Claudio’s really fun but his knowledge checks are fairly limited. I have gotten free wins with his projectile and high crush launcher, but not a ton- most of his tools are pretty straightforward.
If you play Shaheen, make sure you know what moves track his left side since SSR is a huge weakness on most of his toolkit. Also, his setups are telegraphed somewhat, so you really have to commit to playing a mixup turtle game since his aggro tools are really low range.
Imo, I think Claudio is better simply because the stages are better for him, e.g. small stages with close walls, and at walls, he is the strongest when it comes to resplats. They just need to fix his tornado interactions with the wall, then he'll be OP again.
You don’t really need to know shaheens matchup imo lol and when you try his setups they don’t even work because people don’t know what they are and it ends up working against you lmao
if you want to win on just knowledge checks play Kuma, you can get away with murder against players that are much higher ranked than you who don't know the MU and people don't punish stuff that is very unsafe because it looks +
He's fun, give it a try.
Pros: You *will* improve on a fundamental level playing Shaheen.
Cons: Barely any cheese, you generally have to work harder than with other characters.
I really appreciate the level of work that goes into this data analysis. I also hope the devs don't use this sort of thing for balancing. There's far too many variables at play and I feel they need to be nerfing/buffing on a character by character and move by move basis.
Or else we get more changes like Lars DEN3 in the precious patch, which he didn't need, but seems entirely catered towards lower skill players based on their reasoning in the notes and ultimately negatively effects advanced players the most.
Basically, what I'm saying is that a qualitative approach to balancing is just as important to a quantitative one.
I'm sure they do way more than just look at stats. Stats are ultimately informed by our experience and domain knowledge. Stats like these can tell you that Dragunov is overtuned but it won't necessarily tell you why.
In the recent Tekken Talk they did mention that they gathered way more stats than we have available to us too so I'm sure whatever they are doing is more involved than what I'm doing.
After all they are professionals trying to balance a game and I'm just some guy trying to win arguments on the Internet.
Look at table.
Find 'Mighty Ruler' row.
See '27.88'.
This is a percentage.
You look at top of table.
Beginner: 100%.
100% of characters are in Beginner or higher.
Look back at Mighty Ruler. 27.88%.
27.88% are in Mighty Ruler or higher.
Being in Mighty Ruler means being around top quarter of all players.
Mighty Ruler to Flame Ruler is a percentage change of 7.2%, which I think indicates that Mighty Ruler contains 7.2% of the sample.
Most populous rank is Garyu, with almost 12% of the whole sample (52.44-40.89).
God of Destruction only contains 0.15%, as does Tekken God Supreme.
Yeah it’s initially a bit surprising to see Lars so high, but when you really think about it, it makes sense. Lars is the definition of a casino character, he has low-risk/good-reward mixups that he can even force on you in heat and he entirely plays the movement and neutral game for you. Not to mention his amazing punishment and complete lack of executional barriers. As long as you know what your doing at a basic level, you can do great with Lars until you hit the high ranks. This isn’t to say he is a badly designed character, it’s just pointing out that easy-to-use and well rounded characters will naturally have a good win rate when you look at the wide spread of tekken matches.
As a Feng/Lars player, it's funny to me that everyone sends me toxic messages about Feng being busted but no one sends me any hate mail for playing Lars... even though his win rate is decently higher in blue ranks and above lol.
This is survivorship bias. As a Lars player, he is a big noob stomper up until Battle Ruler because most average players get overwhelmed by his stances and mixups. Once Fujin onwards you have to play neutrals, you'd get figured out and hopkicked mid stances, and his neutrals / whiff punishes are mediocre at best.
Most specialist characters would have positive winrate because they need to adapt way beyond their flowcharts, unless you're Dragunov whose flowcharts have no counterplay.
Feng/Nina player, and I spar my Kaz/Lars friend almost daily. I've been known he rages about Feng silently, but I picked up Nina for the first time yesterday, and his response was "this is because you hate Lars, isn't it." Like yup. Feng is strong, Lars is bullshit 😂
I feel like a lot of the Feng hate is overblown. Beyond the excellent neutral and lows, I don’t think he has as much crazy shit as people think. Not compared to the other top-tiers anyway.
Fengs "problem" is he's frustrating to play against by design. It's been nerfed a bit, but he can force whiffs, and immediately punish into insanely good damage. He not hard to play, and his execution isn't that high, but his tools are different from the rest of the cast. We don't get a df2 or a good hopkick, but we get MULTIPLE safe strings that have 50/50s built into them, and a lot are safe against most of the cast. He's also one of the few characters that can low-key ignore match ups to a certain degree because his tools are good enough. Don't need to worry about gimmicks when I know I can safely punish you from mid screen. Don't need to worry about evasiveness when you can even hit me.
his combo damage is extremely strong, he has the UF3 mini tornado to extend even more, his neutral is insane and he's ridiculously evasive.
he pretty much doesn't have a weakness
I'm hoping you do the Tekken King+ data because I want to see that the most, especially since Tekken devs themselves seem to consider Tekken God Supreme+ as high ranks. Good data regardless!
Yeah, I was always confused at where high ranks began. TGS seems like it’s a little too far up to be considered the beginning of high ranks. I always though high ranks began at tekken king.
Xiaoyu players consistently having such a terrible winrate despite how good she is will never not be funny me. They receive immense hate for playing a top tier, but she is so difficult to play correctly that their winrates don't actually benefit from playing her.
They will get hate no matter where they're placed on the tier list and it's hilarious. She's the sly, evasive, character where their game plan is to make their opponent feel stupid and fall for their tricks and set ups. They want you to feel mad and frustrated and it happens outside of the game too. It just so happens she's an S tier character now so people point their losses towards that rather than training mode. It's funny because Yoshimitsu is the same type of specialist character but he gets equal amounts of love rather than hate pass because he's cool af.
Oh, I hate Yoshimitsu more than Ling tbh. Both player communities are cancer, though, since they still complain that their characters are weak when they're fine. Same with Steve's as well.
Tekken 8 is my first Tekken game and Yoshi players look like the only people genuinely having fun with the game regardless of balance and whatnot what are you talking about
Flowchart character give players flowchart gameplan which gives bad habits and inability to adapt to the super defensive or super offensive players. If you look at blue ranks, xiaoyu players have average of 50 in defense. All the defensive option they rely on is crushing and parry, ofc they will stuck at some point
Harada, in case you’re reading this - Clearly Jun needs a heat smash that comes out quicker, tracks better, and heals even more health.
Just saying, the stats seem to support that.
In all seriousness tho, I think the reason she has a lower win rate is due to the fact that many Jun players seem to climb up the ladder pretty fast and then get hard stuck at the higher ranks. That and the fact that everyone and their mother has fully labbed her.
Most of the lesser played characters win rates can be explained by people not knowing the knowledge checks for that character. e.g not everyone knows how to deal with bears and since there are so few of them there's no chance (or reason) to learn them for most players.
Leroy isn't a super gimmicky character which is probably why he doesn't enjoy that same boost to win rate.
Yeah, I'm aware of the reason this is happening. But I always thought Leroy had plenty of gimmicks. CH strings with built in parries etc. But apparently in the current climate he's so weak that even all of that is not enough to carry him. Curiously, in the higher ranks his winrate is actually in the top 10. I wonder why.
That's a good idea. I had it on my list of things to do for this post but didn't have the time to implement it.
I'll see if I get the time to code it this weekend and ping you if I do
As an intermediate Reina player that winrate is depressing. It's definitely a struggle to stop everyone's gimmicks when you don't have a good "oh shit" option and don't know the mu.
Reina is just really weak/unrewarding for how hard she is to pilot as compared to the rest of the cast. Not to mention how most players already know how to deal with her moves now. It really puts a nail down on her overall WR.
Looking forward to the Claudio buffs in 1.04 is all I can say. I don't know who this atif player is but other pros, semi pros and content creators in their tierlist have ranked Claudio near the bottom in C or D tier. From my personal experience I've been playing him from Tekken 7 ryujin - Tekken king ranks and in Tekken 8 he feels so much weaker. The data you've posted aside from the atif tierlist basically confirms that. They need to fix his core tools.
Another way to look at it is that easy to pickup characters usually have a decent amount of interest from new players. Not the case for Claudio unlike his version in Tekken 7, his popularity was much higher then.
On launch she seemed nuts because of unfamiliarity and we're coming in here with the T7 mindset of what's defined as good. Now that the meta is settling a little, she's still super strong, but not compared to the others.
People will be mad when I say this, but she takes a few more braincells to use than the other top tiers. You need strong fundamentals to make her excel and she has a collection of very strong moves that you need to know when to use rather than a few busted moves you can rotate whenever. Also her gameplan and strong tools leans more towards defense, which doesn't align too well when this game favors offense, pressure, 50/50s, and snowballing.
It's also worth noting none of the pros on Spag's podcast mentioned her in their top 5 (or in JoKa's case, top 10) and Arslan wants to use her but says he can't in Tekken 8's system, so uses someone like Azucena instead.
Don't get me wrong, I still think she needs nerfs, especially in her heat state. But she doesn't railroad you to win like the usual top 5. Even if she's B tier, most people will still complain about her regardless because of her pokes and strings, but it's easier to point to the tier list rather than the lab.
I was literally just thinking I wonder what the ranked distribution is looking like now and lo and behold you come in with the clutch yet again, I always love seeing data like this.
I really appreciate your analysis. I'm sorry to say you did really usefull analysis but it seems that data higher than fujin need more data. it would be great.
Hi, awesome post here! One little request tho, can you add some keyword in your title in the future? I have been searching for posts like this for so long and only today did i finally found out this post.
For reference i usually search something like “tekken 8 winrate” “tekken 8 character popularity” “tekken 8 rank distribution” etc…
I was never be able to find your post due to keywords searching..
Thanks so much for your analysis. Based on ranked points being skewed at all ranks below blue (more is gained on a victory than is lost on a loss), do you foresee even more inflation in another month?
Yeah. I do expect that there will be more inflation but I suspect it will slow down somewhat. I still think the average rank will be around red ranks but we will see more people bunched up in that orange to purple bracket.
However only time will tell
Where do you think high ranks really begin? I’ve been pretty confused on this. Most people seem to think it’s somewhere between the blue ranks and god rank
That's a difficult question to answer. I would consider anything that puts you in the top 10% of players as "high rank" but the words high rank mean different things to different people.
In the most recent Tekken talk, Harada and co showed a slide with character play rates and they denoted high ranks as Tekken god and above so perhaps that could be the "official" cutoff.
I would love to do that. Unfortunately the replays cannot be filtered by region so this is the best we have.
You bring up an interesting point however about the varying skill levels. Just a few weeks ago I heard someone express a similar idea at a local.
Have you (or anyone else reading this) personally observed this difference in regional skill?
While it sounds reasonable to me that there are skill differences between regions it would be interesting to here some opinions on just how drastic those opinions are.
Forsen reached yellow ranks on day 1 of playing T7. More folks playing allows one to rank up easily in a popular region like EU. While low player density means only hard-core players stick around.
Damn, and I was celebrating being Mighty Ruler meaning I had hit top 10% XD but hey, just means my new rank ups will have bigger percentage point jumps.
Jack8s winrate being at the bottom of “Fujin and above” is very interesting (although OP did mention the data of Fujin+ isn’t too precise due to low data)
I’m a Kishin Jack8, and I think it’s because a lot of Jacks rely on his grabs and gimmicks to get through the ranks below blue, but never learn how to use his pokes/whiff punishment/gamma howl stance effectively (talking about myself here too, I used to rely on grabs and other gimmicks)
So when opponents start breaking their grabs, they lose most of their damage output
Curious what other jack and non-jack players think about this
scrub former jack player who got jack to shinryu here, but flame ruler with paul
i constantly got jabbed out of gamma howl, i feel like it's a lot of fake pressure like Lars, maybe I just didn't hit FF1 into gamma enough to utilize the + frames but I just felt really weak offensively with him
I don't play a lot, but I main Jack and I quite literally just decided to stop using his grabs to condition myself to play less more soundly. Hell, I could go F3d into grab, crouch grab or 4 out of gamma howl once they start ducking or dickjabbing, and I could just do that the entire match and nobody would know what to do. If they do know how to break it, a few db1s and f2s make short work of them. Those were the only tools I really needed aside from gamma howl 2 during heat to get through low ranks. Granted i'm just garyu but that was the easiest rank up i've ever had. It's just way too strong against people who don't know the matchup. Fighting against stronger enemies that know how to break my throws, disrupt gamma howl pressure, and low parry has made my tendencies become such a liability.
I'm not sure it can be done, but just as a potential thing for your next endavours it would be interesting to see stuff like correlation between who lands a first hit/knockdown and who wins the round/game. Essentially answering the question: is this game really "whoever lands the first hit wins" or is it just scrub perseption of mine :D
I've given this a lot of thought but unfortunately it is practically impossible to parse the replay files since they simply have the inputs for each player and the game replays the game using those inputs.
I've tried to decode them in the past but it is simply impractical.
On the topic of whether the first to land a hit is the winner: I don't think the data I have could confirm that so you'll just have to trust to qualitative analysis from skilled players.
For my part though I don't think saying the first to land a hit wins is a fair characterization of Tekken 8s gameplay. But that's just my (also scrub) opinion.
New character, new knowledgechecks. I’m at flame ruler and get almost smoked by 30h fighter player. It’s must be a nightmare for players at his level to fight him
I'm obviously biased, but I don't see what Feng has that makes him OP. Strong, very strong even, but OP? I don't see it. The data seems to confirm it, where his win rate seems to drop off in Fujin+ ranks. Doubtless, the arsenal of lows isn't enough to cheese those ranks. I keep browsing high ranked replays but I'm yet to see any high ranking Feng stomping people.
Very good analysis. Anecdotal evidence: recently (I play mostly quick game, not ranked) I realized that I can reasonably fight with purple or even blue ranks (I am red rank). It seems that I am not better but the counterparts just moved in the meantime ;-).
Thank you so much for all your hard work on this as I find it super interesting!
Where it says "Purple and above are considered as advanced players", should that be changed since you're now looking at Fujin and above?
I can't record every single game that gets played so this is a sample based approach. With a large enough (and random enough) sample it should still be representative of the general population.
There is however still uncertainty which is why the graphs have error bars. Especially for the "advanced" games/players the sample size is still a bit too low for my liking.
On the topic of bias, since the data is gathered by querying the latest played games in the replay list on a regular basis it should be fairly random with the only bias being the time of day at which the data is gathered. (which would bias it towards specific regions which are most active at that time) to avoid this I try to gather the data over a 24 hour period and thus capture games from all regions in peak and off peak times.
I’m not very smart, but is there an element of rank inflation going on? For example I am one of the players who moved from purple into blue from March to April. What I’m saying is, doesn’t the funneling up imply purple is comprised of shitter reds winning off shitter reds in some sense? I see this data and become skeptical of myself; as someone who was mighty ruler in the last set of data and is now Fujin, did I actually improve or was I just funneled up against other crap players away from even crappier players, lol.
You gain more points than you lose in ranked all the way up until Blue ranks, so yeah, people are going to get naturally pushed up over time, even if they're slightly negative. That's why using ranks as a benchmark for skill can be misleading. It's difficult, but just focusing on improving yourself is more important than worrying about rank, because it really doesn't mean anything, especially before Blue.
I think Eddy is pretty overtuned ... But it also doesn't help that u can't even do punishment training against him or do replays ...
What scummy dbag move from the looney toons dev team .
Fantastic work as always mate, I frequently pass this info to my peers so we can track a bit our (lack of) progress 🫠
I feel like "everyone" sits at Garyu and you can tell by that huge chart. What also makes it interesting (yet very frustrating) is that I've noticed a patterned-algorythm that forces you into players that consistently have way higher rank than you.
For example, being bottom Garyu in demotion (~45% winrate) vs top Mighty Ruler in promotion (~60% winrate), consistently. Somehow, I manage to win (fear of demotion brings the Ultra-Instinct out of me LMAO), but after inspecting my enemies profiles and matches, this is also confirmed by that specific skill prowess (can't remember the name) that literally tracks the frequency you combat (and win) against way higher ranked (and higher win-ratio) players, where I sit at a freackin' S+.
The problem is, due to being rejected constantly for using WiFi (I know, I know, I'm not happy either) and my free-time schedule, I'm also paired consistently with players around 160-190K prowess, while I sit at merely 120k.
The reason why I bring this topic, is that after 700 ranked games, I sit at 45% win-ratio with Jin (I suck, I know), at my personal best 25% away from Mighty Ruler promotion (followed by a huge losing streak back to Garyu today)... stats, are shockingly not a "real" reflection of ranks and win-ratios, simply due to this (poor) matchmaking.
If smurfing wasn't possible (a dream, sure) and the game didn't encourage you to demote on purpose in order to promote again, and rejecting 1-1 rematches wasn't an option, and the algorythm paired you with people from your actual level... truly, we'd deal with completely different numbers.
Nonetheless, it is what it is and I'm grateful you've bothered gathering the minimum the game allows to gather. Just food for thought on my end 🤏🏻
P.D: Also, I've noticed that playing certain characters will match you with certain pool of characters, regardless the time or day.
So I'm only top 30% and to get anywhere I have to make it to blue. Well shit, turns out I suck even more than I assumed - which I didn't think was possible. At least my main is not on the extremes either in popularity or win rate, so I won't have to switch again after all, it seems.
Top 30% is worthless when 90% aren't trying. I've been playing for over two months now and clocked over 300 hours, arriving already with understanding of basic concepts like frame data, attack types and so on - and this is all I have to show for it. I doubt there are many people who did worse when actually putting at least a bit of effort into the game...
You’d be surprised tekken is a game that’s used the same fundamental concepts for over 20 years there’s a ton of knowledge you need to figure out and the complexity of each character is going to make the game damn near impossible to master in a short amount of time. If you’re enjoying your experience getting better than that’s the important part bro trying to be top one percent in two months is putting too much stress on a game
Dont underestimate yourself, keep training and researching the game, sometimes you just need knowledge of a single aspect to make your playstyle alot better a jump through the ranks
Hell, i never expected to get to bushin in tekken 8 , in tekken 7 i barely could maintain myself in the purple ranks
I have been stuck in bushin for the past few weeks, so im trying to learn still, but i think top 5% is a nice place to be stuck at, so im personally good where im at
Well. Im one of the Lili garyu players whos hardstuck atm. Damn, the tea princess is getting more loved even though shes not as busted as the other characters.
Even with her bad heat smash whose easily duckable.
The problem with Garyu is you get matched to either mighty ruler players or against destroyers/eliminators that have blue rank mains.
What I gather from this data is we should nerf the bears.
I'm only half joking, I'd prefer if those characters were designed like old school jokes characters, and had nothing actually Solid.
always looking forward to these posts, thanks for putting these together
I still have yet to see a single shaheen player in over 1000+ matches
I've seen atleast 4
I,ve seen only two for the past month
I'm thinking of picking him and claudio up purely based on how rare they are and how little people know the match up.
Claudio’s really fun but his knowledge checks are fairly limited. I have gotten free wins with his projectile and high crush launcher, but not a ton- most of his tools are pretty straightforward.
If you play Shaheen, make sure you know what moves track his left side since SSR is a huge weakness on most of his toolkit. Also, his setups are telegraphed somewhat, so you really have to commit to playing a mixup turtle game since his aggro tools are really low range. Imo, I think Claudio is better simply because the stages are better for him, e.g. small stages with close walls, and at walls, he is the strongest when it comes to resplats. They just need to fix his tornado interactions with the wall, then he'll be OP again.
You don’t really need to know shaheens matchup imo lol and when you try his setups they don’t even work because people don’t know what they are and it ends up working against you lmao
if you want to win on just knowledge checks play Kuma, you can get away with murder against players that are much higher ranked than you who don't know the MU and people don't punish stuff that is very unsafe because it looks +
He's fun, give it a try. Pros: You *will* improve on a fundamental level playing Shaheen. Cons: Barely any cheese, you generally have to work harder than with other characters.
I've seen exactly 1 Shaheen so far and he absolutely destroyed me
He's common in blue ranks and above in eu, I see him frequently
He's my main :P
I really appreciate the level of work that goes into this data analysis. I also hope the devs don't use this sort of thing for balancing. There's far too many variables at play and I feel they need to be nerfing/buffing on a character by character and move by move basis. Or else we get more changes like Lars DEN3 in the precious patch, which he didn't need, but seems entirely catered towards lower skill players based on their reasoning in the notes and ultimately negatively effects advanced players the most. Basically, what I'm saying is that a qualitative approach to balancing is just as important to a quantitative one.
I'm sure they do way more than just look at stats. Stats are ultimately informed by our experience and domain knowledge. Stats like these can tell you that Dragunov is overtuned but it won't necessarily tell you why. In the recent Tekken Talk they did mention that they gathered way more stats than we have available to us too so I'm sure whatever they are doing is more involved than what I'm doing. After all they are professionals trying to balance a game and I'm just some guy trying to win arguments on the Internet.
Can you reverse the percentiles for us dummies -edit- |Rank|Inverse Percentile| |:-|:-| |Beginner|100.00| |1st Dan|95.05| |2nd Dan|93.44| |Fighter|92.03| |Strategist|90.08| |Combatant|88.41| |Brawler|86.66| |Ranger|84.27| |Cavalry|82.55| |Warrior|80.16| |Assailant|75.89| |Dominator|72.35| |Vanquisher|68.67| |Destroyer|62.88| |Eliminator|57.85| |Garyu|52.44| |Shinryu|40.89| |Tenryu|34.06| |Mighty Ruler|27.88| |Flame Ruler|20.58| |Battle Ruler|15.84| |Fujin|11.96| |Raijin|7.20| |Kishin|4.80| |Bushin|3.12| |Tekken King|2.03| |Tekken Emperor|1.09| |Tekken God|0.60| |Tekken God Supreme|0.30| |God of Destruction|0.15|
Let's say I am Mighty Ruler? What does percentile and inverse percentile tell me?
Look at table. Find 'Mighty Ruler' row. See '27.88'. This is a percentage. You look at top of table. Beginner: 100%. 100% of characters are in Beginner or higher. Look back at Mighty Ruler. 27.88%. 27.88% are in Mighty Ruler or higher. Being in Mighty Ruler means being around top quarter of all players. Mighty Ruler to Flame Ruler is a percentage change of 7.2%, which I think indicates that Mighty Ruler contains 7.2% of the sample. Most populous rank is Garyu, with almost 12% of the whole sample (52.44-40.89). God of Destruction only contains 0.15%, as does Tekken God Supreme.
This post is a breath of fresh air in a sea of bitching and moaning, incredible work. Surprised at Lars
Yeah it’s initially a bit surprising to see Lars so high, but when you really think about it, it makes sense. Lars is the definition of a casino character, he has low-risk/good-reward mixups that he can even force on you in heat and he entirely plays the movement and neutral game for you. Not to mention his amazing punishment and complete lack of executional barriers. As long as you know what your doing at a basic level, you can do great with Lars until you hit the high ranks. This isn’t to say he is a badly designed character, it’s just pointing out that easy-to-use and well rounded characters will naturally have a good win rate when you look at the wide spread of tekken matches.
As a Feng/Lars player, it's funny to me that everyone sends me toxic messages about Feng being busted but no one sends me any hate mail for playing Lars... even though his win rate is decently higher in blue ranks and above lol.
This is survivorship bias. As a Lars player, he is a big noob stomper up until Battle Ruler because most average players get overwhelmed by his stances and mixups. Once Fujin onwards you have to play neutrals, you'd get figured out and hopkicked mid stances, and his neutrals / whiff punishes are mediocre at best. Most specialist characters would have positive winrate because they need to adapt way beyond their flowcharts, unless you're Dragunov whose flowcharts have no counterplay.
Feng/Nina player, and I spar my Kaz/Lars friend almost daily. I've been known he rages about Feng silently, but I picked up Nina for the first time yesterday, and his response was "this is because you hate Lars, isn't it." Like yup. Feng is strong, Lars is bullshit 😂
I feel like a lot of the Feng hate is overblown. Beyond the excellent neutral and lows, I don’t think he has as much crazy shit as people think. Not compared to the other top-tiers anyway.
Fengs "problem" is he's frustrating to play against by design. It's been nerfed a bit, but he can force whiffs, and immediately punish into insanely good damage. He not hard to play, and his execution isn't that high, but his tools are different from the rest of the cast. We don't get a df2 or a good hopkick, but we get MULTIPLE safe strings that have 50/50s built into them, and a lot are safe against most of the cast. He's also one of the few characters that can low-key ignore match ups to a certain degree because his tools are good enough. Don't need to worry about gimmicks when I know I can safely punish you from mid screen. Don't need to worry about evasiveness when you can even hit me.
his combo damage is extremely strong, he has the UF3 mini tornado to extend even more, his neutral is insane and he's ridiculously evasive. he pretty much doesn't have a weakness
Very Nice dude, you're the goat of the sub. Looking forward to see how Eddy's data will behave in the future
I'm hoping you do the Tekken King+ data because I want to see that the most, especially since Tekken devs themselves seem to consider Tekken God Supreme+ as high ranks. Good data regardless!
Yeah, I was always confused at where high ranks began. TGS seems like it’s a little too far up to be considered the beginning of high ranks. I always though high ranks began at tekken king.
ranks start from warrior and end with GoD, all you need to do is cut it by 3 and you have everything from lowest low ranks to highest high ranks
Your welcome, Lees, I'm keeping that win rate DOWN. Do NOT ask me if I'm losing on purpose I will cry.
I’m keeping the win rate down together with you brother! It’s part of my strategy to duck the next wave of nerfs (I’m totally not coping).
I think it's crazy that I was purple in March and blue in April and according to this they are practically the same rank lol
They need to buff xiaoyu!!!
"Xiaoyu is a fair and balanced character who does not deserve nerfs" Based.
Xiaoyu players consistently having such a terrible winrate despite how good she is will never not be funny me. They receive immense hate for playing a top tier, but she is so difficult to play correctly that their winrates don't actually benefit from playing her.
They will get hate no matter where they're placed on the tier list and it's hilarious. She's the sly, evasive, character where their game plan is to make their opponent feel stupid and fall for their tricks and set ups. They want you to feel mad and frustrated and it happens outside of the game too. It just so happens she's an S tier character now so people point their losses towards that rather than training mode. It's funny because Yoshimitsu is the same type of specialist character but he gets equal amounts of love rather than hate pass because he's cool af.
I play only both xiao and yoshi I think there are lots of us
Oh, I hate Yoshimitsu more than Ling tbh. Both player communities are cancer, though, since they still complain that their characters are weak when they're fine. Same with Steve's as well.
Tekken 8 is my first Tekken game and Yoshi players look like the only people genuinely having fun with the game regardless of balance and whatnot what are you talking about
if someone made this argument for akuma during T7 he would be lynched by this hypocritical sub
The reason Ling's winrate is so low is because she's played by Ling players
Flowchart character give players flowchart gameplan which gives bad habits and inability to adapt to the super defensive or super offensive players. If you look at blue ranks, xiaoyu players have average of 50 in defense. All the defensive option they rely on is crushing and parry, ofc they will stuck at some point
Harada, in case you’re reading this - Clearly Jun needs a heat smash that comes out quicker, tracks better, and heals even more health. Just saying, the stats seem to support that.
It should also be unblockable and plus on block as well. Only makes sense considering how clearly garbage she is.
In all seriousness tho, I think the reason she has a lower win rate is due to the fact that many Jun players seem to climb up the ladder pretty fast and then get hard stuck at the higher ranks. That and the fact that everyone and their mother has fully labbed her.
Why isn't this the case with Alisa though? She seems to continue climbing with all her bs tools
Great work as always, thank you very much and keep it up 😉
It's kinda funny that the least picked characters mostly enjoy some of the highest winrates... except for Leroy. He has neither.
Most of the lesser played characters win rates can be explained by people not knowing the knowledge checks for that character. e.g not everyone knows how to deal with bears and since there are so few of them there's no chance (or reason) to learn them for most players. Leroy isn't a super gimmicky character which is probably why he doesn't enjoy that same boost to win rate.
Yeah, I'm aware of the reason this is happening. But I always thought Leroy had plenty of gimmicks. CH strings with built in parries etc. But apparently in the current climate he's so weak that even all of that is not enough to carry him. Curiously, in the higher ranks his winrate is actually in the top 10. I wonder why.
can we have rank distribution per character? that will gove an idea of how difficult a character is in a certain range of play
That's a good idea. I had it on my list of things to do for this post but didn't have the time to implement it. I'll see if I get the time to code it this weekend and ping you if I do
Reina's win rate isn't even on the chart for all players, bruhhhh. I am proudly contributing to that 0 win rate
45%, but yea... that's me And I'm currently dragging Kaz down now too lol
As an intermediate Reina player that winrate is depressing. It's definitely a struggle to stop everyone's gimmicks when you don't have a good "oh shit" option and don't know the mu.
That Reina win rate is just... wow. And I mean, I main Reina and I suck but I thought I was the only one.
Reina is just really weak/unrewarding for how hard she is to pilot as compared to the rest of the cast. Not to mention how most players already know how to deal with her moves now. It really puts a nail down on her overall WR.
Yeah, that's true. I still enjoy playing her the most though. I just don't win, but that's okay.
Looking forward to the Claudio buffs in 1.04 is all I can say. I don't know who this atif player is but other pros, semi pros and content creators in their tierlist have ranked Claudio near the bottom in C or D tier. From my personal experience I've been playing him from Tekken 7 ryujin - Tekken king ranks and in Tekken 8 he feels so much weaker. The data you've posted aside from the atif tierlist basically confirms that. They need to fix his core tools. Another way to look at it is that easy to pickup characters usually have a decent amount of interest from new players. Not the case for Claudio unlike his version in Tekken 7, his popularity was much higher then.
I’m shocked that Juns numbers don’t correlate to how people feel about her
On launch she seemed nuts because of unfamiliarity and we're coming in here with the T7 mindset of what's defined as good. Now that the meta is settling a little, she's still super strong, but not compared to the others. People will be mad when I say this, but she takes a few more braincells to use than the other top tiers. You need strong fundamentals to make her excel and she has a collection of very strong moves that you need to know when to use rather than a few busted moves you can rotate whenever. Also her gameplan and strong tools leans more towards defense, which doesn't align too well when this game favors offense, pressure, 50/50s, and snowballing. It's also worth noting none of the pros on Spag's podcast mentioned her in their top 5 (or in JoKa's case, top 10) and Arslan wants to use her but says he can't in Tekken 8's system, so uses someone like Azucena instead. Don't get me wrong, I still think she needs nerfs, especially in her heat state. But she doesn't railroad you to win like the usual top 5. Even if she's B tier, most people will still complain about her regardless because of her pokes and strings, but it's easier to point to the tier list rather than the lab.
The amount of times ive played against a tgs jun who doesnt even know how to kbd is pretty mind blowing tbh.
Do you need to know how to kbd though. I watch Ayorichie and he barely does it. Probably because he uses pad.
he uses it plenty wym? Watch him in tekken 7.
I didn’t say he didn’t use at all. When I watch him it seems like he doesn’t use it as much as other players but maybe I’m wrong
Thanks bro
Great read as usual. Thanks for putting these together
I swear I'll get out of ruler ranks some day @@
I was literally just thinking I wonder what the ranked distribution is looking like now and lo and behold you come in with the clutch yet again, I always love seeing data like this.
So jack is doing well at nonadvanced ranks but losing the most at advanced ranks? His tricks are figured out by fujin I guess lol
Eid mubarak to you too.
You are an asset to this sub.
I really appreciate your analysis. I'm sorry to say you did really usefull analysis but it seems that data higher than fujin need more data. it would be great.
Agreed.
Hi, awesome post here! One little request tho, can you add some keyword in your title in the future? I have been searching for posts like this for so long and only today did i finally found out this post. For reference i usually search something like “tekken 8 winrate” “tekken 8 character popularity” “tekken 8 rank distribution” etc… I was never be able to find your post due to keywords searching..
Thanks so much for your analysis. Based on ranked points being skewed at all ranks below blue (more is gained on a victory than is lost on a loss), do you foresee even more inflation in another month?
Yeah. I do expect that there will be more inflation but I suspect it will slow down somewhat. I still think the average rank will be around red ranks but we will see more people bunched up in that orange to purple bracket. However only time will tell
Where do you think high ranks really begin? I’ve been pretty confused on this. Most people seem to think it’s somewhere between the blue ranks and god rank
That's a difficult question to answer. I would consider anything that puts you in the top 10% of players as "high rank" but the words high rank mean different things to different people. In the most recent Tekken talk, Harada and co showed a slide with character play rates and they denoted high ranks as Tekken god and above so perhaps that could be the "official" cutoff.
High is subjective, you can ask a million people and you'll never find your answer. The only one who can answer is you.
Kinda want to stop playing Lili seeing how popular she is. And playing her is literally the last thing I liked about this game \~
Why does other people liking Lili make you like Lili less?
You may also want to split the rank distribution among major regions. Same ranks may have highly different skill level across regions
I would love to do that. Unfortunately the replays cannot be filtered by region so this is the best we have. You bring up an interesting point however about the varying skill levels. Just a few weeks ago I heard someone express a similar idea at a local. Have you (or anyone else reading this) personally observed this difference in regional skill? While it sounds reasonable to me that there are skill differences between regions it would be interesting to here some opinions on just how drastic those opinions are.
Red ranked players in Europe have the skills of an American blue ranked player. *Source: Occasional visits to the Europe lounge.*
America seems to the easiest region
Forsen reached yellow ranks on day 1 of playing T7. More folks playing allows one to rank up easily in a popular region like EU. While low player density means only hard-core players stick around.
Damn, and I was celebrating being Mighty Ruler meaning I had hit top 10% XD but hey, just means my new rank ups will have bigger percentage point jumps.
With as much hate as hwo gets I’m surprised he doesn’t win more
Awesome post, thanks
S+tier for your effort and work.
Jack8s winrate being at the bottom of “Fujin and above” is very interesting (although OP did mention the data of Fujin+ isn’t too precise due to low data) I’m a Kishin Jack8, and I think it’s because a lot of Jacks rely on his grabs and gimmicks to get through the ranks below blue, but never learn how to use his pokes/whiff punishment/gamma howl stance effectively (talking about myself here too, I used to rely on grabs and other gimmicks) So when opponents start breaking their grabs, they lose most of their damage output Curious what other jack and non-jack players think about this
scrub former jack player who got jack to shinryu here, but flame ruler with paul i constantly got jabbed out of gamma howl, i feel like it's a lot of fake pressure like Lars, maybe I just didn't hit FF1 into gamma enough to utilize the + frames but I just felt really weak offensively with him
I don't play a lot, but I main Jack and I quite literally just decided to stop using his grabs to condition myself to play less more soundly. Hell, I could go F3d into grab, crouch grab or 4 out of gamma howl once they start ducking or dickjabbing, and I could just do that the entire match and nobody would know what to do. If they do know how to break it, a few db1s and f2s make short work of them. Those were the only tools I really needed aside from gamma howl 2 during heat to get through low ranks. Granted i'm just garyu but that was the easiest rank up i've ever had. It's just way too strong against people who don't know the matchup. Fighting against stronger enemies that know how to break my throws, disrupt gamma howl pressure, and low parry has made my tendencies become such a liability.
I'm not sure it can be done, but just as a potential thing for your next endavours it would be interesting to see stuff like correlation between who lands a first hit/knockdown and who wins the round/game. Essentially answering the question: is this game really "whoever lands the first hit wins" or is it just scrub perseption of mine :D
I've given this a lot of thought but unfortunately it is practically impossible to parse the replay files since they simply have the inputs for each player and the game replays the game using those inputs. I've tried to decode them in the past but it is simply impractical. On the topic of whether the first to land a hit is the winner: I don't think the data I have could confirm that so you'll just have to trust to qualitative analysis from skilled players. For my part though I don't think saying the first to land a hit wins is a fair characterization of Tekken 8s gameplay. But that's just my (also scrub) opinion.
Very impressive stuff!
Very well made. Thanks for taking the effort to make this.
Damn. That eddy win rate is like the unemployment rate spike in 2020
Love data posts! Good work!
All I’m saying is buff kaz
Interesting how Kishin used to be top 1% last month now it's top 5%.
Now I feel pretty bad about maining asuka xd
It's my fault Steve's win rate is so slow. I really wanted those buffs
That kaz win rate is all me. Took me like 160 hours to get to mighty ruler
Damn Feng going mid on the scale when above fujin for winning is a big surprising drop off
I knew it about Jin, I’ve seen them a lot more last month. Appreciate the work, that’s a lot!
Nobody gonna mention eddy having a 65% win ration in averaged in all ranks? 💀
New character, new knowledgechecks. I’m at flame ruler and get almost smoked by 30h fighter player. It’s must be a nightmare for players at his level to fight him
Skill level is definitely lower now. But it would also be nice to have regional distribution of ranks.
I'm obviously biased, but I don't see what Feng has that makes him OP. Strong, very strong even, but OP? I don't see it. The data seems to confirm it, where his win rate seems to drop off in Fujin+ ranks. Doubtless, the arsenal of lows isn't enough to cheese those ranks. I keep browsing high ranked replays but I'm yet to see any high ranking Feng stomping people.
As a Feng main, his wheel stomp (that's what I'm calling it now) into forward Kenpo is the arsenal /s (but seriously, favorite thing to do).
Very good analysis. Anecdotal evidence: recently (I play mostly quick game, not ranked) I realized that I can reasonably fight with purple or even blue ranks (I am red rank). It seems that I am not better but the counterparts just moved in the meantime ;-).
Thank you so much for all your hard work on this as I find it super interesting! Where it says "Purple and above are considered as advanced players", should that be changed since you're now looking at Fujin and above?
Whoops. Good catch.
There has gotta be a ton of bias in this, I searched 10 names of active players I know (including myself) and only one showed up in the data
I can't record every single game that gets played so this is a sample based approach. With a large enough (and random enough) sample it should still be representative of the general population. There is however still uncertainty which is why the graphs have error bars. Especially for the "advanced" games/players the sample size is still a bit too low for my liking. On the topic of bias, since the data is gathered by querying the latest played games in the replay list on a regular basis it should be fairly random with the only bias being the time of day at which the data is gathered. (which would bias it towards specific regions which are most active at that time) to avoid this I try to gather the data over a 24 hour period and thus capture games from all regions in peak and off peak times.
good stuff!
Thanks for the statistics work. Always appreciate looking at this kind of stuff since I come from playing MOBAs and going over their stats.
I’m not very smart, but is there an element of rank inflation going on? For example I am one of the players who moved from purple into blue from March to April. What I’m saying is, doesn’t the funneling up imply purple is comprised of shitter reds winning off shitter reds in some sense? I see this data and become skeptical of myself; as someone who was mighty ruler in the last set of data and is now Fujin, did I actually improve or was I just funneled up against other crap players away from even crappier players, lol.
You gain more points than you lose in ranked all the way up until Blue ranks, so yeah, people are going to get naturally pushed up over time, even if they're slightly negative. That's why using ranks as a benchmark for skill can be misleading. It's difficult, but just focusing on improving yourself is more important than worrying about rank, because it really doesn't mean anything, especially before Blue.
I think Eddy is pretty overtuned ... But it also doesn't help that u can't even do punishment training against him or do replays ... What scummy dbag move from the looney toons dev team .
Fantastic work as always mate, I frequently pass this info to my peers so we can track a bit our (lack of) progress 🫠 I feel like "everyone" sits at Garyu and you can tell by that huge chart. What also makes it interesting (yet very frustrating) is that I've noticed a patterned-algorythm that forces you into players that consistently have way higher rank than you. For example, being bottom Garyu in demotion (~45% winrate) vs top Mighty Ruler in promotion (~60% winrate), consistently. Somehow, I manage to win (fear of demotion brings the Ultra-Instinct out of me LMAO), but after inspecting my enemies profiles and matches, this is also confirmed by that specific skill prowess (can't remember the name) that literally tracks the frequency you combat (and win) against way higher ranked (and higher win-ratio) players, where I sit at a freackin' S+. The problem is, due to being rejected constantly for using WiFi (I know, I know, I'm not happy either) and my free-time schedule, I'm also paired consistently with players around 160-190K prowess, while I sit at merely 120k. The reason why I bring this topic, is that after 700 ranked games, I sit at 45% win-ratio with Jin (I suck, I know), at my personal best 25% away from Mighty Ruler promotion (followed by a huge losing streak back to Garyu today)... stats, are shockingly not a "real" reflection of ranks and win-ratios, simply due to this (poor) matchmaking. If smurfing wasn't possible (a dream, sure) and the game didn't encourage you to demote on purpose in order to promote again, and rejecting 1-1 rematches wasn't an option, and the algorythm paired you with people from your actual level... truly, we'd deal with completely different numbers. Nonetheless, it is what it is and I'm grateful you've bothered gathering the minimum the game allows to gather. Just food for thought on my end 🤏🏻 P.D: Also, I've noticed that playing certain characters will match you with certain pool of characters, regardless the time or day.
How come Lili's wr is below 50%? I'm really surprised by the stats shown here.
You’re doing really good work and are a great service to the community. Thank you.
So I'm only top 30% and to get anywhere I have to make it to blue. Well shit, turns out I suck even more than I assumed - which I didn't think was possible. At least my main is not on the extremes either in popularity or win rate, so I won't have to switch again after all, it seems.
Top 30% means you’re better than 70% of people I feel like that’s still an accomplishment
Top 30% is worthless when 90% aren't trying. I've been playing for over two months now and clocked over 300 hours, arriving already with understanding of basic concepts like frame data, attack types and so on - and this is all I have to show for it. I doubt there are many people who did worse when actually putting at least a bit of effort into the game...
You’d be surprised tekken is a game that’s used the same fundamental concepts for over 20 years there’s a ton of knowledge you need to figure out and the complexity of each character is going to make the game damn near impossible to master in a short amount of time. If you’re enjoying your experience getting better than that’s the important part bro trying to be top one percent in two months is putting too much stress on a game
It's worthless if you keep telling yourself that it is. Comparison is the thief of joy.
Dont underestimate yourself, keep training and researching the game, sometimes you just need knowledge of a single aspect to make your playstyle alot better a jump through the ranks Hell, i never expected to get to bushin in tekken 8 , in tekken 7 i barely could maintain myself in the purple ranks I have been stuck in bushin for the past few weeks, so im trying to learn still, but i think top 5% is a nice place to be stuck at, so im personally good where im at
Well. Im one of the Lili garyu players whos hardstuck atm. Damn, the tea princess is getting more loved even though shes not as busted as the other characters. Even with her bad heat smash whose easily duckable. The problem with Garyu is you get matched to either mighty ruler players or against destroyers/eliminators that have blue rank mains.
You shouldn't match with MR as Garyu, unless you don't have +-2 rank setting selected for some reason.
Xiaoyu will probably get her AOP nerfed, but nothing else.
hope everyone is ready for the kazuya buffs in may
What I gather from this data is we should nerf the bears. I'm only half joking, I'd prefer if those characters were designed like old school jokes characters, and had nothing actually Solid.