Tuesday Morning Mythra 6/27: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Bloom4Eva?
you know the drill by now. neo. patreon. new twitter.
Good morning, TMM gamers! Eventful weekend last weekend, but never fear, I already predicted all of it!
I wanted to dedicate this week’s column to discussing King of Fields 95 #3 (I think that’s the naming convention) in particular.
KOF was Europe’s first and only major this season, barely sneaking over at 3012. Despite that, Europe’s had a few other relatively large events: 2 B+s in Italy’s Icarus and Spain’s Glory 3. This is important once you realize that major attendance is [nebulously, maybe] required for qualifying for UltRank.
If KOF had dropped to below being a major, I’m sure the UltRank team would have had to take some time to figure out how to address the Bloom4Eva situation, but as it stands, he’s been to a major, and now it no longer remains a problem.
Bloom, unfortunately enough, comes with his own set of issues with regards to ranking him as a player, and I wanted to dive into Europe’s Golden Boy and take a deeper look at the forces at play with regards to his season.
Let’s do a quick rundown on who Bloom is. Bloom’s a great example of a breakout talent from the Wi-Fi era; he then quickly went on to run the United Kingdom. He kept strong results in Europe through 2022, but in his big breakout took a set over Glutonny at COLOSSEL, came to the States for a relatively low impact Double Down (although in hindsight, JDV, Teaser, Smirk, frawg, and Kome is a pretty good tournament), then won his first major at VCA 2022 over Glutonny — twice. His win at VCA continues a legacy set the year prior by fellow statesman Peli in terms of “Europeans who have won a major over Glutonny.”
This year, he’s been having a strong season in Europe, and has absolutely cemented himself as a top three talent in Europe.
That’s where the problem arises — he hasn’t left Europe this year yet, and likely, he doesn’t intend to.
That’s totally reasonable! Travelling fucking sucks and the pressure is pretty stressful, and the kid is young too. Apparently he didn’t have the greatest time at Double Down either, so I get it.
So Bloom’s win profile is pretty limited — unlike with North America or Japan, finding relevant top level wins to boost the resume is somewhat tough. Even ignoring his Double Down, though, he was able to get a lot of good data against NA and Japan at L’Odyssee, taking sets over Shuton and Fatality, but this season lacks any sort of equivalent. This year, his only guaranteed Top 30 head-to-heads are against Gluto and Sisqui, and that kind of limited data set makes him pretty hard to evaluate, especially compared to the robust resumes of all of the NA and JP talent that populates the rest of the Top 30.
To fully understand this situation, I’m going to have to talk about Leffen…for a second week in a row. The biggest controversy StatsCord has ever run into was in January 2019, in the run up to Genesis 6. Genesis 6 was Ultimate’s first event with international talent, and Leffen believed that overall, Europe was seeded unfairly. He then went on to collect a photo album of people in the server shittalking Europe, and that’s where the penguin meme comes from.
Ultimately, Leffen did overall end up right. Sure, Glutonny famously lost to ImHip at Genesis 6, beginning a legacy of a continent struggling against Olimar, but Gluto went on, obviously, to become one of the best players in the world.
We’re five years deep, and nobody really still subscribes to the penguin thing about Europe anymore, but it still brings back the larger discussions about how one can assess player strength: if you want to be ranked highly, you need to beat people who are also ranked highly, and you might struggle finding those players in Europe.
To be clear: this isn’t me calling Europe bad! I just think that rankings favor regions that hold larger events, since they have more robust data to work with, and as seen prior, Europe hasn’t been able to host a major until KOF this past weekend.
So yeah, what’s Bloom’s season looking like?
So it’s looking kind of messy. On one hand, 2–1 on Gluto and 5–0 on Sisqui is pretty nutty. I won’t fault the Polinomis loss too bad— after all, he’ll be the third highest ranked person with a weird Lucario loss. An even record with M4E isn’t great optics; with that said, it’s looking like M4E built himself a low end top 100 case this season anyway. But the sheer amount of 0–0s make him difficult to assess along with the few dropped sets to OwlBBs and Peli, and it doesn’t help that he had a bad bracket at his one major for the year, making him even harder to assess.
There’s an old chess player named Claude Bloodgood, and I learned about him from an old Ambi Melee Stats article. Basically, Bloodgood was a chess player who was sentenced to life in prison in the late 60s, and played a fuckton of chess games against other prisoners, farmed his elo, and inflated his rating there to the second highest in the country. This is one of the reasons we don’t use elo in Smash — unless you’re Ether — but even in non-elo situations, it’s important to look at how the historical penguin-esque Europe is serving as Bloom’s closed pool, and how many factors might be influencing his success that we can’t control for. Sure, he’s 5–0 on Sisqui and lifetime like 12–0 on him, but is that because he’s that much better than Sisqui, or is that because he’s a god at the Samus matchup? Would he be beating Yaura like this? How would Bloom do against people roughly doing similarly to Sisqui this season, like ApolloKage, Ouch?!, or Gackt? How would Bloom do against the rest of the top 10?
Well, we’re not going to know this season, and so ultimately, algorithms have to take what they have and probably put him somewhere between 28th and 35th, and European Twitter will get very, very angry.
I want to see Bloom play in either the States or in Japan, but I know it’s a toughie, and it’s no pressure no matter what. Ultimately, the only person Bloom needs to play the game for is himself, not an unemployed 22 year old sitting in his studio in Chicago begging the Xfinity gods to let him play a game of Street Fighter without a disconnect.
Fortunately enough, we’re going to get a great opportunity to see Bloom against the world soon enough.
Tera’s coming up in September, and Light/Sparg0/Tweek coming over to Europe gives Bloom a great opportunity for something I’ve been looking for from him — other top 10 H2Hs. This tourney looks like it’s going to be a banger, and hopefully it’ll help remedy Bloom’s relative lack of data making ranking him difficult, and stabilize his set of results. I, for one, am always excited to watch Bloom’s play against world talent; it’s a treat. As someone who didn’t watch Smash 4 Like That, Bayonetta is one of my favorite characters to watch.
But until that rolls around, I think the Xenoblade Accent People on Twitter are gonna have to keep insisting that their boy is the goat, and I can’t wait for them to prove it.
Until next week!
Best wishes,
Trade War
