Enough Is Enough. Coaching Needs To Stop.

Last weekend, I had the good fortune of being able to go to APEX 2015. It was, simply put, awesome. Watching players from all around the world compete on the big screen with hundreds of other Smash fans is an experience I won't soon forget. Melee? Great. Smash 4? Amazing. Even 64 got its share of the limelight. But as some of the later Smash 4 matches rolled around, the event slowed to a crawl.

I bet you can guess why.

Far too much time is being spent on this menu during tournaments.​

During Smash 4, there was nearly as much activity in between matches as there was during. People were running up and down the aisle, advising their friends on what to do versus their opponents. Players 'debated their counterpicks' while having full conversations about the last match, or what to do next. It was obvious, it was boring, and everyone but the players involved hated it. Coaching in Smash, especially Smash 4, needs to go - not just for the reasons above, but for the integrity of the game.

Why Is It A Problem?

Coaching has been a contentious issue in Smash for awhile now. At CEO 2014 last year, Project M was plagued by coaching, with mid-set coaching sessions taking longer than the matches themselves in some cases. Because the tournament took so long, several people suggested moving Project M sets from four stocks to three in order to save time - an effective idea that unfortunately did not address the true problem. At that point, Project M 3.0 was a relatively new game still. Compared to other Smash titles, Project M is considered the most matchup-based of the series; many characters have unique gameplay mechanics that must be taught or experienced to be understood. I'd go as far as to say there are situations in Project M where the player with more character knowledge can win over a stronger opponent. Because of this, knowledge of the game is a significant part of the game.

Smash 4 is even more heavily reliant on knowledge: matchups are unique, and situational understanding is a huge part of the game. This is exacerbated by the fact that Smash 4, compared to Melee or Project M, is not particularly technical. There are no useful techniques that are difficult to execute, so a player's technical skill, while important, pales in comparison to what they know. The most important attributes a Smash 4 player can have are situation awareness and adaptability. Giving players 'coaches' that can fill in knowledge gaps allows a second party to essentially adapt for them. So mid-set coaching, where a player is taught what to do in situation X, Y, or Z, gives that player an advantage over their opponent that they frankly have not earned, and do not deserve.

Thousands of people were watching matches during APEX 2015 weekend. Why should they have to watch three minutes of coaching in between?​

Now, some of you may be saying to yourselves, "well who cares? Both players can have coaches, after all." This may be true, but it doesn't make it fair. Coaching becomes doubly problematic when you realize that the only players getting significant mileage out of coaching situations are top players. Regular player Joe Schmoe's friends don't have a lot of great advice to give him; an elite player's training partners, on the other hand, are likely able to tell them exactly what to watch for. As an example, take ZeRo. He is the undisputed best at Smash 4. Nobody doubts his talent, and he will likely be at the forefront of his game for years to come, coach or no. But let's say some new player appears out of nowhere, challenging him for his spot. Should that player have to play against ZeRo and the minds of his top-level friends? Or should he be afforded the opportunity to beat, or be beaten, by the best in the world in a true battle of wits?

So What Should We Do?

Don't get me wrong: this all makes sense. Smash 4 is a new game, and even the best players have a lot to learn before they can claim full mastery of it. Knowledge is far from uniform, and a Rosalina player may notice things about a certain matchup that a Diddy Kong player wouldn't. Everyone wants to share knowledge and help their friends win, and I'll admit that's a noble cause. But at the end of the day, once a set starts, it's a competition between two players - not their posses. Add in the amount of time it wastes throughout a tournament, and you have an issue that not only cheapens competition, but keeps tournaments from running at a consistent pace.

Part of the competitive meta right now is the amount of knowledge you bring into a match. Let's get rid of coaching once and for all, and treat game knowledge like the part of the competition it deserves to be.

This piece is purely the opinion of its author, and does not reflect the position of Smashboards or its affiliates.

 

It would actually be kind of interesting to see a coach standing on the sidelines rushing in for his 30seconds yelling at the Doubles team, "GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR ***ES!" Before storming back off with a clipboard stampeding back and forth next to the stage shouting every so often to remind them how much they suck... One can only dream.

 

I think Smash 4 took so long not because of coaching, but the matches themselves. I am not bagging on 4 but fights take a pretty long time to finish. Watch each fight and compare it to the coaching and you'll see a fairly large difference. The game takes long, that's all.

Coaching should stay, it encourages crews/friends.

 

Its like you people don't watch actual bloodsports or something. Midmatch coaching is completely acceptable in the real world, and its regulated. You get a few words from your "coach", the bell rings, and you're back in or you're punished. Thats all that really needs to happen with Smash, there needs to be alloted time between matches for counterpicking and coaching if the players want it, times up, back to the match. To simplify a penalty, after the "bell rings" and the alloted time is up, the player who gets to counterpick has another ten seconds to say their choice if they haven't decided by then or they lose a stock. Simple.

 

I must say, APEX needs to change the name of the event you register unless it bans coaching. I signed up for "Smash for Wii U 1v1" not "Smash for Wii U 2v2" yet 2v2 is often what I was seeing during the supposed 1v1 top 8.

 

Coaching in a set feels a bit... wrong. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not against regulated coaching (Here's the keyword: REGULATED) especially since Smash 4 is a new game and quite frankly, not many have been treating it right (I may or may not have an article on this at some point later in the year) but in a set? Not only does it disrupt the match but as said, it's no fun except for the people involved.

Coaching in-between matches and regulated (only one person to one person) is fine imo as long as it's regulated. People will always find ways to get around the rules (hi smartphones). Beyond that, I start to get sketchy

Also I think people are making a bigger deal out of it than they should. There were other reasons that Smash 4 was slow as someone who was watching. I'm not even just going to blame it on the game; APEX was running like mad cats due to the snow and quite frankly, sharing everything on one stream didn't make it any less slower.

"HEY GUYS 1K MONEY MATCH BETWEEN LEFFEN AND MANG0 HYPE"
"OKAY"
"EXCEPT... YOU HAVE TO WAIT THREE HOURS"

I mean, it made the payoff more rewarding, but having Melee end at 3 AM on my time zone was still ridiculous.

 

Coaching is bound to happen anyway. Before a set, during your future opponents match, etc. It should be limited to one set coach, decided beforehand and they should have 30 seconds. A quick moral booster, a quick pointer on something you missed. But that should be the limit.

 

You can always expect a good thread from The Derrit

 

Coaching should be 100% abolished when it comes to getting ANY advice while a set is in progress. There should be no exceptions, no one else on the main stage besides players and anyone directly needed (camera crew, commentary, TO/Judge/stage enforcer).

It's impossible for coaching to be 100% fair to all players, since top players inherently congregate with other top players for opinions. Brawl and Smash 4 players are way more guilty about this than Melee players, but it should be removed across every game and be a staple rule for tourneys going forward.

There's no way to 100% remove it, since you have concerns about people in the crowd shouting out the same stuff a coach might point out to you, or players getting around with loopholes (ask for a bathroom break/smoke break after one of the games, go away from people and ask your buddy some advice etc), but the spirit of the rule should remain and be enforced.


Smash should be about 1 v 1, your opponent's skill and knowledge matched up against your very own for an entire set. You should not have to turn to your opponent, ask him what stage he bans or counter-picks, and then find out there are 2 people where your lone opponent ought to be.

 

Hand warmer time limit of 45-60 seconds, only before the first game of a set, and is in place of the 'coaching minute' before the first game. If you need a coach to figure out to do Game 1, you're doing something wrong.

 

great post but
[quote="DMG, post: 18523188, member: 31947"
Smash should be about 1 v 1[/quote]
is it bad if i read this and thought "every game but smash 4 because smash 4 is better in teams"

 

btw, nobody ever gave a reasonable, valid answer w/r/t when I said this months back:

do you actually know how you can enforce no coaching (which, within rules, would be defined as giving advice to a player currently playing) considering all the variables? @Wife mentions a time where someone yelled a seemingly simplistic (and otherwise not-even-sounding-like-advice) phrase to someone in the early days of melee, and the player it was targeted to proceeded to run the set back directly after this. how do you enforce the idea of yelling in a rowdy crowd, especially if it doesn't even really sound like advice but could be a codeword? what if that crowd is so rowdy, that there's no conceivable way to even tell who said it, much less what the implications of what they said are?

do you enforce headphones, thus making multiple players uncomfortable and ruining crowd interaction? or is it just going to become the next stalling rule, where you just hope everyone abides by it and there's no objective way to actually enforce it?

 

No but you see Project M doesn't have any major tournaments for that to have any effect on the game.

For Smash 4 I would agree. What's there to pause for? If you need to know what's wrong from someone else then you deserve to lose in the first place.

 

what's coaching?

 

Enforce question

There's no 100% method, unless you want to isolate the players from the crowd. Which is not that crazy of an idea, other video games do this albeit usually for different reasons and they aren't FG's. People from the crowd can shout out stuff, regardless of any prior coaching regulations. If we want to limit coaching to 1 person per player, for 30 seconds, people in the crowd handing out advice would also bypass that rule. Doesn't mean we should give up on putting the brakes to an unfair practice.

 

As far as I'm aware, Evo does not allow Coaches on stage. Once a set starts, it is played without stopping unless some outside factor comes up(controller issues, etc)

So, my opinion on this matter is simple. If Smash wants to be part of the big boys club at evo alongside Street Fighter, Marvel, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat, then coaching should be discouraged at all tournaments from now on.

If a Marvel player can't take the time to talk to coaches to figure out a counterpick to a troublesome team, then why should Smash have that luxury? You're supposed to be a top level-player, you should have some ideas of counterpicks that could work. And if you don't, then maybe that's something to work on for the next year.

Coaching drags down the pace of games. Once of Smash 4's biggest issues at Apex was the constant coaching that had to go on. Even in sports that have time outs, a player just can't run off the field at the end of every play to go talk to their coach. They have to spend time outs to stop the clock and figure out their gameplan.

If coaching can't be taken out, then why not do something like that? Each player has three time outs at the start of the tournament. If they make it into the top 16, then they get back whatever timeouts they used for a total of 3 to use in top 16.

With those timeouts,they have only 30 seconds to consult their coach or anyone else.

The limit of three timeouts is intended to keep players from stalling by bringing in coaches after every match and forces them to carefully pick when to use them. Do they save them for a later match, or burn them on the current match?

Also, in the case of a timeout in a match, neither player can use their timeouts.

Just an idea to consider here.

 

I think when it comes to the matter of Top 8, the person who announces the matches/players to come up to the stage should also regulate some coaching to 1 min or less and announce beforehand to have your coaches at your side during the game so no one is allowed to run up and try to help.

That I think is the best way. Simply limit coaching time and "coaches". Coaches must be named before the match, and time limited to a minute or 2.

 

Thanks a lot false

 

20 sec time limit to chose characters?

 

Want to know what also needs to regulated....hand warmers....needs to have a time limit....way too much time was spent on that at apex

normally it's just 30sec. I agree that it should be regulated.

 

Coaching was short at Apex. They had a 20 second rule or so, even less during WF's and GF's, I don't think it mattered that much. Whenever I had my coach tell me something, around 15 seconds later the TO would say time.

This post. It's nearly unbelievable how this one post isn't even recognized. I am flat out impressed about the behavior of this community.

 

I personally like coaching, however, tournament heads should enforce some rule about it as it can get very annoying when trying to watch matches and there is a three to five minute pause between sets.

 

because we dont want anymore players gettting better at smash competitively

 

This post. It's nearly unbelievable how this one post isn't even recognized. I am flat out impressed about the behavior of this community.

That's because that's only ZeRo's experience. It happened to many of the people at APEX this year.

 

we shouldn't have to ban coaching but regulate it better by limiting the time to how long a player can be coached. for example, at apex there was a pools match that last forever. it was just 1 pools set and lasted almost 40 minutes. i finished all of my pool matches at Zenith in that time and was already on to playing friendlies. the match was a smash4 pools match with a luigi player that beat this one guy and then his team was coaching his after the set for at least 25 mintues. and then it was all for nothing because the guy switched to DK and the luigi player destroyed him even faster then he did in game 1. but at the same time realistically the only way coaching can be regulated is if TO's have someone keeping an eye out for that with the players on stream.

 

This post. It's nearly unbelievable how this one post isn't even recognized. I am flat out impressed about the behavior of this community.

I don't think its an issue with coaching, [I posted earlier about coaching as regards how it is in Tennis I still stand by that] I think its more about the time allowed in between matches itself.

Regulate the time in between the matches itself, let coaching have its thing, but if you haven't selected a stage within the time allotted its a penalty on the Counter-picker.

In say a span of that 1-min break between matches the player is allowed any coaching or drink, but the next match must start in the next minute.

 

People complain that Sm4sh takes too long, but in truth, Melee took just as long as Sm4sh at Apex. The reason wasn't because the games themselves that were slow, it's the coaching and all the breaks in the middle that delayed everything.

Coaching needs to go, or be regulated with a timer like they do in sports.

Melee had double the stocks.... the games were too slow. They almost timed out quite a few games as well. The average stock was like 1 min to 2-2.5 or something.

 

"I bet you can guess why."

Yeah, I can. It's because Smash 4 gameplay is slow as f*ck. Perhaps coaching was a factor as well, but the slow gameplay is mainly to blame here.

I'm not trying to gore anyone's ox, but let's not delude ourselves here as to what really caused the delay.

 

bruh.......

 

I'm not trying to gore anyone's ox, but let's not delude ourselves here as to what really caused the delay.

What really caused the delay? T8 of Smash4 took ten minutes less than Melee I think on page 3 its quoted and proven.

If I remember correctly it came down to the TO's not having things organized due to snow and other unforeseen happenings.

 

60 seconds to select character and stage and get whatever coaching you want. Let's go. Even without coaching I've seen players stare at stage or char select for days.

 

I think we shouldn't ban coaching entirely, rather just give a set time limit on how long people should coach mid-match.

30 seconds max.

 

I never really had a smash coach before, i guess i dont have an opinion!

 

Coaching is a part of a whole lot of games but it's always regulated. I propose that players in top 8/16/32/whatever cutoff you prefer are permitted one coach who can sit with them on the stage, and that's it.

 

We just need timed coaching.. 40-60 seconds.

 

Doesn't mean we should give up on putting the brakes to an unfair practice.

because I'm sure everyone just went and took the no stalling rule seriously, right? absolutely no intentional time-outs after that?

a no-tolerance rule isn't just useless, it's worse than useless, because not only are the problems going to continue, but people against any rule change can just say "well we already solved it, so there". by enforcing a time limit, there's none of this "but what if [x] happens", you pass the time limit and that's that

 

Exactly. It's Smash Integrity. Plagiarism is a violation of Academic Integrity, and using someone else's coaching is the Smash form of Plagiarism.

this seems a little much.... haha

 

this seems a little much.... haha

If you'd have scrolled down, you would've seen the concession I made.

Granted, it's not as serious of a matter by any means, but it's the same general concept. It wasn't really you who wrote that paper, and it wasn't really you who won that game. In both scenarios, one uses the easy out to avoid doing work and look good.

 

..........

 

reply

If you put a time limit on coaching, that still does not stop the crowd from shouting something out (which is a negative in all scenarios), and it doesn't prevent the inherent unfairness that can occur if you don't have access to the same level/quality/circle of coaches or knowledgeable friends. Making it 20 seconds still means Zero can tell M2K how to play, while the other person doesn't have the same access.


At the very least, if we are going to accept personal coaches for players, I think coaching time should not only be highly limited, but either player can ban coaching on both sides at any point of the set. Nobody seems to enforce "1 coach per player" despite putting it on the rules. That's the best compromise, even though it looks sad watching top players huddle over each other giving advice between games, when we are supposed to pride ourselves on individual skill and talent.

 

As a boxing and mma fan and considering Smash is virtual prizefighting, I don't see why a very brief between round coaching period is a problem. so long as the time is tightly regulated and overtime is deftly penalized.