Before anything else, I want to be clear about what this post is: it’s a summary of the core arguments from the OP, not an invitation to quote every single point and argue it individually. If that’s your plan, don’t bother. This is my final response, and after this I think we’re ready for a vote count.
The Core Issue
This thread exists because of a problem I kept running into while working on Marvel CRTs: the scaling is a mess. What we currently have is an attempt to fit 150+ street level characters, written by dozens of different writers with different interpretations and ideas, into a single coherent scaling chain. That alone should be a red flag. But it gets worse. This chain actively replaces character feats instead of supplementing them. If character A gets a new High Hypersonic feat, upgrading them means instantly upgrading 150+ other characters along with them, regardless of whether any of those characters have ever demonstrated anything remotely close to that level. Nobody stops to check. The chain just moves.
Part of why this happens is crossover scaling. Characters interact across books, and those interactions get treated as scaling evidence even when the crossover has nothing to do with establishing consistent power levels. Most crossovers aren’t written with that in mind, and using them as a foundation for scaling 150 characters is exactly as unreliable as it sounds.
Actual Examples
1.
Street Tiers Scaling to 9-B From a Handful of Calcs
Every street level character shares the same 9-B tier because they’re all connected to the same scaling chain. It doesn’t matter who actually performed the feat. Everyone scales to it automatically. There’s no consideration of whether the feat is consistent, applicable, or even relevant to a given character. The result is that everyone ends up identical on paper when they clearly aren’t in the actual comics.
2.
MHS+ Removal
This was a thread I ran myself. When I removed MHS+ speeds from street level characters, the same problem appeared. Characters with no bullet-time feats whatsoever were scaling to the same speed as consistent bullet-dodgers like Elektra and Daredevil simply because they’re on the same chain. That’s not accuracy, that’s just inherited stats.
3.
72 Profiles Affected By 2 Calculations
During a recent revision thread to remove poorly executed calculations, I found that 72 character profiles were dependent on just two calcs. That alone is absurd. But beyond the number, the practical result was characters scaling to opponents far above them and weaker characters sitting at the same tier as someone who effortlessly one-shotted them. That’s what the chain produces.
4.
The Low Tier Speed Upgrade
This one is the most telling. There’s an ongoing thread to upgrade characters like Captain Marvel to Sub-Relativistic or higher based on legitimate feats of flying to space and reacting at those speeds. It can’t pass. Not because the feats are bad, but because it would backscale to 9-Bs. Let that sink in. We’re rejecting decades of feats from dozens of characters because the street level scaling chain has to be protected. The chain has become more important than the actual evidence.
Proposed Addition to the Policy
A character’s primary source material is defined by the books in which they hold notable plot relevance. This includes solo runs, team books, and events where the character plays a significant role, not merely appears incidentally.
Cross-scaling remains valid, but a character’s own consistent portrayal across their primary source material takes priority in cases of contradiction. Cross-scaling is only applicable as primary justification when the narrative explicitly frames the characters as comparable, not merely because they interact, appear in the same event, or fight alongside each other incidentally. Particular care must be taken when a character would scale to a feat that doesn’t reflect their own portrayal, especially when they have no consistent narrative relationship with the character who performed it.
Anti-feats are part of a character’s consistent portrayal and should be weighed alongside positive feats when determining their statistics.
Characters whose primary showcase comes from team books or events due to having little to no meaningful solo history scale normally from those appearances, as that constitutes their primary source material.
These guidelines apply specifically to Attack Potency, Durability, Lifting Strength and Striking Strength. Speed is excluded from this framework given the lack of meaningful granularity in how Marvel and DC portray it at most tiers.
Speed is still excluded from my proposal, but given how bad the situation is with the "Low Tier Speed Upgrade" thread, I'd rather include and make it all stats. Speed also works for examples regardless if they're being excluded here or not, given it highlights the issue even more.
The Scaling Chain Has Made Indexing Lazy
This scaling chain has made it actively less fun and less rewarding to research and index characters, because you constantly have to reconcile your character with people who have nothing to do with them. It’s made both supporters and staff lazy, because if a character fought someone who fought someone who fought Daredevil, they automatically land at 9-B and nobody bothers calculating their actual feats anymore. The scaling chain became a crutch. Characters who have legitimate destruction and durability feats that could define their tier properly are just left with inherited stats because the work of actually calculating them feels pointless when the chain already decided where they belong. That’s not how a wiki dedicated to accurate indexing should work.
And before anyone says the solution is just “do better research,” let’s address that directly.
No, This Is Not An Issue Of “Poor Research”
Poor research is a contributing factor, but it’s not the root cause of any of the problems I’ve described here, and treating it as such is just a way of avoiding the actual issue.
Think about it. The MHS+ removal was done with proper research. I went through the feats, identified the problems, made the thread. And yet the result was still 150+ characters being affected at once because that’s how the scaling chain works. The research was there. The problem wasn’t fixed because the system itself is the problem.
The same applies to the 72 profiles held together by two calculations. That wasn’t a research failure, that was the scaling chain doing exactly what it’s designed to do. Two calcs, 72 profiles, because everyone scales to everyone. More research wouldn’t have changed that outcome, it would have just meant someone noticed it sooner.
And the Low Tier speed upgrade is the most telling example. That thread isn’t being blocked because of poor research. It’s being blocked because upgrading legitimate feats from decades of stories would backscale to 9-Bs, so the 9-B scaling chain effectively overrides actual character feats. That’s not a research problem, that’s the system actively working against accuracy.
Poor research makes things worse. But even with perfect research, these exact same problems would still exist as long as the scaling chain structure remains unchanged. The research argument is a way of blaming the people doing the work instead of fixing the framework they’re working within.
And there are examples of this right here in this thread. I’ve argued that characters should scale to their own feats without interference from characters that have nothing to do with them, and that was pushed back on. So even when the research is done, even when the feats are there, the scaling chain still takes priority. At that point the argument that this is a research problem completely falls apart. You can do all the research in the world and still not be able to apply it correctly because the system won’t allow it.
The Benefits
We already do what this thread proposes, but only for one character. Moon Knight.
Moon Knight was stuck in 9-B jail for years because he was listed as “comparable to Daredevil and Punisher” without any real proof backing that up. It took someone actually sitting down and going through all of his appearances, counting his fights, and realizing that he not only had multiple variable power mechanics at once, but also had significantly more High 8-C fights than 9-B ones, and those fights were against characters from his actual core stories, his own villains, his own mythology. Not random crossover appearances. His own world.
So I guess the issue is indeed just a lack of proper research, right? Obviously not.
Once that research was done, Moon Knight was quietly removed from the 9-B scaling chain, and his High 8-C ratings are now based entirely on his own feats and the feats of characters from his own mythology like Jack Russell. His profile is massively better for it. His villains have their own profiles now, his abilities are properly indexed, his mythology is represented. That’s what accurate indexing looks like.
But here’s the thing: if someone had noticed that silent scaling chain removal and pushed back on it the same way the Low Tier Speed Upgrade gets pushed back on, none of it would have passed. The research alone wasn’t enough. It only worked because the scaling chain removal went uncontested. And we can still scale that version of Moon Knight to 9-B through Gambit keeping up with him, and through Jack Russell who is High 8-C fighting characters in that range. The connection exists. It just isn’t the foundation of the profile anymore.
That’s exactly what this proposal formalizes. The research matters, but without a policy backing it up, it can be undone the moment someone decides to push back. If it worked for Moon Knight, it can work for everyone else.
This is also a direct reply to
@NaturalDestroyer, who asked me what the practical effect of the proposal would be and then went to Discord to say it “appears” I wasn’t interested in answering him. The answer was right there the whole time with Moon Knight. Maybe if we actually paid attention to our own profiles instead of waiting for someone else to spell it out, we would have figured that out a lot sooner.
Community Voice
The people most affected by this proposal aren’t staff, they’re the members who actually maintain these profiles day to day. They’re the ones reading the comics, doing the research, running the calcs, and then watching their work get overridden by a scaling chain they had no say in. Their perspective matters here, and I want to make space for it.
I reached out to some of the members who work on Marvel and DC profiles directly and asked them how the current system has been affecting their work, and how this proposal would change things for them going forward. Here’s what they had to say:
@Tomfer:
This is for Marvel only. My biggest problem with scaling chain is how it hurts the interpretation of the character and how lazy it is. I’ll highlight a very funny case that is Skin, a X-Men character. He’s 9-B because he’s scaling to Reaper, which in turn scales to Havok, which physically scales to… No one. He just is. While that’s obviously because of the low quality profile, the thing is… Why is an obscure character like Skin scaling to a Daredevil feat? X-Men has decades worth of content and feats, do we really have no physical feats that they could scale from instead of relying on a character that they barely interacted with? If at all? Is it really that difficult to take a single other feat from characters closer to him? If it’s a random with barely 20 issues that do not belong to any group, then it’s whatever. But if they have an entire cosmology, especially a group like the X-Men who’s popularity and content rivals the Avengers, it just shows that no one bothers to look for feats or calc them.
About crossover villains like Ultron and Kingpin, the answer is quite obvious. We take all of their fights throughout their entire career, count them, and see what the majority is. It’s what I did with Moon Knight when I introduced his High 8-C key. I literally just counted all of his scaling fights and saw that by numbers alone, he fought more enemies who scale to High 8-C than 9-B, and the fact that 70% of his fights were with his actual villains helped a lot. Kingpin is a really funny case because there’s actually no reason to scale him from anyone but Daredevil. Most of his fights are against him, despite the fact that he debuted in a Spider-Man comic. By consistency alone, which is nothing but a numbers game, he fought Matt more.
@Rex_Eckles already voiced his opinion above, and there is also
@Eseseso as well.
I also invite the members mentioned above to further express themselves here in the thread before we move to a staff vote count. They’re the ones closest to this material on a daily basis, and their perspective on how this proposal would affect their work is something staff should have the full picture of before making a decision.
Also, I want to address what
@Rgerdeena said on Discord. Nobody got kicked out of anything. What I said was that I respectfully asked him to stop commenting until he had actually understood the proposal or had something useful to contribute, given that his comments up to that point were textbook stonewalling. That’s not banning anyone, I don’t even have that power. The thread is open to everyone. The only thing I asked is that people actually engage with what’s being proposed before commenting on it.
