Explanation:
I’ve heard many sounds about making a PAL tier list in the past few years, since there are some clear differences between not only the NTSC and PAL version, but also their respective communities. With SSBM coming closer and closer to its end, I felt this was the time to make a true PAL tier list. Dutch moderator Nihonjin put me in charge of organising it (he did help me out with deciding on a few things though), so here is what I did and why.
I felt I shouldn’t decide who got to vote for every country by myself. First of all, because I don’t know every smasher in every scene that well. Secondly, because one person shouldn’t decide something like that. So I have put major smashers, who know their own community well and have proven to be intelligent debaters and good players, in charge of deciding the voters of their own country.
Australia: Cronos_Rainbow
France + Italia: Joanna Dark
Sweden + Norway: Helios
The Netherlands: Marc
The UK: The_Doug
Thank you!
In order to prevent empty voting, I asked them to select players who were both capable of stating their reasoning behind their votes and who are respected smashers, so most of them have often ranked well within and outside their own countries. I also did this to get about 20 voters, because I thought a 5-man panel would be too elitist.
The voters were:
Australia:
Bringer
cats
Cronos_Rainbow
France:
Bossofsmash
Doraki
Joanna Dark
Poilon
Italy:
Aldwyn
Seretur
Norway:
Kriz
Masamune
Sweden:
Captain Jadde
Ek
Helios
Smash Alex
The Netherlands:
Dave
Ivo
Marc
Remen
The United Kingdom:
Doug
Euan
Qwester
This makes a total of 22 players. A few more people were approached, but they simply couldn’t make the vote or have been substituted. Also note there is a pretty good voting balance between countries. Getting all these people together to vote was difficult, so I doubt there’ll be another PAL tier list.
As for the break up, it soon became clear that the first three tiers were pretty obvious, but after that it became quite vague. Therefore, we agreed to split the list up into only four tiers. Basically, the first and second tier represent characters that are considered tournament viable, while the third and fourth tier represent characters suited for low tier tournaments.
That about sums it up. If there are any questions, I’d be happy to answer them. Discuss away!
