SneakyTortoise
Official Master of Salt
So, this was a thread I was going to wait until I2 came about before writing, but as we are at Tier list season once again (despite the patch dropping just over 2 weeks ago, you animals) I thought that it could be a good time to bring it up and see what you all thought.
We all know that everyone around here loves a tier list, but I am going to try my best to steer people away from them and towards the more productive discussion method where the character's important aspects are visualised and directly compared as a whole.
The way I believe this has been perfectly implemented in is infil's KI guie. And I urge everyone to check it out, specifically the character page, to get an idea of how effective and useful something like this can be.
The tool basically looks like this:
Here, you can see that the key components of the game, that can contribute to a character being good or bad, are each rated and visualised. This is a much more honest approach to discussing characters as you can directly show what they are good and bad at, and then let someone else decide whether that's what they want from a main/side character, rather than just giving them an arbitrary 3rd of 7th tier list placement.
Now, for something like this for MKX, we'd obviously change what the key points of the radar chart are. And the best part is that, as the meta of the game changes and the impact of the tools a character has changes in importance, we can change these points to reflect that. So we can discuss as a community what the key components should be, then each character forum can try to come to a consensus of how their character chart would look, top players can present theirs, and then we can compare them and discuss how it plays out.
I think something like this would also be valuable, not only for comparing characters, but also for character guides. Straight away the author would be able to show the character's strength and weaknesses and the reader can decide if that's the type of character they want to learn.
I have no experience in writing code or creating websites, but I'm pretty sure that incorporating something like this into a website isn't too difficult, as it is just an excel chart that you can interact with. @STORMS @Alien Substance (not sure who knows about that kind of thing, but thought I'd tag for your input/thoughts)
TLDR: Characters should be compared with their qualities and weaknesses visualised, rather than just through arbitrary ranking.
We all know that everyone around here loves a tier list, but I am going to try my best to steer people away from them and towards the more productive discussion method where the character's important aspects are visualised and directly compared as a whole.
The way I believe this has been perfectly implemented in is infil's KI guie. And I urge everyone to check it out, specifically the character page, to get an idea of how effective and useful something like this can be.
The tool basically looks like this:
Here, you can see that the key components of the game, that can contribute to a character being good or bad, are each rated and visualised. This is a much more honest approach to discussing characters as you can directly show what they are good and bad at, and then let someone else decide whether that's what they want from a main/side character, rather than just giving them an arbitrary 3rd of 7th tier list placement.
Now, for something like this for MKX, we'd obviously change what the key points of the radar chart are. And the best part is that, as the meta of the game changes and the impact of the tools a character has changes in importance, we can change these points to reflect that. So we can discuss as a community what the key components should be, then each character forum can try to come to a consensus of how their character chart would look, top players can present theirs, and then we can compare them and discuss how it plays out.
I think something like this would also be valuable, not only for comparing characters, but also for character guides. Straight away the author would be able to show the character's strength and weaknesses and the reader can decide if that's the type of character they want to learn.
I have no experience in writing code or creating websites, but I'm pretty sure that incorporating something like this into a website isn't too difficult, as it is just an excel chart that you can interact with. @STORMS @Alien Substance (not sure who knows about that kind of thing, but thought I'd tag for your input/thoughts)
TLDR: Characters should be compared with their qualities and weaknesses visualised, rather than just through arbitrary ranking.