[quote=@MelonHead]Unpowered: So anything within human capabilities (guns haven't been fit into this properly yet, as using a gun is within human capabilities, but the damage it causes is way above human capable attacks.)[/quote]That's completely bullshit.
a sword or hell even an arrow does more damage than most bullets. The only difference is that guns are easier to use and their bullets are faster.
There are still countless ways you can fight a gunner, especially in a fictional setting.
At worst you have to separate this to low and high tiers.
A guy armed to the teeth AND skilled in various martial arts would be unfair against somebody who only has either of these two.

[quote]Powered: This is the broad category where most characters sit, and due to the hard to categorize nature of magic etc we've broadened it to make it easier to fit a lot of different characters together. I like to think of the sub categories within powered as

Low Powered: This is where your vampiric and other super-natural entities -tend- to sit, heightened beyond human physical characteristics, fairly weak forms of magic, etc.

Mid Powered: By far the broadest category, this can range from low level destruction to street level IMO, though quantifying characters is pretty much impossible, you just have to judge each case by case.

High Powered: Street edging towards city level destruction. The category after this is somewhat unhelpfully 'God' so I consider anything up to but before a god in this category. [/quote]Um, low and street level destruction is practically the same.
Unpowered dudes with modern weapons are already this level, the only difference is how much resources and effort is spent.
You can set up a C4 to blow up a reinforced door while the Powered dude can do the same with a lazy kick.
Also city level destruction is about 12 orders of magnitudes higher than typical street level power. Perhaps you'd rather quantify that as the broadest category here.

Anyways, your opinion seems to conflict with [@Rilla]'s idea for "mid tier" a bit.
I like your way of explaining it more, though.

[quote]The reason why most of the characters in the character challenge thread are the same is because people tend to edge up their competition or match it. After the first few characters were thrown down I dropped a relatively powerful mid-tier character and everyone from that point on matched it to ensure they wouldn't be outdone, essentially. If you were to ask people however I'm sure they have a wide range of tiered characters for you to fight at a request. I quite like to play lower tiers for example.
[/quote]That much is given.
But if the majority of the characters are "low tier" it worries me considerably because it tells something about the overall freedom and imagination in these.
Granted, I sure haven't read all matches and you can obviously have fun with low tier exchanges.
I just feel this kind of overpresentation throttles down all the other efforts.
Hearing stuff like anybody thinking that guns are OP doesn't help in my belief on this front.
Seriously, how many fiction people watched/read? I may be slightly overexposed to them because for a year I used to have nothing to do but it still doesn't take a genius figure things out.
To sum it up this is starting to bother me a bit.
On a different note I just figured out the perfect candidate for this game.