Below you will find the first European Brawl tier list. Considering differences in metagame and mentality, a collective of Europeans felt it was worth it to try our hand at our own tier list. It is always difficult to get the input from people all over Europe, so it remains to be seen whether this will be done again, and if so, how frequently.
Top
SS: Meta Knight
S: Diddy Kong
A: Snake, Marth, Falco, Ice Climbers, Wario, Captain Olimar
High
B: Pikachu, King Dedede, Zero Suit Samus, Lucario
C: Mr. Game & Watch, Fox, Toon Link, Peach
Mid
D: Wolf, Pit, R.O.B., Donkey Kong, Kirby
E: Sheilda, Ike, Sheik, Sonic
F: Luigi, Ness, Yoshi, Pokémon Trainer
Low
G: Lucas, Mario, Bowser, Samus, Captain Falcon, Zelda, Link, Jigglypuff
Bottom
H: Ganondorf
Procedure
The best players and theorists from a variety of European countries were asked to vote. We tried to reach out to players to the extent that they could be reached and agreed to participate. The 39 individual votes and everything else you could possibly want to know can be found here:
http://m2eila.fr/smash/tier_lists/2011_European_Brawl_Tier_List/
Major thanks to Slhoka for setting up the data collection and analysis, as well as gathering the French votes!
It was hard to define statistically sound tier gaps and still have a somewhat elegant result. Separating tiers is usually done through differences in character averages. A common rule of thumb is to place a gap where the difference exceeds either 1 or 1.5, but in this case a consistent application would lead to several single character tiers and we had to be a little more pragmatic. Single character tiers were all resolved by adding characters to the closest group, with the exception of the very top and bottom tier. This is because we felt that the top tier needs to be more clearly defined, while the gap between the second worst and worst character was the largest in the entire list at 2.41. The raw data is available in the link provided earlier, in case you want to check it and do some manipulations of your own.
Notes
Top
SS: Meta Knight
S: Diddy Kong
A: Snake, Marth, Falco, Ice Climbers, Wario, Captain Olimar
High
B: Pikachu, King Dedede, Zero Suit Samus, Lucario
C: Mr. Game & Watch, Fox, Toon Link, Peach
Mid
D: Wolf, Pit, R.O.B., Donkey Kong, Kirby
E: Sheilda, Ike, Sheik, Sonic
F: Luigi, Ness, Yoshi, Pokémon Trainer
Low
G: Lucas, Mario, Bowser, Samus, Captain Falcon, Zelda, Link, Jigglypuff
Bottom
H: Ganondorf
Procedure
The best players and theorists from a variety of European countries were asked to vote. We tried to reach out to players to the extent that they could be reached and agreed to participate. The 39 individual votes and everything else you could possibly want to know can be found here:
http://m2eila.fr/smash/tier_lists/2011_European_Brawl_Tier_List/
Major thanks to Slhoka for setting up the data collection and analysis, as well as gathering the French votes!
It was hard to define statistically sound tier gaps and still have a somewhat elegant result. Separating tiers is usually done through differences in character averages. A common rule of thumb is to place a gap where the difference exceeds either 1 or 1.5, but in this case a consistent application would lead to several single character tiers and we had to be a little more pragmatic. Single character tiers were all resolved by adding characters to the closest group, with the exception of the very top and bottom tier. This is because we felt that the top tier needs to be more clearly defined, while the gap between the second worst and worst character was the largest in the entire list at 2.41. The raw data is available in the link provided earlier, in case you want to check it and do some manipulations of your own.
Notes
- Unlike with Melee, there are no differences between PAL and NTSC copies of the game. While individual votes sometimes varied a lot, the final result is not too different from the most recent BBR tier list. The most notable differences between common European rulesets and Unity are found in the stage list: for this project we assumed a list of 10 stages with Brinstar, Pokémon Stadium 2 and Rainbow Cruise banned.
- While low tier events still have the same 9 characters, mid tier events would lose Fox and Peach under this tier list. A consideration could be made to add the C tier, but in my humble opinion mid tier events have always been dominated by the best characters available and this might turn out refreshing. Either way the tier list was not made with side events in mind.
- Other than for MK, Diddy and Ganondorf, standard deviations for most characters were rather high. Lucario takes the cake at an SD of 3.71, with his highest ranking being 7th and his lowest 24th. Overall the results suggest a metagame that is still changing a lot, while we can also see that some characters lack representation in the Euro zone. Considering a relatively high amount of characters are viable from this game’s large cast, it is likely that every competitive region has some otherwise viable characters that are developed less than they could or should be.
- A few people made a mistake with the Sheilda entry, which by definition can never be lower than the best of the two characters it consists of (Sheik). Because her position was overall solidified and it wouldn’t really matter, those votes had her position replaced with her default position right above Sheik, which she actually ended up very close to in the final tier list. The entry’s worth remains questionable.