What are Tier Lists
In games, not everything is created equal. Some characters dominate tournaments, while others struggle to secure a single win. Some weapons and items become the meta, while others gather dust in the inventory. Some factions conquer the map, while others cower in the corner, desperate to survive. Naturally, when planning out their victory, players look for information on what is worth picking, and what is best avoided. A common way to present this is with a tier list, separating everything out into multiple brackets of similar effectiveness.
Why Community Voting?
Traditional tier lists come from a single player’s opinion, and can soon become outdated. But metas shift, strategies evolve, and communities develop new insights. TierVS harnesses collective wisdom through community voting, creating tier lists that reflect real player experience across skill levels, and can remain up to date with every patch.
How Voting Works
Instead of demanding you rate everything all at once, we show you two options at a time and ask: Which is stronger?
Your vote updates both rankings using a system borrowed from competitive games themselves. Elo ratings. When a lower-ranked option beats a higher-ranked one, it gains more points (and vice versa). Over thousands of votes from the community, the strongest options naturally rise to the top. And whenever the meta shifts, and the voting shifts, so do the rankings.
Smart Matchmaking
Just like in competitive games, we match similarly-ranked options against each other. You will rarely see a top-tier character facing a bottom-tier one. Those matchups are obvious and don’t provide useful information. Instead, you’ll vote on close calls where your opinion matters most, refining the ratings by focusing on competitive matchups.
Understanding the Numbers
Each option has a numerical rating that goes up when it wins and down when it loses. But what do these numbers actually mean?
A 200-point difference translates to roughly a 3:1 advantage. The higher-rated option is expected to win about 75% of the time. A 400-point difference means closer to 10:1 odds, or about 90% win probability.
When you vote for the underdog in a mismatched pairing, they gain more points than they would from beating a similarly-ranked opponent. When favorites lose to underdogs, they drop harder. This creates a self-correcting system where rankings stabilize around their “true” strength.
More votes mean more stability. Options with few votes see bigger rating swings, helping them quickly find their place in the rankings. As an option accumulates more votes, each individual vote has less impact. This prevents wildly popular matchups from experiencing dramatic swings based on temporary voting trends, while still allowing genuine meta shifts to gradually adjust the rankings.
Over time, a 100-point gap might represent the difference between a solid meta pick and a niche counter-pick, while a 400-point gap separates top tier from clearly outclassed.
Of course, each game, and each community, will have different standards for what counts as overpowered and what counts as useless. Highly competitive games may consider a small edge in performance and a 55% win rate to be massively overpowered. Other games can see the top characters or items be dozens or even hundreds of times more powerful than the weakest options. TierVS measures which option is stronger in each matchup, but not necessarily how much stronger.