SRK Ranking reveals how Street Fighter V's character tiers evolved in 2016
SRK Ranking has crunched the Street Fighter V numbers and revealed the best and worst characters in the game based on tournament results.
At the top? Cammy, while Juri is considered the worst.
Improved the character ranking evolution graph, source data athttps://t.co/fFLKflkykC
Displays relative rank over 3 month periodes. pic.twitter.com/j5ll1zHxjC
— SRK FGC stats ✊ (@SRKRanking) November 18, 2016
It might not come as a surprise to anyone that Cammy, Ryu, Chun-Li, Necalli, and Ken are the top five characters (in that order.) However, at the beginning of the year, Cammy was in the middle of the pack of the original 16-character roster.
The data was collected through 237 tournaments registered on Shoryuken.com, which includes all of the Capcom Pro Tour events, other majors, and popular locals. Players were then assigned a score based on the classification of the tournaments.
SRK tracked the characters’ movement over three-month periods and for the most part, the top 8 characters remained mostly the same, with the exception of M. Bison who went in a free fall from eighth to sixteenth.
“A clear trend is that Street Fighter V has a top 8 that distances it from the rest,” SRK Rankings told Yahoo Esports. “This is true for the whole evolution, except for M. Bison who started off in top 8 but was replaced by R. Mika. Nash started off very strong thanks to Seon-woo “Infiltration” Lee winning majors but dropped now that he is playing other characters.”
SRK Ranking believes Cammy’s reversal on the chart is due to players like Zhuong “Xiao Hai” Zeng and Evil Geniuses’ Kenneth “K-Brad” Bradley blooming late with the character.
Other notable entries on the chart include Karin dropping from fifth to eighth, Nash dropping from first to seventh, Rashid moving up from 16th to 12th, and Guile shooting up from 18th to ninth overall.
Guile’s success can largely be attributed to Team Liquid’s Du “NuckleDu” Dang, Christopher “NYChrisG” Gonzalez, and Sean “ImStillDaDaddy” Dench. All three players have had varying degrees of success, but NuckleDu has done exceptionally well in recent months, winning multiple CPT Ranking Events as well as Premier Events Canada Cup and Red Bull Battle Grounds.
“Note the results depend on players using the character. The more popular a character is, the higher the total scores will be and thus the ranking,” SRK Ranking said. “But, as in the CPT, big points are only earned by winning so being popular is not enough.”
It will be interesting to see how the rankings might change as DLC characters become more tournament friendly and more characters are added in Season 2. We already know Akuma is on the way and he could definitely shake things up for the beginning of the CPT in 2017.
Michael Martin covers Street Fighter V and the Capcom Pro Tour. Follow him on Twitter @Bizarro_Mike.