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Does Melee Have Better Balance Than PM?

Boss N

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DISCUSSION TOPIC

If Certain PM Characters Are Truly Broken, How/Why Are They Broken Compared To Melee's Roster (a game where only half, if that, of it's roster is even viable and relies on unintended technical exploits) What Makes Melee Characters More Well Balanced & If It Was Up To You, How Would You Balance The Roster Or Aspects Of The Game?

Lengthy Post Ahead:
THIS POST IS NOT INTENDED TO PROVE A POINT, JUST START A DISCUSSION.

So a lot of Melee players I play against in PM tend to complain how too many of the characters are brain-dead stupidly broken (even though just earlier they say people who complain about such things when it comes to characters like Shiek are just bad players)

Lets take Link for example, people are usually infuriated with this matchup because of his reliance on his projectile spamming, and how this is dumb because it's an auto-win. I often make the counter argument that it's not any different from how Fox works; all link has to do is press buttons, so does Fox. (though at a much faster rate) The counter argument is often that Fox takes a lot more work, but Link takes effort too. There's a lot more thought and effort into making sure you cover as many approach options as possible while making sure you don't make yourself vulnerable (cuz every one of his projectiles leaves him VERY open)cuz if your projectile pressure isn't air tight it's very easy to punish Link. His close range attacks are ONLY good for stringing together punishment combos, but not anything else, if an opponent manages to find their way in then he doesn't have nearly as many options to fend them off (without getting repedetive) compared to other characters.

And people will say that all he does is throw boomerang, if he really is doing nothing but spamming JUST the boomerang, I'm sorry but that's not the games fault it's your own for not being able to figure out how to get around the problem, because there is a solution. I will always stand by my claim when I say Fox is stupid, but at the same time I will acknowledge that he is still beatable and it's my own fault for not figuring out how to deal with him instead of blaming it on the game.

The PMDT have the unfortunate task of taking a cast of 41 characters being able to compete on as even on a possible playing field, and their source game is one that only has a handful of viable characters that are only like that due to unintended technical exploits within their game. Imagine trying to make a game meant for speed running, except you HAVE to make the main mechanics based on flaws in the games programming, yet still somehow make it a challenging and engaging. Now try to make that game competitively viable. That's the daunting task, from a game design perspective, that the PMDT has to do with character balancing and they don't have many other frames of references to draw from, not even other fighting games. So naturally, quirky things are going to come up.

But hows the fact that some characters have gimmicks, differ from the fact that melee characters have gimmicks as well? Or can you do a lot more with Melee characters than PM?
 

Bleck

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anyone who thinks a game is unbalanced compared to Melee is literally a walking, talking pillar of salt
 

Binary Clone

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No, it doesn't.

People get salty because there's 41 characters that are almost all entirely viable, and they don't know the matchup. Melee has 8ish viable characters, and PM has more viable characters than Melee has characters in the first place. The idea that Melee is more balanced is silly.
 

Xermo

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People are just buttmad that they can actually lose to a link player now. Because it isn't Melee, they write it off as P:M jank and blame the game, not their inability to now learn 33 new match-ups.
 
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Gotohellcadz

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No, it doesn't.

People get salty because there's 41 characters that are almost all entirely viable, and they don't know the matchup. Melee has 8ish viable characters, and PM has more viable characters than Melee has characters in the first place. The idea that Melee is more balanced is silly.
Literally all my melee friends when they first tried to get into pm...
 

Pachinkosam

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I like both games samus super wavedash is much easier in project m and they don't have the extender grab for samus on project m.
 
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Sunshine Jesse

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No. Balance was never the appeal behind Melee, and no good players fool themselves into thinking it is (...to my knowledge).
 

Shadic

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Lets take Link for example, people are usually infuriated with this matchup because of his reliance on his projectile spamming, and how this is dumb because it's an auto-win.
Have you played a release since 3.02?
 

Celestis

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Melee players tend to complain when a character like Link does things like that because they are not comfortable with the idea of a character like him being any good. It's kinda programmed into their minds. Plus they just don't know the match-ups, plain and simple.
 

Strong Badam

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Lmao I can't take the title of this thread seriously. PM has over three times the number of viable characters. It's like not even a question of opinion, it's just obviously wrong
 
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MLGF

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Hey NBoss, look! The exact same things were said on Smashboards as they were on the state facebook page about this topic!
What a wacky coincidence.
 
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jackal27

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Absolutely not. Melee is a game built almost entirely around a small, elite group of characters and using them effectively. Project M is so much more balanced compared to Melee, even in its current still-in-dev state. I love Melee, but anyone who says this is just mad because a game is different from the one they're used to.
 

EarthCrash

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Of course not. The entire basis of Project M's balance was how to make every character go against Melee Fox in an even match up.
 

Zigludo

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I think it depends on your definition of balance. It's not completely unreasonable to assert that the unviable characters in a given game are not relevant to balance when viewing the game in a competitive context, because those characters simply will not be played. For instance, when evaluating a question like "How good is NTSC Melee Sheik?", the fact that she has 95-5 matchups with Bowser and DK usually remains unmentioned, because nobody plays those characters, so those matchups don't matter.

If your definition of "more balanced" is "a higher number of tournament viable characters", then PM is more balanced and there's not even any way to begin arguing otherwise. End of discussion. That's not my personal definition of "more balanced", though.

On the other hand, if your definition of the phrase "more balanced" is something like "more normalized matchup spreads", and if you consider Melee to be a game that consists only of its tournament viable characters (which, in the top32 of any major, it is), the argument could be made that a given Melee top tier player is less likely to run into an impossible matchup that demands a character switch (Pika has a pretty big problem with ICs and Sheik, but Pika isn't in most people's personal Top Tier.) Just about every top tier matchup is hotly debated in Melee and very, very few are considered worth learning another character for, rather than simply improving personal skill in the given matchup. Among themselves, the top8 of Melee have relatively decent balance with few to zero "unwinnable" matchups.

On the other hand, there are many characters in Project M that are considered "viable", but who have certain matchups that most recommend picking up a secondary for. 3.5 Bowser is a pretty fine example of this, he had the tools to deal with most of the cast, but had a particular difficulty dealing with consistent grab punishes and edgeguard setups leading into meteor smashes. (Hello Falcon, Wario, Ganondorf and GnW.)

Due to the wide diversity of character designs and the sheer number of matchups, many such outliers and less-than-normalized matchups may occur.

EDIT: For the record, I am not saying that Melee is more balanced than PM. I am not saying that PM is more balanced than Melee, either. Personally, I don't feel as though I understand the individual matchups in Melee well enough to give a definite statement as to how balanced they are overall (there are 56 of them in top8 alone!) I feel even less qualified to make definitive statements on the overall balance level of Project M, which has 1600 matchups or so. I would prefer to avoid Dunning-Kruger'ing myself on such a complex subject.
 
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Shellfire

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To be fair, a lot of the complaints about jank were pretty valid until recent versions.
 

The Party

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Melee is reasonably well-balanced if you think of it as a game with eight characters. The top tiers are pretty well-balanced around each other. Thinking of Melee as a 26-character game, it's horribly unbalanced, but in practice, the low tiers are so irrelevant to the metagame that they shouldn't even be considered when talking about game balance.
 

Shellfire

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Not to mention the fact the the top 8 still has some blatantly harsh matchups. The lower end of the top 8 also barely makes it into the list.
 
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MegaMissingno

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Not to mention the fact the the top 8 still has some blatantly harsh matchups. The lower end of the top 8 also barely makes it into the list.
I would argue the same could be said about PM, there's a good handful of below-average characters who I would rank around the level of Melee's lower S and upper A tiers. And then there's Bowser and Puff who are kinda screwed with extremely one-sided matchups.

Of course, that's still pretty good for a game with 41 characters to have the majority be great, a bunch that are still alright, and very few be truly bad. Anyone expecting the entire roster to be completely perfect is just being unrealistic, and I would challenge anyone to name another game that can keep this many characters this close.
 
D

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Lmao I can't take the title of this thread seriously. PM has over three times the number of viable characters. It's like not even a question of opinion, it's just obviously wrong
maybe, but its also a good source of constructive criticism from a bag of meat holding a controller. sometimes i think the DT is so pre-occupied with their own technical and strategic knowledge of the game that they miss the bigger picture of what it feels like for the average gamer. the average gamer doesnt read frame data or use PSA or go to nationals, but their point of view is still the statistical majority and they can still make very valid points with a half-informed but detached and neutral point of view. if randoms are asking which game is more balanced because they cant tell, its a good early indicator thats worth evaluating.
 
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MLGF

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This guy has been in the scene for about a year. Lmao, no idea where newbie came from

Not even sure where this came from

*EDIT* pretty sure you need to duel main with quite a few characters in melee to be efficient too
 
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AceGamer

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Lol at people saying the top 8 of Melee are balanced. When people say balanced they mean the whole game, if you have to forget that over half the roster exist then a game is nowhere near balanced XD
 

Exodo

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Is the thread seriously gonna go on? How in the actual **** can people think, melee is more balanced than pm... Like seriously people, this is just a dumb question
 

TreK

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Idk, I don't need a secondary to play my Melee main in Melee.
/jk but not really.
 

Thor

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People look at the characters in PM and cry "broken". They seem to forget how unbelievably broken the most commonly-played Melee characters are.

NOTHING in 3.02 felt even close to broken [except Mewtwo's teleporting shenanigans] when I go back and try to play my main Link vs a good Melee Fox. And 3.5 made it so that truly nothing felt broken in PM, ESPECIALLY compared to when I go back and play a Falco who spends the entire time either laser camping or shinegrabbing me on FD in Melee.

14 years has made a lot of people blind...

EDT: I also enter plenty of Melee tournaments when I can and thoroughly enjoy Melee playing as Link and occasionally breaking out a Falco or Marth [or whomever]. But I will state that even though I thoroughly enjoy Melee [and am amused by salt when people drop games or sets to my Link as X high tier], I don't think it's balanced. Not to say that PM doesn't have its own balance issues, but they pale in comparison to how imbalanced Melee really is.

P.S: Totally unrelated, but 5:48 for a hype moment when I was on-stream this past Saturday [and then a few moments later the twist DI on the nair XD]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8POqijSVX5s&index=12&list=PLwtjOEYy9Kxj92Mt5ubJslibkbGm1aNiC
 
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Scribe

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Honestly, this is probably one of the big similarities to D&D/Pathfinder and Smash, community-wise.

People claiming that Zoning-based characters like Link and Ivysaur are overpowered in Project M are a lot like people saying that, say, Path of War and the Soulknife in Pathfinder are overpowered. They're not actually overpowered; people just aren't used to that sort of character being viable. They're so used to zoning (in the case of smash) or melee fighters (in the case of D&D Pathfinder) being too underpowered to compete that they assume that this is the way things are meant to be, and as soon as a third-party developer puts out something where they can compete, people call hax and say it's overpowered.

As a side note, the different smash games and mods line up pretty well with the various editions of D&D and fan made remakes/supplements thereof.

Smash 64 = OD&D and AD&D (Seeing a resurgence as of late, not as popular nowadays as more recent installments, a lot of early installment weirdness)
Melee = D&D 3e and 3.5 (Still popular to this day, has balance issues that its fans either overlook or claim are a feature, not a bug. Very competitive/powergamer-friendly)
Brawl = D&D 4e and Pathfinder (the former for being regarded as more "casual" and overcorrecting on the perceived flaws with its predecessor, the latter for attempting to fix its predecessor's balanced issues and instead making them worse)
Smash 4 = D&D 5e (The culmination of its predecessors, combining well liked (and not so well-liked) aspects of the previous installments)
Project M = Dreamscarred Press' Pathfinder supplements (Well-regarded among fans for bringing back well-liked content from the base game's predecessors and having tighter balance than both the base game and its predecessor. Also a bit more over-the-top.)
Brawl Minus = Legend System (Also well-regarded, but much more over-the-top than the base game/its predecessors and has a general design philosophy of achieving game balance by breaking everything.)

anyone who thinks a game is unbalanced compared to Melee is literally a walking, talking pillar of salt
Hey, hey. If you're willing to look outside of fighting games, D&D 3.5 and vanilla Pathfinder are worse than Melee or Brawl would could ever be. Wizards end up as Fox on bath salts while Fighters are basically a cross between Pichu and Nolimar.
 
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OninO

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It seems lots of PM primaries have an emotional attachment to the idea that the expanded PM cast is all, or near all viable. I think it's too early to tell. The game just hasn't gone through an extended "tempering" period where all the that match ups have really been hashed out and the tools available to each character fully explored. (I'm using "tempering" in the sense that steel is tempered to control its structure as it cools).

It seems absurd to me that in light of the under-developed meta, anyone could claim that "most of the cast is viable". In the end, the only truly viable characters (as solo mains) will be the ones that have at worst, 50-50 match-ups with the entire cast. The difficulty of achieving that balance, WITHOUT homogenizing significant portions of the cast, can't be overstated. The sheer number of pairwise interactions to test, further complicated by the "infinite positional variation" of an analog platform fighter is ridiculous.

The "balance" in melee is a result of more than a decade of "balancing" endeavors by a passionate community, without further interference from the developers.

If you think the PMDT has managed to balance 41 characters from 0.0 to 3.6, even drawing on inspiration from melee, you're dreaming. That's setting aside the fact that every attempt at balance by the PMDT is a destabilizing influence on the "tempering" of the game.

Honestly, I think the PMDT should only be stepping in to alter clearly degenerate characters, after year long (or longer) cycles. The question of how to quantify degenerate is really difficult. In a sense it's degenerate for a single character (character X) to achieve 50-50 against the entire cast when other members of the cast do not achieve a similar spread. Then the only "safe" option to main is character X (see Fox).

Tl,dr: Claims that "most of the PM cast are viable" are premature at best.
 
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GuySensei

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Doctor: Alright let's see what's wrong with you -Insert melee players name-. *pushes his butthurt detector up to him*

Melee player: Am I gonna be alright doc? Give it to me straight.

Doctor: I'm sorry -Insert melee players name-...but you have a severe case of PM butthurt. The only subscription I can give you for this is a dose of salt that makes you hate PM because it has more than 8 viable characters.

Melee player: Thanks doc. I'll be back for another check-up after my fight with some furry with a laser gun.
 

GenNyan

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You're asking the wrong question. Rather than ask "does it have better balance?," ask "How much balancing is too much of a good thing?" You can only balance a game so much until every character is exactly the same.

Melee has had the benefit of going 14 years with no patches/updates. This has allowed the meta to settle. While with constant tweaks, nobody can be sure how balanced PM really is because it changes so often.

I don't know what post it was in, but I remember M2K saying that the melee top 8 is secretly underpowered compared to the rest of the PM cast because people already know how to use them to their full/mostly full potential.
 

CyberZixx

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A lot of melee players don't like the designs of many of the PM characters and would rather just fight the same match ups in melee as them find them more fun. The melee meta is far more explored and the match ups are less so you are less likely to lose to lack of knowledge. Which is appealing to a lot of players. Match up knowledge is a huge part of fighting games, but not so much modern melee so to those players it feels bad.

There is so many more characters in this game with unique stuff to learn. Like Bowser's armor, G&W's weird hitboxes, Lucario's everything. I am part way in this camp, where outlier characters like that I am not a fan of and would rather melee match ups, but still love playing PM for what it is. Lot of players feel that way, it is why my local scene is rapidly becoming more melee than PM.
 
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