SpaghettiWeegee
Smash Apprentice
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2010
- Messages
- 91
Hello, Smashboards! I was browsing old tournament footage and the thought occurred to me that, due to the unique nature of Smash Bros. and specifically the diverse roster of Smash 4, the currently-accepted rule for breaking ties in the event of the match clock hitting zero before one player has lost all stocks is insufficient and unfair.
As it is the most recent thoroughly-documented form of generally-accepted Smash 4 rules for competitive play, I make this claim based on the Apex 2015 Rulebook. As it is written:
My proposed solution to this problem is to disregard percent as a factor in determining the victor in these time-over situations and instead use a different, more reliable number-- something that, if I were to propose a dumb name for it off the top of my noggin' would be called something like Smash Susceptibility, although I wholeheartedly encourage suggesting a better name in the thread below.
Essentially, Smash Susceptibility (SS) is the distance which a fighter will be launched if hit by a smash attack. It can be calculated by taking a given character's recorded percent at the moment of timeout and modifying it by their weight value. I'm no dataminer, so I don't have this information on me right now, but I'm going to throw out some dummy numbers to just give a feel for how it might work. Let's say Ganondorf's weight value is 100 (pretty heavy), and he ends a match with 70% left on his final stock. To calculate his SS, we'd simply divide his percent by his weight value (70/100) and we see that Ganondorf concluded the game with a SS rating of .7. Now let's take a look at the G-dawg's opponent, Mr. Game and Watch, who has a weight value of 25 (super lightweight) at the moment of timeout is at 50% on his final stock. G&W's SS calculates out to be 2.0, which is significantly higher than Ganondorf's SS despite G&W's percent damage being lower. In this case, it looks like Ganondorf, with his lower comparative SS, is actually much safer from being KOed by a raw smash attack, and thus will win the tiebreaker.
To summarize, the formula for SS will look something like Final Percent/Weight Value = Smash Susceptibility. Whoever ends the game with the highest SS will be considered the winner. In the event of tied SS, identical proceedings from the Apex 2015 rulebook should be followed.
This model does not take into account a character's vulnerability to gimps or the length of that character's recovery. This could potentially cause it to be considered an unfair rule as well, because it may result in a situation where one character may be launched further than their opponent but be able to recover, while if their opponent were launched by a smash attack of the same power they would be unable to recover. If this is considered terribly problematic, an additional variable taking a character's maximum recovery distance could be taken into account, increasing their SS if their sum total recovery distance falls below a certain threshold (sorry, Little Mac). This, too, encounters trouble when considering some characters have spectacular horizontal recovery but practically nonexistent vertical recovery (e.g. Donkey Kong) or vice versa, and runs into the additional wrinkle of potentially overcomplicating something I'm already probably overcomplicating. Because I do not have a suggestion as to how to proceed in the development of this caveat at this time, I will remark on it no further, but I do encourage discussion on it nevertheless!
Any thoughts? I'm no tournament officiator, so I figured it'd be constructive to take this idea to Smashboards to see what people who know more about the competitive scene than I do think about it. Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think!
As it is the most recent thoroughly-documented form of generally-accepted Smash 4 rules for competitive play, I make this claim based on the Apex 2015 Rulebook. As it is written:
While this rule makes sense for traditional fighting games, where win/loss conditions are decided based on a set resource pool being drained to zero, the more open-ended way in which victory can be achieved in Smash (with certain characters struggling to KO even at percentages as high as 120% and others having reliable kill options as low as 60% in some matchups) indicates that a similar understanding of fairness cannot be applied to such a different game type. Additionally, some characters, by virtue of being heavy, fall into combos more easily, and as a result repeatedly find themselves at percent deficits faster than other characters despite, in actuality, not actually being any closer to being smashed into blast zones than their opponent. A Bowser at 80% may have a higher percent than a Jigglypuff at 60%, but any Smash player can tell you that Bowser is in no more danger of being knocked out than his opponent in this scenario (some might even argue that Bowser is actually safer than Jigglypuff, although I have no data to support this claim currently).The winner of a match that goes to time (time out) will be determined by stocks and percentage. When the timer hits 0:00 player with the higher stock count is the winner. If both players are tied in stocks the player with the lower percentage is the winner. In the event of a percentage tie, or a match in which both players lost their last stock simultaneously, a 1 stock tiebreaker will be played with time limit equal to the regular time limit divided by the regular number of stocks, rounded up. Sudden Death is not to be played at all, and will not count. (Emphasis mine)
My proposed solution to this problem is to disregard percent as a factor in determining the victor in these time-over situations and instead use a different, more reliable number-- something that, if I were to propose a dumb name for it off the top of my noggin' would be called something like Smash Susceptibility, although I wholeheartedly encourage suggesting a better name in the thread below.
Essentially, Smash Susceptibility (SS) is the distance which a fighter will be launched if hit by a smash attack. It can be calculated by taking a given character's recorded percent at the moment of timeout and modifying it by their weight value. I'm no dataminer, so I don't have this information on me right now, but I'm going to throw out some dummy numbers to just give a feel for how it might work. Let's say Ganondorf's weight value is 100 (pretty heavy), and he ends a match with 70% left on his final stock. To calculate his SS, we'd simply divide his percent by his weight value (70/100) and we see that Ganondorf concluded the game with a SS rating of .7. Now let's take a look at the G-dawg's opponent, Mr. Game and Watch, who has a weight value of 25 (super lightweight) at the moment of timeout is at 50% on his final stock. G&W's SS calculates out to be 2.0, which is significantly higher than Ganondorf's SS despite G&W's percent damage being lower. In this case, it looks like Ganondorf, with his lower comparative SS, is actually much safer from being KOed by a raw smash attack, and thus will win the tiebreaker.
To summarize, the formula for SS will look something like Final Percent/Weight Value = Smash Susceptibility. Whoever ends the game with the highest SS will be considered the winner. In the event of tied SS, identical proceedings from the Apex 2015 rulebook should be followed.
This model does not take into account a character's vulnerability to gimps or the length of that character's recovery. This could potentially cause it to be considered an unfair rule as well, because it may result in a situation where one character may be launched further than their opponent but be able to recover, while if their opponent were launched by a smash attack of the same power they would be unable to recover. If this is considered terribly problematic, an additional variable taking a character's maximum recovery distance could be taken into account, increasing their SS if their sum total recovery distance falls below a certain threshold (sorry, Little Mac). This, too, encounters trouble when considering some characters have spectacular horizontal recovery but practically nonexistent vertical recovery (e.g. Donkey Kong) or vice versa, and runs into the additional wrinkle of potentially overcomplicating something I'm already probably overcomplicating. Because I do not have a suggestion as to how to proceed in the development of this caveat at this time, I will remark on it no further, but I do encourage discussion on it nevertheless!
Any thoughts? I'm no tournament officiator, so I figured it'd be constructive to take this idea to Smashboards to see what people who know more about the competitive scene than I do think about it. Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think!
Last edited: