Announcement Spring 2021 Ranked Season Announcement & More

Hello everyone, this is a quick announcement regarding the upcoming Ranked season (Which would normally begin on April 1st). While its obvious we are very late on our promise to deliver the Arenas update, also known as the Anniversary update part II, we have been working on it since the original announcement and plan on having it out this season. That being said, the ranked portion of the game isn't connected as of now to the arenas, making it unplayable.

Obviously, this puts us at a crossroads, either delay the update until the NEXT ranked season, meaning all the old throwback maps and map contest winners would have to wait 3 more months, or do we release within the ranked season, at the cost of ranked being unplayable? Many players have expressed frustration at the current state of ranked, which is incredibly unreliable so to speak, so we are going to be taking it down for this season so that we can push the Arena update mid-season, and have a brand new ranked experience for the Summer 2021 season.

However, just because ranked will be out of commission for the season doesn't mean its dead exactly, during its downtime we will be asking all of you what changes you'd like to see for its return on the public Discord. Questions like: what maps should be banned from the rotation, what items, what rulesets, new elo calculation, rewards, etc will be there, so be on the lookout! We'll also be open to any suggestions as comments under this post as well, even if we don't respond or look like we've seen it.

This post is moreso to keep everyone informed about whats been going on behind the scenes, work has been happening, albeit slow; nearly the entire Smash team works and goes to school full-time, so sometimes we get very busy with real life stuff and can't commit to deadlines we initially thought would be easy to meet. We look forward to collaborating with the community to make aspects of the mode more fleshed out and friendly to all sorts of groups, thank you all for your continued support.

-The SMASH Team

HYPE!
I already made a suggestion regarding ranked elo calculation in this post. I was thinking about a reward system with it that would make sense in the case a version of that suggestion is added, which is basically giving small rewards when certain elo ranges are reached, while keeping a top 3 prize (maybe extending it to top 10 or top 20 wouldn't hurt though). The main benefits are that those are also easier reachable for newer players, giving them even more incentive to play ranked and grow their skillset.

Regarding items in ranked, I would say to remove items like jet-pack, rocket launcher, GRAPPLE (unless reworked in the way I have already seen you mention) and extra life.

My opinion on maps is that certain maps are known to be good for testing skill, and are commonly played e.g. Arena and Temples. I would say that these need to occur a lot in ranked. A bit variation besides it is not bad though.