Super Smash Bros. Ultimate players hoping to learn more about the Global Smash Power (GSP) system tried and succeeded in getting the lowest possible score for the Incineroar.
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GSP is the matchmaking value Super Smash Bros. Ultimate uses to track players’ skill with certain fighters when pairing them with opponents. Each character has an individual score that goes up or down with wins and losses, but an average is shared among the whole roster to prevent unbalanced matchups when picking someone new. Other than that and the fact that a high enough GSP unlocks Elite Smash battles, there’s still much that’s unknown about the GSP system, but players have found that it’s harder to get to the lowest number than one might think.
A Redditor and Ultimate player by the name of LetterSequence was on a losing streak with the new Pokemon fighter, so they decided to see how far they could drop Incineroar’s GSP. The game knows if players are trying to intentionally lose through either spamming moves or just throwing themselves off the stage though, so the player created a strategy where they let an opponent take their first stock before retaliating and using a variety of moves to avoid the spam-detection system. After letting their opponent kill them again, they’d use Incineroar’s dangerous up-special Cross Chop move to intentionally dive off the stage while making it look like an accident.
The lower they got, the harder it was to keep descending the GSP ladder, they said. Under the 50,000 GSP mark, the lag got worse, and so did the skill, but the latter was to be expected. Some high-GSP players will know it’s not uncommon to lose a lot of GSP for a match, but once the player got beneath 10,000 GSP, they said it was nearly impossible to lower the score. They did eventually get to a score of “1” though as the image above proves.
“Once you get below 10k, your rank drops slow down to a crawl,” the player said. “With my good characters, I’d lose around 100k for a bad match. Around here? I’d be lucky if I dropped 400 spots after every loss. It certainly took a while.”
But as another player discovered, the scores aren’t reserved for only one player. After seeing the initial post about the low-GSP Incineroar player, another person responded with an image that showed they, too, had the lowest score. They didn’t detail their methods like the first player did but promised more info would be shared soon on their GSP research.
