I'm loving the game so far, but this is a massive downgrade from Sm4sh. Lumping everyone in together, and having every battle affect your GSP ranking in unpredictable ways is stupid. No matter what you actually want to play, it throws you into a random match likely completely different to what you wanted. I just spent 10 matches working my GSP up over 600k with Isabelle, only for a single loss to item spam to slam my ranking back down to 275k. In the next match, I got thrown into a team battle with some random against two players who were obviously working together and got double teamed to hell (the other guy got taken out in ~40 seconds, leaving me alone), and though I took them both down to a single stock left each, my ranking crashed to 90,000. Complete shit, and completely drained my motivation to touch online again.

Both For Fun and For Glory had their own place and were good times in their own right, why not at least keep them separate and give them different rankings or something? Lumping everything together just ruins the experience

I agree. Game is so good and so much fun but the online is a huge let down.

All they had to do was keep For Fun and For Glory, implement the GSP system in For Glory, and add Battlefield to the rotation, but they decided to overthink it and now we have this mess.

Its improved over the WiiU version but still far from perfect. Interms of latency. But im from Australia so it probably might be a Aussie thing.

Iirc they did a Splatoon 2 and made the matchmaking primarily regional. So yeah still an improvement even though the netcode is probably no better than 4's.

OT: I couldn't care less about GSP, but not being able to play what I want when I want to is definitely a huge step backwards. It's not too late for them to fix this, but it was clearly an intentional decision so they'll probably just ignore the complaints much like they do with Switch Online.

Agreed. No for Glory matches, I'm glad I've not paid my online subscription, I'm on my 7 day trial, I'm cancelling it and will end up going back to Sm4sh for online. Huge disappointment on that side.

Besides the lag I don't really see a problem with it. The competitive online scene doesn't really start until you unlock Elite Smash. I assume there will be changes to it over time considering the game just came out.

This tweet just encapsulates everything wrong about the unified online.

Kind of glad I didn’t buy this for its online, mostly because I’m really not good lol

I get the feeling this game was rushed a bit to make the holiday shopping season and the online component was at the bottom of the to-do list. Hope it's fixed up soon.