Discussion Main / CharacterTiers

I edited the "Competitive Pokémon Battling" section. It was terribly written, was extremely outdated, and the last passage wasn't even true!

Removed this digression, which is partly analysis but mostly speculation:

• Since Go and Chess are theoretically solvable (the same way Tic-Tac-Toe is solvable), a hypothetical computer which could calculate the optimal strategies could determine who wins when both sides play perfectly. For example, Tic-Tac-Toe can be completely solved by a bright ten year old, so a sufficiently advanced player can quickly learn the optimal strategy. It yields a draw every time. Chess and Go are like Tic-Tac-Toe. When (If!) they are ever solved, the optimal strategies will either be a win for one player or the other, or a draw. Many other games have similarly been solved, such as Connect Four, where perfect play results in player 1 invariably winning and Chopsticks, where player 2 can always win. So when played perfectly, in any game with no random element and a finite number of possible states, there is either no character tiers or a God Tier and a You Lose tier. It may just be beyond our power to calculate out what the optimal strategies are, which is indeed the case for Chess and Go.
  • To elaborate a little bit, Go is typically played on a 19 x 19 board (361 spaces), with each space able to be black, white, or empty. That means that there are a total of approximately 2.08 * 10^170 (yes that is 170 zeroes) legal positions possible in Go. Those legal positions can be reached numerous ways, causing even more calculations necessary every move. Without going into too much detail, with the most powerful computer currently in the world, it would take over 3 days for it to calculate a single move in the opening stages of the game.

I've made major structural changes to this page due to poor Example Indentation, some natter and Troper Tales, and the like. Everything's now folderized, but I'd like people familiar with the games themselves to clear out any factual inaccuracies that remain. I've tried to keep the facts as they were, but that doesn't mean that the facts are correct.

Thanks in advance. :)

The Pokemon section needs to be cleaned up. The tiers have changed recently (Pikachu is in NU now), and the definitions if the Underused and Neverused tiers could use some work.

There's also some rather unnecessary information under it (like the "just because it's not in a high tier doesn't mean it's not useful" thing).