List of SCON4 tier lists

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First Community Tier List

The first community tier list was released December 29th, 2021. It corresponds to game version 1.3.42 (Uchiha Hideout). Clemente collected the ballots and performed the calculations. Thank you to all the players who submitted ballots and special thanks to Kyuubi for making the graphic.

Methodology

The community tier list was calculated by averaging rankings supplied by members of the SCON4 community. All members of the Super CON4 Discord were eligible to submit ballots, which were collected between August 2nd and December 26th, 2021.

Respondents were asked to rank the 37 tournament legal characters from best to worst. Ties were allowed but respondents were encouraged to order as much of the list as possible. All characters needed to be ranked (no "IDK's" allowed among the legal characters). Karasu and Akamaru were disregarded due to not being tournament legal. 29 players submitted usable ballots.

The rankings were converted into numerical values between 1 and 37, with 1 representing the best character. In the case of ties, the rank value was split between the tied characters. For example, two characters tied for rank 3 would each be given a score of 3.5. To lessen the effect of outliers, the top and bottom 5% of scores for each character were dropped, which wound up being only the top and bottom scores. The remaining 27 scores for each character were then averaged to get the final rank score.

K-means clustering was used to generate potential tier groupings with different k-values (numbers of tiers). Five was selected because it was the smallest number of tiers that captured the meaningful gaps between characters. In addition, the majority of submitted ranks with tiers utilized 4-6 tiers, so 5 was considered the consensus distribution.

Results and Interpretation

Itachi was the highest rated character and is close to being in his own tier (the gap between him and Sasuke was similar to the gaps seen between the five tiers). The gap between S and A tiers was about twice the gap between any other tiers.

Itachi, the number 1 rated character, crucifies Ino during Sweatfest Vol. 1

Jiraiya was the only character never rated in the top 20. OTK was the most inconsistently rated character.

The tier list is not meant to be definitive. The mod was released only one year prior and has received many balance patches in that time. Some characters may not have been deeply or widely explored and thus the meta may be unstable. In addition, the vast majority of SCON4 has been played online so this list may not be entirely generalizable to an in-person environment. Finally, future patches will unavoidably change how the characters are perceived.

If it helps, think of this tier list as a description of the prevailing sentiment for each character among a variety of players. For example, it's not that Jirobo is necessarily a weak character; rather, it's that most voters thought Jirobo was a weak character.