How close together will the tiers be?

[Dr. James Rustles]

To be honest, I think something as big as this shouldn't strictly be left to a poll, because it doesn't take into account the actual reasoning people have. It should just be analysed continuously after the game comes out, to work out all the nuances of the customisable elements.

Okay, you got me. I'm going to reply. It doesn't take into account the actual reasoning people have? I'm so lost. People will vote based entirely on their own reasons - what that reason is is irrelevant. Democracy wins.

And who's to say people who vote "No" automatically know what they are talking about?

Yeah, that was back when some people were still convinced that custom movesets would affect normal attacks, have sliders and were banned from With Friends too.

Casually disregarding this was the day of the April direct in which we learned it was special moves that were custom.

 

[ChikoLad]

Okay, you got me. I'm going to reply. It doesn't take into account the actual reasoning people have? I'm so lost. People will vote based entirely on their own reasons - what that reason is is irrelevant. Democracy wins.






Casually disregarding this was the day of the April direct in which we learned it was special moves that were custom.

No, I mean if tourney organisers went solely off of votes, that would be unwise, because people might think they want certain things for silly reasons, or make their votes while either being uninfomred or overly biased. And you're a hypocrite if you deny this, since you already went and said that people who think customisable elements should be allowed in tournaments "don't know the game well enough".

And let's not pretend democracy is a perfect system that we can just ride into the sunset with.

 

[Shiliski]

None of us are even qualified to have this discussion on custom stuff. I don't care if you're Ken/Isai/M2K/whoever. I don't care if you've run 1000 tournaments. None of us are qualified. The only ones who have a clue are the ones taking a "wait and see approach" because they at least know that they don't know.

What if custom movesets take all of 2 seconds to set up, assuming you've unlocked everything already? What if "maxed out" equipment is easy to obtain and it's just a matter of picking your favorite "perk"? What if it's actually incredibly time consuming to set up custom movesets because of bad UI issues? What if equipment is so woefully unbalanced that it causes degenerate gameplay?

TOs will figure things out, I'm sure, but they'll figure it out only after they have the real game in their hands and don't have to rely upon empty theorycrafting. We don't even know what the tier list is going to be, except that Zelda might be at the bottom and even that is debatable.

Back to the topic: I'm hoping that the tiers will be close, but we'll see.

 

[LancerStaff]

Just sayin', us competitive KIU players managed to create a stable metagame out of random drops. There's probably a fusion process for equipment.

Also, we weren't dumb and banned obviously degenerative things when it became obvious.

 

[Sensei]

Tiers always change as the metagame progresses. There may be huge gaps in the beginning when someone exploits a tactic or combo with certain characters or there may be small gaps when people are still figuring it out. My guess is that the gaps will be small in the beginning as the developers and testers would have already made tweaks to balance before release.

 

[Senario]

Not really. Ultra Street Fighter IV's tiers are so close together that it's basically just a formality.

That and Ultra is a combination of several iterations of Street fighter so it explains why everybody is good. You can literally pick which version of this character you want. Like, do you want vanilla ryu? Or Arcade edition Ryu?

A friend who loves street fighter explained it to me a while back, seems like a really good system for a traditional fighting game with as many iterations as street fighter.

 

[Moldy Clay]

I don't particularly follow tier lists outside of looking at them to see what the newest one is and going "Oh, well that's interesting". I play the characters that I feel comfortable playing, or have fun playing, and I don't go to professional tournaments (though this primarily rides on not knowing where they are in relation to me and the money involved).

In SSB64 I only played Link, with honorable mention going to Ness & Luigi (so, just C & D).
In Melee, I originally only played Link, but spread out to characters across all 4 tiers.
In Brawl, I played characters from literally every tier, except Meta Knight/SS.

Having said that, I'd like to hope for the game to be better balanced than Brawl, at the very least. Just looking at how all over the place Brawl's is with so many different sets, and looking at the horrendous match-up spreads for a lot of characters (especially the Zelda characters aside from Toon Link) is depressing. Not because it directly affects me, but because it affects tournaments and how they play out and what you end up watching, should you choose to.

Hopefully, it will be closer to Melee, where it's broken into only a few tiers, but I could see it being like Brawl's if only because of the amount of characters. The fact is, it will be a long time before we get a real grasp on the tiers. And if the game has like 50 characters, it will be a while before we even see some competitive players as a lot of them showing up. A lot of the early tournaments will likely be primarily veterans and a tiny handful of the newcomers, putting them near the top in initial lists. I mean, Brawl & Melee's tier lists were still being updated in 2013, and SSB64 was up until 2011.

At the very least, I do think that the characters themselves will be switched up a bit, or move around. Lots of characters getting buffs and debuffs, so I think, if nothing else, we'll be seeing some different characters that were previously in lower tiers in Brawl or Melee.

But I mean, obviously I have no idea.

 

[josh bones]

None of us are even qualified to have this discussion on custom stuff. I don't care if you're Ken/Isai/M2K/whoever. I don't care if you've run 1000 tournaments. None of us are qualified. The only ones who have a clue are the ones taking a "wait and see approach" because they at least know that they don't know.

What if custom movesets take all of 2 seconds to set up, assuming you've unlocked everything already? What if "maxed out" equipment is easy to obtain and it's just a matter of picking your favorite "perk"? What if it's actually incredibly time consuming to set up custom movesets because of bad UI issues? What if equipment is so woefully unbalanced that it causes degenerate gameplay?

TOs will figure things out, I'm sure, but they'll figure it out only after they have the real game in their hands and don't have to rely upon empty theorycrafting. We don't even know what the tier list is going to be, except that Zelda might be at the bottom and even that is debatable.

Back to the topic: I'm hoping that the tiers will be close, but we'll see.

Pretty sure it won't takie 2 seconds for custom movesets for one reason. Mindgames. Let's say you are fighting a luigi main, then you want to pick the best moves to counter it, and your opponent will do the same, you are missing important factors here.

 

[Donyoku]

Pretty sure it won't takie 2 seconds for custom movesets for one reason. Mindgames. Let's say you are fighting a luigi main, then you want to pick the best moves to counter it, and your opponent will do the same, you are missing important factors here.

That could be a reason to make custom movesets illegal, because that would require TO's to decide who makes their custom movesets first or what is allowed or banned. It could be a huge formality that would make tournaments take much longer. I would still like to see how it goes however, just see what will be incorporated.

 

[#HBC | Red Ryu]

In melee, fox has 3 other characters on this level tier wise, and around 8 characters that can win events that are commonly used.

In brawl, every tournament is

Why are you talking like fox is the messed up character?

Uhhh...in terms of what the smashboards rankings are recording Fox is actually more dominant than MK right now.

actually in terms of the overall cast.

I'm out of town for a weekend, and then a topic like this has to happen. Okay, let's set some stuff straight.

Let's just start by attacking the biggest myth in the community: that Melee is better balanced than Brawl. I could offer many logical arguments for why this isn't true that no one would believe so instead I'm going to rely on straight tournament results. Just check out smashboards rankings and go to the character sections for each. As of about 5:30 PM CST today, I did a little math with these numbers. Consider:

Brawl: 4169

Meta Knight: 16.77%
5% count: 4
2% count: 17
1% count: 29

Melee: 9380

Fox: 18.43%
5% count: 6
2% count: 12
1% count: 13

The top numbers for each game are the total number of points per game, a measure of the popularity of the game. Brawl is about 44.4% as popular as Melee, but the important point for our purposes is that this is the denominator for all viability calculations. Taking the total points a single character has divided by this number for the respective game will show the percentage of the metagame that character controls. Right off the bat, we see Meta Knight actually controls somewhat less of Brawl's metagame than Fox controls of Melee's which is very interesting. Melee's number of characters who control at least 5% of the metagame is 6 to Brawl's 4 so Melee has a larger top tier. However, the number of generally strong characters in Brawl (2% of the metagame) is more like 17 (almost 18! Peach was super close!) while Melee has only 12 which is a result that shows a nearly identical percentage of each game's total cast in the "high tier" strength level despite Brawl having a considerably larger cast. Then you look at the 1% level which is about the level of "any real viability at all", and Melee adds only one character to have just 13 characters and half the cast while Brawl shoots up to 29 characters which is 78.4% of the cast. There are a lot of interesting things that could be said here, but just saying that Brawl is worse balanced than Melee is flat out not reasonable. You either have to insist that the tournament results for these games are bogus and totally unreflective of how the games really are (a very dubious claim in two old games like this!) or admit that we have an interesting and nuanced situation here that honestly reflects pretty well on Brawl as a whole.

For smash 4, the main thing to take away from that is that Sakurai's prior efforts are actually pretty commendable, and his ability to balance has only been improving game to game given that he scaled up to Brawl's 37 character roster remarkably well. If nothing else, he doesn't have to redeem himself after the past game on the question of balance so there's no reason on that front to be skeptical of the balance of a further game.

Then we can look at our other main data point which is the impressions from everyone who has played. They've been pretty universally positive! Most people who had positive demo impressions (myself included) gushed over the balance. We had a few minor complaints on it (Zelda really did seem to suck), but for every complaint we consistently had high praise for so many other good decisions like how every other low tier who really needed help seemed to have gotten it (Yoshi, Bowser, Mario, Samus, Link). The negative impressions of the demo seem mostly focused on people disliking gameplay systems like dash mechanics or shield speeds or whatever; I haven't actually read a single one that said "it seemed like only a few characters were any good" or anything like it. People often focus on what HugS said, but as I understood it, he was just saying he was sure Samus was not the best character in the game, a statement most of the community agreed with him about and a statement that says absolutely nothing about the overall balance of the game or even about whether Samus is overall a good character. Likewise even when we buy into the arguments from credibility that suggest listening just to players with a strong tournament history to the exclusion of everyone else, the main impressions I remember seeing were zero's... which were pretty positive as I read them!

I truly just don't get why people would be down on this point at all; it seems to me like every way there is to look at this issue should lead us to be optimistic about the balance of the new game. We won't know for sure what it is until we actually play and for more than a year really, but all sights so far are really positive. I would say that, yes, we can and should trust Sakurai and the dev team to do a good job on balance; they've given us no reason to suspect they'll do anything less.

Only 50% of Melee's cast actually shows up to at least 1% representations.

Brawl has almost 80% of the cast show up to a 1 percentile. Melee is more rounded at the top, that is true while MK is the main outlier but a lot more of the cast in Brawl still shows up than in Melee ever since the rankings have been recorded.

 

[shapular]

I don't particularly follow tier lists outside of looking at them to see what the newest one is and going "Oh, well that's interesting". I play the characters that I feel comfortable playing, or have fun playing, and I don't go to professional tournaments (though this primarily rides on not knowing where they are in relation to me and the money involved).

In SSB64 I only played Link, with honorable mention going to Ness & Luigi (so, just C & D).
In Melee, I originally only played Link, but spread out to characters across all 4 tiers.
In Brawl, I played characters from literally every tier, except Meta Knight/SS.

Having said that, I'd like to hope for the game to be better balanced than Brawl, at the very least. Just looking at how all over the place Brawl's is with so many different sets, and looking at the horrendous match-up spreads for a lot of characters (especially the Zelda characters aside from Toon Link) is depressing. Not because it directly affects me, but because it affects tournaments and how they play out and what you end up watching, should you choose to.

Hopefully, it will be closer to Melee, where it's broken into only a few tiers, but I could see it being like Brawl's if only because of the amount of characters. The fact is, it will be a long time before we get a real grasp on the tiers. And if the game has like 50 characters, it will be a while before we even see some competitive players as a lot of them showing up. A lot of the early tournaments will likely be primarily veterans and a tiny handful of the newcomers, putting them near the top in initial lists. I mean, Brawl & Melee's tier lists were still being updated in 2013, and SSB64 was up until 2011.

At the very least, I do think that the characters themselves will be switched up a bit, or move around. Lots of characters getting buffs and debuffs, so I think, if nothing else, we'll be seeing some different characters that were previously in lower tiers in Brawl or Melee.

But I mean, obviously I have no idea.

Brawl's tiers are actually closer together than Melee's. See Ampharos's post in the other thread that Red Ryu quoted above. The number of tiers has nothing to do with it. Melee has typically had 5 or 6 tiers, and the one before the current one actually had eight. You could easily put gaps between Falco and Sheik, Peach and Falcon, and Yoshi and Zelda based on the point values each character has. Brawl having about one and a half times as many characters pretty much necessitates more tiers. Don't be surprised if Smash 4 has as many as eight tiers even if it's the most balanced Smash game yet.

 

[Shiliski]

Pretty sure it won't takie 2 seconds for custom movesets for one reason. Mindgames. Let's say you are fighting a luigi main, then you want to pick the best moves to counter it, and your opponent will do the same, you are missing important factors here.

No I'm not. I'm not missing anything. I have assumed nothing, therefore none of my assumptions could ever possibly be wrong. Since there are no assumptions. At all.

I have taken 0 shots and missed 0 of them.

I am not saying that they will take 2 seconds. I am saying that we don't know how long it will take. If you need to dig through 5 layers of menu to set up every single custom move then they're likely to be banned, but if it comes with a quick and easy interface then it can be as easy as picking your character. That's the kind of thing I was talking about.

Secondly, you're still assuming too much because there's no reason to believe that the custom movelist is set up and balanced in a consistent Rock Paper Scissors triangle. It could very well be that Move A is better than Moves B and C in literally every match up. In which case, the move selection will indeed take 2 seconds.

Even if it is not that bad, it's still very possible that Move A is better in this particular matchup than Move B or Move C could ever be, even if Move C is actually a really good move in some other character matchup. B might actually be completely useless, and thank God we aren't stuck with it.

In order for mindgames to even be a thing, you'd have to have some very carefully made balancing act where, say... if Fox picks move A, then Link is better off if he picks his Move B, but if Fox knows that Link is going to pick B, then Fox is better off choosing his Move C, and yet if Link chooses Move D over B, then Link has an advantage over a Fox with move C, but then Fox's Move A would trump Move D easily. You need at least 4 layers of Yomi to have a mindgame.

I don't expect to see that kind of thing in any matchup, let alone all of them. At best there might be 1 or 2 matchups that accidentally have that kind of setup. To create that on purpose would be a balancing nightmare and, let's face it: There's no reason to even create that kind of thing before the match. From a game design point of view, you want all Rock Paper Scissors decisions to happen during the match and not at the CSS. Even if that kind of counterpicking is unavoidable, you still want to minimize it a bit because you want players to actually get to playing the game instead of spending 5+ minutes worrying about what character and moveset they're going to choose.

The ideal situation would be the second one, where each matchup has its own ideal moveset for each character so people can actually use the full moveset system. For example, anti-projectile moves will be decent only against characters who actually use projectiles. However, it's also a likely to have a character whose Move A is better than B or C every single time.

 

[allison]

On custom movesets and tiers:

There's reason custom movesets would mess up tiers. Characters can be taken as a whole, regardless of customization. There's no need to base it off of some kind of "ideal" setup. The only "wrench in the works" people see is Palutena and Miis, but they aren't problematic either. Palutena's custom moves have different animations, but that's just window dressing; DK's Hurricane Punch may have the same animation as his default Nspec, but it behaves entirely different. As such, Palutena isn't really different from anyone else. Miis are trickier. I'm guessing all tournaments would have to have a "standard" Mii to avoid any weird inconsistencies. However, they can still work, and we can still have tiers.

 

[VhatDeHel]

I'm all for custom moves, but I think that custom equipment would be too....confusing. I think that stuff is awesome for variety in singleplayer and among friends, but it's too much stuff to keep track of when it comes to competition.

 

[Sparklepower]

Uhhh...in terms of what the smashboards rankings are recording Fox is actually more dominant than MK right now.

actually in terms of the overall cast.



Only 50% of Melee's cast actually shows up to at least 1% representations.

Brawl has almost 80% of the cast show up to a 1 percentile. Melee is more rounded at the top, that is true while MK is the main outlier but a lot more of the cast in Brawl still shows up than in Melee ever since the rankings have been recorded.

Does this account for tournaments that are MK banned?

It's also important to remember that tiers aren't based off of tournament results. Take a look at the matchup charts, the only matchup MK has that's considered even is Pikachu (interestingly) , while Fox has 3 even matchups (in a smaller roster). I would still say that there's a much larger gap between MK with the rest of the Brawl roster as opposed to Fox's gap to the rest of the Melee roster. Hell, there's been tier lists in the past where Fox wasn't number one, but Meta Knight has been considered in his own tier throughout the entirety of the Brawl metagame (except for the 2009 tier list from the smash back room).

I'll admit, I've seen some really compelling arguments on this board for Brawl's balance, but in general what I seem to find these arguments saying is "Brawl is well balanced if you ignore Meta Knight" ... but Meta Knight exists.

The tier lists I'm looking at for reference:
http://www.ssbwiki.com/Tier_list
http://www.ssbwiki.com/Character_matchup_(SSBM)
http://www.ssbwiki.com/Character_matchup_(SSBB)

 

[Rockaphin]

Sakurai's babies will be God Tier while the rest will loom towards the bottom except Marth. He'll be stuck in the middle, lost and lonely.

 

[mimgrim]

Does this account for tournaments that are MK banned?

It's also important to remember that tiers aren't based off of tournament results. Take a look at the matchup charts, the only matchup MK has that's considered even is Pikachu (interestingly) , while Fox has 3 even matchups (in a smaller roster). I would still say that there's a much larger gap between MK with the rest of the Brawl roster as opposed to Fox's gap to the rest of the Melee roster. Hell, there's been tier lists in the past where Fox wasn't number one, but Meta Knight has been considered in his own tier throughout the entirety of the Brawl metagame (except for the 2009 tier list from the smash back room).

I'll admit, I've seen some really compelling arguments on this board for Brawl's balance, but in general what I seem to find these arguments saying is "Brawl is well balanced if you ignore Meta Knight" ... but Meta Knight exists.

The tier lists I'm looking at for reference:
http://www.ssbwiki.com/Tier_list
http://www.ssbwiki.com/Character_matchup_(SSBM)
http://www.ssbwiki.com/Character_matchup_(SSBB)

FYI that Melee MU chart is seriously outdated. As it is currently, Melee doesn't have a MU chart, it just doesn't work out well. For example Marth is only even with Fox on FD, otherwise Fox has the advantage. There's a lot more wrong with it as well.