It's a really weird point system, you get more points by beating someone at your rank and higher (sounds like not the case for S though) and lose more points at someone with your own rank than to a higher or lower rank (which I would think you would lose more to people at and lower than your rank). Sometimes, like this morning, I'll lose considerably fewer points than I should have against people at the same rank and a couple matches later be back to losing 150 points (may or may not have been something to do with my losing streak from the last time I played). The points seem to also work on a streak system, the more wins you have in a streak the higher number of points you get from winning (at one point against F rank players I was getting 200+ points per match at A rank) while if you are losing a lot of matches in a row you progressively lose fewer points.
I'm stuck around A+ because I only have time to play for an hour at a time in the morning before I go to bed and about a half hour or so before I leave for work at night (rocking the night shift with only about 105 hours of ranked, I don't really play normal versus or lobbies) which normally results me in playing oversea matches whenever I play at all, I also enjoy playing other games. The queue times already are obscenely long in many cases (especially so on my nights off when I can wait up to ten minutes between matches looking for anyone at all ranks to play. I end up watching game videos, anime, or movies while I wait because I can't dedicate time to playing games on my laptop while in queue) so giving someone the ability to decline a ranked match would add to the time before I see them again in another ten minutes just because I got a Great or Greatest on them two matches previously (has happened bt extremely few times, I think I have 4 Greatests at this time).
It gets even more frustrating when I end up playing the same two people who play Alpha or Hayate (the only two at this point I cant stand playing against online) and they thrash me all night because I can't make proper reactions at that kind of lag and can't adjust very well (I'm a very "Hi-Counter Hold" kind of person because of playing a grappler for years, in just about every fighting game I play I make plays at the last second because most of them give damage bonuses).
95% of the people I play are at 1 bar of lag but many of them seem as if they have a full connection, I use the character select screen, and when I forget to I do the guard dance before a match starts, to see just how much lag I will have to endure for the match. For those who don't know what I mean I test the lag by moving the selector around the roster and see how long it takes for the directional input to kick in or mash the guard button a few times at the beginning of a match to check there. I would probably be terrible with Mila combos offline now because I'm so damn used to playing with at least 200ms latency.
As a side note, did the patch notes cover anything about game freezes regarding the PS3 version freezing at the stage select screen? Occasionally my PS3 will freeze after character select and I end up losing about half a night's progress in the process which only adds fuel to the fire. When I checked there wasn't a change for it.
However I do like that character select will be blind pick now, but I do enjoy playing Santa Bass against lower ranked players and the players I know I can beat with BS throws that I seemingly always forget how to use but still manage to pull off (Sorry Mr. StWahng, I can only aspire to be like you).