Custom Moves have been a heavily debated topic post Evo 2015 all across the Smash community. Many people have varying opinions on the matter and it seems an answer everyone can agree to is still not something we have. When debating and discussing difficult topics it is always hearing from everywhere and everyone to try and develop an answer.
Marc Hagen (@
Marc) is an editor and writer for
Smash Europe, a "portal for the competitive European Smash Bros. community", as well as one of the main TOs of the
Avalon tournament series. He sat down and wrote an editorial to discuss his own feelings and provide a unique perspective from a European Smash player. A preview can be found below.
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Besides stock count, the most hotly debated topic in the international Smash 4 scene is the inclusion of custom moves. Although most TOs decided against them due to the poor logistics involved, the controversial decision to have them legal at EVO inspired several regions to practice with them and renewed the debate since. The core question I ask myself is whether the costs of having custom moves legal are worth it, considering the practical implementation, the case study of EVO and a potential split of the community. All things considered, I would prefer to move forward with a metagame without customs.
A world of possibilities… at a price
Customs are interesting in that they are a rare example of the competitive Smash scene turning on a setting that is off by default, rather than the usual limiting or customizing of default settings. They open up a great many moveset configurations, several of which affect specific match-ups or even impact the metagame somewhat. Turning them on or off can even affect character viability, prime examples being Charizard,
Palutena and
Mii Brawler. Although Smash 4 generally has no shortage of character diversity and several top tiers have great customs of their own, opening up new possibilities for tournament play is the biggest draw to legalizing customs.
I believe that customs would have been a staple of competitive Smash 4 if every character had their entire moveset unlocked from the start. They were common during the short tenure of the 3DS version, as every player could be held responsible for his own save file and they were seemingly quicker to unlock than on the Wii U version. It took me personally about a month of grinding on train rides to and from work to get every custom move in the game, which is not that long if the game is to survive for several years. It’s obviously much less work if you only focus on characters you actually use, which is a viable route for the 3DS, where you are on your own save file at all times.
That said, it still baffles me that the decision was made to lock such a fundamental part of gameplay behind several layers of grinding. A poor game design choice, not in the last part because you can get duplicates and are thus never guaranteed a new move even if you get a custom drop for your preferred character. This results in the unfortunate fact that you can hardly expect the average Wii U save file at a tournament to have every move in the game, which goes against the principle of uniform tournament settings and is the crux of the issue.
The most feasible solution to have custom moves at tournaments is to distribute pre-made common movesets from the 3DS version, which takes up costly tournament time, limits people to popular configurations and doesn’t negate the fact that many people don’t have access to them during practice. While you could tell players to grind it out, this is unheard of for a fighting game. Most TOs do not provide all of the set-ups for their events and this, in addition to DLC, would make it even harder to give players everything the ruleset entitles them to.
Considering that customs likely would have been a staple if unlocked by default, barring potentially broken moves, I believe the debate to be a question of “is it worth the hassle to include them under these circumstances?”, rather than a question of “should they be legal from a theoretical point of view?”.
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He goes on to discuss how these played out on the Evo main stage, other concerns, and gives a final conclusion. What were his final thoughts? Be sure to head over to Smash Europe and
read the full article here to find out.
SmashCapps hopes people take time to read the entire article and that the discussion on custom moves can manage to be a healthy discussion. To get his own feelings on custom moves go follow him on Twitter.
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