix and Asimo wins at P-tiers that Miya doesn’t have, but Miya’s P-tier acola wins and Raru/Sparg0 wins at smaller events keep him close behind. It’s here that because of how close things are, loss quality might actually make a big difference, and I again favor Sparg0 who took his losses at less important A-tier and B-tier events vs Miya losing at a P-tier and an S-tier. If there’s one thing in Miya’s favor, it’s the amount of 1st places to his name, but that sort of thing ultimately did not give him an edge back in 2023.

1

I might be undervaluing A-tiers throughout this whole ranking, but I think that although the race to #1 is and continues to be very close, only one event post-LMMM has enough value by itself to actually result in a change in hands and neither Sparg0 or Miya are attending UltCore.

Lastly, a quick list of any player who has at least 3 wins against the above group at B-tier or higher events. Some big potential for the ranking with these guys, but I’d be kind of shocked if any of them were in the top 20 with their current stats. There’s still some events left where they could make some plays though.

As it stands, Marss, Tea, and TamaPDaifuku seem to have the best collection of wins + event tier.

In the end, it is all speculation. Just like anyone else posting their ranking opinions, I’m not much different in that I still have no idea if I’m anywhere close to what we’ll actually be getting. But, back in 2024.1, I was very surprised by Shuton’s ranking and while I don’t particularly disagree after seeing the data, I feel like whether it’s the ranking valuing things more than expected or valuing things that people don’t pay attention to, there’s a disconnect somewhere and some effort is needed to bridge the gap.

At least it all makes more sense than the Game Awards, right?

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