Community Voted Tier Lists May 2025
In May, I (LG SchuStats) started running weekly Community Voted Tier Lists based on different criteria as a fun little experiment and it’s gotten quite some traction! Here are the four lists I released in May:
In each form, the responders were given a description of the criteria so everyone is on the same page, and I’ve put that description below each list. In each form, players were asked to rate as many characters as they like on a scale of 1 to 10. I have a document detailing how the ratings were combined here.
This form got 227 responses! This was the description given to the responders for the sauce/flashiness tier list:
"How much "sauce" a character has is based on how much of the following traits they have:
- Expressive movement and neutral
- Creative combos/strings
- Rewards/requires flashy risk taking
- Has many ways to disrespect the opponent
- Just looks cool in advantage state
- Rewards being built different / High skill ceiling
Sauceless characters usually have the following traits
- Autopilot/repetitive gameplay/flow-chartiness
- Basic and guaranteed kill confirms
- Easy / low skill ceiling"
This form got 149 responses! This was the description given to the responders:
“How "difficult" a character is defined by how difficult it is to play that character at top level, relative to other characters in the same viability tier. What that means is Ganondorf, for example shouldn't be considered difficult just because he's so bad and therefore it's extremely difficult to do well with him. His difficulty should be assessed compared to other difficult characters.
Characteristics of difficult characters include:
- High execution barrier for their most important tools/combos
- Very unforgiving (i.e. if you make a small mistake, your risk of losing a stock increases a lot)
- Many difficult/complex decisions required in neutral, advantage and disadvantage states
- A steep learning curve
- Requires more/harder/smarter work to reach top level"
This form got 261 responses! This was the description given to the responders:
“Pretty self-explanatory, but the one caveat is that you should judge how fun a character is to use in the context of whichever capacity you personally like to play smash in the most, whether it be tournaments, friendlies, casual, elite smash, randubs etc.”
This form got 338 responses! This was the description given to the responders:
"Pretty self-explanatory, but the one caveat is that you should judge how fun a character is to play against in the context of whichever capacity you personally like to play smash in the most, whether it be tournaments, friendlies, casual, elite smash, randubs etc."
Each of these lists were structured so that the “good” attribute was at the top of the list and the “bad” attribute was at the bottom of the lists and so the lists have lots of interesting correlations between them. Two standouts to me were Joker and Mii Gunner. Joker was the only character to be in the top 2 tiers in every single list. Mii Gunner got 0.00, the lowest possible rating in 3 out of the 4 lists. People generally seem to love joker and really really hate Mii Gunner.
