Discussion of Stage Legality in Smash Bros. Ultimate

[Crystanium]

-snip-

Excellent post. I'm surprised it hasn't received more likes. I think Corneria could be legal. Yes, the ceiling is lower, but as far as I'm aware, it's been playable in SSBM and SSBB. With hazards off, there's no need to worry about Arwings or the turrets on Great Fox. One issue that might pose a problem is going underneath the stage to stand on the turrets, but I'd say this would be a minor issue and not worth banning the stage, at least as a counter-pick.

 

[DJ3DS]

Having played it yesterday, hazards Great Plateau Tower is honestly fine in my opinion. The tower isn't *that* obtrusive and doesn't feel that difficult to break. A single bounce from a character in Sudden Death completely destroys it. Calling it a cave of life is completely overblowing the situation.

I could perhaps understand this stage not being neutral for it but I see absolutely no reason why it shouldn't be at least a counterpick.

 

[Vulgun]

Having played it yesterday, hazards Great Plateau Tower is honestly fine in my opinion. The tower isn't *that* obtrusive and doesn't feel that difficult to break. A single bounce from a character in Sudden Death completely destroys it. Calling it a cave of life is completely overblowing the situation.

I could perhaps understand this stage not being neutral for it but I see absolutely no reason why it shouldn't be at least a counterpick.

Personally, I do agree with the idea that the stage itself will become a Counterpick during the competitive lifespan of Ultimate. There's no smoking gun that points in either direction for the stage to be Neutral or Banned, as on one hand, you have a ceiling that can allow for much more juggling potential and survivability, but on the other, you have an otherwise neutral layout with a ceiling that can be destroyed fairly easily, especially late game.

While I would love for this stage to remain a Counterpick throughout the entirety of Ultimate, I still stand by what I said earlier and say that we'll need to test the stage in a competitive field for the most accurate feedback possible. Regardless of my own personal opinion toward the matter, this would be the fairest possible thing we could do for a stage as unique as this. I would personally give it one to two majors before we come to a conclusion of its legality.

By then, months should have passed since the game's launch and everyone will have had a solid grasp of what this game will be like competitively.

 

[DJ3DS]

Personally, I do agree with the idea that the stage itself will become a Counterpick during the competitive lifespan of Ultimate. There's no smoking gun that points in either direction for the stage to be Neutral or Banned, as on one hand, you have a ceiling that can allow for much more juggling potential and survivability, but on the other, you have an otherwise neutral layout with a ceiling that can be destroyed fairly easily, especially late game.

While I would love for this stage to remain a Counterpick throughout the entirety of Ultimate, I still stand by what I said earlier and say that we'll need to test the stage in a competitive field for the most accurate feedback possible. Regardless of my own personal opinion toward the matter, this would be the fairest possible thing we could do for a stage as unique as this. I would personally give it one to two majors before we come to a conclusion of its legality.

By then, months should have passed since the game's launch and everyone will have had a solid grasp of what this game will be like competitively.

Oh, sure. I agree with everything you said, I just think that everyone who has immediately jumped to the conclusion it should be banned are being far too hasty. Moreover, it's emblematic of an extremely conservative mentality towards stage selection that I personally find extremely dull.

 

[Untouch]

Here's my current opinions on the stages we have in the demo and the potential issues they may have and how they may hurt legality. This isn't necessarily a list of whether or not stages should be legal since there's much more at play to consider.

Blue: No issues at all.
Green: Very minor issues. I don't think these issues will hurt stage validity but the problems exist. Green Greens is assumed in this case to not have any blocks spawn.
Yellow: Issues exist and are hard to ignore. I think the problems in this stages are and will be controversial. Issues may force these stages to be counterpick at best. These stages will need to be looked at first as player behavior will determine if they work or not, like Pokefloats in melee or Duck Hunt in smash 4.
Orange: Major issues. I think people will argue for these stages but I don't think they'll be legal because of the obvious issues.
Red: Critical issues. Huge campable stages and stages with walkoffs. I didn't include Moray Towers because while it is huge and campable, it isnt nearly as bad as New Pork City,

 

[Jamison]

Excellent post. I'm surprised it hasn't received more likes. I think Corneria could be legal. Yes, the ceiling is lower, but as far as I'm aware, it's been playable in SSBM and SSBB. With hazards off, there's no need to worry about Arwings or the turrets on Great Fox. One issue that might pose a problem is going underneath the stage to stand on the turrets, but I'd say this would be a minor issue and not worth banning the stage, at least as a counter-pick.

I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt that the turrets under the stage would be broken or removed with hazard toggle. Same can be said of Arwings, but even so I don't think they are a huge issue. The low ceiling of the fin is noteworthy and very advantageous but my biggest concern is the right side of the stage because you have the giant wall. Since the wall curves outwards it makes it easy to tech things like an up smash that sends you straight up and of course you'd survive most forward hits bouncing off the wall. I think the fin is just a big problem because of survivability it creates. Playing it in the past you can just tech smash attacks quite easily and survive way too long. I think that's the biggest issue with it. The blast zone above the top fin prob isn't any worse than Green Greens so I think it's not ideal but not game breaking. And thanks for the compliment. =)

 

[Amiibo Doctor]

What about starting with the obviously fine stages like Battlefield, Smashville, etc. (starting with stages that were tournament legal in their original games seems like a good plan to me) and then seeing about just working the less obvious stages in as time goes on?

 

[Munomario777]

the problem with that is that in previous games, it's very rare that stages were added to a stagelist down the road, mainly removed and never brought back

 

[Fell God]

the problem with that is that in previous games, it's very rare that stages were added to a stagelist down the road, mainly removed and never brought back

It's a major flaw with the ban lists honestly. They never reconsider stages. All the more reason we should start with as big a legal stage list as possible.

 

[Jamison]

I realized something about Great Plateau Tower recently. The entire map is essentially like if you took Hyrule Castle 64 and made a map out of the far right side of the stage. I just found that interesting. I wonder if the similarity was intentional. The issue with GPT with hazards on is there is a strong likelihood of other stages being used with hazard toggle off in competitive. Switching hazards on and off over the course of a tournament will take up time (unless the hazard toggle becomes as easy as hitting X or Y at stage select). I don't think it's a major issue as far as time goes but switching it on and off could easily lead to people forget to turn it back on and since hazard toggle makes small differences in stages like T&C it could easily be overlooked and hazard toggle could be left on and we'll get 0.9 scenarios. So that's a concern. I still have my opinion on the cave of life but for GPT I do think there's an argument for people saying the cave of life is small enough it's not an issue. I personally wouldn't allow it but it's clearly less of an issue than a stage like Melee's Hyrule Temple.

Spoiler: Great Plateau Tower plat/cave

I don't believe the top of the tower breaking very easily in sudden death is irrelevant to competitive play. Nobody should be getting to 200% on a stage that small (stage and blast zones are both small) let alone 300%. If they do then it's likely going to be BC of the cave of life which would be a major issue. I do wanna know how the damage to the tower scales. Like if say the tower breaks in 1 hit with someone at 300% does it break in 3 hits with someone at 100%? If that was the case I could see it being less of an issue but someone could still eat a smash attack that would KO, eat an aerial/tilt and then eat a 2nd smash attack that would KO and survive. So a lighter character could go from 100% to 140% solely BC of a stage hazard which I feel is an issue. If the tower damage scales exponentially instead of multiplicatively then someone could eat a lot of hits with the hazard.

But characters, play styles etc. will all affect how "broken" the hazard/ceiling plat is. The community could feel it's not a major issue. Testing it out with hazard toggle on could show that most of the cast can punish the tech with a jab or tilt or something of that nature. Maybe since it is a relatively small cave of life it won't be as big of an issue as some of us think. But it still could be and would need some testing.

Spoiler: What if they actually patched stages?

As far as testing stages goes I honestly don't feel like it's in anyone's best interests to use competitive play as a testing ground for half the stages. For example, I don't think it would take two top 100 players playing on hazard toggled GPT too long to see if the cave of life is broken or not. I think with many top players likely to be streaming the game early on a lot of issues with stages could be found relatively quickly. But again just my opinion.

As far as stages historically not being added back into competitive play, the issues that got them removed in the first place have remained present. Now would I would love to see is for Nintendo/Sakurai to notice some of these issues and do something they've not done before...patch stages. Sm4sh had so many character buffs/nerfs but stages were for the most part (not including DLC) largely ignored. It's why there are stage issues to this day. If the devs notice some competitive imbalance in a stage maybe there's hope they will tweak it to make it competitively viable. Imagine if they had just removed the tilting of Lylat with a patch. I still hope they rework GTP to have a passable plat with hazard toggle. It does seem like there's a bit more focus on competitive play this time around so maybe some of these things aren't just a pipe dream. If a stage got patched I think that could revive it to competitive viability were it removed.

 

[Untouch]

On an unrelated note, it's a shame that jungle hijinx might not be returning, seems like it'd be a pretty solid stage with hazards off.

 

[viewtifulduck82]

the problem with that is that in previous games, it's very rare that stages were added to a stagelist down the road, mainly removed and never brought back

Yeah, because we always do it backwards and start with stages that clearly shouldn't be legal "for the sake of trying it out". As a competitor I absolutely can't stand early smash stage lists for that reason.

Start with safe stages, and then discuss other potential stages.

 

[**Gilgamesh**]

Only FD, battlefield versions, smashville, Pokemon stadium should be legal. I don't think this is too conservative either maybe frigate orpheon as a countrrpick.

 

[Funen1]

Even under the old stage-striking system, you need 4X + 1 stages to be able to strike fairly. Having only those four stages cannot possibly work.

And on the more general topic of whether to start with more or less stages, this series' history is clear: stages that are removed for any considerable length of time never come back. Trying to suggest that we start small and add more stages over time is naive at best and arguably self-defeating at worst (or possibly manipulative if you wanna assume that low of people, but of course that's a hairy business and I won't go any further). People in the Smash scene can be so closed-minded about what constitutes an "acceptable" stage, or they're so used to pursuing as much control/simplification as possible over what goes on with their experiences with Smash that they slip into confirmation bias without even realizing it - finding "reasons" to support banning a stage with a minimally invasive element without taking a step back and really mulling over whether they're even approaching it constructively, understanding that you can still do something about more factors than you realize. I'm not much in the mood to go into a long commentary about how all this is rampant in the Smash community, but anyway tl;dr trying to start with few stages and then adding more won't work, period. A new game like Ultimate with something as godlike as a hazard toggle gives me hope that maybe the game itself can save the community from itself, or that more figureheads could even step up and try to educate others on being more flexible, but I'll believe it when I see it.

 

[Fell God]

I don't mean this as an attack, but I feel that, often, stages can sometimes be used as a john. Yes, there are some stages that heavily change matchups, such as Duck Hunt and Halberd (mostly in Brawl) but the thing is, stage choice always affects the matchup. Characters that have difficulty dealing with projectiles do notably worse on FD than on other stages, stages with lower ceilings make vertical KOs much deadlier and stages with high ceilings make vertical KOs far less threatening. One thing that can stagnate the meta, to an extent, is limiting stage choice too much, to the point where we're stuck on Town and City and Smashville like before. However, hazard toggle can bring about a new issue: how do we decide which stages need hazards off and which don't? Personally, I feel that stages that were already legal before hazard toggle, such as Melee's Pokémon Stadium 1 or Prism Tower, will be fine with hazards on. Of course, in the case of the former, it will probably need hazards off if the windmill works like it did in Brawl, but regardless, I think variety is a necessity, especially if Nintendo's plans to support the Switch for longer than they've supported other consoles are true (which would mean there would be a larger gap between Smash games)
If Ultimate is going to last, we should at least give a more liberal stage list a chance. If we could have custom moves available for EVO 2015, I don't think it's too unreasonable to have a larger stage list for the early competitive scene for Ultimate if not its entire competitive lifespan.

 

[**Gilgamesh**]

I don't mean this as an attack, but I feel that, often, stages can sometimes be used as a john. Yes, there are some stages that heavily change matchups, such as Duck Hunt and Halberd (mostly in Brawl) but the thing is, stage choice always affects the matchup. Characters that have difficulty dealing with projectiles do notably worse on FD than on other stages, stages with lower ceilings make vertical KOs much deadlier and stages with high ceilings make vertical KOs far less threatening. One thing that can stagnate the meta, to an extent, is limiting stage choice too much, to the point where we're stuck on Town and City and Smashville like before. However, hazard toggle can bring about a new issue: how do we decide which stages need hazards off and which don't? Personally, I feel that stages that were already legal before hazard toggle, such as Melee's Pokémon Stadium 1 or Prism Tower, will be fine with hazards on. Of course, in the case of the former, it will probably need hazards off if the windmill works like it did in Brawl, but regardless, I think variety is a necessity, especially if Nintendo's plans to support the Switch for longer than they've supported other consoles are true (which would mean there would be a larger gap between Smash games)
If Ultimate is going to last, we should at least give a more liberal stage list a chance. If we could have custom moves available for EVO 2015, I don't think it's too unreasonable to have a larger stage list for the early competitive scene for Ultimate if not its entire competitive lifespan.

We are not allowing hazards to be toggled on stages in the rule-set. It would be to complex and bizarre figuring out what stages to ban and if they're hazards on or off not to mention the issues of stages being categorized as different from hazards on and off. We need simplicity for the sake of growth and logistics. All stages should played with hazards off as permanent.

 

[Fell God]

We are not allowing hazards to be toggled on stages in the rule-set. It would be to complex and bizarre figuring out what stages to ban and of they're hazards on or off not to mention the issues of stages being categorized as different from hazards on and off. We need simplicity for the sake of growth and logistics. All stages and played with hazards off as permanent.

But...Randall...

Anyway, don't know how great that idea is for variety, might as well just play on Omega and BF variants at that point. Hazard toggle removes a lot of stage elements.

 

[DJ3DS]

Only FD, battlefield versions, smashville, Pokemon stadium should be legal. I don't think this is too conservative either maybe frigate orpheon as a countrrpick.

So in a game with an order of magnitude more stages than Smash 4 and a toggle explicitly designed to make them more competitive, you think having LESS stages to choose from isn't too conservative?

We are not allowing hazards to be toggled on stages in the rule-set. It would be to complex and bizarre figuring out what stages to ban and if they're hazards on or off not to mention the issues of stages being categorized as different from hazards on and off. We need simplicity for the sake of growth and logistics. All stages should played with hazards off as permanent.

I disagree and think each stage form should be considered on its own merits. It is understandably a fringe case but if a perfectly serviceable stage becomes problematic with hazards off (such as by creating caves of life on this instance) it is ridiculous to disallow it by this reasoning alone.

Moreover if this is "too complex" in the few fringe cases this will happen then I genuinely worry for this community.

 

[dav3yb]

I don't mean this as an attack, but I feel that, often, stages can sometimes be used as a john. Yes, there are some stages that heavily change matchups, such as Duck Hunt and Halberd (mostly in Brawl) but the thing is, stage choice always affects the matchup. Characters that have difficulty dealing with projectiles do notably worse on FD than on other stages, stages with lower ceilings make vertical KOs much deadlier and stages with high ceilings make vertical KOs far less threatening. One thing that can stagnate the meta, to an extent, is limiting stage choice too much, to the point where we're stuck on Town and City and Smashville like before. However, hazard toggle can bring about a new issue: how do we decide which stages need hazards off and which don't? Personally, I feel that stages that were already legal before hazard toggle, such as Melee's Pokémon Stadium 1 or Prism Tower, will be fine with hazards on. Of course, in the case of the former, it will probably need hazards off if the windmill works like it did in Brawl, but regardless, I think variety is a necessity, especially if Nintendo's plans to support the Switch for longer than they've supported other consoles are true (which would mean there would be a larger gap between Smash games)
If Ultimate is going to last, we should at least give a more liberal stage list a chance. If we could have custom moves available for EVO 2015, I don't think it's too unreasonable to have a larger stage list for the early competitive scene for Ultimate if not its entire competitive lifespan.

This is the main reason i started (https://smashboards.com/threads/criteria-for-legal-stages.456798/) <- this thread. If stages are discussed based on characteristics and not focusing on a single stage, we should be able to come up with a list of criteria that we can then hold every stage next to and ask, "does it hit any of these that would make it non viable?" I think this would be a better way to try and discuss how to get a starting list of stages, since it would force those who don't want X stage because they're not a good enough player to admit there are no clear faults with it, and they're just johning.

As far as the hazard toggle thing, I still think if it's easy to turn it on and off, then it should be allowed, but a stage should still only be classified as a whole. Having a stage legal with both hazards on and off would probably be insanely unlikely, but i feel that would start to needlessly expand the list of available stages.

 

[Amiibo Doctor]

We could just count stages that work both with and without hazards as separate stages. Stadium w/ hazards and Stadium w/o.

 

[viewtifulduck82]

FD, BF, SV, Pokemon stadium with hazards off, and yoshi's island stage is literally all that's required to start off.

Pls pls pls do not ruin early game results by adding a million stages just because you want variety. It is 100% not okay to just add stages for the hell of it.

As a long term competitor I can't stand having all of these bogus stages thrown onto us by people that wont play the game for longer than a few months every smash cyle.

There are 0 issues with starting small and expanding. People are saying stages never get added back, but we've also never been in the situation where we had several really good stages to choose from. We've also never started conservatively like this. Can we please just keep it simple to start off with stages we absolute know are competitively viable instead mucking up early game events with stuff we haven't gotten to test???

 

[dav3yb]

FD, BF, SV, Pokemon stadium with hazards off, and yoshi's island stage is literally all that's required to start off.

Pls pls pls do not ruin early game results by adding a million stages just because you want variety. It is 100% not okay to just add stages for the hell of it.

As a long term competitor I can't stand having all of these bogus stages thrown onto us by people that wont play the game for longer than a few months every smash cyle.

There are 0 issues with starting small and expanding. People are saying stages never get added back, but we've also never been in the situation where we had several really good stages to choose from. We've also never started conservatively like this. Can we please just keep it simple to start off with stages we absolute know are competitively viable instead mucking up early game events with stuff we haven't gotten to test???

There's also 0 issues with starting large this time and narrowing down. It's not like we don't know issues with past stages that are returning, and can figure out what makes them work or not work. And with the hazard toggle, there really should be no reason to need to worry much about some stages like we used to. Once we have all the information on how a stage performs with its hazards off, there really shouldn't be much of an issue starting with more, since most stages won't have anything that is just glaringly bad or polarizing as far as results go.

 

[Frihetsanka]

Early game events matter much less though. For one thing, many players will not have found their main early on, and those who continue using their main from Smash 4 will be at an advantage anyway. I think it's fine to have a larger stage list initially in order to get some information and then we trim it down until we reach the best possible stage list (whatever that ends up being). That's a better solution than adding stages later on when the meta has already settled.

With that being said, there's no need to add stages that are cleary unviable. Great Bay is dead on arrival.

 

[Untouch]

Honestly early on you're going to get tourneys with weirder stage lists anyways because a standard and stage list won't be set yet anyways.

 

[ParanoidDrone]

FD, BF, SV, Pokemon stadium with hazards off, and yoshi's island stage is literally all that's required to start off.

Pls pls pls do not ruin early game results by adding a million stages just because you want variety. It is 100% not okay to just add stages for the hell of it.

As a long term competitor I can't stand having all of these bogus stages thrown onto us by people that wont play the game for longer than a few months every smash cyle.

There are 0 issues with starting small and expanding. People are saying stages never get added back, but we've also never been in the situation where we had several really good stages to choose from. We've also never started conservatively like this. Can we please just keep it simple to start off with stages we absolute know are competitively viable instead mucking up early game events with stuff we haven't gotten to test???

Even if we limit ourselves to stages that a) have been legal in previous titles (Melee, Brawl, 4) and b) are known to be in Ultimate, we still have a generously sized list:

Battlefield
Final Destination
Smashville
Town & City
Pokemon Stadium 1/2 (hazardless; no transformations)
Lylat Cruise (hazardless; no tilting)
Yoshi's Island Brawl
Dream Land 64
Yoshi's Story Melee

That's nine stages. All perfectly acceptable as borne out by the past years of competitive Smash. And you're seriously suggesting we start out with just four legal stages? Out of literally 80+ known stages so far?

Let me pose some questions: Suppose we do follow through with your suggestion and have a tiny stage list to start with the intention of expanding it later. Who will actually explore the other stages? Who determines if a stage is allowed or not? In what context will this testing be done? Will others be able to weigh in on the results will it be done by fiat? How long will this take? Will there be a deadline or can they skate by on constantly saying "we'll get to it eventually"?

 

[Routa]

I would personally first try to make a stage list without needing to turn hazards off. It would simplify the stage ruling and far easier to remember which are legal. I would also try to avoid similar platform layouts. We all know that in the end the platform layout is the most important aspect of the stage.

So here is what I would consider to be the stagelist (and most likely the first stagelist we will have in finland):
-Battlefield
-FD
-Smashville
-Lylat
-Yoshi's Brawl
-Frigate Orpheon
-Arena Ferox
-T&C/Prism Tower
-Yoshi's Melee

We have tried to run different amount of stages here in finland and it seems like people tend to remember up to 9 stages from a top of their heads without having to spend time on remembering. This is why I think 7-9 stages would be ideal. Big problem with Sm4sh and Melee is that they favour characters that prefer triplat layout quite a bit. This is why I think it is important to limit the the amount of stages that share a similar layout.

 

[viewtifulduck82]

Even if we limit ourselves to stages that a) have been legal in previous titles (Melee, Brawl, 4) and b) are known to be in Ultimate, we still have a generously sized list:

Battlefield
Final Destination
Smashville
Town & City
Pokemon Stadium 1/2 (hazardless; no transformations)
Lylat Cruise (hazardless; no tilting)
Yoshi's Island Brawl
Dream Land 64
Yoshi's Story Melee

That's nine stages. All perfectly acceptable as borne out by the past years of competitive Smash. And you're seriously suggesting we start out with just four legal stages? Out of literally 80+ known stages so far?

Let me pose some questions: Suppose we do follow through with your suggestion and have a tiny stage list to start with the intention of expanding it later. Who will actually explore the other stages? Who determines if a stage is allowed or not? In what context will this testing be done? Will others be able to weigh in on the results will it be done by fiat? How long will this take? Will there be a deadline or can they skate by on constantly saying "we'll get to it eventually"?

That stage list is also fine. The 5 I listed are what I see as the most essential and ththe absolute minimum the game could run on. My point is there are always stages like halberd, castle siege, delfino, duckhunt, etc on a stagelist that take ages to get rid of.
Just have an evaluation every season start for possible new stages. Form a panel similar to the pgr panel that includes the TO's that host majors and a select few top players. Any stage that can be argued as fine for competitive play in the panel should be allowed at the next major, and then poll the players that attended on how they feel about the stage.

This will probably take awhile to finish, but it also takes awhile to remove questionable stages too.

I just think anything that wasn't
A.) Legal at the end of a game's lifespan
OR
B.) A previous stage that was close but was held back by a particular hazard
Shouldn't be legal at the start.

I'm also of the opinion that we don't need an incredibly large stage list just because.

 

[Frihetsanka]

I would personally first try to make a stage list without needing to turn hazards off. It would simplify the stage ruling and far easier to remember which are legal.

Wouldn't it be better to simply always turn hazards off, then? A stage such as Frigate Orpheon is much better with hazards off, after all.

 

[ParanoidDrone]

Wouldn't it be better to simply always turn hazards off, then? A stage such as Frigate Orpheon is much better with hazards off, after all.

I agree with this. The number of stages that are improved with hazards turned off is much greater than the number of stages that are improved with hazards turned on. If the hazard toggle isn't accessible directly on the stage select screen, I'd even support a permanent hazards-off rule with no hazards-on stage allowed.

 

[Untouch]

So far, from the demo at least, the only stage that becomes worse with hazards off is Town and City since the platforms are static. I think that's a fair sacrifice to make to make everything easier for TOs.


Also if hazard toggle is always going to be on and FD's background is very noisy like it was in smash 4, I could see Wily's Castle being legal instead since they're nearly identical.

 

[Amiibo Doctor]

Also if hazard toggle is always going to be on and FD's background is very noisy like it was in smash 4, I could see Wily's Castle being legal instead since they're nearly identical.

I second that. Smash 4's FD was tooooo hard on the eyes, and Wily Castle is a solid alternative.

It's not ridiculous to suggest that we can memorize a dozen or more stages. Shoot, this game has almost 70 characters and I guarantee you every competitive player will at least have a surface understanding of what every move does. Why wouldn't that also apply to stages?

 

[viewtifulduck82]

I second that. Smash 4's FD was tooooo hard on the eyes, and Wily Castle is a solid alternative.

It's not ridiculous to suggest that we can memorize a dozen or more stages. Shoot, this game has almost 70 characters and I guarantee you every competitive player will at least have a surface understanding of what every move does. Why wouldn't that also apply to stages?

It's ridiculous for newer players absolutely. 7-9 stages is the limit for what most people remember off the top of their head. Besides, what's the point of even having that many stages? If you're only answer is "variety" I wouldn't say it's a good enough reason.

 

[Fell God]

It's ridiculous for newer players absolutely. 7-9 stages is the limit for what most people remember off the top of their head. Besides, what's the point of even having that many stages? If you're only answer is "variety" I wouldn't say it's a good enough reason.

Couldn't it be argued that the potential poor memory of players is a bad reason to keep the stage list small?

 

[Routa]

Couldn't it be argued that the potential poor memory of players is a bad reason to keep the stage list small?

I have seen a lot of people having a huge problem remembering what stages we had legal back when we ran 13 stages (yeah we actually had 13 stages legal here in finland). This was also a problem when we reduced the amount of stages to 11. After a close game it can be really hard to remember quickly which stages are legal. Also if we are going to run FLSS then the stagelist should not be too long. Remember that stage variety > big stagelist. Having all the different BF variations will bring far more harm than good.

Wouldn't it be better to simply always turn hazards off, then? A stage such as Frigate Orpheon is much better with hazards off, after all.

Yes and no. We aren't yet sure how much hazards off will alter the stage. If we can run a good stagelist without having to add extra rule to say that this and that button needs to be on when picked this and that would make the rulelist far easier to remember and to understand. Also other reason why I am against putting hazards off has to do with the choosing of the legal stages. This will most likely cause different regions to pick different legal stages, which will cause problems with people who travel ooc.

 

[Amiibo Doctor]

We could just have people use an RNG app to decide what stage to play on next. That way we can articulate hazards on/off versions, and maintain the massive amount of possibly legal stages.

 

[viewtifulduck82]

I have seen a lot of people having a huge problem remembering what stages we had legal back when we ran 13 stages (yeah we actually had 13 stages legal here in finland). This was also a problem when we reduced the amount of stages to 11. After a close game it can be really hard to remember quickly which stages are legal. Also if we are going to run FLSS then the stagelist should not be too long. Remember that stage variety > big stagelist. Having all the different BF variations will bring far more harm than good.



Yes and no. We aren't yet sure how much hazards off will alter the stage. If we can run a good stagelist without having to add extra rule to say that this and that button needs to be on when picked this and that would make the rulelist far easier to remember and to understand. Also other reason why I am against putting hazards off has to do with the choosing of the legal stages. This will most likely cause different regions to pick different legal stages, which will cause problems with people who travel ooc.

Not really. I figure stage hazards off 100% of the time would be standard. Under what circumstances would hazards need to be kept? I cant think of a single reason that a stage would be any more competitively viable with hazards on, as opposed to off.

We could just have people use an RNG app to decide what stage to play on next. That way we can articulate hazards on/off versions, and maintain the massive amount of possibly legal stages.

I'm sorry for asking this, but are you being serious, and have you ever played the game using actual competitive rulesets?

 

[Amiibo Doctor]

I am absolutely serious, and I have played competitively on and off for years. Unless you want to use the traditional system, we're going to have think creatively.

 

[Routa]

Actually there was a little talk about that between EU TOs. Other thing brought up was idea of switching stages between every "season".

Main problem is that Smash is way too stage depend game. Closes thing we have to Smash in terms of stage importance (outside of platform fighters) is Tekken 7. In that game some characters do have advantage in certain stages, but it does not change how you play in neutral. Due to it not altering the neutral of the game or giving big advantage to other player the game has stages selected randomly.

 

[Fell God]

I have seen a lot of people having a huge problem remembering what stages we had legal back when we ran 13 stages (yeah we actually had 13 stages legal here in finland). This was also a problem when we reduced the amount of stages to 11. After a close game it can be really hard to remember quickly which stages are legal. Also if we are going to run FLSS then the stagelist should not be too long. Remember that stage variety > big stagelist. Having all the different BF variations will bring far more harm than good.

I never suggested having hazardless Midgar or Miiverse (the latter of which probably won't return anyway) or anything like that. In fact, I'm suggesting the opposite, sort of. Should hazard toggle be as simple as pressing a single button on the stage select screen in the final game, I don't think it would be unreasonable to have certain stages be played with hazards on. Otherwise, what's the point in having both Pokémon Stadiums? Without hazards, they're identical, and yes, I know Stadium 2's hazards are far more disruptive, but Stadium 1 is a relatively fair stage even with the transitions. I just don't see much point in tossing that aside when it wasn't seen as a problematic stage in the past.

 

[Thinkaman]

I'm just going to point out that it's typically the oldest competitive vets who want more stages.

We're the ones who played Melee tourneys for years on Green Greens and Mute City, and had lots of great matches there.

It was always the youngest players who johned and complained about stages, with the most "faux-competitive" players being the "only FD" crowd.