6 Jun 4705 - Tier_Talk
Gamenight will continue tomorrow. Any of you who wish to bring a game may do
so, with the understanding that it may or may not get played, and that I cannot
take responsibility for it getting lost if you just leave it around the place.
It's hard to find a game that everyone can play and enjoy, rotate out on, talk
about and so on, so when a good candidate emerges, it is important to make sure
everything about the game is working just as planned.
Just as planned.
The plan is for people to get along. The plan is for everyone to have fun. The
Tao of my job is to even out fun and make it uniform through your ranks. When I
have finally done this, I can die.
Here's the scoop. Guilty Gear XX in its various flavours is such a game. At the
house, we have XX. Sometimes others bring Isuka or Accent Core or Slash. For
those who don't know, Guilty Gear is a side-scrolling fighter, like Street
Fighter, King of Fighters, or Karnov's Revenge. It's a blast and you should try
it, though it can take a little practice to get used to doing inputs if you have
no experience with similar fighting games. For the sake of those who wish to get
in on the fun among the serious crowd (we're not really a serious crowd of GG
players, trust me), I suppose I should set up some training and shall. Talk to
me if you would like to learn Guilty Gear.
For the rest of you mugs, I'm laying down the law right now. This is a pet peeve
of mine, and since you're in my house, there you have it.
No tier talk.
This means no whining about some character or other being higher-tier, or
claiming you only lost because of tiers or anything else. I'm sick of it, and I
don't want to hear it any more, especially about Accent Core specifically. Even
people on online forums who whine about the tiers at least have some idea of
what they're talking about. It ends here. Now you should understand why:
In Guilty Gear, tiers are developed based on statistical analysis of matchups
between two characters of equal skill. The way a character matches up against
every other character determines what tier that character goes in, all relative
to how each other character stacks up. Points are assigned in one of a few ways,
a good matchup is worth more points than a bad one, and so on. The grading and
scaling is arbitrary, but as long as it is consistent, it is valid. For our
purposes, I'm going to be considering the tiers listed here:
http://kayin.pyoko.org/GuiltyGear/actiers.html. You'll notice that no
matchup out of ten matches is ever worse than 6-4 on average, and there's much
more 5.5-4.5 and 5-5 going on.
This means that, given equal player skill, you'll win that many matches on
average against the other guy. This also means that you may well lose ten
matches in a row to someone who is equally skilled as you, even if your
character has a 6-4 advantage. That's probability for you.
So on the whole, everyone needs to stop talking about what tier their dude is in
and keep playing Guilty Gear. You have been warned.
And if it makes you sad; shed a tier.
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