Official MBR 2010 NTSC Tier List

[Varist]

If only I somehow knew that you were talking not about the current metagame, but rather a hypothetical future metagame
Gotta brush up on my mind reading, I s'pose

"However, I believe that as the opponent's proficiency with their faster character grows, Ganon will find himself too slow to beat out the faster character often enough in the neutral game to mathematically keep up in punishment.

In sum, because I believe faster characters' play ceiling is higher than slower characters' ceilings, over time proficiently-used fast characters will outclass slow characters severely."

If you're going to walk into a discussion without having read the entirety of it, be prepared to look stupid. Some advice. Looking stupid isn't always a bad thing, sometimes it helps you learn.

 

[.Ðempt]

If I were aggravated I would not be posting in the thread anymore. They may think I am not giving enough credit to the mental game, but that is an assumption that failed to take into account that all of my predictions were based on the future. Do I believe that the mental game is less important than character attributes? No, I actually do not think that.

But do I believe that as players using fast characters get better, the mental game will become shallower for the slower character? Yes, because they have limited options versus the faster character. For the sake of example, if you have 15 options and my character only has 5, mathematically the neutral game is an uphill battle for the slow character. Common sense would suggest the slow character will lose it more than 50% of the time. The gray area arises when you consider how much the slower character really needs to win the neutral game to win the entire battle. That is why we cannot just rank characters by their speed.


Now you should also understand why Bones founding his argument on "well Fox and Falcon are the fastest characters but they're not the best so that means you must be wrong" seems so ******** to me. At least, I hope you understand. If you don't, that's okay.

Well........that honestly just sounds like common sense. >_<

I agree speed is a huge factor. It's why I play the way I do. But if you're still recognizing the fact that mindgames and the like are also a huge factor.....then why is there even an argument....lol.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

Because the obvious interpretation of that was "future metagame where the current skill ceiling is surpassed" rather than just "improving with your character and getting closer to the current skill ceiling"
Re-read the sentence and tell me that the second interpretation doesn't make more sense, or at least as much sense

Yes, a Fox and Ganon of equal skill that play each other will result in the Ganon winning. This is not new.
And yes, perhaps in the future the gap between Fox and Ganon will increase.
However, at the moment, a Ganon can beat a slightly less skilled Fox, and that is because of the importance that mind games have on the meta.

Which is why I said that you're undervaluing mind games when you put Ganon as low as you do, how am I wrong?

 

[Varist]

If only I somehow knew that you were talking not about the current metagame, but rather a hypothetical future metagame
Gotta brush up on my mind reading, I s'pose

All you said in that paragraph is "fast characters can out-smart slow characters too, and they are better at it"
which I do not disagree with
so again, point out how I am wrong

I never said your post was wrong. I specifically clarified at the end of it that I did not say your post was wrong.

I said you missed the point, and that is true. I never said that the premise you included in your post was wrong.

Do not force arguments that never existed.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

But you are wrong and I am right

We're done here

don't even pretend I took that out of context

 

[.Ðempt]

I think....

....we need to go to bed.

 

[Varist]

Well........that honestly just sounds like common sense. >_<

I agree speed is a huge factor. It's why I play the way I do. But if you're still recognizing the fact that mindgames and the like are also a huge factor.....then why is there even an argument....lol.

I know, I have no idea why people are arguing with me. They know I'm right but they're trying to distort what I said into something that is obviously wrong so that they can argue against thin air.

Because the obvious interpretation of that was "future metagame where the current skill ceiling is surpassed" rather than just "improving with your character and getting closer to the current skill ceiling"
Re-read the sentence and tell me that the second interpretation doesn't make more sense, or at least as much sense

Yes, a Fox and Ganon of equal skill that play each other will result in the Ganon winning. This is not new.
And yes, perhaps in the future the gap between Fox and Ganon will increase.
However, at the moment, a Ganon can beat a slightly less skilled Fox, and that is because of the importance that mind games have on the meta.

Which is why I said that you're undervaluing mind games when you put Ganon as low as you do, how am I wrong?

You are wrong because you said that I undervalue mind games. I do not undervalue mind games. That is why you are wrong. Please do not tell me what I think because I'm sure I know what I think better than you.

You missed the point again about what I quoted. I never said I was talking about a hypothetical future metagame, you said that. Don't you remember? It was in the last 10 minutes.

 

[Varist]

We're done here

don't even pretend I took that out of context

Instances of the word "you" are not directed at you specifically Grim Tuesday, so you shouldn't feel attacked. I just happened to write that after responding to your point and they are directed at anyone who disagrees with me for a reason I don't see merit in."

I'm not pretending. You did take it out of context. Are we done now? I actually am going to bed.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

all of my predictions were based on the future.

I never said I was talking about a hypothetical future metagame

what the **** are you even playing at kid I can do this all day

 

[Varist]

what the **** are you even playing at kid I can do this all day

Do you not understand the difference between a prediction and an argument?

I can't do this all day, please take your pants off of your head before you stumble into whatever thread you're going to next.

Good night folks

 

[Grim Tuesday]

I'm not pretending. You did take it out of context. Are we done now? I actually am going to bed.

cute that you can edit your post and then pass it off as me selectively ignoring your addition lol

the most infuriating people to have a discussion with are the ones who are more interested in playing games of semantics and showing everyone how right they are than actually talking about the game

I gave my argument for why I believe you undervalue mind-games, your response was just "you're wrong". Well obviously I'm wrong in your opinion or we wouldn't have a disagreement
if you're just going to say the same thing over and over as if it is gospel, instead of putting new information on the table and trying to convince people that you're right, there is nowhere to go from here

there is no adjudicator for you to impress here, dude

 

[.Ðempt]

Yes, a Fox and Ganon of equal skill that play each other will result in the Ganon winning. This is not new.

Wait....wut

 

[Grim Tuesday]

^lol
*fox winning

 

[.Ðempt]

NO YOU ALREADY SAID IT. NO TAKEBACKS.

 

[-ShadowPhoenix-]

we can all agree that ganon is horrible, right?

 

[Upke]

Not as horrible as Zelda.

 

[Bones0]

If you're going to walk into a discussion without having read the entirety of it, be prepared to look stupid. Some advice. Looking stupid isn't always a bad thing, sometimes it helps you learn.

It's hilariously ironic that this is coming from the guy that stopped reading my post after the first sentence (because apparently you can strawman someone in one sentence lol).

 

[Blother]

Just out of curiosity, is this what I should expect when I visit this specific thread? I was kind of hoping to see discussion about characters in the current metagame so I can get a feel of what to expect if I choose to pursue a competitive level of play, but I don't think I'm getting much out of this.

I guess pointless arguments are somewhat entertaining...

 

[.Ðempt]

Honestly, videos are a better place to start. They're going to actually show you things, visually, whereas we can only explain things in text.

Also, it only takes two sentences to strawman someone. One sentence from the person being strawman'd, and the other from the opposing side.

 

[Divinokage]

If I were aggravated I would not be posting in the thread anymore. They may think I am not giving enough credit to the mental game, but that is an assumption that failed to take into account that all of my predictions were based on the future.

Confirmed for year 20xx.

But imo even in 5 years the matchups won't change that much anymore because playing even faster than we currently are requires sooo much precision it's ********. If anything it would be the more obscure characters like Yoshi that will surprise people.

The matchup for example Fox/Ganon, Fox won't be able to Nair any faster or whichever aerial. There's always gonna be a counter to the one move he throws, if he adapts then I can also adapt. I agree there are really bad positions for Ganon, much worse than I can make Fox be in a bad position, slowly but surely I'm figuring it out of how to counter all the possibilities. If let's say I'm close to the ledge and then Fox Nairs in a way where I can't jab or uair on reaction to counter it then I thought of doing Upwards Ftilt which should work. So to say that there are answers for everything, you just need to take your time and focus a lot.. lol.

If anything it's the positioning and movement where Ganon is more limited than Fox, if I actually punished Fox properly every time Ganon would win all the matchups.. like I said he only needs 2 reads to kill any character when you do it right. Edgeguarding isn't that hard either, he covers the stage extremely well.

 

[Blother]

Honestly, videos are a better place to start. They're going to actually show you things, visually, whereas we can only explain things in text.

Also, it only takes two sentences to strawman someone. One sentence from the person being strawman'd, and the other from the opposing side.

I do watch a lot of videos, but videos don't have discussion on the characters. I want to know what the player playing the character is thinking rather than watching only the action they choose to perform. I would prefer to watch streams because I can ask questions and watch a continuous stream of gameplay between two (or a few) players. Sadly, these aren't as common as I would like them to be, so my only other (online) option is to follow discussions between characters.

On a side note regarding streams, I believe that melee needs to go in the direction of streaming more casual play if it wants to continue to grow. Assuming you guys want to grow. For all the people that watch the documentary on competitive smash (which was awesome) they will want to find other ways to watch gameplay. The issue is that there may be a long period between the time they watch the documentary and the next streamed tournament. Those people can spend time watching videos and playing a bit in between, but this could cause them to lose interest. Streams are entertaining and, I would argue, are the best tools for learning (provided the person/people streaming are willing to talk about their play with viewers).

 

[-ShadowPhoenix-]

Character discussion is probably a better place to look for good information.

 

[Habefiet]

Just out of curiosity, is this what I should expect when I visit this specific thread? I was kind of hoping to see discussion about characters in the current metagame so I can get a feel of what to expect if I choose to pursue a competitive level of play, but I don't think I'm getting much out of this.

I guess pointless arguments are somewhat entertaining...

This thread is useless. I highly recommend going to the character specific threads, where (for more common characters, anyway) there tend to be detailed excellent discussions of specific matchups and broad concepts on a fairly regular basis. For example, a while ago there was a much more engrossing discussion of Marth's neutral game in the main Marth thread than anything you saw in the last couple pages.

Melee Discussion is a barren wasteland of scum and villainy and this thread is arguably the chief offender. All you'll see are the same tired broad generalizations. On the rare occasion that a top player tries to spark an interesting discussion, responses tend to be limited at best and discussion dies off quickly. You see it happening right now. Kage's actually attempting to have a decent discussion of Ganon's capabilities versus faster characters and instead the rest of us all suck our own ****s until the cows come home. No one's mind ever changes. No one leaves having learned anything. Just bitter intractable people being bitter and intractable.

Part of the problem is that you have people in this thread talking about things that they really know nothing about. I for one am not even going to attempt to engage in Fox v. Ganon discussions because I'm a low level player AND have no experience of any kind in the MU AND have only basic viewing experience from which to form complex opinions. But 90% of this thread consists of someone saying "Fox wins by a lot cuz he so fast" and the ensuing cacophony.

I generally just avoid this thread entirely, this post and the one I made yesterday or whenever are the first two posts I've made in this thread in a very, very long time. If you're looking for constructive conversation this isn't the place to find it. The character discussion threads are infinitely more informative, interesting, and focused.

EDIT: That's not to say that the opinions and thoughts provided by all low level players are inherently bad, just that this thread is a disaster lol

 

[Blother]

I don't think all character discussion threads are of equal activity across the board. The Peach board, who I have been focusing on, seems to be pretty barren, and I am sure there are many other character boards that are the same way. Maybe I should give it more time since I haven't been frequenting this site for too long (starting reading weeks before I joined though). Also, can I expect the information that is already discussed/stickied to be relevant to the current metagame? There seems to be a lot of threads that are very old and don't see activity anymore, and I am unsure if the information is still useful or if I need to find something more up to date.

 

[Shiny Mewtwo aka Jigglysir]

No one's mind ever changes. No one leaves having learned anything. Just bitter intractable people being bitter and intractable.

Ladies an Gentlemen, the internet!

More specifically, internet forums!

 

[Ripple]

We'd have a much better discussion if we were in the 2013 tier list thread

 

[Shiny Mewtwo aka Jigglysir]

We'd have a much better discussion if we were in the 2013 tier list thread

No.

No we wouldn't.

 

[.Ðempt]

Character discussion is a good place to start. Just reading through some of the threads can be helpful (although not all of them are very......insightful).

Talking with other smashers helped me a lot when I was starting out. Especially face to face. But that may just be a preference to reading it.

 

[FourStar]

After skimming through the last three pages of stuff this really shows why tier lists don't matter, but a new character matchup chart would be really good right now.

For example, (i'm bias because i play pika) Pikachu vs Marth is definately not +2 marth anymore.Yes he still wins the matchup because Pikachu is light and easy to kill, but Marth is also kind of light and easy to gimp making the matchup very close. I'd say its 55:45 Marth.

MU's have changed a lot since the last MU chart. Especially with the breakouts of players using underrated characters such as Axe with Pikachu, aMSa with Yoshi, and even Armada with Young Link (only one MU though lol).

 

[Bones0]

Matchups are way too flexible for a matchup chart to ever be worth creating. There's already a laughable number of matchups within the 60-40 range which ends up being negligible in practice. Melee isn't like other games where characters frequently hard counter each other.

 

[BTmoney]

After skimming through the last three pages of stuff this really shows why tier lists don't matter, but a new character matchup chart would be really good right now.

If a MU chart exists then tiers exist. To take it a step further if not all MUs are even then tiers exists

chart -> tiers, but not necessarily tiers -> chart

 

[Blother]

Have tiers ever be made differently from the 2010 or 2013 style? Considering how everyone seems to claim that at the highest level of play the better characters are all about even, why does there need to be a numerical list of characters? Do we really need to say that Fox is some quantitative value better than Falco? I would like to see tier list where the tiers aren't ordered in a best -> worst manner. Obviously the tiers already have this, but the numerical placement of each character is arbitrary to a point.

I am also curious if we could tier character in a different sort of way. Do you think there is a way to put characters into a group based on similarities between them and make tiers from those categorical groups? Although I feel that the characters probably cannot be grouped this way, I want to throw it out there to see if anyone might be able to see a good way to do it sense I am lacking knowledge of most of the characters.

 

[BTmoney]

Have tiers ever be made differently from the 2010 or 2013 style? Considering how everyone seems to claim that at the highest level of play the better characters are all about even, why does there need to be a numerical list of characters? Do we really need to say that Fox is some quantitative value better than Falco? I would like to see tier list where the tiers aren't ordered in a best -> worst manner. Obviously the tiers already have this, but the numerical placement of each character is arbitrary to a point.

I am also curious if we could tier character in a different sort of way. Do you think there is a way to put characters into a group based on similarities between them and make tiers from those categorical groups? Although I feel that the characters probably cannot be grouped this way, I want to throw it out there to see if anyone might be able to see a good way to do it sense I am lacking knowledge of most of the characters.

Traditionally tiers are "made" (the gaps in tiers) by notable numerical differences after compiling votes/placements.

Typically Fox and Falco receive the most #1/2 votes.
So Fox might wind up with an average placement of 1.3 (i.e. mostly #1 votes, keep in mind when voting you have to use whole numbers) and Falco might wind up as 1.7 (i.e. more #2 votes than #1 votes) when you average out all of the placing they received in a vote.

1.3 and 1.7 are very close.
However for the 3rd spot on the tier list, Sheik/Marth/rarely Puff & Peach start getting votes.
Sheik might have a score of 2.9 and Marth might have a score of 3.2

Sheik and Marth typically do not receive many #1 votes. They are distinctly away from the Fox/Falco tier but they are close to each other.

So a tier list might look something like this

Elite Tier
# 1 (1.3) Fox
# 2 (1.7) Falco

(large numerical difference separates tiers. The 2.9 indicates that from a numerical standpoint Sheik "clearly" is not as good [it's subjective how much "worse" she is, she's just clearly not the #1 or #2 character in this example] as Fox or Falco to the average person. This is hypothetical but pretty indicative of what goes on.)

High Tier
# 3 (2.9) Sheik
# 4 (3.2) Marth


etc. Did this make any sense? I explained this pretty poorly. The titles of the tier and the colors are pretty arbitrary.

 

[Xyzz]

You can always go by "the fast fallers, the floaties and the inbetween" or group them by their jumpsquat timings or anything else that you come up with. There just wouldn't be much point, would there?

The numerical placings don't really matter that much. They just are there because pretty much every tier list has happened by "hey guys, sort the cast by who (in your opinion) is most likely to win a tournament to who's least likely to do so" and then doing the arithmetic mean over the results. Tiers have been placed by the most significant gaps. I think this time it was more of a "**** it, everybody thinks ICs are the worst of the top8, but nobody thinks they're that much worse, let's just make broader categories, which carry more meaning".
Pick a "S-tier" and losing is entirely on you.
Pick an "A-tier" if the character just clicks with you, and you'll probably do better with that guy than if you picked from the top8.
I wouldn't go lower than that, if you like winning... but there's people doing amazing things with those as well, and maybe some of them aren't really worse than the A-tiers... it's just that virtually nobody plays a character that isn't S-tier, so the available data is super limited.

 

[BTmoney]

I see nothing inherently wrong with the # system
The numbers don't matter "that much" but they matter "enough"

They just mean what they mean and I think people misunderstand or exaggerate that or they don't understand what a tier list is

I am against arbitrary names of tiers though (even though it makes no difference to me, some people can't get over what people want to call their tiers. The #s are way more important but I guess it's not doing new players any favors if you say "Fox/Falco God Tier" and "Falcon C Tier" and it sort of is just silly)

 

[Blother]

So the tier is based on a voting system?

 

[BTmoney]

I don't think all character discussion threads are of equal activity across the board. The Peach board, who I have been focusing on, seems to be pretty barren, and I am sure there are many other character boards that are the same way. Maybe I should give it more time since I haven't been frequenting this site for too long (starting reading weeks before I joined though). Also, can I expect the information that is already discussed/stickied to be relevant to the current metagame? There seems to be a lot of threads that are very old and don't see activity anymore, and I am unsure if the information is still useful or if I need to find something more up to date.

I just happened to read that but no. You're better off watching videos and doing a lot of critical thinking to figure out what's going on. If it's not active discussion it's probably outdated. But there are plenty of stickied useful threads and active stickied threads.

The best think you can do for yourself is think and ask questions (and play too) =].

And to answer your other question is yes, usually it's based on a voting system. However the tier list is pretty indicative of actuality (imo)

 

[Blother]

I'm sure the tier list makes sense considering it is based off of votes. People are going to vote for the characters that win the most. Its just a shame that some characters probably still have more potential, but it is scarcely realized because most people choose to play character higher on the tier list.

I do try to ask as many questions are I can. Since I have joined this forum I look around multiple times during the day, and ask about anything that I see in my play or from watching videos. I would love to have access to more streams. They are great for getting the opportunity to watch high level play AND ask the players questions directly.

 

[Divinokage]

I'm sure the tier list makes sense considering it is based off of votes. People are going to vote for the characters that win the most. Its just a shame that some characters probably still have more potential, but it is scarcely realized because most people choose to play character higher on the tier list.

That's not quite true because you should play the character you feel the most comfortable with. If YOU feel that other characters have more potential, why don't you prove it? Or do you not want to go through hell?

 

[Purpletuce]

Blacktician, if fox and falco were 1.3 and 1.7 respectively, that would mean all of the 1 and 2 votes belonged to them. If that were the case, there could be no other characters less than 3, because to get that value would require a vote less than 3, which would not be available.

Math police.

Spoiler

Note, if there were a few votes for 1 or 2 not belonging to spacies, and the spacies were rounded to those numbers, you might have a few loose votes, but not enough to cause a 3rd character to be less than 3, especially if your fourth character is 3.2.