What Makes a Character TOP TIER? 

I appreciate this a ton 🙏 i will continue grinding i just wanna make stuff thats a good blend of informative and educational so im always happy to hear stuff like this

This is a point that can take a long time to explain and explore fully, so forgive me for cutting corners in responding to this well thought out comment. But ease of win condition (what i discuss in this video), is hugely different from ease of execution, which i dont factor into the idea of character strength since inevitably, the top 0.1% will breach that barrier. Some win conditions are strong, and some are weak (inherently) and then on top of that, things like frame data, system mechanics, and character-specific resources can also be used by designers to mitigate and weaken said inherent win-con strength. A strong win condition is something like punishing, because of the stuff i said in the video, those openings you fish for mean guaranteed damage, if you react to raw data that you can see on screen, you win. A weak win condition is something like item throwing, a playstyle where you give up your okizeme for your next pressure interaction, and must open yourself up to activate your wincon, which has a random chance of being bad or useless. Youll notice this with characters like Jamie too, hes weak because sf6 is defined by drive rush knockdowns and he gives that up for drinks. I do wanna say though your point on sf6 strength is misconstruing the data somewhat, and ignoring many factors. I believe youre referring to the CPT character usage vs win percentage graph that Alliettefaye made recently, and simply put, to get out of pools as jamie, you must be a better jamie, and thus there were fewer jamies that won more on average. And while you do see a dissolution of strength nearer the top of the tier list because of this same factor, as - like you said - matchup familiarity plays a part too, its also ignoring that of those 557 luke games, many of those are gonna be luke vs luke, and you also just have more data to work with too, so it inherently slides more towards 50% (a bit like the idea coin flips wont show you 50/50 results until you get closer to infinity, but with more factors to involve). It wouldnt be possible for a character with 1/6th of all CPT top 8 games played to have a 90% winrate. Its part of the reason why the old-guard dataset-based Tier lists youd see on SFIV and prior have kinda gone the way of the dino. Since say, the top 8 of last years 7000-man evo tourney of SF6, are going to be players so statistically anomalous that say, the overall 47% winrate of JP isnt factoring in as much as the blend of raw character strength and player talent on display, since there might be 447 JPs but only one of them is Kakeru. And kakeru might know things about JP other players dont, or be executionally better at pulling off combos that are harder for genpop, or reacting to difficult hitconfirms and screen stimuli. So like, note im not saying its invalid to use that dataset but you could potentially use that data to say, ken is washed hes not the best character in sf6 clearly. When knowing the matchup well doesnt make a character itself worse, its the character in practice that is weakened. (Perhaps thats what matters to you overall, so in a game like GGXXACR with two of the strongest characters ever, Zappa and Testament, Sol has significantly better tournament results, because he is much easier than those characters even if on paper the character strength differential is massive. So you might put Sol in a tier above those two in that case) Also just like a fun thought experiment i guess, but any playstyle that requires you to make a guess what your opponent is going to do, is inherently a weaker wincondition than one where you just react to whats on screen. And yet some players, like sonicfox notably, or daigo too, are known for "downloading" their opponent and making incredibly hard-callouts. Which is the weakest thing you can do in a fighting game because you dedicate an incredibly unsafe normal to just guessing "my opponent will be hit by this and wont react properly". And yet some players are amazing at this. Even though the character theyre playing has no impact on it. Thats where the whole "I dp and its random but Daigo DPs and hes a genius" idea comes from. Would Ryu be the best character in SF6 if someone correctly guessed when the opponent would attack every time and just DPd them correctly 9/10 times they pressed any button? Probably not. I go over some of these ideas in a less "stream-of-consciousness" manner in my "What is an archetype" Video. Where i describe the idea of "facilitation" which is what i use to define both a characters archetype and tier list position. How strong are the situations a character is designed to create and how do you decide what those situations even are, so if youre interested in more rambling or seeing where im coming from i hope that video helps somewhat.

@@DarumaFGC "Ease of win condition" is something that can be easier to find examples of in other genres: a notable one being trading/collectable card games (Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, etc.). A deck's win condition becomes more or less easy/consistent depending on how many cards are necessary for it to be executed, how useful components of the win condition are in general (ranging from being genuinely good cards even without being part of a combo or absolute bricks until the pieces are assembled), and how easily your win condition can be disrupted by common strategies in the metagame. If your win condition involves drawing one copy of a card, and there are other cards in your deck that make finding it easier, then it is a very consistent and easy win condition. If you have to draw 5 specific cards that all don't do anything until you have all of them, and there are additional steps after that your opponent can interrupt, then it'll be a very inconsistent and difficult win condition. Analogous win conditions to "bricky" combo decks in fighting games are ones that Lord Knight calls "two-step win conditions", in which a character has to find space to do something to enable character specific mechanics-Jack-O' needing to find space to get out a house/minion for example. Of course, characters with these sorts of win conditions won't necessarily be bad depending on how they're designed overall, but they'll be more likely to run into trouble in at least some match-ups. But as you touch on with attributing win conditions to archetypes, win conditions don't need to be character specific-and frequently aren't. Getting a knockdown, getting your opponent to block something, or just getting into the right range in neutral can be significant components of a character's win condition, and the ease/difficulty of achieving these things is what makes up the "ease of win condition." If a character's win condition starts off of getting a knockdown, but their tools in neutral are subpar and a specific starter is needed to confirm into a knockdown, then that'll be a difficult win condition. If a character just needs to get into the right range and that range just happens to be round-start distance, then that's an easy win condition.

Many more to come!

Theres something i couldnt fit in this video, but some top tiers are practical vs on paper. I.e. testament and zappa are #1 and #2 for GGACR# but sol has significantly better results than either, because hes much easier to play. Kens more utilitarian hitconfirms just make him more usable to a top player than luke is, which is why theres a (slight) bias towards ken in results right now, even if on paper luke is better current patch

@DarumaFGC makes sense, although in my experience so far, I still have seen a lot more Luke's than Ken on the scene/performing better

Super appreciated!! 🍻 ill keep cracking on at more videos, but its great to hear from you guys that its enjoyed.

Sort of what i was getting at with that diatribe is the idea of a practical top tier vs an on paper top tier. Even with the nerfs, which arent insignificant, Ken will likely always still be played at high level and see good results because his tools are self sufficient and work very symbiotically with the games mechanics. I couldnt fit this in the video, but a good demonstration of Theoretical vs Practical top tiers are the top tiers in Guilty Gear accent core. On paper, testament and zappa are some of the wildest characters of all time. They are far and away the top 2 in that game. But, because these characters are very hard and require a ton of mental stamina to focus in while playing enough to play them at their best, if you look at accent core tournament results, Sol absolutely washes both of them results wise. So, its like, not useful to claim Sol is top #1 even if hes the character that wins more. And i think the same of ken v luke, luke is now on paper the better character but his gameplan is so much harder to put into practice that ken will always stay relevant even with sweeping nerfs. Hence players like sayff, phenom, tokido, etc not switching over to luke even though theoretically, these are two very similar characters if you think the gameplans just fireball, dp, stuff approaches with big buttons. Theres a ton more nuance to that obviously but yknow. Insert the meme bafael made of lukes sfv nerfs moving him from S tier to S tier.

@@DarumaFGC I think assessing practical vs on paper top tiers is a good discussion as well but I feel it still misses the mark with Luke. Even before the mini patch luke was everywhere in tournaments. At capcom cup there were 11 Lukes compared to 7 Ken’s, the Luke’s got farther than the Ken’s and post nerf this is likely to get more stark. That being said ken is also a practical top tier and the reason they probably didn’t switch out was the Ken was good enough that taking the time to switch to Luke just wouldn’t be worth the investment, putting aside whether or not they just liked ken better. I don’t think there’s any major difficulty gap either. Run cancels are probably a bit easier than perfect knuckles but both are incredibly practical and consistent even at intermediate level play and that’s the only Luke thing you could say is particularly hard. Everything else is just basic shoto stuff cranked to 12 and since 2HP is such an insane AA while 2mp is an all in one poke/counterpoke/combo starter/DRush check/combo fodder/pressure tool the mental stack is lower than the average character

I think if anything hes closest to a bully, similar to a footsies character but focused on hard dedicating to risky options for space denial, whereas a footsies character is safe and noncommittal

@@DarumaFGC is it a strong archteype?(its meta?) bcuz i want to play Terry in street fighter 6 but when it comes to fight i am a noob so i don't really know if it is good or not.Also ty for answering me, i am going to watch your video about bully characters now

It depends a lot on the implementation. Bullies can go from bottom to top tier in a single patch. Its happened many times in big fighting games. My guess is that he will be pretty good, i think his special moves are sort of mediocre for SF6s game style, but like we have seen with M. Bisons reveal, they are very willing to offer extremely good frame data to make up for that. At the stage youre at in fighting games, dont worry too much about tier lists and focus more on fundamentals, i have 2 playlists of videos on beginner tips and knowledge on how to make up gameplans and come up with your own combos etc. They are in playlists on my channel though theyre my oldest videos, so they might not be of the same quality but i promise the information is good and simple to understand. Just play who you think is coolest while still having an input style you like. As you get better and better, those things will all get easier too.

@@DarumaFGC Thank you !!!

@@DarumaFGC also,i promise is the last question,would you say Marisa from SF6 is a bully??

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