This guide aims to explain why the for glory win percent is not representative of your skill as a smash player. I give my thoughts on the matter and very simple quick tips towards the end on what a beginner should do to keep track of their progress rather than relying on those in accurate numbers.
My statement on why win percent and for glory results are not an accurate representation of your skill as a smash player.
For glory one on one can be a very toxic environment because of how inconsistent it is and because of this inconsistency; theres going to be something thrown your way to challenge your mindset every time you play online. Smash is a game that has evolved and changed constantly and when I say this I’m only talking about Sm4sh, the way the game has evolved since 64 is even more immense but I got into smash with the introduction of the 3ds version so I won’t be mentioning any games outside of the 3ds and Wii u instalments. I myself used to care a lot about for glory win percent as it was easily accessible and I thought it was accurately tracking my progress as a smash player. This couldn’t be more wrong and the same goes for every smash player out there. After the introduction of Bayonetta and Corrin we had another patch making the current version of the game 1.1.5. This game has been patched and changed 15 times, characters have been introduced some have been patched to make them less “OP” and others have been buffed to make them more usable and take them out of any strong disadvantages they have. With this said and given how much the game has changed that means it must have affected you in some way, or at least your character. The biggest examples I can think of this are the way diddy kong was nerfed twice to strip him from a lot of his power and killing potential compared to his early days in sm4sh. The other example is on the other side of the spectrum; Mewtwo was a character very hyped for and many people were disappointed when they found out he doesn’t play well, over the course of a few patches they tweaked him and made him a character with a lot more flow and as a result Abadango from Japan won Pound 2016 with mewtwo, a character previously viewed as very low tier. This only slightly covers how much sm4sh has changed as there are other things like the shield mechanic changes that change the game a lot.
I went out of my way to prove to myself that for glory win percent really doesn’t mean much at all. My way of doing this was to aim to get my win percent as high as possible, at this point my win percent was sitting around 48% and I thought this was very bad and even though I know now that the number doesn’t mean anything; its that initial low statistic that motivated me to get better at the game. It wasn’t till the introduction of Roy and Ryu that I started understand the game more and get better competitively. I still remember my first “read” I was playing a Dr Mario who I found really hard to catch with my attacks (as Roy) I lost lots of matches against him and tried to remember advice I hear from smash tubers, Jtails I remembered saying that you need to look at what your opponents are doing and notice any habits. With this in mind I looked at the Dr Mario player and noticed whenever I set up a tech chase opportunity he would always tech roll in, this was always the opposite direction I was running so I found it hard to attack him and get follow ups. Then one time I just did a pivot fsmash and it connected and got the kill, as insignificant and silly as it may seem; this was my breakthrough in smash. It took even longer to start doing things like this consistently so hopefully you can understand a bit better now why the win percent has no correlation to your skill. So I then started to aim for a high win percent. My method for this was stupid but it worked.
I would go on fg and find a player who I could tell wasn’t very good and I would constantly exploit their weaknesses and habits, and everytime I did this I would taunt resulting in them getting annoyed and making more mistakes. Everytime I encountered a player who was laggy, better than me or a player who nearly beat them and lost because of an SD I would leave. So I only played people who weren’t as good and this gave me a high win percent:
I was surprised with how much my win percent could grow if I did this over and over and winning 100 matches out of 100 certainly seems possible, but if I went ahead and did that I think I would be a worse player than if I found good players. One, I would be a worse player ethically because I don’t think its very nice to find inexperienced or young players and continuously beat them and then only provoke them with taunts which I’ve come to understand that some players take very seriously. And the ofcourse the other obvious answer is that if im playing less experienced players I’m not going to make any improvements to my own gameplay. Is It necessary to space perfectly against a player who still thinks little mac is really strong!! No. Not to shun any serious little mac mains ofcourse he can be lethal but theres no denying his weak air game and if these players aren’t aware of how to recovery successfully with mac then they’re gonna get ****** on. So I had achieved my goal of a high win percent (at least out of the last 100) and had improved from 40% to 60%. WOW A WHOLE 20%??? Yeah exactly another reason why win percent doesn’t mean ****. To improve my win percentage by that 20ish% I estimate it took around 500 matches 300 during my rise in skill as a competitive player and then another 200 to achieve that 98% last 100. This is nothing. Your win% will rise more if you haven’t played many matches. If you play 10 matches and win 1 then your win% for those 10 will be 10% and if you then lose another match then it’ll be zero. A fall in 10%. So if you play a session in fg and get discouraged because your win percent had fallen by something as ridiculous as 30% then odds are you haven’t played many matches to begin with so it falls and rises quicker. When you have to win 10 consecutive matches to make you win% go up by a fraction of a percent that’s when you know you’ve become a more seasoned player. Getting a high win percent isn’t hard, which is why it’s bad to focus on it. When doing that marathon of wins I go so ****ing bored; I played the same kind of players over and over and I did so with my strongest characters over and over which lead me to get bored of my own mains, I had to use them aswell because trying to punish other players mistakes with unfamiliar characters would be detrimental to gaining those numbers that no one else can see. So what did I achieve? Nothing amazing, I played my mains constantly and most likely developed bad habits from doing the same **** against the same players and all that for a number. Its seriously not worth worrying about, Im probably very late to be posting something like this as imagine many players have come to the conclusion its means nothing a long time ago but I just wanted to share my thoughts and also share how I think your wins should be kept track of.
Here is my win percent now; I should note that my overall is my 1 on 1 as well because I’ve never played smash or team.
So if you want to keep track of how you’re doing in smash I propose you do this:
Take note of the following things.
What character you are playing against.
What character you are playing with.
How did you take their stocks if any.
How did they take your stocks if any.
Did you win or lose the match?
Save the replay!! Saving replays is the best way to observe you and your opponents habits and some of these habits you spot might be costing you matches. Say you look through all this data and you see that you die a lot to Ness, and then you check the moves you’ve been killed by. If you see that you’re dying to his back throw a lot then you can try and take measures to prevent that in future. You need to make your opponent work for kills and getting impatient for a kill and rushing in could be playing into your opponents hands, literally, that ***** will not hesitate to throw your ass so hard your win percent drops, but we don’t care anymore about that do we? I should hope your answer is no especially after reading this.
You should also check how you’re getting kills against people, if you notice it’s the same moves everytime then you should try mixing them up a bit, and if your selection of kill moves is small then mix up how you confirm into them.
This is my first smashboards post and i hope it has been at least somewhat helpful and provided a new starting point for any inexperienced players who have ever doubted their ability to play this game well due to looking at the for glory win percent.
My statement on why win percent and for glory results are not an accurate representation of your skill as a smash player.
For glory one on one can be a very toxic environment because of how inconsistent it is and because of this inconsistency; theres going to be something thrown your way to challenge your mindset every time you play online. Smash is a game that has evolved and changed constantly and when I say this I’m only talking about Sm4sh, the way the game has evolved since 64 is even more immense but I got into smash with the introduction of the 3ds version so I won’t be mentioning any games outside of the 3ds and Wii u instalments. I myself used to care a lot about for glory win percent as it was easily accessible and I thought it was accurately tracking my progress as a smash player. This couldn’t be more wrong and the same goes for every smash player out there. After the introduction of Bayonetta and Corrin we had another patch making the current version of the game 1.1.5. This game has been patched and changed 15 times, characters have been introduced some have been patched to make them less “OP” and others have been buffed to make them more usable and take them out of any strong disadvantages they have. With this said and given how much the game has changed that means it must have affected you in some way, or at least your character. The biggest examples I can think of this are the way diddy kong was nerfed twice to strip him from a lot of his power and killing potential compared to his early days in sm4sh. The other example is on the other side of the spectrum; Mewtwo was a character very hyped for and many people were disappointed when they found out he doesn’t play well, over the course of a few patches they tweaked him and made him a character with a lot more flow and as a result Abadango from Japan won Pound 2016 with mewtwo, a character previously viewed as very low tier. This only slightly covers how much sm4sh has changed as there are other things like the shield mechanic changes that change the game a lot.
I went out of my way to prove to myself that for glory win percent really doesn’t mean much at all. My way of doing this was to aim to get my win percent as high as possible, at this point my win percent was sitting around 48% and I thought this was very bad and even though I know now that the number doesn’t mean anything; its that initial low statistic that motivated me to get better at the game. It wasn’t till the introduction of Roy and Ryu that I started understand the game more and get better competitively. I still remember my first “read” I was playing a Dr Mario who I found really hard to catch with my attacks (as Roy) I lost lots of matches against him and tried to remember advice I hear from smash tubers, Jtails I remembered saying that you need to look at what your opponents are doing and notice any habits. With this in mind I looked at the Dr Mario player and noticed whenever I set up a tech chase opportunity he would always tech roll in, this was always the opposite direction I was running so I found it hard to attack him and get follow ups. Then one time I just did a pivot fsmash and it connected and got the kill, as insignificant and silly as it may seem; this was my breakthrough in smash. It took even longer to start doing things like this consistently so hopefully you can understand a bit better now why the win percent has no correlation to your skill. So I then started to aim for a high win percent. My method for this was stupid but it worked.
I would go on fg and find a player who I could tell wasn’t very good and I would constantly exploit their weaknesses and habits, and everytime I did this I would taunt resulting in them getting annoyed and making more mistakes. Everytime I encountered a player who was laggy, better than me or a player who nearly beat them and lost because of an SD I would leave. So I only played people who weren’t as good and this gave me a high win percent:
I was surprised with how much my win percent could grow if I did this over and over and winning 100 matches out of 100 certainly seems possible, but if I went ahead and did that I think I would be a worse player than if I found good players. One, I would be a worse player ethically because I don’t think its very nice to find inexperienced or young players and continuously beat them and then only provoke them with taunts which I’ve come to understand that some players take very seriously. And the ofcourse the other obvious answer is that if im playing less experienced players I’m not going to make any improvements to my own gameplay. Is It necessary to space perfectly against a player who still thinks little mac is really strong!! No. Not to shun any serious little mac mains ofcourse he can be lethal but theres no denying his weak air game and if these players aren’t aware of how to recovery successfully with mac then they’re gonna get ****** on. So I had achieved my goal of a high win percent (at least out of the last 100) and had improved from 40% to 60%. WOW A WHOLE 20%??? Yeah exactly another reason why win percent doesn’t mean ****. To improve my win percentage by that 20ish% I estimate it took around 500 matches 300 during my rise in skill as a competitive player and then another 200 to achieve that 98% last 100. This is nothing. Your win% will rise more if you haven’t played many matches. If you play 10 matches and win 1 then your win% for those 10 will be 10% and if you then lose another match then it’ll be zero. A fall in 10%. So if you play a session in fg and get discouraged because your win percent had fallen by something as ridiculous as 30% then odds are you haven’t played many matches to begin with so it falls and rises quicker. When you have to win 10 consecutive matches to make you win% go up by a fraction of a percent that’s when you know you’ve become a more seasoned player. Getting a high win percent isn’t hard, which is why it’s bad to focus on it. When doing that marathon of wins I go so ****ing bored; I played the same kind of players over and over and I did so with my strongest characters over and over which lead me to get bored of my own mains, I had to use them aswell because trying to punish other players mistakes with unfamiliar characters would be detrimental to gaining those numbers that no one else can see. So what did I achieve? Nothing amazing, I played my mains constantly and most likely developed bad habits from doing the same **** against the same players and all that for a number. Its seriously not worth worrying about, Im probably very late to be posting something like this as imagine many players have come to the conclusion its means nothing a long time ago but I just wanted to share my thoughts and also share how I think your wins should be kept track of.
Here is my win percent now; I should note that my overall is my 1 on 1 as well because I’ve never played smash or team.
So if you want to keep track of how you’re doing in smash I propose you do this:
Take note of the following things.
What character you are playing against.
What character you are playing with.
How did you take their stocks if any.
How did they take your stocks if any.
Did you win or lose the match?
Save the replay!! Saving replays is the best way to observe you and your opponents habits and some of these habits you spot might be costing you matches. Say you look through all this data and you see that you die a lot to Ness, and then you check the moves you’ve been killed by. If you see that you’re dying to his back throw a lot then you can try and take measures to prevent that in future. You need to make your opponent work for kills and getting impatient for a kill and rushing in could be playing into your opponents hands, literally, that ***** will not hesitate to throw your ass so hard your win percent drops, but we don’t care anymore about that do we? I should hope your answer is no especially after reading this.
You should also check how you’re getting kills against people, if you notice it’s the same moves everytime then you should try mixing them up a bit, and if your selection of kill moves is small then mix up how you confirm into them.
This is my first smashboards post and i hope it has been at least somewhat helpful and provided a new starting point for any inexperienced players who have ever doubted their ability to play this game well due to looking at the for glory win percent.
- Applicable Games
- Smash 3DS, Smash Wii U
