Discussion: Ban Criteria

[Ishiey]

I have no idea if this is an appropriate topic to even bring up but I might as well give it a shot, since the core concept is something I've thought about discussing for a while...

Pretty much everyone here should be familiar with how the "MK Ban Movement" went for Brawl. It was a total mess that split the community and caused a lot of tension. Part of the problem with the whole movement was that pro-ban would say things like "look at all this data and tournament dominance and unique tactics and surgical nerfs we're putting in place to keep MK around" and anti-ban would respond with things like "it's too early, not enough data, the character is beatable so just get better, ZSS won APEX". Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth for all eternity. With no clear guidelines as to what constitutes a broken character it becomes impossible for the community to cleanly resolve how to go about handling this conflict.

I believe that by creating an established objective criteria for what makes something ban-worthy (or how to bring up and pass a vote on what people want to ban, or another similar-enough method), we can better avoid and resolve community conflicts that may otherwise blow up like MK's legality in Brawl. This may be especially important with the advent of all the custom moves and team combos being discovered.

This is a tough topic to approach though. How do we balance competitive needs, community needs, and spectator needs? Should we look at all three equally? How do we encourage consistency among tournaments in different regions, and is that something we should be encouraging in the first place?

At the end of the day, the community votes with their venue fees and not their online posts. However, that basically leaves people who want certain ruleset changes fighting with other TOs in their region to secure a spot for tournaments with their preferred rulesets, which can lead to somewhat fracturing a local community if the rules deviate "too much" (whatever that line may be). TOs are supposed to work together, not against eachother, but with clashing ruleset philosophies (ex. let's say EC's largest tournament wants custom moves legal while WC's largest tournament wants them banned) it may pressure people into picking a side, lowering tournament attendance for each event. Idk, just throwing out possible concerns here, not sure to what degree they truly apply.

 

[Deleted member 245254]

I have no idea if this is an appropriate topic to even bring up but I might as well give it a shot, since the core concept is something I've thought about discussing for a while...

Pretty much everyone here should be familiar with how the "MK Ban Movement" went for Brawl. It was a total mess that split the community and caused a lot of tension. Part of the problem with the whole movement was that pro-ban would say things like "look at all this data and tournament dominance and unique tactics and surgical nerfs we're putting in place to keep MK around" and anti-ban would respond with things like "it's too early, not enough data, the character is beatable so just get better, ZSS won APEX". Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth for all eternity. With no clear guidelines as to what constitutes a broken character it becomes impossible for the community to cleanly resolve how to go about handling this conflict.

I believe that by creating an established objective criteria for what makes something ban-worthy (or how to bring up and pass a vote on what people want to ban, or another similar-enough method), we can better avoid and resolve community conflicts that may otherwise blow up like MK's legality in Brawl. This may be especially important with the advent of all the custom moves and team combos being discovered.

This is a tough topic to approach though. How do we balance competitive needs, community needs, and spectator needs? Should we look at all three equally? How do we encourage consistency among tournaments in different regions, and is that something we should be encouraging in the first place?

At the end of the day, the community votes with their venue fees and not their online posts. However, that basically leaves people who want certain ruleset changes fighting with other TOs in their region to secure a spot for tournaments with their preferred rulesets, which can lead to somewhat fracturing a local community if the rules deviate "too much" (whatever that line may be). TOs are supposed to work together, not against eachother, but with clashing ruleset philosophies (ex. let's say EC's largest tournament wants custom moves legal while WC's largest tournament wants them banned) it may pressure people into picking a side, lowering tournament attendance for each event. Idk, just throwing out possible concerns here, not sure to what degree they truly apply.

I'm not necessarily going to give you a cop-out, but an eternal debate on the valid legality of a character or other "surgically" specific features is generally an indication of weakness in the game itself, in terms of balance or otherwise.

There's always the concern of balance in competitive gaming, but right now I think the best course of action for Smash 4 is one of flexibility. With the exception of the blunder at EVO 2008 (I mean, come on, items?), we should really give Smash 4 the benefit of the doubt this time around, because at least for first impressions, the game is looking to be quite dynamic, and custom moves will only widen the breadth of the game's versatility in 1v1 match ups.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that if the game turns out so horridly designed that one character towers over the rest when played at a high level, similar to your most immediate example of MK, then there isn't going to be much we can do to save the game from going the same route as Brawl did. This doesn't have to be considered a bad thing, Brawl reaped plenty of competition for years, it just didn't stick in the long run to the mainstream FGC.

It also doesn't have to be completely and utterly balanced across the board, it just needs to not have any blatant, glaring imbalances. Melee, as an example, is and always has been blatantly imbalanced on several fronts but that hasn't stopped it one bit. It's that no single imbalance towers above the others that people have no issue ignoring those quirks of the game.

 

[Ishiey]

I'm not saying that we ban anything pre-emptively, or that we should have to ban anything. Just that it may benefit us to have a guideline of sorts, so that when people start clamoring to ban X or Y we can look at a set criteria of what makes something ban-worthy and take action from there. Drawing the lines before the game is significantly explored makes it so that the criteria is less biased, and therefore removes bias from the actual act of banning (or not banning) something later on.

For example, let's say we had a clear ban criteria in Brawl, and MK broke that criteria. Then we ban MK. Perhaps this leads to a healthier competitive metagame, extending the projected lifespan of the game. Things like that. Just because a game has flaws doesn't mean it can't potentially be "saved" by banning things. Not saying that banning MK would do anything like that though, and tbh I would much much much much much MUCH rather not make this post about Brawl's issues with banning things. I only posted that stuff in the OP as a reference to a time where I think having a ban criteria established would have helped the community.

Also, as I said in the OP, is it all about competitive balance? Is there any weight placed in how the game looks for spectators? What about general feelings of enjoyment from the community? Are these factors that should be considered in whether or not it is appropriate to ban something? If so, how do you fairly and accurately factor them in?

 

[Deleted member 245254]

I'm not saying that we ban anything pre-emptively, or that we should have to ban anything. Just that it may benefit us to have a guideline of sorts, so that when people start clamoring to ban X or Y we can look at a set criteria of what makes something ban-worthy and take action from there. Drawing the lines before the game is significantly explored makes it so that the criteria is less biased, and therefore removes bias from the actual act of banning (or not banning) something later on.

For example, let's say we had a clear ban criteria in Brawl, and MK broke that criteria. Then we ban MK. Perhaps this leads to a healthier competitive metagame, extending the projected lifespan of the game. Things like that. Just because a game has flaws doesn't mean it can't potentially be "saved" by banning things. Not saying that banning MK would do anything like that though, and tbh I would much much much much much MUCH rather not make this post about Brawl's issues with banning things. I only posted that stuff in the OP as a reference to a time where I think having a ban criteria established would have helped the community.

Also, as I said in the OP, is it all about competitive balance? Is there any weight placed in how the game looks for spectators? What about general feelings of enjoyment from the community? Are these factors that should be considered in whether or not it is appropriate to ban something? If so, how do you fairly and accurately factor them in?

Eh...this is always an incredibly difficult topic to discuss.

While definitely not unconstructive, it's just so difficult to strike a proper balance between what is objectively best for the game's competitive value as a player and a competitor, and what is best for a viewer. The two are invariably and completely different positions on the playing field of the games scene, yet in a way both are equally important. In certain ways however, the bettering of one side can sometimes impact the other negatively.

All great questions that I don't have the magical answer to, hell I bet most of us aren't even fully sure what the answers are, but fortunately within this situation I can say that at least in my opinion, I think that what is most competitively appropriate from a completely objective standpoint of determining who is the most skilled, is actually at the same time the most entertaining to me. That may be a unique view of the situation and not shared by the majority, but I gain a larger thrill from knowing the competitor is even just a bit more definitely skilled when they win.

 

[Overswarm]

To make an appropriate competitive ruleset, the ruleset itself must be self-contained. That means the ruleset supports itself from the inside, not from the outside. Allowing rule changes based off of spectator numbers could allow for things that would actually hurt the game -- smash balls are pretty hype, but would they be proper attributes for competitive play? We may get more viewers but less actual players. I've seen it happen in competitive games before (See: Halo series) where they try to stick to the "defaults" and lose out on entrants.

Plus, doing things just for spectators has an invisible line. If Little Mac is the most exciting, should everyone play little mac? Why wouldn't we change the ruleset to an iron man because people like different matchups? Now everyone has 3 characters and one is ALWAYS little mac because he is exciting. This can be safely called "arbitrary".

NorthEast doesn't want to play on Rainbow Road because they hate the cars and how it affects their popular characters, but South in the Texas region they actually love playing on Rainbow Road and have found that character diversity increases as a result. Outside influence on the ruleset results in two correct decisions.


So now we can pretty safely say that the ruleset has to be self-contained. You start from the base (3 stock, 8 minutes) and work from there. Everything is an extension from that.

8 minutes? Because we are in a tournament and need it to end.
3 stock? Because it has proven to be easily finished within 8 minutes but still give extra time for specific matchups that require it and allows for comebacks.
Time out rules? Because 8 minutes.
Counterpicks? Because of the variety of character choices in Smash.

So on and so forth.

The tricky part comes when you want to ban something. Sometimes its easy. We have Hyrule Temple and it breaks the reason we have 8 minutes. We have Spear Pillar and it breaks the reason we have 3 stocks. Those are easy bans -- they mess with what is already established (comebacks are possible, timeouts aren't guaranteed by accident).

When something like MK comes along, he doesn't inherently bust anything within the ruleset. Well, MK did, but they surgically banned those aspects. MK's success though isn't relevant to the ruleset itself. You WANT people to play good characters and try to win, that's the point. MK just was too good at doing that and everything kinda capped out early.

For that you have to look at outside factors, which by default makes it messy.

It'd be easy to say "here's a list of criteria we need to do such and such" but people won't listen to it. People forget that we (as in the BBR) actually DID set criteria. We waited a long period of time after setting the criteria and the pro-ban predictions were seen as profoundly correct. This was ultimately seen as irrelevant.

So criteria doesn't work.

An alternative is to have a "ruling body". A ruling body hasn't worked because the ruling body itself doesn't follow criteria. In the BBR we had Umbreon of all people discussing what stages should be legal/illegal. Guy didn't like Brawl itself and wanted to emulate Melee. Had people from multiple countries, each with their own rulesets, voting on stages that they didn't even play on and voting for banned specifically because it was already banned. Had some people voting only to ban stages that had shown they were bannable in tournament while others were voting to ban stages they thought would show they were bannable in tournament. Had some who simply wanted flat/plat stages and didn't want variety -- they wanted to have the japanese stage list by default. Had people say they wanted to ban a stage for reason X, were shown reason X was flawed, then they wanted to ban stage for no reason or for a different reason. I have yet to see someone say "I want to ban because of..." and then change their mind when they were shown to be wrong.

Ruling body doesn't work.

So what does work?

The only thing I trust at this point is data and self-contained rulesets. My mentality at this point is if someone says "hey, I think stage A should be banned, it is too strong a counterpick" I am going to look at the results of stage A and compare it to other stages. If stage A's results are considered "too strong", logically all other stages within that same line should be banned. If stage A consistently results in 2 stocks but stage B does the same, it would need to be banned or both not banned. Otherwise you need a different reason.

This obviously has its limitations. Personally I'd prefer ritualistic humiliation of anyone who stakes a claim of something should be banned without showing data that illustrates why, but that's just me.

I mostly agree with Zipzo above.

 

[ぱみゅ]

Nice post up there OS, but the question stands still: What would the ban criteria be?

 

[Deleted member 245254]

Nice post up there OS, but the question stands still: What would the ban criteria be?

I mean, I think it should be the same criteria it's always been for most games.

If something is so strong that it inherently muddies and ruins competitively play as a result of its inclusion, either by destroying variety due to its obvious advantage of use, or destroying the intended design of the game to the point where it isn't fun, or adds too many variables to the potential winner of a 1v1 match (IE RNG like items), then it should probably be banned. Items fell under one of these. MK (arguably) fell under one of these. Chain grabs (for some tournies) fell under one of these. It's going to really depend on the venue but I think at the very least things are looking a lot better this time around than in previous iterations.

I don't see how this changes going in to Smash 4.

 

[Overswarm]

There is no criteria that will universally work.

Any robust ban criteria you have set for any stage would ban Final Destination in both Melee and Brawl.

"Ban Walkoffs"

Why?

"Because it results in high variance due to the insane punishes that can occur due to chaingrabs, waveshines, etc.."

FD has similar variance in its results due to its highly polarizing nature in just as many matchups. Would you ban FD? Probably not.

Everything is a case-by-case basis. The only thing you can do is just point out when someone is lying. If someone says "Little Mac is OP, when someone picks Little mac it is basically RANDOM who wins due to that OP OHKO punch! BAN LITTLE MAC!" you can just show data that says "true" or "false". If the data shows "true", then you continue the discussion.

 

[Deleted member 245254]

There is no criteria that will universally work.

Any robust ban criteria you have set for any stage would ban Final Destination in both Melee and Brawl.

"Ban Walkoffs"

Why?

"Because it results in high variance due to the insane punishes that can occur due to chaingrabs, waveshines, etc.."

FD has similar variance in its results due to its highly polarizing nature in just as many matchups. Would you ban FD? Probably not.

Everything is a case-by-case basis. The only thing you can do is just point out when someone is lying. If someone says "Little Mac is OP, when someone picks Little mac it is basically RANDOM who wins due to that OP OHKO punch! BAN LITTLE MAC!" you can just show data that says "true" or "false". If the data shows "true", then you continue the discussion.

Agree on the case-by-case basis thing.

 

[Overswarm]

I mean if you guys want me to write up "ban critera" I'd be more than happy to do so. It CAN be done and logically consistent. That part is easy.

The hard part is when I say things like "Stage X is good for competitive play" and someone else says "No way, ban it, it has a hazard".

I mean Melee plays on virtually no stages now and they play on both Final Destination and PS1 which, by their own banning criteria, should have been banned long ago. Their stagelist should be Yoshi's, Battlefield, Dreamland given their behavior. But they aren't logically consistent and at a certain point care more about aesthetics than content.

 

[Deleted member 245254]

I mean if you guys want me to write up "ban critera" I'd be more than happy to do so. It CAN be done and logically consistent. That part is easy.

The hard part is when I say things like "Stage X is good for competitive play" and someone else says "No way, ban it, it has a hazard".

I mean Melee plays on virtually no stages now and they play on both Final Destination and PS1 which, by their own banning criteria, should have been banned long ago. Their stagelist should be Yoshi's, Battlefield, Dreamland given their behavior. But they aren't logically consistent and at a certain point care more about aesthetics than content.

FD, for example, is a counter-pick. The whole purpose of its availability is basically because of the slight advantage it can provide, so I don't necessarily agree on the surface with this.

However I am interested in what a tournament without counter-picking would be like, in a " I think it could better in the long run" way.

 

[Overswarm]

FD, for example, is a counter-pick. The whole purpose of its availability is basically because of the slight advantage it can provide, so I don't necessarily agree on the surface with this.

"Green Hill Zone, for example, is a counter-pick. The whole purpose of its availability is basically because of the slight advantage it can provide...."

It's like mad libs, but with a dash of inconsistency.

FD's advantage wasn't "slight". It the single most devastating counter-pick in every set of recorded data ever in Brawl. Eeeeeeeeever. As in nothing else came close unless you were looking at just individual characters on individual stages. For all the complaints people had about D3 and walkoffs/walls, D3 didn't actually do that well on them because people just picked those that didn't fall down.

However I am interested in what a tournament without counter-picking would be like, in a " I think it could better in the long run" way.

Depends how you do it. Typically, removing counter-picks is one of the dumbest things a TO can do and effectively ruins a metagame. Brawl's metagame was pretty thoroughly ruined by people who wanted FD/Yoshi's Island/Battlefield/Smashville as their stage list. The tier list went from being varied to "here's Meta Knight and people who do well on these flat/plat stages. It essentially removed counter-picking from the equation by force.

Counter-picking was originally set in place to encourage stage knowledge (a smash trait that is treasured by most) and playing multiple characters (secondaries and tertiaries). It's also there as a defense against innate smash qualities.

Quick, who wins: Lucario vs. Marth?

Got an answer?

Now quick, who wins: Donkey Kong vs. Dedede?

The answer came a bit quicker then, didn't it?

Without counter-picking, the result is that characters like Donkey Kong are simply unplayable because they have one or more debilitating matchups. It literally makes the character unplayable without counterpicks because you have a non-zero chance of running into a Dedede and getting CGed from 0-death.

With counter-picking, the DK can be beaten by a D3 and then switch characters and stages to prevent the D3 from having such an advantage.

It's a defense mechanism.

Without counter-picking + maintaining character / stage variety, you have many options that are just gone. If you lose on FD against the Ice Climbers, you can't play that character for fear you'll run into FD+ICs.

You can do "let's all play one stage" and pick something at random, but essentially what you're doing there is saying "these are characters I have decided to be good". Picking Smashville or Battlefield is no better than picking Mute City or Green Greens.

You can do "each round you play on stage X, stage Y, then stage Z. These stages change based on the round you're in" but this changes the possibility of running into an issue and instead forcing the issue. If "round 2" has Onett and FD, a strong player would play Fox and ICs. If they don't, they're at a disadvantage.

You can do "let's play random", but then you're essentially randomizing results and forcing characters that aren't subject to extremes as much to be played.

Counter-picking is a really, really good thing.

If you want to improve tournament play, the only thing you should want to remove is the "starter" stage. Just toss it out, because it's only there because we need an odd number. If you're willing to run Swiss and have "draw" as a result or willing to just trade CPs back and forth until someone wins by 2 games, you'd have better results.

 

[Deleted member 245254]

"Green Hill Zone, for example, is a counter-pick. The whole purpose of its availability is basically because of the slight advantage it can provide...."

It's like mad libs, but with a dash of inconsistency.

FD's advantage wasn't "slight". It the single most devastating counter-pick in every set of recorded data ever in Brawl. Eeeeeeeeever. As in nothing else came close unless you were looking at just individual characters on individual stages. For all the complaints people had about D3 and walkoffs/walls, D3 didn't actually do that well on them because people just picked those that didn't fall down.



Depends how you do it. Typically, removing counter-picks is one of the dumbest things a TO can do and effectively ruins a metagame. Brawl's metagame was pretty thoroughly ruined by people who wanted FD/Yoshi's Island/Battlefield/Smashville as their stage list. The tier list went from being varied to "here's Meta Knight and people who do well on these flat/plat stages. It essentially removed counter-picking from the equation by force.

Counter-picking was originally set in place to encourage stage knowledge (a smash trait that is treasured by most) and playing multiple characters (secondaries and tertiaries). It's also there as a defense against innate smash qualities.

Quick, who wins: Lucario vs. Marth?

Got an answer?

Now quick, who wins: Donkey Kong vs. Dedede?

The answer came a bit quicker then, didn't it?

Without counter-picking, the result is that characters like Donkey Kong are simply unplayable because they have one or more debilitating matchups. It literally makes the character unplayable without counterpicks because you have a non-zero chance of running into a Dedede and getting CGed from 0-death.

With counter-picking, the DK can be beaten by a D3 and then switch characters and stages to prevent the D3 from having such an advantage.

It's a defense mechanism.

Without counter-picking + maintaining character / stage variety, you have many options that are just gone. If you lose on FD against the Ice Climbers, you can't play that character for fear you'll run into FD+ICs.

You can do "let's all play one stage" and pick something at random, but essentially what you're doing there is saying "these are characters I have decided to be good". Picking Smashville or Battlefield is no better than picking Mute City or Green Greens.

You can do "each round you play on stage X, stage Y, then stage Z. These stages change based on the round you're in" but this changes the possibility of running into an issue and instead forcing the issue. If "round 2" has Onett and FD, a strong player would play Fox and ICs. If they don't, they're at a disadvantage.

You can do "let's play random", but then you're essentially randomizing results and forcing characters that aren't subject to extremes as much to be played.

Counter-picking is a really, really good thing.

If you want to improve tournament play, the only thing you should want to remove is the "starter" stage. Just toss it out, because it's only there because we need an odd number. If you're willing to run Swiss and have "draw" as a result or willing to just trade CPs back and forth until someone wins by 2 games, you'd have better results.

Well the idea would be to limit the stage list down to those that favor characters the least.

You're speaking from a zero-sum evaluation of the word "balance" in this case but we all know things just aren't black and white like that. There are going to be inherent advantages somewhere, whether that be in the stages or the characters. The idea is obviously limiting/dispersing those advantages to as much of the cast as possible, while maximizing the stage variety in order to keep things fresh from a player (and by extension, the viewer) perspective.

The arena system in WoW didn't care that Rogues were out of style in the current patch while I was climbing to high ratings in PvP, I had to adapt and push through that to make do with what I had (and I did so).

I don't think you can interchangeably mention any stage in that situation as the stages in question actually do have factors about them aside from character advantages that make them non-optimal for a skill-determining 1v1 match. In my opinion the more power the players have to control their fate as possible with the least amount of interruption from the stage is the ideal place we always want to be, while at the same time maximizing the amount of locales we have that adhere to that general guideline.

 

[Overswarm]

Well the idea would be to limit the stage list down to those that favor characters the least.

I'm gonna stop you right there.

This mentality is pretty rampant in the smash community. People use words like "neutral" and even after we got rid of that word in exchange for "starter", people then said "we need better neutrals for the starter list". This mentality also completely ruined the starter stage list project. Instead of having a 9-stage starter list balanced with stages like Castle Siege, Halberd, and Delfino, we got only Battlefield, Smashville, and FD.... three versions of the same stage.

There is not, has never been, nor will there ever be a stage that "favors characters the least" that is in any way a functional "play only on this stage" solution. There is no "neutral", nor has there ever been.

People often liked to play on Smashville and cited it as neutral. It was not "neutral" in any way. Did you know that Snake had an obscenely high win rate on Smashville in comparison to Battlefield in ALL matchups? It aided his recovery drastically with the ability to b-reversal onto the moving platform and hurt characters that had low mobility (like Marth).

Did you know that Battlefield was one of ROB's worst stages? ROB had a weakness in that he had a blind spot underneath and behind him, allowing him to be easily juggled. The platforms on battlefield extended that, allowing players to wait for ROB to fall on the platform and hit him back into the air if they missed the original juggle.

No matter what stage or stages you pick, someone gets screwed over.

People had the same idea that you did and limited Brawl's stagelist drastically. It neutered the meta game and helped only a few certain characters.

"Rainbow Cruise is too good for Meta Knight" was a reason to ban RCruise. Despite their claims, MK's win rate on RC showed it as his 4th or 5th best stage overall (it was close) with Halberd, Delfino, and Smashville as his top stages. Halberd, Delfino, and Smashville stayed on for some time. People even CPed MK to Halberd due to the low ceiling, but MK decimated Snake there. What's funny is G&W and Wario both did amazingly on Rainbow Cruise against Meta Knight compared to how they did on traditional stages. When RC was banned, G&W and Wario both suffered tremendously.

There is no such thing as a balanced stage.

Sonic wants lots of space, Ganon wants very little. The logical conclusion is "let's have a mid-sized stage" until you realize there are characters like Diddy that prefer a mid-sized stage.

It's unlikely we'll ever have the data we need to determine what is "balanced" in a stagelist. What we CAN do is leave in as many stages as possible and only remove them if they show to be a problem in tournament. To do otherwise is shooting ourselves in the foot.

 

[Overswarm]

To reiterate my point:

When we started, all of the "top" characters were the ones that were easy to play and did well. ROB was there cuz of me and 2 other ROB's doin' awesome because ROB could recover from anything.

Notice Olimar in mid-tier and ICs sitting down near Kirby, Pit, and Wolf. Diddy, a character who requires flat/plat to excel, is below DK, someone who isn't considered viable.

This was several months after release.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl Tier List #1
Top


High


Middle


Low






About a year after release, superfluous characters like ROB and G&W started to fall while skill-requiring characters that were difficult to play started to come into play. At this point, a year in, we see that Snake is much better than most of the cast and MK absolutely dominates everyone.







Below is right around the time people started altering the stagelist for the worse, removing stages because they were "too good for Meta Knight" and/or "too campy". You can blame Wario for the campy stuff -- he got a lot of visible timeouts.

June 2009



This was the BBR stagelist at the time (August 2010):

Starter/Counter

* Battlefield
* Yoshi's Island
* Smashville

* Lylat Cruise
* Pokémon Stadium

* Final Destination
* Castle Siege

* Delfino Plaza
* Halberd


Counterpick

* Luigi's Mansion
* Norfair
* Frigate Orpheon
* Pokémon Stadium 2
* Port Town Aero Dive
* Distant Planet
* Pictochat
* Jungle Japes
* Rainbow Cruise
* Green Greens
* Brinstar

This wasn't meant to be a copy/paste list, but rather "here's what you can use and still have a good event". People didn't use this much, nor did they like it. "Too random!" or "too janky" they would say.

By November, Alpha Zealot and a bunch of other TOs got together for this: http://smashboards.com/threads/crea...onals-agree-to-same-stagelist-new-tos.292389/

and effectively killed Brawl

The stage list lost nearly all of its stages. From 9 starter and 11 potential counterpicks (20 stages) to a grand total of 14 stages.

1. Battlefield
2. Battleship Halberd
3. Brinstar
4. Castle Siege
5. Delfino Plaza
6. Final Destination
7. Lylat Cruise
8. Pokemon Stadium 1
9. Pokémon Stadium 2
10. Frigate Orpheon
11. Picto Chat
12. Rainbow Cruise
13. Smashville
14. Yoshi's Island

AZ's thing was posted in November.

Here's the tier list in February 2010:







Notice how weird a jump that was?

Sept. 2010




July 2011




Hey, what would happen if we lowered the stage list FURTHER?

Smashville
Battlefield
Final Destination
Yoshi's Island
Lylat Cruise
Castle Siege
Battleship Halberd
Pokémon Stadium 1
Frigate Orpheon
Delfino Plaza

April 28th, 2012







Oops! Looks like Meta Knight has remained at #1 and the 3 characters with the best flat/plat games have gone on to take 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. Who could have predicted?

April 25, 2013





Not exactly much of a change on our current tier list, which is to be expected.

"But Overswarm, tier lists change all the time! We can't predict the future that easily, ICs, Olimar, and Diddy really WERE that good the whole time! It just took time for people to get good with them.

To that I say:
http://www.ssbwiki.com/List_of_SSBM_tier_lists_(NTSC)
http://www.ssbwiki.com/List_of_SSB_tier_lists_(NTSC)

We're pretty good at assessing what characters are good. Within half a year we already knew that MK was the best, and within a full year we knew he was overwhelmingly the best. The skill and aptitude of these characters didn't change, just the stage list. When the stage list changed to benefit them, the metagame suffered drastically as they were propelled to the top because stages were built for them. It was just as deadly as if Melee had suddenly said "your stages are now Onett, Yoshi's Pipes, and Peach's Castle".


Edit: Almost forgot! The current ruleset for Brawl:

Neutral Stages

• Battlefield
• Final Destination
• Lylat Cruise
• Smashville
• Yoshi's Island (Brawl)

Counter-Pick Stages

• Battleship Halberd
• Pokemon Stadium 1
• Castle Siege

Guaranteed to start on Battlefield, Lylat, or Smashville and every stage has basically the same layout.

 

[#HBC | Red Ryu]

I would try and ask/debate how we shouldn't let 1 region decide the ruleset of everyone else...but I know that isn't going to happen in reality.

 

[Deleted member 245254]

I'm gonna stop you right there.

This mentality is pretty rampant in the smash community. People use words like "neutral" and even after we got rid of that word in exchange for "starter", people then said "we need better neutrals for the starter list". This mentality also completely ruined the starter stage list project. Instead of having a 9-stage starter list balanced with stages like Castle Siege, Halberd, and Delfino, we got only Battlefield, Smashville, and FD.... three versions of the same stage.

There is not, has never been, nor will there ever be a stage that "favors characters the least" that is in any way a functional "play only on this stage" solution. There is no "neutral", nor has there ever been.

People often liked to play on Smashville and cited it as neutral. It was not "neutral" in any way. Did you know that Snake had an obscenely high win rate on Smashville in comparison to Battlefield in ALL matchups? It aided his recovery drastically with the ability to b-reversal onto the moving platform and hurt characters that had low mobility (like Marth).

Did you know that Battlefield was one of ROB's worst stages? ROB had a weakness in that he had a blind spot underneath and behind him, allowing him to be easily juggled. The platforms on battlefield extended that, allowing players to wait for ROB to fall on the platform and hit him back into the air if they missed the original juggle.

No matter what stage or stages you pick, someone gets screwed over.

People had the same idea that you did and limited Brawl's stagelist drastically. It neutered the meta game and helped only a few certain characters.

"Rainbow Cruise is too good for Meta Knight" was a reason to ban RCruise. Despite their claims, MK's win rate on RC showed it as his 4th or 5th best stage overall (it was close) with Halberd, Delfino, and Smashville as his top stages. Halberd, Delfino, and Smashville stayed on for some time. People even CPed MK to Halberd due to the low ceiling, but MK decimated Snake there. What's funny is G&W and Wario both did amazingly on Rainbow Cruise against Meta Knight compared to how they did on traditional stages. When RC was banned, G&W and Wario both suffered tremendously.

There is no such thing as a balanced stage.

Sonic wants lots of space, Ganon wants very little. The logical conclusion is "let's have a mid-sized stage" until you realize there are characters like Diddy that prefer a mid-sized stage.

It's unlikely we'll ever have the data we need to determine what is "balanced" in a stagelist. What we CAN do is leave in as many stages as possible and only remove them if they show to be a problem in tournament. To do otherwise is shooting ourselves in the foot.

You can't just stop me there as I hadn't even gone on to make my point yet. I know that no matter where we play, someone could have an advantage, that's exactly what I ended up saying almost verbatim, but I simply do not approve of stages where SD's can at all result of factors that are more than inconsequential. We have at the very least, enough variety for ROB to get away from his apparent game-losing disadvantage on Battlefield for a whole set.

To reiterate my point:

When we started, all of the "top" characters were the ones that were easy to play and did well. ROB was there cuz of me and 2 other ROB's doin' awesome because ROB could recover from anything.

Notice Olimar in mid-tier and ICs sitting down near Kirby, Pit, and Wolf. Diddy, a character who requires flat/plat to excel, is below DK, someone who isn't considered viable.

This was several months after release.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl Tier List #1
Top


High


Middle


Low






About a year after release, superfluous characters like ROB and G&W started to fall while skill-requiring characters that were difficult to play started to come into play. At this point, a year in, we see that Snake is much better than most of the cast and MK absolutely dominates everyone.







Below is right around the time people started altering the stagelist for the worse, removing stages because they were "too good for Meta Knight" and/or "too campy". You can blame Wario for the campy stuff -- he got a lot of visible timeouts.

June 2009



This was the BBR stagelist at the time (August 2010):


This wasn't meant to be a copy/paste list, but rather "here's what you can use and still have a good event". People didn't use this much, nor did they like it. "Too random!" or "too janky" they would say.

By November, Alpha Zealot and a bunch of other TOs got together for this: http://smashboards.com/threads/crea...onals-agree-to-same-stagelist-new-tos.292389/

and effectively killed Brawl

The stage list lost nearly all of its stages. From 9 starter and 11 potential counterpicks (20 stages) to a grand total of 14 stages.


AZ's thing was posted in November.

Here's the tier list in February 2010:







Notice how weird a jump that was?

Sept. 2010




July 2011




Hey, what would happen if we lowered the stage list FURTHER?



April 28th, 2012







Oops! Looks like Meta Knight has remained at #1 and the 3 characters with the best flat/plat games have gone on to take 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. Who could have predicted?

April 25, 2013





Not exactly much of a change on our current tier list, which is to be expected.






To that I say:
http://www.ssbwiki.com/List_of_SSBM_tier_lists_(NTSC)
http://www.ssbwiki.com/List_of_SSB_tier_lists_(NTSC)

We're pretty good at assessing what characters are good. Within half a year we already knew that MK was the best, and within a full year we knew he was overwhelmingly the best. The skill and aptitude of these characters didn't change, just the stage list. When the stage list changed to benefit them, the metagame suffered drastically as they were propelled to the top because stages were built for them. It was just as deadly as if Melee had suddenly said "your stages are now Onett, Yoshi's Pipes, and Peach's Castle".


Edit: Almost forgot! The current ruleset for Brawl:

Neutral Stages

• Battlefield
• Final Destination
• Lylat Cruise
• Smashville
• Yoshi's Island (Brawl)

Counter-Pick Stages

• Battleship Halberd
• Pokemon Stadium 1
• Castle Siege

Guaranteed to start on Battlefield, Lylat, or Smashville and every stage has basically the same layout.

Here and in the post before it, you seem to be asserting that the stage list directly and nearly single-handedly modeled the tier list, which I think is a bit absurd.

MK came forward above the others because he was simply a beast. It nearly didn't matter what stage you took him to. Other characters may have flourished because of their chain grabs, so again, also irrelevant to stages. The rest can be equated to simple balancing failures or lack of synchronization with the Brawl game mechanics, in contrast to other character designs that did it better.

I'm sorry dude but I think strict stage lists are going to happen and they are always going to be strict, because there are some downright criminally designed stages out there that seek to kill the competitors, in an environment where we want the competitors in every single circumstance the one to be killing each other. I disagree that the stage list artificially influenced characters to be seen as "better". A single advantage on a stage or two does not register that character in people's minds as being high or top tier.

It is objective fact, that the more we let the competitors fight without outside interference, the more likely it is the better player will come out on top, and if a match point game takes place on final destination where x character has an advantage, like you said, every character is going to have a disadvantage or an advantage somewhere, that is simple the punches you roll with in hoping the game is designed relatively balanced enough that you aren't too often faced with that reality. That's the trust we put in the developers themselves when we play their game in a competitive format. MK was strong because he was designed strong. Projectile characters have seen advantageous success on FD because that was the design. You can't format competitive rules in either direction to compensate for inherent traits of the game that we cannot change, otherwise there's just no point, throw the game out altogether, which ultimately ended up happening to Brawl.

In short, while a character may have an advantage somewhere, it doesn't bring a bottom tier character in to top tier to add X stage to the selection. All major tier conversions for a character generally resulted from a player displaying that characters potential in a tournament (or many). At the end of the day, the characters are the most important driving factor in what people are attempting to go head to head with, not the stages. If I could create a magical stage that was 100% boring yet gave no inherent advantage to any character, cut it in to a bunch of different skins omega-mode style, and then make it the only single stage that was legal I'm pretty sure most people would do that (Animal Crossing on Brawl was a pretty good kinda example of this despite shortcomings you named).

Competitive Smash is about characters fighting for superiority, in my opinion, I really couldn't care less about where that takes place. Luckily, we are most of the time given a breadth of variety in locale that don't breath too far estranged from a consistent standard, so that's what ended up being our "neutral" stages. Advantages or not. We deal with the hand we are dealt, and before you take that quote and reverse it on to me when it comes to legalizing more stages, we are still responsible for balancing the competitive aspects of Smash properly with the desire for absolute, 100% fairness (which is unachievable). Smash was not inherently designed to solely be a competitive fighter, which is why we make the tweaks that count, with options given to us by the developers. It's actually beautiful really, the freedom they've given us to decide that stuff by ourselves.

 

[Overswarm]

Stages are just as much a part of smash as characters are. You're starting from the assertion of "all stages should be entirely flat and have no impact on gameplay whatsoever" and saying the consequences of that mentality are irrelevant.

The stage list does mold the tier list, just as much as the inherent properties of the characters do. If Melee was played only on Onett, Marth would be low tier. Now imagine a stage list with 20 varieties of Onett. Now imagine someone saying "psh, everyone has a disadvantage somewhere. Just roll with it, you get what you get" and playin gon 20 varieties of Onett.

We've already seen the results of this "constructionist" meddling. When people think they know better and simply eliminate as many stages as possible, character variety plummets and matchups become one-sided.

You can think that it's absurd that the stage list affects how good a character is, but you'd be wrong. It's such an inherent aspect of smash that it is literally baked into our tournament structure in the form of "counterpicks". If the stages couldn't determine what characters were good and bad, counterpicks wouldn't exist... but they do. The sheer difference between playing on Final Destination or Pokefloats alone should be enough to make even the casual observer realize the impact stages have.

 

[Deleted member 245254]

Stages are just as much a part of smash as characters are. You're starting from the assertion of "all stages should be entirely flat and have no impact on gameplay whatsoever" and saying the consequences of that mentality are irrelevant.

The stage list does mold the tier list, just as much as the inherent properties of the characters do. If Melee was played only on Onett, Marth would be low tier. Now imagine a stage list with 20 varieties of Onett. Now imagine someone saying "psh, everyone has a disadvantage somewhere. Just roll with it, you get what you get" and playin gon 20 varieties of Onett.

We've already seen the results of this "constructionist" meddling. When people think they know better and simply eliminate as many stages as possible, character variety plummets and matchups become one-sided.

You can think that it's absurd that the stage list affects how good a character is, but you'd be wrong. It's such an inherent aspect of smash that it is literally baked into our tournament structure in the form of "counterpicks". If the stages couldn't determine what characters were good and bad, counterpicks wouldn't exist... but they do. The sheer difference between playing on Final Destination or Pokefloats alone should be enough to make even the casual observer realize the impact stages have.

The difference between Final Destination And Pokefloats is the type of dynamic we attempt to eliminate in competitive Smash, though. The most notable difference is you are inherently more likely to die to the stage than you are the other player.

Not really a good example as it has nothing to do with a character imbalance, that is a consequence that affects all characters negatively, at varying amounts depending on the abilities of the character to deal with those elements, hence why it's not used in competitive play.

 

[Overswarm]

The difference between Final Destination And Pokefloats is the type of dynamic we attempt to eliminate in competitive Smash, though. The most notable difference is you are inherently more likely to die to the stage than you are the other player.

Says who? I played on this stage for years. I saw it played at top level play on frequent occasions. The stage didn't kill anyone on its own. It was a static loop every time. The only possible SD as a result of the stage was the Seel glitch which was found pretty fast and could be avoided easier than the Castle Siege glitch in Brawl. Battlefield kills more players than Pokefloats, so suicide via stage mechanics certainly can't be an issue.

Here, watch these:

Show players using offensive manuevers in line with stage knowledge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsrlqfrIOo0

Defensive manuevers in line with stage knowledge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyUqQu_TgaA

Mobility in line with stage knowledge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPjGehlm6fM

You'll note that "the stage" didn't kill anyone in any of those matches and if you watched them you'd probably understand why that never really happened. It wasn't some zany crazy stage with random elements all over, it was just moving platforms. It was actually a pretty decent stage all around, at least for the time when we played it. The seel glitch was a threat, the sudowoodo threat was there, and it was certainly a counterpick, but it wasn't a player-killing stage.

I fully understand that SOME people might kill themselves on pokefloats or Green Greens or whatever stage if they don't know how it works. I eliminated JV from pools at FC:6 (or FC:D? I don't remember) by taking him to Green Greens as Falco. He picked Ice Climbers and he lost because he didn't know the stage. He got pretty mad. But it was his fault.

"Having to learn the stage" is part of smash. If it isn't, we'd need to ban Battlefield due to its ledges, PS1 due to its transformations and Yoshi's Island due to Randall. If you want to get extreme, you have to learn "the tree in dreamland turns around each time" from DL64. You can learn pokefloats just by watching those three videos, faster if you played on it. Not a hard pill to swallow.

What's more, learning stages has been a good addition to smash.

I played with a wide stagelist in Brawl and I saw character variety. When Xyro hosted tournaments with a larger stagelist, he saw character variety. We even saw people consistently beating Meta Knight on various stages. Donkey Kong on Jungle Japes was a monster in that matchup -- I had to deal with Ook there many times. We had thriving scenes with competitive results and members who placed highly in multiple tournaments across the US.

"You're more likely to die from the stage than you are the other player" is a statement you'd hear from someone who doesn't actually have any experience on the stage. I don't know what your tournament history is, but I've been playing for a decade and it's pretty easy to see that a statement like that just plain isn't true. If you have some that somehow overcomes the suicides on Battlefield I'd like to hear it though.

Was Fox too strong on Pokefloats? Maybe, I could definitely see it. As tech levels increased I could see it becoming more intense and Fox oriented. Fox was really good on a lot of mobile stages. He wasn't overly dominant there (at least not moreso than he was elsewhere) during the time period it was played though.

Not really a good example as it has nothing to do with a character imbalance, that is a consequence that affects all characters negatively, at varying amounts depending on the abilities of the character to deal with those elements, hence why it's not used in competitive play.

Except it was used, extensively, to great success. It's reason for being banned was "Fox is too dominant". I know, I was there when we were discussing its legality.

I think people sometimes forget that Melee's history is one of a large stage list and that the trend towards only a few stages happened after Brawl was released and no one played Melee anymore.

The goal of making a ruleset isn't to meet some arbitrary criteria or even to make the most people happy. We don't entertain a captive audience. We have to build something sustainable so that we can entice others to enter rather than exclude them.

When I say the tier list for Brawl was shaped by the stage choices, I'm not exaggerating. It's also not me making a claim after-the-fact; ask anyone in the BBR during the time, they can recall with a headache how many times I told them exactly what was going to happen. Looking at the results I was correct!


When people talk about banning things, I get nervous. People don't realize the rippling impact they have on the metagame with each individual change.

Banning a stage, a character, a custom move... they all have serious consequences.

When you say that you should try to make players play on the stage "with the least advantage", what you're saying is that you understand and accept those consequences. My fear is that your foundation of knowledge is shallow and you're thinking on the surface level. Think about what it may mean for Smash 4 if we did something like playing only on FD and what it takes away. Within a month, maybe two, of playing Smash 4 tournaments we'll be able to see who likes to go to FD and with what characters. The characters that frequently choose FD or who have FD banned against them will end up being the ones that would benefit.

 

[Deleted member 245254]

Says who? I played on this stage for years. I saw it played at top level play on frequent occasions. The stage didn't kill anyone on its own. It was a static loop every time. The only possible SD as a result of the stage was the Seel glitch which was found pretty fast and could be avoided easier than the Castle Siege glitch in Brawl. Battlefield kills more players than Pokefloats, so suicide via stage mechanics certainly can't be an issue.

Here, watch these:

Show players using offensive manuevers in line with stage knowledge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsrlqfrIOo0

Defensive manuevers in line with stage knowledge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyUqQu_TgaA

Mobility in line with stage knowledge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPjGehlm6fM

You'll note that "the stage" didn't kill anyone in any of those matches and if you watched them you'd probably understand why that never really happened. It wasn't some zany crazy stage with random elements all over, it was just moving platforms. It was actually a pretty decent stage all around, at least for the time when we played it. The seel glitch was a threat, the sudowoodo threat was there, and it was certainly a counterpick, but it wasn't a player-killing stage.

I fully understand that SOME people might kill themselves on pokefloats or Green Greens or whatever stage if they don't know how it works. I eliminated JV from pools at FC:6 (or FC:D? I don't remember) by taking him to Green Greens as Falco. He picked Ice Climbers and he lost because he didn't know the stage. He got pretty mad. But it was his fault.

"Having to learn the stage" is part of smash. If it isn't, we'd need to ban Battlefield due to its ledges, PS1 due to its transformations and Yoshi's Island due to Randall. If you want to get extreme, you have to learn "the tree in dreamland turns around each time" from DL64. You can learn pokefloats just by watching those three videos, faster if you played on it. Not a hard pill to swallow.

What's more, learning stages has been a good addition to smash.

I played with a wide stagelist in Brawl and I saw character variety. When Xyro hosted tournaments with a larger stagelist, he saw character variety. We even saw people consistently beating Meta Knight on various stages. Donkey Kong on Jungle Japes was a monster in that matchup -- I had to deal with Ook there many times. We had thriving scenes with competitive results and members who placed highly in multiple tournaments across the US.

"You're more likely to die from the stage than you are the other player" is a statement you'd hear from someone who doesn't actually have any experience on the stage. I don't know what your tournament history is, but I've been playing for a decade and it's pretty easy to see that a statement like that just plain isn't true. If you have some that somehow overcomes the suicides on Battlefield I'd like to hear it though.

Was Fox too strong on Pokefloats? Maybe, I could definitely see it. As tech levels increased I could see it becoming more intense and Fox oriented. Fox was really good on a lot of mobile stages. He wasn't overly dominant there (at least not moreso than he was elsewhere) during the time period it was played though.



Except it was used, extensively, to great success. It's reason for being banned was "Fox is too dominant". I know, I was there when we were discussing its legality.

I think people sometimes forget that Melee's history is one of a large stage list and that the trend towards only a few stages happened after Brawl was released and no one played Melee anymore.

The goal of making a ruleset isn't to meet some arbitrary criteria or even to make the most people happy. We don't entertain a captive audience. We have to build something sustainable so that we can entice others to enter rather than exclude them.

When I say the tier list for Brawl was shaped by the stage choices, I'm not exaggerating. It's also not me making a claim after-the-fact; ask anyone in the BBR during the time, they can recall with a headache how many times I told them exactly what was going to happen. Looking at the results I was correct!


When people talk about banning things, I get nervous. People don't realize the rippling impact they have on the metagame with each individual change.

Banning a stage, a character, a custom move... they all have serious consequences.

When you say that you should try to make players play on the stage "with the least advantage", what you're saying is that you understand and accept those consequences. My fear is that your foundation of knowledge is shallow and you're thinking on the surface level. Think about what it may mean for Smash 4 if we did something like playing only on FD and what it takes away. Within a month, maybe two, of playing Smash 4 tournaments we'll be able to see who likes to go to FD and with what characters. The characters that frequently choose FD or who have FD banned against them will end up being the ones that would benefit.

I mean, I appreciate the extensive outline but it's really just a difference of opinion in what I think constitutes the best possible environment for two players to decide who is more skilled at Super Smash Bros.

In my interpretation, and what many others may also feel, I'm most interested in who better controls their character in an effort to best their opponent. The stages mean about as much to me as they do in Street Fighter, though maybe a teeny bit more due to the Battlefield : Final Destination flat and flat-plat dynamic in my opinion being necessary to dissipate the advantages of either among the casts match-ups.

A few videos of players being apparently unaffected by the stage doesn't prove anything. The stage objectively has the ability to kill you. If you sit your character somewhere, they will be dead within 20 seconds without moving. That should never happen at the hands of anything other than your opponent, at a base level, so principally I believe Pokefloats is rightfully banned.

Now I recognize that I do not make the rules but neither do you, otherwise I'm assuming Pokefloats would still be legal, thus we should need to come to a compromise here at some point.

 

[Overswarm]

I mean, I appreciate the extensive outline but it's really just a difference of opinion in what I think constitutes the best possible environment for two players to decide who is more skilled at Super Smash Bros.

In my interpretation, and what many others may also feel, I'm most interested in who better controls their character in an effort to best their opponent. The stages mean about as much to me as they do in Street Fighter, though maybe a teeny bit more due to the Battlefield : Final Destination flat and flat-plat dynamic in my opinion being necessary to dissipate the advantages of either among the casts match-ups.

How you feel is irrelevant to the actual impact on results. Many new players feel that final destination is the most balanced stage, but anyone who tracks information related to that stage can pretty easily see that it is a polarizing aspect.

If you're just wanting to construct the game from nothing rather than take the game as a whole and remove only what is necessary, you need to know all the pieces.

A few videos of players being apparently unaffected by the stage doesn't prove anything. The stage objectively has the ability to kill you. If you sit your character somewhere, they will be dead within 20 seconds without moving. That should never happen at the hands of anything other than your opponent, at a base level, so principally I believe Pokefloats is rightfully banned.

I don't follow your logic. Yoshi's Island can kill you if you don't move while standing on Randall, but the solution is available to the player at all times: move. It's a non-issue. Battlefield can kill you despite you putting in what would otherwise be a "correct" input as well. I don't follow.

 

[Deleted member 245254]

How you feel is irrelevant to the actual impact on results. Many new players feel that final destination is the most balanced stage, but anyone who tracks information related to that stage can pretty easily see that it is a polarizing aspect.

If you're just wanting to construct the game from nothing rather than take the game as a whole and remove only what is necessary, you need to know all the pieces.



I don't follow your logic. Yoshi's Island can kill you if you don't move while standing on Randall, but the solution is available to the player at all times: move. It's a non-issue. Battlefield can kill you despite you putting in what would otherwise be a "correct" input as well. I don't follow.

In the same vein you're using compiled data from games that are not Smash 4 to dictate your point for a rule set/banning strategy in Smash 4, it works both ways/two way street etc.

I'm only applying FGC and competitive gaming logic. Generally, no matter the game we're discussing, making it the most fair can sometimes be synonymous with making it "more boring" due to the fact that homogenization tends to happen as a result of making things more fair. That's just unfortunately how it goes, occasionally. The whole reason we limit the stage list in competitive play at all is for that purpose, to appease "fairness" in the best way that we can.

 

[Overswarm]

Stages typically aren't removed for "balance" reasons. If they were, every stage would be bannable because every stage gives someone an advantage. We just remove them due to something called "overcentralization".

If we allowed a stage like Onett in Melee to remain legal, we can expect an increase in the trend of using Fox on that stage. At MLG Chicago, Ken fought Neo's Roy on Onett with Fox and it was a pretty close set, but shortly after that event people starting CPing other players to Onett. While Roy actually did fairly well against Fox on Onett, many characters simply could not handle the stage. So many, in fact, that it became "Play Fox or have a disadvantage". If it had remained legal you'd be unable to play any character BUT Fox, which would result in the death of character variety.

It's still competitive to play only on Onett. You get consistent results. It's entirely possible that Fox players could have similar win rates on Onett compared to other stages they're good on as well -- if Fox had a 70% win rate on Onett against Falco but had a 72% win rate against Falco on FD, we wouldn't ban FD. The issue is that Fox could have an abnormally high win rate against a vast majority of the cast.

The advantage Fox received on the stage was inconsequential. We simplify our language a lot and say "we banned stage X because character Y was too good on it", but the core of the logic is that it's "everyone play this character on the stage or don't play at all" rather than "he's too good there". You're allowed to be better in a matchup or on a stage and you're even allowed to dominate on a stage or against a certain character. It's why we don't ban picking Fox against Ness in Melee or picking Pikachu against Fox in Brawl and why we have counterpicks and bans.

If Pikachu's d-throw CG against Fox worked on EVERYONE and it turned out to be overcentralizing, we'd look to limit Pikachu in some fashion.

If a stage was too good for a certain character against EVERYONE, it'd be overcentralizing and ultimately a pointless stage.

It's an important distinction.

I'm not sure if other communities ban things because they're "too strong" or "too easy", but the Smash community typically doesn't work that way. Some scrubby TOs did it in Brawl with things like "ban D3's standing chaingrab" and a few in Melee tried it with "no wobbling", but on the whole the smash community doesn't participate in that.

The reason we don't is that there's no such thing as "fair" outside of mirror matchups and any attempt to emulate fairness results in unforseen consequences that often reduce character viability and variation.

 

[Marc]

[quote="Overswarm, post: 17676308, member: 18904"I mean Melee plays on virtually no stages now and they play on both Final Destination and PS1 which, by their own banning criteria, should have been banned long ago. Their stagelist should be Yoshi's, Battlefield, Dreamland given their behavior. But they aren't logically consistent and at a certain point care more about aesthetics than content.[/quote]

We've banned both FD and PS1 in singles for a while. The only reason to bring them back was so we could have stage bans again, to give a choice to the small minority not auto-banning either of those. We had Fountain in addition to BF/Yoshi's/DL64 though.

Not really going to touch on the rest for now, since we've already agreed that most stages in this game are crazy by anyone's standards and I think the OP was moreso made with characters in mind. I am going to agree with OS that making ban criteria upfront probably won't work and that we should just let the game be what it is. You can argue that SSB64, Melee and Brawl all would be more balanced with their best 1/2 characters taken out (Pikachu and Kirby, Fox and maybe Falco, MK and ICs), but they turned out a certain way given the other choices the scene made and people played and enjoyed those games. If other fighting games are any indication, people don't really care if a few characters are dominant and I don't think we should all of a sudden force that with a series that has never had character balance. It's safe to assume that the scene will gravitate to stages with minimal changes and hazards, so better start looking for characters that either camp/wall very well or more or less circumvent the limited movement options.

 

[Deleted member 245254]

Stages typically aren't removed for "balance" reasons. If they were, every stage would be bannable because every stage gives someone an advantage. We just remove them due to something called "overcentralization".

If we allowed a stage like Onett in Melee to remain legal, we can expect an increase in the trend of using Fox on that stage. At MLG Chicago, Ken fought Neo's Roy on Onett with Fox and it was a pretty close set, but shortly after that event people starting CPing other players to Onett. While Roy actually did fairly well against Fox on Onett, many characters simply could not handle the stage. So many, in fact, that it became "Play Fox or have a disadvantage". If it had remained legal you'd be unable to play any character BUT Fox, which would result in the death of character variety.

It's still competitive to play only on Onett. You get consistent results. It's entirely possible that Fox players could have similar win rates on Onett compared to other stages they're good on as well -- if Fox had a 70% win rate on Onett against Falco but had a 72% win rate against Falco on FD, we wouldn't ban FD. The issue is that Fox could have an abnormally high win rate against a vast majority of the cast.

The advantage Fox received on the stage was inconsequential. We simplify our language a lot and say "we banned stage X because character Y was too good on it", but the core of the logic is that it's "everyone play this character on the stage or don't play at all" rather than "he's too good there". You're allowed to be better in a matchup or on a stage and you're even allowed to dominate on a stage or against a certain character. It's why we don't ban picking Fox against Ness in Melee or picking Pikachu against Fox in Brawl and why we have counterpicks and bans.

If Pikachu's d-throw CG against Fox worked on EVERYONE and it turned out to be overcentralizing, we'd look to limit Pikachu in some fashion.

If a stage was too good for a certain character against EVERYONE, it'd be overcentralizing and ultimately a pointless stage.

It's an important distinction.

I'm not sure if other communities ban things because they're "too strong" or "too easy", but the Smash community typically doesn't work that way. Some scrubby TOs did it in Brawl with things like "ban D3's standing chaingrab" and a few in Melee tried it with "no wobbling", but on the whole the smash community doesn't participate in that.

The reason we don't is that there's no such thing as "fair" outside of mirror matchups and any attempt to emulate fairness results in unforseen consequences that often reduce character viability and variation.

Again, you're evaluating my argument from a purely black or white perspective. Obviously, once we're pitting two players against one another playing different characters, there's nothing we can do to stop the inherent imbalance of the matchup having some kind of affect, big or small.

I've also never asserted that stages be outed for "balance" reasons. It's quite simple, they are outed because they are deemed to not fit our arbitrary criteria for what constitutes a fair stage. In Smash Bros. there is going to be a lot of arbitrary in the ruleset because there is no clearly give tournament legal ruleset within the game itself, and even if there was, we wouldn't likely be very lenient on it if it, per say, included items or something.

This has nothing to do with character advantages on any given stage, that is the "imbalance" that we suck up and deal with in an effort to play this "party game" competitively, and it's most certainly because we value the character play above the stages by a long shot. We don't ban characters as whim-fully as we do stages, why? Because everyone wants to make sure that on the character-front, there is the max amount of possible flexibility within the games restraints. Once we ban a character, it begins to feel too arbitrary, like we have to cover for the games weaknesses to let the game shine in a competitive light. This is why anyone aside from MK players may be against his banning.

In this scene, what constitutes a "fair stage" is a stage with as very little extraneous factors affecting the competitors as possible. Different variations of platforms and terrain tend to be welcome. Moving stages or ones with many hazards, predictable or not, tend to not be welcome because even if the strongest players rarely get hit by a hazard, nobody wants to see a grand finals match even by chance or otherwise end by a player getting killed by one, no matter who's fault it is.

It's about the characters, the stages take a backseat, this is why we ban stages in the first place, to better match the characters. We don't ban characters to highlight the balance of a stage. The match up "imbalance" is an inherent trait of the game we muster through in order to even play the game competitively, because character banning is not a welcomed practice in our community.

 

[Overswarm]

I've also never asserted that stages be outed for "balance" reasons. It's quite simple, they are outed because they are deemed to not fit our arbitrary criteria for what constitutes a fair stage.

Fairness isn't arbitrary, nor is arbitrary criteria how a stage is banned. I personally wrote a large number of the rules currently used in both Melee and Brawl tournaments; my language has been posted in nearly every tournament thread on smashboards. These rules were not arbitrary, but were written as a result of real-world examples and data collection. We didn't ban Distant Planet because "it has water", we banned it primarily because sharking was too prominent. There was no defense against a Meta Knight who got a slight lead and then stayed on the bottom ledge, retreating to the far ledge when threatened, and u-airing through the stage all the while. This took time to discover and some individual TOs did ban the stage early, but it was listed as a counterpick officially until we had data showing that it was, in fact, an issue.

In this scene, what constitutes a "fair stage" is a stage with as very little extraneous factors affecting the competitors as possible. Different variations of platforms and terrain tend to be welcome. Moving stages or ones with many hazards, predictable or not, tend to not be welcome because even if the strongest players rarely get hit by a hazard, nobody wants to see a grand finals match even by chance or otherwise end by a player getting killed by one, no matter who's fault it is.

It's about the characters, the stages take a backseat, this is why we ban stages in the first place, to better match the characters. We don't ban characters to highlight the balance of a stage. The match up "imbalance" is an inherent trait of the game we muster through in order to even play the game competitively, because character banning is not a welcomed practice in our community.

I regret to inform you that this has rarely been the case throughout Smash's history. More importantly, it's never been the reason a stage has been banned by any Smash back room. Certain stages are disliked and we try very hard to find legitimate reasons to ban them if they do not seem immediately apparent, but we never ban a stage simply because it is "not welcome". Mediocre TOs perhaps, but not any sort of governing body. Even the TOs that do ban something based on how much they like a stage give a reason, even if it is flawed.

Individual TOs and players very well may, and often do, have arbitrary criteria that determines what they think "should" and "shouldn't" be legal. It's their tournament, they can do coin matches if they want. For us, however, we aren't running a tournament but discussing whether something should be legal in abstract. For us, the moment you accept arbitrary criteria as valid input, you immediately accept any and all arbitrary input as equally valid. For all past rulesets released, it has been that each individual stage has remained legal until a reason is shown for it to be banned for this reason.

I also think it's important to point out that the "flat/plat" players are in a small minority of actual players. Melee is incredibly tiny in terms of playerbase compared to what it has been in the past. Brawl was explosively huge and had a myriad of new players and the majority of new players typically prefer to play on a large variety of stages. As these players gain in skill, they develop their own opinions on what constitutes a "good stage", often influenced by their region. The Midwest and South typically employ a larger stage list and more tournament variety while the NorthEast and West employ a more conservative approach (the West coast much less so). The new players in each region though typically start playing Smash just to play their favorite game as their favorite character and have yet to develop a personal bias. Most of the players stop playing before they fully form it.

I don't say all this to downplay your personal beliefs, but to educate you on the history of competitive smash and where these rulesets come from. Competitive Smash is much deeper and more involved than any other fighting game and absolutely crushes them in terms of both attendance and prize money. When it comes to fighting games, Smash is far and away the most popular and long lived. One of primary the reasons for this is that it follows a very unique life cycle of approximately 5 years. By the end of that 5 years, rules are (more or less) set in stone and attendance plummets. The metagame is more or less "figured out" and people stop learning quickly. There's no more "matchup discussion" as people more or less "get it". People learn their place in tournaments, get bored, and you've only got the "dedicated players" left; that's where we are at right now.

But this Friday, Smash 4 is being released in the US. A surefire way to hinder its growth is to tell every 13 year old kid who gets Smash that he can only play on Final Destination when he goes to a tournament. An equally poor way to ensure you get an incredibly shallow metagame is to ban extraneous options in order to get to what you perceive is a "fair" ruleset. Custom moves, stages, whatever -- it's all added depth and the more depth the better and longer lived the game. This is why we don't have "arbitrary" rules, but reasoning behind it, so we can tell the new players "this is why" and so we don't strangle our own metagame.

 

[Deleted member 245254]

Fairness isn't arbitrary, nor is arbitrary criteria how a stage is banned. I personally wrote a large number of the rules currently used in both Melee and Brawl tournaments; my language has been posted in nearly every tournament thread on smashboards. These rules were not arbitrary, but were written as a result of real-world examples and data collection. We didn't ban Distant Planet because "it has water", we banned it primarily because sharking was too prominent. There was no defense against a Meta Knight who got a slight lead and then stayed on the bottom ledge, retreating to the far ledge when threatened, and u-airing through the stage all the while. This took time to discover and some individual TOs did ban the stage early, but it was listed as a counterpick officially until we had data showing that it was, in fact, an issue.



I regret to inform you that this has rarely been the case throughout Smash's history. More importantly, it's never been the reason a stage has been banned by any Smash back room. Certain stages are disliked and we try very hard to find legitimate reasons to ban them if they do not seem immediately apparent, but we never ban a stage simply because it is "not welcome". Mediocre TOs perhaps, but not any sort of governing body. Even the TOs that do ban something based on how much they like a stage give a reason, even if it is flawed.

Individual TOs and players very well may, and often do, have arbitrary criteria that determines what they think "should" and "shouldn't" be legal. It's their tournament, they can do coin matches if they want. For us, however, we aren't running a tournament but discussing whether something should be legal in abstract. For us, the moment you accept arbitrary criteria as valid input, you immediately accept any and all arbitrary input as equally valid. For all past rulesets released, it has been that each individual stage has remained legal until a reason is shown for it to be banned for this reason.

I also think it's important to point out that the "flat/plat" players are in a small minority of actual players. Melee is incredibly tiny in terms of playerbase compared to what it has been in the past. Brawl was explosively huge and had a myriad of new players and the majority of new players typically prefer to play on a large variety of stages. As these players gain in skill, they develop their own opinions on what constitutes a "good stage", often influenced by their region. The Midwest and South typically employ a larger stage list and more tournament variety while the NorthEast and West employ a more conservative approach (the West coast much less so). The new players in each region though typically start playing Smash just to play their favorite game as their favorite character and have yet to develop a personal bias. Most of the players stop playing before they fully form it.

I don't say all this to downplay your personal beliefs, but to educate you on the history of competitive smash and where these rulesets come from. Competitive Smash is much deeper and more involved than any other fighting game and absolutely crushes them in terms of both attendance and prize money. When it comes to fighting games, Smash is far and away the most popular and long lived. One of primary the reasons for this is that it follows a very unique life cycle of approximately 5 years. By the end of that 5 years, rules are (more or less) set in stone and attendance plummets. The metagame is more or less "figured out" and people stop learning quickly. There's no more "matchup discussion" as people more or less "get it". People learn their place in tournaments, get bored, and you've only got the "dedicated players" left; that's where we are at right now.

But this Friday, Smash 4 is being released in the US. A surefire way to hinder its growth is to tell every 13 year old kid who gets Smash that he can only play on Final Destination when he goes to a tournament. An equally poor way to ensure you get an incredibly shallow metagame is to ban extraneous options in order to get to what you perceive is a "fair" ruleset. Custom moves, stages, whatever -- it's all added depth and the more depth the better and longer lived the game. This is why we don't have "arbitrary" rules, but reasoning behind it, so we can tell the new players "this is why" and so we don't strangle our own metagame.

Let's put this out on the table...I would be totally a-ok with a more flexible stage list, even if it included hazard stages.

However, I just don't see it happening given the history of our stage list handling.

I completely agree with depth being added at every corner whether it be stages, moves, even equipment, but some depth can actually detract from the competitive value of a 1v1. Items can be argued to add depth too, but they will likely NEVER see the light of day again.

When I say arbitrary, I mean we made them up. Based off of data or otherwise, we still bent the tournament norm to what we feel is the best. Not nintendo, not the actual game developers, not some omnipotent God.

 

[Overswarm]

When I say arbitrary, I mean we made them up. Based off of data or otherwise, we still bent the tournament norm to what we feel is the best. Not nintendo, not the actual game developers, not some omnipotent God.

I think "constructed" might be a better term :B

 

[Zigsta]

It seems to me like a lot of 3DS tournaments are leaning towards banning stages that may actually allow more character diversity. I know there's a TON of janky stages in the 3DS game, but most tournaments are using FD/For Glory/BF/Yoshi's with no CPs. I have yet to see a tournament with Tomodachi Life, Brinstar, Lumiose City, and possibly Arena Ferox. Offhand those seem to be the least janky aside from the starters.

I'm going to a tournament Sun that allows all of the above (and AF and TL are starters) with even Mute City, Reset Bomb Forest, and Tortimer Island thrown in as CPs. While my stage lists usually lean to the more conservative side, I believe the only way to truly know if a stage is ban worthy is to actually play on it in tournament. With proper data as evidence, only then is something ban worthy.

I'm really excited to try out these new stages (not gonna lie, mainly as Bowser) against as many characters as possible in order to understand them better. We can't just go into these games with a Brawl mentality of "if it's not totally flat, let's ban it."

 

[Overswarm]

Zigsta, do you think you'd be able to convince the TO to have players fill out the data slips from the data thread?

If enough tournaments fill out those slips and fill in the spreadsheet, we coudl figure out what is bannable reeeeeeeeeeeally fast.

The stage list is going to be pretty large for quite some time as people randomly add and remove stages back and forth.

 

[Raziek]

There are places that are banning Lumiose?

How is that even possible?

 

[Overswarm]

But it moves Raziek!

*shakes old man fist at noobs who can't learn stages*

grumble grumble go play street fighter grumble grumble

 

[Zigsta]

Zigsta, do you think you'd be able to convince the TO to have players fill out the data slips from the data thread?

If enough tournaments fill out those slips and fill in the spreadsheet, we coudl figure out what is bannable reeeeeeeeeeeally fast.

The stage list is going to be pretty large for quite some time as people randomly add and remove stages back and forth.

I'm sure the TO would be totally cool with it. A Brawl player (and honestly a scrubby one) have him a lot of grief on Facebook about the stagelist. This is his first tournament, so I'm sure he'd be happy to know that his tournament will help in evaluating the new game for everyone.

I'm assuming the easiest way to have people fill out the spreadsheets is to print out spreadsheets ahead of time. I still need to dig into the data thread but I'll be sure to do so prior to this weekend, and I'll contact the TO as well.

 

[Overswarm]

I have a document there that I'll be updating tomorrow. You can print it off and cut it into strips, it has an example on the second page.

If anyone complains about a stagelist for a tournament on release weekend, tell them this:

"Now is the perfect time to test any and all stages for competitive play. If they actually are abusable and you know this, use it to your advantage and win the tournament! You'll have an edge over everyone else and be known as the guy that figured out the stage should be banned. Also fill out this slip."

 

[Overswarm]

Zigsta the tournament slips document is now updated. Feel free to print it off!

Remember that you can take pictures of slips with your 3DS, so if you didn't want to fill in the spreadsheet as you go (or were sending them to someone else to fill in), you can just use an SD card reader to have a record of them. :D

 

[Zigsta]

Awesome, thanks! Still waiting for the TO to get back to me.

 

[Ishiey]

http://smashboards.com/threads/community-project-mr-game-watch-in-doubles-data.375553/

This is what I was trying to get at btw. Using tournament data to justify bans, and having a quantifiable cut-off for what level of results is "too much". It makes the whole process a lot "cleaner" imo.

I think we should try to implement this policy for character bans, stage bans, character combo bans (teams), and "stalling" bans (in the event ways are found to somewhat artificially push a game to time-out). Only question is what value the cut-offs should be set at.