Balance Discussion

[gogurtpeachy]

I often see smash 4 players, when talking about their game in comparison to melee, call it the better balanced game, i've always disagreed so i decided to do some research for myself. Allow me to preface this by saying that i researched this topic in a way that may end be controversial so allow me to explain my methods.

I decided to not use the 10 most recent Melee tournaments as i did for smash 4, Melee has had more time to develop it's meta game so i decided to instead use results from tournaments of a similar era of competition. Smash 4 has been out for about 4 years now, i decided to go off of melee results from a similar time, unfortunately due to how few super majors existed at the time, this meant i used tournaments from 2006-2010, while for smash 4 it was just 2017-2018. If i were to do this again i would probably just use the 10 most recent melee super majors to compare. I decided to look at the top 8 from 10 tournaments, look at the characters played in that top 8 and write them down. After i had the full list of characters, I found the % of the cast that was played in top 8s. Here's the list of tournaments i used for this data, as well as the list of characters across all 10 tournaments.

Spoiler: Melee Tournaments

MLG New York Playoffs, 2006: Melee Pro Singles Brackets
Pound 2: Melee Singles Bracket
MELEE-FC Diamond: Melee Singles
Zero Challenge 3: Melee Singles Bracket
Evolution Championship Series, World, 2007
Super Champ Combo: Melee Singles Bracket
Pound 3: Melee Singles Bracket
EPITA Smash Arena 2: Melee Singles Bracket
GENESIS: Melee Singles
Pound 4: Melee Singles Bracket

Spoiler: Smash 4 Tournaments

2GGC: MkLeo Saga - Wii U Singles
2GG Championship - 2GG Championship
EVO Japan 2018 - Super Smash Bros. for Wii U
Frostbite 2018 - Wii U Singles
Get On My Level 2018 - Canadian Smash Championships - Super Smash Bros. for Wii U Singles
MomoCon 2018 - Smash 4 Singles
2GG: Hyrule Saga - Smash 4 Singles
CEO 2018 Fighting Game Championships - Super Smash Bros. for Wii U
The Big House 8 - Wii U Singles

Spoiler: Melee Characters

Marth

Falco

Ice Climber

Sheik

Fox

Captain Falcon

Marth

Samus

Mewtwo

Peach

Puff

Ganondorf

Spoiler: Smash 4 Characters

Rosalina

Zero Suit Samus

Corrin

Diddy Kong

Bayonetta

Fox

Mario

Donkey Kong

Cloud

Sonic

Meta Knight

Olimar

Mewtwo

Marth

Luigi

Sheik

Megaman

Roy

Captain Falcon

Bowser

Pikachu

Toon Link

Spoiler: Final Results

Melee: 46.15% of Cast used
Smash 4: 37.93%

So when comparing percentages of cast used in tournament melee is more balanced by quite a bit, this doesn't necessarily mean melee is balanced, or the more balanced game, there's other factors involved, i could have looked at the top 16 of majors, or looked at the top 50 players of both games, but in the context of placing top 8 within a similar time period of the games life, melee is more balanced.

 

[MercuryPenny]

smash 4 has roughly twice the number of characters; a top 8 with each slot being a unique character means roughly half as much in smash 4 (melee's ~30% to smash 4's ~14%, ~13% including miis). if the goal was a fair statistical comparison, including top 16 from smash 4's majors would have made the end results for both games much more compatible.

the metric itself is less-than-stellar, but gathering the percentage of EVERY character relative to each other in both games in a comparable, reasonable sample size is obviously time-intensive and beyond the scope of an amateur statistician with an agenda, so i'd be dishonest if i claimed that it's what i expected (plus, i'd be very surprised if those statistics hadn't already been made by now, which would have made it redundant).