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

[Nah]

might be easier this time to just not go with names and use letters instead, it's still an understood tiering method and we can avoid wasting time with this "should bottom tier be a thing in Smash 4" thing

Also I definitely agree with not doing Mii's this time. Varying legality means a near-literal few actually know them to a meaningful degree, and their viability also varies a lot depending on whether or not they can go with other sizes and/or moves. There hasn't been much reason to include them in tier lists for years now really.

 

[KuroganeHammer]

Y'all are cooked if you don't think there aren't at least 5 bottom tier garbage trash characters lol.

 

[KaizorOne]

Bayo should be SS Tier. And why the *** is Diddy above her in this list, lol. Bayo is by far Number 1 in the game.

 

[Zerp]

I think it depends a bit on whether you consider tiers to be relative or not. I think that tiers should have some criteria, and if a character reaches those criteria then that character belongs to a certain tier. Imagine if the worst character in the game goes even with every character but two, who that character slightly loses to. I would be okay with calling that character "Mid tier" instead of "Low tier" or "Bottom tier", even if it's the worst character in the game.

Take a game like Rivals of Aether, for instance. That game has 13 characters and is considered fairly balanced, and the community seems split on a tier list. Should the bottom 2 or 3 or so be considered "Bottom tier" or even "Low tier" if they're not considered to be much worse than most other characters?

Another issue I have with the term "Bottom tier" is that it's not wildely used. "Low tier" is commonly used and people talk about Low tier tournament (not Bottom tier tournaments), they make videos on "Why you should main a low tier" (not "Why you should main a bottom tier"), and many people call characters like Jigglypuff and King Dedede "Low tier".

TV Tropes has a page for Character Tiers, and here's what that page says about Low Tier and Bottom Tier:

• "Low Tier: You probably don't want to choose these. They could theoretically be useful, but choosing such a character is a suboptimal choice; take only if you need to fill space. Sometimes, these characters find a niche for their shock value, or because they work well against unprepared or surprised opponents. This sort of usage stops working once your opponents get wise, at which point you should return to a higher tier.
• Bottom Tier: Joke Characters, and those who are just bad. They may have an advantage over someone in top tier, but outside of that specific situation, be prepared to have extreme difficulty using a Bottom Tier character in high-level play."

The worst characters in Smash 4 seem to fit "Low Tier" better than "Bottom Tier". It's also worth noting that in the Reddit tier lists, the worst characters in the game are generally ranked C- instead of D-tier (even though D-tier is an option).

On another subject, I think we should skip rating Miis this time. It's pretty clear that most people tend to underestimate Miis a bit (at least with all sizes allowed and customs on), and 1111 Miis are pretty bad anyway and hard to rank since almost no one plays them.

I completely get what you're saying but yeah, I'm just of the opposite view, I feel like the tiers should be a relative thing, I think it shouldn't matter how viable or unviable the characters in Bottom or Top Tier are for them to retain those titles simply for being at the top or bottom, like, if we had a game where almost every character didn't win over 50% of their match-ups and the absolute best only won say 60% or so, should we just scrap Top Tier and High Tier and just make everyone Mid Tier? I can see why people'd want to do that but I don't think I'd want that.

Also, I want to rate Miis but I agree we should skip them this time, it's likely that soon (as in after we start the tier list but not that far away from now) the Miis will come up in the recommended ruleset since this PGR season is ending soon, and we have no way of knowing what the legal Miis will be before the new ruleset is out. (Although I fully expect them to be 1111 since even when Guest XXXX was dominating popularity polls they were 1111 lol)

Bayo should be SS Tier. And why the *** is Diddy above her in this list, lol. Bayo is by far Number 1 in the game.

The reason Diddy is above her is because the list is extremely out of date, last time we voted was over a year ago, popular opinion at that time didn't lean to Bayonetta being number one anywhere near as heavily as it does now.

I'm also partially responsible for Diddy being number one there lol

 

[Frihetsanka]

Y'all are cooked if you don't think there aren't at least 5 bottom tier garbage trash characters lol.

I prefer the term "low tier garbage trash characters". They may be bad, but more like low tier levels of bad rather than bottom tier levels of bad. It's mostly semantics, anyway.

I completely get what you're saying but yeah, I'm just of the opposite view, I feel like the tiers should be a relative thing, I think it shouldn't matter how viable or unviable the characters in Bottom or Top Tier are for them to retain those titles simply for being at the top or bottom, like, if we had a game where almost every character didn't win over 50% of their match-ups and the absolute best only won say 60% or so, should we just scrap Top Tier and High Tier and just make everyone Mid Tier?

In that case, I would be open for two broad tiers: High Tier and Mid Tier (one could argue that Rivals of Aether is like this). "Top Tier" implies that the character is a bit overpowered, but not necessarily enough to break the game. If we look at Project M, I think it would feel a bit weird to call characters like Jigglypuff (who is basically Melee Jigglypuff in a game where other characters got buffed), Pit, and Yoshi Bottom Tier.

TV Trope's definition of Top Tier and High Tier (one can certainly question whether these definitions are correct or not, however):

• "Top Tier: Incredibly good characters that are still overpowered, but less so than those in God Tier, and not overpowered enough that they warrant a ban. When God tier is banned, these are the characters to choose. They are generally better than most non-God Tier characters, counter-picks notwithstanding.
• High Tier: All around good choices. Usually, they are here because they have advantages over Top or God tier characters and beat a lot of lower-tier characters. They have only a few weaknesses."

I could see there being games with no Top Tier characters, though Smash 4 almost definitely has some (we probably don't have any God Tier characters though). Anyway, we could just do S/A/B/C/D/E/F tiers, or 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 tiers, or something like that. We could just copy the 4BR format (S-G), that way it'd be easier to compare the two tier lists (at least until 4BR release a new formet, assuming they'll do so).

 

[Frihetsanka]

One of my biggest issues with the placements of the previous list was Corrin's placement, and I happened to stumble upon this post when reading some old posts, so I decided to respond to it.

Its basic logic: Corirn can't be that good, if he was he would have been sweeping tournament by now because he would never run into a noticeably losing MU according to what a large chunk of you are claiming. It wouldn't be "wait to see if Ryuga ever does better than he did with Ike" or "wait until Cosmos is done school" it would be "man Corrin is everywhere". Instead, his results are overall slowly dropping. Its for a good reason. The claim that their worst MU in the top/highs is 45:55 doesn't hold water.

Cosmos seems to do quite well quite often these days, now that he's done with school. He's even doing well in bad MUs (like Fox and Sheik), he mostly seem to struggle vs Tweek, MkLeo, and Fatality, either going fairly even with most other players or beating them. Cloud seems to be Cosmos' worst MU right now.

Top players like ESAM have picked Corrin up... and then dropped him. He has been tried, tested, and found wanting. SSB4 is a game with an absolutely massive mid tier list (by that I mean true mid tier and not this silly "mid tier +" ) and all of those characters are good and can even make a lot of noise in internationals... just not consistently.

It is true that not many players have picked up Corrin (Cosmos will probably be the only Corrin player on the next PGR, though Ryuga was on the last at least), I think this has more to do with the fact that Corrin was released pretty late. I'm curious, do you still think that Corrin is a mid tier in Smash 4? I think she's easily top 15 in Smash 4, potentially a bit higher even.

 

[Wintermelon43]

Well it's been 4 days and bowserboy hasn't replied to my dm despite me seeing him online, so I take that as meaning he doesn't care. So now I just need to know whether Browny wants to do this again or if he would prefer me to do it.

 

[Browny]

Well it's been 4 days and bowserboy hasn't replied to my dm despite me seeing him online, so I take that as meaning he doesn't care. So now I just need to know whether Browny wants to do this again or if he would prefer me to do it.

Is there enough demand to actually keep this going? There is an issue if there isn't enough people voting because the list becomes more subject to bias. With 58 characters if theres only like 20 people voting, quite often many characters will not get enough votes to even justify a move and also a few dedicated people can skew certain characters when there arent enough people to counter it.

Most of the recent posts are from the same few people so I don't think this should be restarted. When Smash ultimate comes around, I'll restart this but like before I probably wont do it forever so if you wanted to take over and bowserboy doesnt want to, then you can.

I do want to change how it works slightly as well and find a way to automate it, like using online polls. It can take a very long time to count everything sometimes.

 

[Frihetsanka]

Is there enough demand to actually keep this going?

We don't know yet. One option is to try to start it and if we don't get enough votes we abandon the project.

I do want to change how it works slightly as well and find a way to automate it, like using online polls. It can take a very long time to count everything sometimes.

I see three potential issues with this: The first is that polls can sometimes be tempered with. The second is that some methods require more efforts on the voter (like having to create or log in to a Google account in order to vote). The third is that we won't get to see individual votes, which is one of the fun aspects of voting (and seeing people motivate their votes).

Perhaps one option is to not allow people to change their vote after they've voted. This would make it easier to count the votes since you can simply count them as they come, instead of having to go back to recount edited votes. Another alternative is to demand that people who want to change their votes are really clear about it (they could @ you).

 

[Browny]

Good point on not seeing what others voted on. Naturally not letting people see votes would remove bias but it removes the interactivity of it all. It's not that bad its like half an hour to do the vote tallying but its also because sometimes I can make mistakes counting so many things and then theres the cases of people voting multiple times in a single period and I don't notice it.

I really dont think there's the amount of people active here to restart it. Smashboards has lost so much activity to reddit its not even funny but when smash ultimate comes out it will get back up there. Reddits community voted list is well organised but they still use the exact same, lazy method to develop a list of just averaging votes.

 

[Wintermelon43]

Yeah, I admit I was thinking of that

 

[Frihetsanka]

I really dont think there's the amount of people active here to restart it.

I've been having the same concerns, though I figured we could just try and see if people are up for it. However, so far only 5-7 people have responded, which doesn't exactly bode well. If more people are interested, it would be good if you responded. If not, then it might be better to just wait for Smash Ultimate.

 

[Zerp]

I think more people will show interest once it's active, really, when we're seven months behind schedule I'd imagine it'd be hard for most people to believe it'd ever come back, it looks abandoned, and if you don't think it'd ever come back what's the point in expressing interest anyway? Once we get going there'll probably be a little more traffic, and the moment we get some, I think more'll come after that because of it'll show up more in "New Posts" and some users who didn't know about it/thought it was long dead and haven't been up to date with it will see it, some of them will post, and then it'll be in new posts more often, and it can snowball from there. Tier List discussions are naturally popular, as long as we actually get going I don't see us really dying down or being too small because it's a popular topic, I think we'd be fine honestly.

 

[Frihetsanka]

A new topic might help. I'm not sure what will happen but I suppose it's up to Wintermelon43 to decide. If not enough people vote then we could just abandon the project, after all.

 

[Wintermelon43]

I could make a new topic

 

[MarioManTAW]

I am interested BTW

 

[Browny]

I could make a new topic

Make a topic to gauge interest, but as it stands I don't give permission to use my method on a new thread unless I see a high enough level of interest.

These threads have been successful in the past because of the high level of activity which cuts down bias massively. If there's like, <25 people who support the idea, that's not enough since with so many characters in the game its possible a few people can single handedly change the list without enough other votes to counter them. At times I would have 80+ people voting in a single period. As such I am not keen to see this method that I spent a long time coming up with kind of ruined in the eyes of the public by being so wildly susceptible to bias that comes with low interest.

If you do get enough people keen to do it, you can go ahead. I still retain rights to the original though and will restart it for smash ultimate but as I said before, I might end up handing that over too. We'll see how well smashboards fares.

 

[Wintermelon43]

Make a topic to gauge interest, but as it stands I don't give permission to use my method on a new thread unless I see a high enough level of interest.

These threads have been successful in the past because of the high level of activity which cuts down bias massively. If there's like, <25 people who support the idea, that's not enough since with so many characters in the game its possible a few people can single handedly change the list without enough other votes to counter them. At times I would have 80+ people voting in a single period. As such I am not keen to see this method that I spent a long time coming up with kind of ruined in the eyes of the public by being so wildly susceptible to bias that comes with low interest.

If you do get enough people keen to do it, you can go ahead. I still retain rights to the original though and will restart it for smash ultimate but as I said before, I might end up handing that over too. We'll see how well smashboards fares.

Well okay then. I don't really care about doing this very much tbh so not doing it is perfectly fine by me, I just figured if people wanted to do it I could help out.