I knows tiers are a hot discussion point at the moment, but
@|RK| pointed out how Smash 4's inconsistency was exaggerated in the last topic. I wanted to expand further on that, but the Tier List dropped. Still, I wrote this up over the last couple of hours, and I hope it'd be an interesting subject to discuss/look at.
My interpretation on why Smash 4 has perceived consistency issues, especially in comparison to Melee. I saw and participated in a brief but civilized conversation on the matter on Melee!GameFAQs, a chill place I usually go to for following the Melee scene. Tafokints is cool. This isn't a game vs. game thing, as I adore pretty much every smash title (Super Smash Flash?
) and Melee's consistency is a good thing to put as a reference to.
Smash 4 has a few things that make it plausible for top level players to be defeated by people often considered less skilled. Rage and 2 stocks are often considered prime reasons for this, but I'd like to be fair on both accounts.
-Rage can and has led to matches being decided in abnormal ways, but this is not anywhere near as common as people perceive it to be. I can't think of too many examples where it outright threw the match in favor of the less skilled player during the set. Nairo vs. VoiD is the first thing that comes to mind, where rage seemed to determine VoiD's fate at KTAR.
-3 stocks did not prevent upsets at Clutch City Clash, where Samsora took two sets over Ally. Yes, game 5 had an SD that went negative towards Ally, but the match otherwise would've been even, and Samsora had shown full capability in the prior 6 games to outplay Ally.
The simple truth is that upsets, while possible to occur due to 2 stocks and rage, also occur for a variety of other reasons people tend not to consider. Here are some good ones:
-A lack of matchup knowledge.
-Character matchup problems.
-Personality problems that inherently lead to inconsistencies.
-Player error, mental block, etc.
-Players that cause upsets being far better than people give them credit for.
Matchup knowledge is still something that's being laid out. A lot of people find it absurd that after X amount of time some players don't understand certain matchups, but this is to be expected. If you don't play a certain matchup very much and your primary concern is a matchup that you know you'll see a lot, you'll dedicate the majority of your time to that matchup. In Melee, you're not going to practice the
matchup very much when you're going to be seeing a lot of
,
,
, and
bracket. This especially applies as a mid/low tier main, where your top priority is mastering your most difficult matchups to the best of your ability.
This means you're not going to be prepared if a very skilled player of a very uncommon character faces you in bracket. Some people are good enough to coast by or may have actual MU knowledge from study, but we see MU tank players a lot anyway.
Dabuz's Olimar has defeated a lot of people in part because Olimar is an uncommon matchup and very few good Olimars exist. Shuton doesn't travel much in Japan as far as I know, so even Japanese players might experience difficulty in the matchup. Kuro certainly did vs. Dabuz, even after cleanly beating his Rosalina.
ZeRo admits that his loss to Kamemushi was due to him not understanding the matchup. He said he wanted to play with ScAtt in the future to help rectify this because Kameme refused friendlies even after EVO was over. ZeRo is often honest about his wins or losses, so I trust he's telling the truth, and Mega Man is a character with a lot of untapped potential. ZeRo evidently
needed practice against a good one, and very few Mega Mans exist at the top level that would be suitable for practice against.
Etc, etc.
You can probably find numerous examples of either poor matchups or a lack of matchup knowledge tanking players at certain points in tournies. Ally seems to struggle against sword characters, which may reflect on Mario as a character having trouble against sword character. His high-level close calls/losses seem to include some things like:
-Games against Ned.
-A loss at CEO to a Corrin.
-A very close game with Mr. E at GOML.
...And, more obviously, Dabuz has shown to struggle against certain sword characters that are good at whacking Luma. He went 2-1 vs S2H, a Meta Knight main, indicating that even a mid-level Meta Knight can tank Rosalina if they know they ladder and play the matchup efficiently. It's as if you picked a low or bottom tier as a top level player against a high-tier. You're good, but no amount of good play can totally deter how lopsided a specific matchup can be. With 58 characters and balance superior to its predecessor, this is an inevitable reality, even for certain high-tiers.
Player error is another problem. Mr. R got 17th at EVO, a shockingly low placement for such a fantastic player who has beaten pretty much every top level player at least once. Why? He lost to Kamemushi due to a series of tech errors that led to SDs. This, in turn, can "tilt" a player, create a mental block, etc. Many players are known to be prone to this, even if it's towards one particular player or matchup. Again, just an example, but a good one nonetheless.
Tilt can lead to a snowball effect where players might not play as good as they're known to be able to even after the match is over. This is more ingrained in personality problems, but discouragement extending beyond the game you lost can hurt your playstyle and lead to you being exploited rather quickly. It's undeniable that ZeRo is afflicted by this. While I don't know if the match exists online, ZeRo vs. Salem at EVO was periscoped. ZeRo only got in top 32 because Salem made an error. He was one solid hit away from being eliminated at 33rd. This is after an expected and devastating loss to Mr. E. What happened the following day? ZeRo gets third after dominating everybody in loser's bracket until Kamemushi beat him.
Player error can also be less complex. With the ZD/Mew2King example I noted, Mew2King simply made a few dumb decisions and got punished hard for it because of the nature of had bad Luigi can gimp certain characters and how bad Cloud's recovery can be at times. This is inconsistency that's player-born, and not really reflective of the game's skill ceiling. If you play worse than your opponent or make errors that are circumstantially fatal, you lose, no matter how good you are. Mew2KIng also suffers from the "tilt" problem, probably more than any other top level player in the game's history. He is capable of defeating anybody in Melee or Smash 4, but his mindset holds him back, and he'll be much to hard on himself when he makes mistakes.
...Then, there's also upsets simply being caused by really good players. Look at the PGR. Now look at EVO's Top 32, your average Umebura results, etc. 2016 has been a breakout year. The metagame has shifted. There are people who're simply really good at the game who weren't well known previously. Samsora is PR'd 1 in Louisiana, and that's when Captain Zack, the state's #2 PR, had come out months prior to do really well against Texas. That should've been proper foreshadowing, right? Maybe not to the extent we saw, but it was at least indicative that Louisiana, despite not being known for an illustrious Smash scene, definitely has really good players.
ZeRo's losses in pools, for example, are likely partly due to his own mindset, but he also lost to people in pool finals. He's lost to Seagull Joe, Prince Ramen, Mr. E, and Day prior to top 32 brackets. These are all good players with decent track records, and all of them would likely rank somewhere in the Top 100. This doesn't mean they're on ZeRo's level, but none of them are incapable randoms with poor track records.
The comparisons to Melee are probably best made in the tech skill comparison. Smash 4 is hardly free on tech skill and it's a common misconception that it has none, and movement is still a key thing to master, but it's undeniable that it has less tech skill as a requirement.
The skill floor for Melee is insane, meaning tech error is simply more likely to happen in the lower ranks, and it's punished very harshly. This, combined with an incomparable history between the games (Sm4sh is young, Melee has been around for a long time and has had a greater time to establish itself and its players in the long term) leads to less upsets.
Another major point of comparison worth noting is that Sm4sh's upsets are somewhat exaggerated - you rarely see perceived "randoms" or mid-tier players making a gigantic splash throughout an entire tournament. Anybody in the top 15-20 of Smash 4 could conceivably take a major, whereas Melee has boiled it down to, more or less:
-Mang0
-Hungrybox
-Armada
-Leffen
-Outside chance of Mew2King
Sm4sh doesn't have the sheer dominance among its top ranks, and its top ranks are far more extensive. Any of these players could conceivably take a major, after ZeRo's dominant era finally came to a close prior to the Summer:
-ZeRo
-Ally
-Abadango
-Dabuz
-Nairo
-VoiD
-Mr. R
-Larry Lurr
-Ranai
-Mew2King
-Kamemushi
-Zinoto
-ANTi
-KEN
-Pink Fresh
-Marss
...This isn't meant to say that one game is better than the other due to having more variety (which isn't inherently good on its own), simply that top 8s and "upsets" are far more likely to occur when 20something players can all take tournies, meaning you'll have a lot of weird Winner's Quarters sets or Round 4 sets that can lead to bad brackets that throw fantastic players out at 17th or 13th even though they might've won a major two months ago. Add the other million factors I've listed, and you'll probably understand that it isn't as simple as the rulesets and game mechanics. I brought Melee into the discussion because people often use it as a comparison since it's extremely consistent.
