Anime Weekend Atlanta Results - 9/28/13

[TheReflexWonder]

Annual anime convention decided to have one last hurrah of a tournament before Smash 4 does its thing.

http://www.awa-con.com/

Tournament results for the 1v1 Brawl tournament yesterday (78 entrants), which had a wonky ruleset to make up for the sheer number of entrants (Best of 1 until Top 8 of Winners only, 2-stock, 5 minutes). Also, random seeding, which actually turned out almost perfectly for once--

1: RedHalberd ($450)
2: TheReflexWonder ($150)
3: Mampam ($75)
4: DRN
5: Kismet
5: LionArmor
7: Player-1
7: Villn (Chima)
9: Mercy Daniel
9: Jack Mueller
9: Jumba
9: Masa
13: Four
13: GhostAnime
13: Chris Brantley
13: FTK RedX
17: HKamen
17: Tobi
17: Dove
17: Mike G
17: Phase
17: luke
17: Luffy
17: OblivionGX
25: Clink
25: James de Blank
25: EnchiladaGrandé
25: Apallo48
25: Thor
25: Chris Brown
25: Yoshi
25: Marcus
33: Grey
33: Sephiroth7
33: Vermillionz
33: Rabid_Tanuki
33: 1-UP
33: This One Guy
33: Daniel Edmonds
33: John123
33: smashdestroyer
33: Zenith
33: Lazengann
33: Coomer
33: ralph
33: Chris
33: Suga
33: skaabii
49: Grizz
49: Satsu
49: Ness
49: Van Skorvold
49: sara
49: joey
49: Merf
49: Ferris
49: Dr. Brobotnik
49: the joker
49: Josh Riggs
49: Steven Harbin
49: Mr. game & watch
49: Brett
49: Max
49: djstefien
65: Nipples of the North
65: Cottoneyes
65: alex g
65: iEarnLungs
65: Xavi G
65: C7
65: Umberisk
65: Redex
65: Swordtail
65: Connor
65: bestboy
65: Ryan
65: Goat
65: ness gonzalez

Here's the bracket's image link (I won't put it in BBCode stuff so that the page isn't horribly stretched)--
http://i.imgur.com/pBlbMcF.png

I doubt anyone cares, but if anyone was still interested in knowing who's playing around here and what kind of money is being thrown around for Brawl, this was a thing.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

If I had to take anything from this event, it would be that 2-stock should be the standard. It only serves to speed things up and nobody feels cheated or handicapped as a result.

Imagine all the side events we could finally have time to do, and/or all the getting-home-at-a-reasonable-hour you could finally manage on a tournament day.

 

[IceArrow]

Just some advice, 6 minutes is better for a 2 stock ruleset because timeouts are much more easier with 5 minutes.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

The ruleset was specifically designed to make sure that matches didn't take that long, and it only really mattered in Grand Finals (Wario vs. Meta Knight, a matchup that is among the campiest in the game).

That said, it's really not a significant difference. 3-stock, 8 minutes translates to 2 minutes and 40 seconds per stock. 2-stock, 5 minutes translates to 2 minutes and 30 seconds per stock (and there would be one fewer number of respawn invincibility periods per character to sit through). If the aim is to stop the few people actively looking to time people out, then I'd rather take 5 minutes per game on those, because it won't change the other 90+% of games/matchups, and we're still shaving a minute off of all the campiest matchups.

I don't care about discouraging camping (let's be real here--it -is- Brawl). I only care about tournaments ending at reasonable hours and having to sit through an extra stock and/or three minutes that don't add anything useful or interesting to the gameplay/competition.

 

[IceArrow]

Ya, I know it's just that there are arguments that 3 stocks should have 10 minutes and 6 is in the middle. I'm not discouraging timeouts its just encouraging players to go for timeouts.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

In that scenario, a normal set can take more than 30 minutes when you factor in stage striking, counterpicking, and the like. As a TO that likes to have time for a side event and dinner/hang-out-time with friends, I find that completely unacceptable.

Again, I would argue that the extra time/stock doesn't add anything of merit to the gameplay. If you're able to play to the timeout, it is because the game was taking a long time regardless of the timer, not because there's less time to work with. At least in that case, one of the characters actively attempts to go in, which is one more than the alternative.

 

[IceArrow]

Although that is true, most tournaments generally do have enough time for 3rd events regardless of the ruleset. Also some characters get immediate advantages from 2 stocks like PT and ZSS. Also reads are valued much more.

 

[Ereth]

Florida represent!

 

[TheReflexWonder]

Personally, I feel that PT gets nerfed, as most matches end up being best Pokémon -> second best -> best for three stocks. The best Pokémon tends to do way more than the other two on average. That's just my personal opinion, though.

That said, neither PT nor ZSS are particularly good characters, so even if they get buffed by the change, it's not like it's turning the metagame on its head.

In my experience as a TO, third events end up making people leave instead of going to dinner or going home at midnight, which is rough and a bigger commitment than a lot of people would like to make. It can be a significant concern, and it's definitely food for thought when it comes to alleviating those issues without causing a fuss in tournament play.

 

[RaptorTEC]

My hero Player-1 getting outplaced by LionArmor.

 

[OverLade]

Definitely agree concerning 2 stock 5 minutes, though personally I feel 6 minutes would be a little bit safer. In the matches that ended as timeouts, I didn't feel like I was playing particularly campy, I just feel like the beginning of the first stocks and end of the last stocks always take a bit longer so just multiplying the time by about 2/3rds usually doesn't work out exactly.

That and the losers matches being one match, but aside from that I think the concept is great. The tourney could've finished much earlier too if they had allowed you to run it more efficiently.

GGs to all.

 

[IceArrow]

Lol, I'm sure you know more about PT then me so I believe you on that. And ya, ZSS/PT aren't that good either. I always enjoy third events while some like to leave or go to dinner so either way with a three stock ruleset I can always participate in third events and get home at a reasonable time.

In my opinion with a 2 stock and 5 minute ruleset that if I get the first stock then I will just time them out. I believe a lot of other people would do the same thing. That is why 6 minutes I believe is best because they won't go for timeouts and actually make the match quicker.

 

[MegaRobMan]

I test run a lot of things in Nebraska since no one cares here.

As a TO, I also like 2 stocks, but when I have ran it, people don't seem to enjoy it, feel they are getting less out of their $, they want 2 stocks, best of 5, insert john here.

I also like 3 minutes per stock in brawl, remember, matchups like Samus vs Sonic exist.

Just some input where it wasn't asked but ya dig.

 

[Player-1]

lmao, 2 stocks is definitely a significant difference from 3 stocks, luis.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

In that you spend significantly less time where nothing is happening? Yeah, I'll admit that it is a big difference.

 

[Sailor Princess Twenty-Two.]

Wish I had gotten a chance to play more people, it's the first time I've been out of state in like 2 years. I'm surprised some of you even recognized my name, if i lived down here I sure as hell wouldn't know who I was.

I'm a little salty about losing to 3rd and 5th to get 13th, but that's just the luck of the draw, better than being Zinoto and losing to 1st and 2nd to get 7th. Must be that young Michigan out of state curse. I'm probably gonna come down again next year too.

 

[Player-1]

In that you spend significantly less time where nothing is happening? Yeah, I'll admit that it is a big difference.

No because every hit matters that much more and gives you less time to adapt to people making it less forgiving. If I wanted I play a less forgiving game then id play marvel or melee

 

[TheReflexWonder]

No because every hit matters that much more and gives you less time to adapt to people making it less forgiving. If I wanted I play a less forgiving game then id play marvel or melee

Every hit matters the same amount, though. It's like having two bars of health instead of three in a traditional fighter. Perhaps a psychological aspect of it makes some people feel like they have to be more conservative, but getting 0-to-deathed by an Ice Climbers player still does the same amount of damage to your livelihood, since they have that much less time/health to work with in order to get a grab. If Joe Cool can get an ICs chaingrab off roughly every other stock, then while he has one fewer stock to take, that's one fewer stock's worth of time to work with in order to get the grab, too.

Also, comparing Brawl to Marvel in terms of how forgiving it is is laughable, as regardless of how many stocks are used per game, 98+% of Brawl games are decided by dozens of individual exchanges, rather than the extreme one-and-done that Marvel is famous/notorious for. You still have a relatively huge amount of time/health to make up for mistakes even in a one-stock environment.

If it takes you ~15+ minutes to adapt to a player to the point where you'd be able to make it count in a set, I'd argue that you need to step your tournament game up. The idea of adapting in current Brawl play tends to get muddied with the extreme war of attrition that many players don't have the endurance for. It's a fighting game, not a test of how long you can refuse to make a significant move out of neutral position. Case-in-point: Most of the time you end up using Neutral-B repeatedly against me as Diddy, you do more damage to yourself than me or simply don't accomplish anything, but it's a common occurrence in a lot of our matches, because it's generally safe to do, though it doesn't have any merit except in the most situational of circumstances. People are just used to being able to take their sweet-ass time with moves that don't make anything significant happen against an alert and intelligent player, and it's very likely that it would normalize as people get used to experiences with a lower stock count.

 

[hichez50]

@Reflex

You are late to the party. You can ask Hunter I have been saying that we should seriously consider 2 stock since 2010. There is no reason to have 3 stocks in brawl since we are playing 2/3 sets anyway.

@ Player-1

I Agree with Reflex. Sure more time gives you more time to adapt, but at top level play players are adapting too each other as soon as the timer says "GO". Then at lower level play the person who adapts the quickest should win that game. If the player who just lost wants to step up their game in the next match more power to them.

Also I sorta agree with Hunter that every hit means more. But a large part of the game should be execution on the first go around. Take a musician for example. He is considered inconsistent if he messes up the first note of a performance, therefore making him "less of a player"(lack of a better phrase) than someone who consistently executes correctly on the first note of the performance and plays just as well.

Sure you can always make the ZSS argument, but I don't think she is that much of a problem.

 

[Player-1]

every hit doesn't matter the same, if you have two bars of health in a traditional fighter both are say 100 units and you get hit by a move that does 10 units of damage well, well that's one fifth of your overall life bar instead of one tenth, it's pretty significant.

If you're limited by 5 minutes to adapt to a player well then I'd argue that it's too much of a guessing game rather than pattern recognition and adaptability. Pattern recognition is a big part of fighting games. For example, if I asked what 3 numbers came up in the sequence "1, 2, ..." well it could be 3,4, and 5 if I'm only adding up numbers,it could be 4, 8, 16 if I'm multiplying the previous number by 2 (or of the formula 2^(n-1)), it could be the list of prime numbers +1 so 2,3, and 5. It could be lots of different patterns and it'd be quite unreasonable of me to expect you to be able to give me the next 3 numbers. Consistency is also an issue in that doing an experiment one time doesn't say much for the results, that's why experiments we have multiple trials and the more trials used the more accurate the experiment will be since the first trial could just be an outlier. You can say that 2 stocks is enough time for all of this, but I don't think so. Brawl and smash in general is a game with a lot of freedom and variables with many situations. In a single game of brawl, some situation might be rarer than most others and by limiting the opportunities for it to happen the less we'll see it hence making it more of a guessing game rather than pattern recognition for that one situation. You could also say, "well why don't we play 4,5, or 99 stocks" well obviously tournaments do have a time limit that we can only go so much for, and we've been able to do it with 3 stocks for 5 years now so I don't see any reason to stop doing it with 3 stocks.

 

[hichez50]

Player-1

You are, sorta, falling for the sunk cost fallacy by saying I don't see any reason to stop doing 3 stops now that we have used it for 5 years. You should have learned about this in accounting.

Well at some point you are going to just have to commit to options. If you want to get a better feel on how your player will react you can play super campy and gauge how your reacts during certain situations.

 

[Player-1]

reread plz cuz you don't get it


kthxbai

 

[hichez50]

You have tunnel vision, cuz if you aren't right at the end of the day you think everybody else is wrong.

kthxbai

 

[NH Cody]

2 stocks, 5 minutes is a silly rule.

 

[Player-1]

I guess we should just have 1 stock, 1 min timer, best of 1 single elimination tournaments to make sure tournaments are done as fast as possible, if you can't adapt that fast then you're just bad I guess

 

[KOkingpin]

I guess we should just have 1 stock, 1 min timer, best of 1 single elimination tournaments to make sure tournaments are done as fast as possible, if you can't adapt that fast then you're just bad I guess

this type of thinking is why I don't play brawl. Your attitude really sucks sometimes.

I don't see the 3 stock thing getting changed for a game that no one is going to play soon anyway, although I personally think is it a great idea. It does make exchanged SEEM more important. We all know that everyone that plays brawl now will quit with Smash 4 comes out.

 

[OverLade]

Spoilers: RedHalberd is the armored titan

edit: 2 stock 5 minutes is good, though I prefer it would be 6 minutes. I doubt we'll see any sort of huge change in the way brawl is played, but I'll definitely try it at some of the free locals we host in my city.

 

[Player-1]

this type of thinking is why I don't play brawl. Your attitude really sucks sometimes.
.

It's the same thinking that Reflex and friends have, less stocks means faster tournaments and there is no significant difference for the metagame so why not? IDK what you mean by attitude sucking, it's just my opinion that 2 stocks isn't as good as 3 stocks for competitive play and it's a fact that there is a significant difference in 2 and 3 stock matches which was the original point reflex was making.

 

[Keys1281]

I'd have to try this to really get a good idea of if it changed anything for me...But honestly, I don't think it's worth changing what we've been doing for so long all for just a few months. In the end, it's up to the TO to come up with not only the ruleset, but an efficient strategy to organize a tournament altogether.

Honestly, if people attending tournaments were a lot less lazy and/or preoccupied with unnecessary stuff, and TOs were a bit more strict about DQs/time limits and had more people to ensure the tournament is going as planned, tournaments would be shorter in general. I haven't really done a ton of TOing, so I can't say any of this from personal experience, but the gist of what I'm trying to say is that the game we've been playing shouldn't be altered because in reality, a lot of time seems to be wasted outside the matches.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

I already explained that 3-stock, 8 minutes is 2:40 per stock, while 2-stock, 5 minutes is 2:30 per stock, as well as how the idea of consistency is forever intertwined with general endurance because of how long Brawl matches tend to be, so the difference in terms of meaningful gameplay is generally negligible. The most important thing to consider is seeing how to make events more efficient without making players feel that they're getting less bang for their buck. which is definitely a significant factor.

That said, do you really feel that an hour-long grand finals is acceptable and not mentally exhausting in a way that doesn't actually test game skill?

 

[Player-1]

IDK what the stock to time ratio has to do with the stock to damage ratio since hits still mean that much more unless that's not directed at me or that comment, in which case IDK who you're responding too. Also, IDK what's wrong with general endurance and mental stamina, I feel like it should be rewarded. I don't think the trade off for consistency, adaptation, and all of the other things I've mentioned just to make events a bit shorter is worth it, nor do I think it makes the event efficient in anything more than shaving off some time when there isn't really that big of an issue with tournaments going over time and usually if it is an issue it was an issue with the way the tournament ran or some other problem rather than the game and I also feel like I'm getting less bang for my buck.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

Stock to damage ratio remains the same since there isn't a drastic change in the number of meaningful interactions.

Mental stamina and endurance to the degree that current Brawl events require them is rather unreasonable at high levels of play; again, it's not about how much thought you have to do, but rather how much time you have to focus on rather unimportant, mundane tasks throughout, because the ratio of relatively meaningless interaction/inputs to meaningful ones is, way more often than not, greatly imbalanced toward the meaningless interactions, just because of the way that high-level Brawl spacing attempts work. As a result, a large majority of what we lose in two-stock play isn't thought-provoking or an interesting measure of skill.

Consistency and adaptation are still arguable, as more stocks/time = more time to trip and less time for adaptation to affect the outcome of the set (assuming both players are able to adapt to each other in a reasonable amount of time). If consistency mattered that much to you, you'd make no-tripping codes mandatory, but, that's another point. Seeing as how most matches would last roughly two-thirds the time as they would in 3-stock, that's a much larger time cut than "a bit shorter." It's the sort of thing that would allow for the crew battles we never have because the events are slow-going, and it's the sort of thing that would allow people to be able to go to a tournament without having to commit morning, day, and night to it, which is pretty significant for some people.

There's a lot of merit to the idea no matter how you look at it.

 

[Player-1]

stock to damage ratio doesn't remain the same at all, if you're going to say most matches would last about two-thirds the time they do for 3 stocks is much larger than a bit shorter then I'm going to say that there is a drastic change in the number meaningful interactions. Nor do I think it's an unreasonable amount of mental stamina and endurance. I don't really know about any meaningless interaction or input, everything you do in this game has a meaning. I'd be all for no-tripping codes except logistically at large scale events it's not really going to work. You can use your stage builder hacks or whatever to put it on wiis without homebrew, but there'll be various things that don't work out perfectly like what if the wii restarts and the player(s) at the setup just boot up the setup without hacks by accident? Then everyone that plays on that wii are playing without the code on throughout the day, and other logistic things like that. Also, the trip ratio of how much stocks/time you have to the amount of times you trip would (statistically) be the same in a 2 stock or 3 match.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

My argument about stock-to-damage ratio revolves around the idea that cutting out the incredible amount of fat that is Wario jumping around in neutral position with a Waft already stocked or Diddy firing Neutral-B and throwing bananas up for minutes at a time is worth sacrificing the comparatively tiny amount of meaningful interactions lost, since said meaningful interactions are the same as the ones that would still be happening on the two stocks that are left.

As far as tripping is concerned, the ratio would be the same but there would be more of them per match, which is a noticeable factor in terms of consistency being affected.

 

[Player-1]

So why not go a step further and reduce it to 1 stock, 1 min timer, bo1, and single elimination since that fits your criteria too and cuts down tournaments even shorter?

The consistency being affected doesn't change because there are more per match, the ratio is what affects that

 

[IceArrow]

I just don't understand the point of a 2 stock 5 minute ruleset which just promotes timeouts and makes results more inconsistent. Just out of curiosity, how many timeouts happened this tourament because if I went to this tournament or any player using ICs, Falco, TL, Wario, DK, or DDD, the games would all go to time.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

A one-minute timer significantly cuts down the amount of time people have to work with per stock, which is an obviously-drastic change in gameplay.

I would personally be down for testing 1-stock, three minutes, best of 5 as a tournament standard, too, but I also imagine that the combination of drastically-lowered play time per set and significant increase in red tape/not-actually-playing (the gaps caused by more time spent figuring out counterpicks, the jarring effect of a gimp costing your entire livelihood of a game, etc.) would make this feel much less reasonable to players, myself included.

Best-of-1 undermines the counterpick aspect that is integral to the Smash experience and would therefore be too significant a change. It would also not be received well by players for the same reason.

Single-elimination also has a significantly more drastic effect on consistency, since the matchup aspect of the game can be a rather large factor in a large chunk of matchup. Also, the one-and-done luck-of-the-draw feeling that would come from this would most definitely leave a bad taste in players' mouths.

None of these things are on the same level of subtlety as the time/stock reduction I am proposing, and you know that.

 

[Player-1]

A handful of matches went to time, idk any exact numbers

 

[NH Cody]

trying to change the game's ruleset because of outside logistical factors like tourney running time is ridiculous.

this is why I hate nationals that have bracket pools and not round robin

 

[Player-1]

No it's not on the same level as 1 stock obviously but there is no question a significant change which is the point I'm making and it's not a change necessarily for the better