Super Smash Bros. Brawl Online is lacking

[Grey Acumen]

FightingGameGuy said:
I'm am disappointed with the online implementation.

I think some people missing a crucial point about ranking systems-- aside from feeding egos, any system which gives an approximate rank of skill can be used to help match up players of more or less equal skill.
Without considering some approximation of skill (whether leaderboards, some "level" via an experience system like Blizzard's excellent battle.net, or any other system you want to think of) there's a high likelihood of a number of match ups being very imbalanced.

If you're one of the very bad or very good players you're likelihood of finding a suitable match randomly is quite low. For the enthusiasts of the game who are very good that's quite annoying. Sure the very good players can go through all sorts of extra hoops on their own like creating external rankings, but its still fundamentally an inconvenience.

Sidenote: there seems to be a lot of bashing people for wanting leaderboards in order to satisfy their egos but is that really so wrong? Look at all responses the SMG threads in the Nintendo forum to questions like: "how many stars do you have", "what was your completion time" and "how many deaths did you have". Is it really so wrong for players of fighting game to wonder "about how good am I" or "am I actually improving"? (given that historically the AI in Smash bros has been too poor to answer that question once a very low threshold of skill has been crossed.)

Actually, from what I remember reading, they specifically stated that there would be a way to match people up in terms of skill level. Most likely, this means that there is a ranking system, but not one that will ever be shown publicly.