Smash Ultimate Results-Based Tier List: December 2024
Welcome to Luminosity’s Official Results-Based Tier List by LG Schu. What is a results-based tier list? Well, most tier lists are a ranking of characters based on one person’s (or a group of people’s) opinions of each character’s competitive viability. For example, the official tier list was made by combining the opinions of the top 150 players in the world.
However, this tier list has a different aim: to rank characters on their viability based purely on tournament data. See the methodology section, or the subsections of it that pique your interest, for more information on how this tier list was calculated.
This is an update to my old results-based tier list, which was released in August 2023. Note that the old list used slightly different methodology and some differences are due to changes in methodology rather than a character’s change in quality of results. You can find the old results-based tier list here.
Methodology
Overview
This tier list is an aggregate of 8 different lists which are each based on different metrics that indicate a character's viability in the meta and where they should be placed on the tier list. Each character's final score(the number below their picture) is a weighted average of their placements on the eight lists. Each character’s highest placement is given the most weight and their lowest placement is given the least weight. This approach emphasizes each character’s strengths in the data and punishes characters that are consistently bad across all metrics. You can see the data of how each character’s score was calculated here.
Which players have the highest impact?
A character’s top representative will naturally have the greatest impact of any player on their character’s placement, but this list reflects each character’s holistic performance across high and top levels of play. Essentially, I avoided making a character’s placement hinge on the performance of one or two players.
Time Period
This list is also not meant to reflect the meta in December 2024 alone, but instead each character’s performance since October 18, 2021. This starting date was chosen because it’s when the final DLC fighter, Sora was released, so that all characters had an equal amount of time to accrue results and because almost all balance patches were before this date. The results from October 18, 2021 to December 1, 2021(the day the last balance patch was released) had no major effect on characters changed in the patch. This list was finalized on December 9, 2024, which is the end date.
Ratings
Some of the eight metrics use “ratings”. These are the ratings calculated by the Schu Ranking Algorithm V3, which is a point-in-time ranking algorithm and for every metric that uses it, it calculates the player’s rating at the appropriate point in time(specified below for each list).
Character Data
Character Data was sourced from start.gg, ausmash, manual/crowdsourced data and the titles/descriptions of tournament match VODs on YouTube. For each metric that concerns specific sets, character data from that specific set is used, if it’s available from start.gg, ausmash or youtube. For sets with no character data and for metrics that concern whole players, the average of their character usage across their offline sets around that time is used, with more weight given to characters that are clearly mains rather than secondaries/pockets.
“Hardcore” Players
Two of the lists concern “hardcore” players, for lack of a better term. These are players who have competed in 50+ offline events. This is used to measure the performance of the players who have put the most time into the game and their characters.
List 1: Sum of Wins
This metric is the sum of the ratings of players beaten at major tournaments with this character
List 2: Sum of Wins per Loss
This metric is the previous metric divided by the number of losses at major tournaments with this character. This adjusts for popularity and punishes characters that are popular but do poorly on average
List 3: Best Players’ Ratings
This is probably the hardest one to explain the details of. It's the weighted rating of the top 10 weight(not the top 10 players). So if player X plays character A 80% of the time and they're the best, they will take up the 0 to 0.8 slot. If player Y plays character A 50% of the time and they're the second best, they'll take up the 0.8 to 1.3 slot and so on up to 10. For each point in time since the starting date(10/18/2021), the weighted average of those top representatives’ ratings are calculated. The sum of those weighted averages across all points in time is that character’s score for this metric. This confusing system is so that if a character is a popular secondary, they are rewarded for that by the players who secondary them having a spot in the top 10 but those players' effects on the score is proportional to how much they use the character.
List 4: Peak Rating
This score is the highest weighted rating that a representative of that character has achieved since the starting date(10/18/2021). Weighted rating is the player's rating times the character's share of the player's character data. This particularly rewards successful solo mains since their rating is multiplied by 1(100%), which reward characters that are solo-main viable.
List 5: Top Cut Representation
This score is the percentage of players in top cuts of ranked events that are representatives of this character, weighted by the character's share of the player's character data. “Top cut” depends on the tier of the event: P tier = Top 128, S+ tier = Top 96, S tier = Top 64, A+ tier = Top 48, A tier = Top 32, B+ tier = Top 16, B tier = Top 8, C tier = Top 4, D tier = Top 2. Tiers are derived from Lumirank for 2024 and 2023, Ultrank for 2022 and OrionRank Eclipse for 2021.
List 6: Sum of Hardcore Players’ Ratings
See above for the definition of "hardcore" for the purpose of this metric. Besides that, this score is pretty self explanatory: the sum of all ratings of hardcore players across every point in time. This essentially measures how good the most dedicated players are on average times the number of players who are willing to dedicate that much time to the character.
List 7: Sum of Top 10% of Hardcore Players’ Ratings
Again, See above for the definition of "hardcore" for the purpose of this metric. It’s the same as the previous rating except it only uses the top 10% of hardcore players. This essentially measures how good the most dedicated and competent players are on average times the number of players who are willing to dedicate that much time to the character.
List 8: Average Rating Growth of New Players
This one is probably the most unique among these metrics. It takes all the players who went to their first offline tournament after the start date and calculates the average rating they gained per day since they went to their first tournament.
