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Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate First Impressions Tier List by Dragon and Honey Bee

Marlow

Premium Supporter
Premium Supporter
S tier is supposed to be reserved for characters who clearly stand out above the rest. That’s how it has been in literally every fighting game ever made.
I've always thought of it in terms of standard deviation. S tier should be those characters that are 3 SD above average. If you have a 25-35 player roster and 5 of those characters are in "S" tier, it's just not mathematically possible. It's like how 65% of people think they're above average intelligence.
 

DixieFlatline78

Everyone Has A Path
Well with this patch Shao Kahn may still be C tier but Robocop might be L tier and Kano is definitely H tier

Having S++, S+, S, S-, Just-Outside-of-S, and A+ tier is so silly. If someone said "Balrog is B-Tier" we should all be able to know that he's a solid mid-tier character. The problem is everyone wants to make these dookie-ass tier lists with lukewarm takes where EvErY cHaRaCtEr Is BrOkEn AnD vIaBlE courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Jacqui solo-main doing a Twitch stream where they say "This character is S+. They have everything. Moving on, we got this character. S. They're ridiculous." These tier lists all look the same and say absolutely nothing. There have been a couple strong tier list casts like Ninjakilla's where he demonstrates in training mode a characters weaknesses but most of them lump 70% of the cast in A+ and A, unordered
 

colby4898

Special Forces Sonya Up-player
Yes the letters do matter, if you actually want to communicate effectively. Everyone can intuitively understand what "A, B, C" means. No one would have a clue what "Apple, Orange, Banana" means. So using "Apple, Orange, Banana" to mean the same thing, when you could have used "A, B, C", automatically makes your tier list a worse communication tool.

A break in natural language order should have specific meaning, not random. Use S to say "These characters don't fall in the natural order with everyone else. They're not A, they're not A+, they're something else entirely." That's a good use of S. But using "S, A, B" to mean the same thing as "A, B, C" (for... reasons??) automatically makes your tier list a worse communication tool.

One of the reasons tier lists are useless is exactly because creators just make up their own rules every time. You're never really sure what you're looking at. If we actually did have consistent, agreed-on rules creators would stick to, we could compare and aggregate lists and they might actually communicate useful information.

As is, tier lists are just clickbait that creators throw up for cheap views (because they know people love to talk about them, even though we all know they're useless clickbait... what does that say about us??)
Obviously apple orange wouldn't be a good system. But my point is if orange is above apple, then its the same as s being above a. Or 1 being above 2 etc. Letters or numbers would just be used cos they have a universal order. You make the gap between tiers smaller by adding tiers. As long as you have a top tier being say A, and the tier that is slightly worse than A being B, that is the same as the top tier being S and the tier slightly worse than it being S-. I would say the - and + make it more confusing, not less.
 

CrimsonShadow

Administrator and Community Engineer
Administrator
Obviously apple orange wouldn't be a good system. But my point is if orange is above apple, then its the same as s being above a. Or 1 being above 2 etc. Letters or numbers would just be used cos they have a universal order. You make the gap between tiers smaller by adding tiers. As long as you have a top tier being say A, and the tier that is slightly worse than A being B, that is the same as the top tier being S and the tier slightly worse than it being S-. I would say the - and + make it more confusing, not less.
The difference is that if you already have your standard top tier in S+, then when a character is introduced/discovered that is actually abnormally good/broken, then you have to start inventing new tiers like S+++, or rearrange the entire thing, which just gets ridiculous.

Keeping things roughly within a standard range avoids that entirely and just makes more sense.
 
I agree with you absolutely, very often tier lists are made very unprofessionally. At dashfight I found a tier list that took into account both the opinions of the world's leading players and the results of the characters in major international tournaments. Shao Kahn is at D level here and Robocop at C level.
 
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