No they are not.. not at all...
all you have to do is watch competitive play to see massive diversity in the top 24s to Top 8s. MK1 is one of the most "balanced", as in how each character is viable, in MK history.
Tiers are just not a thing as much in fighting games as they used to be. Not with the patching and and so much effort into balancing. Every time you see one of those ridiculous tier lists, the next day you see someone win a major with a bottom tier.
I mean, that staked Brazillion thing was a few days ago was a Baraka (Stryker) vs Scorp (Kamerlon) final and the top 64 only just missed out having the ENTIRE roster represented.
This perceived "top tier" stuff is in peoples heads... the actual events tell the true story.
Did you read anything I said or just the title? Because this misses the point on everything I have said.
A low tier character doing well in a tournament happens. Because most people recognize that the player behind the character typically matters far more than the characters themselves. People see low tier doing well as evidence that the game is fairly balanced and the low tiers not being that far away from the top tiers. But this is being results oriented and not focusing on the context. Kinda like when you see a lopsided score of really any sports game, it doesn’t always tell the full story. Let’s take American Football for instance. Lets say the final score was X beating Y 45-10. By this final score, most would assume the game wasn’t close, and that X simply just dominated Y. But those who actually watched the game or have looked at the stats see a different story entirely. That 35 of those points were scored defensively on unforced turnovers. Such as the ball hitting the receivers hands and it luckily tipping into the defenses hands for a pick six. A fumble that was called a fumble on the field and led to a scoop & score and there wasn’t enough video evidence to overturn the call, but if you were there in person you had a clear angle to see that the player was clearly down and that the ground caused the fumble. More instances of this happening to account for the 35 points scored defensively on turnovers. And then you see that all of these turnovers occurred in the redzone, meaning the offense had amazing stats and significantly outgained the opponent and dominated them on both sides of the ball. Probably not a great example because if you don’t know much about American Football you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, lol.
Anyway, my point is, low tiers doing well in tournaments is not only due to the player, as I said in my posts, they’re having to work 10x harder than any of the top tiers just to be able to compete. I shouldn’t need to break down what that’d look like. Also, there’s a reason it’s such a big deal when players do so well in tournaments with low tier characters. It’s a unique phenomenon and one of the reasons for that is because you’re going in Knowing for a fact you’re going to have to work so much harder than everyone else who is using the top tiers, especially in this game. Because again as I said, the top tiers in this game almost all have such strong setplay on top of everything else they have, that you only have to start thinking/trying if the super strong setplay isn’t working, which is rare in and of itself.
I maybe should’ve titled this something different to avoid people just seeing the title and responding to it without reading anything I said, but that’s just how it goes sometimes. ¯\
(ツ)/¯
