Ranked Match

When you get First Place in Riichi City, you get Ranking Points! East Only gets 1 Ranking Point. Hanchan gets 1.5 Ranking Points. The more you have, the more Top Stamps you can gain! See more about that over in the Free to Play Guide.

There are, essentially, 3 stratum of ranked achievement in Riichi City: Sun Room, Galaxy Room, and Legend 

LEVEL 1: Qualifying for the Sun Room

LEVEL 2: Ascending to the Galaxy Room

LEVEL 3: Your Riichi City Saga Truly Begins Here: The Legend Rank and Legend Stars

More Carrot, less Stick: A Soapbox Pitch for Why Riichi City's Ranked is Better than the Rest

Alright, this is the only time i'll make a comparison to other online mahjong apps people may prefer on this little fansite. Ultimately, I will find myself playing them all depending on what events are running, but when it comes to Ranked grinding, I dislike apps that cling to what i consider a negative method of player advancement. What am i talking about? well, let me explain.

First, let me say that I  of course recognize that strong players are strong players, Whatever their ranking is. I respect the dedication it takes to climb to houou or throne level matches. I respect (hell, I just straight up FEAR) the  dedication it takes to get those celestial or tenhoui ranks. However, since these games originate in a country where there are many more ways to play and think about mahjong ability and performance, including an incredibly robust industry  of professional clubs and many mobile apps, the goal of achieving these ranks are just one of many fulfilling ways you can climb in the mahjong world. Here in the west, we really have a much more limited frame of reference. For many people, the English language available games like Yakuza, Final Fantasy XIV, Mahjong Soul, and Riichi City are the only ways people interact with mahjong. Many of us will play for years without even considering touching a tile in real life because of geographic location, and the proximity of people that want to learn how to play. Mahjong is building popularity in the west, but there is still no making a "debut" in jansou. Online ranking is one of the only ways we can recognize personal achievement in mahjong acumen over here.

That being said, the mahjong apps popular and available in the West have mostly have a ranked match system that incentivizes a style of play colloquially called "last place avoidance" mahjong. Riichi City mostly avoids the development of this meta.  What do I mean by last place avoidance meta, why do I think that's bad, and why do I feel that Riichi City dodges it?

Well, I hope you'll indulge me nerding out here a bit.

Do you know how to calculate those + and - amounts above your scores you see on the results screen? They don't factor into basically anything about Riichi City, yet they're still displayed because they're very important to mahjong players. These are referred to as "plus minus" or "final" scores. When mahjong players reference how well or poorly their game went, it is these scores they're primarily thinking about.

You get them by taking the score that you have at the end of the game, subtracting the "Kaeshi" or the amount of points you're supposed to return. For most of the apps, you start with 25000, and you're supposed to end with at least 30000 or more for you to have "won". Next, you award the Oka if you're playing with one, usually 20000 points to first place. That's where the difference of 5000 usually comes from between your starting score and the score you have to try and earn by the end of the game, everyone takes 5000 of their points and puts them into a purse for the first place winner.
Next, divide the scores by 1000. To finish the calculation, you add or subtract what is called the Uma. These are bonus additions or subtractions to your final score based on your placing. Riichi City's Uma is +30/+10/-10/-30. Notice how the uma point payment incentivizes placing 1st or 2nd, to gain a parallel amount of points from the 3rd and 4th place players.  This is the widely accepted way to reward specific placings in riichi mahjong per game, the first two placers gain and the last two placers lose.  These plus minus should add up to zero, so they  represent how much you gained or lost for each game.

The largest swing in points comes by placing 1st. 1st place players get a large Uma bonus, as well as the Oka.  Mahjong players traditionally, by the nature of the game's own rules, are encouraged to fight for a first place placing!

However, this is -NOT- how some of the apps do their ranked match advancement, apps which make up the majority of the western mahjong audience.

These apps, instead of incentivizing a 1st place placing, incentivize coming in  ANY PLACE OTHER THAN 4TH. As you start to get farther up the ladder, a 4th place finish will undo more and more of your ranking progress, sometimes even going so far as to reduce your rank by more than MULTIPLE FIRST AND SECOND PLACE FINISHES WOULD. This creates a system where your long term goal on the Mahjong Soul ladder is not to try and win, but rather to play to avoid losing. Advancing under this system requires extremely defensive play.  It feels awful coming at last at these higher levels, especially if you didn't make a dire misplay and are just suffering from the latent randomness of the game. SOMEONE has to come in last, even if you have the  4 most powerful players on earth at the same table. To have 2 or more hanchans of progress eroded by one 4th place makes grinding the ladder at higher skill levels... well... truly a grind. In my personal opinion, it feels like some of the negative energy that can float around the online mahjong community only exists because this method of playing kind of sets mahjong up as a much crueler game that it has to be. This kind of negative reinforcement can really sour people on playing mahjong! 

Riichi City , on the other hand, has a ranked progression that works very much like an uma+oka, where 3rd and 4th are the losers, 2nd wins a little, and 1st wins a lot. The only time Riichi City  takes more ranking for 4th than rewards ranking for 1st is if you are smurfing in a room you are overqualified for, IE. you are a 4D player playing in Moon instead of Sun. This, in my opinion, gives players an option to play weaker competition when they are feeling more vulnerable at a proper cost: losing to a lower tier of competition will align you with that lower level very quickly.

So player roles and priorities with regard to placing in Riichi City mirrors much more closely how people actually play mahjong:

1st wants to fight against other people coming for the most incentivized position, so they want to win more to increase their lead and have a better chance of turtling up and weathering the storm of the table.
2nd wants to fight 1st, because 1st has an Oka bonus that they want. They also want to keep a positive record, so they must defend against 3rd.
3rd wants to go from being negative to being positive, so they have 2nd, and in close games even 1st in their sights.  4th has nobody to target except 3rd, so they must pay attention to that player.
4th has nothing more to lose, so they must play to overtake 3rd, or if the game is close, overtake 2nd and end positively.

This dynamic struggles to exist when placing 4th is so heavily penalized. I feel that the more people play Riichi City's ranked, the more accurate those ranks become of powerful players. Finishing in 1st is my preferred method of last place avoidance because it feels good, it allows for much more diverse playstyles, and it's the coolest obviously 💪😎. 

I prefer climbing in Riichi City's ranked because it doesn't pressure you to play in a way that only makes sense online, but you CAN if you want!