Tier list

Among the Super Smash Bros. community, it is common for distinguished groups (such as the Smashboards Back Room) to create Tier lists, rankings of a character's potential in tournaments. The Smashboards tier list is generally seen as the "official" tier list, though many other groups have created their own. The higher the character is on the tier list, the better they will do in tournaments.

SSB tier list

Super Smash Bros. Tier List
S		A			B		C
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12

SSBM tier list

Super Smash Bros. Melee Tier List
S				A			B+				B-
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13
C+		C-				D					F
14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26

SSBB tier list

Note: This tier list is outdated.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl Tier List
		SS		S	A+		A-
		1		2	3	4	5	6	7
B			C+			C				C-
8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19
		D
		20	21	22	23	24	25	26	27
E				F
28	29	30		31	32	33	34	35	36	37	38

Controversy over tier lists and their existence

The overwhelming majority of the Smash community believe that tiers exist and not all characters in each game are perfectly balanced. However, there are many casual players in the Smash Bros. community who disagree with the idea of tier lists. It is a common, illogical misconception among these players that all characters in the series are relatively balanced in ability. Such people are known as "Anti-tierists". However, it is extremely difficult to perfectly balance a cast as diverse as that in Super Smash Bros. Furthermore, several prominent members of the community, such as Mew2King, have performed exhaustive tests on the objective qualities of certain attacks, such as speed, hitbox duration, priority etcetera. Some characters are objectively more favourably endowed with these qualities than others, providing strong evidence to base tier listings on. However, tiers lists have undergone many changes since these data have become known, attributing to the partially subjective nature of tier lists. All in all, some characters simply have obviously more potential than others and the shifts in tier lists have only seen few different characters move up and down. Tournament results have shown that some characters are more viable than others; the winners of Melee tournaments most commonly use Fox, Falco, Sheik, and/or Marth, and the winners of Brawl tournaments most commonly use Meta Knight, Snake, Diddy Kong, Ice Climbers, Falco, and/or Olimar. Even low-tier characters have tournament representation and their dedicated mains, such as Gimpyfish, Taj, and Vermanubis. These players routinely place lower than top and high tier mains, despite putting in a similar amount of dedication to their characters. Additionally, the anti-tiers' arguments are constantly refuted, and they have failed to come up with new arguments that disprove the existence of tiers.

Tier lists have been frowned upon by people outside the Smash Bros. scene as well as they see tier lists as restrictions on who will be played in tournaments. The tier list does not restrict the characters played, because even low tier characters have their aforementioned dedicated mains. Some also believe that it limits the ability to learn from mistakes caused by players as the failure would be pinpointed on their character that they use rather than the player's own ability. However, any competitive player who mained a character would know their character's weaknesses and strengths, and a player would be able to tell when a mistake was their own fault or due to a weakness of their character.