Smashboards Community Voted Tier List: Version 4 COMPLETE! Break for a few months...

[Frihetsanka]

Added +1 as countervote, as he really should stay by Ness.

At this point in time, I wouldn't be entirely opposed to putting Ness at the top of high-mid. Ness' results have been better lately anyway, according to Das Koopa's results thread.

 

[Bowserboy3]

TDK - just a note, remember we aren't on that part of voting just yet. We are still using 3 votes to move characters up and down.

What you just voted is a prime example of what we are going to be doing after I update in a few days time.

 

[Frihetsanka]

What you just voted is a prime example of what we are going to be doing after I update in a few days time.

It seems kind of strange to me. If someone wants to move, say, King Dedede up a tier, they'll also have to move Ganondorf and Jigglypuff up. If someone wants to move the Pits down, then Lucas and Peach also have to go. Am I misunderstanding something?

 

[L1N3R1D3R]

At this point in time, I wouldn't be entirely opposed to putting Ness at the top of high-mid. Ness' results have been better lately anyway, according to Das Koopa's results thread.

Well, Lucas already has -2 and Ness is still at 0, so it's more worth my effort to prevent Lucas from moving.

 

[Bowserboy3]

It seems kind of strange to me. If someone wants to move, say, King Dedede up a tier, they'll also have to move Ganondorf and Jigglypuff up. If someone wants to move the Pits down, then Lucas and Peach also have to go. Am I misunderstanding something?

The main idea is to make the right amount of tiers you'd like to see, not to move characters up.

If somebody wanted King Dedede up a tier, he'd have ideally have been voted up there by now anyway. See Browny's post a few posts up to see a better explanation.

 

[TDK]

how the actual hell did Samus get so many upvotes?

-1
+1
-1

Gonna change -1 to +1

I'm not gonna get any support on the Pits so I might as well just do this.

 

[Nidtendofreak]

Except we still have a lot of characters that get bounced back and forth between tiers, with some of them being in the middle of tiers instead being on the end they get bounced around the most. So if somebody has always been voting X character down a tier every time they move up, but X is randomly in the middle of their current tier, that person can't make the tier splits in a way that reflects that.

Bare minimum when you post up the tiers for their "split them up as you wish" phase, you should put the more contentious characters towards the ends they kept bouncing around. So for example: Palutena, Samus, and Lucas would all be and the bottom end of their tiers. Olimar would be at the top of his. Otherwise you're telling people to split tiers up how they want... but people won't be happy with which characters they have to shove into a lower tier just to get the number of tiers they want due to the ordering.

 

[Munomario777]

Alternatively, we could just do the tier-splitting phase after the characters have been ordered within tiers to avoid this issue entirely.

 

[Nidtendofreak]

We can but then we run into the problem of "how many tiers" and "how do we split them"?

Might be best to kinda do both at the same time but specifically say only X number of characters in each tier can move one up or down from their current tier.

 

[Bowserboy3]

Y'all are thinking into this waaay too much. It's part of the process; this has been done past rounds and the lists have been fine.

Just roll with it.

 

[Munomario777]

We can but then we run into the problem of "how many tiers" and "how do we split them"?

Might be best to kinda do both at the same time but specifically say only X number of characters in each tier can move one up or down from their current tier.

It should be enough to just use the current amount of tiers. Order characters within the current tiers, then determine where the tiers should split now that an actual order is set.

Y'all are thinking into this waaay too much. It's part of the process; this has been done past rounds and the lists have been fine.

Just roll with it.

I would hardly call it overthinking it – there are legitimate issues with the voting system which should be resolved or at the very least acknowledged, and would be easy to fix by simply swapping the order of the next two phases of voting.

 

[Frihetsanka]

Votes thus far (tier names are unofficial):

Tier 1 (Top): [0]
Tier 2 (Upper High): [0]
Tier 3 (Lower High): [0]
Tier 4 (High-Mid): [1][0]
Tier 5 (Mid): [1][0][-1][-2]
Tier 6 (Low-Mid): [1][0][-1][-2]
Tier 7 (Low): [0]
Tier 8 (Bottom): [0]

 

[Nidtendofreak]

Frihetsanka Samus is only at +1

 

[Frihetsanka]

Frihetsanka Samus is only at +1

You're right. I corrected it.

 

[QualityQ]

Alternatively, we could just do the tier-splitting phase after the characters have been ordered within tiers to avoid this issue entirely.

I agree with this. Something like:

We spend one voting round *loosely* arranging characters within the tiers we have currently.

Then the next voting round we employ Bowserboy's method, by the line we arranged and organizing the characters into tiers.

After that we can arrange the characters within the new tiers we made.

I have looked at the current list and am having trouble with a couple of tiers because one or two controversial characters end up in the middle of the tier, which means I either have to lump them in a tier I don't agree with or shift everyone else in the wrong tier to compromise for that character. That can easily be corrected with a brief shuffling round for the majority of the issues it causes.

 

[Browny]

This is the original reasoning;

People are often FAR more concerned with which characters share a given tier, than the order of them. People don't care if Metaknight is above or below Pikachu, for example, that's fairly subjective. People have a big issue if Metaknight shares a tier with Cloud and Mario while pikachu doesnt though.

If you set the order of the characters first and then decide on the tier splits, this can cause people to majorly change their minds on where characters should be and the edges of the highest tiers always do this. People will be like 'If I knew that the average vote was for top tier to only have 6 characters, I would have spent my votes sending X character down to join high tier tier because I really don't think they deserve to be above the rest of high tier'.

Ultimately what matters though is that the tier list, in essence, is meant to be a comparison of the viability of each character in an exact ordered fashion WITH an order within the tiers. My original method goes rank the characters - split the tiers - refine the order. If you split tiers after, it now does rank the characters - refine the order - split the tiers. Now however you have undone the refine the order step. I can guarantee you if you refine the order of the characters and THEN split the tiers you are going to have issues where a lot of people change their minds on where a character should be based on the tier split. I have ran this project for years since 2010 and this often happens.

Both ways have issues and I can easily accept the merits of voting first, then splitting the tiers. This project was 100% started because I strongly disagreed with the BBR's method of generating tier lists which was simply people vote, and then we split the tiers and the vote is final. You know what that resulted in? It resulted in messes like this

This is possibly the stupidest tier list ever to be created in video games. Look at the splits. 11 tiers!

X
X
XX
XXX
XXX
XXX
XXXX
XX
XXXXXXXX
XXX
XXXXXXXX

If there were more strict rules in place on the number of tiers and people not obsessing over trying to split it as much as possible, it wouldn't look so dumb. Had they voted for the number of tiers first, say 8, then maybe it would have looked like this

X
XXX
XXX
XXX
XXX
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX

Much better!

You set hard rules on the number of tiers first to ensure the final result looks like it had thought put into it before getting there.

 

[jespoke]

The problem with the current order of operations is that within tier movement won't get to be resolved. I for example don't want to move and up to the next tier, but i DO want them towards the top of their current tier. And that is going to affect how i vote for the tier separations.

 

[Bowserboy3]

The problem with the current order of operations is that within tier movement won't get to be resolved. I for example don't want to move and up to the next tier, but i DO want them towards the top of their current tier. And that is going to affect how i vote for the tier separations.

As a note, I personally moved Marth down to the bottom of tier 2 because there was an influx of downvotes against him because people still didn't realise that characters within tiers weren't ordered (even though Marth deserves to be there in the first place). So I moved him to the bottom of that tier, and low and behold, the downvotes stopped.

I'll move him back to his correct place at the start of the next phase.

In fact, I might just update tomorrow... votes are slow now, and that's expected, as it signifies the list is in a pretty stable position. No point dragging things on longer than needed. I'm updating on Wednesday.

 

[Deleted member]

After UGC Smash Open, there's likely gonna be an influx of votes next phase.

 

[Bowserboy3]

After UGC Smash Open, there's likely gonna be an influx of votes next phase.

Luckily, people can upvote or downvote one character per tier when we are voting on tier placements, and the most common characters will move. I expect if there's any chance a character could move a whole tier here, it may be Bowser (upwards). Sure, Ryu and Pikachu may have done some cool stuff, but it's most likely not enough to bump them up a whole tier.

To be fair, UGC Smash Open wasn't filled with multiple huge character breakouts (like Mewtwo at Pound, per say), and if we voted after every tournament, the tier list would never get finished. We've got to make a stop at some point, and now's a good time to do so.

If character movement was 100% locked when we moved onto the next phase, I could understand your concerns, but characters still have a chance to move during the next phases. Don't worry.

Besides, there's still time for people to edit their votes now...

... So on that basis, I'll be updating on Wednesday. If you want to edit any of your votes to suit UGC, I recommend you do it now.

 

[Frihetsanka]

Simple solution: Do a quick round where people offer their input on the order within tiers (while keeping the current number of tiers), and once that is done we vote on where to split the tiers, and after that we move on to thorougly order the tiers, like usual. This way people will be less likely to feel that they're splitting the tiers are strange places.

Also, Bowser in high tier? I think we should wait and see if his results hold up over time (I highly doubt it).

Some interesting results from UGC Smash Open:

Ness placed higher than Lucas yet again. While Lucas may have a better MU chart on paper, Ness seems to get better results (at least in the US).

Corrin got #13 with Ryuga. This should provide some evidence that Corrin is, in fact, high tier and not high-mid. Might be worth keeping in mind once we order the tiers, she might not be near the bottom of tier 3 after all.

Aaaand not that much else new, I suppose.

Also, @everyonewhohasn'tvotedyet, you can still vote! Just because we're discussing other things doesn't mean you can't vote.

 

[Browny]

Guys...

This vote round cements NOTHING except the numbers of tiers people think there should be. There will be numerous rounds after this to vote on the order of characters.

Under no circumstance do I ever want a list formed and THEN the tiers are split, I think it is a fundamentally incorrect way of doing it because there should be another vote after that for final tweaks after the tiers are split. Or, we can just do it this way and achieve the same outcome in 2 steps instead of 3.

Seriously this list has been done like 6 times in the past, just go with it. You'll have plenty of time to vote on the characters orders later. For now, all we want to know is do you want 6, 7, 8 or more tiers. That's it. Allowing you to move characters up and down to alter the tier splits will help you come to a better decision. Just imagine if at this stage, the list literally had 15 tiers. You'd want to quickly change it to 7-9 wouldn't you?

 

[JayZee1700]

I almost want to +1 but, thats more Nairo being Nairo rather than Bowser being a top tier character. Maybe if there was more tournament results for the Koopa King, then he'd receive my vote.

For now,
-1

 

[QualityQ]

-1
+1
-1

Kind of a tough voting round, but I still think Mac belongs in tier 6 over 5. He's a very linear character and basically has to have very specific things to happen in order to win. Platforms are pretty much a nightmare for him too.

 

[Bowserboy3]

I will be updating in a few hours. If anybody is thinking of voting/changing votes, I advise you do so now.

 

[MrGameguycolor]

+ (Sorry, I'll probably never get the time to explain why)

 

[JayZee1700]

-1

Sorry, but you aint an air fighter Mac. Or a mid-tier.

 

[Frihetsanka]

I'm on the fence about Little Mac. On the one hand, his results are pretty decent, and he can do some really cool stuff. On the other hand, if he falls behind he might get camped on Duck Hunt or Smashville, which is a big problem for him.

 

[Bowserboy3]

UPDATED

That was pretty easy, since no character actually moved, which in turn signifies that the list is in a stable position and we can move onto the next phase; the tier voting phase.

However, before we do that, we need to decide on how many tiers we will be using.

Here are the rules for this round:
This round is simple; all I need to see how many tiers you think would best suit the current list. Right now, we have 8 tiers (unordered, unnamed). Perhaps you think there are too many characters in a specific tiers, and there should be more tiers. Perhaps you think there are uneeded tiers (Falco?) and there should be less than 8. Whatever your opinion, that is what I need to see.

The way to do this is simple; WITHOUT MOVING CHARACTERS INDIVIDUAL POSITIONS ABOUT, post a vote of where you would split the list into tiers. Think of it as having our list as one, long line of characters, and you have to slice where you would denote a tier.

Here is a blank version of our current list you can use (DO NOT CHANGE THE ORDER ABOUT):



And here is an example of a vote; this is my vote:

1:
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7:
8:

As you can see, the order of which the characters are in is not changed, but compared to the last update, the areas which characters split away from eachother to form tiers is different (eg: Link is at the top of tier 5 as opposed to the bottom of tier 4, or Bowser Jr, who is just above Falco, is now in the same tier as him, as opposed to being a tier above him).

I want to stress, this is absolutely not a round of "I can't split this tier here because I feel X character should be higher up". This is merely a round where we confirm how many tiers we will have. For example, I feel that Mii Gunner should be in tier 7 or below, but by the same token, I don't feel any of the characters "below" her deserve to be that low. This doesn't matter, because in the next rounds, we will still get the chance to move characters about, so for now, I have voted on how many tiers I want to see, which is 8.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

 

[Routa]

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5
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[Deleted member]

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[TDK]

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Things I wish I could do:
- Move the pits and Ike into tier 4
- Move G&W into tier 5 or 6
- Move Palutena into tier 4 (*Shot*)
- Move Charizard into tier 7

 

[Frihetsanka]

My vote:

1 (Top):
2 (Upper High):
3 (Lower High):
4 (High-Mid):
5 (Mid):
6 (Low):
7 (Bottom):

I think there are too many characters in Lower High tier (3) at the moment, so I'd prefer if we moved some characters down (I might help Peach up later, but she was "blocking" other characters).

Moving on, I'd like to see King Dedede move up to tier 7 from tier 8 and maybe Ike move down from 4 to 5. I'm also leaning towards Greninja in Lower High tier (3) rather than Upper High tier. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the tier list though (assuming we order them properly within the tiers).

Edit: I added descriptions of what I believe the tiers would be.

Note that while we may have previously considered tier 5 Mid tier due to it being the original tier, at this point we could change the tier list so some other tier would be the mid tier. So if someone were to split top tier in two by suggesting 9 tiers, then perhaps tier 6 would be mid tier. If someone were to merge Upper High and Lower high and we'd end up with 7 tiers, then perhaps tier 4 would be mid tier, etc etc.

My suggestion is to keep tier 5 as Mid tier, but I think several alternatives are viable as well.

 

[QualityQ]

UPDATED

Here is a blank version of our current list you can use (DO NOT CHANGE THE ORDER ABOUT):



Any questions, feel free to ask.

Can you explain why is the only character to have their position shuffled? None of the other characters changed from your original ordering from the previous round. As you stated, we can move characters around in later rounds. So why move the character now?

 

[Zerp]

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EDIT: I moved the line between 1 and 2 one space farther so Marth could be in Top Tier Land.

 

[Bowserboy3]

Can you explain why is the only character to have their position shuffled? None of the other characters changed from your original ordering from the previous round. As you stated, we can move characters around in later rounds. So why move the character now?

Here:

As a note, I personally moved Marth down to the bottom of tier 2 because there was an influx of downvotes against him because people still didn't realise that characters within tiers weren't ordered (even though Marth deserves to be there in the first place). So I moved him to the bottom of that tier, and low and behold, the downvotes stopped.

I'll move him back to his correct place at the start of the next phase.

Evidence: the list at 4.0.9: https://smashboards.com/threads/sma...-number-of-tiers.441533/page-19#post-21526786

 

[Kirby Dragons]

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[Nidtendofreak]

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Certainly a few characters I'd watch to move around from one tier to another, but when taking that into account this is pretty darn accurate to me in terms of # of characters in each tier

 

[MarioManTAW]

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Tier 1: Right characters, wrong order
Tier 2: Same as tier 1
Tier 3: Mostly good (except ordering), but needs to move up
Tier 4: Almost perfect. should be lower within the tier, maybe higher within the tier. Otherwise perfect.
Tier 5: Mostly good, but probably needs reordering.
Tier 6: needs to move up. could move up, could move down. Definitely needs reordering.
Tier 7: Requires reordering, but aside from the aforementioned potential tier 6 moves, no changes needed to the character list.

 

[Bigbomb2]

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I could probably just dissect this a bunch but in general this looks about where the meta is around minus some outliers. I feel like 2/3 and 4/5 are really similar to each other in viability, but having a massive tier 2 and tier 3 would look wonky so dis be good