A preamble on ROB
I recently managed to complete a monthly spread of results from April 2020 to the Present. Some areas were merged (April 2020-April 2021, May/June 2021, then single months onwards) but the gist was to show a map of how character progression went. Prior to this year, I just saved a text capture of the end of each month, but I forgot and had to do the legwork from the last year or so.
I'm doing a lot of stuff & I'm fairly busy but I thought I'd talk about ROB - especially since I think the character hasn't been super well communicated in terms of his results. ROB has consistently been #1 on high data entry sheets since early 2020. After talking with a fellow seeder, I believe the reason is simple - the character isn't dominant, he's simply popular, and this really highlights a need for the stuff I'm doing regarding deeper results analysis.
Interpreting results is a game that's really hard when your expectations are really challenged. I've commented this on various sites where I'm active, but Smash 4 was not much better than Brawl in terms of balancing, so the upper echelon stayed very stable. Once people picked up top tiers - even after nerfs - they found little reason to consider dropping them, because there was a stratification that was embedded with how truly awful the game's first year was in terms of character diversity.
Ultimate - which uses the same scaling for results - doesn't play as well. I may rework the points system to make more blatant flaws less able to bias results, but obvious ones that come to mind are scaling that makes two 33rds at a Category 5 equal to a first placing at a Category 4. This isn't necessarily bad - it just values repetition, which can be valuable at identifying meta threats, but Ultimate has introduced a new caveat that characters who are popular do not necessary equal frequent top 8ers or frequent top 4ers. This was NOT the case in Brawl/Sm4sh.
Point hauls advantage popular characters within a rough top 250-1 frame. This is still way more useful than raw data that hasn't been curated for removing junk, but it has serious flaws if we're talking about discounting characters or crediting them as #1.
Beyond point hauls, the most obvious discrepancy is the fact that most ROB players do not achieve top 8s despite their usage. Zackray is by far the best ROB - it's not even close - and yet he does not, and never has, solo mained the character. The tendency to craft an arsenal of good characters has been true for Zackray as far back as his beginnings, when he used Bayonetta/Corrin/Marth in Smash 4.
Riptide is a fun microcosm of ROB dominating point hauls but not getting that far, relatively speaking. He's really popular, and can garner 6-10% of point hauls at a major without Top 8ing an event. This is true of Riptide, as an example, where the ROB main that got the farthest is now banned FL player Epic_Gabriel. Not only will his banning substantially decline ROB's meta, it's already pretty flimsy as a #1. Now it's doomed to decline, as the character's best mains abroad have all contributed to this, while two won't as much - WaDi, who now may be more of a Mewtwo main, and the aforementioned banned Epic Gabriel.
Basically, there's a grain of salt to using these results I post to find a definitive #1, as it doesn't value peaks as much as it does repetition. While a common argument against Bayonetta was her difficulties winning majors, ROB is not a top 8 insurgent at most major events like Bayonetta was in 4. I don't think these two characters are largely being compared, fwiw, but it's worth noting ROB's upper caps are a lot softer.
I'll be going way more in depth on this soon, but I think the character has reached its limits at most major events, and that his steady #1 lead is fragile under the weight of other ways of results analysis.
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