Praxis's article [at least the part that describes Smash 4 itself] reads like used toilet paper. I've already explained to various people why preconceptions people make about the game are factually incorrect - guess I'll do it again here...
For example, the Vector Influence (VI) mechanic is going to result in a lot more survivability.
FALSE[/very inconclusive]: While the new mechanic DOES increase survivability compared to no mechanic to adjust launch trajectory, it DOES NOT increase survivability relative to a non-64 baseline. If we look to Smsah 64, sure it increases survivability - SO DOES DI! People seem to forget that DI is VERY often used to survive that Fox usmash for 10 more percent on your life (or more, I don't know exact percents), that CCing in Melee + DI (Which was possibly) could add in excess of 30% more on your lifespan (see a Jiggs true-CC a Fox usmash at 90% - imagine TAS survivability with CCing + DI). Directional Influence ALREADY increased survivability by reducing the relevant vector components of flight that determined if you died or not - the new "vector influence" [or what I prefer calling "Distance Influence" abbreviated "DI"
] does the EXACT SAME THING.
The ONLY difference is that you directly affect the vector, which people somehow assumes makes it more effective than Melee/Brawl DI. This MAY be true, but there is FAR too little testing to determine if this is actually true or not, and as such, the claim is of dubious value and the reasoning behind it is utter bullcrap.
The buffing of many recoveries and removal of edgehogging creates a game where you can chase people very deep offstage, but you can’t stop someone from getting back if you fail to kill them with the initial chase.
That's like saying you can't KO Falco in Melee if Doc's bair doesn't KO him with the initial bair - I've seen some footage where Doc gets Falco's initial phantasm with bair, and Falco's DI is good enough that he can just phantasm again, but Doc can bair again (ledge-cancel dropzone yay!) and get the gimp.
Also proven incorrect if anyone has seen Nairo fighting - sure Zelda looks to be VERY difficult to gimp (I'm sure people are in the lab on it already), but I've seen him stage-spike more than a few Fox/other characters with Lightning Kicks, and if he sourspots I've seen him regrab ledge and drop off to try again - you can definitely KO if you miss the initial chase, but unlike in Melee, missing the initial chase while your opponent gets back doesn't usually mean ramen noodles.
But VI is worse in another aspect- it creates (from the attacker’s perspective) inconsistent knockback. People can end up anywhere within a radius after being hit.
I swear he doesn't understand what DI (of Melee/Brawl) actually is... or else he doesn't get what a radius is... Melee allows for angle adjustment, which means you can end up anywhere within a radius (or I guess a certain distance) in Melee/Brawl too. MAYBE he was trying to state that there are more possible places to end up, but that's the point of chasing them down - a person had to be chased down in Melee, and at least half of those places mean your opponent has to chase less far - just like tech chasing where you can roll away ["VI" away], but you can also roll in or stand straight up. And "VI" in is like CC DI in, your opponent may overshoot you.
His arguments about airdodging are ok, but he hasn't gone the next step that all good Brawl players have to take - it becomes a mental bait-and-punish game - if you always airdodge you WILL eat punishment for it, and if you airdodge too close to the ground, say hello to offense's good friend lag-from-a-defensive-option. I know in Brawl I've landed several followups merely by altering whether I attack right away after an attack or if I just follow them, guessing that they'll airdodge and timing the attack to him them afterwards - similarly if people spaced around a Samus/Peach instant nair they would have better success "comboing" her, which is what many of the best Melee players already do.
The “rage mechanic” is poor game design; it’s made for rubber banding. It means that the player who is “losing” has better kill options and can suddenly turn the tide. For newer players who may be used to party games like Mario Kart, or board games, this might sound like a good thing, but it is definitely not in a competitive game. In a fighting game, the winning player should have an advantage that he can use to press his opponent. The losing player has to then take riskier options that will either get him back in the game or end the game very quickly... If the better player cannot consistently win because of this, the game should not be considered competitive. Fortunately, Rage is fairly weak in effect.
[I think I got a little redundant here but whatever]
The first part is fundamentally not true - rage has been shown to do very little, it's not gonna net you a KO on your opponent at 70% unless you already have strong KO potential - Praxis is using hyperbole to its fullest by vastly overestimating the shown effects of rage and overestimating how effective "VI" is when "VI"'s effects are unknown relative to DI and the Rage effect (from a few videos I've seen) appears slight. He notes it at the end, which is merely a clever way to write an article such that people note the perceived downsides of rage without realizing that it doesn't do much, if anything.
More importantly, he misses the (in my opinion) obvious implication [which I realized when I heard about it immediately] - this is designed to reward offensive play by making at least part of your KO potential "Use it or lose it" without substantially buffing you for being at high percents - so the loser has a slight reason to go on the offensive while down, instead of sitting in shield and trying to tack on damage before dying to a KO throw at 200% (which Praxis has already stated he wants to avoid because it's slow) - in other words it encourages those riskier options because they are more likely to get him back in the game, but given what's shown, this isn't a starman, it's more like a mushroom - it can give you a boost, but you yourself still have to be within striking distance for it to really matter.
The rage mechanic has another effect - it means two players at high percents do not need as strong a finishing blow to score a KO, which means that fears that games will drag on are less likely because players will need less commitment to score KOs (Falco bair might be a better KO move, or something), meaning players then have strong incentives to go on the offensive, with a use-it-or-lose-it buff and the ability to look for a safer KO move thanks to the rage [if they don't start hunting, and they make one mistake, their opponent could get the KO and they have to work harder than when they were at high percent to KO - meaning it actually makes the person who gets the KO have a more decisive lead than they otherwise would, since they potentially just made some moves that might KO them not do so, and encourages even MORE risk-taking by players up a full stock, since then getting a two-stock lead [or a win] becomes easier with rage]. This mechanic would seem to reward aggression when your back is to the wall, which was stated to be a good thing.
Not having rage is like being handicapped for being down, so it's only rubber-banding if you think percent lead should always have the advantage - but I think a Fox at 70% has an advantage over a Puff at 65% on Yoshi's Story if they are in neutral, despite the percents [it doesn't do enough to truly rubber-band someone]. And it's been shown to be rather effective - Lucario in Brawl is often willing to take risk at high percents because the payoff is HUGE compared to low percents, and he's already in the redzone - the same logic should apply here.
ALSO, you could avoid this with early KOs/gimps - it adds another layer of strategy in how you go about KOing opponents, except it applies to everyone now, not just Lucario.
The new ledge invincibility mechanics are also interesting, and favor the person in peril; the person returning to the stage will snap with invincibility, while the person chasing will not have invincibility. That is because invincibility is determined by airtime. This seems like a negative change to offstage game, however, it is likely a worthy tradeoff to rid the game of planking.
The person chasing would get i-frames if they chased offstage far enough, no? If this is false, someone tell me, but otherwise this would stop ramen noodles but wouldn't actually stop the chaser from getting a few i-frames if they fail. Glad he noted that it eliminates planking. He does however fail to note that the "snap" is noticeably smaller than in Brawl.
The mechanics of Vector Influence and Rage both contribute tomaking knockback inconsistent. (Note: I don’t mean “random”- I mean that the player attacking will be unable to know the amount of knockback his attack will have as so many variables effect it, including ones his opponent controls.) Making knockback inconsistent completely changes the appraisal of the game if it becomes hard to know when a move transitions in to a kill move. Often times, you won’t know if an upsmash is enough to finish your opponent. Adding inconsistency makes the game worse at high level play, even if it’s not random.
LOL game's not out in NA and and he's expecting people to know KO percents. People learned KO percents in Melee and Brawl by assuming perfect DI and testing them - the same thing will happen in Smash 4 with 0% on you and perfect "VI", and if people feel the need to, they can test it with rage too - it might be more numbers to memorize, but if people actually care to know if their attack will kill, they'll find out. [It may also be that someone figures out a simple formula that equates rage to percent reduction in KO percents, which would make this easier - I don't know if it will, but it's possible.]
The fact that he would make this statement is in my opinion fairly pathetic - is he unaware of how KO percents were determined in the other games???
Blurring the lines of a player’s capabilities in any given situation reduces the depth of the interaction between the players
They're only blurred if you don't do your homework - your sentiment is like me being salty that Falcon's knee didn't KO at 80% because they were playing as Bowser. I didn't do my homework and didn't use it close enough to the blastline, so of course it won't KO. Once people learn the KO percents that assume maximum survivability by the opponent (perfect "VI") this problem will vanish.
You will not be able to set up in to kills, and instead rely on fishing for them.
Doesn't understand that some characters have real setups for certain situations - Falco had SHDL -> BDACUS on a landing character, because they either airdodged into the BDACUS or ate two lasers and had insufficient time to airdodge, MK had uair -> shuttleloop high up, where either uair KO'd or airdodge frame trap KO'd, and dair gimps where you either ate a dair and died off the side or airdodged and were too low to recover, Pikachu had QAC lock -> Thunder2, ZSS had stuff with her whip... also in the current game there is Jiggs utilt rest, and any of the jab locks (Pikachu, Mario off the top of my head) into a smash attack. C'mon, don't spread misinformation. KO setups were harder in Brawl than Melee, but they by no means didn't exist. And Melee had situations where one had to fish for KOs too (Peach above 120%? Good luck Marth, if she's SDIing dancing blade you can start fishing or get her to like 190% before you'll get a KO).
However, both the Rage and VI mechanics have a fairly small effect on total knockback, particularly Rage. Since the mechanics are not overly pronounced, they should not be game-breaking (and there are other fighting games with similar mechanics to Rage that have remained competitive, including Tekken and Marvel vs Capcom 3), and it would be unfair to write the game off because of these. The steps forward of fixing planking
Incomplete paragraph that is staged strategically directly below a large header - that's either very poor formatting or attempting to dismiss counterarguments [which also exclude the ones I wrote above before even reading this part...].
Praxis is not giving Smash 4 a balanced analysis here (I'm not doing that either, but Praxis already did all the work on one side, I'm merely catching the other side back up - if someone wanted my opinion with no outside influence I'd probably say some of what Praxis has said as well).
You are going to see people making very big leaps to justify mechanics that are poor
Not as big as your leaps to label acceptable mechanics poor - unbalanced analyses like these irritate me because they act like there's only one side to the debate - if there's one thing I can state unequivocally, there is NEVER only one side to a debate, especially about something subjective like a video game.
Also he tries to make a claim that begs the question by assuming the mechanics he attacked are poor and using that as a reason to attack someone else's explanation for their acceptability by stating that they are already known to be poor. That's a logical fallacy and biased writing right there.
This will lead to new players perceiving Melee players as rude, particularly on Smashboards
Some will get this undeservedly, but he's acting like there are no rude Melee players. That's empirically denied.
There’s a fair case to objectively describe Melee as the best game in the series
Does not understand what the word objectively means. Best is ALWAYS a matter of opinion (as I will detail and give a few examples of below).
From every aspect of competitive game design, Melee is a better game
Airdodging that induces helplessness is not necessarily or objectively better game design. Neither is crouch-cancelling, and as for L-cancelling... don't get me started on L-cancelling [I've written very long posts about that elsewhere]. That's a small selection of reasons this is objectively false (Definitional incorrectness will make things objectively false). As one more kicker, he's assuming in this statement that games skewed to offensive play makes for a better competitive game - that's not objectively true, even if it is true for many people [that would be called subjectively true], and it makes his argument fall apart [and any reasons cited to why it would be true are matters of opinion, therefore they are subjective, not objective, which means I'm still objectively [from a definition standpoint] correct, like it or not].
Subjective.
There are no real rushdown characters
Play FOW and/or Nairo's Meta Knight and get back to me on that, mkay? You can play a defensive MK against them, but at the very top, that just doesn't work well (Zero showed us that at Apex 2014, and he put on one heck of a show).
And don't get me wrong, Nairo does use some defensive options, but they are very strategically used, much like a Fox's defensive options in Melee (not that he has tons, but whatever). It's just that Nairo seems to favor offense much more, and it works.
Try not to be too mean to them. When someone tells you how Rage is a great mechanic and says “God forbid your opponent has a chance to turn the tide on you,” reply nicely. They will perceive you as arrogant otherwise.
At this point he's just trying to provoke people. But I'll oblige him: "GOD FORBID YOUR OPPONENT HAS A CHANCE TO TURN THE TIDE ON YOU!!!" I'm not saying I agree with Rage, or that I think it's a great mechanic, but it would correct for other things he seems to think are failing [namely the untested KO percents and severe stale move negation that no one seems to like]... and I've cited above why I think his analysis is inaccurate at best.
There are already threads on Smashboards claiming that Smash 4 pessimists are “ruining it” for everyone else.
That's like saying we shouldn't call people out for making doom-and-gloom predictions despite there being factually inaccurate/nonfalsifiable claims present or insufficient data to back it up.
*rereads article*
Wait... oh I see what he did there. Clever.
Like Brawl, Smash 4 will have an emphasis on walking over running, because there is no movement option out of run.
It's called a jump. Also some aerials seem to be safer on shield, and you can always land behind them... there's now not a risk of tripping 2 feet in front of someone's shield. Also dash -> shield -> shield drop can often get you very close, even if not at the ideal range.
Smash 4 will definitely improve with time, but it’s going to improve on a similar schedule to Brawl. The game is not going to magically turn in to Melee. Game length is already much longer than early Brawl games.
That's because people tried to play Brawl like Melee (and didn't know about hitstun cancelling) while people are trying to play Smash 4 like Brawl - if Smash 4 had come out after Melee, it would be very likely that the games would be shorter because people would be trying to do Melee stuff in Smash 4, not Brawl stuff.
This is a result of coming out after Brawl and not Melee, not a result of Smash 4 necessarily lending itself to games longer than Brawl.
Also I don't even care, the game IS too young to judge (not out in NA) - and I have an easy deadline - the first major national, Apex. Until then, regional strategies might not see each other, so we won't know what really works and what doesn't - once that occurs we can start to lay stuff down (I think a tier list prior is premature, but a tier list shortly after Apex would be good timing).
I want to put a special shoutout here for Hungrybox, who I remember cheering on Brawl grand finals at Apex 2010 while other Melee players left. Hungrybox heavily contributed to me personally eventually becoming involved with the Melee scene in addition to Brawl and Project M. I doubt he even remembers me being at that tournament, but it had a lasting effect.
If you want Smash 4 players to appreciate Melee, be like Hungrybox.
LOL Here's a direct quote form Hungrybox, circa 2012:
F*ck Brawl.
Do a u-substitution: * = u.
I appreciate the effort and didn't know Hbox did that in 2010. It's a shame he kinda gave up on that attitude and switched to crapping on Brawl when he did commentary [although him of all people I understand... Jigglypuff fell so far...].
Since I'm curious what he'll have to say to me about all this:
@
Praxis
