Welcome to Smashboards, the world's largest Super Smash Brothers community! Over 250,000 Smash Bros. fans from around the world have come to discuss these great games in over 19 million posts!
You are currently viewing our boards as a visitor. Click here to sign up right now and start on your path in the Smash community!
There's really no way to prove it outside of understanding that more interactions is always a better indicator of skill. If the effects were minimal we would just run 1 stock best of 1 matches throughout the entire tourney, and no one would even be arguing over what stock count we should use because it wouldn't matter. There's definitely times were I've lost the first 2 stocks but was still able to take the game.
Of course it's always better. That's the reason that large data sets are useful. More data = more accuracy. I'm saying that the difference between 1 stock is minimal enough, compared to the gains of the tourney scene, and it's players as a whole, that the loss of a bit of data is overshadowed by the benefits. For example: If we were at 3 stocks, the odds of S4 making Evo would of been drastically cut due to time.
You say customs on was ignored in the balance patch, but then why are there changes to custom moves? At the very least we know that Order Tackle was fixed. It's heavily rumored Burning Spin Dash was changed. Most testers at this point aren't even checking customs; who knows how many changes the technical change list will reveal? Not having custom moves sucks for DLC characters (though it doesn't guarantee them to suck or anything), but I don't see any reason to suspect custom moves were somehow rendered a less important part of the design than before or that customs are somehow less balanced when they were a lot more balanced in the first place for reasons far beyond Diddy. Ironically, default Diddy may be kinda bad now but Battering Banana Peel and Rocketbarrel Attack set-ups may help him stay viable...
In the vast majority of cases, there aren't. For example, Kirby Inhale got less endlag, but this was not applied to Jumping Inhale. I'm sure this will be found to apply to his Hammer buffs too. Sonic Spindash got nerfs but I'm pretty sure I saw confirmation that his custom spindashes were unchanged. This also goes for every special move that was changed in the previous patch, the change wasn't applied to the customs.
We know full well that Diddy gains much less from his customs than most other characters, that was why people wanted Customs On in the first place. He's going to be even lower in Customs On than he is in Customs Off.
I agree that we can't make any solid decisions until we see the results of the datamine, I'm just saying I think we may need to reopen that conversation in light of these new developments. If it is indeed the case that the Custom Moves are generally untouched for the second patch in a row I think that makes a pretty strong case for the Customs Off metagame, as I posted above.
Custom moves received balance tweaks during the last balance patch, and the dev team doesn't have an "intended" competitive metagame because Sakurai doesn't actually like Smash Bros. being competitive.
This is obviously not true. It's not a coincidence that Diddy was hit hard in this patch while Swordfighter was buffed, they're monitoring the competitive side of the game and trying to balance it.
Well it's just been confirmed that Zelda's Custom Phantoms received some buffs.
Maybe a fair point if these are confirmed, though for the most part it seems like where hitbox / frame speed timing changes have been made, Customs have virtually always been omitted.
I understand all that, but these were still substandard options compared to standard Diddy, so he's still going to fall from where he was, and likely quite substantially.
What I want to see is just more proof that Custom specials are really designed to be competitive. When you have issues like certain customs being purely superior to defaults because defaults receive significant nerfs while specials don't, it seems like they aren't. And if they're not being considered when they make changes to the characters, we have the possibility for drastically unintended consequences (for example, DK's quality as a character in Customs On is almost 100% in UpB3. If he gets significant buffs to make up for the fact that he doesn't have this mode in Customs Off, he suddenly becomes a super broken character if this move remains untouched).
Hitboxes adjusted to hit smaller characters is actually pretty big for her.
I think it's fairly well established that Rosalina, Pikachu, and Sonic all see quite substantial buffs from Customs, while, say, Zelda sees practically nothing.
It's an OPTION within the game, in much the same way as the stage selection, item settings, and stock count are all options. We don't have to manually enforce the "no customs" rule by DQing people who use certain moves or anything silly like that, the game gives us a simple button you can press that turns them all off. That makes it a viable point of debate when we're discussing rule settings in much the same way as the stock count or time limit, and is vastly different in terms of enforcement than something like a character ban.
The problem is that they don't appear to be made with this tradeoff in mind. Only a few characters have customs that are decidedly better for FFA, or for varied situations at all. In most cases there's a clear best option for all game modes in each slot.
I believe this very statement rather emphasizes the point that a character is primarily defined not by their specials, but by their normals and innate properties (weight, height, etc). The customs-on metagame decidedly was unable to make a significant impact in 1.02U because the top picks were there because of normals, and no amount of salt about Kong Cyclone or Timber Counter ever actually led to them overthrowing Diddy and Sheik.
Worth noting that Mewtwo himself, and numerous observed changes in this patch, is (are) geared strongly towards horizontal knockback power, which extends the availability of that one successful hit required to significantly cut Rosalina's power. Not that her aerials aren't insane, but she has a significantly harder time being a huge threat without Luma (who also took a small HP cut this patch). She's got pretty okay customs (Shooting Star Bit is alright, and Luma Warp has very real drawbacks despite its strengths), but again, it's the strength of her normals, particularly her aerials, that keeps her ahead of the competition. If Palutena needs Superspeed and Lightweight in order to enter the threshold in which a weaker character can still win by the player's superior application of skill, strategy, and technique, then by all means, Palutena should be allowed that. Even if Zelda's changes don't bring her within a feasible reach of top-level viability, she should still be given access to the options the rest of the roster has.
I feel that the bolded part is quite important. Sure, bad characters get a bit of help, but which of them would you say actually WIN that matchup? Meanwhile, the good characters get worse matchups against Rosa, further pushing her into a clear #1 spot.
On a broad level perhaps, but there are definitely specials that are vital to certain characters. Monkey Flip, Needles, Bouncing Fish, Spin Dash, whatever ZSS's upB is called, Egg Toss, Fireball, Force Palm, etc. Changes to these moves have non-trivial impact to those characters.
The problem is that Rosalina generally has to make a mistake to leave Luma vulnerable. Going for a hard hit vs Luma with Rosalina at neutral usually results in a punish.
Boost Kick. And yes, I agree completely. Changing to the Monkey Flip that goes backwards is almost entirely incomprehensible, but in most cases, the special still fulfils essentially the same role in a different way (for instance, fireballs rack damage at a distance, fast does it with less stun and damage but more speed, and Fire Orb is... not worth using according to the EVO sets). It's very rare, Palutena and Miis aside by design, for a player to prefer a custom that has an entirely different function on a character. And in most cases, unless there's an extremely clear-cut optimum (something I don't even think Kong Cyclone offers, though things like Power Vision and Falcon Dash Punch make good examples), it boils down to player preference and matchup after that. But the argument that always made the most sense to me was (rather in the same vein as what makes a stage fair for game 2 and on but not stage 1) "why should Character X get their best B move while Character Y gets their worst?" Since, when you look at them without the logistical issues attached, that's really what the customs boil down to: Similar moves that, especially on newcomers, could have just as easily been the default without anyone knowing, caring, or complaining.
So which is worse - a character with no bad matchups but not a whole lot of really dominating matchups, or a character with a handful of bad matchups and a whole lot of really, really overwhelming matchups? Well, the latter, obviously. The former is obnoxious; the latter is a scourge on the metagame. It's the difference between Melee Shiek (who basically said to most of the characters below top 10 "If you come to this tournament I will beat you for free but lost a few matchups) and AE Akuma (who was considerably better than most of the cast but very rarely qualified as someone's "worst matchup" - just a bunch of 5:5s and 6:4s). If you ran into a Shiek and you had a bad matchup, your tournament was over. That's pretty bad.
The thing is, I think Customs Rosa may actually be both. She beats pretty much everyone, and some characters really, really bad. This is actually true of most characters who have favourable matchups vs most of the cast in any game.
I know that Sheik gets some good stuff, but the consensus seems to be that she doesn't get quite as much as those 3 and I didn't feel like contesting it here.
If you're seriously going to compare the tier list like this, please 1) make sure the categories on both tiers are the same (you're missing okay characters with Customs on) and 2) don't use made up numbers to arbitrarily illustrate a point.
The numbers are unavailable and totally irrelevant to the general argument, which is that in Customs On, you may have more good characters at the expense of having a few broken characters.
The "broken" characters you spoke of,
, were already at the top of many people's tier list pre-patch, both for customs on and off. In fact, for many people pre-patch, the Top 5 for many were considered to be . And while may have had some of their options nerfed, it doesn't change the fact that they're still overall dominant. Hell, until we have a big major tournament that shows otherwise, we have no reason to believe that are far worse than they were previously. Both characters have strong tools outside of Hoo-Hah and Bair respectively. Banana still trips people, and Bouncing Fish is still a strong recovery and kill move.or because, by many people, they're considered to be mid-tier at best. Now that they have custom options, people are looking at them in a different light. And now with a different Custom Move, people are LOOKING at their movesets differently, movesets that have not changed., that doesn't mean Nintendo might not add them in a later patch. We have had only 2 major patches to this game. Please tell me how you can predict how the future of patching will go based on 2 data points. Especially when this is possibly the first competitive game, let alone a Smash game, that Nintendo has decided to look at and patch. Unless Nintendo specifically comes out to say that they won't be balancing Custom Moves, then all you're doing is speculating.
You are simply lying if you say no one has argued for customs being on purely for a balance perspective, there have been more than enough people who have and have even said they'd go back to customs off if it was better balanced.
See, I reject the premise that this is what happens. I'm not convinced that customs somehow push Rosalina from "in line with the rest of the cast" to "way above the rest of the cast". Or anyone else.
This is a good point, and yet...
The idea that Rosalina becomes an unstoppable juggernaut when a majority of the cast gets better matchups against her by sheer inspection is crazy.
True, but Sonic got nerfs, and some other characters got buffs, indirect or otherwise, which should bring them more in line with the rest of the cast. Except probably in Customs On, where a number of the buffs and nerfs don't matter because they occur to substandard custom options that no one will be using anyway.The "broken" characters you spoke of,
This is what I've been saying - it doesn't look like the developers intend for the Customs On metagame to be balanced, they're focusing on balancing the Customs Off metagame. This raises serious questions about making Customs On our primary focus for competitive events.
No they haven't. Rosa, Pika, and Sonic are still dominating. Pika alone changed many people's opinions on Customs On.
I think it's quite clear that it's very unlikely. Mewtwo is already for sale. Nintendo probably isn't suddenly going to give you more premium content for free later on to "sweeten the deal", they already have your money and they're moving on to making other premium characters.And concerning the lack of custom moves for
It's actually about 200 data points because there are hundreds of changes in each patch. So far, there have been virtually no hitbox / timing adjustments to custom moves, but at least 30+ to default specials. This is a significant difference that lets us make certain inferences about Nintendo's patching priorities.
You're free to disagree with the basis of my argument, further testing will prove that one way or the other soon enough. What I think is more relevant is the impact it would have on the metagame if that basis is shown to be correct.
I mostly agree, I feel that Twitter is generally a place for people to post flippant, off-the-cuff remarks, which don't really create meaningful discussion. It's useful as a barometer for the community feeling towards custom moves (which is definitely a bit more negative than it is here), but that's about it.
This is not what I'm saying at all. What you're saying is that some characters got better tools to fight Rosalina and thus have better matchups against her, but what I want to know is which of these characters actually win the matchup. If there are very few characters who actually beat Rosalina, she is very likely to dominate the metagame.
Speaking of that...Lack of custom moves for
Rosalina, in the most-used sets, doesn't get anything new to protect Luma, unless you call being able to warp her defender away instantly useful (in which case great, she's vulnerable). Luma's potency comes at tradeoffs, and as not-at-all-a-Rosalina-specialist, I'd say they're pretty potent. Shooting Star Bits is effectively a worse (and harder to aim in midair) Falco laser, and Luma Warp removes a potent mid-range kill-capable move in regular Luma Shoot (or whatever it's called). It's a standard speed-power tradeoff, and the power tradeoff is pretty real. You also lose control, as it then becomes far trickier to get Luma into a mid-range position where both he and Rosalina are relatively defended by each other.
It seems fairly clear that those are all the products of the game attempting to read data that doesn't exist.
Maybe I have too much faith in coding standards and robust testing, but I feel like they'd have either put the same move in each custom slot, or told the game specifically that the moves don't exist there and shouldn't be read from there, if there wasn't some plan to use the data later.
They did this one. However, there's a glitch that forces it to try to read that data anyway.
Just gonna point out that Zelda has more benefit from customs than about half the cast; no where near the top, but her defaults are that bad. Din's Flare is a 14% away-roll punish on a character who otherwise has none. Din's Blaze is actually a great-edgeguard tool, and hard-counters Villager stall. Phantom Strike (fast-charging melee phantom) is one of the most underrated customs, and makes Zelda a non-trivially better character by giving her a safe, high-reward air-dodge punish--something her aerial game badly needs.
This was the basis for my statement about Customs Rosalina. Yes, other characters gain stuff that helps them fight Rosalina, but she gains stuff too.
Not only is it often not by very much (out of the contenders for "top 10" right now, ZSS, Shiek, Diddy, Yoshi, CF, and probably a few others get damn near nothing from customs) but we expected that. What we also expected (and which has come to pass) is that low tiers, on average, get way more.
Sheik gets Gravity Grenade, which leads very well into her upsmash. All of her other special moves are already good, but that really completes her as a character.
It sacrifices duration due to the lack of windbox, which results in a bit of a lack of pressure. A missed grenade is far more punishing for Sheik with Gravinades on.
