Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4436775-20130713014204/@comment-12664470-20140219192945

S-ranking frequently required teamwork that's not guaranteed to be found in a typical public game. Even in some of my best games (pictures above) I didn't get an S rank on that run. The main difficulty of S-ranking comes from destroying the targets before the Emergency Mission Update. It's really frustrating to have the update start with only one or two enemies left on the map. Tokyo's a litte more difficult in this regard because some of the targets don't appear until all others have been destroyed, leaving you about 30 seconds to deal with them. (We called it "Target Refresh" in chat, although something like "Second Wave" would have made more sense.)

Often times in a public match, people were focused only on their own scores and as such didn't bother to optimize/coordinate their attacks with the rest of their team. Without voice chat it's unlikely to happen.

I got a bunch of S-ranks on both maps (enough to get the "Inferno" nickname, which I believe comes from a certain number of S-ranks on a given map) but fewer on Tokyo than Pipeline.

I also got 2 S-ranks on Aigaion. That's a lot more difficult to pull off without a fully cooperating team/party, especially when someone is stupid and destroys the core early before all of the fighters are down.

If everyone's working together, it's not difficult to S-rank any of the maps. That might change when we have more maps to play on, who knows.