Necro'lic
Smash Ace
- Joined
- Aug 9, 2015
- Messages
- 654
Oh looky, another tier list discussion. HOW ORIGINAL!!!
This is more of a meta discussion though. I will say right now that I ain't trying to say tier lists don't matter because they do, and I already know this. This discussion is mostly on how we measure character viability via said tier lists.
My stance is that tier lists that are early in the games life, no matter who makes them, are pretty much worthless, because people have not mastered their characters or figured out how to optimally use them yet, so the best tier list early on will mostly have a bunch of uninformed opinions or judgments and thus the only functional one involves saying "well MAYBE this character is really good and this character is really bad".
Later on however, tier lists become much easier to make with more data. But what data do we base it off of? With a history of watching Dota competitively for over 7 years now, I was always under the impression that the best metric to go off of was wins and losses in tournaments. Pick rate was the second best, but sometimes didn't really matter because a hero in Dota could be picked many times and win no games and people would not say that said hero was good because they got picked a bunch. In fact, it usually proves the opposite.
However, with this long discussion I had with multiple people on the smashbros subreddit, apparently smash tier lists are not measured just on tournament wins and losses, but on "moveset viability", representation, and difficulty playing the character. I think going by these metrics are either redundant or unwise.
I guess I will go through each of them that I've heard...
Moveset viability:
This is a redundant metric to go off of, because if a fighter's moveset is viable, that necessarily will result in tournament wins at high level, while the opposite will result in losses. Since tournament wins and losses are a much more concrete and objective measurement, it is safe to say this particular metric is not needed, since it will manifest as tournament results anyway.
Difficulty:
This usually means how difficult the fighter is to play at a baseline high-level rate. Examples would be Ryu, Icies, Rosalina, and perhaps Pac-Man. These are all very high skill floor characters that require you knowing and executing and juggling through many things in their skillsets compared to lower skill floor characters like Fox, Ike, Chrom, and Lucina. I don't think we should go by this metric either, because it gives credence to a fighter simply being easy to succeed with as them being better characters, regardless of the degree of success you will actually get with them. Imagine a low skill floor character that is already learned because they were in the last game, like Lucina for example. If she ended up doing poorly in terms of results later on as people learn the intricacies of the game more and more, would we say her ease of use contributes to her viability to win a tournament despite evidence to the contrary? No. Thus, this is a non-factor in making a tier list.
Representation:
This is very similar to the difficulty one. I will just copy-paste the metaphor I gave on reddit here:
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Conclusion: I think tier lists should base character viability solely on high-level play results, be it wins or losses.
Feel free to counter with any points or against some of mine, but I'd rather have the most objective tier list we can get, and tournament results are the most objective measurement we have, while the others are rather subjective in nature.
This is more of a meta discussion though. I will say right now that I ain't trying to say tier lists don't matter because they do, and I already know this. This discussion is mostly on how we measure character viability via said tier lists.
My stance is that tier lists that are early in the games life, no matter who makes them, are pretty much worthless, because people have not mastered their characters or figured out how to optimally use them yet, so the best tier list early on will mostly have a bunch of uninformed opinions or judgments and thus the only functional one involves saying "well MAYBE this character is really good and this character is really bad".
Later on however, tier lists become much easier to make with more data. But what data do we base it off of? With a history of watching Dota competitively for over 7 years now, I was always under the impression that the best metric to go off of was wins and losses in tournaments. Pick rate was the second best, but sometimes didn't really matter because a hero in Dota could be picked many times and win no games and people would not say that said hero was good because they got picked a bunch. In fact, it usually proves the opposite.
However, with this long discussion I had with multiple people on the smashbros subreddit, apparently smash tier lists are not measured just on tournament wins and losses, but on "moveset viability", representation, and difficulty playing the character. I think going by these metrics are either redundant or unwise.
I guess I will go through each of them that I've heard...
Moveset viability:
This is a redundant metric to go off of, because if a fighter's moveset is viable, that necessarily will result in tournament wins at high level, while the opposite will result in losses. Since tournament wins and losses are a much more concrete and objective measurement, it is safe to say this particular metric is not needed, since it will manifest as tournament results anyway.
Difficulty:
This usually means how difficult the fighter is to play at a baseline high-level rate. Examples would be Ryu, Icies, Rosalina, and perhaps Pac-Man. These are all very high skill floor characters that require you knowing and executing and juggling through many things in their skillsets compared to lower skill floor characters like Fox, Ike, Chrom, and Lucina. I don't think we should go by this metric either, because it gives credence to a fighter simply being easy to succeed with as them being better characters, regardless of the degree of success you will actually get with them. Imagine a low skill floor character that is already learned because they were in the last game, like Lucina for example. If she ended up doing poorly in terms of results later on as people learn the intricacies of the game more and more, would we say her ease of use contributes to her viability to win a tournament despite evidence to the contrary? No. Thus, this is a non-factor in making a tier list.
Representation:
This is very similar to the difficulty one. I will just copy-paste the metaphor I gave on reddit here:
I think the metaphor speaks for itself. It may not be the best one ever, but it gets my point across well enough. Even if one person is representing a fighter, if that fighter gets massive results, even when people learn the matchup, is that supposed to be on the individual skill of the player or the fighter? I would say a combination of both, but the viability of said character is based on wins and losses, so even if it wasn't that player, theoretically another player just as good should do just as well. It's because of this that I see tier lists as viability of characters independent of individual skill, and thus this ends up being a moot point.Imagine someone picks a character and they are the only high-level player who plays said character. This player then ends up winning every single tournament they enter, yet no one else plays the character still. They continue winning with said character even though people understand the matchup (because they have to because they know this player will be a problem if they don't).
They are the only representation for that character. Is that character not considered to be good?
Conversely, let's take a bunch of high level players playing one character who never enters top 8, but they stick with them because they like the playstyle or whatever. They develop their metagame, and get more players into the fold, yet still never make top 8. Is that character not considered bad?
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Conclusion: I think tier lists should base character viability solely on high-level play results, be it wins or losses.
Feel free to counter with any points or against some of mine, but I'd rather have the most objective tier list we can get, and tournament results are the most objective measurement we have, while the others are rather subjective in nature.
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