I put the Shielda part in there because you were complaining about MK being "so low", even though he was ranked 2nd. My best guess was that you just saw him not in the highest tier, so I went ahead and tried to clarified that. I apparently was wrong, but would you mind what made you say "why is MK so low"? He really isnt.


If you find a Pikachu that is predictable with Quick Attack then that Pikachu is doing something wrong. Two insanely fast burst dashes that can be angled relatively freely (if this game had 360° movement this whole argument wouldnt even be needed lol) and has virtually no lag makes it a powerful movement option. It does have s*** priority and therefore loses to a lot of stuff, but thats why I put "arguably" up there after all. Out of curiousity, what would you say is the best then? Quick Attack obviously is not your choice. Also good job at ignoring virtually everything else I said about Pikachu.


Not being a random does not automatically make you good at a game That claim was based mostly on your tier list thread ("Marth wins every matchup except for Jigglypuff" alone speaks more for itself than anything you could say), which makes it very clear that your understanding of the meta is... limited to say the least. And I have yet to see a person that is amazing at Smash while having little metagame knowledge, that just doesnt work. I could go on about how most people whining about Marth tend to be not as good or how "kinda above average" says basically nothing at all, but eeh

So low was a typo. I wanted to say so high, lmao.
I didn't ignore the rest. I just agreed with it. I don't need to answer when I agree, huh? Well, all Pikachu I saw recovered kinda predictable (yeah, for some reason, people can't recover diagonally. It's always up then side. You wasted 2 warps with something you could make with one. Stupid, huh?) Wow. Looks like you can't read when I said: "EXAMPLE". Examples are usually 100% fictional. Do you know what fictional means? I just used that to explain how my tier list works, lol. I even made something bold right there so people could understand, and for some reason, it didn't work.
And I don't have "little metagame knowledge", making presumptions again... Maybe not as much as Back Room people (or maybe that much), but I know what I need to know. And I'm not amazing at Smash. You should know what "kinda" mean. Your interpretation is horrible, gawd.
"Almost all people". It means that not all people. Everyone has a different case. You can't say that because X criminal have murdered many people his childhood wasn't good. Yeah, almost 90% of the times, that's the case. But maybe it's not! You can't tell anything without proofs.

You're distorting many of the things I've written. Good job at ignoring what I said about you being rude.

Without trying to wade too much into the drama, Pikachu is seriously amazing. Quick Attack is unreactable if done correctly (for example, if you set it up so up->down-left snaps to ledge but up->left goes on a platform, it's impossible to cover both without going offstage to hit the first part of the QA, which means you can just do diagonal-up-left to stage and reverse edgeguard).

The key thing is that (ESPECIALLY in a tier list that is supposedly based on matchups) your estimation of the people you play as a character shouldn't determine the ability of the character. I've never played a seriously good Goku that used aerial ki blasts well, could get 0-death combos, or could recover with mixups well. That doesn't mean Goku's trash, it means I haven't played Proto. Tier lists generally assume that players are at a level where they can implement the current meta (i.e., if Fox triple-shining is really good and part of the meta, our imaginary tier list players should know how to do it). The only time skill disparity really comes into play are things at the very frontier of human ability (i.e., clean reaction tech-chasing or excessive multishining), not just "eh it was hard". Most people aren't at that level, but we still strive to capture what happens assuming everyone implements what they should and knows the matchup vaguely well. You could make a tier list that tried to reflect lower-level players (Naruto would be pretty high!), but that isn't what most tier lists do (especially ones that say they're dependent on matchups, which are usually even higher of a standard for players). In debating a character placement, imagine a relatively optimized player: not the best in the world or completely perfect, but someone that can do all the character-specific tech and has a good degree of practice. For Pikachu, that would be flawless QA sweetspotting and recovery like Axe in Melee. It's not that hard to do, so we expect an "optimized" Pikachu player to be able to do that consistently. Maybe we don't consider it within the realm of doability to become really good at ledge-cancelling QA without setups, so we don't imagine a Pikachu player that could flawlessly ledge-cancel everything because even with a lot of practice that's hard.

Another example might be Tails. Tails has some hard character-specific tech (no one tailsdashes flawlessly their first try), but we assume in MU discussions that a Tails player can do that consistently, because if you're going to get good at Tails it's required. So I might say "Tails does really well against Marth because Tails can force Marth to commit by threatening to tailsdash in, which is unreactable" (note, I'm not actually saying this is true, just for the sake of argument) and mean not that "all the Tails players I play against do this", but "the best Tails players (Chaos0, RemPrower, etc.) that I've played use this technique consistently and it's effective". So countering that point with "yeah, but the Tails players I play most of the time don't tailsdash effectively and rely on Electron Cannon for neutral and just lose if you know how to powershield" completely misses the context of the discussion. You should assume when anyone discusses an MU they mean relatively optimized players who use all of the current meta knowledge effectively. That means that perhaps characters without good representation (I maintain Yoshi would be top-tier if well-optimized) have a hard time doing well in tier lists, but it means for players who really want to know "can I get to the top by playing character X against character Y" they get a good answer that isn't dependent on being a certain skill level, but will stay with them no matter how good they become. If you are talking about non-optimized players (using that loosely as of course nothing is optimized in this game yet), you should realize that you're doing something nonstandard, and make that clear.

I'd also say that it's good not to get too angry over discussions on the Internet. It's really not worth it.

tl;dr I think you're unfairly generalizing specific matchup experience (which is tainted by skill disparities and non-optimized players) and try to use only the experience you have against players that use their character's meta well and implement all the stuff they should. For Pikachu, that means QA is not predictable, because it objectively isn't if you're good at using it. That also might apply to the tier list thread.