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[1], everyone who gave feedback on the initial release, and special thanks to Kyuubi for making the graphic. There was a revision to the tier names on January 1st, 2022.[2]
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 half-tier (the gap between him and Sasuke was similar to the gaps seen between the lower tiers). The gap between the first two tiers was about twice the size between any other tiers. The tiers have been named S, A, A-, B, and B- to reflect the difference in distances, and also to represent the community sentiment that all characters have sufficient power level and tools to defeat characters from any other tier (all characters are "tournament viable"). 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 to the voting and had 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 at the time. For example, it's not that Jirobo is necessarily a weak character; rather, it's that most voters thought Jirobo was less strong or versatile as compared to others in the cast.
Second Community Tier List
The second community tier list was released January 12th, 2023.
Methodology
The methods were exactly the same as the first tier list with one difference: instead of being open to submission, about 30 of the top players and predominant members of the competitive scene who were active in the past year were directly invited to submit ranks. 27 entries were returned[3]. Voting took place December to January 2023. The game version was 1.5.1. Placement within tiers is ordered, from left to right.
Credits – Clemente, Cyber, Kyuubi and GunBlaze made decisions, Clemente collected ballots and did the statistics, Brutalmoon battled tedium in creating the custom character portraits and Wahu made the rest of the graphic- and is GOATed for transcribing the picture ranks into text form.
Results and Interpretation
-based neutral and 
punishes for grand finals of Combo Breaker 20222023 saw two major, in-person tournaments: Combo Breaker in May and CEOtaku in September. The dominant storyline in both tournaments was the success of seasoned GNT players who had spent less time with SCON4 specifically, as compared to the field. At Combo Breaker, Abbock and his Kiba surprised everyone by tearing his way to grand finals on winner's side, including a victory over the tournament favorite, Lemo. Lemo was, however, eventually crowned champion, having played Kankuro in bracket and avenging his loss to Abbock in grand finals by switching to Temari. Five months later at CEOtaku, Icebro made a legendary loser's run after a round two loss and took home first place- another deep run for a Kankuro player.
Combine highly visible performances with the subsequent interest in those characters and it's not surprising to see them take large leaps in the 2023 list. Kankuro (+25) is now the top ranked character, followed by Temari (+16). The top tier is rounded out by Kisame (+0), Itachi (-3, knocked off the top spot) and Neji (-1). Kiba (+9), Tenten (+8), Shikamaru (+7) and Jirobo (+12) saw significant promotions as well.
The furthest falls belong to Sakura (-25) and Shy Hinata (-20), who both dropped from high tier to the bottom tier. Both characters had received changes, largely considered as nerfs, after voting for the previous tier list had started, so their drop was not surprising. Rock Lee (-14) also saw a steep decline in this iteration (IDK why haha). Smaller demotions for other top/high tiers can be partially attributed to the rise of Kankuro and Temari.
When looking at the distribution of scores, four obvious groups emerge:
- a top tier (named “S”)
- a large second tier starting at Neji or Ino (named “A”)
- two lower tiers splitting at Lee or Jirobo and Shy Hinata (“B” and “C”)
Neji (S and A) and Lee (A and B) are in-betweeners. If k=4 were used, Lee would be in B. If k=6 were used, Neji would be in A ("k" represents the number of clusters).
The main question of how to display the tier list was: How many subgroups should divide the second tier? The first break created the A- subgroup. The second break would divide A again and pull Neji down, helping form an A+ subgroup. In the end, we decided to go with only A and A- subgroups (k=5), erring on the side of simplicity.
We were somewhat split on how to name the bottom tier. About 3/5 of the voters submitted tier lists with a tier named "C", "bad" or similar. Considering the bottom two tiers have a greater range of scores than the whole A tier and because more voters than not included a "C" tier or equivalent, we felt comfortable naming the bottom tier "C". Ask most players and they'll tell you that you can still win with these characters, they're just less strong than the other characters.
Ranks in text form
Tier,Rank,Character,Mean,SD,PrevRank,Diff S,1,Kankuro,2.8,1.9,26,+25 S,2,Temari,4.6,5.0,18,+16 S,3,Kisame,5.1,4.3,3,0 S,4,Itachi,5.3,3.4,1,-3 S,5,Neji,8.7,5.5,4,-1 A,6,Ino,11.6,6.3,7,+1 A,7,Kimimaro,11.8,5.3,8,+1 A,8,Sasuke,11.8,5.9,2,-6 A,9,Haku,11.9,6.7,5,-4 A,10,CS2 Sasuke,13.1,5.8,6,-4 A,11,Kiba,13.3,7.3,20,+9 A,12,Guy,13.5,3.8,16,+4 A,13,Kakashi,14.0,5.4,17,+4 A,14,Shikamaru,14.8,6.6,21,+7 A,15,Tenten,14.8,8.2,23,+8 A,16,Awakened Hinata,15.2,5.6,12,-4 A-,17,Hiruzen,16.0,5.2,13,-4 A-,18,Sakon & Ukon,17.2,8.4,24,+6 A-,19,Tsunade,17.5,5.6,19,0 A-,20,Orochimaru,17.6,8.2,14,-6 A-,21,OTK,18.0,6.8,15,-6 A-,22,Zabuza,18.5,6.2,25,+3 A-,23,Lee,20.2,5.4,9,-14 B,24,Jirobo,23.6,5.7,36,+12 B,25,Kabuto,24.8,5.5,30,+5 B,26,Anko,26.0,4.8,22,-4 B,27,Shino,26.4,5.3,27,0 B,28,Tayuya,26.6,6.6,29,+1 B,29,Naruto,27.4,4.6,34,+5 C,30,Shy Hinata,29.5,4.5,10,-20 C,31,Mizuki,29.5,4.5,28,-3 C,32,Kidomaru,29.9,4.5,31,-1 C,33,Jiraiya,30.9,4.1,37,+4 C,34,Choji,31.1,5.2,32,-2 C,35,Gaara,32.3,5.6,33,-2 C,36,Sakura,32.8,4.0,11,-25 C,37,Iruka,35.0,1.8,35,-2
Additional Notes
You can try making your own GNT4/SCON4 tier list here.
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- ↑ Voters for the first community tier list: Athkore, Bimbs, Brutalmoon, Clemente, CozyContainer, Cyber, Hamadarody, HewbrewHammer, Heartnana, Icychains, Jakyi2x, Jerry, Kung Julio, Leeshmow, Monkey Kong, Mr. Sinister, Ninshi, No More, Nywen, OMJ, Ricky Ant, Rwbyred, ScrabbleDestroyer, SeroQ, SmthSweet, Spicy, Taelon, Tawkos, and XxxvictorxxX
- ↑ After the release of the tier list, player feedback was that a more "compressed" tier naming system better reflected the state of SCON4. Thus, the tier names were changed from [S A B C D] to [S A A- B B-]
- ↑ Voters for the second community tier list: Bimbs, Brutalmoon, Clemente, Dope, GreyAlice, Hamadarody, HebrewHammer, Icebro, Jakyi2x, Jerry, Kandle, Kitaeo, Leeshmow, LilyHV, Malex, meowmix, Netachi, Ninshi, Paradise, Ricky Ant, Rwbyred, SeroQ, Skeet, Snover, Taelon, themacj and THORFIN