Friday, May 8, 2015

A question for competitive SSB buffs.

While there's no official tier list yet, I've seen a few preliminary ones, and one thing that stood out to me was that Mario was often well ranked, with Dr. Mario near the bottom. What's the reason for such a large difference between such similar characters? (By the way, if you want an example of how lazy Dr. Mario was, apparently they just took Mario's damage and increased it by 12% across the board. They didn't even decide on different values for each move, at least Lucina and Dark Pit have that going for them.)

And for that matter, with constant patches altering the game's balance (Diddy was completely nuked in the last one for instance), will we ever have a proper tier list?

20 comments:

  1. I can forgive being so blase about the universal 12% increase because he has more differences in like everything else. Jumps lower, runs slower, all the specials differ more, some of his attacks have different reach

    He is still a bastion of effort compared to Dark Pit who is just...the same, except his F-Tilt has less knock back, his arrows deas 2% more damage and cant be controlled as much, and his electroshock arm which deals 0.5% more damage and flings them differently.

    If I had to guess, Dr. Mario being lower ranked is probably due to his speed and attack properties?

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  2. Dr. Mario has worse recovery than Mario. He's worse at getting back on the stage, so Mario is more favorable. That's basically the biggest reason for it. Dr. Mario is also a bit more sluggish because he's more powerful, and speed is a pretty big deal.

    Can I ask which tier lists specifically you've looked at?

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    1. Specifically? No, because I found several by just looking on Google.

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  3. Considering this is a fighting game,where player skill takes significant precedence on determining winning and losing,I never understood trying to make a tier list for it.I mean,compared to Pokémon,where there's cold hard numbers and statistics to base such a list on,it just seems like there's too many unpredictable variables in fighting games for it.At least,that's my opinion.

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    1. Player skill and how much the character can apply that. Brawl Ganondorf, for instance, would probably only put up a minor fight against a faster character with another pro...

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    2. Player skill is important, but your character not sucking is pretty big too. Pretty sure some good players tried making Ganondorf work in Brawl, and they all failed miserably. You're criminally underestimating the difference between the best and worst character. Sure, picking the best out of, say, Rosalina and Sheik is difficult, but Rosalina and Charizard? Not even a contest.

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    3. Of course.I'm not saying the "best" player using the "worst" character won't have some issues,but the effort that goes into using that character will certainly show.Same is true for the reverse-the "worst" player using the "best" character won't win because they picked the "best" character.I just think it's too subjective for tiers is all,more so than other competitive games.

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    4. Even so, there are still elaborate metrics in Smash, including straight-up odds of each character beating each other if played by two skilled players of the same skill level. I don't think these are coming out of anyone's ass.

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    5. I was about to add another point about the possible human error of recording said statistics with a silly theoretical that only cloning the same person would create solid concrete results,but let's just agree to disagree,because we could probably keep this going waaaaay longer than it needs to.Agreed?

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    6. True. I'll admit to not knowing the methodology myself, and it'd probably go straight over my head if someone explained it to me anyway.

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  4. Perhaps the people making these tier lists are operating on the idea that if Mario is objectively better as a character, there's zero reason to use Dr. Mario and so he's relegated to the bottom.

    However, that seems like a usage-based ranking system (like Smogon's tier lists), which doesn't exactly fit Smash.

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  5. These early tier lists are usually made by people who aren't too much in the know of wins and skills of competitive play and generally the backroom lists are done after a certain event or time, personally I see EVO this year as being the event where we could get a ver 1 tier list, which even then wouldn't be final, I mean hell the SF2 tier list changed in about 09 when E. Honda was found to have some interesting approaches, which meant that players skilled with him used him more efficiently
    Or maybe im just rambling, though in reality Dr.Mario's recovery is bad compared to Mario, which might contribute to this lowerness

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  6. Dr. Mario's recovery is one of the worst. The reason Mario is favored over Dr. Mario is just that he's easier to play. His combos are pretty intuitive; his tilts don't do so much knockback so it's really easy to just follow up with another attack. downthrow-uptilt-uptilt-uptilt etc. So when you have tier lists that are voted on (like the Reddit ones) you'll find that characters that are more intuitive to play are higher ranked (Mario and Captain Falcon are good examples).

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  7. Tonight's PotW is Krookodile. Any errors anyone else noticed?...

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    1. "All its abilities are really useful". I mean, Anger Point? Really?

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    2. And it's contradicted when the guy was all, "Oh! The third Ability is ANGER POINT! Oops." Maybe he was thinking of Gen 5 Gyarados? These days with Gyarados and Salamence, you can tell if it's Mega if it has Intimidate. For OU (Salamence) or those who need another Mega (Gyarados)...

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    3. Actually, a huge chunk of regular Gyaradoses use Intimidate as well. It's just all-around a great ability to have.

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    4. True. Gyarados is one of those Pokemon you can get away with using either Ability on...

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  8. I'm a moderator on Smashboards, so I hope that's enough to give me some credence when I say it's best not to take any tier list you see very seriously. Unless it's produced by a similar group to the Melee/Brawl Backroom (which is the group(s) on Smashboards which have say in the "official" [IE taken the most seriously] tier lists.), it's best to just brush over it imo. Sometimes it's just people making lists based off their For Glory experiences, experiences with friends and just what they saw from watching some stream awhile ago.

    Mario focuses on getting in and setting up amazing combo strings. Dr. Mario is kinda the same, except his combo strings tend to be shorter due to his lower jump height, overall slower speed and higher knockback, so he can't chase opponents as well as Mario.
    He's a lot stronger though. So he can KO earlier than Mario can. He's almost like Little Mac with aerial presence.
    Mario's back-air is pretty good, but Dr. Mario's b-air is delicious.~

    Doc is actually higher on the official Melee tier list. But Smash 4 played up their differences more than Melee, resulting in an arguably worse Doc.
    And in a game where speed is as important as it is? Mario tends to have less trouble. I personally wouldn't put Doc THAT much lower than Mario, though
    With customs, I'd actually put them pretty close together. Doc is really good with customs..

    As for whether we'll ever get an actual "official" tier list... Well, definitely from somewhere sometime. Europe and Japan have their own communities that I'm sure will put one out eventually
    As for whether Smashboards will make another official one for NA, eh, I'm not too sure. Probably, but not for awhile.
    The balance patches aren't that much of a problem since, outside the first one nerfing Greninja like nobody's business, they don't change things THAT drastically. Even with the most recent one, Diddy's still pretty much the best character. He's just AS "best" as he used to be. He's still really good, just not ridiculous.
    Even then, tier lists get updated quite a bit anyway, so it's not a big deal. Brawl's and Melee's tier lists have gone through many many changes over the years.

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    1. Thanks for the elaborate response, really informative!

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