I want to revist this, because I agree and got distracted from writing a post 3 days ago about how I came to this conclusion.
is played by the #1 player in the game, and also the secondary of the #2 + a third top 10 player. He is also, despite his modest technicality, the #2 most used character among OrionRank top 150 and probably PGR. He, at last, earned the #1 spot at the top of OrionStats character points. No matter how thin his margins in these categories continue to be, it's hard to dispute that he's the king.
is the #1 most used character among Orion Top 150, the only one more than Joker. She was #3 for OrionStats Phase 2. She is pure fundamentals, with no sign of slowing down. Simply learning the matchup isn't a solution to Palutena to the extent that it is other characters, even high/top tier ones. We're not seeing people move on once they find a "real main", like they largely did with Lucina.
The "worst" we can say against Palutena is that Dabuz and Nairo have been performing as "merely" top 10 and not top 5. But Peach and ZSS do not have the broader statistical support backing them up.
is only the 7th most played character in that population, and only managed 11th on said stats. But he is the only character mained by 2 top 5 players! In some ways, that's more impressive than Joker's peak respresentation.
And personally, all else being equal,
I would expect Wario to have a naturally small player base. He's sort of hard in a weird way, takes a
particular mindset (Lucario does too, for comparison) and just as a character is not attractive to most people. Wouldn't you agree? So being played by fewer players and having less results doesn't surprise me, that's my baseline expectation. Yet in that relatively small sample size we have both Tweek and Glutonny's performance.
Isn't it far easier to believe that Wario is a top character, and just held back in broader adoption by his character design, than to believe that both Tweek
and Gluttony are flukes?
is the 5th most used character, tied with Lucina. But unlike Lucina, who is SUPER easy to pick up, Peach is highly technical. This means that not only should we be more impressed by the number of top players who choose to play Peach, but we should see Samsora as disproportionately enlightening of what the character is capable of and also not #3 by fluke.
I feel like the top 4 are
, where the exact order depends on the nuances of how you phrase the question.
and
are very popular characters, tied for 3rd in that top 150 usage. But they aren't the main of anyone higher than 18th or 25th on that list respectively. Their strong OrionStats points reflect their popularity, but no matter how many people play them, and no matter how many times top players have experiemented with them, they don't truely stick. Both are really solid characters, but at the absolute peak of play have weaknesses that those players have learned to deal with better than the aforementioned.
is in a similar boat, but even less popular in the top 150 and carried to #2 in the stats (#1 until the end!) by persistent regional level performance. You have to go all the way down to 62 on OrionRank to find a Wolf main! (Larry) There are
33 characters mained by players higher than that! 33! Is Wolf just the new Ness and Yoshi???
and
and
on the other hand
do have convincing top 10 representation, but
don't have the broader success of the above, even Wario! Yet none of these are historically unpopular or exotically difficult to pick up. I can buy them as top 10 atm, but can't regard them as breaking into that top 4.
Past those guys you end up looking at
, who have solid numbers in every category but no claim to the top. Maybe
and/or
gets to eat at their lunch table too.
/
have worse broad usage but higher peak placing, which imo we sort of expect. (like Wario)
But
is all theory, we can no longer base expectations off a single player's peak performance. We've had a year, and NO ONE else is doing anything remarkable with the character outside of Captain L if we are being generous. The days of thinking Pikachu is #1 or top 3, while the #1 Pikachu isn't top 10 and the #2 Pikachu player is barely top 100, are past. We have to accept that these are amazing players playing a perfectly ordinary and respectable high tier character, and nothing more.
We see comparable real-world representation and results with
! And I'm willing to agree that Pikachu's results are more impressive than that list due to the technicality of the character, but it's too much to leapfrog pika above the all the statistically-robust characters discussed previously.
I think the top 32 is rounded out by
and
/
/
. I think Terry is underexplored (not an unusual opinion) and will always be underrepresented relative to his potential. The other 3 suffer from a substitution effect, in which top players will continue to use alternatives--but Lucina's existence doesn't inherently makes Marth
worse, it just means no one plays him.
