I think tiers are naturally in place. As you try to reach the top of an underground cave, at some point as you progress, you reach ceilings where it’s impossible to rise further. I don’t believe there’s an infinite path to improvement; the cave just doesn’t have any paths further up. No matter how hard players try with n.Sagat, they’ll have a rough time with the best Dhalsim players. There are factors that enable you to maximize your chances in the match but there are just too many factors against you.
That said, I certainly agree with Alex Valle’s comment to nh2 that tiers are very misleading for intermediate players and below. The main reason tiers shouldn’t be over-emphasized is because player ability, up until that very peak, is much more important than character ability and goes much further than what many believe. The tiers given by JP players aren’t meant for mid-level competition; at each level, different situations arise (e.g. Honda is generally very powerful at mid-level when players aren’t as adept at keeping him out). I’ve often mentioned how ludicrous it is when players who lose to my Honda 10-0 are complaining about my using claw. If you’re at the bottom of an underground cave, you really have no idea how far up the cave goes.
My analogy to this concept is having 2 people compete to solve high-number arithmetic problems quickly (although this is passive competition). The one to solve the problems fastest wins and there are 4 “characters” available to play. One “character” has no tools and must solve in his head, a 2nd “character” can use pen & paper to work out problems, a 3rd “character” can use an abacus, and finally a 4th character has a calculator. Based on low level comp in this contest, the person with the calculator would always win. This is what a scrub sees and he’ll quickly label the calculator as completely overpowered and broken.
But as you have players who really become adept at using certain characters (search YouTube for “amazing abacus”), then the tiers aren’t clear at all anymore and the calculator user would be shocked at losing to an abacus. Add in savant-level visual calculation experts and even doing calculations in one’s head suddenly seems competitive. Ultimately towards the top, there are heights that nobody at the bottom of the cave would have guessed. Which “character” is fastest in the end?
What’s a human’s mental calculation limit? Do the advantages of writing on paper outweigh the writing time? Do the manual mechanics of the abacus and calculator slow those characters down? I’d guess that the calculator would win at the end but even that would take a great deal of dexterity and reaction that must be honed through much experience. There are certainly tiers set based on these highest limits (corresponding to a person’s physical/mental limitations) but still, you should be able to see that one’s skill at using the character is more important than the characters themselves up until that point. Personally, I’m halfway decent with a calculator but I know I’ll lose to an abacus master or an abstract number genius.
And similarly in ST, an n.Sagat player could easily beat any Dhalsim that hasn’t reached a close proximity of play level. But that doesn’t mean the matchup is even on both sides, but rather that one player knows more about that matchup from his side than the other player from his side. Most outside of Japan don’t know how to counter certain lesser used characters’ best tactics in Japan; I was baffled by Fei Long and Mattsun’s Ken for a time. Experience is necessary so that you can keep climbing further up the cave to where player skill has reached its limits and where tiers will start to mirror the actual outcomes.
Hopefully, my opinions are all clear. Perhaps the scariest thought is that someone will probably read this and the only fact they’ll come away with is that I believe in tiers.
