ZSS SUX
The story and explanation of how this character may not be as busted as some think. Also there is a dark mode/light mode switch to the left if you care
Background
You are probably wondering what “zss sux” even means. Maybe if you have played some smash brothers ultimate, then you have an idea of what it represents, but for those who have no knowledge of how or what this means I will explain some. Smash brothers ultimate (from now on I will just call it ultimate) is a game that plenty of people play. There are tens of thousands of tournaments for it across the globe and millions of sets have been played in it. Across these competitive events a few star players have arisen, consistently winning at the tournaments they attend. One of these players goes by the tag “Marss” and he plays the character zero suit samus, commonly known as zss. Just like any game, ultimate is balanced in a way so that some characters are better than others and many people argue that the characters top players use are also top tier characters. Marss has argued vehemently that his character is not as “broken” or good as people say (though he obviously thinks she is good enough to solo main). Today we will delve into some data and see if his claim is backed by statistics.
The Zss is Busted Claims
Many people argue that zss is in the top five or even top two characters. Marss has put her in the top fifteen, which is controversial to many even though out of eighty five characters this would place her in the top twenty percent of the roster.
Overview of Data
The Data
Before jumping straight into analysis, lets get some information about the data I have. There is an online database of all tournaments with more than 32 entrants which contains information on characters used, tournaments, placings and more. I have almost three and a half million sets recorded within the data and over thirty thousand different tournaments in addition to roughly three hundred thousand unique players. Unfortunately, not every set contains the same amount of data. When reporting games won or lost to the tournament organizer, the character and point count of the game played is not always recorded. When accounting for just sets that have game information, the amount of data drops to just under a million and a half sets. This is obviously still enough to get some work done. Also, this data set of course does not contain every player, every tournament, and every set ever done but it is large enough to contain at least a majority of this information.
All Tournaments in the Data
This is all the tournaments we have in the dataset. It is a little cluttered and confusing, so in the next few graphs we will show just the US to get a better idea of what characters win tournaments and where some bigger tournaments are located.
Tournaments in the US
To get an idea of the scope of tournaments, I have made a map of the location of each tournament. I decided to only keep tournaments in the US with over 100 entrants to get a better idea of bigger tournaments within my own country. You can hover over the points for some more info.
Tournaments by Winning Char
Next you can see the loaction of tournaments color coded by which character won. Since we do not have game data for every single tournament some from the previous graph will not be here, but most are. Again you can hover over points for more info.
The Proof
Characters Ranked
Here you can see a list of characters ordered by the number of tournaments they won. The first character is snake, you can hover over the point to see exactly how many he won if you cannot tell from the graph and can also scroll down the list at the bottom. You will notice that ZSS is somewhat low, being seventeenth on the list. Hover over each point for more data. (I at first made the character name hover next to the points, but for some reason it would not work when I knitted to the website so I removed it)
Zero Suit’s Winrate over Time
Some may argue that ZSS has low tournament win count due to low usage, so instead we can look at her win rate over time. It was obvious in the very beginning of ultimate she had a very high win rate (all the way at 60%) but as time went on this fell off. Currently she hovers around roughly 45% win rate, which is fairly poor. This was done across all sets in the data with a zss either winning or losing a set.
Conclusion
ZSS has a pretty low win rate and tournament win record, accounting for all tournaments in the US data set, she has only won roughly five within the data set out of three hundred. I think considering these facts it is hard to conclude that she is top five or even top ten and that it is indeed true that zss sux.