What are your opinions on Customs Post-Evo 2015?

[ぱみゅ]

And so... what exactly went wrong at EVO?

 

[Jiggly]

And so... what exactly went wrong at EVO?

Apparantly customs *shrug*


I thought EVO was great, and customs were fine.

 

[Myed]

Obviously the three DLCers don't. Mac's Flaming Lunge is a situationally passable recovery mixup, but given the negligible practicality of Straight Lunge, it's a useful option. Grounding Blow is alright as well, and Guard Breaker's super armor can make a handful of edge guards less effective. I also hear there are some benefits to picking other counters, but I've never really tested them very much.

They were included to indicate that even those of us who use characters who literally can't benefit from customs still support allowing them.

Dash Counter adds another recovery when your opponent is edgeguarding and helps with projectile spam, Tornado Uppercut adds an slightly better recovery instead of a risky move that was rarely used anyway. The other 3 not mentioned are pretty ****, but 5 usable customs is a lot more than other characters (Jiggs)

 

[jet56]

im sorry, but being a mac main, up b combos with down tilt, jab, up tilt, and down throw. it kills relatively fast, a little higher recovery for almost no damage or knockback is not worth it. the compact counter isn't a good enough combo tool, the only 2 useful tools are the 2 neutral, and the 3 counter

 

[Jiggly]

Dash Counter adds another recovery when your opponent is edgeguarding and helps with projectile spam, Tornado Uppercut adds an slightly better recovery instead of a risky move that was rarely used anyway. The other 3 not mentioned are pretty ****, but 5 usable customs is a lot more than other characters (Jiggs)

Jigglypuff has ummm... Hyper voice and... Pound blitz. Even sideways pound is okay in some matchups. I'll wakie wakie and spin phony? Ugh, who am I kidding...

 

[Dr. Bread]

And so... what exactly went wrong at EVO?

evo
thats what went wrong.
honestly the main thing that got my goat was just the villagers. just watching the matches made me want to cry.

 

[Steelballray]

And so... what exactly went wrong at EVO?

Be fair. No wrong would have occurred if customs weren't involved either. And there doesn't have to be something seriously wrong. If the majority of people think of them as no good, whether we are talking compatitive or enjoyment wise, it would be pretty natural for them to want them out.

 

[Raijinken]

Dash Counter adds another recovery when your opponent is edgeguarding and helps with projectile spam, Tornado Uppercut adds an slightly better recovery instead of a risky move that was rarely used anyway. The other 3 not mentioned are pretty ****, but 5 usable customs is a lot more than other characters (Jiggs)

I tried to see some use for Tornado Uppercut, but really wasn't convinced it was worth the very slight recovery boost, when...

im sorry, but being a mac main, up b combos with down tilt, jab, up tilt, and down throw. it kills relatively fast, a little higher recovery for almost no damage or knockback is not worth it. the compact counter isn't a good enough combo tool, the only 2 useful tools are the 2 neutral, and the 3 counter

Essentially this. The default Uppercut is a great move for all but recovering.

Jigglypuff has ummm... Hyper voice and... Pound blitz. Even sideways pound is okay in some matchups. I'll wakie wakie and spin phony? Ugh, who am I kidding...

I personally like Pound Blitz (and Sideways probably works well enough against fastfallers), and could maybe see the pass-through Rollout as a situational recovery mixup (more reliably than default, anyway). At least all three of her Up B moves are of comparable [lack of] strength.

Be fair. No wrong would have occurred if customs weren't involved either. And there doesn't have to be something seriously wrong. If the majority of people think of them as no good, whether we are talking compatitive or enjoyment wise, it would be pretty natural for them to want them out.

But that majority opinion should only hold weight if it's backed in competitive reasoning. No matter how many people I know that don't use customs, or hate defensive characters/playstyles, or hate traveling stages, or hate Sheik, there has to be a legitimate competitive reason to exclude them. The majority of my Smash circle utterly despises Sheik and neither enjoys playing as nor against her. Ban?

If you exclude things on such shallow reasoning as taste or laziness, it's not a competitive ruleset, it's pandering to the mob.

 

[Steelballray]

I don't know about that. Customs arent a stage or a character. Its a new feature that people don't feel obligated to care about all that much. Characters and stages are much more sacred to people than customs will ever be.
Edit: (I made a post at the end of last page mentioning few reasons why people don't feel obligated to them. Check it? :3 )

 

[Zorcey]

I still think the main reason Customs are not in common use is because of top players having a disdain for them, rather than most player being unfamiliar. The most tactical thing the pro-Customs crowd can do at this point is convince Nairo or Zero that Customs give Smash 4 something that no previous, and perhaps no future Smash game can offer. Not to say it'll ever happen.

 

[Steelballray]

I still think the main reason Customs are not in common use is because of top players having a disdain for them, rather than most player being unfamiliar. The most tactical thing the pro-Customs crowd can do at this point is convince Nairo or Zero that Customs give Smash 4 something that no previous, and perhaps no future Smash game can offer. Not to say it'll ever happen.

I don't know about Nairo but Zero showed in many occasions that he hate them. Also he's the guy who went ape **** because in his opinion Lucario is too janky or something, do you think his opinion would be objective about customs?

 

[ZeGlasses!]

I don't like customs because I feel they unbalance and over-centralize the game. I know, they aren't winning tournaments and they were almost none at top 8 EVO, but that doesn't mean they don't have problems. Kong Cyclone, Trip Sapling, and Heavy Skull Bash are all definitely beatable, but the whole match is centered around fighting and dodging this one move. Characters become one-dimensional and it's bad for the game. Some characters genuinely improve from customs, like Kirby, Ganondorf, and Palutena. But there's still a crapload of customs that are overpowered or just useless.

And here's a personal argument I know I'm gonna get **** thrown at me for, but I understand why and I actually encourage you to give me your opinions:

I feel that the ruleset is unfair for a lot of the characters that don't benefit from customs at all. Characters like DK and Palutena shoot way the hell up when given access to customs, and already strong characters like Diddy and Villager become even stronger. In contrast, notably underwhelming characters like Little Mac, Zelda, or Jigglypuff do not benefit from customs at all, and are actually made even worse because of the stronger tools they have to fight against. It's also unfair to the DLC characters, since they outright have no customs at all.

A majority of the customs in this game are outright useless, making a couple weak characters braindead and stupid powerful and already powerful characters even more stronger.

 

[Steelballray]

I don't like customs because I feel they unbalance and over-centralize the game. I know, they aren't winning tournaments and they were almost none at top 8 EVO, but that doesn't mean they don't have problems. Kong Cyclone, Trip Sapling, and Heavy Skull Bash are all definitely beatable, but the whole match is centered around fighting and dodging this one move. Characters become one-dimensional and it's bad for the game. Some characters genuinely improve from customs, like Kirby, Ganondorf, and Palutena. But there's still a crapload of customs that are overpowered or just useless.

And here's a personal argument I know I'm gonna get **** thrown at me for, but I understand why and I actually encourage you to give me your opinions:

I feel that the ruleset is unfair for a lot of the characters that don't benefit from customs at all. Characters like DK and Palutena shoot way the hell up when given access to customs, and already strong characters like Diddy and Villager become even stronger. In contrast, notably underwhelming characters like Little Mac, Zelda, or Jigglypuff do not benefit from customs at all, and are actually made even worse because of the stronger tools they have to fight against. It's also unfair to the DLC characters, since they outright have no customs at all.

A majority of the customs in this game are outright useless, making a couple weak characters braindead and stupid powerful and already powerful characters even more stronger.

Calling them braindead is a tad stretching it. Maybe its the case with villager and DK to a degree but Kirby and ganon won't be taking your stocks 0 to death by spamming customs.

 

[SoniCraft]

Calling them braindead is a tad stretching it. Maybe its the case with villager and DK to a degree but Kirby and ganon won't be taking your stocks 0 to death by spamming customs.

And neither should any character in this game with customs on. The only reason people can't beat these "overcentralizing, overpowered" customs is because people don't take the time to learn how to deal with them. If you don't educate yourself, how can you expect to perform well against these seemingly strong moves? The same goes for anything in default. Luigi Cyclone, Bouncing Fish, Flip Kick, Lloid Rocket, REGULAR Timber(remember when everybody kept getting hit by it? That doesn't happen anymore.), Spin Dash, and MANY others. We haven't banned the use of any of these moves because we all know that they aren't TOO strong. Similarly, if we just learn more about certain custom moves and learn strategies to deal with them, they will not seem NEARLY as bad as they first were.

If you can't beat a DK who literally just spams Kong Cyclone, then you clearly haven't taken the time to research the move and practice against it, so I think you deserve to lose. Why are so many people against customs? BECAUSE NONE OF THEM WANT TO TAKE THE TIME TO LEARN THEM.

 

[ぱみゅ]

So, nothing really went wrong, nothing bad happened during the tournament, logistics was solved easily, every potential gameplay problem wasn't present with proper counterplay, and there is no good reason to drop the Customs meta completely, but we still do.

Did I miss something?

 

[Rizen]

My objections to customs in tournaments are that they make the gameplay centralize around a few powerful exploits rather than good fundamental gameplay, they take an unreasonable amount of time to unlock, the make the game less balanced overall and they make setup for tourneys take longer.

Powerful exploits:
Let me start by saying if you played Brawl with anyone lower than a high tier you know how annoying this kind of thing can be. Take Wolf for example, an otherwise viable character who gets screwed by chain grabs. The DDD MU is -3 for Wolf purely because DDD's grab game. Even really good Wolfs like Kain have trouble getting past it; there simply isn't a good way to combat them with certain characters. CGs were often 0-death.
Fortunately in SSB4 the creators learned from Brawl's powerful exploits or "jank" and removed chain grabs and other things like ledge mechanics which allowed planking, etc. Try playing most characters vs a planking Meta Knight in Brawl; it was so bad that special rules reducing the times MK could grab the ledge were made. I think everyone generally agrees SSB4 is the best balanced smash game with most characters being able to potentially win or place top 8 in tournaments. This is largely because SSB4 is less janky than Brawl. Sheik and pre-patch Diddy were nowhere near as bad as Brawl's MK was. Customs brings the jank back.
Look at villager's customs (trip sapling+exploding balloons); the return of planking. This isn't to say it can't be beat but I am saying it will dominate most games because planking puts the opponent at a disadvantage and gives villager an easy reset at every ledge. Going to a ledge, usually a bad tactic because it gives away stage control, becomes an easy reset that can be rinsed and repeated. Many characters will take a lot of damage getting around this and then villager can run to the other ledge or scrooge under the stage and do it again.
With SSB4's mechanics of Dthrow>Uair>upB-esk combos customs can lead to 0-death setups. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJcIxv_QukE (Hoo-Haw anyone?)
Also you have to consider that customs when used with a competitive mindset are very hard to punish but easy to use. Seagull Joe (not a DK player) basically trolled Average Joe, a good DK player by showing DK's custom upB is better than fundamental gameplay and beat him in dittos at a tournament:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yynXqx03VY&feature=youtu.be
He proved his point about customs being powerful exploits the game will revolve around.
Top players don't dislike customs because they don't know how to use them. Top player dislike customs because they know customs better than anyone and how the competitive mindset is about exploiting the opponent as much as possible safely. Customs will make fundamentals less prevalent and spamming dominant.

Time to unlock.
I see people calling others who complain about unlocking customs lazy and think: have you unlocked every custom move? I have and my solo gameplay time is 101 hours. Playing classic, allstar, target blast, trophy rush, etc with every character (I did beat other challenges too). 101 hours is longer than it took me to beat Final Fantasy 10 the first time. I know you can use a turbo controller on target blast with Ganon but that requires a person buy a turbo controller. And what about 3DS players?
It takes a few hours at most to unlock every stage and character but dozens of hours to unlock every custom. Unlocking time is a legit complaint.

Less balanced:
I know people say "Sheik is already jank" but that's no reason to add more jank. Try using a low tier and chasing down DK's whirling cyclone; it's hard. The added jank only moves a few characters up because they can exploit jank. For every character moved up another must move down. Giving some character, many who are high tiers, exploits makes the characters who have bad MUs vs them in vanilla smash have even worse MUs. After the sorting is settled out the bad characters in customs will be less viable than without them. Sure customs raise characters like Wii Fit Trainer by jank like sweeping sun saturation and jumbo hoops but they make characters without jank customs have a worse time.

Longer setups:
Anytime you add more setup steps it takes longer. In less populated regions where people bring wii Us they might not have every custom unlocked.

___________________________________________________
Customs are very fun, don't get me wrong. I enjoy them. But they're not the way to go for tournaments. This is why casual players like them but tournament players don't. Use them in friendlies and smashfests but don't force them in tournaments.

 

[blackghost]

Watching how this is going I'm getting this vibe people are okay with DEFAULT moves being spammed for kills but when a custom move is good and used its "jank." Luigi down b is heavily spamed, shiek bouncing fish, boost kickand others are hevily used for kill moves but this is all ok because they are default moves. Again this is what i'm getting from this thread currently. I just don't understand why more moves is in any way bad for the community and for the health of the game. I've seen people use every argument under the sun: keep game simpler, easier to practice default, my personal character is worse in customs (which is a statement no one can prove yet), i dont like them and people even argue with BLATANT tournament results: EVO had three villager yes only one was a stal playstyle and 0 DKs in top 32 no other competitive community i'm part of has ever tried to convince itself that a character/move that failed to perform at a major is still OP.
Honestly
i'm just getting tired of ridiculous argments and them being accepted in large by the community.
And lastly my (sarcasm) favorite argument is look at X custom move its so powerful lets ban all 300 moves! (looking at everyone using counter timber as an execuse to ban customs. Custom villager has zero major tournment wins and only one local win that i'm aware of and that local win came when the top 4 players at the local weren't there.
The most irritating fact in the custom debate is the fact that the moves haven't been tried in a large scale and yet people act like the moves are OP when they dont even understand them. Or maybe people truly are ok with smash 4 being dominated by a select few characters as well (because like it or not thats the direction the game is going look at the data for character selection)

 

[SoniCraft]

My objections to customs in tournaments are that they make the gameplay centralize around a few powerful exploits rather than good fundamental gameplay, they take an unreasonable amount of time to unlock, the make the game less balanced overall and they make setup for tourneys take longer.

Powerful exploits:
Let me start by saying if you played Brawl with anyone lower than a high tier you know how annoying this kind of thing can be. Take Wolf for example, an otherwise viable character who gets screwed by chain grabs. The DDD MU is -3 for Wolf purely because DDD's grab game. Even really good Wolfs like Kain have trouble getting past it; there simply isn't a good way to combat them with certain characters. CGs were often 0-death.
Fortunately in SSB4 the creators learned from Brawl's powerful exploits or "jank" and removed chain grabs and other things like ledge mechanics which allowed planking, etc. Try playing most characters vs a planking Meta Knight in Brawl; it was so bad that special rules reducing the times MK could grab the ledge were made. I think everyone generally agrees SSB4 is the best balanced smash game with most characters being able to potentially win or place top 8 in tournaments. This is largely because SSB4 is less janky than Brawl. Sheik and pre-patch Diddy were nowhere near as bad as Brawl's MK was. Customs brings the jank back.
Look at villager's customs (trip sapling+exploding balloons); the return of planking. This isn't to say it can't be beat but I am saying it will dominate most games because planking puts the opponent at a disadvantage and gives villager an easy reset at every ledge. Going to a ledge, usually a bad tactic because it gives away stage control, becomes an easy reset that can be rinsed and repeated. Many characters will take a lot of damage getting around this and then villager can run to the other ledge or scrooge under the stage and do it again.
With SSB4's mechanics of Dthrow>Uair>upB-esk combos customs can lead to 0-death setups. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJcIxv_QukE (Hoo-Haw anyone?)
Also you have to consider that customs when used with a competitive mindset are very hard to punish but easy to use. Seagull Joe (not a DK player) basically trolled Average Joe, a good DK player by showing DK's custom upB is better than fundamental gameplay and beat him in dittos at a tournament:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yynXqx03VY&feature=youtu.be
He proved his point about customs being powerful exploits the game will revolve around.
Top players don't dislike customs because they don't know how to use them. Top player dislike customs because they know customs better than anyone and how the competitive mindset is about exploiting the opponent as much as possible safely. Customs will make fundamentals less prevalent and spamming dominant.

Time to unlock.
I see people calling others who complain about unlocking customs lazy and think: have you unlocked every custom move? I have and my solo gameplay time is 101 hours. Playing classic, allstar, target blast, trophy rush, etc with every character (I did beat other challenges too). 101 hours is longer than it took me to beat Final Fantasy 10 the first time. I know you can use a turbo controller on target blast with Ganon but that requires a person buy a turbo controller. And what about 3DS players?
It takes a few hours at most to unlock every stage and character but dozens of hours to unlock every custom. Unlocking time is a legit complaint.

Less balanced:
I know people say "Sheik is already jank" but that's no reason to add more jank. Try using a low tier and chasing down DK's whirling cyclone; it's hard. The added jank only moves a few characters up because they can exploit jank. For every character moved up another must move down. Giving some character, many who are high tiers, exploits makes the characters who have bad MUs vs them in vanilla smash have even worse MUs. After the sorting is settled out the bad characters in customs will be less viable than without them. Sure customs raise characters like Wii Fit Trainer by jank like sweeping sun saturation and jumbo hoops but they make characters without jank customs have a worse time.

Longer setups:
Anytime you add more setup steps it takes longer. In less populated regions where people bring wii Us they might not have every custom unlocked.

___________________________________________________
Customs are very fun, don't get me wrong. I enjoy them. But they're not the way to go for tournaments. This is why casual players like them but tournament players don't. Use them in friendlies and smashfests but don't force them in tournaments.

All these "exploits" you keep talking about are only exploits because people don't know how to properly deal with them. By your logic, I could call Sonic's use of Spin Dash an exploit because I have an incredibly hard time dealing with it. I mean, how are you supposed to catch up with it when it just zooms right past you? Shielding is useless, and you can't really grab it. What am I supposed to do?

Of course, I'm feigning ignorance because by now many people know that you can clank or hit Sonic out of his Spin Dash with many moves, so it's not REALLY as "exploitable" as some people would like to believe. The same goes for custom moves. Kong Cyclone seems like a move that is unpunishable and impossible to avoid, but this is simply false. Even if you're hit by the first hit, you can airdodge before the second hit, so you only took like 3%. You can also just shield it and nothing bad will happen. As for punishing it, if you know he's going to a platform in order to platform cancel the endlag, then go to where you know he'll be, and you will be able to punish him for it. It's not an exploit if you know how to properly combat it.

I'll have you know I unlocked all the custom moves on my 3DS, and I am fully capable of transferring any set I want to my Wii U because of that. Saying 101 hours is more time than a FF run doesn't mean much if you just look at how much time people will invest in the game other than Solo Mode.

The game is obviously more balanced with customs On because more characters become viable. Pushing a character from non-viability to viability is a much bigger deal than the top tiers getting little boosts to their moveset(one exception I'll say is HSB). Characters who had very hard MUs against top tiers suddenly get options that allow them to deal with them more effectively. If this isn't better game balance, I don't know what is.

 

[Rizen]

All these "exploits" you keep talking about are only exploits because people don't know how to properly deal with them.

It always comes back to this soundbite. "Top players who played at custom tournaments and don't like customs don't know how to deal with them".

Well, I said my piece. Believe what you want. I'm gone.

 

[Ninj4pikachu]

What happened to the "why not both" idea that was floating around here? This way the anti-customs can be whiny and lazy and the pro-custom people can be spammy and cheap. If both were represented at tournaments then we get bigger events, more to do, I'd pay to do both.

I don't want to force anyone to use customs... This way we have our cake and eat it too!...

 

[Raijinken]

I don't like customs because I feel they unbalance and over-centralize the game. I know, they aren't winning tournaments and they were almost none at top 8 EVO, but that doesn't mean they don't have problems. Kong Cyclone, Trip Sapling, and Heavy Skull Bash are all definitely beatable, but the whole match is centered around fighting and dodging this one move. Characters become one-dimensional and it's bad for the game. Some characters genuinely improve from customs, like Kirby, Ganondorf, and Palutena. But there's still a crapload of customs that are overpowered or just useless.

And here's a personal argument I know I'm gonna get **** thrown at me for, but I understand why and I actually encourage you to give me your opinions:

I feel that the ruleset is unfair for a lot of the characters that don't benefit from customs at all. Characters like DK and Palutena shoot way the hell up when given access to customs, and already strong characters like Diddy and Villager become even stronger. In contrast, notably underwhelming characters like Little Mac, Zelda, or Jigglypuff do not benefit from customs at all, and are actually made even worse because of the stronger tools they have to fight against. It's also unfair to the DLC characters, since they outright have no customs at all.

A majority of the customs in this game are outright useless, making a couple weak characters braindead and stupid powerful and already powerful characters even more stronger.

I think the lack of results at EVO goes strongly against any flat statement of "overpowered."
That aside, I think a lot of this is still mis-placing blame on custom specials. Trip Sapling is annoying, but compared to the banana which you must absolutely not get hit by else suffer a grab (and before the nerfs, a near-death combo or guaranteed confirm), not an issue, and it even has drawbacks (can't be moved, loses several of Villager's kill moves). Kong Cyclone is annoying, but on top of having less effective on-stage applications than the default, its low number of hitboxes make it easy to grab through and punish. Heavy Skull Bash is harder to defend compared to the default garbage that is Skull Bash, but compared to Sheik's easy confirms for Bouncing Fish? The power is comparable, and the executional difficulty is comparable, but only one takes the blame, and it's the custom one.

As far as the ruleset's fairness: This will happen no matter how you set the rules. Someone gets screwed. In a non-customs meta, it's people like Samus or Ganondorf whose innate properties and normals are functionally garbage. In a customs meta, a lot of people call the characters who can't/don't benefit from customs the losers. The ruleset determines the winners and losers, and that's not unique to moves. If you banned Smashville from competitive play (comparable degrees of logical twisting would have to go into that), Sheik would be hurt by that, and other characters would benefit from her reduced power.

And of course, any braindead play gets rekt, including but not limited to Kong Cyclone, Plankager, and HSB Pikachu. Personally, I greatly enjoyed the free wins that stemmed from my DK main friend spamming Kong Cyclone (the move does essentially zero shield damage and if you don't land it just right you're a sitting duck).

It's really hard to defend Villager, but you don't amputate from the neck down when one finger is bleeding. That said, I still think we could tweak other rules to discourage planking, whether we do that through edge grab limits or by tweaking tiebreaker rules away from percent lead.

My objections to customs in tournaments are that they make the gameplay centralize around a few powerful exploits rather than good fundamental gameplay, they take an unreasonable amount of time to unlock, the make the game less balanced overall and they make setup for tourneys take longer.

Powerful exploits:
Let me start by saying if you played Brawl with anyone lower than a high tier you know how annoying this kind of thing can be. Take Wolf for example, an otherwise viable character who gets screwed by chain grabs. The DDD MU is -3 for Wolf purely because DDD's grab game. Even really good Wolfs like Kain have trouble getting past it; there simply isn't a good way to combat them with certain characters. CGs were often 0-death.
Fortunately in SSB4 the creators learned from Brawl's powerful exploits or "jank" and removed chain grabs and other things like ledge mechanics which allowed planking, etc. Try playing most characters vs a planking Meta Knight in Brawl; it was so bad that special rules reducing the times MK could grab the ledge were made. I think everyone generally agrees SSB4 is the best balanced smash game with most characters being able to potentially win or place top 8 in tournaments. This is largely because SSB4 is less janky than Brawl. Sheik and pre-patch Diddy were nowhere near as bad as Brawl's MK was. Customs brings the jank back.
Look at villager's customs (trip sapling+exploding balloons); the return of planking. This isn't to say it can't be beat but I am saying it will dominate most games because planking puts the opponent at a disadvantage and gives villager an easy reset at every ledge. Going to a ledge, usually a bad tactic because it gives away stage control, becomes an easy reset that can be rinsed and repeated. Many characters will take a lot of damage getting around this and then villager can run to the other ledge or scrooge under the stage and do it again.
With SSB4's mechanics of Dthrow>Uair>upB-esk combos customs can lead to 0-death setups. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJcIxv_QukE (Hoo-Haw anyone?)
Also you have to consider that customs when used with a competitive mindset are very hard to punish but easy to use. Seagull Joe (not a DK player) basically trolled Average Joe, a good DK player by showing DK's custom upB is better than fundamental gameplay and beat him in dittos at a tournament:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yynXqx03VY&feature=youtu.be
He proved his point about customs being powerful exploits the game will revolve around.
Top players don't dislike customs because they don't know how to use them. Top player dislike customs because they know customs better than anyone and how the competitive mindset is about exploiting the opponent as much as possible safely. Customs will make fundamentals less prevalent and spamming dominant.

Time to unlock.
I see people calling others who complain about unlocking customs lazy and think: have you unlocked every custom move? I have and my solo gameplay time is 101 hours. Playing classic, allstar, target blast, trophy rush, etc with every character (I did beat other challenges too). 101 hours is longer than it took me to beat Final Fantasy 10 the first time. I know you can use a turbo controller on target blast with Ganon but that requires a person buy a turbo controller. And what about 3DS players?
It takes a few hours at most to unlock every stage and character but dozens of hours to unlock every custom. Unlocking time is a legit complaint.

Less balanced:
I know people say "Sheik is already jank" but that's no reason to add more jank. Try using a low tier and chasing down DK's whirling cyclone; it's hard. The added jank only moves a few characters up because they can exploit jank. For every character moved up another must move down. Giving some character, many who are high tiers, exploits makes the characters who have bad MUs vs them in vanilla smash have even worse MUs. After the sorting is settled out the bad characters in customs will be less viable than without them. Sure customs raise characters like Wii Fit Trainer by jank like sweeping sun saturation and jumbo hoops but they make characters without jank customs have a worse time.

Longer setups:
Anytime you add more setup steps it takes longer. In less populated regions where people bring wii Us they might not have every custom unlocked.

___________________________________________________
Customs are very fun, don't get me wrong. I enjoy them. But they're not the way to go for tournaments. This is why casual players like them but tournament players don't. Use them in friendlies and smashfests but don't force them in tournaments.

I thank you for enumerating your feelings on the matter. However, allow me to make a few counterpoints:

Powerful Exploits: To the "HooHaw". Look at any game Nairo plays as Zamus. SKTAR4 especially. Dthrow -> uair -> repeat a few times -> Boost Kick to kill. Completely default, some characters just have this option.
Kong Cyclone, again, is laughably punishable and weak in all non-windbox regards. It's nearly useless on the ground or against grabs of any sort. That said, if you've the "standard Smash mindset" of forgetting windboxes exist until you get killed by one (and then inevitably call it jank), it would be very easy to ignore good fundamentals and rush into the armored windbox as if it was a standard low-startup move. This is just like running into Mac's smashes, except against Mac, we blame the player, not the move. In that video, BOTH players were doing little but trying to out-jank each other. I wonder whether Nairo or Zero would win a Falcon Punch-only fight?
Regardless, if these customs would lead to such clear dominance, then there is no excuse for them to have gone largely unused in the top end of EVO. If you go that far and won't use your "best option," with nothing like "honor" or "reputation" to lose and lots of money to gain, can it really be called the best option?

Time to unlock: Unlock times in Smash4 are uniquely short compared to Brawl, and Melee. Not only that, but it takes one person per community to give everyone access to the EVO moveset. Players who want specifics can use the fairly well-known "pick the character you want to unlock for" strategy to get the moves they want or need. Most people don't use more than a handful of characters. And 3DS players can do the same thing Wii players can: Classic and Trophy Rush.
Lesser-known option, any time you're not using your Wii U, turn on Smash Run and let it idle. Each interaction period will eventually time out, giving you passive customs without doing anything but restarting the mode after each completion. Slow, but entirely passive, and costs no more than the console and game.

Less Balanced: If I were to play, say, Samus against Wonky Kong, my solution to Wind Kong is to not chase. It's armored, not invincible, and I have no reason whatsoever to approach DK when I can rack his damage while he's whirling around. When he eventually approaches, he either does so with standard moves (which will come with their standard pros and cons against whichever low tier character), or he does so with a copter, gets shield grabbed and punished.
Even playing Marth (whose customs are rather tame), or Roy (who has none), against Villager I will always lack approach options, against DK I will always have to beware of armor and his reach, and against Pikachu I'll always have to be worried about being comboed and safely edgeguarded.

Longer setups: The setup is one click after a brief scroll. If that sort of setup is holding your tournament back, you probably need to ban color swapping and require players to share controllers, too, so you don't have to spend the moments it takes to switch. If you meant the time to put the moveset project on each console, I'm sure if my small tournament at which I was the only fully-unlocked player was able to end with every console having the full moveset project, then unless you're seriously aching for more consoles to begin with (I had a 3:1 playeronsole ratio) and can't afford to set aside one console at a time for custom importing, then, again, you have other issues than custom setups.

Also, for such small communities, it's more than feasible to ask players which moves they need, and just add those. I did that at my tournament to get all the setups play-ready (let's be real, even if everyone at a tournament was using customs, you still won't have all 51 customs-able characters represented), and filled in the rest between friendlies (had at least one dedicated setup for friendlies at any given time). By the end of the tournament, every setup was loaded, a few had someone's non-project set for Lucina, and it didn't take away from tournament runtime at all.

 

[Steelballray]

What happened to the "why not both" idea that was floating around here? This way the anti-customs can be whiny and lazy and the pro-custom people can be spammy and cheap. If both were represented at tournaments then we get bigger events, more to do, I'd pay to do both.

I don't want to force anyone to use customs... This way we have our cake and eat it too!...

I dont know. Do you think the metagames are different enough to warrnet for such a thing?

 

[Raijinken]

I dont know. Do you think the metagames are different enough to warrnet for such a thing?

I will jump in and answer a question that wasn't directed at me.

I think they're different enough to warrant it, in the same way that I think League and Dota are different enough to coexist. I think League's just a watered down version of Dota (with the inverse of Customs vs Not's issue, in League you've gotta grind for your watered down heroes champions), but I can understand that the difference in mechanics, balance paradigms, and whatnot can create a different appeal (I know some people who play and enjoy both). I don't think I'd bother playing non-customs if customs were run alongside (unless I somehow became good enough to viably consider competing for a living, and thus want the extra money from the extra entry), but I'd take coexistence over extinction any day.

 

[Ninj4pikachu]

I dont know. Do you think the metagames are different enough to warrnet for such a thing?

Haha according to you and the other anti-tiers they are wildly different than standard play. If they were similar you guys wouldn't be complaining in the first place...

I just don't see why we can't do both. My local scene does both and we have a blast.

 

[Raijinken]

Haha according to you and the other anti-tiers they are wildly different than standard play. If they were similar you guys wouldn't be complaining in the first place...

I just don't see why we can't do both. My local scene does both and we have a blast.

Man I wish I lived in Texas instead of NC (not really, I like getting snow from time to time).

Last time I tried debating customs with NC's players, I got so fed up with them I rage quit our discussion group. Scared to bring it back up (not like it really matters since I'm a solid hour or more from all major population centers in the state).

 

[Ninj4pikachu]

Man I wish I lived in Texas instead of NC (not really, I like getting snow from time to time).

Last time I tried debating customs with NC's players, I got so fed up with them I rage quit our discussion group. Scared to bring it back up (not like it really matters since I'm a solid hour or more from all major population centers in the state).

That's unfortunate. It must really suck not to have any kind of custom scene there. We here in Texas tend to be opinionated and play however we want.

 

[SoniCraft]

Yeah it's looking pretty grim for SC as well. I'm pretty sure we haven't even run a single custom tournament, and we're already completely dismissing custom moves.

 

[Ninj4pikachu]

Yeah it's looking pretty grim for SC as well. I'm pretty sure we haven't even run a single custom tournament, and we're already completely dismissing custom moves.

Damn I didn't know customs were this widely ignored elsewhere... You guys should try and set somthing up

 

[Raijinken]

Damn I didn't know customs were this widely ignored elsewhere... You guys should try and set somthing up

While I know we have no right to talk when compared to Texas, NCers (at least, maybe SCers too) aren't that fond of long drives to events. I know most of NC's events are in Greensboro, Charlotte, and Raleigh. And even knowing that, I saw a post recently saying "With Raleigh running low on events"... so even if there were enough interest to justify the venue and advertising, our players just aren't that interested. Someone in our own scene spent a good while ranting about how our scene is so casual and hardly anyone travels to compete. He was right, in some ways. If only online tournaments "counted."

 

[oldkingcroz]

New Mexico is looking like it's gonna follow in Texas's footsteps ( ~1/2 of the top 25 players use customs here. Lots of custom Rosalinas/ Sheiks, but we've got some dedicated pro-custom Palutinas, Ikes, Yoshi, Mega Men, DK, and the like). Different game styles in different months might just be the way to go.

One of our TOs is pushing for Paragon's rule set, but it's honestly an insane rule set. 2 stock, 7 stages, no customs, no Miis*, no gentlemaning, no wireless controllers, ugh...

 

[|RK|]

I really don't see another big tournament happening with customs allowed.

 

[blackghost]

New Mexico is looking like it's gonna follow in Texas's footsteps ( ~1/2 of the top 25 players use customs here. Lots of custom Rosalinas/ Sheiks, but we've got some dedicated pro-custom Palutinas, Ikes, Yoshi, Mega Men, DK, and the like). Different game styles in different months might just be the way to go.

One of our TOs is pushing for Paragon's rule set, but it's honestly an insane rule set. 2 stock, 7 stages, no customs, no Miis*, no gentlemaning, no wireless controllers, ugh...

Is that TO one of the poeple trying to sell the BS "miis aren't real characters"?
That ruleset sounds awful. on a side note what customs do the yoshis run?

 

[Zorcey]

what customs do the yoshis run?

There should be a "Customs Project" thread in the Yoshi Boards with this information. Try looking there.

 

[Steelballray]

Haha according to you and the other anti-tiers they are wildly different than standard play. If they were similar you guys wouldn't be complaining in the first place...

I just don't see why we can't do both. My local scene does both and we have a blast.

I would complain regardless because I don't want counterpicking with customs to be a thing. And my question was legit. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic or anything.

Its just that if a major had both someone like ZeRo would just compete and take the money for that anyway without using customs. I know he does the same with doubles but doubles require an additional set of skills to be able to compete in. Of course customs do require that you know them and get used to them but thats negligible in my opinion compared to doubles.

Yeah, my main point is that customs aren't different enough to warrant for something like that, even the top ten in customs are the same in default.

EDIT: @ Raijinken The amount of effort a League player needs to put to get into Dota is much larger than the amount a Default player needs to put to compete in customs. The top players in Default are the same Customs after all, and all they seem like they are required to do is KNOW the customs they are going to be facing. I could even say adapting to whatever move you didn't know of beforehand while playing the match isn't all that difficult.
I am just nitpicking tho, I think I'll definitely be voting yes if the poll of whether there should be two separate events was presented.

Why not make a thread for that by the way? Its sounds like a really good question all things considered. It might even be what you need to promote that customs didn't come from Spam-B-To-Win Hell like many people seem to believe.

I think I don't mind the idea of customs all that much after all. I'll be borrowing my friends turbo controller and unlock them and try them properly as soon as I can.

 

[Ninj4pikachu]

I would complain regardless because I don't want counterpicking with customs to be a thing. And my question was legit. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic or anything.

Its just that if a major had both someone like ZeRo would just compete and take the money for that anyway without using customs. I know he does the same with doubles but doubles require an additional set of skills to be able to compete in. Of course customs do require that you know them and get used to them but thats negligible in my opinion compared to doubles.

Yeah, my main point is that customs aren't different enough to warrant for something like that, even the top ten in customs are the same in default.

You make excellent points, but they don't matter. There could be a competition for who can throw blind folded ducks the furthest and if people want it, it will happen, it doesnt have to make sense. Customs will come or go dependent on how people feel, not by whether they are logical or not.

You could say the same thing about the different distance events in track: "the 100m hurdles and the 300m hurdles are too similar." It's all about public opinion and a lot of people think customs are fun. My scene does tournaments and they use customs because they want to.
At EVO the TO's wanted customs so low and behold they had customs.

Bottom line: as long there are people who conduct custom tournaments and advertise it, there will always be two metas (however small the customs meta may become).

 

[Steelballray]

You make excellent points, but they don't matter. There could be a competition for who can throw blind folded ducks the furthest and if people want it, it will happen, it doesnt have to make sense. Customs will come or go dependent on how people feel, not by whether they are logical or not.

You could say the same thing about the different distance events in track: "the 100m hurdles and the 300m hurdles are too similar." It's all about public opinion and a lot of people think customs are fun. My scene does tournaments and they use customs because they want to.
At EVO the TO's wanted customs so low and behold they had customs.

Bottom line: as long there are people who conduct custom tournaments and advertise it, there will always be two metas (however small the customs meta may become).

I don't think it's THAT simple. I don't think TOs will bother making a side event that the same characters and players in the main event are going to be winning. The 100m hurdles and 300m hurdles only LOOK similar. The muscles you have to be training to compete in each are different, so I don't think this compression of yours is all that valid.

Here's a question: do you think players in a customs side event should be required to use customs or not?

 

[C0rvus]

Top players don't seem to want customs, they are a logistical hurdle for players and TOs, and they have to be unlocked and set up in a tedious manner. The theme with the way the meta seems to be going has been out of comfort. People don't question the 2 stock meta, top players want the most conservative stage list possible. Face it, without an impending major pushing custom moves, most people don't want to deal with them. I was surprised by the majority vote to get rid of them at my local. Call them jank or whatever, but it's odd that we are so quick to ignore this cool new feature. But it makes sense, most players don't want to try new things, they want to play it safe. That's how Smash 4 tends to be; safety reigns supreme.

 

[MistressRemilia]

I think that for now, we should try to have customs tours, where 2 players have to agree on the usage of custom moves so they can use it. If one of the two players doesn't want to deal with that for a matter of knowledge or something, that's fine.
Let all players enough time to adapt to most customs, then decide something. We must take it slowly & hope for the best.

 

[Dr. Bread]

honestly "people dont like it because its different/new/change" is one of the most tiring things to hear on the planet. we should take criticism seriously, particularly criticisms about things that divide the community, or make it harder to organize events.

 

[Teh Sandwich]

Opinion before Evo: "ok, let's try customs. I don't really care either way"

After Evo: "the only thing customs add to this game is a headache, for TOs and players" this game is better off (competitively) without customs.