Forum:"Sandbag" characters when recording results

Recently a discussion popped up on Discord regarding the addition/removal of sandbag characters for the results tables. In the past we've been ignoring sandbag characters when top players use them during pools; top players could pull out and win with any character when against a low-level player, making it cheap to say that the character contributed to a player's placement. As a result, characters such as Hungrybox's Ganondorf at or Mew2King's Pichu were not added to the results table.

However, a lot has changed since we started doing this. As brought up in Discord, top players have seen upsets in pools especially for later games such as Smash 4 and Ultimate. (eg., , and at ), which means that even if they were to sandbag, they may have an equal chance of losing the set when compared to using their main. We're also at a point in time where the Smash roster is so huge that mid or low-tier characters do often have legitimate usage, even in top 8 (eg. at, where Bloom4Eva used Corrin and Jigglypuff to defeat a top 10 UK player in Grand Finals).

This does not mean we should start adding Mew2King's Pichu to results tables; there's still a huge gap between top player and low-level players in Melee. However, there is an argument that this gap is very likely smaller in the recent titles, so there should be a change to this rule, or at least have it be less strict for the recent titles. Cookies Creme  01:33, September 27, 2021 (EDT)

Support
Personally I think they should be listed in melee as well. If it contributed to a set win, then it contributed to a set win. If mew2king wanted to get the entire roster on a results table, then that is his prerogative. Gagesango (talk) 05:06, September 27, 2021 (EDT)

Support, for Ultimate at the very least, compare to Melee, where players have way bigger skill difference, they can easily get a pool win with one of the characters on the roster. But Ultimate is a very different game, not only is the roster way more deep and extensive, allowing players to do counterpick wars a lot more often since way more matchups are possible. There are also a bunch of rising stars to the point that a pool opponent can be challenging, many upsets can be caused in a major. Many tournaments can have depths and many regions have talents. So I can see that being more lenient with Ultimate is a good idea. It is however tough to say for something like Smash 4, the game was not only dead for a while now basically, it was also generally less balanced than Ultimate. NPM   Morr!?   12:25, June 17, 2022 (EDT)

Comments
I'm personally going to wait on this because I am rather neutral on this subject, so I want to see the arguments for this first. Cookies Creme  01:33, September 27, 2021 (EDT)