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Ranked Seasons - Is Your Best Finish Really Your Best?

January 24, 2021 · 3 min read

Track Clash Royale player progression by ranks and trophies.

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Ranked Seasons

Ladder System

The Clash Royale ladder system has been the primary mode in which players have competed since the game was released in 2016. From casual to professional, all players have used it to see their progress season after season.

This progression is usually measured with trophies, but trophies can be deceptive due to how they’ve changed over time. Rating adjustments, trophy inflation, season length… all these variables make trophies a poor comparative measurement across seasons. How can you know if you have really improved as a player?

This is where ladder ranks become relevant. Ranks measure player positions at the end of each season. In contrast to trophies, they remain constant; ending in the Top 1000 means that you are among the best 1000 players in the game, regardless of how trophy progression has evolved that season.

Best Season

Until now, the Best Season displayed in profiles has partially been based on trophies — although rank is a factor, players who had reached new leagues would see their Best Season replaced by one that is not ranked if they have reached a new league. This caused a significant preference towards seasons with accumulated trophy inflation, which helped players reach a new Personal Best (PB, record of trophies). In return, the best placements based on rank were often displaced.

These “forgotten” results are now available and will shed some light on the real progression that each player had through time. The ladder ranks logged by Supercell at the end of each season, dating back to the start of 2016, are all added to the RoyaleAPI profiles of the players who obtained them.

Ranked Seasons

Ranked Seasons on Player Profile
Figure 1. The new Ranked Seasons section can be found in player profiles, below esports info and above chests.

This information is displayed in a new section of profiles, named Ranked Seasons (Figure 2). The section is only visible to players who have at least one ranked ladder finish. By default, it summarizes the history of the players into two different finishes: Personal Best Season (highest trophies) and Best Rank Season (highest rank).

Ranked Seasons Summary
Figure 2. A Season ID as year (YYYY) and month (MM). B Personal Best Ranked Season (highest rank). C Personal Best Season (highest trophies in a ranked season). D Toggle detail info.

By switching on the Details toggle, you’ll get a more detailed breakdown of the rank history. Ordered in chronologically descending order, all the ranked finishes are displayed and highlighted on a year by year basis. With this list, it’s easy to see the best finish that was achieved each year, based both on rank and trophies (Figure 3).

Ranked Seasons: Detail: Data Table
Figure 3. A Lifetime best trophies with a ranked finish. B Best trophies in the year. C Best rank in the year.

The expanded section also contains a chart to visualize all the ranked finishes in a condensed way (Figure 4). (A) The vertical axis separates ladder seasons by year, (B) and the top horizontal axis refers to the months in each of these years (1 is January, 2 is February…). (C, D) Based on the shades of the color gradient, you can distinguish how high the rank of each season was.

Ranked Seasons: Detail: Visualization
Figure 4. A Year. B Month. C Season Rank. D Color scales for top 10, top 100, top 1000, top 10000 and top 100000. (Recent seasons go up to rank 9999)

Examples

Now that you understand the basics, take a look at your own profile and search for the best ladder players! Here are a few names to get you started:

Note: Players linked in the examples above have extensive esports information on their player profiles. The new Ranked Seasons section is displayed after the esports info. Scroll down!

Ranked Seasons: Detail: Visualization
Tip: Hover on each cell in the heatmap to see the Rank and Season ID.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Clash Royale team at Supercell for providing the end-of-season leaderboard data that goes back to the very beginning of the game. The information they have provided was crucial for this feature, and also enabled us to display End-of-Season Leaderboard starting from Season 2016-02!

Feedback

Are your ranked results what you remembered? Did they surprise you? Let us know in the comments! We’d also appreciate your feedback about this new feature: Does it provide interesting information? How do you think it could be improved?

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Author: Alpe123
Alpe is the Director of Content and Esports at RoyaleAPI.
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