If you have not read the breakdowns of previous seasons, please be sure to check out the previous season writeups below:
We will be using the same established rules set for the previous season. The WWR uses the same tiering system as PGRU, so we will be utilizing the tiers already established to break down results. 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.
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. Let's take a look at the results.
The image above showcases each character’s “placement percentage.” A placement percentage signifies a percentage out of all counted tournament results for the WWRv6 season in which a character successfully placed, based on the rules laid down earlier. As you can see, of the 79 characters in the game through WWRv6, 34 accounted for at least 1.0% of results, which is slightly less than half of the roster.
ROB tops the roster with a 5.57% placement percentage, which is an incredibly high percentage of results compared to the past 3 seasons. ROB had a total of 130 results, with 95 as a main character, and 35 as a secondary or pocket. ROB was #5 in the previous season, WWRv5, and had a 1.50% increase overall. Our previous season’s #1 character, Sonic, dropped to #4, with a 1.16% decrease.
Smash Ultimate had 3 new additions to its roster this season. The first was Min Min, who actually came out at the very end of June. Min Min had a full season to create results, and started her competitive career a few places outside of the top 20, with 1.46% of results. The next to come out was Steve, who released in mid-October. Despite only having 2.5 months to gather results, Steve was still able to make it over the 1% benchmark. The last character to release was Sephiroth in mid-late December, who barely had time to gather any major results.
Here we see the biggest changes between the first and second online seasons. One of the most important changes we see is how many results were gathered in each tier. We had more tournaments and results to count than the previous season, but we see a massive shift in representation for each tier. S Tiers total has a very large drop while each other category increases, with A Tiers increasing the most.
In terms of characters, the changes for both increases and decreases are less drastic across the board compared to last time, but still much more drastic than offline changes. For the biggest increases, we see a mix of characters who excelled in PGR v2 but fell in WWRv5 make a resurgence, characters who got buffed through patches start to rise, and characters who just started to make their mark on the online meta. Corrin, Diddy Kong, Falco, and King K Rool all saw growth across every category.
For the second season in a row, Bayonetta increases in rank and percentage again, bringing her close to a top 10 character on WiFi. ROB also has one of the largest percentage increases for the second season in a row as well, which brought ROB to the number 1 spot. Lucina and Toon Link, two characters that had notable percents in PGR v2, but had harsh drop offs in WWRv5, see a resurgence as well.
For losses, we see a mix of characters who excelled in the online atmosphere last season have harsh drop offs, and characters who struggled to compete in the WiFi meta drop off even harder than they did last season. Mii Gunner took the hardest dive of any character, seeing a dip in rank, percentage, and player base size, falling below 1%. Joker, Sonic, Snake, and Roy were the top 10 characters from WWRv5 who experienced the largest drops in percentage, with Snake falling out of the top 5 for the first time in all of Ultimate’s competitive life, and Joker and Roy dropping out of the top 10 entirely.
For the second time in a row, Greninja and Peach experienced letdowns again, this time plummeting under 1%. Other characters who had harsh fall offs and fell under 1% are Banjo, Piranha Plant, and Zelda, who all had solid percentages in the season prior. Player bases across the entire cast had decreased overall, with Palutena, Joker, and Snake experiencing the largest drops, which is interesting because Palutena still had an increase in percentage and rank.
This chart showcases the top 10 of WWRv5’s and WWRv6’s placement percentages throughout the year of 2020. The previous article already dissected WWRv5’s top 10 characters in the first half of the year, so I will be mainly focusing on the second half.
But first, let's look at the two characters who were not a part of the top 10 for WWRv5, Ike and Mr. Game & Watch. Ike was able to achieve over 1% pre-quarantine, and then fell off when the entire competitive scene shifted to online. Ike saw a huge surge in June though, which is interesting as it was not until the end of June that Ike saw buffs in patch 8.0. Mr. Game & Watch had very little relevance pre-quarantine, but started to pick up solid results once quarantine happened.
For WWRv6, the top 3 characters dominated the metagame unlike we have seen before. ROB, Palutena, and Cloud maintained the top 3 spots of each month, outside of Ike barely achieving more than Palutena in November, which led to each character's overall percentage being much higher than the rest of the top 10. The overall difference between #3, Cloud, and #4, Sonic, is over 1.2%. Snake, who as stated earlier dropped outside of the top 5 for the first time ever, saw an overall steady flow of results after a sharp drop in July. The two characters who fell outside of the top 10, Joker and Roy, both saw an overall steady decrease in results throughout the latter half of the year, with Roy failing to attain a single result in December.
As stated earlier, 34 characters were able to reach up to 1.0% for their season placement percentage, which is less than half of the roster. That being said, the quintile curve is steeper than ever.
As also stated earlier, the top 3 were head and shoulders above the rest almost every month. The top 3 make a total of 16.06% alone. This is higher than the previous online season’s (WWRv5) 14.27%, and higher than the previous record holder (PGRU v1), which had a total of 15.31%. When combined with the whole top 10, the total grows to 36.65%. We also have 45 characters who did not make over one percent, who make a total of 25.32% of all results. For comparison, all the characters who did not make over 1% last season only made up 19.67%. We are starting to see the online meta establish itself more as more characters start to fall off in relevancy and as more players switch to more successful characters.
Here we see a breakdown of the results in each tier, including which characters have the highest amount of results, and their peak performances in each tier. Cloud, Diddy Kong, Ness, and Sonic were able to take first place in all 4 tiers. Mr. Game and Watch is the only other character who was able to take place in 3 out of the 4 tiers, just falling short of an S-Tier win.
In S-Tier, A-Tier, and C-Tier, the top 3 characters all take the top 3 spots. The only exception is B-Tier, where Sonic slips past Cloud for the third-most results. Each tier itself, though, has outliers outside of the top 10 who excelled in that tier. Pokemon Trainer, Pac-Man, and Luigi were all able to solidify themselves as high competitors in S-Tiers, though only in the 9 and 10 spots. Joker, who had worse performance overall, and Bayonetta, who has seen huge growth in this season, both crack the top 10 at A-Tiers. Young Link had a strong presence in B-Tiers, almost cracking a top 5 spot in percentage. And lastly C-Tiers were the only one in which Mr. Game & Watch cracked the top 10 despite being an overall top 10 character. C-Tiers also saw strong results from some outlier characters like Samus and Donkey Kong.
This chart showcases the correlation between a character's placement percentage and the amount of players who have contributed to that character's results. Once again, we see a solid amount of outliers towards that 1-3% area.
The cyan diagonal line showcases the scattered plots average linear growth. Characters above the line are characters who had a diverse range of players bring in results, while characters under the line had fewer players than average who gathered a majority of the results for said character.
As just mentioned, there are a lot of characters who stem far from the line, both at high and low percent. Very few characters had drastic increases in player base size, but we still see a solid handful of characters that stem far above it. Wolf has always had a notoriously high player base compared to its percent, and there is still not much difference here, though it is not as drastic of an outlier as it was in previous seasons. Samus and Mr. Game and Watch had some of the biggest increases in size this past season, so it is not surprising to see them above the line as well. In her debut season,
Min Min is way above the line as well compared to how many results it gathered. There was no real definitive Min Min player this season, as the character got a large amount of results varied across the spectrum. The last notable character above the bar is Pokemon Trainer, who is actually in quite the similar place as he was last season.
There you have it, folks. WWRv6 concluded Smash Ultimate’s first online competitive year, showcasing a large shift in the meta from offline. Next time we will be catching up to current day, analyzing January 2021 - June 2021.
