With the upcoming 3.0 Update, many people believe we may get the Stage Builder back. In the past many people were complaining about the weak stage selection for competitive play in Smash games. besides the game having an option, to create your own stages. Many competitive games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Star Craft or War Craft 3 used fan-made maps to expend competitive options … but this never really happend in Smash. PM shows, that the community aren't against fan-made projects in general.
So i wondering, why didn't the competitive community ever came together and choose a set of custom made stages?
My theroy is actually very simple: Distribution.
In Brawl you could save the stages on SD cards, but it was very hard to distribute the stages to a higher number of players. Knowing, where to get stages and which were popular was really hard. The online service on the Wii was also very poor, since you only would get random stages.
In Smash 4 you could share stages on Miiverse. But again people had to go look for it, not knowing if stages were popular and where to get them. Also you couldn't really choose custom stages online against other players.
So to answer my question, in how to make Custom Stages competitive, it really depends on Nintendo. The have to make the distribution of Custom Stages easy and allow players to play them online:
So i wondering, why didn't the competitive community ever came together and choose a set of custom made stages?
My theroy is actually very simple: Distribution.
In Brawl you could save the stages on SD cards, but it was very hard to distribute the stages to a higher number of players. Knowing, where to get stages and which were popular was really hard. The online service on the Wii was also very poor, since you only would get random stages.
In Smash 4 you could share stages on Miiverse. But again people had to go look for it, not knowing if stages were popular and where to get them. Also you couldn't really choose custom stages online against other players.
So to answer my question, in how to make Custom Stages competitive, it really depends on Nintendo. The have to make the distribution of Custom Stages easy and allow players to play them online:
- An actual platform, where people can search for Custom Stages, share there opinion and highlight popular choices, so that popular competitive stages actually are easier to find. Uploaders should also be able to update and delete there stages, so that people always will use newer versions. Of course, downloading and managing the Custom Stages should be easy too. Lastly if people play those stages, the name of the stage and of the creator should appear on the screen, so that if players share videos of there matches, the viewers can find those stages and version numbers for themselves.
- Players should be able to play the Custom Stages online in Battle Arenas, so that they get used to them and want to see them appear in the competitive scene.