Thanks to everyone who voted in the latest Mega Smash Poll! The poll has officially been closed, and the full data is available here. When using the data, please link back to this page so people may download their own copy of the data. Feel free to use the data for whatever project you want! We’ll be using the data for a couple of Source Gaming articles. Today, I thought it would be interesting to talk about character dislike and likes in depth.
The poll was designed to be flexible with the amount of information it collects. Before the poll ended, I discussed some things we could learn about the Smash community. It seems that the majority of active participants are 15-20 year old males. Looking at data on Source Gaming’s YouTube channel and Google Analytics, this is further confirmed.
Quick warning: This data was collected before the 1.1.6 patch.
One of the questions I asked was if a character was liked or disliked. This was left ambiguous on purpose. I was hoping to capture the “strong” reactions towards the characters; both positive and negative. For characters that haven’t received a lot or likes nor dislikes, than we can assume they are the middle of the road characters, and are characters that people don’t have strong feelings one way or the other. Providing an answer for like/ dislike wasn’t a requirement, and more people skipped the dislike question.
Another question was to self-identify how “hardcore” each respondent was. 1 was “For Glory” style players [Competitive] while 10 was “For Fun” style players [Less Competitive]. The average was 3.37, with the mode (the most amount of responses) being 1.
I wanted to see if there was a relationship between how competitive a player was, and their character preference. In order to do this, I first looked at what characters were “liked”. Here are the “heat map” results. Please note, the more “red” the less liked the character is. Blue is more beloved.
I also prepared a histogram of the data.
It’s clear that DLC characters have a bias associated with them that is shared by most players. In general, non-competitive players seemed to have higher percents of “likes”, but this might be attributed to the lack of responses from non-competitive players. Captain Falcon, Marth, Ike and Mario seem to all do well with all types of players too.
Then, I decided to analyze what characters were “disliked”. Again blue is good, red is bad.
Unsurprisingly, Rosalina and Luma, Palutena, Dark Pit and Bayonetta elicited strong negative responses from players. I was a little surprised with Olimar and Pikmin, as I didn’t remember him not doing poorly on the previous Mega Smash Poll.
Here’s a histogram of this data.
Anyway, after finding the percentages of likes and dislikes I looked to find the approval rating per character, and per hardcore ranking. Talking the likes and minusing the dislikes, we are left with the following data. Characters with negative numbers were more “dislike” than “like”:
Here’s the histogram version of the data:
…and here’s an interactive chart of approval.
Most characters seem rank better with non-competitive players. Some characters have extreme reactions, for example: MegaMan, Duck Hunt, Greninja, Charizard, Ike, Donkey Kong, Mr. Game and Watch, Luigi and Mario.
Characters that did better with people who ranked themselves in the middle of competitive and noncompetitive are: Ganondorf, Link, Toon Link, Pit, King Dedede, Jigglypuff, Captain Falcon, Shulk. Mewtwo and Cloud.
There’s only one character that seems to do better with the more “competitive” crowd, and that’s Marth. He’s one of the few non-DLC characters that’s in the blue with the most competitive people.
How’s the DLC?
77.2% were “surprised” with the DLC.
86.7% of the respondents were not disappointed with Smash DLC.
48.1% of respondents bought Mii Costumes.
88.1% of respondents bought stages.
93.7% of respondents bought characters.
90.% of respondents liked characters the most, 7.3% stages, and 1.7% Mii Costumes.
Most people thought the price of DLC was reasonable.
A lot of the written responses for, “what kind of content would you have preferred” was about the lack of Nintendo characters, or wanting cut veterans like Wolf and the Ice Climbers back. Some people also wanted skins (non-Mii Fighters) as DLC, and a hazard toggle switch. Most people were surprised by the amount of newcomers in DLC, and having a 3rd party focus. Cloud was the most surprising.
I decided to look at the DLC approval rating in particular. Bayonetta was clearly the most controversial character as she was too deemed to be overpowered by a majority of the people, and for winning the Smash Ballot. Corrin, another controversial choice has also ranked lower– this is a bit odd as more people were likely to say that they were displeased with Roy. I guess in the end, Roy is our boy! Their ranking in the “what character are you most displeased with?” might be due to the fact that some people feel that Fire Emblem was overrepresented in DLC, or preferred a different veteran over Roy.
Mewtwo was the 2nd more “pleasing” DLC, but he is ranked slightly more favorably among the fanbase. Cloud was the most “pleasing” and is generally ranked second. This is probably due to the fact that Cloud wasn’t leaked, and was seen as a welcomed surprise by many.
Additional Comparisons:
Bayonetta’s ranking prompted me to see if the perception that a character a overpowered/ weak had any influence on the approval rating.
Here’s the top 5 characters that need nerfs, and their approval ratings:
Here’s the top 5 characters that need buffs:
There definitely seems to be some influence over how strong a character is perceived and their approval rating. In general, competitive players tend to have less positive views of characters than their non-competitive counterparts. The range for characters that need nerfs is MUCH higher than the range for characters that need buffs.
Next, I looked at what characters had the greatest change from their highest approval rating, to their lowest (The “Controversial” rating). These are Rosalina and Luma, Bayonetta, Megaman, Duck Hunt and Palutena.
Here’s the 5 least “controversial” for comparison. These are Corrin, Roy, Lucas, Shulk and Ness:.
Here’s the characters ranked by average approval rating:
Mewtwo, Cloud, Captain Falcon, Mario and Marth are the top five while Bayonetta, Rosalina and Luma, Olimar and Pikmin, Dark Pit, Mii Swordsman take the bottom 5 spots.
..That’s all for today. This data took a long time to prepare, but I hope you’ve enjoyed reading through this article. The file can be viewed here.
If you would like to view/ download the original responses, check out the files.
Let us know what kind of things you would like us to look into on Twitter or in the comments below!
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Poor Dark Pit! ;(
I don’t get why everybody hates him! He is as cool as Shadow the Hedgehog! 😛
I guess Fire Emblem and Kid Icarus will always be disrespected because they weren’t in Smash 64.
Would be interessting if you could ask seperate for liking the character itself and the playstyle for the next time.
It may be possible that people really like to play Roy or Corrin but hate the fact that “there are too many FE charas”.
I like Zelda and how she is represented in Smash but I hate to play her.^^
I think a lot of people felt like Dark Pit was undeserving of a character slot, or that they’d rather have a more original character than a clone. However, Sakurai has stated that removing clones wouldn’t have freed up enough development time to make a full character. They might also have a problem with how similar he is to Pit, since almost all of his attacks are functionally identical to Pits (Lucina has even damage across her blade as opposed to Marth’s tip dealing more damage, and Dr. Mario hits harder but is slower as opposed to Mario). It’s always been my belief that if Dark Pit remained an alternate costume for Pit, no one would complain as much. But that’d be boring.
But the thing is:
Every Pit -Player has his prefered Pit.
People don’t know wich one is better because its personal taste. I really like the normal Pit, but I prefer DPs Specials.
I like them both about equally. I prefer Pit’s arrows, but I also prefer Dark Pit’s Electroshock Arm.
“But that’d be boring.”
No it wouldn’t. It’d be better for everyone if Dark Pit was an alt like he should have been.
It has nothing to do with those franchises not being in Smash 64. It’s because they are overrepped and got more than they deserved in Smash 4.
I could understand the dislikes of those characters. I don’t know about Rosalina’s case, but Palutena’s probably because of her recovery. It takes too long for her to get back to her stance, which makes her too defenseless. Also even she have all those custom moves, none of them are that powerful either which are quite useless.
I can understand more on Dark Pit’s hates. Of course this depends on people’s opinions, but Dark Pit doesn’t make any differences with the original Pit. He’s simply just a buffed Pit which made him powerful but slower than Pit. Otherwise, he’s almost the same as Pit. Although it’s not what it matters, it could’ve been better if he used other weapons other than using the similar ones of Pit’s, because there’s tons of other weapons that Dark Pit could’ve choose to make the differences. Also, it’s no different that he’s using the Light Arrow rip-off too. I never even enjoyed Dark Pit for this purpose, but that can be said the same to other clones too though.
Bayonetta’s may have changed due to the patch update, but not just only that she may have been over-powered, but possibly difficult to control her due to her being a combo-user fighter. I do think there were many players who weren’t good making combos in any fighting game, which I’m one of them. I don’t mind her being in the game because I do think she’s important, but wouldn’t use her because she’s too difficult to control. Combos isn’t really my style.
I think people ‘dislike’ Rosalina because they think she’s overpowered. In my opinion, she’s not overpowered, Dabuz is. But I can’t speak for everyone. I would also argue that Palutena becomes far more interesting with customs on. When Customs were legal, I remember Jump Glide, Lightweight and Super Speed being used quite often.
Also, just to correct you on Dark Pit: his attributes are exactly the same as Pit’s. The only thing that’s different are his neutral special, side special, final smash, and his forward tilt for some reason. It is a fair argument that he could have been more unique, but the more unique you make him, the more you have to consider that Sakurai has mentioned that Dark Pit (and by extension, Lucina and Dr. Mario) were added because they had enough time to make clones, but not full characters. If they had to design an entirely new moveset for Dark Pit, he might not have been finished at all.
I also agree that Bayonetta was probably disliked because of her unusually powerful combo ability. I’ve seen pro matches where a skilled Bayonetta player was able to take stocks at really low percents, and their opponent could do nothing to escape it. It’s stuff like that which gave her a negative stigma, both with competitive players who had to face her, and casual viewers who were expecting a more interesting match.
Most of us here are still clueless about what Sakurai meant when he said that he was gonna add new game modes as DLC in Smash Wii U and 3DS. Tournament mode was the only mode we got as DLC so it’s tough to figure out what Sakurai meant when he said new modes.
Share, and Tournament are modes.
I know but when Sakurai said he was gonna add new modes as DLC. Most of us do not think he meant multiple settings for tournament mode.