Tuesday Morning Mythra 9/19: What Does It Mean to “Play” A Character?
Welcome back! Today, I’ve just been reeling with the success of the initial JVGrid. Checked the number on daily plays as I write this article Monday night, and we’re sitting on Play #1340, so thank you so much for supporting the project. I’ve spent the past few days tirelessly trying to get the boards’s weird quirks and eccentricities ironed out, so bear with me as we make it through some initial growing pains. Hope you all are enjoying it so far!
As the project has grown in scale and notoriety, though, people have begun to notice a very, VERY intentional design decision: I’m choosing manually who counts for having played which character. This is a manually sourced database that has over 1,600 unique players — and I’m tasked with drawing the lines on what counts as a real secondary.
Naturally, my decisions have gotten a lot of pushback.
So, in the interest of talking through my rationale, let me break down my thinking with regards to establishing what does and does not count as a “main/secondary” for a player. Although this is hyperspecific to JVGrid, I think that it’s interesting enough to take a look at my design decisions to, at the very least, open up a conversation for how difficult it is to draw a singular hard line in the sand to determine how to assign characters to players.
- The character has to win.
There’s a lot of these sort of “last-ditch” characters that seem to come up when a player feels so lost about a specific matchup — a player matchup, or a character matchup — that they fall upon a character that they know, deep down, will not help them win the set.
This, of course, addresses the Maister Sora, but it also addresses some more subtle secondary picks. Glutonny’s Wolf, for example, seems to only exist for him to remember that he is, in fact, a Wario player, and gives him a minute or so to emotionally steel himself for the long, long set ahead of him against Sonic the Hedgehog.
Similarly, Sisqui’s Incineroar does come out often — but it does against people he’s like, cumulatively 0–15 on, so I think it really indicates desperation more than anything real.
None of these “surrender” characters are counted.
Then again, I don’t get wins, and I’m still counted in the database, so who’s to say, really?
2. Legacy mains are countable, but like, they need to be really notable.
There’s a man that we all know and love named “Gavin Dempsey.” Before he started playing Diddy Kong, he played a lot of characters. Most of these characters did not last. Some of them did.
Tweek is listed as Diddy, Seph, PT, Wario, Wolf, Roy. There’s a lot of other Tweek Experiments (tm) that could be thrown up there — the Tweek Aegis, the Tweek Mega Man, the Tweek Joker, the Tweek Banjo…
But obviously, his 2019 picks are pretty damn notable. With that said, though, a lot of people had rotations that were really real in 2019, but definitely, in hindsight, kind of meaningless.
That’s why my general litmus is: the longer away ago something was, the more notable a secondary/legacy main has to be for me to be willing to count it.
For example, I don’t feel like I need to count the Yonni Luigi, but I do need to count the MkLeo Ike. These were both 2019 picks, but the one used to win majors is, ultimately at the end of the day, the most important one.
For the most part, I kind of want to avoid legacy characters. I do want to reserve it for the tippy tippy top, just because: again, it’s 1600 people. I don’t want to bother knowing what #10 on the Massachusetts's PR played in month 2 of Ultimate at a Glitch. If I’m counting a legacy main, it’s because both the player and the character in question were important.
With all of that, I have the ProtoBanham Banjo counted, so I guess I go against everything here I just wrote out.
But I mean, Banjo needs it. Come on!
3. I don’t care if it won if it was really only used like, once.
This is about some weird hyperanomaly cases for character picks: I’m talking the Bloom4Eva Mii Brawler, used to slay Shuton and help Bloom become the second European in Ultimate to take down top level Olimar. I’m talking about the Miya Incineroar, used to win Kowloon 7 over Kameme’s Mii Brawler. And most pressingly, I’m talking about Zackray’s Sora, which he used to win Kagaribi 5 before never picking up the character again.
At the end of the day, I want regularity. Achievement or not, I want to see you keep playing a character before I associate it with you.
Hey, that Bloom point segues me neatly into the next thing…
4. Some of you people need to play fewer characters.
There’s a few players who have built their brand on being considered “wildcards.” The most famous of this is Rizeasu, but players like Stroder, Lunamado, naitosharp, and Yei are all problem-causers in this regard.
My solution is…to…uh…do my best with regards to counting characters these players use. It’s not perfect, but we’re making it count with regards to the character picks that generally find themselves picked the most, but also are the most successful.
But that can change so much, so, really, who’s to say what the right call is with these kinds of players?
5. I do, ultimately, need to put some level of restriction on who counts for a given character.
Rarity score is calculated based on how obscure your answer is compared to your peers. The closer you are to 900, the more “obscure” your score is. Being able to gamify the scores by finding players who have super super niche character pulls, is, ultimately, against the spirit of the game. Nobody would reasonably call Miya “an Incineroar player.” If you need a Japanese Incineroar player, pick Tempaman like the rest of us.
So ultimately, after talking with L4st for a bit, here’s my final outcome on how to pick characters that count:
With that said, though, I could be wrong, so I’ve had the form for auditing characters live for a little bit, and everyone’s been going kind of insane on it, so I have a lot of ground to check through before my next database update.
In any case: thanks for playing! Next week we’ll be back to more normal tournament coverage. Delta will probably give us a lot more to chew on with regards to the state of top level play for the year.
Best wishes,
Trade War
