Ranking in Maru-Jan

Maru-Jan offers a large variety of different ways to track your skill level, and development thereof. You can actually take a look at some of these stats at a glance during play, and evaluate what sort of opponents you're up against.

Rating System (RT)

If you play on Tenhou, you are probably familiar with this system. I don't know enough Japanese to know whether this system is functionally identical to Tenhou's system, or if they're both derived from or 100% identical to ELO. The gist of it is that you start at Rt1500, and doing well (1st or 2nd in 4player, 1st only in 3player) will increase your Rt relative to the Rt levels of your opponents. If you win against high Rt opponents, your Rt will increase a lot. If you lose against low Rt opponents, your Rt will decrease a lot. If your Rt is under 1550, it will not be displayed at all in client (but you can always check it in your profile page). If it is above 1550, you will see it in the lobby. If it is above 1600, it will be displayed to opponents during matches. At certain Rts, the border around your name will become more embellished.

Rt is a tool to judge your skill level relative to other people on Maru-Jan on a long term basis. That being said, Maru-Jan Rts can be a little harder to maintain at a high level than Tenhou R, simply because Maru-Jan does not employ many barriers to keep high level players away from low level players. Low level players might win a lot of R occasionally, but more than likely they will lose small amounts when playing against higher skilled opponents. High level players might lose a lot of R occasionally, but more than likely they will win small amounts when playing against lower skilled opponents.

You can set your Rt back to 1500 for a fee of 100points or 200chips.

Rank (kyu/dan) System

Maru-Jan has a ranking system that is prominently displayed in game. There are at least 30 levels, starting from 20kyu to 1stdan to 8thdan and maybe even above? Place well, and add points. Eventually, when you come in 4th and eventually even 3rd, you lose them. when you hit a certain amount of points, you are promoted to the next rank. The Beginner's East Only lobby only allows players from 20kyu to 10kyu in, but as far as I can tell there are no other in game aspects of what you can or can't do regarding your rank. The ranks, points you need for them, and points you win/lose per game are as follows on the chart:

As you can see, it can be a pretty long road to increasing your rank, even in the lower kyu levels. There is an additional system in place that allows you to gain bonus points for placing 1st in a match with people that are in the same or a higher tier of ranks than you. Here's the chart for how many extra bonus points you can win.

Winning 1st can advance you up the ranks by leaps and bounds early on. If I, a 20kyu, win an East Only game vs a 4dan, a 3kyu, and a 12kyu, thats +3 for 1st +3+2+1, so 9 points, 300% more points than my placing alone. Still, the rank system mostly seems like a metric that tracks how long you've been playing Maru-Jan more than anything else, as the amount of points needed to progress to further ranks becomes exponentially more daunting pretty quickly.

Flag System

Collect flags! This is a pretty simple system. Win and win flags, lose and lose flags. Flags are usually displayed in game, unless you have cooler things to display like belts or trophies. Flags are kind of a good metric of how you are performing on a short term basis. Someone with 12 flags has been doing pretty good recently, while someone with 50 flags has been doing some serious win streaking.

In an East Only game, flag awards are as follows: 1st +3, 2nd +1, 3rd -2, 4th -3. Those totals are doubled for East-South games. Three Player awards are as follows: 1st +5, 2nd -2, 3rd -4 (jeez, first really is the only position that matters in 3player on Maru-Jan!!). As you can see, the amount of flags won is less than the amount lost, so keeping a high flag count really depends on 3rd and 4th place avoidance. If you beat a Maru-Jan Pro, you will receive a bonus flag, regardless of what place you are in.

Mahjong Six Tactics (Mahjong Spirit Animal Totem Personas)

For me, this is where the REAL gravy is at regarding ranking and stats tracking on Maru-Jan. Once you start playing a few games, you will notice that there will be a picture of an egg that eventually hatches into an animal associated with your name. This is your MAHJONG SPIRIT ANIMAL (I don't know if [just joking i'm pretty sure] there's a better translation for how to describe these animals. If there is a more formal more boring official name for the animal on Maru-Jan, please let me know)!! Your animal is derived from the strongest of a set of 6 statistics recorded over the last 50 games that you've played. Until you have 50 games, your picture is a shadow of your animal. If you haven't played in 3 months, you return to egg state and require another 50 games to figure out what animal you are. There is separate stat tracking for 4 player and 3 player games. The different animals and stats associated are as follows:

LION -- ATTACK TYPE -- High hand win rate
WHALE -- ATTACK TYPE -- High average hand value
HORSE -- DEFENSE TYPE -- Low deal in rate
BEAR -- DEFENSE TYPE -- Low average payout value
TIGER -- S(CRUB S)TRATEGY TYPE -- High rate of calling tiles for open melds
EAGLE -- S(CRUB S)TRATEGY TYPE -- High riichi rate

During a game, you can see your opponents animals, and they can see yours. This will allow you to evaluate your opponents strategies and decide how you want to play less obviously shaped hands. Playing across a whale that just called a solid riichi? Might be a better indication of whether to stop pursuing your low value hand, or paying attention to suits they're discarding to avoid dealing into a half or full flush hand. Got a horse to your left? Might want to adjust your hands to not depend highly on tiles they're throwing out, or make sure to damaten if trying to win off them. Of course, anything can happen in any game so animals are not completely reliable, but it nice to have an indication, even a tiny one, of a player's playstyle before a game starts. One hanchan against random players is generally, for average scrubs like myself, not enough to assess someone's tolerance levels regarding risk vs reward or speed vs reward. This system gives you that advance notice. I personally feel like there is a certain hierarchy within the animals with Lions being the best and Eagles being the worst, as you are sure to win most games if you're winning nearly every hand. In contrast, there are a ton of beginning players who only know to keep hands closed and riichi regardless of whether the situation calls for it or not.

If in the last 50 games, your average placing in 4 player games is 2.22 or higher (or 1.83 for 3 player), Your Mahjong Spirit Animal will have a crown icon in the picture. You're the king (or queen) of the beasts!

Most of these animals are predatory, and so there is an another aspect of Mahjong 6 Tactics that is reflected in your Mahjong Spirit Animal, the trophies of your prey! Whenever you place higher than another player, it counts as a "kill" of that player's animal. When you have killed 500 of an animal, an icon will be added to your animal picture, and other players will be able to see it. A different icon will display after 1000 kills. Are you the bear killer, destined to strike fear in the hearts of any bear that dares to face you? Your reputation will precede you.

Chip System

This is an aspect of Maru-Jan I appreciate a lot, as it is an aspect of playing real life mahjong in a jansou that many of us pure online mahjong players may not be aware of. In addition to your main currency, points, there are also chips. (At this point i have not created a dummy test account to see how many chips you start with, but i believe it is 250) Chips are not required to queue for games, but chips are definitely on the line each game. Chips are gained in the following ways:

1 per Aka Dora, Ura Dora, and Ippatsu on closed hands only.
5 per yakuman hand, closed or open.

These chip payouts are not split. In a self drawn win, each player pays out the full amount of chips!

Chips are exchanged and settled independently of the rest of the game, so you can theoretically bust out of a game in last place but come out with the most chips gained in game. Whenever you buy points, you get a certain amount of chips as a bonus. You can also gain chips through the Travel Map, Tribute from your conquered provinces in the Sengoku Warring States yearly event, as well as predicting the winner of the Tenjou Weekly Tournament.

Chips can be used for the following:

League entry fees (50chp)
Tenjou Weekly Tournament (10chp), or resetting your Tenjou Weekly Tournament record for the week (5chp)
Conquering a specific district in Sengoku Warring States (500chp)
Cheering for your team in Tuesday's event Mahjong Koshien
Resetting your Rt back to 1500Rt (200chp)
Every so often there may be monthly events that require using chips