ESAM - Let's Talk: Tier Lists

Tier lists. A subject that causes much debate over where characters should be placed, if one should exist at all, how they should be formed, and much else. Many efforts to devise tier lists have been made from EventHubs to the /r/smashbros monthly voted tier list with each project having various levels of success and failure. But just how important are they in the long run and how should we approach using them to select characters?

Pikachu main and Smash 4 player ESAM discusses just this with his latest Let's Talk video. He gives his professional opinions all about tier lists and discusses the different motivations for playing characters either who are the best or worse. Give it a watch and leave personal thoughts in the comments below.

 

Playing only to win ruins the fun. Who wants to go to a tournament where the entire thing consists of only Shieks and Rosalinas?

 

Anyone can make a tier list more legit than the one on Eventhubs.
They had Roy and Rosa for top 2 once. I wonder if they still do.
It's actually annoying.

 

Playing only to win ruins the fun. Who wants to go to a tournament where the entire thing consists of only Shieks and Rosalinas?

Bet nobody would. I know I wouldn't go. :/

 

Playing only to win ruins the fun. Who wants to go to a tournament where the entire thing consists of only Shieks and Rosalinas?

Someone who wants to make money.

That's how some people see that game. Some people don't care. It's weird how everyone seems to forget that.

 

Playing only to win ruins the fun. Who wants to go to a tournament where the entire thing consists of only Shieks and Rosalinas?

Why would you go to a TOURNAMENT and not expect people to play to win?

 

Playing only to win ruins the fun. Who wants to go to a tournament where the entire thing consists of only Shieks and Rosalinas?

Even if that did happen characters who sole purpose is to counter that character would start changing it up and than characters who counter that and this cycle is called the "top tier"

 

We have to think of smash bros as a spectator sport too. With less variety in character selection, it won't be as much fun to watch. I believe that this won't be a problem in the long run though as many characters seem viable (at the very least).

 

Playing only to win ruins the fun. Who wants to go to a tournament where the entire thing consists of only Shieks and Rosalinas?

Hate to tell you this, but playing to win is what competitive Smash is. You don't need to pick a top tier to do that though.

 

I agree with a lot of what ESAM said.

Tier lists inherently don't matter, it's the area they are around is what matter more if you are talking about how well you can do.

 

If you don't enjoy the meta and don't feel like it's changing, you're probably playing the wrong game.

 

Playing only to win ruins the fun. Who wants to go to a tournament where the entire thing consists of only Shieks and Rosalinas?

I don't know about you, but I've never been to a tourney that solely consisted of Sheiks and Rosas. On top of that, the whole fighting for fun vs fighting to win argument is completely up to opinion. A lot of people go to a tourney to win. And said people have fun playing to win. So yeah. Your opinion is kind of silly.

 

I don't know about you, but I've never been to a tourney that solely consisted of Sheiks and Rosas. On top of that, the whole fighting for fun vs fighting to win argument is completely up to opinion. A lot of people go to a tourney to win. And said people have fun playing to win. So yeah. Your opinion is kind of silly.

You guys completely misunderstood what I was saying. There's nothing wrong with playing to win. I love that! But, if people never try playing as new "mid-low tier" characters, the meta won't develop much...

 

Give the man who made this vid a ****ing medal.

 

You guys completely misunderstood what I was saying. There's nothing wrong with playing to win. I love that! But, if people never try playing as new "mid-low tier" characters, the meta won't develop much...

Ah. My mistake then. I'm a Sheik player who secondaried Samus for a while and now I second DK. Trust me when I say my scene has a decent amount of people who also pick mid to low tier characters as well. We have a really good Samus player over on our west side that can take games off of PR players. I think that the meta for low tier characters will eventually develop more. But right now there's a huge focus on the high to top current tier list, if you can even call it that. Just give it some time for the Sheik and Diddy and Rosa hype to wind down and some new patches to come out. Quite frankly, I think that the meta is developing at a healthy pace and that we'll see some nice buffs for low tiers in the future.

 

Low tier warrior!
{Hiatus}

 

Going to play Sonic forever whatever his tier placement is





Got lucky this time though :^]

 

ESAM has some videos on tier list placings. Of course these are his opinions and everybody has their own, but in case you're interested:

 

I have to agree with esam on his input on tiers

There's the Tournament viable characters

There's the Viable character's who require a secondary

And then there's the unviable.

Hate to tell you this, but playing to win is what competitive Smash is. You don't need to pick a top tier to do that though.

Well to be frank it's basically every competitive game period. People are always gonna choose the best character's for tournaments no matter how balanced the game maybe.

 

"Shouldn't be using her."
This is where I stopped watching this video. It's stuff like this that really pisses me off.
Use who you want to use, period. -_-

 

To be clear, I would not take into consideration clear cut meta where unviable means they can never be used.

Metas change and with patches it is more likely to make some shifts in what happens.

If you also like a character and want to develop them no matter what, go for it. It's better for everyone of you aim high even if people call what you play bad or not.

 

Playing only to win ruins the fun. Who wants to go to a tournament where the entire thing consists of only Shieks and Rosalinas?

Well, the tournament would be bland only because the entirety of it is 1 or 2 characters, not because it's Sheik and Rosalina.

Are you saying 20XX would be boring?
Also, tournaments are meant to win. That's something Sheik and Rosa are good at, and you can't call them "boring" for that.

 

It's kind of hard to set up an actual tier list when some of the high ranking fighters have bad match-ups against the lower ranking fighters.

For an example, in Brawl, although Fox is ranked higher than Sheik, he has a bad match-up against her.

Similarly, in Smash 4, despite how high ranking Rosalina is, Meta Knight and Wario have been known to mess her up, regardless of whether or not customizations are used, and even Roy has a small advantage against her under default conditions. Of course, this is all based on the score inputs that I've recorded, along with the discussions that I've seen for Rosalina's meta.

 

I just gotta say I agree with the guy in the video. It's always been the way I look at tier lists in any game. Though, I will always play the character I love the most because
#1. So many patches jumbling up the tier lists
#2. My mains are just characters I love the most. Whether it's the character itself (like Meta Knight) or it's gameplay (like Link), it gives me motivation to keep playing smash. I'm not going to play a character I hate just because it's higher tier like if Wario or Jigglypuff became SSS tier somehow. Besides, it gets me excited to play against someone using a "superior" character and I have to use my skills to beat them in any game. Right now, I don't have a main or secondary that is A rank in the latest tier list (though Fox is a tertiary character for me in SSB4).
#3. I know I'm better than anyone in my area anyways. Not sure how well I'd do in a tournament though.



And a few other minor reasons as well.
I gotta say though, matchups are definitely a thing to look into. I kinda learned how drastic of a change that can be when I was just practicing with Fox in Brawl. Normally all the computers are rather easy so I don't really try that hard, but when I had to fight Sheik, it caught me way off guard how tough she was to fight with fox. I never have problems with Sheik with any other character too. So that was interesting. Made me feel a little better when I saw the matchup chart on ssbwiki say that fox has a -3 handicap against Sheik though.



Do we have any sort of matchup chart for SSB4 yet?

 

I just gotta say I agree with the guy in the video. It's always been the way I look at tier lists in any game. Though, I will always play the character I love the most because
#1. So many patches jumbling up the tier lists
#2. My mains are just characters I love the most. Whether it's the character itself (like Meta Knight) or it's gameplay (like Link), it gives me motivation to keep playing smash. I'm not going to play a character I hate just because it's higher tier like if Wario or Jigglypuff became SSS tier somehow. Besides, it gets me excited to play against someone using a "superior" character and I have to use my skills to beat them in any game. Right now, I don't have a main or secondary that is A rank in the latest tier list (though Fox is a tertiary character for me in SSB4).
#3. I know I'm better than anyone in my area anyways. Not sure how well I'd do in a tournament though.



And a few other minor reasons as well.
I gotta say though, matchups are definitely a thing to look into. I kinda learned how drastic of a change that can be when I was just practicing with Fox in Brawl. Normally all the computers are rather easy so I don't really try that hard, but when I had to fight Sheik, it caught me way off guard how tough she was to fight with fox. I never have problems with Sheik with any other character too. So that was interesting. Made me feel a little better when I saw the matchup chart on ssbwiki say that fox has a -3 handicap against Sheik though.



Do we have any sort of matchup chart for SSB4 yet?

There's way too many characters for a matchup chart tbh. Tier lists are more feasible.

 

"Silly Bowser, teirs are for queers!"

 

I think it's safe to say we need to rethink how we organize our tier lists. Nowadays, people just go, "oh, this character can combo faster/has earlier kill techs." We get so fed up on the idea that this is all one needs in a character to succeed that we forget the fundamental idea behind the roster as a whole: every character is unique. Every character has a different flavor, a completely different playstyle. Characters like Shiek or ZSS rely on those things to be good characters, but most other characters go for something completely different. We can't judge based on such simple factors alone on a roster as diverse as this one. Some characters can pull certain things that a Shiek player in the meta would never think to even try.

Instead of saying "this character is faster and therefore better" or "combo centric characters are always the best," we need to scratch that and look at how they play in general. As a Robin main, I'm one-hundred percent certain that he's one of the most underrated characters in the game. When you look at things like the power of his moves, his ground speed, his attack speed and how well he can string combos, the normal things one looks at when judging where characters fit on a tier list, you think he's horrible. Not because he is, but because you looked only at areas that aren't his specialty. But when you bare in mind how those moves work together, how he can approach and deal damage (which he sure as hell can,) and overall the virtues of what makes a good Robin player good, you find he is in fact a force to be reckoned with. I don't think he's that out of place on this list. But there are others I'm pretty damned certain don't belong where they are, and were put there likely because nobody took all they had into consideration.

For the most part though, I think this is the best tier list this game has had so far. It still has issues, some of them big ones, but it does it's job well enough. 7/10.

 

Tier lists are incredibly flawed. I have made many comments on this before, but I do want to say this: Smash 4 has an egalitarian balance and the only difference between victors is skill level, characters are =. If you do not accept this, then you are simply caught in the old dogma of previous games where it is more true and have obviously not thought enough and done enough exploration of the characters. Furthermore, all characters are 100% viable options. Learn them to their fullest and apply a mastery of universal smashsonian skills and you will have victory.

 

I don't see Mewtwo on here.

 

Tier lists are incredibly flawed. I have made many comments on this before, but I do want to say this: Smash 4 has an egalitarian balance and the only difference between victors is skill level, characters are =. If you do not accept this, then you are simply caught in the old dogma of previous games where it is more true and have obviously not thought enough and done enough exploration of the characters. Furthermore, all characters are 100% viable options. Learn them to their fullest and apply a mastery of universal smashsonian skills and you will have victory.

A. You're an idiot if you think Zelda is as good as shiek.

B. If you're a dev and you want your game to have the kind of evolving meta like smash, you DO NOT want perfect balance. Extra credits explained this beautifully.

C. Don't use big words to make yourself sound smarter. You make yourself look pretentious and probably made a few grammar mistakes in the process.

 

Playing only to win ruins the fun. Who wants to go to a tournament where the entire thing consists of only Shieks and Rosalinas?

Personally I think that winning is the most fun part of the whole gaming experience. So for me playing to win is more fun than playing to have fun.
But you know that's just me.

 

Tier lists are incredibly flawed. I have made many comments on this before, but I do want to say this: Smash 4 has an egalitarian balance and the only difference between victors is skill level, characters are =. If you do not accept this, then you are simply caught in the old dogma of previous games where it is more true and have obviously not thought enough and done enough exploration of the characters. Furthermore, all characters are 100% viable options. Learn them to their fullest and apply a mastery of universal smashsonian skills and you will have victory.

So you're basically saying that tiers don exit?

I knew this would be the argument in this thread when i saw it on the front page. Tiers don exit believers are more common in smash bros than any other fighting game for some reason, no idea why though.

Anyway your argument is flawed dude. If a player is better than the other, then they can win with a low tier. It's easy to beat a newb fox in melee with pichu for example, even 4 stock (Especially on FD with the chaingrab + Usmash)

But if the players are equal skill.... then tiers matter. Like ... a lot. For obvious reasons that don't warrant an explanation.

Tiers aren't based off who top players THINK is the best but rather which characters WIN the tournaments at the highest win %.

Still, Tires don exit still persists to this day. Lame.

 

Tier lists are incredibly flawed. I have made many comments on this before, but I do want to say this: Smash 4 has an egalitarian balance and the only difference between victors is skill level, characters are =. If you do not accept this, then you are simply caught in the old dogma of previous games where it is more true and have obviously not thought enough and done enough exploration of the characters. Furthermore, all characters are 100% viable options. Learn them to their fullest and apply a mastery of universal smashsonian skills and you will have victory.

"Smash 4 has an egalitarian balance"
Because, you know, Sakurai made his game with the ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité. That's what egalitarian means.

"...and have obviously not thought enough and done enough exploration..."
Now that's a pretty big conveyance issue, 'cause you just used "enough" as a noun and then as an adjective, and it makes it look like you're trying to say that I need to think enough exploration. Bluh.

"universal smashsonian skills"
That is not a word. That is a museum combined with a videogame. Also, they wouldn't be "universal" because they apply specifically to Smash 4, not to Smash as a whole.

0/10 would not read again.

 

Yes! Megaman is great!

 

A. You're an idiot if you think Zelda is as good as shiek.

B. If you're a dev and you want your game to have the kind of evolving meta like smash, you DO NOT want perfect balance. Extra credits explained this beautifully.

C. Don't use big words to make yourself sound smarter. You make yourself look pretentious and probably made a few grammar mistakes in the process.

A. Zelda is as good as Shiek, they are just different. Thanks for surmizing my intelligence for me. I'll be courteous and kind by not commenting on yours.
B. While extra credits has proposed some good ideas that was (obviously) a flawed one. More options pleases more players and provides much more variety for spectators which increases the entertainment value. I encourage you to think for yourself next time.
C. I am appreciative of your concerns about my lexicon and syntax, but if I know the words I will use them. I am not pretentious, but rather just intellectual.
D. *BONUS* I am such an efficent person that I decided I would not waste my time arguing with inexperienced thinkers. I will make no further replies and encourage you to do the same. Have a swell day.

"Smash 4 has an egalitarian balance"
Because, you know, Sakurai made his game with the ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité. That's what egalitarian means.

"...and have obviously not thought enough and done enough exploration..."
Now that's a pretty big conveyance issue, 'cause you just used "enough" as a noun and then as an adjective, and it makes it look like you're trying to say that I need to think enough exploration. Bluh.

"universal smashsonian skills"
That is not a word. That is a museum combined with a videogame. Also, they wouldn't be "universal" because they apply specifically to Smash 4, not to Smash as a whole.

0/10 would not read again.

Egalitarian means equal. Thanks for pointing out a syntax error. As a smashologist, I crafted the adjective smashsonian to describe things that are smash-esque. I would hate to deprive you of your essay writing, so thank you and have a nice day.

 

ESAM has some videos on tier list placings. Of course these are his opinions and everybody has their own, but in case you're interested:

But these fufill what he just said. Most of the top 20 are the "clearly viable" characters and the bottom 11 are the "clearly unviable" characters.
Still baffled why ESAM says Samus is in the "kinda viable" area and not the "unviable" area.

 

So you're basically saying that tiers don exit?

I knew this would be the argument in this thread when i saw it on the front page. Tiers don exit believers are more common in smash bros than any other fighting game for some reason, no idea why though.

Anyway your argument is flawed dude. If a player is better than the other, then they can win with a low tier. It's easy to beat a newb fox in melee with pichu for example, even 4 stock (Especially on FD with the chaingrab + Usmash)

But if the players are equal skill.... then tiers matter. Like ... a lot. For obvious reasons that don't warrant an explanation.

Tiers aren't based off who top players THINK is the best but rather which characters WIN the tournaments at the highest win %.

Still, Tires don exit still persists to this day. Lame.

Then why is there a debate about who is where. Someone should compile the data and figure it out. If it is derivrd from, then it is flawed as they are equal. If its derived from stats then its useless. I am not debating this any further. Have a nice day.

 

Then why is there a debate about who is where. Someone should compile the data and figure it out. If it is derivrd from, then it is flawed as they are equal. If its derived from stats then its useless. I am not debating this any further. Have a nice day.

Your argument assumes they are equal, which they are not. Please explain how Zelda and shiek are are equal in usability.

 

A. Zelda is as good as Shiek, they are just different. Thanks for surmizing my intelligence for me. I'll be courteous and kind by not commenting on yours.
B. While extra credits has proposed some good ideas that was (obviously) a flawed one. More options pleases more players and provides much more variety for spectators which increases the entertainment value. I encourage you to think for yourself next time.
C. I am appreciative of your concerns about my lexicon and syntax, but if I know the words I will use them. I am not pretentious, but rather just intellectual.
D. *BONUS* I am such an efficent person that I decided I would not waste my time arguing with inexperienced thinkers. I will make no further replies and encourage you to do the same. Have a swell day.

"Not pretentious"
"Inexperienced thinkers"
Kek
Also making an extra point to say that you won't be responding to people makes you LESS efficient because you could just, I don't know, not respond to people. That's also ignoring the fact you responded to people twice. Big words don't make you an intellectual, being intelligent makes you one.

 

Why is Duck Hunt so low? Tier lists are nothing but superstition. Any character can beat any other character if the player skills is good enough. Characters do not make skill or victory. Players do.