What seperates tiers?
I understand how match-ups are listed in a tier list, but I don't quite get what seperates the named tiers. For example, what seperates Middle Tier from High Tier, or Low Tier from Bottom Tier? Is it based on a specific ability, such as a strong wake-up option, is it just an overall estimate of options, or something else entirely?
Responses (2 total)
When a tier list is constructed from match-ups, tier divisions are usually made whenever there's a larger-than-normal difference between the win count for two adjacent characters.
Using the EventHubs SF4 tier list as an example, you can see that Sagat has his own tier because his 148 wins is so far above and beyond the second-highest character with 134. Similarly, there's a tier break between C.Viper and Abel because the win count drops from 122 to 117 between them. (Other tier breakpoints, such as the ones between Rufus/Zangief and Dhalsim/Fei-Long, are purely subjective and just done to prevent the tiers from becoming too large. Most tier lists seem to be written so as to break the characters into 4-5 different tiers.)
Street Fighter IV tier lists are pretty much always based on matchups, though, so things like "overall options" don't come into play except when determining the outcome of each individual character matchup. Using this system, the characters with the most favorable matchups and least unfavorable matchups rise to the top of the chart.
Tier-listings are typically based on a statistical analysis of matches between particular characters with the purpose of determining which character, when compared to any other character, is better.
The way that this is done is that everyone is assumed at high-level play to have the same level of skill (even though we know this isn't true, as there is always a winner and a loser). Then, the matches between these players are noted for the characters that they use and win percentages by character are generated from that match data.
With that in hand, you can then get a "best of 10" score, how many games out of ten one character will win over another assuming the same level of skill between the players (e.g. 58% win rate becomes 6/10).
Then, the number of wins a character has against every other character is added up to determine a final score. This final score is what is used to order the characters in terms of ability.
It should be noted that this can be applied to any game that has some sort of discriminator between opponents (in Super Street Fighter 4, the discriminator is the character).
In order to create the tiers, or groupings, one takes into account where the norm is (where do most of the characters group) and then figures out the lower and higher tiers from there.
Ideally, a calculation like standard deviation would then be applied to the final scores and then the ranks would determined from that.
In practice, however, most people just eyeball the final scores and determine the groupings based on that.
Note that there are a number of issues with this (or related) methods which make tier listings inaccurate.
The first is the set of sample data that is used. Since Super Street Fighter 4 just came out, there's not enough match data out there to really put together a proper tier list.
The second is that the skill level of the players is not typically normalized to reflect one player's ability over another. It's always assumed that the players are of equal skill level which we all know is not the case.
One final note about tier listings is that they are a time series. Since we don't know everything that there is to know about Super Street Fighter 4, the leverages that any one character has over another will change as new mechanics are discovered about the game. This will inevitably affect the tier listings over time.
