First of all, online play with two people with good PC's and internet is consistently good: when I play matches with others on the IRC, I rarely think about lag. At most, I have a couple frames, so I dash the wrong way out of a dash-dance; usually never more.

Secondly, a tier list based on offline play would be useless to essentially everyone. Like it or not, this game's meta is based off of games with a couple frames of input lag.

The tier list measures competitive viability. Most tournaments are online, so this matters. Additionally, tier lists represent the viability in general friendlies and such. These are also usually online.

Thirdly, Lloyd and MK aren't free. They have weaknesses like everyone else.

Finally, what characters would change in an offline tier list? Maybe Marth would move down, but I don't think much would change.

"Consistently good" is nice but not perfect, and perfection is pretty necessary if you're trying to develop any kind of science behind a game. The fact that connections are uneven between players and frames can disappear at any moment are pretty absurd variables to skirt around. Lag has been atrocious for me since I started playing again. Very few games are playable by my standards. Might just be my internet. Regardless, I play a lot of Fox and Falcon and am constantly getting screwed by lag, whether it be tech chasing/combos ending prematurely or the slightest frame drop leading to a lame death. Even if I'm bodying someone, it's frustrating knowing I could've done something really cool had the rug not been pulled out from under me.

The best connections aren't on the same level as offline play, and that's not really debatable. If your argument is that offline play will never grow large enough to warrant gauging, fine, and I'd probably agree with you. But I'll always John about lag because it's completely valid. If you die trying to do cool stuff just because the backend of this game isn't optimal, well, let's just say it's very unrewarding. I'm sort of confused as to why you're acting like there wouldn't be some shuffling if the tier list was based completely on offline play. The idea of WiFi Warriors is something that's been talked about on here since the beginning.

And I'm mostly salty just because my connection has been complete a** lately. Like, I'll quit out of 10-15 games before finding a playable one. Makes it pretty difficult to get in a rhythm.

Your experiences with online don't reflect everyone. Personally, most of the time I forget that I'm playing online. I used to have serious problems, but I got a better PC and better Internet and now I'm good.

Yes, some characters (and players) are great online and bad everywhere else, because the punish game online is just not there yet and punishing small openings is difficult, but with a good connection these problems become less pronounced or nonexistent. I really don't think that removing the 2 frames of lag I get on most of the IRC players really would change much.

Eh, I think the higher standards you have the more lag will bug you. Do top melee players ever f*** with netplay? No. There's a reason for that.

That's not a good argument.

Melee was not naturally built for online play, so you need an emulator to do so (look it up yourself). It's not difficult to get it running; but it's more difficult than playing a newer game online (i.e. Smash 4), where you simply make sure you're connected to the internet and select the various options to play online.

Another point is that there are top players for other games that do play online. In fact both, PIE|Smug (USF4 player) and KIT|Cloud805 (UMvC3 player) used to be online warriors before making names for themselves offline. There are other examples but the fact of the matter is that regardless of lag, top players for other games play online. Not all of them (usually due to circumstances), but a lot of them do.

Another fact is that so game no longer have an offline scene. So the next best thing is online play. People play games like Vampire Savior or Garou Mark of the Wolves online over clients like GGPO or Fightcade because that's the only way they can reliably play against others equal to or greater than their skill level.

SSF2 is in a similar boat. Our scene is very young (we have people as young as 12 playing this game), and we don't have a tournament presence at all (the closest we got was Ya Dad hosting those Indy Smash tournies).

Online play isn't perfect (in fact, I hate UMvC3's netcode), and it will never be a perfect substitute for offline play; however, it's the closet thing we've got. Lag bothers everyone, no matter how higher their standards are, but people put up with it so that they can improve. Even if I could find an offline scene with 5-20 people for this game, I would still play online to gather more experience.

I guess this became the official tier list.

You can think that...

I don't think it myself , but pretty much everyone does.

So since this is the most popular list around, shouldn't we just pin it to the forum section and replace the 9a tier list?

:]
Yeah that could be a good idea

We should pin 135's tier list too then.

135 has a tier list? Better check it out....