Lucina could be much better than what people are giving her credit for now
Level lists and character pairings are things that generally focus on a player’s personal experience and feelings, but how do things form from a more empirical approach to the idea?
A Reddit user by the name of Will_occam recently did just that for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate by analyzing the results of 1 million tournament matches to match the characters and the effectiveness of stage selection based on the data.
Perhaps the most surprising discovery related to tournament datasets is how well-balanced overall characters appear to be in actual events.
Will_occam claims the fighter with the highest overall win rate is Lucina at just 55 percent, while Ryu has the “worst” fun enough, though even the Street Fighter rep is still at 46 percent.
Breaking it down further to cover individual character matches shows a greater separation between the cast and how they tend to act where Ryu is apparently subject to around 8-2 unfavorable couples with people like Daisy, Olimar, and Lucario.
Some of that is due to the low amount of recorded set history for particular pairings, which is why the Reddit user further narrowed things down to focus on character matches that had at least 50 data benchmarks.
This roughly balanced the stats a bit to the point where the creator says the worst matchups become 66-34.
Click on images for larger versions.
However, stage selection had a significant effect on those win rates in some cases to the point that Sonic only has an 18 percent win rate on Yoshi’s Story after 1,171 games compared to his overall rating of 49 percent.
Mario is on the exact opposite end with a 77 percent win rate on the same stage, as Will points out that Yoshi’s story allows him to hit ladder combos more easily.
As expected, Lylat Cruise seems to offer the most benefit / detriment to the confrontations after Yoshi’s Story, although most of the other stage selections are much more uniform in terms of character performance.
Of course, there are limitations to the data collected for these comparisons, as these are obtained only from events held in Smash.gg that often present different sets of rules, seeding, etc. Although this is a very interesting tool to take advantage of in our current space.
It is worth noting that this was added before Min Min and update version 8.0.0 was removed, so there is no impact of the changes as of that time reflected in these charts.
If you choose to accept this data to the letter, it paints a very positive picture for the overall balance of Smash Ultimate, which is an impressive feat given the game’s huge roster of over 80 characters now. It’s also a good sign after some of the struggles that previous innings have faced on a competitive level since its inception.
Submitted by Sunforged One.
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