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stupidity begets vilification

@tid
give an example of an "objectively" bad character in melee? i'm not sure if I believe in such a concept
in the meantime i'll practice mega man I guess
I prefer using low tier characters anyway

pichu

wow that was f*** hard

uh seriously lol? this stuff is pretty well documented elsewhere but
mewtwo, dk, both links are all good examples of bad characters that can be played well in enough matchups to not be completely useless but are still clearly worse than most of the roster, pretty clear straight away when you play as these characters that you'd have to play them pretty close to perfectly to have a chance against anyone even half competently playing as a better character
pikachu, gdorf, samus and luigi are worse than the high and top tier characters by a noticeable margin but are more reasonably expected to be played because they're not so much worse that they're unusable

but then you get to the really bottom tiers and have characters like roy and kirby, who you could only really win with if you got lucky and your opponent made constant stupid mistakes or just wasn't very good.

just because he damages himself. no sale

well it's been fun but if you're going to claim that pichu isn't a bad character i think that might be when i have to stop playing

"you're only saying this character is bad because of the reason they're bad"

okay

you can stop now

it's getting too obvious

you've seen me use terms like "low tier", meaning I'm not just someone who thinks they're a fake construct designed to suck out the fun of the game, no
I concede their existence, I just think it's better

smarter

to judge characters by matchups and player skill

tiers are predicated under the notion that both players are as good as they can be with their character
and no one's actually that good
fox is a bad character because his blaster causes no knockback

a character that is objectively bad is a character that is literally incapable of winning if both players try their best

well every fighting game's backroom has a slightly different setup but generally no, the tier lists reflect what we've seen players to be capable of with the characters, as well as their matchups against other characters and tourney performance. smash's especially.

pichu has piss poor matchups against every other character in the game except kirby, who is arguably an even worse character. his self-damage gimmick is not the reason he is considered so poor, as if he was good otherwise, the damage he gets from his own attacks would be minor enough to not outweigh that and it'd just be a neat way of adding a unique con to a character full of pros.
but he doesn't have any pros. he has no viable kill moves because 90% of the attacks he has that are powerful enough have too s*** hitboxes to ever ever land. he dies incredibly early and doesnt have the usual advantage that lightweight characters have where you can't combo them easily. he's outright worse than characters in the game that don't have all of these issues, or characters who have some of them but have enough advantages to make up for it.

so he's poorly designed

that means objectively bad?

wrong way around, he's interestingly designed because a fast powerful character who hurts himself is a neat concept for a character.

he's well designed, but bad because sakurai or his balancing team or whoever got the numbers wrong and didn't make the pros enough to outweigh the cons. it's a classic sakurai design issue and almost every bad smash character can be described the same way. interesting design, unfortunately didn't work out due to incorrect balancing.

When you describe it like that it sure sounds like a poorly designed character to me.

there is a difference between design and balance

Isn't a characters statistics part of their design?

balancing is one element of a character's design, which is a much larger thing that includes the way they feel to control, their intended playstyle, their aesthetic, how interesting they are, any gimmicks or unique mechanics they have etc.

being badly balanced doesn't by itself make a character badly designed, it can just contribute to it. i mean it's not like there are laws about the meanings of the words design and balance when specifically used in reference to fighting game characters lol but that's the general meaning of those things in this context

Oh ok. I would have just assumed he was poorly designed lol. Guess I'm not really looking that deep into characters then.