Misused: Tier-Induced Scrappy - TV Tropes Forum (2024)

Reposted from the queue:

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TL;DR, there deserves to be a separation of the subjective Scrappy element and the objective gameplay element. As for my post from the main thread:

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Should we perhaps repair Tier-Induced Scrappy? I've read through a lot of the entries, and the thing about it is as the trope's defined:

1. Two variations of The Scrappy specific to Video Games and/or Tabletop Games.
2. The first, often seen in fighting games, concerns the best characters getting hated not out of a hatedom but for being overused and/or downright difficult to defeat due to their high power, gameplay-wise; understandably, those two points get on a lot of people's nerves and tend to be favored by other people. Characters who are Difficult, but Awesome tend to avoid this fate because they are hard to play well, but disproportionately powerful examples can still earn this status. A typical Tier Induced Scrappy is a high tier character with next to no learning curve, though high learning curve characters who are unreasonably difficult to beat when played by a master (especially if they also happen to be extremely frustrating to play against and/or boring to watch) can and will earn this status. Stone Wall and Gradual Grinder characters are the most common candidates for this trope (especially heavy zoners), though touch-of-death rushdown characters (particularly ones with good approach options) also tend to earn the playerbase's hatred. Characters with massive weaknesses who are strong in spite of those weaknesses are also common targets just based off of principle; people hate Fake Balance, and these characters are often powerful when they shouldn't be. See also Too Qualified to Apply. In other genres than fighting games, such as MOBA or Hero Shooter, these high-tiers can also be hated for being extremely difficult to deal with (if you're the enemy) or making the game centered around them and them alone (thus making you feel pointless if they're on your team). And for single-player games, they can be hated for being so powerful that they remove all challenge from the game.
3. The other, more common to RP Gs, is a character who is widely hated because they just suck in gameplay terms. They might be the nicest person in the world, but if they're The Load in combat or gameplay, their fate is decided. A Low Tier Induced Scrappy has no Magikarp Power; they're bad from the start and they never get to a point where they become worth the trouble or able to hold their own, no matter how much you invest into them, especially when there's other, more rewarding characters on hand. In fighting games and MOB As, they are frequently Skill Gate Characters who are easy to pick up and do well with and are dominant in lower-level play, but do exceptionally poorly in higher-level play; the Scrappy part often comes from bad players who insist on using them with the same suboptimal strategies and builds and refuse to get better, get destroyed by competent players, and proceed to ragequit, lagswitch (if possible), abuse report functions, send abusive private messages, rage on message boards demanding nerfs, and generally act like incorrigible Scrubs.

The thing with the nature of a Scrappy is that it's by and large disliked for their gameplay performance, with that hate either coming from a place of it making much of the casual gameplay or competitive scene of a game unfun, or their individual characters being unimportant or uninteresting enough to save them from this fate if the game's mechanics are flexible as such. That in itself is quite big, but the fact of the matter is that it's still a Scrappy - there'll always characters who will complain about how a character is useless, but gameplay in other genres won't be nearly as much of a deterrent for a character's fandom.

An example of this are several bad units in Fire Emblem: Roy, Lyndis, Nino, Amelia, Ewan, Marisa, Rolf and Mia are all bad units, but all of the characters I've mentioned are Breakout Characters or Ensemble Darkhorses at best or respected for being a likable/good character at the absolute worst (Rolf), to say nothing that due to how Fire Emblem is designed with Random Number God in mind for level ups and the various RNG-proof means of beefing up a unit, anyone can perform well and kick ass, which is really where the distinction comes in and why all of the units I've mentioned are protected if they have strong unit feel, are likable characters, cute, well-written, or some combination of the totality.

Another example would be some of Pokemon's examples of Mons that are terrible in competitive but are still well-loved - Furret and Mightyena are perfect examples, as they both scored extremely high on popularity polls despite being absolutely terrible for competitive, often because of how Pokemon is designed that (usually) helps poor performance be offset by an appealing appearance or general look.

In short, none of the examples I've listed are even hated for gameplay performance.

And yet, it's listed as such regardless:

1. While Lyn is a popular character for various reasons, gameplay is not one of them. Her focus on high Speed becomes rather pointless when Blazing Blade has a very slow enemy roster and the vast majority of the cast can double anything aside from bosses on promotion, and between lackluster Strength and swordlock, her attacking power when not using her Mani Katti is even worse than Eliwood's. Her durability is also notoriously garbage for a melee unit with no ranged options or other utility, with a pitiful 2 Defense at base level and a 20% growth meaning that she can get two-shotted by the vast majority of enemy types, and while she has a theoretically good dodge rate, it's cancelled out by the massive number of lance-wielding enemies with weapon triangle. Though she can rejoin Eliwood at a decent level if one funnels a lot of Lyn Mode's experience into her, this means XP that isn't going to Sain, Kent, and Florina, who are all much better recipients of it—and if you skip Lyn Mode, then she joins at level 4 with stats that are downright awful. Her promotion into Blade Lord does at least patch her durability problems somewhat, but it only gives her bow access (meaning she still can't counter at both ranges), and worse, it involves delaying Eliwood's much better promotion for several chapters. And on top of all that, the Sol Katti, her Sword of Plot Advancement, is considered the worst final weapon in the franchise—it weighs more than a Silver Axe despite being locked to a unit with poor Constitution, its Might is lower than a Silver Sword, it only deals effective damage to one enemy (the final boss), and even a Strength-capped Lyn takes fifteen hits to kill said boss while said boss is very likely to kill her in one. Lyn is held in such low regard that it's downright common for players doing speedruns or ranked runs to simply not train her at all, in favor of stuffing her in a corner on the maps where she's force-deployed.
2. Despite being an Ensemble Dark Horse and popular enough to have been introduced to Fire Emblem Heroes well before almost every other FE 8 unit, Amelia's actual performance in her home game leaves a lot to be desired. She joins earlier than Ewan, and has poor stats, poor movement, and is initially locked into 1 Range thanks to her Weapon Rank. She also has the choice between Cavalier (in a game where you have a lot of viable mounted units) and Armor Knight (which is generally awful). The question of which is worse between her and Ewan tends to vary, but the usual answer is that neither one is good unless you feed them an entire floor of the Tower of Valni (which would put any unit ahead of the curve).
3. Poor Mightyena. Another Dark-type Ensemble Dark Horse with a much-loved design like Umbreon, it has a decent Attack stat...and absolutely terrible everything else. All of its other stats are below average to pathetic, and it doesn't have the move pool to make up for its complete lack of functionality, really only having access to Sucker Punch when Knock Off, a much better Dark-type STAB move, exists. Its Hidden Ability Moxie could let Mightyena act as a sweeper in theory, but in practice, its abysmal stats aside from Attack don't do enough favors to help it. Mightyena is so bad that it got booted to Untiered as soon as the format was created in Generation V, and its job got done far better by other, better (but still mediocre) Pokémon like Alolan Raticate and Absol. To add insult to injury, in Generation VIII, its fellow Com Mon, Zigzagoon, got a Regional Variant and evolution that, while not perfect, is considered leagues better than Mightyena, meaning its long stay in Untiered is set to continue with no end in sight.

Keep in mind these examples don't even focus on why they're a Scrappy, just that they're bad as a unit/gameplay wise. The fact it doesn't focus on Scrappy-dom and reads more like a tier explanation guide honestly is a major part of the problem, especially when Smash Bros.'s entry does this with aplomb, giving actual evidence why they're disliked: both because they ruin the fun of the gameplay, or their innate appeal as characters are irrelevant to the genre they're in (fighting games):

1. Bayonetta. Hold on tight, because This Is Gonna Suck.
2. Her Smash 4 appearance is the most hated fighter across all of Smash. She and Cloud helped create a "pay to win" stigma upon DLC characters, with Cloud starting the trend and Bayonetta codifying it. Her damage output per combo and punish were regarded as the best in the game by miles. She could tack on massive amounts of damage per punish, even creating conditional "touches of death" for a single mistake on the opponent's part. And with a combination of range and priority, Bayonetta could catch mistakes easily. Her recovery is nigh-untouchable, and challenging it even allowed Bayonetta to edgeguard or combo back in return. Witch Time is the best "Counter-Attack" in the game, able to slow down opponents for a free smash attack, stifling a recovery, or an easy edgeguard. She also has the best dodges in the game thanks to Bat Within which allows Bayonetta to take zero knockback and only half-damage. While her weaknesses are enough to allow punishes, they're nothing compared to her benefits, stirring up a massive controversy as to whether or not Bayonetta should even be legal. Update 1.1.6 was dedicated to mostly nerfing just Bayonetta. But even with these nerfs, Bayonetta's punish game remained intact. The Bayonetta hatred reared its ugly head during the grand finals of EVO 2018, where a Bayonetta ditto between Captain Zack and Lima led to much of the audience walking out, with Captain Zack even saying he received death threats and was accused of "ruining the game".

And even then, many of the examples listed are Right For The Wrong Reasons, as they focus more on gameplay than actual hatred.

In short, I strongly recommend that Tier-Induced Scrappy gets a clean-up for all of the reasons listed. Not even because the trope itself is bad, but has gone beyond it's definition of Scrappy-dom and went more into "bottom-tier character and top-tier character" rather than actually focused on their performance having a significant and/or notable malus to their popularity as a general character.

Edited by CalamityRaven26 on Jan 25th 2022 at 10:35:59 AM

~Calamity Raven 26, we're going to need a wick check to prove that it's misused, so declining.

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