Please note that this analysis was completed prior to Low Tide City and does not include any results from that tournament.
For this breakdown, we will be using these rules to define the meta. Both the PGRU and WWR use the same tiering system, so we can utilize them to categorize the variety of tournament placements. Characters that placed at C-Tier tournaments, the lowest ranked tournament, will be represented through the top 8 placements. Next up the scale would be B-Tiers, where we will take the top 16, and then for A-Tiers, we will take the top 32. Finally for S-Tiers, the tournaments with the highest accolades and tournament entrants, we will be taking the results of the top 64. While there is no official system for this post pandemic period of offline events, we still have the ability to categorize these events thanks to Barnard's Loop’s effort of tracking tournaments throughout 2021.
A player must win a single game with a character for the result to count. If a player pulls out a character in a set but does not win a single game with that character, then the character is not counted. Also consider that character data is dependent on data recording from tournament and event runners and may be incomplete. With the rules established, let us take a look at differences between the offline and online metas.
Characters with the biggest and smallest differences in placement percentages from offline to online. Click to expand.
Some characters experienced major differences in their ability to place often and overall popularity when the transition to online occurred. When looking at the lifetime data of Ultimate, we can pick out the characters who experienced the largest and smallest overall percentage changes between the average percentages of offline and online placements.
Peach stands out as the only character with over a 2% difference that leaned towards offline results. She attained a top 5 placement percentage in PGRUv1, and was Top 10 for both PGRUv2 and PGRU 2020 as a whole. During the online period, Peach started fairly strong, among the top 20 for placements during WWRv5, but quickly fell off. She was not able to make it over the 1% threshold in WWRv6, and by WWRv7 was barely able to make up 0.25% of total results in the season.
In the current post pandemic period, she is not nearly as strong as she was before the online period, but remained just barely in the top 20 prior to Low Tide City. Fox, Joker and Greninja are also characters who had a significant percentage difference in the offline eras. Joker is an especially interesting case out of these characters. He never fell outside of the 1% threshold during the online era, but had such an incredibly stronger presence in the offline era. Joker ended up the second highest percentage of results in PGRU v2, and had the number one highest percentage of results during PGRU 2020.
On the other side of the spectrum, Cloud and Sonic were some of the most prominent characters during the online era. Both were top 5 in placement percentages for all of the WWR seasons utilized for this study, with Sonic peaking at number 1 during WWRv5, and then settling at fourth for the other two seasons. Cloud consistently garnered the third highest amount of placements for each online season.
Unlike Peach with online, though, Cloud and Sonic have been relatively relevant in each season of the offline meta. Neither has dropped below the 1% threshold in any of the offline seasons, including post pandemic. Pre-Low Tide City, Sonic is currently considered eleventh for total number of placements in the post pandemic era, which is his current offline peak. Cloud on the other hand peaked at fifteenth during PGRU 2020.
Both characters have some exceptional seasons in terms of percentages, so why is the difference so high? It is because both characters had incredibly high percentages for every online season. They were so far beyond the competition in placements and popularity during the online seasons that it harshly outweighs their offline achievements.
Ike and ROB are also characters who had significantly stronger seasons online. ROB is very similar to Cloud and Sonic with performing well offline, but having such a strong online presence that it does not matter. Ike on the other hand is a character that definitely struggled offline, especially after PGRU v1. Ike has not been able to reach above 1% for offline results since that season, but had a significant showing for the online seasons. Ike was in the top 20 of results for WWRv5, and then quickly became a mainstay for the top 10 in WWRv6 and WWRv7.
There are three characters who managed to see almost no change between offline and online average percentages. King Dedede, Bowser Jr., and Ryu all had very similar percentages for both metas. These three characters were never particularly strong, with none of them ever hitting over 1% in any season of competitive Smash Ultimate. This consistency has remained for each of them, with Bowser Jr being the closest to break the threshold this current post pandemic season.
The character on this list who has achieved the most results by far is Zero Suit Samus. She has achieved top 10 total results in both an online and offline season, and has remained relatively consistent for both eras of Smash.
All-time placement percentages for offline and online play. Click to expand.
This is the all time percentages for the total eras of Smash Ultimate’s lifespan. For offline, you will notice that a majority of DLC characters are on the lower half of the roster. This is mainly because they did not have as much time to gather total results like every other character. The major exception to this is Joker, who has achieved top 5 for all time results for the offline scene.
You may see a similar pattern for the Fighter Pass 2 characters for the online breakdown, specifically regarding Sephiroth and Pyra/Mythra, who did not have as much time to flourish in the metagame.
For this chart, characters on the left are more often represented offline, and characters on the right are more represented online. Click to expand.
This chart represents the majority of results a character has had since PGRU v1. The blue bars represent the 4 different seasons of offline (PGRU v1, PGRU v2, PGRU Jan-Mar 2020 and Post Pandemic) and the red represents the 3 different seasons of online (WWRv5 Mar-Jun, WWRv6 and WWRv7). From this chart you can see how much of the life span of Ultimate was played online during the pandemic.
A large portion of characters trend closer to online, even the ones who had a pretty even mix of results. A large portion of the DLC characters trended towards higher lifetime online results due to how little the amount of offline tournaments they have been able to appear in. The only exceptions are Joker, Banjo, and of course Kazuya who came out after the online era.
We can also look at the differences in lifetime unique players between offline and online to see which characters were more represented in what era. Quite a large portion of characters trended towards having slightly higher representation online than offline. This may have been due to the ease of access of entering a wifi tournament over an offline one, allowing a larger pool of talent access to competitive play.
On the farther ends of the spectrum, characters such as Min Min, Steve, Ganondorf and Kirby were much more represented online, with the former two not having much offline experience compared to their online. Others such as Peach, Pichu, Olimar and Sheik had greater representation offline, with Sheik and Olimar having incredibly little playtime online. Palutena had the most unique players for both offline and online, deeming her as the most popular character to place throughout all of Smash Ultimate.
The last comparison we will look at is the percent differences and peak placements of S- and A- Tier tournaments between the two eras. For S-Tier tournaments, we see some common overlap with characters such as Palutena, Pokemon Trainer, ROB, Snake and Wolf. The other five are incredibly different though, with Peach and Joker taking high percents for offline, and Cloud and Sonic taking high percents for online.
In A-Tiers, we once again see common overlap with Palutena, ROB, Snake, and Wolf, but also this time with Zero Suit Samus. Those 5 actually take up the top 5 for - Tier placement percentages, but the top 5 for online consist of Cloud and Sonic instead of Wolf and Zero Suit Samus.
As you can see, the data shows that the metas were quite different between offline and online. Reasons for this could range from the different playstyles that online allowed, to ease of bracket entry and accessibility of wifi tournaments for many over offline. We are now seeing in this post online era a lot of players who mainly entered wifi tournaments starting to show up and achieve good results at large offline events. As the offline scene continues to flourish, we will get to see if these differences will lessen from these players entering, and if the post-pandemic meta will turn out to be more similar to the offline or online era of Smash Ultimate.