Crap, I wrote this last night and forgot to post it...
Like mystery gift. "Jigglypuff can now pull from a set of random items using side taunt." "O_O" That could change tons of things. It also creates this giant metagame that needs to be developed for her that involves discovering combos and whatnot that can be done from the different items, or how to combo into throwing certain powerful items for kills. That, and those smoke balls are sure to annoy any vBrawl player who wasn't a big fan of the move in the first place. I mean, something else couldn't be thought of to help her out without introducing something so huge?
So Mystery Gift is obviously the elephant in the room as far as this discussion goes. It's a very flashy "joke" change for the "joke" character of the series. It would not be close to appropriate on anyone else. (Except maybe Pichu in Melee?)
However, the reason it has stuck around isn't because it is flashy or funny or crazy. It got to stay because it legitimately helped Jigglypuff in matchups against defensive ranged characters. Honestly, in matchups against anyone else it is somewhat rare to ever pull an item out... (You are way better off pushing any time you gain a positional advantage.)
As for "creating a giant item metagame", I don't really buy that. They are items, everyone has seen them before and none of them really have a lot of depth to them. Mr. Saturn does lots of shield damage, Spring and Pitfall go through shields. Congratulations, you now know everything there is to know about Jigglypuff's toys.
Then there's other stuff like the cancel. Spacy side-B cancels and Peach Bomber cancels. They don't seem like such huge deals, but are there any other similar cancels in Brawl? Brawl seems to be devoid of cancels. Sounds like a Melee thing. When you start telling vBrawl players that these characters can cancel ending lag of moves with other moves, that's another strike in their book. "Why is that necessary?" "You can't cancel stuff in Brawl O_o" It makes the whole thing feel a lot more like it's indeed a hack and not a balance patch. Especially when you do stuff like spacey side-b -> double jump -> side-B. Were those moves so bad that that was really necessary? Or was it implemented to make the game more attractive?
First, don't fall into the trap of "the goal here is to buff bad moves and nerf good moves". We are trying to balance characters, not moves. Sometimes it makes sense to leave bad moves bad, and sometimes it even makes sense to buff already excellent moves! (For example, Ness fair is already one of the best moves in the game, but the shield damage buff on it turned out to be one of the better decisions I think.)
Back to your main point though: The primary purpose of the cancel changes, like all changes, was to improve balance. Peach, Fox, Wolf, and Falcon were almost universally in the bottom 5-8 characters in any submitted tier list for the first release. There's a number of factors for this, including underestimating the impact outside changes would have on Peach's unique playstyle and overestimating the impact of exploits being removed on fast-fallers. Peach was still pigeonholed into a spacing game that was
almost on par with the rest of the game, Fox still had fundamental approach issues, and Wolf was still showing weird matchup issues mostly due to his now worst-in-game recovery (plus feedback on his nair change wasn't positive).
General changes to Peach proved almost Zelda-style pointless, because everything in Peach's moveset already fit such rigid roles. Nothing in Fox's moveset really worked in terms of a buffed approach, and multiple experiments with shield damage proved stupid, pointless, or both. Wolf we really didn't have any options for except follow the Falcon route and start buffing random moves until he ends up a power character--there wasn't really a good way to do this while targeting problem matchups either, since unlike Falcon his issue was recovery. (If we buffed Wolf's damage and KO power up to A tier, Olimar, Jigglypuff, and a few other characters would
hate us.)
Fox's side-b cancel survived early passes because it was fun and very appropriate to his playstyle, and stuck around past that because it addressed his approach issues when nothing else had. Wolf was in the same boat, except with an emphasis on mobility/recovery. Peach Bomber cancelling actually fit into Peach's existing spacing game in a way that addressed long-range defensive characters.
Falco was a seperate issue. From the start I didn't like that Wolf and Fox were getting nearly identical changes but he was left out. However, there was no balance need or justification to make such a change in Falco. (AA was quick to point out that anything that at all enabled Falco to run away on stage better is never going to happen.) Falco had another problem though: His revamped d-throw was slightly TOO good at high %s, and I didn't like the idea of Falco being overall *more* focused on grabbing. The end solution was to tone back Falco's d-throw "buff", and give him a pale shadow of Fox/Wolf's new advantage, which addressed Falco's recovery weaknesses in some matchups without contributing to his spam game.
I hope some of that information was helpful.
Which brings me to my next point. Didn't you guys say these bonuses were being implemented to make the game more attractive to the casual viewer? [incoming argument you've heard a hundred times] These changes don't seem drastic enough to attract anyone who's playing Brawl+, Brawl-, or Project M, but they are seemingly drastic enough to turn off vBrawl players who fear that playing a lot of BBrawl will mess up their vBrawl game, which it isn't supposed to. It kind of makes it impossible to tell them it's just like vBrawl but more balanced when they see a character randomly spawning items or canceling moves.
The primary motivation has never been to be flashy. What you're talking about was the change in our position that flashy is not "evil". Again, in the first release, I considered say Ike's side-b no special fall to be somewhat shameful, like we failed to do better. After release we saw that Ike was one of our most successful characters in terms of player reception... so maybe flashy isn't always bad after all, and perhaps there are cases where one big concise change is ideal.
Again, the most important word for this release is "concise". Pretty much all of the changes are functionally independent. Fox is the most clear example of this: The only thing you have to remember to move between vBrawl and BBrawl is that you can't jump cancel side-b in vBrawl. No timing, spacing, or even damage or knockback changes. All there is, is one singular
concise change.
And man, I can't whine about that Nayru's Love enough @_@ That just screams HACK to me.
You are talking about the slide, right? I'd be glad to discuss it, what about it do you find problematic?
I think the main reason it disappoints me, is I thought you guys were doing fine with the first release. There were no crazy flashy or significant changes, and balance was significantly better overall. There were more minor changes that could be made throughout to make it even better (such as nerfing some previous overbuffs, and perhaps a few more little nerfs to some of the top characters). Some matchups were still a bit tough, but hey, isn't that what secondaries are for? Not every matchup can be 50:50, and no character had a dominant amount of poor matchups overall. Were the flashy changes really necessary?
I'm definitely proud of the first release, and I know AA is as well. However, let's look at some data:
-According to my personal opinion (in data form), the first release condensed 38 characters to a range of 12-13 vBrawl characters. (with Zelda as an outlier) That's roughly a 3x improvement in balance.
-According to average data connected from other players, it was condensed to a range of about 18. That's about a 2x improvement in balance.
-We had exhausted most of the straightforward potential for depolarizing the matchups of Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, Link, Sheik, Zelda, Ganondorf, Olimar, Fox, Wolf, Falcon, Jigglypuff, and Ike. These characters could not reasonably be improved further in terms of the matchup polarization. (Luckily some of these characters were already fine, others like Zelda...)
-Some characters had "jarring" over-buffed moves, including Yoshi, Link, Falcon, and Jigglypuff.
-For this release, my personal opinion/predictions built over the last two months currently has the cast condensed to a gap the size of 6 vBrawl characters. That's roughly a 6x improvement in balance over vBrawl, or 2x over my opinion of the first release/3x over the general opinion of the first release.
-The average impressions from other players predicts a constriction to a range of about 10. That's about a 4x improvement in balance from vBrawl, or about a 2x improvement in balance from general opinion of the first release.
I think the preliminary results speak for themselves! I keep repeating: these are not random flashy experiments made to woo Youtube, they are changes selected for precise reasons to surgically fix problem matchups where no simple solution exists. Brawl has 37 characters and 666 matchups not counting Sheik+Zelda, and I think in this release you will be very hard pressed to find a character that wouldn't be A/B tier in vBrawl nor a single matchup that is worse than 40:60.
Thanks for the post, and I hope everyone is exciting for the release!
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