I can’t say, I’m brand new at season 3. PC player here.
It was just a blind ranking system. there were no points that you could see, you just started as level 1 and you played until it said you ranked up or down. It went all the way to 50 and not many people made it that far…Helll I never made it past 13! Of course each level had a fight title like it does now. BUt there were no tiers or points…really nothing visually either.
Could you go backwards?
Oops, missed the fact that you said you could rank down.
Yeah. Basically that was elo. I think elo leagues are better than 50 ranks. Also your elo should not be hidden to yourself.
Show the actual elo rating to yourself, but only show the elo league/title of the opponent. Should be 7 leagues. Bronze/silver/gold/platinum/diamond/killer/grand master. Top 32 of grand master get pro stars.
Titles are like sub leagues showing you the elo rating bracket.
I think it would work. I wonder why they went the other direction? Seems like they are going for a more visible game mode that is simple to understand for those not taking it too seriously.
What if once hit Killer it took on a new Ranking system within so the Bronze- Gold is more bells and whistles for Casuals and Killer Tier gets serious and goes all WIn% Elo?
One thing I think you aren’t taking into account is the fact that the ranking system for KI ISN’T the backbone of the matchmaking system of KI. Matchmaking in KI is done the same way as every other XBL game, through the “trueskill” ranking system. The league system of KI is really just a nice wrapper for the trueskill matchmaking to give people something to work for / through.
The ELO system you are pointing too sound nice, but yeah, that won’t be coming to KI, or any MS game any time soon as far as I can tell.
Well, KI S1 used a similar system to be honest, even down to the game only matching you against players with a similar elo/trueskill ranking. The issue (well, one of them anyway), was that at the highest levels (say 32-40), there was basically a desert of viable players for those people to get matched against, and so they had absurdly long wait times between matches. They then tried to fix this by letting the matchmaking open up more quickly, but then you ran into people who are level 15-20 kind of going “wtf am I doing matched up against Grimmmz?”
I personally despised the S1 ranked system, as I think it was absurdly punitive and punished you for trying to learn new characters or for deciding “maybe I won’t destroy this new player with my main, I’ll give him a chance against my secondary.” In general, you got bupkis for beating people 3-4 ranks beneath you, and absolutely obliterated for losing to one. The point differential was bad enough that the very first people grinding to Killer (rank 40) literally got NO points for beating lower level players, but could lose like 20% of their promotion bar for dropping a single game. And since there by and large weren’t any other very highly-ranked players, those kinds of players were all they got to fight. That’s just annoying.
An argument can be made that they collapsed the tiers too far (though the devs say there’s actually quite a few less Killers than most people think relative to the size of the playing community), but overall I greatly prefer the Ranked Leagues system to what we had in S1. That Ranked system was just frustrating and grindy, and nothing was worse than watching two hours of grinding erased by losing two matches. Good riddance to that 
Elo-like systems can work and be fun (SFV uses this basically), but I still prefer KI’s system. I like being able to mess around with new characters when they come out without being super stressed about what I’m going to do to my rank.
I personally hate elo with a passion and would never play a game with it. Why wants to play a game where you can expect to just go 50/50 all the time on average? That’s absolutely no fun at all. I’ve played my share of games with this system and it is atrociously bad. The point of a ranking system should not be to accurately categorize and segregate skill levels, it should just be a means of sugar-coating your skill level through artificial progression.
I got Killer tonight. Killer in Season 2 was pretty easy to get. Way harder this time. I got to the final promotional match and got utterly destroyed by a Killer Shadow Jago, then got back and had a Gold Master Sabrewulf. I should have won. I Supremed him the first match, and maybe got cocky, and lost the next 2 to get knocked back down. Then went all the way down to 750 after losing 2 more match. Tonight I won like 9 in a row on a tear and got back to Killer.
It’s tough, but tough for a reason. If everyone is a certain rank then it doesn’t mean a whole lot to get there.