You know what's even worse than fighting game ranked ladder? Mahjong ranked ladder

The whole fighting game community has been talking about online ranked match lately, because the more you grind ranked match, the more you come to hate it. We’ll all eagerly tell you so; probably too eagerly for our own good.

After the dopamine rush of rising through the ranks fast, players finally meet their match— as the system was designed to do— and inevitably plateau at whatever rank they’re able to successfully hold down. Sometimes you hear "I'm stable"; sometimes you hear "I'm hardstuck." It's a matter of mindset.

The competitive move at this point is to check out of ranked match, head back to the dojo, and start improving our play: experimenting with our character, watching our own matches to pick out our mistakes, and learning practical counters to the opponents we fight online. That’s how we’d actually be able to surpass our rivals, and more importantly than that we’d probably pull more satisfaction out of our sessions. The system was designed to bring us to players at our level, not necessarily to place us, as we are, at the top right now.

If anything, ranked reveals our current limits to us. (Maybe that's why it makes us so mad.)

But the number itself— platinum rank, gold master, mega plywood overlord, however much the game decides to flatter you– has a more immediate pull. The lizard-brain move is to skip all that vegetable-eating self-improvement nonsense and get right back into ranked queue, because dammit, there’s a number there ready for us to make go up. But there comes a point where we won't improve just from playing more matches. Passively waiting for free points off easy wins keeps us sloppy, plateaued, and dissatisfied. Thus, and for many other reasons, our drive to climb the ranks for its own sake can actually make us kind of miserable.

So I thought it might be interesting and perhaps even valuable to talk to my fellow fighting game heads about mahjong ranked match, and how it’s like that, but worse.

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Introducing luck to ranked ladder

Fighting games are deterministic: the game is determined entirely by our decisions, and every decision we make is up to us. I can psychologically pressure you in a fighting game— try to get you to freeze up so I can throw you, try to get you to jump in so I can anti-air you— but the decisions you make are your own, even the choice to roll the dice on a random guess. That’s where all the mind games stem from. I make you guess wrong three times, I win. “Go ahead, knock yourself out.”

Mahjong isn’t like that at all. Not only are good play and victory not necessarily connected, you don’t necessarily get to play. (Marvel aside.) Players are fundamentally at the mercy of probability and the luck of the draw: we play the tiles that we are given. You can be dealt a hand that’s literally impossible to win despite your best efforts, or you can be dealt a hand that wins effortlessly without any skill involved. You might just become a helpless bystander while the real game happens to two of the other players at the table, or perhaps everything could be going just fine until you deal in a completely safe-looking tile that causes you to be hit by lightning and die instantly. The other three people at the table are in the same boat. You can’t win every time in mahjong, not even close: a 25% 1st-place rate is considered unlikely even for a strong player.

Yet online mahjong is all about ranked matches. Reach a certain rank on Tenhou or Mahjong Soul, and unlike in fighting games, that actually means something among strong players. Why would this be?

Well, it’s the closest to an objective means that we have to measure the quality of a player. Any player could just get unusually lucky over one, two or even ten or a hundred games. It takes a truly long-term record to tell if a player consistently makes the good decisions that (most often) lead to victory and avoids the mistakes that (most often) lead to defeat. Those results will show on a stat sheet, and only so many players in the world can maintain those high stats against other strong players in the chaotic, high-stress environment of this game.

So even though tournaments exist and have their own prestige, ranked match results count in mahjong. If your intermediate mahjong player reaches 4dan/1800R on Tenhou, congratulate them and buy them a drink: they've worked hard. (And avoided the lure of anime gacha babes.)

But luck can make ranked match a uniquely demoralizing experience. When I lose ten straight matches in a fighting game and demote a rank, I understand that I made mistakes that I can later study, or I fought much stronger opponents, which is itself valuable.

When I’m in top form at the mahjong table and I’m simply never dealt a playable hand, or I get hit by an instant deal-in on every big hand, I feel as though luck has defeated me. Because it has. That’s the game I signed up for.

Stakes

It might be because I’ve been doing it for so long, but I actually feel pretty comfortable in fighting game ranked modes. Even when I plateau: I’m stuck around rank 30 in Virtua Fighter, but I never get tired of it, nor do I feel all that bad about losses. A big part of this is that the matches are fast, and your rank falls or rises in little increments. A little up, a little down. Even a losing streak that might put you down a rank doesn’t hurt that much, because it’s just a lot of little downs. And you got outplayed, so what’s to bitch about?

In mahjong, you play for a long time and your rank rises or falls one way, and significantly. The significant time expenditure— on average about 45 minutes, but sometimes you’ll be playing for five minutes or an hour and a half— and the progressively higher stakes as you rise the ranks makes ranked match a much more tense situation. Bad luck can be merciless: it is not uncommon for a single losing session to undo days of progress in the ranks, or for a streak of losing sessions to last weeks or even a month.

Right now I play Virtua Fighter 5 or Granblue Fantasy Versus in ranked when I want a moment to relax: it feels good to push those buttons, and I don’t have to “get serious” unless the opponent is that much stronger, in which case it’s even more pleasant to kick my brain into high gear. I’m not extremely serious about getting ahead in fighting game ranked match: I’m just a very experienced old guy who's kind of decent.

By contrast, I am actively trying to become a top-level riichi player; the scene has motivated me and I want to win tournaments and hold my own against my high-level friends. (I even paid good money to fail the pro test, before reconsidering why I would pay dues simply to play against the same people I already play against.)

Because I’m more serious about it and because there’s more at stake, I never play mahjong ranked on my main account (Riichi City) until I have no obligations left for the day and I can give the game my full, undivided attention. I try to play two full east-south games a day in the top lobby, almost every day: a slow and steady pace that’s demanding, but which doesn’t induce burnout. The stakes involved, and the amount of focused time the game demands, force you to take it more seriously. After all, a stupid casual mistake at the wrong moment– like that one ill-advised button mash in a fighting game– could give away the entire game.

I should know. Last year I lost first place in a major to a mistake like that.

So here’s my rank

Here are my competitive mahjong bona fides: I am 8th dan (out of 10 dan ranks, and a Legend rank after that) on Riichi City, where I've been playing seriously for about three years. My rank topped out at 9th dan, in the top 200 players on the server, and I placed second in their (aforementioned) major tourney last year. The legitimacy of a Riichi City high rank is debated versus Tenhou or Majsoul, but I believe the consistently strong play in the top lobby is self-evident, and I hold my own there.

And here’s my rank. I am presently on the low end of 8th dan. The rates are 300 points for first place, 100 for second place, -135 for third place and -285 for last. There is a slight curve to RC’s ranking rewards: at low ranks you win more points than you lose, but as you move up, you begin to lose more points than you win. The penalty for third is steep (unlike on Tenhou, where it is zero), so players have to fight hard to the end.

I show you this to express that it’s crushing to lose big in ranked riichi. The process regularly sends players into spirals of despair, as bad results make them play worse, leading to worse results and so on. Riichi Discords are littered with the wailing of the damned, beginner and experts alike. One of the biggest obstacles to turning out consistent results is actually emotional vulnerability. Mindset. Tilt.

And let me tell you, I'm not immune. On Riichi City, I’ve demoted all the way to 7th dan (from 9th) twice now, and clawed my way back up to 8th both times. All it really means in the long run is that I’m holding a respectable rank, despite swings of variance. But in the moment, that weeks-long string of losses hurts. You ask yourself if you ever knew how to play this game in the first place. If I spent two hours playing mahjong only to lose all the progress I made in the last five sessions… did I not just waste my time?

And that reasoning is a trap. It’s the wrong way to think about it.

Rank isn’t the important part of ranked match

The worst thing that a ranked match system can do to you is get you thinking only of the numbers. Sitting in front of your screen hitting the “start” button over and over again, like you’re pulling the lever on a slot machine, just waiting to get lucky. (It’s also, for business reasons, how the developer wants you to be!) I’ve been in this place during the worst of my mahjong slumps; despite understanding the phenomenon rationally, I’ve still found it difficult to climb out. It’s a big reason I recently broke my two-a-day training regimen for the first time in a couple of years: I started to feel like I was filling a quota and going through the motions without giving the game meaningful attention.

See, the moment-to-moment rises and falls of an XP number are not the reason we should play ranked match, much as it seems like that. We’re playing ranked match to get to a higher quality experience. In online mahjong, we rank up specifically to gain access to lobbies that only strong players can get into in the first place, to improve both ourselves and the level of competition we’re up against. My opponents in Riichi City’s Galaxy lobby are well-trained and don’t make obvious mistakes anymore. In these matches, I can no longer count on weak players to hand me their points, as I can in the lower lobbies. It’s no exaggeration to say that I’m playing a completely different game: tighter, riskier, and less random. And as frustrating as the grind can be, I love the matches I play.

Every fighting game that separates "Master" and above players from the rest of the player pool, leaving them to fight only each other, is doing this, from SF6 to Granblue to Tekken. Mahjong just uses lobbies (which can be a problem, but that's a different post).

When I watch Vtuber Kurono Senba play on Majsoul and someone picks up a huge hand out of the blue, she doesn’t get bitter and say stuff like “lucky idiot! Cutting me off!” She says “Wow! Look at that hand they picked up!” Anyone who has ever played online mahjong understands that it takes a tremendous amount of confidence and strength of spirit to be able to think this way, to be able to see the whole table beyond oneself and to understand the game isn't necessarily about you. I hope one day to reach that mental level. I think it’s the single most important quality you need for riichi.

IRL is better for you, you know

That being said, I think that every frustrated online player badly needs to touch the grass that is the IRL gathering. This goes for any game at all. Online play is extremely convenient, and might even get you games with stronger players than offline groups can offer… but it isolates you. You need to see people; you need make contact with them, understand that they’re actually there. What’s more, you need to free yourself from the numbers.

I realize that not everybody can necessarily access an IRL play group, or maybe your local play group is not composed of people you’d like to spend time with… but look for something. It'll almost always be good for you.

Speaking for myself personally, it was getting involved with a local club that caused me to fall in love with mahjong all over again... a decade after leaving a local club that had kinda ruined it for me. That part ain't different at all from the FGC. (And in the case of riichi, you’d probably be surprised at the explosion of local clubs in the last few years.)

Last IRL mahjong session I played, I placed fourth in an absolutely doomed, no-chance effort and then a handy first. Online I’d have probably remembered that fourth-place match for a couple of hours. I’d have been depressed about it, pondering my bad luck when there was no need to do so. At the table, we laughed. Hell, we’d been laughing the entire match.

Ranked is a tool. Used well, it will sharpen you. But find a place where you can laugh, too. Without it, ranked will just kill you.