I hear this question quite frequently from players who are perhaps looking for a benchmark to judge themselves against, either on Showdown or on Battle Stadium. This is also one of my least favorite questions to receive, because I don’t really agree with the underlying thought process. Many elements of Pokemon rely on luck, and many more are completely subjective. Pokemon also requires constant learning. When you attempt to sum up all of those different skills into one number, you miss a lot of smaller details about how you’re improving and growing. There is not and will never be one number that you can use to judge your own skill.
Furthermore, I personally focus my VGC goals and aspirations on doing as well in tournaments as I can. Some players take ladder rankings very seriously. For me, the ladder is primarily a place where I can get proof of concept for my teams’ performance. I’d like to know if opponents who don’t know anything about my team can figure out ways to beat me that I didn’t consider when I was building the team. Thus, I rarely have long ladder sessions and quickly move to playing practice best of 3s after I’m sold on the concept behind a team.
That being said, you came here for an answer. This is how I think about battling through each of the different ladder ratings:
Showdown
The number that most people pay attention to on Showdown is the ELO number, which is a rating system originally designed for chess. It goes up when you win battles, and down when you lose battles, and you’ll earn more for defeating an opponent with a high ELO and less for defeating a low ELO opponent. Showdown provides two other metrics, GXE and Glicko. GXE roughly estimates your odds of defeating the average ladder player. Players who take Showdown ladder very seriously tend to rely on GXE as the most important metric. Glicko is another metric, similar to ELO. You can read more about these rating systems here.
I focus on the ELO metric. Although it is perhaps not the most accurate estimate of a player’s skill, it’s a rough estimation and that works for me. Keep in mind that the ELO range also changes the more people are playing on a ladder.
Battling at 1000 - 1200 ELO: All new accounts start at 1000 ELO. You’ll see some very wild teams in this radius which defy a lot of conventional teambuilding practices. Some of these players come straight from Smogon or other metagames and are giving VGC a try. This range is a good test; can you and your team beat other teams that are so unorthodox that there’s no way you can expect them coming? Battling here is one of the best ways to build up fundamentals and find clean paths to victory. In this range, you’ll probably also find a handful of people from higher ladder who are making new accounts (termed “alts”) and climbing back up the ladder from the default rating.
Battling at 1200 - 1400 ELO: This range is mostly made up of the players who are able to climb further away from the default rating, so battles might be a little more challenging on average. Opponents will be a little bit more willing to hedge guesses based on your team and make predictions. Don’t think that you’re completely clear of oddball teams, either: they are a constant on Pokemon Showdown, no matter your rating.
Battling at 1400 - 1600 ELO: This is the range in which I spend most of my time on most of my accounts. I tend to get good battles that make me think seriously in this range. You can get excellent tournament practice without ever climbing above this range.
Climbing for Top 500: If you’re focusing on ladder, top 500 is a good goal. It is not trivial to make your way through the crazy teams and the good players, and placing in the top 500 requires a consistently high win percentage.
Climbing for Top 100/Top 10: The margin for error is a lot smaller than reaching the Top 500, and will shrink as you climb the ladder. You’ll need to play many more games and beat opponents a much higher percentage of the time. Your opponents will consist of both people who take best of 3 VGC incredibly seriously and people who are trying to beat you in a best of 1 battle however they can.
Climbing for First: Getting to first on the Showdown ladder is about perseverance and making very few mistakes in light of the vast majority of solid players and gimmicky teams that will try to steal your ladder points. Even one loss to bad luck will sink your rating like a stone; the people who tend to try for first on the ladder have ratings that are far above the rest of the players, so, when trying to pass them, you’ll earn very few points for a win and drop a ton for a loss. If this is a goal of yours, it will require serious patience and a lot of focused time.
Battle Stadium
The ingame ladder rating works a little bit differently than Showdown does. First, the ladder resets every month. The Showdown ladder never resets until a new format drops. Furthermore, unlike Showdown, which has an ELO, Battle Stadium only shows your rank. If you reach the Master Ball tier, you get a number, which is your ranking out of all Master Ball players.
A good first goal is reaching the Master Ball tier.
Once you’re in the master ball tier, there are many factors that tie into your ranking. The number of active players can vary depending on the month, and depending on when in the month you play. It’s going to be a lot easier to reach a high ranking on the first few days of the month, as compared to the last few days of the month. That being said, there’s not a “good” ladder rating that we can give you. An ambitious goal is to reach the top 30 at the end of the month so that you can be featured on Liberty Note, a Japanese website.
Words of Caution
The battles are best of 1, which is a very different environment than you might encounter at a best of 3 tournament. The two battle formats test different skills. Don’t be disappointed if climbing the ladder is challenging.
The ladder can become very insular, especially near the top. You might play an opponent with a strange strategy multiple times. You might end up overpreparing for a matchup that you play infrequently in the long run.
Showdown is much faster and has a move undo button, which is very different from in game. It can be challenging to adjust to the differences.
