Applying Wobbles' "Local Maxima" to Marth

[A_Reverie]

For those that are out of the loop, Wobbles made a blog post titled Local Maxima in which he talks about B.E.A.S.T. 6, some Ice Climbers stuff, but I want to draw attention to the titular concept of local maxima and how it can apply

"You are blindfolded, standing on a hill. You can feel wind whipping around your face, and you gingerly put your foot out, trying to find ground to walk on. After spinning around a bit, you find a direction that is sloping upward, and you start to climb the hill.
It’s slow going, but you poke around and feel with your hands and eventually it feels like you have climbed a fair distance. Finally, you reach a point where nothing leads up, and you are at the peak of the hill. Happy, you take off your blindfold and look around to survey your progress.
It turns out that you are actually at the base of a massive mountain, and its peaks are soaring high into the clouds. Your hill, by comparison, is incredibly tiny.
Your hill can be called a “local maximum.” It’s the highest point in its immediate vicinity. Every change from your current location would be a downgrade. But if you ever want to climb the mountain, you will have to leave the hill, and you will have to go downward. If you want to go up, you have to go down.
This is, funnily enough, a problem in machine learning. A program will learn how to do something, and improve its results, and then get stuck doing something “optimal.” Because any immediate change will reduce its results, it never changes, repeating itself. However, it only found an “okay” strategy or idea and perfected it; it has to go in a much different direction to achieve truly great results. When you want a computer to do the learning for you, you need algorithms that don’t get it caught up in local maxima."

Wobbles skillfully articulates a problem I've been trying to define and work on myself. I've seen a lot of low to mid level players struggle with it across all characters, but let's look at the idea behind the way Wobbles is applying it to his character.

"Right now, most ICs will use the infinite to secure kills. They will also use styles that emphasize the grab game, to get as many of those infinites as possible. This works pretty well against a lot of people, and consequently, Ice Climbers that wobble a lot will win a lot.
Unfortunately, it seems like we’ve hit a peak. When somebody is skilled at avoiding that grab… what do we do? Well, generally speaking, we lose. Our answer is typically “we have to get better at grabbing somehow,” and despite that we are not getting that much better. In fact, certain players absolutely eviscerate us, leaving our sad ****** entrails spilling all over loser’s bracket.
We have pretty much reached the peak of that hill, but the real mountain is sitting right next to us, tall and imposing as ever before. It also makes people think that the character lacks the potential to succeed. You just have to look at how badly the best players destroy us.
The real answer, I think, is to start climbing down, so we can start climbing up.

Originally, I just wanted to avoid wobbling so I could do crazier, sillier things with my character and have more fun. Now I am actively trying to avoid thinking about it because I want to attain the skills that other players have, and apply them to my character.
One problem is that our infinite is just *too rewarding.* It skews your thoughts towards getting that next grab. Even if it doesn’t, it can make you complacent, letting you ignore certain mistakes because you’re still winning by a fair amount. It also causes you to avoid certain difficult situations, because they won’t lead to grabs, so why bother? Especially when those positions are risky!
However, this means we are ignoring facets of the game that every other player has to master. We aren’t focusing on our defensive smash DI. We aren’t focusing on the close-quarters scuffling that every Fox learns because he has a Falco for a training partner. We make lots of little technical mistakes, or simply fail to optimize them, because those don’t necessarily pertain to our grab game, and then they cost us.
In short, we are falling behind. We are falling below. Other people are climbing up the other peaks, and we are idly shuffling around, trying to find the best spot on our hill to watch them."

I think there's a lot of wisdom here that can be applied to Marth, particularly in regards to the strong grab game point he made. Marth has an incredibly strong and rewarding grab game as well, to the point where we can take stocks off of plenty of the cast with one grab and an optimal punish. But knowing this, how does this affect our approach to neutral?

This brings to mind something I believe I've heard @Dr Peepee say during some interview. He mentioned zoning, and how Marth players haven't been utilizing Marth's zoning game to its full potential. I think this is because while playing Marth, it's tempting to lean on grab game to an extent that we forego other powerful styles, and as an example I encourage you to watch Beat vs. Armada:

Beat takes a game off of Armada's Peach, which is no small feat, using a very honest neutral that revolves around zoning. I think this style can be applied to every matchup and blended with our incredible grab game to produce great results. I guess the take away from this thread should be something Wobbles mentions later in his post:

I am also trying to avoid wobbling as much as possible. If I get a grab, I intentionally convert it into a different scenario. Originally this was just for funsies, but now I think that it is, in fact, the right thing to do if I want to improve. Mind you, there is no point in truly forsaking such a strong punish game. It kills people dead. As far as punishment strategies go, it is pretty much the peak for my character, whenever it’s available. That is why this past weekend, I tried to use it as often as I could, especially in my (super close) top 8 set against Professor Pro. I am still highly competitive. I would like to win!
However, if I use it every time, particularly in tournaments and pressure situations, I’m depriving myself of the opportunity to train other skills in those situations...

We need to be training other skills to advance our character. Marth is often considered pretty optimized, but the more I see the Melee meta getting pushed, the more I disagree with this notion. Challenge yourselves to build different skills and blend other playstyles into your own.

 

[Life]

The big example in the article, wobbling, i.e. "if ICs grab you and Nana is nearby you're dead," does bear a striking resemblance to "if Marth grabs Fox and the stage is FD they're dead."

I've been doing a bit more of a zoning style myself lately, though that has less to do with pretentious pseudo-strategy and more to do with I've been playing mostly PM for the last year and a half so my Marth punishes are rusty. I used to be the opposite extreme where I DD-grabbed everything in sight and won with my punish game, so that's a bit ironic. Sword-zoning is really emotionally rewarding though, every approach you read feels good.

 

[AirFair]

This style does, in my opinion, require a lot of patience, but can be very rewarding if you don't try to grab all the time. It takes time to really get good at it.

 

[FE_Hector]

Honestly, in the context of absolutely no character at all, the "local maxima" concept is RIDICULOUSLY in how it explains the mental blocks and the mental game that is such a massive part of Melee. Given how my Falco laser theory works (I don't like shooting a lot of them), I think I may try to relate this to Falco at some point. Thanks for inspiring me!

 

[MrLasagna]

I think when a player is improving they focus on what works/doesn't work because it is a steroid and produces the maximum amount of short term gain. Over reliance on a characters strong points can leave your game underdeveloped.

Consider if Marth was a few tiers lower than he is, say because his grab range is shorter or his dash dance is shallower. Players would be forced to develop creative/interesting ways to play him, like how low tier mains are forced through adversity to make their character work.

 

[Lowell]

I'm still learning the game so concepts like this are nice. I hopefully can stop myself from ever getting stuck on the small hill.

 

[Smash G 0 D]

I think The Moon is a great example of someone who is adept at this. Sometimes it is difficult to resist the temptation to go for a long, optimized combo on a spacie off of a grab, but sometimes you've just gotta throw in a Dthrow or Fthrow and punish the missed tech. At the end of the day, it's about taking off stocks and recognizing that your opponent is human.

That said, I still think we should strive toward the capacity to pull off optimized punishes when possible. Don't give your opponent a chance to be good if you don't have to.

 

[Kopaka]

The concept of practicing other characters at times to help build other skills that could be applied to your main comes to mind. Like playing Puff for air movement, Fox for speedier L cancels, or even just to build more of an understanding of multiple characters if you have the time for that.

Those concepts in Wobbles' article are definitely great. You never want to plateau and play for short-term wins at low/low mid level because you Wobble all the time. Or not even Wobbling. Could be things like going solely for shine gimps with Fox. It takes a certain level of discipline to not go for those things in tournament though if you're so focused on that W