There has been a bit of a debate over the use of custom made characters in Brawl+. The official WBR position is that Custom characters will never, ever, ever, EVER be a part of WBR endorsed B+. And that's fine. That is their position and they are welcome to it. However with the popularity of the new custom character utility PSA and the Clone Engine and maybe a model importer somewhere on the horizon, it seems that eventually there are going to be some very polished custom characters sometime down the line. As such, many people are interested in seeing a few of the characters who ended up on the cutting room floor put back into the game. Brawl+: Director's Cut would be a project intended to give tournament operators interested in hosting Tournies with custom characters a standard build and ruleset in which to use them.
Please note that I have no interest in beginning this project until a stable clone engine is introduced. Currently custom characters are completely unviable in tournament use due to the lack of one. Characters which require a custom model (ex. M2) will not be included until a stable model hacking engine is introduced.
There are several problems facing such a project, which the WBR are unwilling to deal with. First and foremost it seems, is balance. A character must be balanced in order to be included in the cast, and there is some concern that a new character dropped in with a couple of good matchups will upset people who suffer a poor matchup. There are a few problems with this logic. One is that in a balanced game, either each character must have a decent proportion of good and bad matchups, or all matchups must be equal. The latter is obviously not true in either vBrawl or B+, as such we must assume that balance is obtained by having a good proportion of good and bad matchups.
With such a large cast, an introduction of a select few characters after a large amount of playtesting by the public would hardly give anyone a huge advantage. vB/B+ are both games in which maining a single character is not advisable. Characters all have varying matchups and having a character or two as backup to cover your weaknesses is highly recommended. Anyone with such a setup is not going to be destroyed by any new characters. The plan is not to introduce a bunch of metaknights.
The overall number of allowable custom characters is up for debate, but somewhere between 4 and 8 seems reasonable. This is not an attempt to turn Brawl into Mugen. The obvious first few choices would be those cut from Melee: Doc, Roy, M2, Pichu, possibly YL? Whether or not completely new characters would be allowed is entirely up for debate. I personally would be content just to see the reinclusion of the melee cast.
Characters would initially appear in a nightly 'alpha' build, which would not be approved for tourney use. After extensive playtesting they would be approved for use in the official beta version. They will be introduced one at a time, until all characters make it into the official beta build. Additional playtesting will be done until eventually a gold version is agreed upon. This will likely not happen until well after a gold version of B+ is maintained.
Onto distribution: The B+:DC project would simply be maintained by updating a .rar with the latest Brawl+ gct, updated with any necessary codes for the clone engine, model importers, etc etc. It would also include paths and the proper .pacs for the custom characters. It would simply be extracted to the root of the SD and you would be good to go. The official post for it will also contain any relevant tournament rules that need updating from the WBR ruleset. This file would be updated whenever Brawl+ official build is updated, as well as whenever an update for the custom characters is needed. Much like B+, there will likely be several builds towards the beginning, slowing down as things balance out later on.
Another problem is that .pacs are easily editable, so there is the problem of people making custom pacs and trying to bring them to tournies. This is easily remediable by having the TO require anyone bringing a build to back up their SD card and then completely clear it, bringing it to the tournament blank. The TO can then copy the standard set to each SD card individually, taking perhaps 2 or 3 minutes.
This project, of course, depends on public support, which is the primary purpose of this thread. Would you be interested in seeing something like this in the future?
tl;dr
Are you interested in a brawl+ build with standardized, balanced custom characters? If so, show some support and share your questions and ideas.
Please note that I have no interest in beginning this project until a stable clone engine is introduced. Currently custom characters are completely unviable in tournament use due to the lack of one. Characters which require a custom model (ex. M2) will not be included until a stable model hacking engine is introduced.
There are several problems facing such a project, which the WBR are unwilling to deal with. First and foremost it seems, is balance. A character must be balanced in order to be included in the cast, and there is some concern that a new character dropped in with a couple of good matchups will upset people who suffer a poor matchup. There are a few problems with this logic. One is that in a balanced game, either each character must have a decent proportion of good and bad matchups, or all matchups must be equal. The latter is obviously not true in either vBrawl or B+, as such we must assume that balance is obtained by having a good proportion of good and bad matchups.
With such a large cast, an introduction of a select few characters after a large amount of playtesting by the public would hardly give anyone a huge advantage. vB/B+ are both games in which maining a single character is not advisable. Characters all have varying matchups and having a character or two as backup to cover your weaknesses is highly recommended. Anyone with such a setup is not going to be destroyed by any new characters. The plan is not to introduce a bunch of metaknights.
The overall number of allowable custom characters is up for debate, but somewhere between 4 and 8 seems reasonable. This is not an attempt to turn Brawl into Mugen. The obvious first few choices would be those cut from Melee: Doc, Roy, M2, Pichu, possibly YL? Whether or not completely new characters would be allowed is entirely up for debate. I personally would be content just to see the reinclusion of the melee cast.
Characters would initially appear in a nightly 'alpha' build, which would not be approved for tourney use. After extensive playtesting they would be approved for use in the official beta version. They will be introduced one at a time, until all characters make it into the official beta build. Additional playtesting will be done until eventually a gold version is agreed upon. This will likely not happen until well after a gold version of B+ is maintained.
Onto distribution: The B+:DC project would simply be maintained by updating a .rar with the latest Brawl+ gct, updated with any necessary codes for the clone engine, model importers, etc etc. It would also include paths and the proper .pacs for the custom characters. It would simply be extracted to the root of the SD and you would be good to go. The official post for it will also contain any relevant tournament rules that need updating from the WBR ruleset. This file would be updated whenever Brawl+ official build is updated, as well as whenever an update for the custom characters is needed. Much like B+, there will likely be several builds towards the beginning, slowing down as things balance out later on.
Another problem is that .pacs are easily editable, so there is the problem of people making custom pacs and trying to bring them to tournies. This is easily remediable by having the TO require anyone bringing a build to back up their SD card and then completely clear it, bringing it to the tournament blank. The TO can then copy the standard set to each SD card individually, taking perhaps 2 or 3 minutes.
This project, of course, depends on public support, which is the primary purpose of this thread. Would you be interested in seeing something like this in the future?
tl;dr
Are you interested in a brawl+ build with standardized, balanced custom characters? If so, show some support and share your questions and ideas.
