Ranked Match
The Ranked Match Lobby
Ranked match is where you'll be spending most of your time on the app. It is where you play the majority of the game, looking to acquire Top Player stamps, and advancement up the ladder in order to become a Riichi City Legend.
On this screen, you can see the following information:
Dan Ranking: Marks your current rank and your progress toward the next rank.
Rating: A more granular expression of player skill, starts at 1500, and increases or decreases based on your performance, as well as the rating of your opponents.
Coin Purse: Coins are required to play ranked matches outside of the Star room. You will win or lose coins based on your performance at a constant rate that you can check by clicking on the ! next to the room you want to play in.
Picking a Ranked Match Room
There are 4 different "rooms" where you can queue and play against people around your skill level. At the beginning of your journey, only the Star room is open to you. As you go up in the ranking, you will be able to access rooms where stronger players play. If you continue to to grow and become stronger, Some rooms will be closed off in respect for your overwhelming mahjong power. You can queue for full "hanchan" style games, or if you don't want to sit down for that long, there's always the East Only queue!
The 4 Rooms available are:
Star Room: No Entry Fee. Accessible from Novice to 3rd Dan.
Moon Room: 3,000 Coins to enter. Accessible from 1st Dan to 6th Dan.
Sun Room: 5,000 Coins to enter. Accessible starting from 4th Dan.
Galaxy Room: 10,000 Coins and R≥1800 to enter. Accessible starting from 7th Dan.
Riichi City's Ranked Progression
Riichi City uses a kyu/dan style ranking, where enough wins will promote you to the next kyu or dan, and losing too much will demote you. It also uses an ELO inspired system where you gain and lose rating based on the quality of your competition and your performance. It tracks your rank in 4P and 3P separately.
Riichi city's 'skill strata' that let you assess someone's prowess at first glance is a little less direct than other apps you may be used to unless you're used to playing older mahjong clients. Here is a graphic that will hopefully clarify the way you should perceive these ranks.
Baptized By the Sun: Qualifying for the Sun Room
When you achieve the rank of 4th Dan, you will unlock entry into the Sun room. Theoretically, you can play against the strongest players on the server in this room, as it is open to the highest rank, the Legend rank. Riichi City will often throw special events specifically for players playing in the Sun room or higher, with additional LT and other prizes being available to win, including tournament style events with Amazon gift cards, unique titles, autographs from famous professional mahjong players, and more. Riichi City is a game that appreciates strong players. When you've mastered even what the Sun has to throw against you, then there is only one frontier left...
It's probably gonna feel like this initially. Just stay strong!
The Key and the Gate: Ascending to the Galaxy Room
The room where the strongest players on Riichi City fight their battles, the galaxy room, has not one, but TWO requirements for entry. The first is to qualify as 7th Dan. The second is to have a Rating of 1800 or above. Your Dan ranking allows you to approach the gate, your Rating is the key that unlocks it.
Your Rating starts at 1500. When you complete a match, it is adjusted according to this formula:
Change in Rating = Final Score / 3.5 - R0
Unlike your Dan progression, where only your placing matters, your individual scores factor in a lot here. R0 is a derived stat that considers your opponents' Rating. If you defeat players that have a higher Rating than you do, expect your Rating to increase more than if you defeated players with a lower Rating. The maximum you can increase from 1 game is +30, and the most you can lose per game is -20. Unlike other mahjong games where their ELO ratings also consider the amount of games played, Riichi City's Rating formula is much more simple, but still useful as an evaluation tool.
An R of 1800 can generally be seen as a player above an intermediate level of skill.
An R of 2000 can generally be seen as an expert level player.
An R of 2500 is a brilliant player, already in the top .5% of the player population.
(these descriptions are from Maru Jan, but I thought they were pretty apt!)
If you are learning on Riichi City, and you're much lower than 1500, don't fret. Finishing above 30k will keep your R on the right trajectory, and because there is not a decay on growth related to amount of matches played, you will be able to get to that 1800 eventually.
At this point, you know what you're getting into. Best of luck with the summit in view!
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? These are referred to as "plus minus" or "final" scores. When mahjong players reference their games, 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 the largest 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 goal on the 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!
These point distributions come from Mahjong Soul and Riichi City respectively, as players take their first steps into their first 'serious competition', Master 1 and 5th Dan, both ranks start at 1400 ranking points and promote at 2800.
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!