Why do fighting game character tiers exist?

This shit has had me cracking up. The ignorance is in heaps here.

@FluxWaveZ said:

@MikkaQ said:

If you scale down to a fighting game which is a more intimate experience, the closer you get to a perfect balance, the more boring the fight is going to be. The characters would all be the same if the balance was perfect or even anywhere near perfect.

Then do fighting games "deserve" to be taken seriously at a professional level? They're so popular in the tournament scene, and people oftentimes refer to these games when they speak of "E-sports", but aren't sports designed so that everything is fair? If fighting games can't be fair, then they'll never reach the popularity and renown of a Starcraft II, right?

Why is deserve in quotes? Fighting games have been played competitively since the release of SF2WW in 1991. Tournament players do not care if only a handful of the cast is viable. MVC2 was not balanced but it was played in tournaments for over 10 years. Super Turbo is not balanced but it has been used in tournaments for even longer.

You mentioned the electronic sports term but the fighting game community (FGC) rejects that term. Ultradavid wrote a long article about the differences between esports and FGC cultures (http://shoryuken.com/2011/12/12/guest-editorial-momentum-matters-a-historical-perspective-on-the-fgc-and-esports-communities-2/). One of the founders of shoryuken.com also wrote an article about what is wrong with eSports (http://shoryuken.com/2011/12/04/where-esports-leagues-go-wrong-with-fighters/) Jared Rea mocked the term by calling it digiSports on a recent Live On Three episode. Arturo Sanchez constantly makes eSports jokes on twitter and when he commentates Spooky streams. The FGC has been growing exponentially since 2009 and they have been doing it on their own terms.

Because everyone is not a grey blob.

Fighting games have dozens of matchups. Every character in Arcade Edition has 38 matchups. For every unbalanced matchup a character may have, someone else may dominate them. Generally the characters with the fewest bad matchups work their way to the top, and in some cases certain characters have so many matchups in their favor that counter-picking isn't a very practical strategy. Also Japanese tournaments usually force a player to use the same character throughout, so counter-picking isn't even an option.

It's not like an RTS, where each faction is built so that if they read their opponent's strategy, they can prepare and counter it. In Super SFIV, a character like Cody, who has limited options to get out of pressure, is always going to be in trouble against aggressive characters like Yun. It's not like he can change his build order. I know how quickly an RTS can fall apart trying to balance out all the strategies and units against each other, but I think a fighting game character is generally more rigid than an entire RTS faction.