Data based tier list for smash

[Zen Ocarina]

(I originally posted this in one of the general discussion boards on this forum, and was then told that I should try posting it in one of the competitive discussion boards instead. This is relevant to all of Smash, and not just Brawl, though.)


Hi everyone,

I am a 22-year old Marth main (for Melee and Brawl) 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.

 

[DeLux]

I would LOVE it if you ran a webapp for this and we could make it a reality.

If it takes off I'll sticky this thread.

 

[Zen Ocarina]

I can definitely make a webapp using randomly generated data. It'll take a while to get working, though (I'll have more time after I graduate from school, which should happen soon).

If someone who has access to real data could give that over to me, that would be awesome. For now, I only know that I can watch YouTube videos form old tournaments and record stuff manually.

 

[JB IV]

I support this.

Sounds like a really good idea, but I think that you would need some parameters for the data so that amateurs won't impact the tier list or at least not as heavily. For example, there could be a weighted multiplier dependent on what round the players were in or it could be limited to the second round of a tournament or after pools. You also probably shouldn't include data from matches before at least 2010 (2 years would be better but not all match-ups are played enough to have been impacted in only 2 years).

 

[Zen Ocarina]

That was a problem that I had considered. I decided that I would include all matches, including amateur matches, anyways, and let people filter the data themselves on the web app. So, they can see the tier rankings when it only considers matches within a certain date range and only with national/international tournaments. It will also be possible to have multiple formula.

 

[mimgrim]

The ranking's here on smashboards would be a good place to start probably. It doesn't have everything obviously, but I think it would at least be a good start.

http://smashboards.com/rankings/

 

[#HBC | Red Ryu]

I''d like to see something like this realized.

 

[KAP22714]

A results based match-up chart, which from what I gather directly translates into your tier list, has already been attempted. Take a look:

http://smashboards.com/threads/result-based-matchup-chart-1-1-13-30-6-13.338282/