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Very interesting data.
I've heard Joker's pretty bad online. At the very least, he's like Pika and Fox where he heavily appreciates offline's faster pace to extend his combos on reaction. That gets heavily nerfed online.
I'm no statistician, but when I look at the characters who have the highest usage rates, I see in them the best characters per rough archetype and/or have the most reliable gimmicks. For example, I think most agree that Bowser is not a top tier, but very few would disagree that he's the best of the superheavies. Ness back throw never goes out of style. Cloud is arguably the strongest swordsman in a purely netplay setting, and limit gives him the ability to just throw out even more incredibly safe kill moves.
Diddy scores surprisingly high for a character so notoriously considered bad on WiFi. Diddy requires enormous precision, and that's often a bad call on WiFi.
Win rate is heavily used for card game balance. For example when demon hunter launched in hearthstone it had a 60 percent win rate and had to be nerfed.
's the new in the sense that he's getting results everywhere: #1 on Orion rank, several players popping up in top 8s all over including Grayson, Wadi, Benny and the Jets, Epic Gaberial and less so 8bitman, he has a ridiculous kit that can steal stocks at 80% with offstage rotor arms but everyone's still saying "no he's not top tier but rather a gatekeeper". Then a ROB beats MKLeo and everyone starts saying he's on of the best in the game. Pika wishes he had those kinds of results.
is that he's in a similar vein to , and I have the opinion that I think Shulk is about the 6th best character in the game. He's not nearly as bad as his lack of results suggests and he's a top tier for sure, but he's not top 1 until someone picks up Pikachu and shows that their theorycrafting isn't just "with perfect play, Pika wins nearly every matchup". I was hoping Zackray was going to pick up Pika after ESAM's request (Especially because Zackray had a Pika at Squad Strike at Smash Summit 2), which may have been a showcase of what the character can really do, but that doesn't seem to have happened. their would have more people believing the character is top 10 if Zackray solo-mained the character, but because he uses Joker to cover ROBs bad matchups people don't think the character is good enough to be top 10 yet.
The meta in Japan is a bit more kind to ROB since there aren't many top level Pikachu mains or G&W mains (Zackray himself is probably one of the best G&Ws in Japan). Having probable -2 MUs to two top tiers is rough if you want to solo main a character. By no means impossible to win, but still quite rough.I also wonder for
The pics used in the list are top tier. : chef's kiss : (List itself is idk idc.)
A Like for a LOL, but Rob clearly has some very bad MUs, and characters with clearly bad MUs will always be vulnerable to counter-picking. Hence, never top-tier as I see the term used. AFAIK trying to counterpick a toptier instead of using your main is a dicey proposition at best. As we've discussed before, a low tier char discovering a great MU vs a top-tier doesn't usually cause the low tier to rise much; it just drags down the top-tier. And ROB has more than one bad MU of notable severity.
I've asked before why Shulk jumped to theoretical toptier and never received a definitive answer, so I'll propose one and people can yell at me when I get it wrong.My personal belief with
Disagree. MU charts are backward-looking; theorycraft is future-looking.
What are all these losing Pikachu matches everyone is looking back on? How did Das Koopa and all the results guys miss them all?
That's a good case however I disagree with it. The problem with this is that you're treating MUs as if they aren't theory. And they are. You can say ROB doesn't have a top 15 MU spread all you want but at the end of the day he's winning tournaments more than anyone else. Look at it scientifically: you have a hypothesis about ROB's placement, MUs etc so you gather data. You test your hypothesis. Smash isn't an exact science with factors like skill and popularity but you can still get a pretty good idea of how viable a character is by how well they do. The more evidence the stronger the case is and ROB has the most evidence of any character. There's no such thing as an air tight case in smash but I find it very unlikely that so much data is the product of environmental errors. If ROB's not a top 15 character than why does he win so much?
It seems likely that, like Riot does with League, they used win-rates to make early decisions about low-level play. This is surely what guided the early (2.0) nerfs to K. Rool, Inkling, ect, as well as the early Smash 4 nerfs to Little Mac, DDD, and Greninja.
My first thought: Kalos improves Mac's weakest attribute, his recovery, via both distance and mixup. Also, camping and "lame play" is harder than is given credit for.
Hard disagree. MUs are based on tool interactions, not tourney results or theory. If you want to get an idea of a particular MU, you don't watch tourney matches or online play and you don't chatter in forums. You take a friend to Training Mode and do drills. "I'm going to recover from this point via strategies like X, Y, or Z. You try to stop me using R, S, T or anything else you can think of. After a half-hour or so, we'll repeat with my character's extra resource burned from the start..." ..and so on, all night, in all the major situations, for just one MU. You first get a sense of what's possible, and then a sense of what's probable, and then a sense of counterplay, all the way up the yomi tree til it circles back to zero. You talk to other pairs that did the same just to ensure no one had a blindspot.
For some clarity on the list:
all placed in High Tier being placed in Top Tier, especially over the four characters listed being placed in Mid Tier
At this point in time? Yes, I would be inclined to agree. It takes a good amount of time (many years) to actually build decent MU charts, and with Ultimate we're not that close yet (and even after years people could still disagree. Good theorycrafting still trumps results, although bad theorycrafting does not. We also need to keep in mind solo-maining vs using a character as part of a roster: Many, but not all, ROB players use ROB alongside many other characters, thus avoiding some of this worst matchups. This could be an indication that ROB isn't as good as people think, although it could also just be that ROB players tend to prefer playing multiple characters.
Is ROB actually winning more tournaments than other characters? Or are several ROB players placing high to score points on OrionStats? Zackray uses a good amount of Joker too, no? As for data, ideally you'd test every MU (or every relevant MU) for every character with multiple players in order to get information on MU spread. This would, of course, be extremely time intensive. Instead you could look at tournament results, but there are so many factors involved (luck is huge, if you play a character with many losing MUs you'll really hope to run into easy MUs in your bracket). I also don't agree that he has "the most" evidence, in phase 1 he was #13, in phase 2 he was #7, in phase 3 he's #1, on OrionStats. Wolf was #1, #2, #2. Joker #22 (released late), #1, #5. Also, two very interesting cases for why results can be misleading: Shulk #25, #19, #23, Pikachu #24, #23, #29. An approach too focused on results would put Pikachu and Shulk outside of top 10, maybe even outside of top 15!
Could it be that the top ROB and G&W and Pikachu players all underestimate ROB in those MUs? Sure, that certainly happens with other characters and has happened in the past as well. Non-Japanese Zero Suit Samus players seem to underestimate her MU spread (if you look at Bankai, JeBB/Clovers, Juice, and Marss ZSS looks like a top 25 character at best). One difference is that non-ZSS MU charts don't seem to reflect that she loses hard to them, notable Wolf mains don't think they win +2 (some of them even think it's Even!), and ESAM thinks Pikachu is just slightly winning, Cosmos Inkling slightly winning. So with ZSS it does seem that most of the notable mains underestimate her, but the main difference is that mains of other characters don't seem to. In the case of ROB, both the mains and the opponents seem to think ROB loses hard. Are they all mistaken? It's not impossible, although perhaps a bit improbable.
? How much did he benefit from the 9.0.0 buffs? Wrath and Sonido seem very optimistic, KEN a bit less so. Personally, I think the character is very underrated, and has a strong case for being top 15, if not top 10.
This is basically my position. The daily sets of charts being pumped out, whatever that is called, is theory/opinion. (Regardless of what the label might have meant previously or aspires to be.) The usage of the term has sort of been bent, and in my case I've just sort of begrudgingly accepted the new semantics. (You are 100% right that it's the drive for "content" driving much of this editorialization.)
I agree with this. Currently, every MU chart is speculative to a high degree, and is based on a mix of theory, analysis, and experience. It is not pure theory, since it is guided by results and experience, but currently most people are leaning heavily on theory. This is understandable, given the huge amount of characters Ultimate has. Ultimate being better balanced also makes it trickier to make MU charts: In Brawl or Melee, it's a fairly safe assumption that a random top or high tier will beat a random mid tier. In Ultimate, it is fairly common for mid tiers to occasionally go even with top/high tiers, and some mid tiers might even slightly beat some high tiers!
-the biggest nerf from 4 was not being able to cancel Spin Dash to shield, correct? But from watching Sonic players this doesn't seem to be that big of a deal, he can still cancel with dair or find ways to play around it. In Smash 4, pretty much everyone agreed that Sonic was a top 10 character. I believe that, after buffs, he may yet again be a top tier character. I could be wrong and would be interested in hearing why. Sure, he can't cancel Spin Dash. In which other ways is he worse compared to 4? Is anyone up for making a comparison between Smash 4 Sonic and Ultimate Sonic?
Other notable nerfs include:So... Sonic
Very optimistic about this character. The masterful way KEN manuvered around hitboxes and forced his opponents to guess what options he was going to "commit" to looked very promising for this character's meta. Could very likely be a top tier imo when offline comes back and we see if the gap difference between Online and Offline Sonic is really that big.Oh, what do people here think about Sonic
Sonic as a character has such a unique gameplan that he basically obliterates characters, so although he has a decent top-tier mu spread, what really pushes him there is the fact that he obliterates so many mid, low, and high tiers.
GnW
Hit and Run and Campy are not mutually exclusive words, if anything they are correlative.
And in Diddy's case, it has item play and defensive tactics with the hit and run, and with Roy and Chrom a lot has to do with their range as well.
It's effective in every fighting game if the character has the tools to make the strategy actually work.
I may be arguing semantics but I'm going to disagree here.
Calling chrome, diddy kong and sonic all the same archetype is a bit of a stretch, don't ya think?Diddy and Roy / Chrom seem to have a similar hit and run playstyle, but more combo based than Sonic.
All are also high tier characters, so we could state this type of character is quite effective in Smash yeah.
No, that wasn't what am saying. I state all of them excel in hit and run, but are all very distinctive about their approach to it.
Maybe I'm again just an old man yelling at
, but tier lists aren't supposed to predict anything. They're just a summation of all MU charts, full stop. Hence they're backward-looking and a kind of report on the state of balance.
[Btw, this post doesn't just apply to you. Just want to share my general thoughts since this is the current topic of the thread.]Maybe I'm again just an old man yelling at
I realize enacting the formula of "old tier list + new patch notes = new tier list" is practically its own sport (and a fun one), but that isn't how they're actually made. So throwing statistics at a 'teir list' which was made that way seems like the long way around to saying what's evident in the definition.
Heck, in many cases one can't even say if adding 3 points to a char's low kick will affect any MUs at all, let alone a tier position. Esp. since, generally speaking, a tier isn't in any particular order, since the differences between same-tier chars is slight enough to be swamped by human factors.
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