To-do list:

• Move examples of Tier Induced Scrappy between either Low-Tier Letdown (for low-tier examples) and High-Tier Scrappy (for high-tier examples) if they fit. note that being hated by players is a required part of the definition; examples that do not mention that aspect are ZCEs and/or misuse.

Wick check:

"Two variations of The Scrappy specific to Video Games and/or Tabletop Games.

The first, often seen in fighting games, concerns the best characters getting hated not out of a hatedom but for being overused and/or downright difficult to defeat due to their high power, gameplay-wise; understandably, those two points get on a lot of people's nerves and tend to be favored by other people. Characters who are Difficult, but Awesome tend to avoid this fate because they are hard to play well, but disproportionately powerful examples can still earn this status. A typical Tier Induced Scrappy is a high tier character with next to no learning curve, though high learning curve characters who are unreasonably difficult to beat when played by a master (especially if they also happen to be extremely frustrating to play against and/or boring to watch) can and will earn this status. Stone Wall characters are the most common candidates for this trope (especially heavy zoners), though touch-of-death rushdown characters (particularly ones with good approach options) also tend to earn the playerbase's hatred. Characters with massive weaknesses who are strong in spite of those weaknesses are also common targets just based off of principle; people hate unbalanced characters, and these characters are often powerful when they shouldn't be. See also Too Qualified to Apply. In other genres than fighting games, such as MOBA or Hero Shooter, these high-tiers can also be hated for being extremely difficult to deal with (if you're the enemy) or making the game centered around them and them alone (thus making you feel pointless if they're on your team). And for single-player games, they can be hated for being so powerful that they remove all challenge from the game.

The other, more common to RPGs, is a character who is widely hated because they just suck in gameplay terms. They might be the nicest person in the world, but if they're The Load in combat or gameplay, their fate is decided. A Low Tier Induced Scrappy has no Magikarp Power; they're bad from the start and they never get to a point where they become worth the trouble or able to hold their own, no matter how much you invest into them, especially when there's other, more rewarding characters on hand. In fighting games and MOBAs, they are frequently Skill Gate Characters who are easy to pick up and do well with and are dominant in lower-level play, but do exceptionally poorly in higher-level play; the Scrappy part often comes from bad players who insist on using them with the same suboptimal strategies and builds and refuse to get better, get destroyed by competent players, and proceed to ragequit, lagswitch (if possible), abuse report functions, send abusive private messages, rage on message boards demanding nerfs, and generally act like incorrigible Scrubs."

The problem that comes from this is how it's rarely often the character themselves aren't hated for being high-tier or low-tier, but are listed in spite of such. Seriously, I've done a wick check, and these were my results:

Wicks Checked: 50/50

Final count:

• Correct (Disliked By the Community): 4
• Incorrect (Not Disliked By the Community or No Mention of Scrappy-related Qualities): 38
• Incorrect (Wrong Placements AND No Scrappy-dom): 5
• Ambiguous (Unknown if Scrappy-dom is Accurate): 3

Wicks: 50/50

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 23rd 2023 at 9:26:14 AM

Fixed the title.

Also changed the wick count of the second category to 39 because you missed a wick.

Edited by MacronNotes on May 20th 2022 at 9:15:13 AM

Advice: Remove the copy of Tier Induced Scrappy's description from the opening post to reduce post size to just the argument, people can just go to Tier Induced Scrappy page to read that.

If you think (based on a paragraph at queue draft, it seems to be gone now?) it needs cleanup it's not really something TRS is needed for. However, the correct count being so low shows there's a deeper problem.

Tier Induced Scrappy has a long description that talks about a lot of things at once and also has examples hard-split. I believe this creates confusion what the context requirements are. I propose to rewrite the description and remove type labels. "A game character is hated for being under/over-powered compared to others." could really be described more concisely.

I believe meta-ranking is just Character Tiers.

Edited by Amonimus on May 20th 2022 at 4:58:16 PM

Edited by CalamityRaven26 on May 21st 2022 at 7:33:42 AM

Your Sandbox.TRS Queue entry had this:

"In short, I strongly recommend that Tier-Induced Scrappy gets a clean-up for all of the reasons listed."

I've typed the response to it while the thread was on a lock, if your older suggestion is longer relevant then disregard my bit on it.

Edited by Amonimus on May 20th 2022 at 4:25:50 PM

Got it, fixed. Thanks.

Edit: Like a total doofus, accidentally posted my reply here. Fixed.

Edited by CalamityRaven26 on May 24th 2022 at 6:25:05 AM

Also, gonna go sleep, so you can discuss without me. Night. :)

(Also, if you're quoting someone else's post you can use [[quoteblock]] [[/quoteblock]]. Though in the case of where you're responding to the whole post at once, rather than breaking it up and responding to individual parts, we generally prefer if you use the up-arrow notation I'm using in this sentence.)

Edited by MorganWick on May 20th 2022 at 7:38:39 AM

Splitting would probably be an awkward decision, unless if we can pull it off. However, I envision the split as both high tier and low tier having separate tropes, and of course making it clear the character is derided for their tier. I do have one name idea for the low-tier side, but I won't pitch it due to possible other kind of misuse it'd accumulate.

For now, I will second giving this a scrubbing first. I did pull a TIS entry some time ago, mainly because it meandered and failed to mention tier or actual hate.

I presume the wick check in OP is running into a bunch of low-tier examples, because otherwise I'm not sure how it'd be seeing so much misuse.

This one is weird. Mostly because low-tier characters aren't strictly hated so much as acknowledged as being awful to use, thus people will suggest avoiding them if asked for advice. Kind of hard to have strong feelings of hatred unless a game forces you to use them for an extended period of time. Some low tiers actually may get reputations as something along the lines of a meta/gameplay Woobie that people lament over due to their status.

This honestly might be worth hard splitting into "high tier character/class that is hated due to being too good" (this works best with the current name imo, or possibly High-Tier Scrappy or Meta Scrappy) and "character/class that everyone knows sucks and suggests never using".

Edited by Karxrida on May 20th 2022 at 10:27:51 AM

I agree.

(Also, if you're quoting someone else's post you can use quoteblocks. Though in the case of where you're responding to the whole post at once, rather than breaking it up and responding to individual parts, we generally prefer if you use the up-arrow notation I'm using in this sentence.)

Fire Emblem's an example of that; due to how the mechanics of the game works, anyone can become strong and useful, with it mainly becoming a matter of how much time is needed to invest into it as a wholesale. Because of that none of them are even Scrappies, unless they have zero character appeal (even Sophia and Gwendolyn, units from FE6 that are infamous for being bad, still has a fair share of fandom in spite of (or often because of) how bad they are. So it ultimately becomes an arbitrary point as to whether it qualities.

Thing is that's a problem, is that splitting it into additional categories will only serve to make the bloat worse, and make us have to revisit it individually for each trope should they get bloated, because of how the trope's internal mechanics make it so prone to bad definition. It's the kind of problem that really moreso demands a wholesale clean-up, I'd argue; especially given there's so many bad examples going around, it's one of those things that genuinely need a bit of a purge, IMO.

Edited by CalamityRaven26 on May 21st 2022 at 7:53:22 AM

Karxrida's split, especially for the suggestion of a YMMV item for characters/units who are considered notoriously weak to play with but not necessarily hated, since this is a known common fan opinion worth documenting. This item could have the word "scrappy" removed from its name.

Edited by Albert3105 on May 22nd 2022 at 9:02:20 AM

I mean any given RPG will likely enable some sort of fuckery to make everyone useable, most often just with enough Level Grinding. I can boot up a random Pokémon game right now, power up something like a Beedrill to Level 100 with enough time (or cheating), and proceed to wipe the floor with the campaign. That doesn't make Beedrill good when that time grinding could have been spent on actually playing the game normally. I used to participate in Pokémon in-game character tier discussions, and any Mon that required unreasonable amounts of investment to make useable usually got dumped in the lower brackets. I was also under the impression that FE character tiers take in a number of factors, such as consistency across runs (which usually involve good growths to some extent).

Also, I already brought up that low tiers aren't necessarily hated, which is why I suggested a split.

You do realize I suggested a hard split, right? Which is the exact opposite of bloat??? I do not understand what point you're trying to make here.

I am also thinking about how do we call the split tropes:

• Hated for being overpowered: The current name is too vague for this purpose, because it doesn't specify that the character must be hated for being OP.
• Famously low-tier characters: ??? (something that doesn't contain "Scrappy").

Edited by Albert3105 on May 24th 2022 at 4:15:12 AM

Good idea on this one, too. Maybe something like "Weaksauce Character" or something of the sort.

In lieu with Albert's suggestion, I do think that it's an important distinction to make on ease of use. Like you said, Level Grinding helps out quite a bit, but it doesn't make them necessarily good. Which is honestly the point which "famously low-tier characters" come into play. What's the criteria, exactly? How should it fit?

I personally think that "famously low-tier characters" are characters that stick to the low-tier definition of Scrappy as a wholesale: no matter how much they improve, they never truly get "good" or catch-up. Thing is, I think that's the point where it starts to bleed into discussion with gameplay mechanics and ease of use compared to actual payoff - how easy it is to get that character to a point of being usable. Games that have not only grinding but very easy and quick to do so (like FE8) I feel should be kind of nixed because it actively gets to the point where anyone can become "good" because of it. I think it thus would work best as a split where it'll always suck no matter how much it's given to become "good".

Again, I don't disagree with the idea, I'd just say it's important to ask what the criteria is.

Edited by CalamityRaven26 on May 25th 2022 at 8:49:43 AM

Woke up today, and honestly have a bit of a suggestion how we can do it:

Meta Scrappy: What effectively the Tier-Induced Scrappy page is, it's basically characters that are hated for being too bad or too good at what they do and thus are an active crimp on that playstyle. Both high-tier and low-tier examples require actual, sourceable demonstration of said Scrappy-dom (much like The Scrappy does), but characters that are egregiously low-tier but still not Scrappies go into:

Meta Mincemeat: For characters that are especially infamous due to simply not jiving with the game's mechanics as a wholesale. If your average low-tier character is merely "average" bad (outclassed by most if not all the game but is in a game where they can legitimately do well with the mechanics given; examples of this are characters like Cielo in Digital Devil Saga (who's arguably the worst party member) or any "average" bad unit in FE (like, say, Amelia or Lyn, as even they can still have moments of incredible use if trained well), then I think they don't qualify for this. Put simply, Meta Mincemeat as a trope is for characters that either goes into So Bad, It's Good or So Bad, It's Horrible in terms of meta usage. Keep in mind that I feel there should be a distinction to be made as to what that includes: it shouldn't just be low-tier characters (which was what I meant when I talked about "bloat" - that was tiredspeak for "splitting the high-tiers and low-tiers into two different tropes won't likely fix the misuse of said tropes, and would likely require a changes to the parameters to fix ill-defined definitions"), but low-tier characters that are almost impossible or impossible to use courtesy with even the game's given mechanics should qualify for this trope IMO. This means two things: one, simple low-tier characters aren't going to cut it, especially if they're in a game with ease of use or numerous ways to get "good" meaning that even if they're bad, they can be easy to use enough that they can still do well in the game itself under certain situation. Two, they have to be famously bad: as in, not only do they suck, they especially suck, as there's really nothing that could help salvage them within the context of the mechanics of the game going against them. This is something I define by having zero actual mechanical merit to use even within the game's given mechanics, so something that simply doesn't work as it's intended to work for given its description to its role, and is fandom famous as a result. That's the important distinction to make, over how much it's a matter of agreement on (lack of) ease of use as well infamous reputation.

Edited by CalamityRaven26 on May 30th 2022 at 8:10:20 AM

Do we have any potential crowner options other than splitting?

Mutually exclusive:

• Split the trope at least for Low-Tier and High-Tier Scrappies into own tropes.
• Remove "Tier" type labels from the description and soft-splits, and re-sort examples, in favor of relying on example context more.

Any other ideas?

e: Gave the second option some clarity.

Edited by Amonimus on Jun 3rd 2022 at 4:03:12 PM

A rename should also be considered if we split, but I'd like to wait to see if we do indeed split before moving forward on that.

We'd already have crowners to decide the names of the new tropes if we split (which would include an option reusing the current name for one of the two tropes; probably the low-tier one in this case), so is it OK to go ahead with the options Amonimus proposed?

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 3rd 2022 at 8:00:20 AM

~Amonimus what does your second option mean? Maybe it's just because I'm sleepy/still newb-y but I have no clue what that entails or would look like as a result. If you don't mind, could you elaborate on it in really basic terms?

I've thought I've made it clear enough, but even further,

to get rid of "Low Tiers" and "High Tiers" mentions, merge subpages and just tell within examples "this fighter is disliked because of this specific inbalance and etc".