Tier list glossary

The vocabulary used around tier lists, from tiers and placements to brackets, power rankings and alignment charts.

Most of these terms came out of competitive gaming and spread outward with the format. A few - bracket, power ranking, alignment chart - are not tier lists at all, and knowing the difference is usually what decides which one you should be making.

Tier: A tier is a single labelled row on a tier list, holding every item judged to be of roughly equal quality.; Items within a tier are deliberately unordered. That is the core of the format: you decide which band something belongs in and stop there, rather than arguing about whether it is seventh or eighth.
S+ tieralso SS tier, EX tier: S+ tier is an optional rank placed above S, used when a single top tier is not enough to separate the very best entries from the merely excellent.; SS and EX serve the same purpose and come from the same source - Japanese games that escalated beyond S for exceptional performance. None of the three is part of the standard scale; they are added when S has become crowded.
Tier list template: A tier list template is a reusable starting point that already contains the tier rows and a set of items to sort, so the ranking can begin without building the list first.; Templates are what make a tier list shareable as an activity rather than just an image - two people can rank the same template and compare placements directly.
Ranking chartalso Tier chart, Tier ranking chart: A ranking chart is another name for a tier list - a grid of labelled rows with items sorted into them from best to worst.; The terms are used interchangeably in practice. Ranking chart tends to appear in more general contexts, while tier list carries the gaming origin with it.
Bracket: A bracket is a ranking format that settles an order through rounds of head-to-head matchups rather than by placing items directly into tiers.; Brackets produce a single winner and a strict path to it; tier lists produce bands with no winner. A bracket is better when you want one answer, a tier list when you want a map of everything.
Power ranking: A power ranking is an ordered list of competitors from strongest to weakest, usually published regularly and revised as form changes.; Power rankings are strictly ordered where tier lists are banded, and they are explicitly time-bound. Sports media use them weekly for exactly that reason.
Meta: The meta is the set of strategies, characters or choices currently considered strongest in a competitive game, and it is what most gaming tier lists are actually ranking.; Because the meta shifts with each balance patch, a tier list built on it has a shelf life. This is why undated gaming tier lists are so often misleading.
Placement: A placement is the act of putting one item into one tier, and the smallest decision a tier list is made of.; Most of the value in a tier list comes from the handful of placements that were difficult. The obvious ones carry no information.
Tier list makeralso Tier maker, Tier list creator, Tier list generator: A tier list maker is a tool for building a tier list, letting you add items, drag them into labelled tiers and export the result.; Tier maker is the shorter and increasingly common name for the same thing. There is no functional distinction between the terms.
Alignment chart: An alignment chart is a two-axis grid used to place items along two independent scales at once, rather than the single quality axis a tier list uses.; It is the closest relative of the tier list and often confused with it. Use an alignment chart when one dimension cannot capture the comparison - a tier list cannot express that something is both excellent and irritating.
Community ranking: A community ranking is a tier list built from the aggregated placements of many people rather than one person's opinion.; Aggregation smooths out individual bias and tends to produce a wider spread across the middle tiers, since strong opinions on either extreme cancel out.
S tier (as slang): Outside tier lists, calling something S tier is informal praise meaning it is among the very best of its kind.; The phrase escaped gaming vocabulary in the late 2010s and is now used conversationally by people who have never made a tier list, which is a reasonable measure of how far the format spread.

What is a tier list?What S, A, B, C, D and F mean Open the tier maker