If you’ve been friends with me for the last four months, you’ll know that I’ve spent a ton of time learning data analysis. Why, you ask? I just felt like it – and if you know anything about me, I tend to fixate on random obsessions before moving onto (or being distracted by) something else. Avid readers of this column may realize that as of lately, I’ve used this column as an excuse to run basic charts on different Smash topics I’m interested in, as well as present information I’ve already compiled.
Now, on a Melee-specific note, one thing I’ve been lately thinking about is the concept of dual-maining – or more specifically, the character counterpick war. But save for a few exceptions, it really feels like the vast majority of Melee today is played between solo mains. In fact, I was pretty sure that the prevalence of people with multiple characters ready for tournament, broadly speaking, was an artifact of the past.
For today’s column, I initially decided to take a look at every official Top 100 ranking period since 2013 (excluding 2021 due to the lack of a finalized list). My guess was that from 2013 to now, Melee’s Top 100 has seen a significant decrease in what you could broadly describe as “multi-maining”, and a significant increase in solo maining. However, upon reaching my answer, I learned quite a bit more about the state of playing multiple characters. If you’re looking for a final takeaway or connecting thread, I don’t really have one. I just thought it’d be fun to look at.
Is Playing Multiple Characters on the Decline?
The first step was importing each of the Top 100 lists from SSBwiki into a spreadsheet. After this process, I then cross-referenced each player for their respective year with their officially listed characters. Keep in mind: there’s a few eye-brow raising discrepancies between the official record and what I remember – Armada, for instance, is listed as a solo Peach player for 2013 and 2014, despite the Young Link being a notable part of his arsenal. However, since we’re looking at each year’s entire Top 100, the false categorizations that exist are fairly minimal.
Regardless; for the question I wanted to answer, I made sure that everyone with multiple characters listed were broadly categorized as “multi-mains”, while people with only one character were listed as “solo-mains”. You could probably nitpick the specific terms – if I were more precise, I would make a difference between having a secondary to complement your main and actually playing two characters in equal capacity. But, for now, this is what I decided to work with: “multi-mains” and “solo-mains.”
After that, I grouped each SSBMRank or MPGR year by the type of character main they were – solo-main or multi-main. I put the total count for both on a line plot, measuring the total prevalence of both on the Top 100 from 2013 to the end of last year.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been as confident as I was that playing multiple characters was dead. Although you can definitely notice a discrete uptick in it around 2015 to 2018, it’s stayed pretty steady since. If anything, last year actually gave us the most “multi-mains” at the top level than we’ve seen in the previous two ranking periods. More or less, we’re not that far from where we started, at least in terms of playing multiple characters or just one. But as an extra step, I ran regression lines through both to see the cumulative change over the last ten years.
Given the information we have, it seems safe to say that it isn’t quite true that playing multiple characters has totally gone out of fashion. If anything, the actual number has gone up from 2013 to now, although not significantly enough to definitively prove the opposite.
Are Solo Mains Currently Outperforming Multi Mains in the Top 100?
I examined my data a little more in depth to see how multi mains and solo mains compared against each other by the results. Following my classification of each player (not adjusting for repeat instances), I counted the instances of “solo-mains” and “multi-mains” for the entire 2013 to 2023 period for SSBMRank. I ended up with 678 solo-mains and 222 “multi-mains”.
When it comes to this dataset, I’m of a few minds. First of all, there’s more than three times as many solo mains within the Top 100 than there are multi mains, which should already be telling. However, when it comes to how they perform against each other within this dataset, the multi mains technically have the edge in terms of average rank placements (44.86 vs. 52.35) on the list, as well as in median placements (46 and 52).
I then examined how the two performed on a year by year basis against each other. Now, here’s where it gets interesting: by the data we have, 2022 was the first year in which solo mains within the Top 100 outperformed “multi-mains” in terms of average rank – not just total representation on the list.
Now, keep in mind that this obviously doesn’t mean that solo mains are better or that even multi mains are better. I merely thought these trends were interesting to note. As a matter of fact, this probably played a large role in my false belief that playing multiple characters had become a relic of the past. I may have incorrectly thought that because of a greater prevalence of solo mains at a higher level.
However, on a semi-related note, I wondered about recurrent players within the Top 100 who have been on both ends of the spectrum of playing one character or multiple. Purely from looking at players who have made the Top 100 and remained there – not accounting for players who made the Top 100 only once or twice – how does the act of switching from one character to multiple characters (or vice versa) typically impact a player’s rank? I assumed there would be very little difference.
Do Solo Mains Who Switch to Playing Multiple Characters Typically Do Better?
To determine this, I subset my data of players to include only people who have been ranked on the Top 100 under both categories of main types. Following that, I filtered my data even more to take note of the typical changes in rank from solo mains to multi mains and vice versa.
On average, the type of change from one to another – ASSUMING that the player in question remains in the Top 100 – was fairly small, but positive in both instances. In other words, once you’re in the Top 100, assuming you’re able to remain at this level of play, making the switch in either direction typically leads to a marginal improvement in placement on the list. That is, however, a fairly big assumption, which makes this point a bit self-selecting. I don’t have enough evidence either way to reject or confirm my assumption.
Miscellaneous Considerations & Notes
- Are there better “catch all” ways to measure performance of players who have made Top 100, switched “main styles” in either direction, and then suffered a significant dropoff or improvement in their performances?
- How do repeat appearances factor into this? Instead of treating each player’s appearance on the list as an individual data point, what about measuring switches across only the players who have ever made the Top 100?
- Would my conclusions be different if I ran them for different ranges of the Top 100? For example the Top 50 or 25 or 10?
- What are the different ways to subset “people who play multiple characters” in more accurate terminology for multiple groups? How would my findings change?