Oh? So you think peach deserves the #1 spot despite having multiple bad matchups and having only 1 top tier player in the history of the game? The character ranking list is what you are looking for if you want a pure results based list. Hate to tell you, though, that fox will be #1 on that list.
A tier list is, by definiton, an ordered list of the characters based on how well they should do in a tournament. In other words, how effective they are at winning a tournament. This means that it will always be at least a partially subjective list.
How well a character
should do in tournament? The language of the definition itself suggests some sort of godlike game play that will never occur. In that sort of environment, people ignore the fact that Fox/Falco get the **** combo'd out of them every time they get touched, unlike Peach, Jiggs, and other characters who are much more resistant to 0-deaths.
There's also a ton of real-world logistics that constantly get ignored. The fact that Fox and Falco are super common, for example. Not only does this inflate their results (no wonder we have so many spacies in bracket; over half the tournament entrants main spacies...), but it means their opponent is more likely to know their character's matchup. In tournament, you usually don't have any idea how your opponent plays. If you play a spacie, you have to figure out how they play faster than with other characters because of how hard you get punished. Samus players are MUCH less likely to get upset in tournament because they have so many chances to learn from their opponent and adapt and fine tune their strategy. As an example, spacies mains have to learn a Falcon player's tech chase habits VERY quickly. If you tech roll away and learn that he likes guessing that option, too bad. Your adaption meant almost nothing because you only have 3 stocks left, and he might never do that same read again. Even if you mentally acknowledge and adapt to every single one of his tricks, it only takes <10 tricks for you to lose all 4 of your stocks. On average, when a Jiggs gets tricked 10 times, they still have 2 stocks left. How many "gimmicks" you need to win vs. certain characters is vastly important in tournament (especially with us playing best of 3, UGHH!), yet I've never heard anyone make these kind of compensations.
I'm not just crying over spacies being top tier, either. Other characters face similar situations in certain matchups. The spacies are decent enough on every stage in any matchup (except FD I guess). Some characters are extremely vulnerable to counterpicks to certain stages, certain matchups, or both. Right now, we have some vague hybrid of two tier lists. There are two general options:
1. Results-based tier list
We could even devise a system to make it perfectly objective. Take the tournament's number of entrants or pot value, and use it to assign a relative value to a character's placing. Personally, this list wouldn't impress me because it ignores the huge variance in the population of mains (~10% of the Jiggs population places top 5 every tournament...), and Melee's player pool just isn't deep enough for it to mean anything. Having two good players like PP and Mango labeled as Falco completely ignores the fact that Mango could just as easily use Fox and get about the same placing. Same with M2K using Sheik or Marth. If we had 5 people at the "top level" for every character, it'd be a different story. Overall, this list would just seem pointless to me because it would tell us what we already know: how characters tend to perform in tournaments.
2. Theory-based list
We all guesstimate human potential, and then Theory Bros. our ridiculous biases and ignorance of other characters. Only a handful of people are truly capable of speaking about top level game play with any sort of accuracy and understanding of what is actually going on, and even they have a lot of bias from their own experiences/preferences (Armada calling Fox-Peach and Jiggs-Peach 70:30, etc.). Obviously this option is pretty much the complete opposite of the first. In an effort to create a tier list that says more about the game, we overreach past results and objective forms of measurement into the realm of our imagination. Unfortunately, we're all human, so our theory sucks ****.
We combined these options, but all that does is create randomness in the criteria. Some people heavily value results, while others suggest they should only be guidance and reassurance for our theory. It really just ends up compounding the negative aspects of both so that no one even knows WTF is going on anymore. People just go off of how they feel, and the list is essentially meaningless.
