Phyvo
Smash Journeyman
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2007
- Messages
- 289
FAQ - The Why of Competitive Rules
Here I hope to answer common questions that have been asked lately about advanced techniques and tournament rules. Updated sections in cyan.
________________________________
What are tournament rules for?
Tournament rules are not rules that all tournament players feel are the correct way to play the game, all the time. They are just the consensus reached among tournament players concerning how to run a tournament and to best test the skills of it's participants. The key here is "skill test", in a general sense. Whether these skills are mental, involving knowing your opponent and endless other things, or physical, involving the muscle memory required to pull off every move in the game, they are still skills that are valuable to test. Brawl involves less muscle memory, but that doesn't mean that muscle memory is a bad thing. It just means that when Brawl players are pitted against each other in a tournament there will be less muscle memory involved.
________________________________
It's no fun losing all the time to people who use these glitches!
Well, *I completely agree*. Except for a few individuals, losing all the time with no chance of winning sucks for both the loser (it's frustrating) and the winner (it's boring). How many professional chess players do you see playing 8 year old kids? Not that many, because it's boring and we all know what would happen. When playing chess, then, we have a whole rating system for each player so that this sort of thing doesn't happen and beginner players don't have to play chess masters.
Now, notice, that this is separating the masters and the beginners into two different worlds. They might never get to play each other at all! Is there no way to for a master and a beginner to get together and... play a game? Is the professional SSB player forever removed from the average player, never able to play any SSB game with them at all? NO!
There are two simple options for when professionals and casuals want to play a game together. First, you might play a different game entirely. If you friend is a master at Chess, you might decide you want to play Monopoly instead for awhile. Or you might try mixing up the rules. If your friend is awesome at chess you might try Fischer chess. In SSB, we have an obvious thing to do to mix up the rules: Items! *This* is really what items and all that randomness are for and can do!
________________________________
So why don't tournament players use items? Why do they ban my favorite stages?
I just want to make clear that the argument against the use of items only applies for tournament play (and any practicing for such a tournament). Otherwise, you do what you think is fun, because the point is to purely to have fun.
Again, remember that tournaments are created so that competitive players can measure and compare their skills against other players. This is also fun for lots of people! But it requires some special rules to be set up so that it's the best player that will win.
For example, on some stages, professional players can effectively game the system and do REALLY CHEAP STUFF. In Hyrule Castle in Melee, your opponent, if he chose Fox, could hit you once and run away until the timer ran out and ended the match in his favor. You have no chance of hitting him back (unless you're Captain Falcon I believe) to regain the lead. Imagine if in soccer you could score a goal and then just run away from the field with the ball until the game ended. This is obviously dumb and kills the game. It's for reasons akin to this that some stages are *completely* banned, and other stages are slightly restricted in their use. In soccer we set what's out of bounds, in SSB we set a stage "out of bounds" or under slightly restricted use.
Items (and this includes some stages too) are a random element. Imagine, again, that you're playing soccer. Now imagine that there's a 50% chance of you not scoring a goal when the ball goes into the net, determined by the flip of a coin. It has to be tails for you to actually score. Now imagine losing because you got 10 heads, no tails and the other team got 1 tails when they got a goal. Now, how freakin' lame is that? WAY LAME. It just kills the competitiveness of the game, you see? One team won not because it was actually better than the other team and had more skills, but because they got lucky on a coin toss. You wouldn't have the World Cup if that's how soccer worked today. People would hate soccer rather than becoming rabid fans crazy and rioting over it! Err.. ok. Don't go biting people who hate Brawl, please. ^.^v
Again, items' greatest strength is in mixing up the game so that the average player and professionals can play each other AND HAVE FUN. If you have a friend who's really good at the game, and you like item matches, if he's a friend at all he'll play some with you (assuming he's not grumpy), or at least suggest a different game you could play together (like going from Chess to Apples to Apples).
________________________________
I don't think we should be encouraging Brawl glitches to be found and exploited. Why are we?
Originally in soccer people only shot goals with the front of their feet. This was all fine and good, people had fun playing it and loved to play it this way, even at a professional level. Eventually, someone discovered that you could curve the ball by not hitting it dead on, making it a lot harder for a goalie to defend the goal. Enter Madam Controversy, stage right.
The fact is that with any set of rules, they are never so exhaustive that no one will ever find new ways to do things within the game that no one had thought of before. This is true of *all* games. The only difference between Melee and a sport in this regard is that in sports we are told at age 8 or so, "Well, it's not against the rules", and most sports have been around long enough that many of these controversial things aren't controversial anymore. You don't think curving the ball into the net is cheap because people have by now gotten over it and explained it to you that way when you were 8! If SSB wasn't a shorter-lived video game, and all these glitches of which you speak were treated as just part of the game when you were little, I don't think you'd have a problem with any of them!
Because, however, of the short lifespan of a video game, with the rules mostly defined and enforced by the game itself, many people attack competitive play, saying "they're cheating with glitches, programmers never intended this!" Well, did the creators of soccer directly *intend* that we curve shoot the ball into the goal using the side of our feet? Did the creators of basketball directly *intend* slam dunks? These games evolved to greater things right under their noses! Aren't all these things awesome things that, when someone does them, we say OMG THAT IS SO AWESOME? It still takes skill to control all your muscle movements so that you jump and slam dunk, or to curve the ball into the goal. It still takes skill to control your muscle movements so that your character on screen performs one of these advanced moves.
All of these unintended techniques have all been wonderful additions to their respective games. Sure, you may say that the sheer number of them in Melee is fairly ridiculous, and, yes, it *is* a bit bizarre to watch people sliding around when they wave dash (and perhaps you and I are thankful that Brawl looks better because that isn't going on). But in tournaments those "glitches" are allowed because they are the slam dunks, curve balls and base steals of SSB. People at a professional level have said, "you know, this wasn't exactly intended, but it doesn't break the game and actually encourages competition!"
________________________________
My friends and I don't edge guard because we think it's cheap. Why do tournament players think otherwise?
The answer is that... it isn't cheap for them. "Cheap" moves and strategies are annoying because they don't seem to have any weaknesses. Have you even heard, say, one of your friends call Fox's lasers cheap when he laser camped? Or Link's Up-B attack? You may know someone who knows how to defeat those "cheap" attacks, you may know how to yourself, or you may discover how to in the future! In fact, these moves actually only *appear* cheap because no one has taught you how to defeat their cheapness.
Edge guarding is the same thing. I've watched a lot of tournament Melee matches, and I tell you that I've seen many players die to edge hogging and guarding... but I've also seen so many return safely despite the efforts of the guarder. Competitive players have learned how to deal with edge hogging and guarding just as well as you may have learned how to deal with Link's Up-B attack, and some even find the edge game to be the most exciting part! So edge guarding for tournament players is not their fate being sealed, it is a fun section of the game in of itself.
It's not that you, as an average player, are too stupid to realize that edge guarding isn't cheap. Some impolite competitive players might say this, but they've had the opportunity to "stand on the shoulders of giants". Many of the most inventive competitive players at the top have already paved the way for them. You just haven't completed learning how to counter any of these cheap moves, whether it's because you don't have the time to or because you're up against a wall and just having a really hard time dealing with it. Whatever the case, edge guarding and edge hogging fall into the same line as the other techniques tournament players use. None of them are impossible to counter or deal with.
Let's take, for example, the technique of Wobbling. For awhile it basically gave Ice Climbers the ability to KO you whenever they grab you. Not cool. So some tournament players banned it (east coast), because it was a technique which many thought too hard to counter and gave the Ice Climber too much of an advantage. However, it has been found that this, too, is counterable. Good smash players can get out of a Wobble, preventing the KO, while they are still under 50%. The ice climbers also have a hard time landing a grab in the first place because of their short grab range, a major hindrance which allows players to avoid their grabs entirely.
Therefore, even this technique, which was banned from many tournaments for awhile, has its own weaknesses that good smashers have been able to use to avoid it.
So tournament players have rhyme and reason behind what moves are cheap, and thus banned, and what moves aren't.
________________________________
It still provides the edge guarder an advantage! Isn't that unfair?
I would say not. If you think about it, ever little move you make in SSB, whether it's picking up an item or using an attack, gives your character some kind of advantage. Advantages themselves are not a bad thing.
________________________________
Still, why don't we have these honor rules in tournaments? I think the game is more fun without it!
Soccer, Football, and other sports have all sorts of honor rules which are enforced by referees. By honor rules, I mean rules which are physically possible to break. In soccer, you can pick up the ball and throw it into the goal, but the refs and agreed honor rules stop you. You can't divide yourself to create a team of 20 yous. You can't make Sonic jump 6 times in Brawl, or hit with a punch from the other side of the screen, but you physically can Wobble or select the Hyrule stage when they're banned, those are honor rules.
The problem with having so many honor rules is that it gets impractical. Video games make it easy because they limit the physical capacity of the players to what is allowed by the game world. In other words, the game is like a referee sort of god. This provides a convenient agreement point for tournament rules because... we can't really change them, and more or less they're adequate.
Moreover, the more honor rules you have the greater the need for a ref. It's all fine and dandy when the player accusing the other of edge guarding is telling the truth, but how are you to *know* that there aren't false accusers trying to get their opponents disqualified? How do you settle the dispute without a ref of some kind? You need a ref, someone watching the game do to it!
But the SSB scene isn't big enough for referees. We seriously just can't do it, it's too much work to ref every single match for most tournaments. It's not like soccer where there are only so many countries and they have months and months to play the whole season. Even the biggest SSB tournaments have to be over in just a few days. You just can't ref that many games, it's too slow.
So that's why we default to the physical restrictions, the game itself, as the default ruleset. Because to do anything else is impractical unless you're talking about stage selection or the banning of characters (the latter is something I doubt we'll have to do).
________________________________
This concludes my FAQ. I hope it has been helpful. If you think something needs clarification or isn't covered concerning why competitive rules are the way they are, please post here and I'll try to add it in when school allows.
Update History:
2/17 - gammar earrors much?!
2/16 - Wobbling details, edgehogging can be fun, a little cleanup and color addition. Kudos to Witchking_of_Angmar, Itakio, and plasmatorture.
Here I hope to answer common questions that have been asked lately about advanced techniques and tournament rules. Updated sections in cyan.
________________________________
What are tournament rules for?
Tournament rules are not rules that all tournament players feel are the correct way to play the game, all the time. They are just the consensus reached among tournament players concerning how to run a tournament and to best test the skills of it's participants. The key here is "skill test", in a general sense. Whether these skills are mental, involving knowing your opponent and endless other things, or physical, involving the muscle memory required to pull off every move in the game, they are still skills that are valuable to test. Brawl involves less muscle memory, but that doesn't mean that muscle memory is a bad thing. It just means that when Brawl players are pitted against each other in a tournament there will be less muscle memory involved.
________________________________
It's no fun losing all the time to people who use these glitches!
Well, *I completely agree*. Except for a few individuals, losing all the time with no chance of winning sucks for both the loser (it's frustrating) and the winner (it's boring). How many professional chess players do you see playing 8 year old kids? Not that many, because it's boring and we all know what would happen. When playing chess, then, we have a whole rating system for each player so that this sort of thing doesn't happen and beginner players don't have to play chess masters.
Now, notice, that this is separating the masters and the beginners into two different worlds. They might never get to play each other at all! Is there no way to for a master and a beginner to get together and... play a game? Is the professional SSB player forever removed from the average player, never able to play any SSB game with them at all? NO!
There are two simple options for when professionals and casuals want to play a game together. First, you might play a different game entirely. If you friend is a master at Chess, you might decide you want to play Monopoly instead for awhile. Or you might try mixing up the rules. If your friend is awesome at chess you might try Fischer chess. In SSB, we have an obvious thing to do to mix up the rules: Items! *This* is really what items and all that randomness are for and can do!
________________________________
So why don't tournament players use items? Why do they ban my favorite stages?
I just want to make clear that the argument against the use of items only applies for tournament play (and any practicing for such a tournament). Otherwise, you do what you think is fun, because the point is to purely to have fun.
Again, remember that tournaments are created so that competitive players can measure and compare their skills against other players. This is also fun for lots of people! But it requires some special rules to be set up so that it's the best player that will win.
For example, on some stages, professional players can effectively game the system and do REALLY CHEAP STUFF. In Hyrule Castle in Melee, your opponent, if he chose Fox, could hit you once and run away until the timer ran out and ended the match in his favor. You have no chance of hitting him back (unless you're Captain Falcon I believe) to regain the lead. Imagine if in soccer you could score a goal and then just run away from the field with the ball until the game ended. This is obviously dumb and kills the game. It's for reasons akin to this that some stages are *completely* banned, and other stages are slightly restricted in their use. In soccer we set what's out of bounds, in SSB we set a stage "out of bounds" or under slightly restricted use.
Items (and this includes some stages too) are a random element. Imagine, again, that you're playing soccer. Now imagine that there's a 50% chance of you not scoring a goal when the ball goes into the net, determined by the flip of a coin. It has to be tails for you to actually score. Now imagine losing because you got 10 heads, no tails and the other team got 1 tails when they got a goal. Now, how freakin' lame is that? WAY LAME. It just kills the competitiveness of the game, you see? One team won not because it was actually better than the other team and had more skills, but because they got lucky on a coin toss. You wouldn't have the World Cup if that's how soccer worked today. People would hate soccer rather than becoming rabid fans crazy and rioting over it! Err.. ok. Don't go biting people who hate Brawl, please. ^.^v
Again, items' greatest strength is in mixing up the game so that the average player and professionals can play each other AND HAVE FUN. If you have a friend who's really good at the game, and you like item matches, if he's a friend at all he'll play some with you (assuming he's not grumpy), or at least suggest a different game you could play together (like going from Chess to Apples to Apples).
________________________________
I don't think we should be encouraging Brawl glitches to be found and exploited. Why are we?
Originally in soccer people only shot goals with the front of their feet. This was all fine and good, people had fun playing it and loved to play it this way, even at a professional level. Eventually, someone discovered that you could curve the ball by not hitting it dead on, making it a lot harder for a goalie to defend the goal. Enter Madam Controversy, stage right.
The fact is that with any set of rules, they are never so exhaustive that no one will ever find new ways to do things within the game that no one had thought of before. This is true of *all* games. The only difference between Melee and a sport in this regard is that in sports we are told at age 8 or so, "Well, it's not against the rules", and most sports have been around long enough that many of these controversial things aren't controversial anymore. You don't think curving the ball into the net is cheap because people have by now gotten over it and explained it to you that way when you were 8! If SSB wasn't a shorter-lived video game, and all these glitches of which you speak were treated as just part of the game when you were little, I don't think you'd have a problem with any of them!
Because, however, of the short lifespan of a video game, with the rules mostly defined and enforced by the game itself, many people attack competitive play, saying "they're cheating with glitches, programmers never intended this!" Well, did the creators of soccer directly *intend* that we curve shoot the ball into the goal using the side of our feet? Did the creators of basketball directly *intend* slam dunks? These games evolved to greater things right under their noses! Aren't all these things awesome things that, when someone does them, we say OMG THAT IS SO AWESOME? It still takes skill to control all your muscle movements so that you jump and slam dunk, or to curve the ball into the goal. It still takes skill to control your muscle movements so that your character on screen performs one of these advanced moves.
All of these unintended techniques have all been wonderful additions to their respective games. Sure, you may say that the sheer number of them in Melee is fairly ridiculous, and, yes, it *is* a bit bizarre to watch people sliding around when they wave dash (and perhaps you and I are thankful that Brawl looks better because that isn't going on). But in tournaments those "glitches" are allowed because they are the slam dunks, curve balls and base steals of SSB. People at a professional level have said, "you know, this wasn't exactly intended, but it doesn't break the game and actually encourages competition!"
________________________________
My friends and I don't edge guard because we think it's cheap. Why do tournament players think otherwise?
The answer is that... it isn't cheap for them. "Cheap" moves and strategies are annoying because they don't seem to have any weaknesses. Have you even heard, say, one of your friends call Fox's lasers cheap when he laser camped? Or Link's Up-B attack? You may know someone who knows how to defeat those "cheap" attacks, you may know how to yourself, or you may discover how to in the future! In fact, these moves actually only *appear* cheap because no one has taught you how to defeat their cheapness.
Edge guarding is the same thing. I've watched a lot of tournament Melee matches, and I tell you that I've seen many players die to edge hogging and guarding... but I've also seen so many return safely despite the efforts of the guarder. Competitive players have learned how to deal with edge hogging and guarding just as well as you may have learned how to deal with Link's Up-B attack, and some even find the edge game to be the most exciting part! So edge guarding for tournament players is not their fate being sealed, it is a fun section of the game in of itself.
It's not that you, as an average player, are too stupid to realize that edge guarding isn't cheap. Some impolite competitive players might say this, but they've had the opportunity to "stand on the shoulders of giants". Many of the most inventive competitive players at the top have already paved the way for them. You just haven't completed learning how to counter any of these cheap moves, whether it's because you don't have the time to or because you're up against a wall and just having a really hard time dealing with it. Whatever the case, edge guarding and edge hogging fall into the same line as the other techniques tournament players use. None of them are impossible to counter or deal with.
Let's take, for example, the technique of Wobbling. For awhile it basically gave Ice Climbers the ability to KO you whenever they grab you. Not cool. So some tournament players banned it (east coast), because it was a technique which many thought too hard to counter and gave the Ice Climber too much of an advantage. However, it has been found that this, too, is counterable. Good smash players can get out of a Wobble, preventing the KO, while they are still under 50%. The ice climbers also have a hard time landing a grab in the first place because of their short grab range, a major hindrance which allows players to avoid their grabs entirely.
Therefore, even this technique, which was banned from many tournaments for awhile, has its own weaknesses that good smashers have been able to use to avoid it.
So tournament players have rhyme and reason behind what moves are cheap, and thus banned, and what moves aren't.
________________________________
It still provides the edge guarder an advantage! Isn't that unfair?
I would say not. If you think about it, ever little move you make in SSB, whether it's picking up an item or using an attack, gives your character some kind of advantage. Advantages themselves are not a bad thing.
________________________________
Still, why don't we have these honor rules in tournaments? I think the game is more fun without it!
Soccer, Football, and other sports have all sorts of honor rules which are enforced by referees. By honor rules, I mean rules which are physically possible to break. In soccer, you can pick up the ball and throw it into the goal, but the refs and agreed honor rules stop you. You can't divide yourself to create a team of 20 yous. You can't make Sonic jump 6 times in Brawl, or hit with a punch from the other side of the screen, but you physically can Wobble or select the Hyrule stage when they're banned, those are honor rules.
The problem with having so many honor rules is that it gets impractical. Video games make it easy because they limit the physical capacity of the players to what is allowed by the game world. In other words, the game is like a referee sort of god. This provides a convenient agreement point for tournament rules because... we can't really change them, and more or less they're adequate.
Moreover, the more honor rules you have the greater the need for a ref. It's all fine and dandy when the player accusing the other of edge guarding is telling the truth, but how are you to *know* that there aren't false accusers trying to get their opponents disqualified? How do you settle the dispute without a ref of some kind? You need a ref, someone watching the game do to it!
But the SSB scene isn't big enough for referees. We seriously just can't do it, it's too much work to ref every single match for most tournaments. It's not like soccer where there are only so many countries and they have months and months to play the whole season. Even the biggest SSB tournaments have to be over in just a few days. You just can't ref that many games, it's too slow.
So that's why we default to the physical restrictions, the game itself, as the default ruleset. Because to do anything else is impractical unless you're talking about stage selection or the banning of characters (the latter is something I doubt we'll have to do).
________________________________
This concludes my FAQ. I hope it has been helpful. If you think something needs clarification or isn't covered concerning why competitive rules are the way they are, please post here and I'll try to add it in when school allows.
Update History:
2/17 - gammar earrors much?!
2/16 - Wobbling details, edgehogging can be fun, a little cleanup and color addition. Kudos to Witchking_of_Angmar, Itakio, and plasmatorture.
