Originally posted by TheLordofMurder
@Digi
I respect your opinion and I guess we agree to disagree as I see nothing wrong with making (for example):
Low Herald: Lowest is Nova (Frankie Raye), Greatest is Jack of Hearts (remember this is all an example)...
Mid Herald: Lowest is Adam Warlock, Greatest is Waverider...
High Herald: Lowest is Quasar, Greatest is either Surfer or Thor...
Low Trans: Lowest is The Collector, Greatest is Mangog...
Mid Trans: Lowest is Blackheart, Greatest is The Runner...
High Trans: Lowest is H/P Doomsday, Greatest is The Grandmaster...
Skyfather Low: Lowest is Thanos, Greatest is Seth (bare with me zopzop!)...
Skyfather Mid: Lowest is Nightmare, Greatest is The Serpent...
Skyfather High: Lowest is Vishnu (from Thor 300), Greatest is Odin...
From there you just fill in the blanks inbetween; yes, it wont be perfect...nothing ever is...but I simply fail to see how the above would complicate things.
It would definitely (hopefully) lead to some good debate!
Maybe complicate isn't the right word. It would be no better than what we have now, imo, and worse in at least one way.
But the complicated part is twofold. When those on the forums who have been using one set of criteria for years suddenly shift to another, there's your complication. Setting actual characters as the upper and lower limits instead of power levels...there's your complication, for reasons stated above. That's also why it would be worse...because defining things by characters is proven to be problematic long-term, and we rightly identified the problem with Tony before it was too bad.
And getting anyone to agree on anything, there's perhaps the biggest complication. Because if this were considered, it would be piggybacked with half a dozen other ideas for wholesale retcons of the tiers, and about 100 different opinions on where to draw the lines. Because I know those characters you picked are just examples. But I see at least half a dozen that would be voted down, either because some think them more/less powerful, or because they jump around in power levels too much (like Warlock, for one, who once upon a time was high herald, not a candidate to be the low end of mid, which kind of makes my point). But I couldn't name you better options, because they would be just as problematic.
I always used to tell people, if they didn't like the tiers, make their own and use that. No one's stopping you, and everyone knows the tiers aren't perfect.
And to be clear, this system would be fine. You've clearly put thought into it. We could refine it, and turn it into a working tier system. But it would be every bit as random as our current one. Your attempts to disambiguate would do very little, if anything, to fix that. The edges of tiers will always be fuzzy. It's a shared vocabulary. Very little else.
That's my take. As you said, agree to disagree. But I was in charge of the tiers thread for years, and it was MUCH more active and changing during that period, so I'd like to think I'm aware of some of the problems you'd encounter.