Chasing tiers vs. natural selection regarding character choice

[BassX]

So I'd like to hear everyones opinion on character choice. Do you chase high tier characters to reduce any advantage an opponent has going into a match? Or do you use whatever character you are naturally good at?

,my goals are simply to be the best I can be. I started out maining zero suit samus and did alright. Had major issues getting punished and landing killing blows. I decided to switch to rosalina and fixed the punishment issue in my game but still had problems landing hits/Kills. So being completely frustrated I started using my old main, G&W. Across the board, my skills improved but he is low tier. So now I wonder if I have a ceiling ill never be able to break in tournaments due to my character

 

[G-Guy]

luckily for me, i do not plan to visit tournaments (do not even know where to search in germany), so I usually stick to characters I like and to those I can play well with.

I.E. I love F-zero and I am decent as the cap, so there ya go, instant main (same goes for my boy, Wario)

 

[Donkeykong98123]

Pick someone that feels natural instead of forcing yourself to learn higher tiered characters

 

[Antonykun]

I say experiment with everyone until you find someone you love. If it happens to be top tier, then it doesn't matter because that's what you love/win with.

 

[Hon Si Zi]

It's hard to say. I want to be competitive, and there is a point where at the highest level, you cannot be competitive with some characters, especially those that rely heavily on punishing. If I wish to beat someone such as Zero in the far future, I cannot be using a character where my skill level must be significantly higher than my opponent's to win. Finding out what characters do or don't meat that threshold is also difficult itself. It's a balancing act, because I also can't just pick a high tier character that doesn't feel right to me, either.

 

[Esquire]

"Some individuals use statistics as a drunk man uses lamp-posts — for support rather than for illumination."

Tier lists are merely aggregated statistics based off of tournament results, usage, and match-up results. Discussions on things like character tools and strengths/weaknesses are not reasons as to why characters are ranked, but rather explanations as to why the statistics point that way. Tier lists provide support for competitive players in terms of arguing which members of the cast are relatively stronger competitively compared to other characters in the cast. They don't refute /any/ character's chances of winning a tournament, but rather suggest likely outcomes of matches. "Ganondorf doesn't win many tournaments" =/= "Ganondorf can't win a tournament".

What does that all mean? It means that tier lists are important for the competitive community in understanding the data of real-time tournament results, but are never concrete "this character is bad/this character is good" lists. This is why people get so frustrated over people constantly making subjective lists about how individuals perceive characters and labeling it a "tier list" when such things are far from what a tier list intends. People are free to give subjective opinions, but tier lists are based off of numbers.

Use the characters you excel at. Understand your weaknesses and strengths as a player and find a character that matches that. Or even a secondary to pick up to help support your weaknesses. Use official tier lists as a means to see the results of how your character fares in tournament play. Don't use tier lists as a lone support for your character choice.

 

[Antonykun]

"Some individuals use statistics as a drunk man uses lamp-posts — for support rather than for illumination."

Tier lists are merely aggregated statistics based off of tournament results, usage, and match-up results. Discussions on things like character tools and strengths/weaknesses are not reasons as to why characters are ranked, but rather explanations as to why the statistics point that way. Tier lists provide support for competitive players in terms of arguing which members of the cast are relatively stronger competitively compared to other characters in the cast. They don't refute /any/ character's chances of winning a tournament, but rather suggest likely outcomes of matches. "Ganondorf doesn't win many tournaments" =/= "Ganondorf can't win a tournament".

What does that all mean? It means that tier lists are important for the competitive community in understanding the data of real-time tournament results, but are never concrete "this character is bad/this character is good" lists. This is why people get so frustrated over people constantly making subjective lists about how individuals perceive characters and labeling it a "tier list" when such things are far from what a tier list intends. People are free to give subjective opinions, but tier lists are based off of numbers.

Use the characters you excel at. Understand your weaknesses and strengths as a player and find a character that matches that. Or even a secondary to pick up to help support your weaknesses. Use official tier lists as a means to see the results of how your character fares in tournament play. Don't use tier lists as a lone support for your character choice.

I would like to add that maybe sometime in the future some characters might be unplayable or broken so maybe that might influence the character to pick as opposed to a tier list

 

[Cornstalk]

I don't see the tiers being so painfully spaced apart with Smash 4 because of the general lack of difficult techs and Nintendo's attention to minor balancing tweaks.

Throw in the option of custom moves, and characters that felt like they were lacking options suddenly get a few new toys that make some of the harder match ups more manageable. Ganon's Drop Kick option for Down-B changes him from projectile vulnerable chump to a projectile spammer punisher.


Thanks to customs, I personally prefer Charizard because Dragon Rush combine with his heavy hitter style is very comfortable to me. My back-ups are Pikachu because his Thunder Wave and Heavy Skull Bash customs open up KO opportunities that he previously struggled to gain and Ganon (for the drop kick) when I want a slugger but Charizard struggles to handle the projectile spam.

Without the customs, the effectiveness of the roster does actually feel pretty limited when facing threats like Diddy, Zero Suit, and Rosalina. So yeah, I'd probably tier ***** a little more without customs and learn someone like Diddy. More realistically, I just wouldn't play because the game would get stale really fast. That happened to me with Melee when Fox and Falco moved up to top tier. Got so sick of fighting the space animals and the occasional Sheik and Marth the game became more tedious then challenging and exciting.

 

[Nobie]

I think one of the "dangers" of chasing tiers is that in a game this young the characters we all think are better and worse could very well change. Obviously, it's not like every low-tier character is going to magically become top-tier, but the more people experiment and try to push their characters and themselves to their utmost potential, the more likely this can happen. Develop the characters you want, and if it gets to a point where you feel you can't do any better, just switch, but there's a long road ahead.

 

[M.C.Jeducation]

Just play the characters that you enjoy and are good at. Especially when talking about Smash 4 its really too early for the tier list to mean a great deal, and with the game receiving regular patches characters positions on the tier list will likely change even more drastically than in previous games.

 

[EarthBoundRules]

At this point, none of the characters' metagames have developed enough to create an accurate tier list. Be the one to show the world your character's potential!

 

[Browny]

Tier lists are merely aggregated statistics based off of tournament results, usage, and match-up results.

Just popping by to let you know that in the case of smash bros, this is not how tier lists are made.

You described the correct method to generate a tier list.

With smash bros, it is asking a decently large group (like 30-50) of professional players to rank characters 1-49 (or however many there are) by their opinion and then averaging out the results. Absolutely no weight is given to results, usage and matchups it is purely their averaged opinions, loaded with regional, character and status-quo bias

...

Its awful, I know. But thats the reality.

 

[Ffamran]

I've been promoting the bread-bird, , so yeah... Bread-bird needs more attention.

 

[ChronoPenguin]

Mii Swordsman is the best character in the game.
Everyone who isn't using Mii Swordsman is a scrub.

 

[cardboardowl]

tier lists will never be as important as player skill and match ups


also don't listen to any tier list you see yet. game is too young.

 

[RODO]

Everyone is pretty viable. Chasing tiers in this game is silly to me.

 

[Minordeth]

True story, unless the tier spread ends up being far wider than it is looking, go with who you like to play as. Very few players actually reach the place where tier differences at the highest meta-level make a significant difference.

 

[vexoskeleton]

right now most characters seem to be on some what even playing field, so sticking with who you like and feel good with is best until and you'll eventually learn your character is trash if they are.

 

[MegaMissingno]

In general, the important thing is simply that you pick a character that's viable. You're never gonna get anywhere with Kirby in Melee. But you don't need to go straight to Fox if you find that Luigi suits you better. Rock whatever works for you - as long as it does work!

In Smash 4, there's not really any tiers you can even look at this early on, and we don't know if Nintendo might still continue patching and rebalancing. Like so far all I can really say for now is don't pick Wii Fit Trainer, and that may change (I wanted to like her, I really did...). For now, pick whoever you want. Come back in a year or two and ask again, we'll see whether or not they're all still good once the dust has settled.

 

[ewic]

Chasing tiers (especially so early in this game's life) is not only detrimental to you and your enjoyment of the game, but also isn't helping to discovering character's potential.
I used to play a lot of League of Legends and the same problem happened there, where people would deem certain characters to be "the best" and everyone would blindly believe it, resulting in a stale and repetitive pick-ban process where all the same characters are being used. All because of one tournament or word of mouth. It's funny because it'd only be a matter of weeks before another round of "OP characters in the meta" are discovered and the cycle continues.

If winning tournaments is what you want, I'd say give the game at least a year to develop. We don't even know if regular patches are coming, which if they are... Means you can main anyone in hopes that they'll be buffed in the future.

I understand your predicament though, in fact I'm in a similar situation. Although I've decided to play who I want/have the most fun with to see how far I can go. So little is known about this game and especially under-appreciated characters so I'm willing to put the work in to see if my mains can stack up in the future.

Just look at Trela showing recently how good Charizard can be (when everyone I saw was saying he was terrible). Or ESAM's Pikachu. Or Earth's Pit in the recently Umabera 10 Japanese tournament. I'm willing to bet there's a lot of characters in this game that are significantly better than people are giving them credit.

Lastly, personal opinion here... I think it's a lot more hype to be the "best G&W" than "29th best Sheik" or something of the sort. If you want people to cheer for you, play an under-appreciated character and reap the rewards of being the "underdog".

 

[GuyLightning]

Was gonna go on a long rant about the dichotomy of tiers/choice, but I can condense it into a couple of sentences.

Pick who you want to play. Will it be hard going against opponents who use better characters, yes, but if you work hard (you will have to) and learn matches, then you can beat opponents with better characters. Let no one tell you no.

 

[Terotrous]

I generally play Random with my friend, we like to play Random vs Random because that keeps the game fresh basically forever. As such, my main tends to just be the character that I'm best with, and that will usually be a high tier character. I have been playing a lot of Yoshi in Smash 4 so far, but I'll probably gradually lose interest in using the same character all the time,

 

[TTTTTsd]

At this point, if I had to be incredibly honest, I'd recommend playing who feels natural right now.

As of right now (this is incredibly subjectable to change) Smash 4's character spread doesn't look as brutal as Brawl's in terms of matchups and dominance, while there are definitely clear winners I feel the gap is not as wide as it was in the past (the gap still exists and it always will.) I play Dr. Mario so I am well aware I am going to struggle initially, but I don't think any of my matchups are even close to impossible, I think my worst would be a 7:3 against me as Doc.

Just use who you perform best with, and let time and your discovery tell you what to do next. I wouldn't chase tiers this early on, but it's important to know what you're getting into regardless. Just don't take them too literally.

 

[Mastr Spar10]

So I'd like to hear everyones opinion on character choice. Do you chase high tier characters to reduce any advantage an opponent has going into a match? Or do you use whatever character you are naturally good at?

,my goals are simply to be the best I can be. I started out maining zero suit samus and did alright. Had major issues getting punished and landing killing blows. I decided to switch to rosalina and fixed the punishment issue in my game but still had problems landing hits/Kills. So being completely frustrated I started using my old main, G&W. Across the board, my skills improved but he is low tier. So now I wonder if I have a ceiling ill never be able to break in tournaments due to my character

Honestly, Ive always been a samus main since the beginning because I love the metroid games more than anything, so I just started playing her and just naturally got good with her, Lucina is a similar case in that I also love fire emblem and I tried her out and I found that she was super fun just like samus.

 

[Mastr Spar10]

So I'd like to hear everyones opinion on character choice. Do you chase high tier characters to reduce any advantage an opponent has going into a match? Or do you use whatever character you are naturally good at?

,my goals are simply to be the best I can be. I started out maining zero suit samus and did alright. Had major issues getting punished and landing killing blows. I decided to switch to rosalina and fixed the punishment issue in my game but still had problems landing hits/Kills. So being completely frustrated I started using my old main, G&W. Across the board, my skills improved but he is low tier. So now I wonder if I have a ceiling ill never be able to break in tournaments due to my character

Also I try my best to be at my best with the characters I love, if your good with g&w then play him until you make him seem like a top tier. The way I see it, tiers are just a starting point for when you wanna pick someone up, the higher the tier the easier the character is to learn and do good with (for the most part, there are some that aren't like that) bottom line don't let tiers bring you down

 

[LightLV]

Just popping by to let you know that in the case of smash bros, this is not how tier lists are made.

You described the correct method to generate a tier list.

With smash bros, it is asking a decently large group (like 30-50) of professional players to rank characters 1-49 (or however many there are) by their opinion and then averaging out the results. Absolutely no weight is given to results, usage and matchups it is purely their averaged opinions, loaded with regional, character and status-quo bias

...

Its awful, I know. But thats the reality.

Nothing is different about tier lists in other games. People ask pros to generate them because they're the best players out there. And chasing tiers isn't all that big a deal. All it does is ensure a large amount of matchup experience against your character.

Tier Lists can easily exist a few weeks after a game is released, they rarely stay static to begin with. And there are certain characters that are just practically and mathmatically weaker than the rest of the cast, regardless of how you play them.

 

[BassX]

Chasing tiers (especially so early in this game's life) is not only detrimental to you and your enjoyment of the game, but also isn't helping to discovering character's potential.
I used to play a lot of League of Legends and the same problem happened there, where people would deem certain characters to be "the best" and everyone would blindly believe it, resulting in a stale and repetitive pick-ban process where all the same characters are being used. All because of one tournament or word of mouth. It's funny because it'd only be a matter of weeks before another round of "OP characters in the meta" are discovered and the cycle continues.

If winning tournaments is what you want, I'd say give the game at least a year to develop. We don't even know if regular patches are coming, which if they are... Means you can main anyone in hopes that they'll be buffed in the future.

I understand your predicament though, in fact I'm in a similar situation. Although I've decided to play who I want/have the most fun with to see how far I can go. So little is known about this game and especially under-appreciated characters so I'm willing to put the work in to see if my mains can stack up in the future.

Just look at Trela showing recently how good Charizard can be (when everyone I saw was saying he was terrible). Or ESAM's Pikachu. Or Earth's Pit in the recently Umabera 10 Japanese tournament. I'm willing to bet there's a lot of characters in this game that are significantly better than people are giving them credit.

Lastly, personal opinion here... I think it's a lot more hype to be the "best G&W" than "29th best Sheik" or something of the sort. If you want people to cheer for you, play an under-appreciated character and reap the rewards of being the "underdog".

Just want to thank you for such an enlightening post that truely has influenced me. Also thanks to all who have contributed to this thread.

With that said, Ive decided to ride or die with G&W. Let the chips fall where they may.

 

[LightLV]

As of right now (this is incredibly subjectable to change) Smash 4's character spread doesn't look as brutal as Brawl's in terms of matchups and dominance, while there are definitely clear winners I feel the gap is not as wide as it was in the past (the gap still exists and it always will.)

woooooho, boy.

Just give it time. Trust me.

 

[TTTTTsd]

I didn't say it wasn't going to change but I'm not going to be foolhardy and say it is or isn't.

Either or is incredibly stupid to commit to because quite honestly this game's been patched once and who's to say it won't happen again? Hell they removed vertical vectoring, an entire system mechanic. I can't even begin to predict what they're going to do next, honestly.

My statement boils down to "it's early meta, seems fairly okay right now, play what you want." This should be encouraged, unless you want characters to be underdeveloped? (It's happening already anyways, who am I kidding? I'd rather not encourage lack of exploration.)

 

[Colonel_S]

There's a lot of characters in this game. A lot. I can't help but playing a couple.

Tier lists that are out now are mostly garbage, despite having some interesting and possibly true predictions. We haven't played the game long enough to know what's going to happen in tournaments. Eventually we'll have the data for an accurate tier list, but today is not that day.

It's been said a lot in this thread already, but I agree: play who you want. If they're high tier, great. If not, just that much more of a challenge to prove yourself.

 

[LightLV]

I didn't say it wasn't going to change but I'm not going to be foolhardy and say it is or isn't.

Either or is incredibly stupid to commit to because quite honestly this game's been patched once and who's to say it won't happen again? Hell they removed vertical vectoring, an entire system mechanic. I can't even begin to predict what they're going to do next, honestly.

My statement boils down to "it's early meta, seems fairly okay right now, play what you want." This should be encouraged, unless you want characters to be underdeveloped? (It's happening already anyways, who am I kidding? I'd rather not encourage lack of exploration.)

I mean yeah, ideally everyone should experiment with everyone. It APPEARS as if Nintendo is going to make an active attempt to balance the game, something 100% expected of any fighting game released in the last 5 years, but something Nintendo is probably going to struggle against itself with. I believe removing vertical vectoring and shortening the blast zones on Wii U are great steps in the right direction. But then Lucina got no buffs, and i remain skeptical.

In the end though, I dont see how either option in regards to tier picks is a bad thing. The best thing that can help evolve the meta of any game is people playing it, and the developers paying very close attention.

How and who they play is kind of irrelevant. As long as the game is balanced correctly, it'll always even itself out.

 

[TTTTTsd]

I think it's important to emphasize who they find to be natural and enjoyable for them. I mean, I could spend the time playing Fox in Melee but I found Falco much more natural for me, stuff like that.

It's important to not jump TOO early on tiers though and to not overvalue them early on, but I really do hope this game continues to get adjustments and refinements as necessary. Praying.

 

[BassX]

I think it's important to emphasize who they find to be natural and enjoyable for them. I mean, I could spend the time playing Fox in Melee but I found Falco much more natural for me, stuff like that.

It's important to not jump TOO early on tiers though and to not overvalue them early on, but I really do hope this game continues to get adjustments and refinements as necessary. Praying.

Greninja's fall from 1.0.4 serves as a warning and a reason as to why I decided to slow down with tier chasing and just start off with somebody I am naturally good at while using a couple different other characters on the side.

 

[|RK|]

I prefer to play characters that I like and that I feel good playing as. Lucario happens to be my main for that reason (I liked him in Brawl, and I saw a bunch of cool improvements when he was revealed for Smash 4, so I chose to play as him when I got it). I also like Kirby, but he felt off when I played as him in Smash 4. His range was genuinely bothersome (which is funny, because Lucario's range is also ****). So Samus is my secondary instead, because I like playing as her.

That Lucario happens to be (potentially) high tier is coincidental; he's the most interesting for me to play.

 

[ArticulateT]

I usually play characters I like the theme or mechanics of. I mained Link in SSB and Melee because I'm a huge Zelda fan and Link was awesome. I played as Lucario in Brawl and Project M because I liked the way he played, and to be fair, between him and Captain Falcon as the closest Facsimile to Blaziken there could be in Smash Bros, Lucario's mechanics simply won me over. I still played Link in Brawl and Project M, and would occasionally dabble with Ike too because Ike looked cool and was satisfying to play as.

Now in the current iteration of Smash, I main the Mii Brawler, since it's the closest thing to a character creator the game has, and the moves I picked for him look and feel awesome. I still have Link and Lucario as fall backs, I haven't really touched Ike, and I've found some kind of affinity with Charizard and Ganondorf.

In short, there's really two ways you can go about it, either pickj a character and adapt to it, or find one that resonates with you quickly. You'll get that advantage from the former, but you'll reach your 'potential' sooner with a character that feels comfortable.

 

[ソチャラ「Sóchara 」]

I play this game because Megaman is in it. Therefore he is my main. I had around 85 hours logged by the end of the 3ds version with 99.1% playtime as him.

#### tiers.

 

[CE_TheLord]

Well, I always feel comfortable using top tier characters (And ironically most of the time they're characters that I love) Just Like Fox and Marth in Melee, not because they're high tier but because Ilove them, and Metakinght was my main in Brawl along with Wolf because they're my favorite from their respective series lol

 

[CaP_Omega]

I am Ganondorf.

But really, it's more of a matter of feel to me. Like Greninja might be considered high tier and Meta Knight might be considered like low tier, but I enjoy using them because they make the fight tense for me and that motivates me to up my concentration. Sometimes I let loose the Yoshi if I get sick of fighting against a strategy I'm not used to, though.

 

[Signia]

Or do you use whatever character you are naturally good at?

This entire game feels unnatural, so I'm just gonna pick a top tier.

 

[Xsyven]

I've never been good with plenty of high tier characters. When I play Melee, I'm literally better with Kirby than I am with Peach.