'Kay.
Tiers are cool and all, but the fact that said top players aren't in mirror matches tells you a lot about the viability of everyone in the cast. Even supposedly low tier. The fact of the matter is there's no huge difference in characters aside from some of their options being entirely braindead. For one, Saitsuofleaves is right when many top players have varying opinions of who is on top. They're really mashed together and the tools necessary to win with a character are not that far away. Having played XIII for a long time, with a characters that have been considered low tier, they can answer a lot of high tier problems.
Absolutely, but I don't recall disagreeing with this. There are alot of characters with different moves, true. What I want to say about this is, though, that for example:
High tier character A has move A, B, C, and D.
Low tier character A only has moves that can correctly respond to High tier character's A and B move,
Whereas High tier character B can correctly respond to
all of High tier character's moves.
With this example in mind, you will most definitely see much more of High tier character A and B, than of Low tier character A. Reason being is that they
want to win.
Definitely, you are right. There are characters who are just braindead and can easily follow a gameplan to victory while putting up a fight. That's baseline until someone understands the gimmick and realizes how much of a gamble it is and how much work it takes to be good with the character. I'll use Kyo as an example. At really high level play, Kyo spends a lot less time throwing out specials and fireballs, and more time using mixups and pressure. The reason being is almost none of his block strings or his specials are safe on block or if you GCAB it. At a mediocre level, Kyo will do fine because someone doesn't understand or have the Kyo experience to fight against it. At the same time, if someone of equal level understands your character even a little bit, and you don't respect it, you're eating a good 40% from anyone. If you're a little higher skill, losing momentum from being thrown out of practically every move you have will suck and even more so with basic cross-up setups.
I agree with this. Though, in the modern day fighting games, I don't really consider any character to be a braindead character that leads to automatic victory. I am fully aware of how important a mixup game is.
It is not like Arcade where you had to play the game a completely different way when those characters were on the field. Raiden made you have to pay attention and rush down haphazardly to do as much damage as possible and you'd need to spend meter to get K' pressure off of you. If he touched you, he did near 50% for very little or no meter. This is much different, much more balanced, and makes you respect every character. Even someone as low as Terry. The way I look at the tier list, you can assume the list is right for Day 1 players or immensely high level play. If not, you will barely notice the weaknesses lower characters have.
What I personally see as a huge weakness in a character, is if you don't have a significant advantage on knockdown. I'm not a good KOF player by any means, so correct me if I'm wrong... hell, I probably only played the arcade version for a couple of hours at most. But to me it seems that Yuri puts you back to a very neutral position when you knock the opponent down. That is what I consider to be low tier.
That's proof enough right there. I can understand if you want to look at tiers to see who will be the easiest person to play (seeing as that's about all it is). However, if you're basing your entire character choice on these characters, and you expect to easily win, that's a bad idea. I'd suggest pick top tier if you don't know how to play really well or you're not sure of your match-up.
Yes, that is a very bad idea indeed. But see, I didn't say that the tierlist is
all that matters, did I? I also said that the character has to fit your playstyle, for example zoning or rushdown or whatever. If your playstyle is rushdown, and the best character of the game (according to the tierlists) is a zoning character, then, obviously, you should not pick that character.
As much as people keep yelling and clinging to who's EZ mode, the game's still plenty balanced. So smacking Saitsuofleaves down for saying tiers don't matter is totally unnecessary.
Just making this clear, I didn't respond the way I did just because he said that tierlists don't matter. It's the mocking and sarcastic reply he gave Tikok, who was merely trying to prove him wrong, even giving him valid examples, that was ticking me off.
