Are teirs just an assumption of capability?

Hello Novians. I've been in deep thought about the choices of how things are measured to be good or bad in gaming metagame and came to the conclusion that most lists of teirs are possibly just guessed assumptions upon conduct. Since most Novians are most familiar with the concept of pokemon I'll start here. 


Pokemon: The main source of the metagame revolves around the teir system of Smogon community. Determining on what pokemon is good or not has greatly been influenced on the usage of pokemon and follow up on what are the most optimal sets and how they measure up to opposing teams. While at first this seems like it makes sense and validates the placing for them, it only does it at a surface level. I say this only because the teirs are never consistent with pokemon and most placing for certain pokemon are arguable among different people with different outlooks. It seems like pokemon aren't deeply in depth evaluated on their full capabilities but just on what the majority use and how they all use it. For a popular argued example we have blaziken with speed boost placed in the uber(banned) teir because it is feared to easily be able to sweep whole teams. While within that community it may be a true statement that blaziken is indeed "overpowered", when you look at pokemon as a whole and the many different combinations or team formats and how limited speed boost blaziken actually is on it's own and even supported, it can easily get gimped by a simple priority move, sturdy, counter, resistence, defence tanks, ect. This is a huge reason why I see the main teir system of pokemon to be extremely flawed and unreliable. 

Smash bros: Within smash it's actually a lot more complex to figure out than it seems. How the teirs measure up in smash is actually for the most part kinda accurate...ish? and characters are evaluated and compared to an extent, but still is vastly imperfect from my perspective. With smash instead of basing off of usage it's actually basing off of something that makes less sense to me and that is tournament placings/wins. Now at first you could say that yeah of course that's how you measure if it's better, if it wins then it's obviously good right? Well...it's actually kind of a complex direct answer to be honest. You see unlike pokemon you have full control of the actions you do at all times when playing characters meaning you're not dealing with numbers, rng, speed, type chart, and movepools on a grande scale. All characters have the same base controls so it's pretty even fair and nobody has like extra controls over another. So in tournaments and metagame events what it really comes down to it for the most part is actually the player's skill itself. This is why I personally find talk and placings of characters to be somewhat sketchy but not that drastically far off...maybe? Now before some of you go off about "hey are you saying all characters are equal? are you fucking retarded?" that's not what I'm saying at all. Obviously in smash characters do have more tools and advantages within their mechanics that give them an obvious edge against certain other characters. Jigglypuff is actually arguably the worse because it can barely do much against most characters due to having not much for it to offer. Bayonetta is by far the best charatcer because she basically has no critical weaknesses to exploit and is the only character that i have to set my pride aside and actually jump into the crowd and say she's broken as f***. In between those two though is actually arguable with all other smash characters. For one ganon is also refered to being possibly (I may be wrong) 2nd worse character in the game but I kind of feel very off about that due to what he's capable of and how he has better tools than my own main which is ike. I used to hold ike to a candle of being at least a really solid decent character but I've come to realize how inferior he is to literally almost all of the cast even though he is ranked to not be one of the worse characters I have my own speculations on his standpoint in the game. All characters have other characters as well they have advantage/disadvantage over so it's actually extremely hard to really know what is better than what, especially because all players are different and no player is perfect with any character to actually know what exactly is better than what so teirs for smash actually can be biased statements based off of personal experiences so it can't really be reliable either.

Yugioh: Yugioh is actually a really extremely easy metagame to gauge in terms of what is the best and what is worse if you compare by archetypes since it's the most obvious but even it also bases off the somewhat of the same speculation that is tournament wins and usage. Yugioh is also rng based but in modern day it's been forged to get less and less rng focused so that you can see the capabilities right off the bat. I'd say that out of all metagame that yugioh is the best with constructing what is good and bad but that's only because of how hugely unbalanced it is and there's no going wrong with the choices.


In conclusion based off of what I brought up when it comes to how the metagames essentially judges what is good and bad, they seem to mostly bandwagon and assume off of what the majority use and off of non mechanic choices(player skill), not exploring more in depth of the full capabilities of their respective games. Metagame communities always limits themselves and just follow off of model people and don't care to explore and expand new possibilities to see if it is really true on how things are placed. This is why most communities seem to grow at a seemingly slow pace or seem to not grow at all. Metagames just stay repetitive and barely change due to just being followers and having no real creativity  among themselves because they are just afraid of losing and forget that games are just tools for people to enjoy and have fun.

So if you agree or disagree give me you opinion on if you think that how metagame gauges things is right or wrong. I personally think because of how sketchy teir systems be that we shouldn't even stress over or base our thinking around its concepts because it's all invalid. What we should do as gamers is continue to use and do what we feel is right and experiment with what we enjoy using and see how far it can actually go without following the concepts of what people believe just on a base level. You could be really surprised what you can find out on your own or with others once you step out of the limiting space.

By the way i forgot to fucking mention Dugtrio, a kanto pokemon, generation 1 pokemon might i add, being suspected for ban in gen 7 after all these years of it being the same pokemon with the same abilities. Real reliable teir system pokemon meta lol.

Meta is just whatever is easiest and most abusable. It's generally there because it's a reliable way for players to get results tested by many more skilled before them.

Going against the meta is important too but unless you're actually skilled or lucky enough to find something creative that can beat the meta it can be hard to get those consistent results.

I'm much more an advocate for using what I want over what's best but there's still often times I feel like I could have done better if I broke down enough to use what everyone knows is kinda overpowered instead. Tier lists aren't everything but I do think they exist for a reason too.