Quote Originally Posted by Luccan View Post
Yes, but there are also people who wouldn't play fighter because it's obviously weaker and more limited in its scope of abilities than many other classes whether the tier system existed or not.

The tier system was created to give DMs a rough idea of how well PCs of different classes could accomplish tasks (particularly relative to each other). T1 can handle pretty much any theoretical task and at high levels of optimization can do many of them with ease. Meanwhile, a T4 or 5 is likely to run into trouble outside a specific niche and sometimes even inside its own. Tiering can also serve as means to alert your players, if they're familiar with the tier system, how well they should optimize. If you say you're going to run a T1 game, for instance, they know they either need to break out High Op tricks for T2 and T3 classes or play a T1 class competently. OTOH, if you say you're going for a T4 balance point, they know that if they want to play a higher tier class they might have to make some choices that would normally be considered a little to very suboptimal.

Conventional wisdom seems to be you can play mostly fine within two tiers of whatever the stated balance point is. You can certainly play a class down more than that, but you really can't play up past a certain point.
I don't think I would join a game where the DM expects the characters to be optimized or of a certain tier. By far most people I play with never go online to read up on the game. Nor do they own any books. A GM should adjust the game in such a way everyone has fun. Regardless who has the strongest character.