Significant Tiering: Melee Vs. Other Fighters

[SilverKnight]

I'm rather new to these forums, so I humbly ask you excuse my 'Newbie' status and listen to what I have to say based on the content of my post, rather than the status of my rank.


First off, Tiers exist in all fighting games based on my experience. I wasn't here for the whole "Tier Wars" nonsense, but as an avid competive fighting game enthusiast and long time serious player, I would have to claim with absolute certainty that tiers are prevailent. I am not posting to debate this, and if you disagree note I will be ignoring your replies, as that is not the intension of my discussion.


Let me specify what Tiers are for all those who do not know what I am refering to...

As pertaining to all fighting games (With examples from Melee)...

Tiers are character rankings in fighting games crafted by experienced players.

These are based on character usage/wins at Tournaments, KO potencial, speed/ weight/ gravity. Lag, speed of hits, usefullness, power, knockbacks, (Metagame, akas combos and techniques), spikes, range, and many many other aspects.

Tiers are:
God Tier (Not in smash): Blatantly overpowered, negates any skill in matches. Banned in Competition.
Eg: If Giga Bowser was playable (Without the setbacks)

Top Tier: Characters that have the greatest potencial yet are still able to be beaten when lower tiers have greater skill. Advanced Metagame, most frequently used competively.
Ex. Fox

Upper Tier: Better potencial than most characters, this is usually the highest Tier in most balanced fighting games. The margin of advantages and Metagame is not as significant as
Top Tier.
Ex. Marth

Upper-Middle: Slightly better than Middle Tier.
Ex: Captain Falcon

Middle Tier: Average Potencial, basically, Mid-Tier is usually neither stronger or weaker, and can still beat Top-Tier with some skill.
Ex. Ice Climbers

Lower-Middle Tier: Almost the same as average but with a slight disadvantage. Used less frequently in competive play.
Ex. Roy

Low-Tier: Noticably lower than normal. These characters are much weaker than the norm, and are rarely seen in competive play due to their disadvantages. When dealing with matches of the highest skill, Low Tier needs a significant amount of skill to best Top-Tier, and a bit more to beat middle tier. From this point on, God Tier is unbeatable unless the player is not trying.
Ex. Kirby

Bottom Tier: Outright horrible, alot of skill is needed to play these peices of crap and win. Less Metagame. The margin of Top tier to Mid Tier is the same as Mid tier to Bottom tier.. Making Top-Tier to Bottom Tier double the gap. Not unplayable, but there is alot of skill required to score wins against the higher tiers.
Ex. Mewtwo

Garbage Tier(Not in smash): Unplayable, skill is factored out of the equation, these characters are nearly impossible to score a win with, can even be called "Joke Characters". Unbalanced and laughable metagame. Never used in tournaments unless you are drunk or something.
Ex: If a Goomba was playable, or a Wireframe.



That's a really basic and loose defination, but it should give anyone who doesn't know a good idea of how it works.


ALL THAT BEING SAID... XD

I feel that the Tiers in Melee are way more significant than in alot of games...
Looking at Tournaments it seems that Marth, Fox, Falco, Sheik, are almost always the choice of the best players. Ken, Isai, PC Chris, Mew2King, (ChuDat being the outlier) all seem to back this, and are thought to be the best.

However, in Soul Calibur, while Cervantes, Xiung, Yoshi and Taki were obviously Top/upper... they were not the only characters used by the best players, and were used at the same rate as many of the lower tier, showing the gap of significance was lower.

This does not exclude fighters with God Tier such as Marvel Vs Capcom 2:
God Tier is obviously the most used, but you see the best pros incorporating low-tier as well. It is not uncommon to see a low-tier win a major tourny, but how often do you see Yoshi winning EVO? Not ever! xD


Besides competive play, Tiers in Melee even have a HUGE impact on the casuals (though they'd be the last to admitt it). I can't tell you how many people unknowingly use the Top/Upper tier without knowledge of them. Sheik is used by almost all my friends, but in other games, I remember everyone having lower-tier mains as well, more diversified!


So this is just what I have seen, and I know it is prevailent in Smash64 considering the abundance of Kirby users..


So in the viewpoint that tiers are more significant on gameplay in Smash than most fighters, why do you think this is? I mean smash is one of the few games where people debate their existance...


In my opinion, it is the whole battle style that makes Tiers more important! Instead of relying on HP/Special Gauges, Smash is experience of entirely different color.. Characters rely on the basic movesets for many other things, namingly recovery and evasion. The special physics make it so you have a dynamic entirely unique... Ringouts are the only form of KOing ... making speed and Ringout ability more important than slow/power+range like most fighters.

Either way this is all just musings and thoughts I had when I was playing various fighters with my buddies last night. It was odd how many of us main low-tiers in other fighting games.. but we all main the higher tiers on Melee. It could just be coincidence, but I think it has relevance.

Any thoughts on this? I think this possibly could explain why they are so debated as well.


Maybe I'm just rambling XD

 

[Puffer]

Maybe I'm just rambling XD

No, you're not just rambling - I've felt the same way about the tiers in Melee, and thinking about it for too long makes me mad (and a bit sad, too). Out of all the fighters I've played, Melee, so far, is the one which has the most noticeable imbalance and thus the tiers ARE more significant, as you said. Because tiers are reflections of what happens in tournament play, they can sometimes offer a relatively accurate portrayal of which characters are "better" and which are "worse."

I've often wondered why, just ONCE, a Bowser or perhaps a Mewtwo couldn't dominate a tournament or two. There's definitely players out there that are skilled with the lower-tier characters, but like you said, the only characters you ever hear about "being in the spotlight" are the cream of the crop (i.e. Fox, Falco, Marth). Other characters like the Ice Climbers, Peach, and Captain Falcon can sometimes sneak in too, but usually, tournament play is dominated by the aforementioned Top/High tier characters. As much as this bothers me, I've learned to accept the fact that it's a part of Smash and I can't really change that. The best I can do is wait for Brawl, I guess.

But yes, in answer to your question, I'd say that the tiers in Smash are significantly more significant (hah hah, redundant) than in other games. Tut tut.

 

[choknater]

as long as DK and Falcon and Luigi players are placing high in various parts of the globe, i can still (ignorantly) believe that tiers aren't too big of a deal ^_^

anyways, i wouldn't look into it too much. in the end, what matters are one objective thing and one subjective thing

1. do whatever it takes to win
2. use characters you enjoy

looking too deeply into the concept of tiers without the initiative to change them is pretty redundant to me.

and yeah, sheik/marth/fox/falco dominate.


i don't think smash is TOO imbalanced though. once again, this is pretty subjective. take a look at 3rd strike... makoto and akuma players can still get up there, can't they? it's allll good. but remy and sean are too sux and stuff. YAYUHZZZ

 

[Anth0ny]

Nice read. I completely agree with you. However...

Bottom Tier: Outright horrible, alot of skill is needed to play these peices of crap and win.

This is why Gimpyfish is a hero of mine

 

[Cereal Rabbit]

Aren't Ice Climbers Upper Mid Tier? Mid Tiers to me are something more like Doc/Mario/Ganon/Link. Other wise a great "outline." But I don't think that bottom tiers are that bad and crappy...

Dan is top tier in SF...

EDIT: The Dan thing was a joke, but I just love playing with him. o_o

 

[IvanEva]

I think that the single biggest reason I'm looking forward to Brawl is for a new character balance (after getting Marthed one too many times). Tiers can be very annoying in how hard it can be to beat the top ones. Hard to the point of it not being fun anymore. Generally speaking, I strongly dislike tiers. However, I certainly don't hate them...

For starters, tiers are only really relevant at the metagame. Before that, they're usually a lot less pronounced. Heck, when a friend of mine told me that Fox and Falco were top tier I certainly didn't believe him. I found Fox way too heavy and Falco way too... average? It wasn't until my friend and I upgraded our playing, in large part thanks to tournament videos and guides, to a more competitive level that the tiers started to come out. However, before that, and when we stop playing any given game for a while, we revert back to our pre-competitive nature and then the tiers disappear for a short while.

One benefit I find that comes from tiers is in bragging rights and psychological rewards. Beating a top tier with a lower tier character can be a source of a lot of pride. At my local school arcade there are many (almost all Korean...) players who only use top tiers at Marvel vs. Capcom 2. At first I found it very frustrating when those top tier teams would absolutely destroy me but after a long while I became good enough to stand toe to toe against them using my mid-tiers. I have to rely on a lot of little tricks, mindgames, mixups, and some unorthodox styles to win but when I do, and it happens a lot more often now, I feel absolutely great. If those Koreans weren't totally mafia-like in their cold, tournament-ish demeanor, I'd probably make more jokes about how Chun's bracelets must be made of plastic or something (when she beats up Magneto).

As well, some tier levels are pretty much intentional so it's hard to fault the developers for it. I mean, I'm very glad that Pichu can't exactly hold his own against everybody. It just wouldn't be right. Likewise, Gill from Street Fighter should be overpowered - he's the boss. I don't think that it's a surprise that the top four characters in Melee are the "cooler" characters, although perhaps that's just my opinion.

Melee is a lot more balanced than Marvel vs. Capcom 2. No doubt about it. Fox doesn't murder Mewtwo quite like Cable murders Roll. But then again it's not as balanced as Street Fighter III which has it's Yuns, Chuns, and Kens but they're not untouchable by any means.

All that being said... LUCAS FOR TOP TIER!

 

[Yo Mang]

I think another factor is the Smash is a fairly young series. The gameplay mechanics Smash is built on were relatively untested when Melee was in development compared to, say, a Street Fighter game, whose one on one, meter centric gameplay has been around for several decades so developers generally know what factors could unbalance a character. For Melee, though, the only game the developers had to look to for a template was smash 64, so there wasn't as much for them to go by when trying to balance the game.

I think the Zelda/Sheik thing in Melee is a great indicator of this; the developers of Melee tried to design a pair of characters that complimented each other to inspire players to switch between them to take advantage of their individual advantages. They supposed that being as Sheik has alot of "weak" moves with little knockback but high damaging capabilities, people would use Sheik to rack up damage and then pull out Zelda with her lighting kicks and other heavy knockback moves to score the KO. What they didn't realize, however, was that Sheik's "weak" attacks and their low knockback were actually ridiculously good for combos, like her blasted chaingrab, and she had enough KO-capable moves on her own, like the deadly f-air semi-spike, that Zelda's strong KO moves were unneeded.

As you touched upon, there's also a lot of ways for characters in Smash to be different. In addition to frames of animation, hitboxes, combo ability, etc. like you have in other fighters, a character's ability to move around a stage in all directions, including how fast they can traverse a map and how well they can move in the air, etc. Virtually unique to Smash are concepts like midair recovery, edgequarding, spiking, directional influence, countless ideas that must be applied to master movement in the 2D plane. With all these myriad factors, it must be a nightmare for a developer to predict how tweaking a character's stat in a given area will affect all these applications of their moveset. Of course I'm not the most knowledgeable in this area, as the only other fighter I've ever really invested any amount of time in is Street Fighter III (can Remy pleeeeeaaaase please please be in SF4 he's so much cooler than Guile grrr why do I like all the unpopular characters) but that's the general impression I get from watching other fighters.

Looking forward to Brawl, I wonder how much of an effect the tier list will have on it. We've already seen some changes in the Brawl demos as reported by attendees of E for All, etc. such as new edge grabbing mechanics, the apparently reduced effectiveness of chaingrabbing, the complete overhaul of the airdodge system and its subsequent obliteration of wavedashing as we know it, so balance is clearly on their minds. On the other hand, the Brawl roster is even more diverse, not just in the sheer number of unique characters but the number os new gameplay mechanics they use. Pokémon trainer, for example, is like a Zelda/Sheik setup except from the looks of it the "stamina" system will actually force you to switch pokemon periodically. Captain Olimar is almost entirely dependent on his Pikmin to attack and recover, and he can only pluck them if he's on the ground and it takes him time to do so. Samus switches to ZSS every time she uses a final smash. Snake appears to have projectiles as smash attacks. For that matter, characters like Snake are in the game. It'll be interesting to see how these things affect the tiers and the balance of the game.

 

[ph00tbag]

I think the extra dimensions in smash of platforms and a buffer between damage and winning serve not to nullify tier rankings, but magnify them. Where in most fighters, there's crouching, standing and jumping positions, as well as being against the wall, Smash adds in platforms and ledges and off-stage, as well as a few other positional qualifiers. These positions don't even out the playing field, but rather it seems that for each new possible position a high tier character can occupy, they gain that much more of an advantage.

Furthermore, the whole edgeguarding aspect seems to reinforce the tiers. Low tiers can obviously do damage to their opponent, and given the right skill levels, they can even eek out ahead of a higher tier character, however, they consistently have trouble getting their opponent off and keeping them off, while high tiers excel in this to the point where a well-place hit can gimp kill.

However, there's also evidence that Smash's set-up buffers some effects on the tier list. For example, in a traditional fighter, Pichu's self-destructive tendencies would put him in Garbage Tier without question, and waveshining would invariably put Fox in God Tier. But the "open"-endedness of Smash does actually even the odds a bit.

There's not really a point to this, I guess. Just more wood for the stove, I guess.

 

[SilverKnight]

Dan XD yeah I like Dan too! But Akuma ftw =D


Ah I'm glad you feel the way I do... I was looking up statistics to see popularity in games (based on polls etc)

Sheik is the most played characters in Melee, (Top/Upper)
Ryu: Street Fighter 2 (Upper Tier)
Megaman : Marvel Vs Capcom 1 and 2 (Low-Tier)
Subzero: Mortal Kombat 2 (Lower-Middle Tier)
King (o.O): Tekken 4 Arcade (Low-Tier)
^ I don't believe that, I would have asumed Bryan

These were the polls I could get enough of.

There's an obvious trend though (as inacurate as they may be)
Each of these are based around popularity, not Tier (Except Ryu which is maybe both)
But if Melee was going on popularity, Link or Mario would be the most played...
Link is hardly ever played yet he is so popular. Why? Low tier. Tiers are really significant in Melee.

Based on loose polls that is XD

 

[Yo Mang]

Are these polls amongst tournament goers, or just general people who play Street Fighter and Tekken and the rest?

I think if you polled the whole spectrum of people who played Smash, some low tier characters we tend to dismiss on these forums would rise in popularity. For example, at the silly video game club I attend at my high school, there's a fair share of Foxes and Shieks and Marths, but there's also a lot of people (including many people who insist tires don exits and try to turn the items on when I'm not looking) who play Roy and Mewtwo and Mario. High tiers would probably still come out on top if I were to do a poll, but by a much smaller margin than is seen in the competitive scene.

 

[Emblem Lord]

Ryu is one of the best characters in Street Fighter 2 Turbo.

He is definitely top tier.

I'm gonna assume he is popular cuz he is the face of the Street Fighter series.

 

[Puffer]

But I don't think that bottom tiers are that bad and crappy..

They're not - the bottom tiers in Smash are definitely still capable of dealing out serious punishment in the hands of the right player (Taj with Mewtwo, Gimpyfish with Bowser, etc.). Unfortunately, however, I haven't heard of ONE of these characters winning even a single tournament, which makes me only madder at the high-tiered characters who are constantly "up there." So no, the low/bottom tier characters in Smash aren't really "garbage tier" level, but they are "bad" enough to the point that the high/top tier characters will constantly thrash them. Again, I REALLY wish that someone would start pwning the population with a low/bottom tier - but, based on what I've seen so far, it seems unlikely.

On a side note, the reason I don't touch high tier characters is that I can't bear the thought of having an inherent advantage in a game. If there's going to be imbalance, I wanit to be slanted against me, NOT my opponent. The way I see it, that'll give me a bigger challenge, beat me into shape, and help me learn my character's weakness and strengths inside and out.

I think that the single biggest reason I'm looking forward to Brawl is for a new character balance (after getting Marthed one too many times). Tiers can be very annoying in how hard it can be to beat the top ones. Hard to the point of it not being fun anymore. Generally speaking, I strongly dislike tiers. However, I certainly don't hate them...

Agreed. I'd like it if Brawl is at least relatively balanced, but based on the Smash track record, that seems unlikely.

I don't think that it's a surprise that the top four characters in Melee are the "cooler" characters, although perhaps that's just my opinion.

I hate to disagree, but I find nothing "cool" in the slightest about Fox and Falco. Marth and Sheik, yes, I can see how they'd be "cool", but not the space animals. To me, they seem more like a couple of nerdy, geeked-up critters that have no business on the battlefield. Starfox was cool right up until N64 when he made his fatal "DO A BARREL ROLL" mistake...he was cool in Super Nintendo. So was Falco, so was Slippy, Peppy, AND General Pepper. Again, as soon as those characters hit N64 and above, they got instantly nerd-ified. Just my opinion, though.

I think another factor is the Smash is a fairly young series. The gameplay mechanics Smash is built on were relatively untested when Melee was in development compared to, say, a Street Fighter game, whose one on one, meter centric gameplay has been around for several decades so developers generally know what factors could unbalance a character. For Melee, though, the only game the developers had to look to for a template was smash 64, so there wasn't as much for them to go by when trying to balance the game.

You hit the nail on the head - Nintendo was never in the business of making fighting games and thus we can't expect the Smash series to have exemplary balance qualities. Based on what I've read so far on the Street Fighter series, for example, it seems that the characters in those games are much more "viable", overall, than those in Smash, meaning that the lower-tiered characters can still beat their way to the top in tournaments. I haven't seen that happen yet in Smash (although hopefully I will some day), and this leads me to think that the character balance is significantly more crippled in Smash than it is in, say, Street Fighter. This shouldn't be surprising, seeing as how Capcom made the Street Fighter games for the explicit purpose of providing competitive, fighting action. Nintendo made Smash not just for the "fighting", however, but also for the "fun" factor like messing around with items, fighting with legendary characters, traveling to classic Nintendo areas, and generally experiencing a game with "cross-genre" characters. I doubt they focused too much on game balance.

So, of course, we get this nice big problem when "competitive" gamers all of a sudden flock to Smash and start analyzing it as if it was meant to be a hardcore fighter like Street Fighter. Smash is a GREAT game, and probably one of my favorites right now; however, it's pretty clear that Nintendo did not have the same intention as (for example) Capcom did in creating Street Fighter. While Smash is intended to provide a host of elements for its players, not just fighting, Street Fighter is intended for the sole purpose of providing a competitive fighting experience. Thus we can't really "judge" Smash and look at it the same way as we would a traditional fighter because, bottom line, it wasn't MADE to be a traditional fighter. Go figure that things like balance, character matchups, and tier charts would result from Smash; the game creators weren't really worrying about this too much. I'm surprised (and glad) that Smash turned out as playable as it did. As we'll see, Brawl will bring down the final verdict on whether or not Nintendo has decided to "balance" out their third game in the Smash series.

 

[SilverKnight]

Oh yes, the polls are tournament + casuals.

 

[thesage]

I'm pretty sure Link is the most popular character in ssbm. Almost all the noobs I know play Link. His forum here is one of the biggest. After that it's fox (cuz his up-b is too broken lolz).

 

[greenblob]

Well, with Melee, most people want a character that is very mobile. No one wants to play a character who feels like he's moving through molasses rather than air. In general, upper-tier characters are more mobile than lower-tier characters. This is not a coincidence.

 

[Radical Dreamer]

So in the viewpoint that tiers are more significant on gameplay in Smash than most fighters, why do you think this is? I mean smash is one of the few games where people debate their existance...

I can answer this questions pretty easily.

Smash is not more tier significant than most fighters, unless by "most fighters" you mean Virtua Fighter 4-5 and the Guilty Gear XX revisions. Tiers are just as significant in every major Capcom fighter as they are in Smash. The exception is Marvel, which has a God tier of four characters who alone render much of the game's cast of nearly sixty characters unviable, and then another ten usable characters.

Street Fighter 3 Third Strike is basically about three characters, maybe four. Yun and Chun Li are just clearly so dominant, with Ken being a slightly distant but definite third. If you search for final or semifinal matches for 3S you're going to get mostly just yun vs chun, ken vs yun, chun vs ken, chun vs chun, ken vs ken, etc. Hell, I go out of my way looking for 3S matches on youtube with different characters and it's really **** hard, even for an upper mid tier character like Yang. Sure, there are players like RX and Kokujin who beast with Urien and Dudley respectively, but generally the final matches in big tournaments are yun, chun, ken. In Smash, two of the best players in California (basically two of the best players period) are Hugs and Mango, who play Samus and Jigglypuff respectively. You don't see many Ibukis and Oros winning major 3S tournaments, and you don't see many Seans and Qs at all.

If you look at the final results for CvS2 at Evo World 2007, four out of the eight top finishers used an A-Groove team consisting of some combination of Vega, Bison, Blanka and Sakura, including BAS, the first place finisher. Of the four non-A-groove teams, three of them had Sagat. The lone exception was Buktooth, who is known for playing a unique team. But Buktooth got fifth, not first.

According to Sirlin, roughly half of the SF2 Turbo cast is capable of beating Old Sagat.

Smash players debated the existence of tiers because a large portion of them were/are not traditionally fighting game players and thus did not experience this kind of gameplay of prior to Smash.

 

[Emblem Lord]

Radical Dreamer for president.

So good to see other people who know their **** when it comes to other fighting games,

 

[Perfect Hero]

Maybe I'm just rambling XD

Yes you are.

Ryu is one of the best characters in Street Fighter 2 Turbo.

He is definitely top tier.

I'm gonna assume he is popular cuz he is the face of the Street Fighter series.

Mid Tier i think. . .
The top tiers in ST are O. Sagat, Sim, Boxer and Claw.

I can answer this questions pretty easily.

Smash is not more tier significant than most fighters, unless by "most fighters" you mean Virtua Fighter 4-5 and the Guilty Gear XX revisions. Tiers are just as significant in every major Capcom fighter as they are in Smash. The exception is Marvel, which has a God tier of four characters who alone render much of the game's cast of nearly sixty characters unviable, and then another ten usable characters.

Street Fighter 3 Third Strike is basically about three characters, maybe four. Yun and Chun Li are just clearly so dominant, with Ken being a slightly distant but definite third. If you search for final or semifinal matches for 3S you're going to get mostly just yun vs chun, ken vs yun, chun vs ken, chun vs chun, ken vs ken, etc. Hell, I go out of my way looking for 3S matches on youtube with different characters and it's really **** hard, even for an upper mid tier character like Yang. Sure, there are players like RX and Kokujin who beast with Urien and Dudley respectively, but generally the final matches in big tournaments are yun, chun, ken. In Smash, two of the best players in California (basically two of the best players period) are Hugs and Mango, who play Samus and Jigglypuff respectively. You don't see many Ibukis and Oros winning major 3S tournaments, and you don't see many Seans and Qs at all.

If you look at the final results for CvS2 at Evo World 2007, four out of the eight top finishers used an A-Groove team consisting of some combination of Vega, Bison, Blanka and Sakura, including BAS, the first place finisher. Of the four non-A-groove teams, three of them had Sagat. The lone exception was Buktooth, who is known for playing a unique team. But Buktooth got fifth, not first.

According to Sirlin, roughly half of the SF2 Turbo cast is capable of beating Old Sagat.

Smash players debated the existence of tiers because a large portion of them were/are not traditionally fighting game players and thus did not experience this kind of gameplay of prior to Smash.

QFT. End Thread..................

 

[Emblem Lord]

In ST: World Warriors ryu is bottom tier.

I'm talking about Super Turbo.

Tiers change with each re-release.

Ryu is pretty much number one in Super Turbo. Other than Akuma of course.

 

[Radical Dreamer]

No, top four in ST are Old Sagat, Dhalsim, Balrog and Vega. Upper mid tier is Ryu, Chun and Bison. I think Daigo said Old Sagat vs Ryu is one of the hardest matchups in the game that's still possible.

 

[Balloon]

I've always considered tiers in melee to mean less than other fighting games.

But I don't have a ton of experience in other fighting games.

 

[:034:]

Melee's tiers, in my opinion, are very significant and highly noticeable, but the gap between Top and Middle isn't as big as with other fighters.

I asked my friend (who doesn't know anything about the tier list or advanced Smash) who the best characters were and he immediatly named Fox and Falco. I said "What about Shiek and Marth?" and he agreed that they were rather overpowered as well.

And he doesn't even own the game. Pretty much only plays it with me.

 

[Emblem Lord]

Radical dreamer: Gah. You are right. I was talking about Hyper Street Fighter 2.

I got my games mixed up.

 

[MattyMcPwn]

I would say that there are higher and lower tier characters in melee, but it is only really noticable to skilled players. I'm sure if you got two begginers to play as mario and fox, the fox player would keep comboing and not really know whats happening. With mario, he would do fairly normal attacks, making it easier to blast.

No matter how high tier a character is, there is always a way around him. Thats why I hate people coming to the conlusion that the characters are "over-powered" after one or two matches. The best way to deal with them is to read your opponents tactics, maybe try playing as the character himself to see what you would do in a situation and go against his weakpoints. It's the same in any beat-em-up.

 

[choknater]

Radical Dreamer, you are very knowledgable about fighters. I like you.



I love Buktooth lol... i noticed that about the Evo World results too.


Though that is a good example about the west coast (HugS, Mang0, don't forget SilentSpectre... all upper mid tier characters.) The east coast, which is the strongest region, seems to represent the very echelon of the tier list pretty well. With PC and M2K and KDJ respectively using Fox, Marth, and Sheik, I'd say it's pretty clear that the three most dominant players in smash have shown that the tier list is pretty well defined. Big ups to ChuDat for dealing with them...

Perhaps my argument for this is that since the metagame of 3S is a little easier to reach than smash because of less required technical ability, more people reach the high end of the peak of skill, meaning the yun/chun/ken thing is more defined. In melee, there is also sort of a 3 character triangle at the VERY top of the metagame, but even then that is rare, are there are pretty much only three players (plus maybe Azen) who have reached that top level. And I don't even know that much about east coast players; there could be more.

But yes, you're right. Smash is a little more balanced than 3S in a way, but when I say that, I mean that there are about 7 characters worthy of winning tournaments rather than 3.

 

[KishPrime]

I'm curious if anyone thinks that the sheer number of players who play Melee have something to do with this perception. To win a Melee tournament of the same prominence as a traditional fighter, one may have to go through an extra 2-3 tournament rounds, likely against higher tiered characters. That's a huge thing.

Perhaps the reason lower tiers seem less capable is simply because of the sheer number of players drown out the low tier players.

 

[replicate]

Perhaps the reason lower tiers seem less capable is simply because of the sheer number of players drown out the low tier players.

I'm sure this is true; it seems a lot of people only want to get "good" at the game they dedicate themselves to Sheik or Fox, and then because of this only high tiers get played in tournaments, which even furthers the tier gap.