Character Ranking List - Project M - updated 4/4

[Oro?!]

Interesting update os. 1 thing I wish was accountable for would be region strength. Oracle getting 2nd to sethlon, a man who has never lost a pm tournament, doesn't do rob or gnw any justice for example despite oracle having the arguably strongest results for those characters.

 

[Oracle]

Good update other than this little bit:

While ROB is being used a lot and getting decent placings, there doesn't seem to be a Sethlon or Gimpyfish with a strong tournament presence for ROB which is holding back his placement.

I'm hurt

 

[Overswarm]

Have you posted in their tournament threads asking for that information?

Metroid has; I'm not going hunting for stuff though. I update the excel file and this thread, I ain't badgering TO's to properly post their results

 

[Overswarm]

Interesting update os. 1 thing I wish was accountable for would be region strength. Oracle getting 2nd to sethlon, a man who has never lost a pm tournament, doesn't do rob or gnw any justice for example despite oracle having the arguably strongest results for those characters.

Dakpo currently gives the most points to G&W.

"Region strength" is a false reading when it comes to character strength. History has shown that winners in one region are often winners in others. While Sethlon, Kirk, Mew2King, and Gimpyfish could all arrive at the same tournament and obviously not get 1st, they'd still all place highly. Saying that ROB's placement is hurt by Oracle losing to Sethlon is about as helpful as saying ROB's placement is helped by DiscoBunny not being a tournament threat.

More importantly, character aberration in terms of singular players accenting results is uncommon for a reason. People play good characters. If a character is unpopular, that character is bad. That character may become good or at the least useful in the future, but there's a reason Oracle is one of many ROBs but the only one who is actually hitting top 3 consistently and it isn't because Oracle is just that good of a ROB.

As the metagame develops it may turn out that characters A, B, and C are actually really good across the board and in this environment you may see characters like ROB shine if they counter those characters. In the free-for-all that is going on at the moment though, the only reason someone would pick up ROB is if they liked his playstyle, liked his character, or thought he'd help them win. The first two are rarely chosen by good players and the last one hasn't come to pass yet.

When you expand this mentality to a region basis, it becomes silly to think of weighting results based on region activity because we're not talking about players, we're talking about characters. We already know that observing all relevant tournaments gives accurate results, so weighting is unneccessary and dangerous.

Good update other than this little bit:

I'm hurt

You shouldn't be. You've contributed ~20 of ROB's 27 points. That said, ROB's points are inflated a bit by SCSYN5 which had both high entrants and a high entry fee. It was a tough tournament (so inflated deservedly so), but that's still an additional 14.25 points. You would have gotten ~5 points if it was $5 entry or ~9 for $10. If it had been $5 entry it would have put ROB just under captain Falcon. ROB also has many players, which is bad considering he still has a large amount of points residing in your contribution.

To put that in perspective, Gimpyfish has given ~20 points to Bowser with his two tournament wins, making him a little less than 1/3rd. It is likely that his future tournaments will put him in first place as well. Myself, Majora, and Kirk also have Bowser wins contributing to his point total. That's just counting 1st place finishes! ROB pretty much just has you and as long as you are getting 2nd to Sethlon without other ROBs supporting you, it's difficult to see ROB accelerating in placement on your merits alone.

Sonic has Sethlon who, in one tournament win, gave Sonic more points than ROB has all together.

So one or the other would have to occur. Either a ROB needs to start doing consistently winning or ROB needs more consistent placements in the top 3 to gain real traction.

 

[Oro?!]

Its easy to play devils advocate to that argument though and say that there are lower skilled tournament winners who are essentially falsely boosting a characters perceived strength. Data is not biased though so its pretty irrelevant. i basically feel that there will be major inaccuracies until there is an fc sized pm tournament for 2.5. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Overswarm]

Its easy to play devils advocate to that argument though and say that there are lower skilled tournament winners who are essentially falsely boosting a characters perceived strength. Data is not biased though so its pretty irrelevant. i basically feel that there will be major inaccuracies until there is an fc sized pm tournament for 2.5. Just my 2 cents.

We see temporary boosts but it is exceedingly rare that you have

A) a big tournament
B) a decent entry fee
C) bad characters placing in the top placements

Looking at Apex in Brawl, Zero Suit Samus won the event. We know Zero Suit Samus isn't a top tier character. She's just played by a strong player and was an unknown entity compared to the normal tournament victors, further enhancing her success. ZSS would temporarily get a HUGE boost from this...

But looking at the other victors you'd see that Metaknight had 2nd, 3rd, and 4th and realize that the status quo doesn't actually change that much.

The more tournaments that occur, the more accurate the results get. It can be frustrating to see something like Sethlon's one Sonic victory boost Sonic up so much (it's also the primary reason DK is up there), but it won't last if the characters themselves aren't worth something. As more people play, you get a better view of what is ACTUALLY good.

Lower skilled tournament winners (or placers) will boost results, but same thing. As events get bigger and people get better it becomes less likely and, more importantly, if a tournament was actually a decent size and had enough entrants and money involved to influence points considerably, good players would come to it. Free money.

 

[Overswarm]

lagboards10

 

[Overswarm]

lagboards10

 

[Overswarm]

lagboards10

 

[Overswarm]

SLIGHT UPDATE with some new info:

I was curious as to how "healthy" Project M's game was, statistically speaking, so I looked at the variance.

For those unfamiliar, it basically boils down to "the larger this number is, the greater variance"

Usage variance: 29.90
# of Characters that can be considered "popular" using the mean as a baseline: 14 (Fox to Peach)
Points variance: 269.82
# of Characters that can be considered "viable" using the mean as a baseline: 12 (Bowser to Captain Falcon)


We have a relatively health game at this point, with 12 characters being considered mathematically viable and 14 being considered popular.

I don't have usage statistics for Brawl or Melee, nor do I have Character ranking data relevant to our tiem period, but I DO have Character Ranking data from a few years into Brawl.

Post-March 2010 Brawl Points Variance: 619,444.2

Compare that to Project M's 269.82 and you can safely say holy crap.

Now this is primarily due to Meta Knight's dominance and Snake's sloppy seconds.

Removing Meta Knight Brawl Points Variance: 181,146 (~440,000 less)
Removing Meta Knight and Snake Points Variance: 76176.85

This is good information, as Brawl Post-March 2010 was a dominated game that was basically already solved. The changes haven't been that extreme since then and most involve characters shuffling places rather than anything else.

So if in the future I or someone else uses data in this way and says "Bowser's OP, he wins too many tournaments" or something of the sort, you can point to the variance present.

Project M's variance WILL increase as people figure out matchups and characters more, but I do not forsee the same variance we saw in Brawl.




TL;DR

Project M is currently in a healthy state with many viable and many popular characters with relatively low variance using Brawl, which had high variance in 2010, as a baseline.

 

[Gimpyfish62]

oh speaking of this thread i forgot to submit results in the other thread

whoooooops

 

[Overswarm]

Updaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate!

Let me know if I missed any tournaments. Also, tell your TOs to stop being twits and start reporting characters. Poor Strong Bad won a tournament and it isn't in the list because there are 3 "???" in the report for me to use it. Not fair to the other characters! Fill in those results and yell at your TOs!

 

[metroid1117]

Updaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate!

Let me know if I missed any tournaments. Also, tell your TOs to stop being twits and start reporting characters. Poor Strong Bad won a tournament and it isn't in the list because there are 3 "???" in the report for me to use it. Not fair to the other characters! Fill in those results and yell at your TOs!

^This. To players, PLEASE be more proactive about posting in results threads, it's kind of frustrating to have to wait on data that should be standard at almost any tournament =/.

Also, thanks for updating, Overswarm! Sorry that SMYM14 couldn't be added because of the split. Just as a suggestion, you might want to add to the title of the thread the date of the last update so people know.

 

[Overswarm]

Good idea.

Reading your tournament results thread is irritating as all get out simply because people post results over 3 different posts and expect you to combine the info, and even then they still have "???" for characters. Here I am making an excel sheet with crazy formulas and whatnot and they're like "eh, I dun remember who he used WHATEVS"

I could add in the "split" tournaments and just give 50% of the points from 1st and 2nd to both players, but I won't. If you're going to split, do it so secretly that no one else will know unless you tell them and so it doesn't get posted in the results thread!

 

[Oro?!]

K next time we will play it out to ensure not getting home til 6 am.

There's a different between splitting for the sake of splitting, and splitting for logistical or venue related reasons or something else.

 

[Scythe]

oro getting off!

 

[Overswarm]

K next time we will play it out to ensure not getting home til 6 am.

There's a different between splitting for the sake of splitting, and splitting for logistical or venue related reasons or something else.

Actually no, no there is not. It still results in two people not competing for the top spot. How you feel about it could be different, but the result is the exact same.

If you're worried about finishing on time, I suggest you talk to your local TO about more efficient formats or look into getting CRTs off of craigslist (for free!) to get setups easier.

31 people showed up; we started at 12:30 and finished doubles by around 2:30 and then finished ALL THREE ROUNDS OF POOLS by 8:30 p.m.!

Basically a full "bracket" done in pools only was faster and more efficient than a 32 man double elim bracket, resulting in more games played in less time. A full tournament took a whopping 6 hours.

If you'd like more information, check out instructions here:

http://www.smashboards.com/threads/...aster-than-double-elimination-bracket.324691/

 

[Juushichi]

@ This:

I actually remember running a $1 Ranbat tournament here in Columbus, back when Momo2 (our FGC/smash scene's old WNF haunt) was still open. We played a lot of games on few TVs, it was also an all-pools format. Our top-2 was Carls and MX, however they were slated to start their Bo5 set around 11:50. As Momo2 closed at midnight, it was easy to determine that the set wouldn't finish. They could have split, but I know that the two are rivals and such and we would see each other going into the weekend for a tournament down in Cincinnati. So, instead we kept it with a reliable person (Pech) in an envelope for them to play for when we all got to Arcade Legacy. We went down in the same car, the guys warmed up and played their finals set from Wednesday to start off Columbus' tournament day.

This is always an option. I know there's an issue of trust and sometimes of people wanting the money right then and there, but we managed to make it work.

 

[metroid1117]

By the way OS, in case you were interested, I heard back from the players at N.O.O.B IV. There were 12 entrants and the entry fee was $10. Here's the characters that the top 8 used:

1: Wizzrobe ($84.00) (Sonic)
2: Plup ($24.00) (Ivysaur, Bowser)
3: Hungrybox ($12.00) (Jigglypuff, Mario)
4: Harriettheguy (Fox)
5: McNinja (D3)
5: Jello (Ness)
7: Sartron (Lucas)
7: Doomchickens (???)

Looks like Bowser is starting to dominate Florida as well.

 

[zman804]

I understand if you don't want to change it, but have considered allowing tournaments with a sub 5 dollar entry fee? AZ tournaments have been 3 dollars entry fee for the past few months and I honestly don't think it makes the players any less hungry.

 

[Strong Badam]

yo i heard i didn't have a tourney win in this thread cuz 7th places had question marks for their chars

HERE YOU GO

1. Strong Bad ($60)
2. RFrizzle ($17)
3. Hylian ($10)
4. Zivilyn Bane
5. Fishburne
5. Shinobi (used Wolf once against me and lost otherwise went Fox?)
7. Jace
7. Cookiemonsta (smashboards WHY no icons :[)

I'm sorry I lost to Oro and let them split! I wanted to ****ing win that tournament.

IL I'm coming for you!

 

[Gimpyfish62]

look at that bowser ranking LOL

 

[Wizzrobe]

By the way OS, in case you were interested, I heard back from the players at N.O.O.B IV. There were 12 entrants and the entry fee was $10. Here's the characters that the top 8 used:

1: Wizzrobe ($84.00) (Sonic)
2: Plup ($24.00) (Ivysaur, Bowser)
3: Hungrybox ($12.00) (Jigglypuff, Mario)
4: Harriettheguy (Fox)
5: McNinja (D3)
5: Jello (Ness)
7: Sartron (Lucas)
7: Doomchickens (???)

Looks like Bowser is starting to dominate Florida as well.

Surprised you found this

Also, do the tournaments have to be recent?

 

[Overswarm]

Surprised you found this

Also, do the tournaments have to be recent?

January onwards, this version.

I also do not update based on this thread; my updates solely come from Metroid's thread. I just go through and look at the *new* tags he graciously puts in for me and add from there. If someone lets me know I'm missing a tournament I should have gotten and tells me

A) the tournament name
B) it has all the relevant information
C) it is in metroid's post

Then I add it for the next update, regardless of when it was. I prefer it to be in chronological order but I don't mind backtracking some.

 

[Oro?!]

I don't care if you say ZSS or Marth didn't "win" SMYM, but the fact is that every set was played seriously and ZSS and Marth made money. In addition it scraps other things like DK getting 3rd and Bowser/a bunch of other characters getting credit for a very stacked tournament with a lot of entrants. There was no collusion, just tired smashers and I personally did not want to beat Dart in his current shape as a competitor. Taking a W from that would've hurt me way more than getting credited for a tournament win in some internet thread. **** the money, or any tournament "winner", you should post those results because everything that was played mattered. If Dart agreed, I would do a 50$ MM for the tournament "victor" next time I saw him, but in the end it only matters for aesthetics for your thread. Do whatever you want, but if a lot of those players that played hard at SMYM don't get credit then I would personally be very disappointed.

 

[Overswarm]

Sounds like those players that played very hard at SMYM weren't respected by the people who got to the finals, who then said "Nah bro, let's split. I'm tired."

Definitely something aspiring smashers can look up to.

Splits, of any kind, do not go into the character rankings list because they invalidate the most important result of the tournament. As far as I'm concerned it's a non-event.

 

[metroid1117]

Sounds like those players that played very hard at SMYM weren't respected by the people who got to the finals, who then said "Nah bro, let's split. I'm tired."

Definitely something aspiring smashers can look up to.

Splits, of any kind, do not go into the character rankings list because they invalidate the most important result of the tournament. As far as I'm concerned it's a non-event.

Personally, I'm not really concerned about characters receiving points for the tournament, but I just wanted to let you know that SMYM was not very well-run and the tournament finished extremely late. People who weren't expected to TO, including me, had to help run the tournament and get it started more than 2 hours behind schedule. GF1 had finished at midnight and people still had to drive home - it would have been dangerous to prolong the tournament and have people make the 2+ hr home any more tired than they already were. Yes, it looks bad on our community to see people splitting, but I care more for my friends' personal safety than our reputation.

 

[Strong Badam]

It sucks, the players split for a good reason, the players that placed 3rd-7th had nothing to do with it and don't really deserve their results to be ignored, etc. but as long a Overswarm is consistent in his policy, I really don't see an issue here.

 

[JacopeX]

I'm mad at how overused Sonic is out there.

 

[Kink-Link5]

Much more satisfied with this thread with the further changes, and I hope to see more elaborated data over time eventually. The Implications section and the thread title are still a silly amount superfluous since most of the things that are "implied" are the OP's own personal thoughts and not things that are implied at all.

 

[Overswarm]

Much more satisfied with this thread with the further changes, and I hope to see more elaborated data over time eventually. The Implications section and the thread title are still a silly amount superfluous since most of the things that are "implied" are the OP's own personal thoughts and not things that are implied at all.

OP also gets to say what he wants because he's OS. :B

 

[Tlock]

Is this thread going to be updated again?

 

[awesome13579]

To be honest, I think the top 10 are either characters that we are familiar with from melee, or are easy to play with. Other characters take some time to use and master, such as Pit, G&W, Wario, and TLink. These four in particular can really be potent when played correctly, but not many people do such, for they are hard to master properly. I myself am a G&W main, beating Fox, Sheik, and Bowser players - siblings and friends alike.
All the characters can compete against each other very well, and possibly win, which is what PM is aiming for: balance. However, when some characters take little effort to win, adding effort to said characters make them much stronger than other characters. No character is bad in PM, but there are some that are clearly better than others.

 

[Overswarm]

Is this thread going to be updated again?

It is likely, I've just been busy and interest in M has waned a bit due to the whole "nobody plays Project M" thing around here.

 

[Juushichi]

Come up to Columbus, Overswarm. I've been wanting better competition. It's just me and Carls (with other people playing here and there) up here.

 

[Carls493]

Yeah, we could use more PM rep & experience, here.

 

[Overswarm]

Come up to Columbus, Overswarm. I've been wanting better competition. It's just me and Carls (with other people playing here and there) up here.

I invited you guys down twice and neither time did you show up

At that point I kinda put P:M on the "I'll play it if it's here but am not going to put any effort into it" box.

 

[Juushichi]

Usually the ability for me (and carls) to go down hinges on external factors. I don't remember what happened the first time, but the second time something in the family came up.

that's a shame though.

 

[Overswarm]

Eh, I'm probably not going to update this anymore. I like the project and Project M is a fun game, but it's not particularly popular.

Plus, I can't stand talking about it. Half the Project M players that discuss the game are already bashing Smash 4 so I don't really want to support that.

 

[Wrestlemania]

Eh, I'm probably not going to update this anymore. I like the project and Project M is a fun game, but it's not particularly popular.

Plus, I can't stand talking about it. Half the Project M players that discuss the game are already bashing Smash 4 so I don't really want to support that.

Overswarm if you are done with this do you think that you could post your data? I am sure either myself or someone else would be willing to continue this as actual tier lists at this point are not very valid, however this is a ranking of how successful characters have been and is actually really cool.
I mean I guess someone could try rebuilding the data from scratch but that would be a pain.