Data-based Smash character rankings

[Zen Ocarina]

Hi everyone,

I am a 22-year old Marth main living around LA. I play smash pretty casually and have no intention of getting super good because I have other hobbies more important to me, but might show up to a tournament sometime for the hell of it. I follow the competitive scene like people follow sports.

Anyways, I have an idea for the Smash community: a automated way to rank the characters. Basically, right now, the character tier list is largely decided by voting, which is very subjective. To remove that, here's what I think is another way to make a tier list:

1. Put as many sets with two different characters as possible from tournaments into a database. What this means is that if Player1 beats Player2 2-1 using Fox while Player2 uses Falco, then the database will record 2 wins for Fox against Falco on the date of the tournament and 1 win for Falco against Fox on the date of the tournament.
2. For every matchup, compute the percentage that one character wins over another.
   
3. If CharacterA beats CharacterB 60% of the time or more, then CharacterA is said to have an advantage over CharacterB. If CharacterA wins more than 40% of the time, but less than 60% of the time, then the match is a tossup. Otherwise, CharacterB has an advantage over CharacterA.
4. Sort each playable character by the number of advantages, then by the number of tossups. The character with the most advantages is the "best character".

I think that it'd be interesting to see how the tier list evolves over time. We can use this database to show how far Jigglypuff rose the ranks when Mango joined the scene, for example, by comparing the number of advantages Jigglypuff has before and after Mango joined the scene.

I can write the webapp that will do this. But, before I begin working on the webapp, I have a couple questions that need to be answered.

1. Does such data exist? If so, is it easy to get?
2. Would the Smash community be open to collecting such data in future tournaments? It's a lot of work.

I don't mean to replace the current tier system. I just think that it'd be interesting to compare my idea to the current tier system. Neither the current tier system nor my idea are perfect.

 

[Lore]

Try the Smash tactical boards or the tier list threads; you'll get a better response that way.