User:Semicolon/Treatise on the Existence of Tiers: Difference between revisions
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First, before we get to explaining of the arguments and what they mean for tiers, we have to examine a critical idea: what is a tier? Simply put, a tier is a ranking of how a character (or a set of characters) is expect to perform under tournament conditions based on that character’s metagame. The practical offshoot of this is the idea that the higher the tier of a character, the better that character is in relevant aspects of the game. Tiers are malleable, and change over time (even if these changes are marginal). They are based on tournament placing, so they are empirically decided, and disputes over tiers cannot be decided with logical number crunching (and before you say it, the existence of tiers CAN be logically proven, as we will see later). Instead, they must be decided by a very large sample of data under very controlled tournament conditions, and from there medium placing can be determined through inductive reasoning. | First, before we get to explaining of the arguments and what they mean for tiers, we have to examine a critical idea: what is a tier? Simply put, a tier is a ranking of how a character (or a set of characters) is expect to perform under tournament conditions based on that character’s metagame. The practical offshoot of this is the idea that the higher the tier of a character, the better that character is in relevant aspects of the game. Tiers are malleable, and change over time (even if these changes are marginal). They are based on tournament placing, so they are empirically decided, and disputes over tiers cannot be decided with logical number crunching (and before you say it, the existence of tiers CAN be logically proven, as we will see later). Instead, they must be decided by a very large sample of data under very controlled tournament conditions, and from there medium placing can be determined through inductive reasoning. | ||
Another idea important to this discussion is what is behind a tier, or in simpler terms what causes the existence of tiers. Clearly, differences in the abilities of characters are what tiers are based on, say they can be said to cause the existence of tiers. But these differences have a quality referred to in gaming as imbalance. Particularly in real time strategy games, the idea of imbalance features prominently, but it is common in fighting games as well. There is no game that has ever been said to have perfect balance, with the possible exception of Starcraft: Broodwar | Another idea important to this discussion is what is behind a tier, or in simpler terms what causes the existence of tiers. Clearly, differences in the abilities of characters are what tiers are based on, say they can be said to cause the existence of tiers. But these differences have a quality referred to in gaming as imbalance. Particularly in real time strategy games, the idea of imbalance features prominently, but it is common in fighting games as well. There is no game that has ever been said to have perfect balance, with the possible exception of Starcraft: Broodwar. | ||
Now we will move to the discussion of the evidence for the existence of tiers. | Now we will move to the discussion of the evidence for the existence of tiers. | ||