Street Fighter 6 director says internal character ratings are ‘totally different’ from player tier lists, felt Alex was the best in SF5

Trying to rate a fighting game character’s strengths and weaknesses is mostly subjective and will change depending on who you ask, but overall there is still some consensus through their discussion.

internal games I recently spoke with street fighter 6 Director Takayuki Nakayama and producer Shuhei Matsumoto spoke at length about a number of topics, including tier lists and how the developers feel internally about their characters.

After talking about how the players were initially fighting against E. Honda and JP though he believed they weren’t too extreme, Nakayama goes on to talk more about how they view their characters and their power levels.

In a nutshell, the director recounts how developers often have very different thoughts on how a fighter has more or less power internally compared to hardcore gamers.

Principal Nakayama: “I love seeing the tier lists that players post. They are totally different from our internal thoughts. Even with Street Fighter 5, our opinions never aligned with those of the players, even at the end.

Most people seemed to consider Luke the strongest, but on our development team, what if I told you that we actually thought Alex was on top? We don’t talk about these things because then it becomes an ‘official statement’, but it’s interesting.”

That was quite an interesting comparison considering that professional gamers consistently listed Alex among the worst characters in SF5 until basically the last season of the game.

Even in our final tier list for Street Fighter 5: Champion Editionwe ranked Alex 26th out of 45 characters, so we still felt like he was mid-level, while the dev team felt he was much stronger than what we were seeing.

Although Alex’s example may be a little shocking, this whole sentiment is a little less surprising for a number of reasons.

For one, the developers aren’t among the strongest players in the world who compete in the game on a daily or weekly basis, and therefore won’t always see things the same way as they do.

Their experience is likely to be higher than the average player in general, but personally they won’t be beaten or challenged in the same way.

They also have all the relevant data on their side to help back up their conclusions with statistics.

Developers can always see which characters are earning the most, what they are winning with, and on the other hand what players are losing with.

It’s a pretty simple explanation for why Cammy was still getting paid in SF5 even though she continued to win or in the best majors, but overall, she had one of the worst win rates online out of the gate.

Trying to balance a fighting game is a delicate line that I don’t envy where developers have to factor in feedback/results from top players, hard data, and their own internal testing to get to a point where everyone can have a good time.

You’re not always going to get this balance “right”, but there are methods to try to get it that way.

Hopefully Capcom and players are still happy with the balance of Street Fighter 6 considering they stated his plan is to give the game a major balance update once a year.

Although they are apparently not refraining from making whatever adjustments they see fit as they are adding a new method to perform Drive Rushes when Rashid arrives in a few days on July 24.

Translations for this article were provided by our very own Nicholas ‘MajinTenshinhan’ Taylor.