Stage Analysis & Discussion Thread

[Piford]

Soooo, just in case you guys weren't aware.... The large red balloon in Wuhu Island explodes on contact and can easily kill. Not saying that this means we should ban it, but I think it's worth mentioning at the very least. Wuhu isn't as tame as a stage as previously claimed, as there are strong hitboxes that occur on it.

Did everyone know this or is this previously not known?

Yeah this is know. Also theres's a hitbox when the stage skid against the water at the very beginning. This only happens when the stage is going to the arena section and it isn't very powerful.

 

[MrGame&Rock]

Also, in terms of stages, this is my opinionated list from "most legal" to "most likely to be excluded". I suggest using them all, but removing stages should be done from the bottom up. If your region has a particular aversion to hazards and are cool with walkoffs, you could move CS up and Halberd down etc

1. Smashville
2. Battlefield
3. Town and City
4. Final Destination/Omega Palutena's Temple
5. Lylat
6. Duck Hunt
7. Kongo Jungle 64
8. Skyloft
9. Halberd
10. Castle Siege
11. Delfino
12. Wuhu
13. PS2
14. Norfair

Why Norfair over something like Mario Circuit?

 

[The_Jiggernaut]

Cool, just checking for the balloon thing. I was Jigglypuff (big surprise) and I actually landed on top of it very close to the top blast zone (I was sent up there by knockback), so I don't think my damage was much of a factor. I certainly could have avoided landing on it if I knew.

 

[dav3yb]

Cool, just checking for the balloon thing. I was Jigglypuff (big surprise) and I actually landed on top of it very close to the top blast zone (I was sent up there by knockback), so I don't think my damage was much of a factor. I certainly could have avoided landing on it if I knew.

Took me a while to even find the balloon you were talking about. I hit it once before it was even on screen, but i was thinking it might've been one of the random planes flying around at first.

For anyone hunting it, a balloon floats up on the cliff portion of Wuhu. All in all, i dont think this is any worse than the few area's of Skyloft that can hit the player when flying around, and so far it seems like the only one? Also, it seems to do 10% damage, if anyone is wondering.

 

[ParanoidDrone]

Took me a while to even find the balloon you were talking about. I hit it once before it was even on screen, but i was thinking it might've been one of the random planes flying around at first.

For anyone hunting it, a balloon floats up on the cliff portion of Wuhu. All in all, i dont think this is any worse than the few area's of Skyloft that can hit the player when flying around, and so far it seems like the only one? Also, it seems to do 10% damage, if anyone is wondering.

Wuhu has 3 damaging hazards:

When skimming over the water to the arena, the water does 5% damage with light vertical knockback. It doesn't kill until over 300%.

The boat does 100% damage and spikes for an instant kill if it runs into a player in the water. Notably, if someone falls into the water while the boat is moving, they're not pulled along until after they reach the surface and start treading water.

The balloon on the cliff does 10% damage as we've been discussing.

Wuhu Island Thread

 

[dav3yb]

Wuhu has 3 damaging hazards:

When skimming over the water to the arena, the water does 5% damage with light vertical knockback. It doesn't kill until over 300%.

The boat does 100% damage and spikes for an instant kill if it runs into a player in the water. Notably, if someone falls into the water while the boat is moving, they're not pulled along until after they reach the surface and start treading water.

The balloon on the cliff does 10% damage as we've been discussing.

Wuhu Island Thread

i barely count the water skimming as a "hazzard," since i dont think it'll ever kill anyone ever.

I guess im thinking of hazards being things that "come at you from somewhere," like the carts in Mario Circuit or the F-Zero stages. I don't think about the boat hazard much because its like the moving portion where its just "stay on the boat or die" kind of mentality. A bit less prevalent imo than some random piece of geometry flying into the platform on skyloft, where its a lot less predictable and not as noticeable.

 

[MrGame&Rock]

I was playing some matches on Port Town the other day, and just going by the traveling and the platform layout of the transformations, it's a great stage. Borderline better than Skyloft and Wuhu even. Only one walkoff that I can recall and its not even abusable because of the curved boundaries, and every single transformation promotes non-campy play. Makes me even sadder that the cars are broken and the main platform doesn't have edges, because those two problems take what would have been a perfect stage and made it unplayable.

 

[Firefoxx]

I was playing some matches on Port Town the other day, and just going by the traveling and the platform layout of the transformations, it's a great stage. Borderline better than Skyloft and Wuhu even. Only one walkoff that I can recall and its not even abusable because of the curved boundaries, and every single transformation promotes non-campy play. Makes me even sadder that the cars are broken and the main platform doesn't have edges, because those two problems take what would have been a perfect stage and made it unplayable.

RIP 4 versions of the Mute City theme

(I know music doesn't really matter, but Port Town has the best lineup of music in the game and its a shame how unplayable the cars make it)

 

[ParanoidDrone]

RIP 4 versions of the Mute City theme

(I know music doesn't really matter, but Port Town has the best lineup of music in the game and its a shame how unplayable the cars make it)

That said I still think it's a crime that LIke a Snake (aka the actual Port Town theme from GX) isn't an option.

 

[MrGame&Rock]

RIP 4 versions of the Mute City theme

(I know music doesn't really matter, but Port Town has the best lineup of music in the game and its a shame how unplayable the cars make it)

Yeah. My favorite stages in the game music wise are Port Town, Palutena's Temple, Onett, Kalos League, PS2, FD, and Skyloft. Of those stages, PS2 has a shot of being legal, FD is a neutral, and Skyloft is a counterpick sometimes. The others? Nope. (I also love KJ64 aesthetically, IDK why tho)

Least favorite aesthetically/music wise? Smashville, Town and City, Delfino, Garden of Hope, Castle Siege, Mario Circuit Brawl, Yoshi's Island Melee, and Skyworld. And while most of those are at least tolerable, I hate the aesthetics of T&C and ESPECIALLY Smashville. And half of those stages, including the two I despise, are tourney favorites. Ugh.

 

[FullMoon]

Funny, T&C is probably my favorite stage. Three of the songs there are among my favorites in the game, especially because of how out-of-place they sound compared to the action for the most part.

And speaking of hazards

Can we ban Halberd now? =V

(Just kidding, I love that stage)

 

[The Stoopid Unikorn]

Funny, T&C is probably my favorite stage. Three of the songs there are among my favorites in the game, especially because of how out-of-place they sound compared to the action for the most part.

And speaking of hazards

Can we ban Halberd now? =V

(Just kidding, I love that stage)

The arm was disgusted by the lack of

​

 

[MrGame&Rock]

The arm was disgusted by the lack of

​

Meta Knight has chosen his god-tier successor and won't allow anyone else to take that place

 

[FEFIZ]

Guys, a legal stage with a very near vertical Blast zone, plz! Thanks.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Guys, a legal stage with a very near vertical Blast zone, plz! Thanks.

Town and City, Halberd, Windy Hill Zone if your TO is crazy like me. :D

 

[Piford]

Town and City, Halberd, Windy Hill Zone if your TO is crazy like me. :D

Town and City's is closer, but only barely so thing's kill like 2% earlier.

 

[popsofctown]

Blastzone sizes and horizontal vs. vertical blastzone disparities are the most boring, straightforward kind of stage counterpicking and boring, straightforward manner of conferring advantages to certain characters. I consider it a vice. Oftentimes there are interesting strategic considerations presented by the stages, but one character has a killing upsmash and the other doesn't and choosing the stage with blastzone irregularities becomes a no brainer option that overpowers all other considerations.


If "Making custom stages that replicate stages we can't use because hazards" ever coalesces, I'd like to see custom stages uniform blast zone distances follow suit. I want to lose because you figured out your uptilt knocks me onto a low platform and makes me miss techs on a certain stage, and that wasn't as important as my assessment that a high platform would let me hide and charge my moves, etc. I don't want to lose because you have the ceiling heights written down on a piece of paper and pick the lowest one ever time (which is optimal a frightening amount of the time)

 

[Piford]

Blastzone sizes and horizontal vs. vertical blastzone disparities are the most boring, straightforward kind of stage counterpicking and boring, straightforward manner of conferring advantages to certain characters. I consider it a vice. Oftentimes there are interesting strategic considerations presented by the stages, but one character has a killing upsmash and the other doesn't and choosing the stage with blastzone irregularities becomes a no brainer option that overpowers all other considerations.


If "Making custom stages that replicate stages we can't use because hazards" ever coalesces, I'd like to see custom stages uniform blast zone distances follow suit. I want to lose because you figured out your uptilt knocks me onto a low platform and makes me miss techs on a certain stage, and that wasn't as important as my assessment that a high platform would let me hide and charge my moves, etc. I don't want to lose because you have the ceiling heights written down on a piece of paper and pick the lowest one ever time (which is optimal a frightening amount of the time)

Don't worry almost all the stages have the exact same ceiling and distance from the ledge. Halberd is the only notable exception of having a low ceiling and Kongo Jungle 64 is the only notable exception of having a high ceiling. The others vary either not at all or so little in Town and City's case that it's not really going to matter as much as the other features of the stage.

 

[popsofctown]

Duck Hunt doesn't have a blast zone that's very close to the ledge? It seems to to me.

 

[Piford]

Duck Hunt doesn't have a blast zone that's very close to the ledge? It seems to to me.

Nope from center stage it'd actually be the farther since the only stage longer than Duck Hunt you'd likely see legal is Wuhu Island. At the ledge it's the same as every other stage except Kongo Jungle 64, which is larger. The camera in Duck Hunt makes you perceive the side blastzones as being close when in fact they are not.

 

[popsofctown]

Well I'm happy to hear that. My local monthly bans halberd and has 2 stage bans so there should be some non-blastzone factors going on.

 

[Pazx]

Your local monthly bans halberd? That's a shame for your entire scene.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Well I'm happy to hear that. My local monthly bans halberd

whyyyyy

 

[Firefoxx]

This is the ruleset Aftershock, "the culmination of the Winter Aftershock circuit" is using

*2 Stock, 6 Minute games
* Starter Stages: Final Destination, Battlefield, Smashville
*Striking will be performed in a 1-1 manner, first strike is determined by RPS
*Counterpick Stages: Town and City, Halberd, Kongo Jungle 64, Duck Hunt
* Each Player gets one stage ban
* Modified Daves Stupid Rule: A player cannot go back to the stage he last won on in the set

Ally and Zero are going to this.

 

[Piford]

What happened to the philosophy of we are only going to ban things that actually break the game and deserve to be banned. Like honestly people pull out the most BS reasons to ban stages, and most seem either uneducated, hasty, or not willing to try new things. Honestly at this point, I think Smashville is actually going to be the only stage kept legal when I hear complaints about Battlefield (you can fall through it and the underside is weird, obviously not reasons to ban it but people think it is). Like suck it up and stop making exceptions to your ban criteria based off what you want. Like "Oh you can fall though Battlefield it should be banned" and "we can't ban smashville just because you can fall through it" should not be said by the same person. I feel like most of the reckless banning actually resulted from the Wuhu Island glitch since it seemed before that that people were willing to actually have a bunch of stages legal, Now if you want anything besides Smashville you get deemed a scrub or stupid or casual or whatever. Like honestly were supposed to try and give players the most amount of options not the least.

 

[webbedspace]

Did they decide Delfino's blast lines were finally too wacky to live? Or maybe to exclude it as an anti-Diddy measure, in which a Halberd ban forces Meta-Kong to settle for Town and City? (If anything, that'd explain Kongo being rescued from the dustbin as an anti-Diddy counterpick, maybe.)

 

[The Stoopid Unikorn]

I think Smashville is actually going to be the only stage kept legal

inb4 it also gets banned because of the balloon

 

[The_Jiggernaut]

This is the ruleset Aftershock, "the culmination of the Winter Aftershock circuit" is using

*2 Stock, 6 Minute games
* Starter Stages: Final Destination, Battlefield, Smashville
*Striking will be performed in a 1-1 manner, first strike is determined by RPS
*Counterpick Stages: Town and City, Halberd, Kongo Jungle 64, Duck Hunt
* Each Player gets one stage ban
* Modified Daves Stupid Rule: A player cannot go back to the stage he last won on in the set

Ally and Zero are going to this.

I can't believe there's going to be a big tournament with LESS stage than Apex. This is really baffling to me. It has no touring stages whatsoever, which really shunts the meta in a very specific direction. (towards Diddy and away from a lot of otherwise viable characters)

Striking from 3 starters is an absolute joke. The player to strike second gets a rather extreme advantage, and in most cases it becomes equivalent to the winner of a Rock Paper Scissors match simply picking the starter stage. Striking from 3,7,11 have problems with the player to go second having an advantage, but the advantage they have in 3 is extremely large.

 

[Firefoxx]

I think its a combination of the Wuhu Island glitch, early apathy towards Smash 4 from a lot of popular smash people (just last week at Winter Brawl D1 said that his ideal tournament would run Omegas only), the fact that Smashville is in the game, and this weird obsession with combos (which brings along with it a hatred for all stage elements that might detract from the sanctity of the almighty combo.)

Edit: Like the arguments you hear against Lylat and Duck Hunt revolve around the tilt and the dog respectively. Its always mentioned that the tilt and the dog can interrupt gameplay by causing a character to stop what they are doing. The underlying fear is that people will escape combos with the help of the stage and we can't let that happen because combos = hype and hype = Melee will love/respect us or something.

 

[Plain Yogurt]

So when are Yoshi's Story, Dream Land 64, and Pokemon Stadium finally going to get banned? Oh and might as well ban Fountain of Dreams too since its platforms move.

 

[Funen1]

This spawns a bit from my lack of experience with social media lol, but is there any testimony from the TOs or other prominent members in the local community that might've been involved with making this tournament regarding why they only included these stages and set up these particular rules? Don't get me wrong, I agree that the decision to only have 3 starters and exclude the other 6 commonly talked about legal stages was a bad one, but I'm not keen on deriding their choices for a particular reason and then finding out it was really for another, possibly more justifiable reason (not likely in this case IMO, but you get the idea).

On the topic of the number of stages used for striking, 7 and 11 still aren't ideal compared to a number that satisfies "4x+1", but even then you could theoretically do something like 1-1-1-2-1 striking order for 7 stages (add an extra "2-2" for 11) if you really wanted to have the first player retain a natural advantage (you still lose the "alternate between players in sets of 2" thing though). 3 doesn't even give you a chance to do that.

 

[Firefoxx]

http://smashboards.com/threads/mar-...ly-zero-socal-texas-best-arlington-tx.387430/

Tourney thread is there, one of the TO's (Im guessing) said the ruleset was not finalized but there has been no movement on that and it seems like most of the discussion in thread is 2 stock verse 3 stock.

But yeah, there was no real reason for the stage list that I could find

 

[Piford]

I think its a combination of the Wuhu Island glitch, early apathy towards Smash 4 from a lot of popular smash people (just last week at Winter Brawl D1 said that his ideal tournament would run Omegas only), the fact that Smashville is in the game, and this weird obsession with combos (which brings along with it a hatred for all stage elements that might detract from the sanctity of the almighty combo.)

Edit: Like the arguments you hear against Lylat and Duck Hunt revolve around the tilt and the dog respectively. Its always mentioned that the tilt and the dog can interrupt gameplay by causing a character to stop what they are doing. The underlying fear is that people will escape combos with the help of the stage and we can't let that happen because combos = hype and hype = Melee will love/respect us or something.

I forgot about D1 and the BANNED! video hurting a lot of stages. I remember when every singles stage was shown off people would scream BANNED! because of some reason or another.

D1 only wanting Omegas kinda shows that he really shouldn't be that influential in creating a stage list. He's a great guy and all, but I really think the "everything needs to be banned" attitude that came from what he said really hurt Smash 4 with banning of a bunch of stages (and also things like Mii Fighters).

Also the people who complain about stages messing up their combos are the exact same people who complain about how there are no combos in Smash 4 (which, lets be honest, there aren't many and none are on the scale of Melee ones). If the stage messed up your combo its usually your fault for not adjusting what's going on based on the stage. The dog popped up? Well you knew it was going to happen work around that. You could possibly even extend combos using elements of different stages.

 

[Firefoxx]

I forgot about D1 and the BANNED! video hurting a lot of stages. I remember when every singles stage was shown off people would scream BANNED! because of some reason or another.

D1 only wanting Omegas kinda shows that he really shouldn't be that influential in creating a stage list. He's a great guy and all, but I really think the "everything needs to be banned" attitude that came from what he said really hurt Smash 4 with banning of a bunch of stages (and also things like Mii Fighters).

Also the people who complain about stages messing up their combos are the exact same people who complain about how there are no combos in Smash 4 (which, lets be honest, there aren't many and none are on the scale of Melee ones). If the stage messed up your combo its usually your fault for not adjusting what's going on based on the stage. The dog popped up? Well you knew it was going to happen work around that. You could possibly even extend combos using elements of different stages.

Yeah his Smash 4 commentary has improved dramatically since Apex, but it really sucks that he has such a big voice in the community and uses it in some of the ways that he does.

 

[Linkshot]

If I had to ever legit defend removing Smashville from the starter's list, I'd say that it gives too large of an advantage to the already Diddy-tier Sheik. If she starts a fAir string while the platform is ahead of her, it's pretty much a 0-death just because the platform lets her carry you to the blastzone.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

So I found out why you should ban Windy Hill Zone. My opponent was recovering, and out of nowhere, the spring came from the side of the screen and spiked him. I have a recording, if anyone is interested in converting and uploading it. It's like... ****. That's like the line on Pictochat, except even worse.

Testing on Yoshi's Island so far has been relatively fruitful. I can't find anything wrong with the stage. Like, at all. It's awesome.

 

[FEFIZ]

Town and City, Halberd, Windy Hill Zone if your TO is crazy like me. :D

And for 3DS stages? Legal stages for me in 3DS is just Final Destination, Battlefield, Yoshi's and Prism Tower, this last as a counter pick legal stage. All the blastzones are the same in this 4 stages?

 

[19_]

Do you guys want to know something hilarious? Looking at the title of this thread you would think that the discussion would be about discussing how and when to use stages in competitive environments. What character is good/bad on this stage? What neat tricks can I pull off on this due to it's design? Things like that you know.

But why do that when I can do that when I can play on the simplest stage possible?
If you ever wondered why this thread is always about stage legality this is why. It's like stage knowledge is some kind of sorcery that frowned upon because the stage killed the player and not the character. I get if it has a random (RNG) element that can kill you or is easily campable but at least prove it. While your at it prove that using stage knowledge against your opponent is bad for the meta.

If Smashville, Battlefield and/or omega/FD are the only worthwhile competitive stages and the rest are going to be an after thought then why does this thread exist?

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Do you guys want to know something hilarious? Looking at the title of this thread you would think that the discussion would be about discussing how and when to use stages in competitive environments. What character is good/bad on this stage? What neat tricks can I pull off on this due to it's design? Things like that you know.

But why do that when I can do that when I can play on the simplest stage possible?
If you ever wondered why this thread is always about stage legality this is why. It's like stage knowledge is some kind of sorcery that frowned upon because the stage killed the player and not the character. I get if it has a random (RNG) element that can kill you or is easily campable but at least prove it. While your at it prove that using stage knowledge against your opponent is bad for the meta.

If Smashville, Battlefield and/or omega/FD are the only worthwhile competitive stages and the rest are going to be an after thought then why does this thread exist?

Because the people who think that are stupid, wrong, scrubby, and destroying this franchise. That's why.

 

[webbedspace]

Honestly I'd gladly welcome any brief diversion discussing which characters are advantaged/disadvantaged in specific stages. Like, I've heard that Jiggly and Little Mac both benefit from going to FD, for completely different reasons. So: who benefits the most in that matchup? Does anyone really know?