Introduction
Statistics are a huge part of any spectator sport. For those who haven’t heard, I’ve been working on a project to gather statistics directly out of Melee. The result of the work was showcased for the first time at HTC Throwdown […]

by Noah “Theftz” Gordon
Introduction

Winner stays on
This mantra is at the heart of every fighting game culture and is a practice that has become the standard for rotations in the smash community. You can trace its roots back to the arcade days, when slipping a quarter into a Super Turbo machine bought you the right to take on all challengers until you were dethroned. However, the CRT is a very different beast than the arcade machine, and it’s time for us as a community to put aside this tradition.

When you insert a quarter into an arcade machine, you are purchasing the right to play time with real capital. A smasher who walks up to a friendly station has made no such purchase. Unless he owns the set-up, he is no more entitled to play time than anyone else sitting at the station. Each player should have the right to equal amount of practice opportunity, regardless of skill.

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by MIOM|Tafokints
Introduction

Assessing where players are in the Melee totem pole has always been fraught with uncertainty. Unlike other e-sports, the top 25 players might only play each other in a tournament setting once or twice a year. Outside of the big 5, many of these players have very inconsistent placements at nationals, ranging from as high as 5th place to as low as 97th (e.g. s2j at Apex 2014). There are also several cases in recent history where a player’s stock has been elevated over-zealously after one extraordinary tournament performance, only for them to falter at the next major (e.g. aMSa, Leffen, Westballz, etc.).

So it seems we need to be more conservative with our reactions to tournaments, which leads us to ask the more general question: how do we know when one of these players truly deserves to be placed at a higher tier relative to the rest, perhaps a ‘demigod’ tier? As I’ve mentioned previously, I don’t think we can elevate players after 1 to 2 solid performances, but, at the same time, how many performances should it take? How should a player perform against other players around the top 25? How consistent should a player be against lower-tier players? Even if we can’t answer these general questions with absolute certainty, perhaps we can see if someone’s performances stand out. Let’s take a look at where we’re at right now:

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