Character rankings 6/14 edition: vote now!

mischiefmaker

We're back!

It's been an exciting 2 months since the last rounds of character rankings were tallied -- seven new characters (Thor, Steve Rogers, Human Torch, Falcon, Daken, Sentry, and the nascent Nick Fury), two changes to existing characters (mStorm, some minor tweak I can't remember right now), and several significant structural changes that affect the meta, including the change to lightning round rewards, bracket sharding, increased emphasis on alliance rewards, and seasons. Since there's no new character coming this week and no balancing changes coming for at least a month, now seems like a good time to do another round of rankings!

We had an overwhelming response last time, which was great, but sadly a lot of work to calculate the results. So this time around we're going to try using SurveyMonkey, which automates collection of results. As usual, we're keeping it simple: rank all the characters from best to worst, using whatever criteria you like, where #1 is the best and #41 is the worst. I'll keep voting open for 1 week, so if you want to have your vote be counted, go do it now!

Here is the survey link. Enjoy!

mischiefmaker

For those that prefer the old spreadsheet format, you can use the spreadsheet as a scratch area, here, and transfer your ranking to the survey when you're done.

Important: Anything on this spreadsheet will be ignored; if you want your ranking to be counted you MUST use the survey link in the original post.

Nonce Equitaur 2

Could you sort these in order

****
***
**
*

at the survey place?

mischiefmaker

They're already sorted, but in reverse order. I did it that way on purpose so as to try and minimize the influence that the existing order had on results, while still making it easy to find characters.

Nonce Equitaur 2

mischiefmaker wrote:

They're already sorted, but in reverse order. I did it that way on purpose so as to try and minimize the influence that the existing order had on results, while still making it easy to find characters.

This causes a lot of unnecessary up / down scrolling. The first thing I had to do was to rate all the 3*** as 1 and all the 1* as 41, so I could do this without having to scroll up and down twice for every single entry.

mischiefmaker

Wait, what? I'm confused. If you start with the current order, you can just rank all the 1*s as 41 without scrolling once. That will make the 2*s the top of your ranking, and then you can either rank them all #30 or something and have the 3*s at the top, or you can scroll down once to the 3*s and rank them all #1 without scrolling again. You shouldn't have to scroll up and down at all, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to do or how you're doing it.

Nonce Equitaur 2

My process was ....

#1 I want to put ***Thor. Okay, scroll down to the bottom. Mark him as #1. Okay, I've popped back up to the top.
#2 I want to put Human Torch. Okay, scroll down to the bottom. Mark him as #2. Popped back up to the top again.
Maybe I should work from the bottom.
#41 I want to put as Yelena. Scroll up to the top. Mark her as number 41. Popped back down to the bottom.
Where was I? Right, wanted to do BagMan as #40. He's up at the top. Mark him as #40. pop back down to the bottom.
That seems to be just as bad.
#3 and #4 I want to mark as Hood and Hulk. Of course they are down at the bottom. Scroll up and down a few times marking #3 and #4.
Rage. Rage. Rage.
Mark ALL the 3* heroes as #1.
Mark ALL the 1* heros as #41.
Start over again.
It's vastly easier now. Finish up the survey.
Post note to thread about changing the sorting method.
Explain in detail why putting the worst heros at the top and the best heroes at the bottom is a terrible thing for a survey of this type.

jojeda654

It depends on how you want to start ranking them.

I think the majority will start giving top ranks to 3* star characters, instead of giving low ranks to 1 stars. It is much easier to decide that Sentry will be #1, followed by LT and LD, than to remember if Venom is #35. (or was it 45?)

vudu3

While I will devour the results thread I don't plan to vote for the simple reason that the vast majority of my 3* characters (and all of my 4* characters) are unusable due to inadequate covers and/or levels. For that reason I would probably over-rate Lazy Thor because I use him so much and I'd rank characters like Panther and Patch almost solely on fighting them in PVP. This doesn't seem like a good way to get an accurate picture of the true rankings. It seems that unless you have everyone maxed (or near-maxed) there's going to be quite a bit of bias and guesswork.

I have no first-hand knowledge of how a maxed GSBW ranks compared to a maxed Human Torch because both of my characters are sitting at around level 50. Any opinions I have on these characters are based on PVP when they're buffed but still at around level 75, fighting them in PVP and PVE where the AI doesn't know how to properly use them, or combing through the forums.

I suppose it's necessary to a point but I wonder if it might be better to have have forum members "apply" and then mischiefmaker only counts their scores if their roster meets a certain criteria. Anyone else feel this way?

Is anyone else going to abstain from voting because they don't feel qualified to accurately rank all the characters?

mischiefmaker

RE: survey ordering, I took the survey in both Chrome and Safari to test the experience (mostly to compare to the spreadsheet method), and didn't encounter the behavior where it snaps to the top or bottom. I know it's not ideal but if you're having annoying problems with the survey snapping you to top or bottom, you may want to try a different browser.

RE: complete knowledge, I don't think it's necessary to have a full roster of maxed characters to provide useful input. In fact, I think it's important to get different perspectives -- someone who mostly plays the same characters on offense, for example, may have a skewed view of how those characters play on defense; someone who has maxed 3* may have forgotten how good the better 2* are, etc. I definitely want people who have maxed rosters to participate because they provide an important data point, but it's not the only data point that matters. As for this leading to bias and guesswork, well, we'll rely on the wisdom of crowds to balance it out.

Unknown

My vote is in, as usual. Out of curiousity, will we be able to see voting results before the compilation?

Unknown

Even though it's only one cover I still think FURY is better than some 3* characters

DirigiblePilot

On this one, I chose to consider not solely excellence, but also a bit of fun value. For example, while Black Panther's black is quite good, his yellow and blue are mediocre-ish and rather boring. On the other hand, when you've got a finely-tuned MNM/CS engine going, that's just awesome, which is why they rank higher than him. I didn't do this kind of thing a lot, but in situations where I thought it was close, I used this as a tiebreaker.
I'm so glad this is back, I love voting and I ESPECIALLY love reading the summaries afterwards.

EDIT: Ok, I'm of the firm belief that self-damage is bad, but I just read a very convincing argument by Phantron over in the Characters forum, so now I regret placing Sentry as low as I did. If there's any way for him to be changed from I believe about 9th to 3rd, right above Patch, that would be great. If not, oh well, it's only one erroneous vote.

mischiefmaker

Unfortunately, there'll be no way to view the results during the voting, since they're only available to the creator of the survey. But we already have 27 votes in (!) so voting will only last a week, so you shouldn't have to wait too long to see the results, unless I get really busy and have to put off writeups for a little bit.

DP, I moved your Sentry up to #3, with everyone else moving down a spot accordingly.

Unknown

It's pretty hard to do this when some characters are good on their own but others work better than some of the best in specific teams or in specific situations, especially since some are really good on offense but terrible on defense and vice versa, but I'll try my best at ranking them individually. I also think having an offense/defense survey would have been cool so that we can get a better understanding of how good that character is on offense or defense, but that'll take too long. The format for voting is a little odd too so it is going to take longer to fill this out than I expected, but what I'm doing is first rating every character in its appropriate * level, then from their I move them up or down accordingly. My list will probably differ a lot compared to others, but I can't wait for the results.

TheVulture

Thanks for running this, mischiefmaker.

Everyone must have their own criteria, but my logic for top tier was all-round-awesome > integral characters > dissuaders (characters who are only good for defense).

Also marked 4* lower than some 1* on the reasoning that undeservedly hugely cost (time /money) of obtaining and levelling them are aspects of character balance.

Unknown

Think I may have given some odd results by putting them in reverse order by mistake.... whoops

It was because they started 1* to 4* going down the page so I started from there and tweaked. Well at least that's my excuse for being careless and not reading it properly

Unknown

Could there be an option of not ranking some characters. I dnt have the 3s as usable yet. So cannot judge them.

DirigiblePilot

sgcray wrote:

Could there be an option of not ranking some characters. I dnt have the 3s as usable yet. So cannot judge them.

You could always judge them based on compilation of data gathered from reading the forums, analyzed in you own unique way, of course.

mischiefmaker wrote:

DP, I moved your Sentry up to #3, with everyone else moving down a spot accordingly.

Hooray thanks, I didn't even think it was possible to do that!

OzarkBoatswain

I voted. As with last time, I don't really know where Invisible Woman ranks and I just took a guess. For those interested, my top 3 are 1. Sentry 2. CMags 3. Patch; full list added to the google doc.

over_clocked

I voted LT as low as #3 out of spite. LD and Sentry didn't make it to my top 6, but Sentry is a suicide machine and Daken has one AP outlet in an off-colour, also, spite for goldified characters. He's mostly offensive support while Falcon is defensive support (better PvE than PvP).

Edit: I can imagine what kind of argument Phantron has made for self-damage characters and while I fully understand doesn't mean I agree. I have a history of hating Juggernaut then Ares then Patch when I first learnt of them. Now it's Sentry hate time. Who I'll probably rank #3 when I have him maxed.