Hiya. I don't want to derail anything, but I just wanted to share some opinions with BBrawl.
First of all, maybe you remember me as High Dragoon from the Pokemon gamefaqs boards Ampharos.
Anywho, I had the chance to play BBrawl with my Game Studies club the other day. There were maybe 30 people there with all but the winner switching out. People had a lot of fun and we saw new characters like Bowser and Ganondorf winning (Might I say, when it comes to BBrawl Bowser is my new secondary. You made him awesome)
But we all noticed something. Link. If one detail was broken, it was Link. His Arrows work well in the beginning and the knock back is great. But then at later parts in the game, like when the enemy has 100%, it becomes a little OP. Suddenly the arrows turn into long-ranged smash attacks. My friend put it nicely when he said "it wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so fast"
Also, any chance you can create alternate .gct files later on that DO freeze some stages, or at least provide the option of freezing stages? Personally, I don't understand the point of removing the bottom layer of spear pillar while still retaining the crazy stage hazards.
One last thing. Any chance you can improve Lucario's Double Team? Marth and Ike have no lag between the activation of their counter and the actual move itself. Lucario does. Nothing pisses me off more than when I execute what I THOUGHT was a well-timed double team, only to be knocked out of the stage while hearing the double team sound effect. I activated the move before the opponent KOed me, but the move didn't occur fast enough.
Thanks for your input. Allow me to address this.
It's good to hear about diverse winners.
As per Link, here's the idea. When Link is off-stage, it's really easy for basically any other character to kill him. His recovery is just terrible, as in really terrible, and it's not changed in Balanced Brawl. His arrows are supposed to give him some way to "return the favor", as it were, when the situation is reversed. We have actually received some fairly mixed feedback on this in terms of the positive/negative; it's interesting. Some people, like your group, find it jarring and overpowering. Others seem to find ways to avoid it pretty easily, some of them going so far as to suggest that a non-resolution to the "Link can't jump" issue is a problem this doesn't fix. There's a third group that seems to not have a problem with the arrows and thinks Link is well-balanced of course... Design wise, for the next version, the diverse opinions on these arrows will be interesting. I would say though that you should be mindful that there are certainly options against them as evidenced by if nothing else the different ways they seem to affect different players.
I have a lot to say about stages (I really don't get to talk about them enough) so I'm coming back to that later in the post.
Some moves are just bad ideas. The best example here is actually Jigglypuff's Sing. It's a pretty terrible move that has not been improved in Balanced Brawl, and it probably won't be. The thing is that right now it's basically a non-force in the game (since it's so bad), but if it were good, what would that mean? It would mean that the move that disables your opponent completely would be a substantial part of the game and that that AT where you chain Sing together would be a non-novelty and actually a credible way to run the clock and all sorts of other horrible stuff. Double Team isn't as badly designed as Sing by a long shot, and we actually did try to improve it early in development before we discovered the way it's coded is kinda dumb and the move is generally unwilling to be sped up. Implementation woes aside, it's probably fair to say that Lucario really doesn't need much out of this move, and I'm not sure if Lucario having a solid countering move is necessarily a good thing. However, it sounds like you're finding non-traditional uses for it that don't work on any assumption of actually hitting with the attack, so maybe it's fine anyway and just has a different use from the immediately apparent one? Sometimes that's how moves work out, that the main use isn't the obvious use (like the main use of Yoshi's Egg Roll is momentum canceling, not actually rolling into the opponent). It's not a bad thing. Even if that doesn't come into play, making all moves useful isn't a top priority so, if the greater good calls for it, terrible moves sometimes just need to stay terrible.
My response to stages is long and contained below:
The idea here is to make the stages more fair. Something like a laser on Spear Pillar isn't really unfair. It has a huge, telegraphed start-up, can hit all players and does so with no discrimination, and offers opportunities for strategic play in terms of forcing others into it or keeping up an offense while avoiding it or whatever. Spear Pillar lasers are also pretty far from instant death so getting hit every once in a while (essentially always due to your own mistakes) is hardly the end-all of the match. Of course, many stages don't test that sort of skill (for instance, Smashville does not test it), but I think it's pretty good for the game (and obviously a part of "Sakurai's vision") to have stages that do. I really wish I could have tweaked Spear Pillar more in the last version and hope to do so for this version (specifically, I'd like to lower the bottom of the stage via some advanced trickery while keeping the walkable lower area gone, and I'd like to weaken some of Cresselia's attacks which are probably more powerful than the game's interests are served by them being).
On the other hand, something like a hard loop is just stage ruining. When doing the design for some of these stages, we went forward with a philosophy that we should design with an assumption that all players play to win at all times regardless or how nasty, unpleasant, or boring the tactics are. On Spear Pillar in standard Brawl, the best tactic is to pick a character that runs fast (like Sonic), fight to get any sort of lead (like a 10% lead in Sonic vs Bowser let's say), and then literally run circles around the stage and away from your opponent until time runs out. We are aware not all players will do this, but here's how I looked at it at least. If both players are willing to use such tactics, the game is awful and degenerate and not interesting and the only solution is not to play on that stage. If neither player does, there's no problem but the result isn't meaningful either since neither player is really pushing very hard to win. However, the kicker is that if one player does and one player does not, the player who does is virtually guaranteed to win and the actions of the other player in the game are just completely irrelevant. That is way worse than any stage hazard could ever be; it makes the game super lame (no one is having fun that way) and it destroys all competition (no one can feel proud about winning like that). Given the drastic negatives of loop stages, our perspective on them basically was "literally any change is an improvement (neutral at worst) because this stage might as well not have been in the game before". We've received a bit of flak for this (especially on Temple actually) which shows what different ways people look at things, but I think that, especially as our tools improve and we can make the sort of smoothing changes that are amenable to everyone, our approach will make the best game stage-wise.
My problem with frozen stages is that a lot of people seem to have this "misconception" as it were that somehow stages as a whole are improved by being non-interactive and such and that in the end all any good competitive player wants is some flat stage maybe with a few platforms. Of course the game has a few stages like that, and I have nothing against them, but I suppose I can say I just don't trust the community enough on this point that, given a no effort either way choice between playing on diverse, interesting stages and making a bunch of stages really similar to each other that they'd chose for the better here (the same way, for the official Bbrawl build, we don't really trust people to make their own changes to characters). Of course, this is an open project so anyone can use our .txt based code to compile their own .gct with whatever alternate changes they want, be it frozen Pokemon Stadium 2 or splitting up the Pokemon Trainer or whatever.
I suppose I can end the long explanation about stages by saying that part of the character design focused around them too. For instance, the fact that Sonic has a great back throw for killing off walk-off stages and is generally effective at forcing opponents into stage hazards was definitely considered when making him.
The jab change seems a bit iffy, to be honest.
Jab combos, like most combos in this game, aren't supposed to be actual combos --rather, they're supposed to be strings.
The "standard" flow of Jabs goes something like:
Jab1-->Jab2--> Choose one:
Jab 3
Mix-up with any other Attack option
Shield
Grab
Spotdodge
Wait
--variants of Wait:Shorthop, Fullhop, Foxtrot/Run/Walk, etc, etc)
and so on.
The interaction between options here is really very rich and interesting; it's a big part of why boxing is so fun and challenging. The interactions are made even more complex by SDI which allows for some interesting spacing-based counter-options (and, of course, options that can be used against those counter-options).
For most characters, there is a really nice tension between the various mix-up options available after Jab2; however, there are certain characters that, if they were changed and given the ability to do so, will always choose to use a "popping" Jab3 over any other option, because resetting spacing and getting their opponent away from them is rewarding enough that it isn't worth taking the risk inherent in choosing any of their other available mix-up options. As things exist now, those characters are denied guaranteed access to their most tempting option (the Jab3 that knocks the opponent away), thus forcing them to expand their mix-up game and utilize their other options. This creates a Yomi situation with a nice tension: they are always looking to use that "popping" Jab3, but they know that you know that and they know that you can counter the Jab3, so they might try to punish your counter instead; thus resulting in a nice little game of weighted-RPS at the end of every successful Jab string rather than just a mindless spacing reset.
Removing that from any character, especially on jabs that knock your opponent away, seems like a bad idea. (At least rapid jabs can potentially still be SDI-ed and punished, but any jab that "pops" your opponent away doesn't even allow for that simple counter-option.) A guaranteed "pop" jab combo is basically a zero-interaction situation that is just an automatic spacing reset button; too much of that will make the boxing game more shallow overall, and in the case of characters like Olimar/ZSS/Snake it is incredibly risky for balance reasons.
Of course, there are already "popping" Jab combos in this game that are guaranteed, but it is important to acknowledge that such Jab combos have an enormous impact on boxing. Lucas, for example, has a guaranteed(?) "pop" Jab combo, and, while it is amazingly good and it completely changes the boxing dynamic in all of his match-ups, it is acceptable that it completely dominates his other boxing options because he is one of very few characters designed this way and the overall character was designed with that level of boxing power in mind. His boxing game is heavily skewed towards Jab3 and Spotdodge, but that is perfectly fine since his overall character design is balanced around it.
Obviously, there's nothing wrong with a bit of diversity by having characters deviate from the "standard" boxing model I outlined at the beginning of this post. There should be as much diversity in boxing as there is in any other element of the game. (i.e., Recovery, killing power, speed, etc.) Having oddballs like Lucas, Pikachu, ZSS, Samus, and Marth certainly makes the game better; however, characters who stick to the "standard" boxing style are just as important and their boxing dynamics should also be preserved.
I can see some merit in the argument that it helps "smooth" out the game, but I don't know if that carries enough weight to make up for the very real impact such a change could have on the boxing metagame.
Whatever you decide, please be fully aware that changing how various Jab combos behave is much more than a simple cosmetic change. The change to Donkey Kong's Jab combo, a change that seems to have been made fairly lightly, has had a very real impact on his boxing game vs. Fox and has changed the dynamics of CQC in the DK vs. Fox match-up in a very non-trivial way, although I don't think it has skewed the overall match-up too much. However, going forward, I hope that you strongly consider the ramifications of these changes on boxing dynamics so that no undesirable repercussions arise in match-ups where the boxing balance is crucial to maintaining overall match-up balance.
Oh, we're fully aware of the potential implications of that (to be honest, no decisions on that regard have been made). I think you underestimate the depth fully linking jab combos have. Let's start with the simple statement that, in standard Brawl, there are 37 non-single hit jab combos (obviously the single hit jabs of Zelda and Ganon aren't interesting and will from here on out be ignored). So, of those 37, 23 of them link fully "enough" (that is, they link either fully or into a rapid jab sequence that itself may fail at some point). That means only 14 jab combos have such issues, and some of them obviously don't play in depth's favor. The real thing Snake wants to do out of jab is jab1 -> ftilt1 -> ftilt2. That does a very large amount of damage and knockback and is way better than jab1 -> jab2 -> jab3 all around, especially since we made his jab3 weaker (since him having a killing jab was kinda ridiculous even in principle). The reality here is that Snake's "boxing" game out of jab1 basically consists of always wanting to go for ftilts if you want to attack at all because the minor guaranteed damage of jab2 is nowhere near worth the lesser advantage, and jab2 -> jab3 is way harder to land than jab1 -> ftilt1 anyway. Given that Snake may be a character needing some changing anyway, wouldn't an overall change package that includes a linking jab2 -> jab3 probably increases the depth of this game by basically adding an option to the mix?
Then you have Charizard and King Dedede who fail to link after jab1 meaning their jab cancel games themselves are rather poor anyway and really they just have pretty lousy jabs. They play around it by just using dtilt and grab respectively in the situations in which one might jab. While it's not something to be taken lightly, them having at least something here is a direction that potentially has some gain for the game.
The real highlight of a situation that really makes me want to put in some changes on this front is what Mit was saying about Captain Falcon (that agrees with everything I've seen). Nominally, he actually can link all the way to jab3, but he doesn't link to rapid jab or really get much of anything good at all out of that jab3. Captain Falcon has interesting mix-ups with jab1 -> grab versus jab1 -> jab2 -> grab and other such gimmicks, but nowhere in any of his jab games is jab3 really a factor. Captain Falcon is also a character who has a lot of really basic things about the game working against him (like the fact that range/disjointedness is a really big deal in Brawl and that he'll have none of that); he may be the single character who most depends on strength in this "boxing" as you describe it. I see good things down the path of him having a linkable rapid jab and that aside the generally more advantageous jab3 that comes with that.
To provide a good example of deep games in this regard that didn't involve changes at all on our part, look at Luigi's jab game. Luigi has a ridiculously good jab cancel game after jab1, a passable but not special jab cancel game after jab2, and a guaranteed jab3 if he chooses to go that far (SDI aside, of course). A lot of Luigi players approach this differently, and I think a lot of the depth of Luigi's game comes from the different ways he can approach his fully linking jab combo. Jab1 -> Fire Jump Punch is a classic parlor trick that some Luigi players try to land as often as possible, but others barely go for it at all or try for the Fire Jump Punch after jab2 sometimes just because the opponent expects it less even though it's harder to land (not to mention the jab2 does a little bit of damage itself). There are grabs and tilts and such all around, and sometimes the opponent is just proving too hard to hit with any gimmicks or needs to be trained not to worry a bit so just hitting with a full jab combo is decent enough itself. The damage isn't bad, and it refreshes some stale moves well being three different moves and all.
Of course, we have other things to remember and a good example of why we ultimately playtest any change before a public release. In the original public preview, we had several Zero Suit Samus players bring up complaints about how they thought her jab2 -> jab3 should link. We were skeptical of the value of this from the start, but we ran an internal playtest of a version that did link. Thinkaman was the one who specifically ran it actually, but his report was that it was just completely awful with all that Zero Suit Samus really ever did in matches mattering a lot less and her just abusing her frame 1 jab into good mostly guaranteed damage was what started to really matter with the character. Needless to say, that version of Zero Suit Samus did not see the light of day again, and it's not really on the table to bring back that link. We definitely intend to test not just jab changes but all prospective changes before releasing anything, and ultimately it will hopefully only give more depth, not less, and will be more a matter of giving characters things they would have done better to have like most characters already had and less a matter of introducing something mindless or killing the viability of interesting play. It's definitely not a matter of just changing them all blindly, and odds are some will stay as they already are for the greater good in the end anyway (I can't say I think Olimar's changing is likely).
When I talk about jabs not linking, by the way, I'm not considering SDI just in case there was some misunderstanding. SDI out of jab combos is a universal part of the jab game in Brawl that I have absolutely zero interest in changing. I'm talking about the jabs that fail when you hold shield or the jabs that can be mashed out of with frame 1 invincible moves. In BBrawl right now, that only actually applies to 13 jab combos (Samus, Zero Suit Samus, Kirby, King Dedede, Olimar, Fox, Captain Falcon, Pikachu, Charizard, Jigglypuff, Marth, Mr. Game & Watch, Snake). Let's keep the scope of what we're talking about clear here...
* from the ground. It wouldn't change his game much. It's much like the n-air buff to Sonic. I'd approve this buff alot and it wouldn't be too dramatic.
- Razor Leaf buff (Something like they did with Link), +KB sourspot Vinewhip, An easier Kill option?