The time has come to talk of many things: of tiers and games and of communities

So originally I was planning on talking this week about 'BlazBlue' having been cut from the Evolution 2012 (largest fighting game tournament in the world) lineup after having been a reasonably successful entrant into the Evolution 2011 lineup. However after reading the takes of several others on this issue I realized that I was coming at the topic from a slightly incorrect perspective and with (apparently) incomplete information. That said I'd still like to weigh in a bit on the topic of what other authors covered along with why I think 'BlazBlue' has generally been among the less successful fighting games (success is relative). But first I'd like to discuss tier lists.

So while I'd like to jump right in with a discussion of tier lists it first helps to understand the idea of a matchup. The idea in fighting games behind a matchup is which character, assuming two fictitious players of high and perfectly equal skill, wins more often between two specific characters. This is usually represented as 5-5 (an even matchup), 6-4 (a matchup that decently favors the first character), etc. Before going any further it is worth noting that almost every matchup and/or tier list is subjective, i.e. people compiling their views on a character's relative strengths and weaknesses, strong matchups and weak matchups. So once you have all the matchup information it becomes relatively simple to compile a tier list. Let's create a couple of faux examples:

Character:	A	B	C	D	E
A		6	6	6	6
B	4		6	6	6
C	4	4		6	6
D	4	4	4
E	4	4	4	4

So in this hypothetical tier structure it's pretty clear to see why 'A' is the top character as they have favorable matchups with every other character. Similarly 'B' is the second best character as they enjoy favorable matchups with every character except 'A'. That said most games don't work out this way. Let's look at a list with a little more variety:

Char.:	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	Total:
A		5	5	5	6	7	8	9	45
B	5		6	6	6	6	6	6	41
C	5	4		5	6	6	6	6	38
D	5	4	5		5	6	6	6	37
E	4	4	4	5		6	6	6	35
F	3	4	4	4	4		6	6	31
G	2	4	4	4	4	4		6	28
H	1	4	4	4	4	4	4		25

OK, so maybe this tier list isn't that much more representative of an actual game than the first one (too few characters for starters) but it is useful to illustrate a different way to tier characters. In this list 'A' is the top character in the game despite having fewer favorable matchups than 'B'. In this case 'A' is on top because in the mathups that they do win they absolutely steamroll most of them*. It is worth pointing out that many tier lists will include fractional numbers in their matchups in an effort to get a more realistic appraisal of the matchup (i.e. 5.5-4.5 would be a slightly favorable matchup for the first character).

So at this point, assuming that you haven't dozed off, you may be wondering why I chose to bring up all this talk of tier lists in an article that started off talking about 'BlazBlue'. Well...actually before I get to that I'd like to address one of the main issues that another author brought up with regards to why 'BlazBlue' got axed from the Evo linup namely the lack of community support. Hell, let's consider this me calling out the 'BlazBlue' community. This is a community that for a variety of reasons seems perfectly content to let the game die as far as offline play goes as long as they can keep being kings of online play. There's a guy in my area who has offered up his own money as prize money at free to enter tournaments in order to get more people out of their houses to play 'Blazblue'. Number of entrants? Well the most that I've seen show up for one of these events was 16. That's fewer than twenty people who can be assed to leave their houses at the prospect of winning free money and I live in a state that if forum registration information is to be believed has a fairly large playerbase for this game. That's sad.

So bringing this semi-back to the tier discussion one of my thoughts on this was that the reason that 'BlazBlue' doesn't enjoy broader support is that it made a terrible first impression. In hindsight while 'BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger' (BB:CT)was a fun as hell game it was also a broken piece of junk. The final tier list for that game (which I can no longer seem to find) would make my second example look fair and balanced. It was a game that managed to have some terribly lopsided matchups with a roster of only twelve characters. That's actually a pretty impressive level of failure as I can think of games that have upwards of three times as many characters** with none of the lopsided matchups found in 'BB:CT'. So when people first played the game they where treated to a game with, if all one cared about was winning, 3-4 viable characters and that's it. With that level of imbalance it is unsurprising to me that many of the “pros” who had played 'Guilty Gear' (an older and much beloved title also by Arc System Works) where fairly quick to dismiss the game. It is also equally unsurprising that none of those “pros” have really given any subsequent versions of the game a shot. Sure the later versions of the game have fixed many/most of the issues that plagued that first one but it seems like it's too little too late. You only get one chance to make a first impression and you could say that 'BB:CT' blew it. See you all next week.

*Most fighting game tier aficionados start considering matchups becoming towards the realistically unwinnable end of the spectrum at around 7-3 and up.

**This may not sound like a big deal on the surface but if you think about it it really is. Each new character added to a system adds an amount of new matchups to the equation equal to the number of characters already there, i.e. if your game's roster has twelve character and you add two new characters then you've added 25 new pieces of matchup information to your tiers. In theory the more characters in a game the more difficult it is to maintain balance. Also while true balance should never be the goal having the characters clustered around a similar power level usually leads to a more enjoyable game in my experience.