How do you feel about walk offs?

[Neo Zero]

With 4's reveal settling in very well, I thought I'd ask the community about a subject that could be controversial, walk offs.

A quick recap for those that don't know for whatever reason, a walk off refers to a stage that has floor going past the horizontal blast zone, sometimes having no bottom blast zone period as well. So far we have a few stages that already fit in this classification. Wii Fit Room (WiiU), Gerudo Valley (3DS), Hyrule Field: Spirit Tracks (3DS), Nintendogs (3DS) are just a sample of the various walk offs the 4th game(s) have in store for us. Now walk offs aren't new to the franchise, dating back to the first installment back on the N64. Most often contain a large amount of gimmicks to them as well, and typically, most walk offs have been banned from competitive play. In Brawl they were probably most apparent as a much larger number of stages were walk offs, or contained walk off parts in them. I can't speak for the older games too in depth, but Brawl at the very least also had characters that could essentially dominate a large portion of the cast due to being walk offs, most notably being King Dedede, who could essentially kill someone off one grab if he could chain grab them. As I said, these are stages that aren't viewed fondly by players of various skill levels.

But this is a new game, and some of the walk offs look very well designed speaking from a competitve look. Best example likely being Gerudo Valley. A little on the long side, but looks hazard free and has a good assortment of platforms and levels. My question I pose to people is could stages like that, a stage archtype looked down on, be legal or even neutral stages in the new game. For the sake of arguement, lets view this without having to worry about being pushed off stage from one grab, like King DDD could, and judge on the merits of the stages and how we play this game. Your thoughts?

 

[Chiroz]

I always assumed walk-offs were banned because of Waveshining in Melee and then because of DDD Chaingrabs, IC Chaingrabs, etc. in Brawl. Quite frankly, walk offs have a very different feel to them, there is no edge, which takes away the edge game completely. There's a few more things to consider but all in all, I think the ban decision would come after having testing them out, but I see no reason why they would be banned with the little information we do have as of now.

 

[LiteralGrill]

Some of it I thought was the idea that a player could just try to sit RIGHT on the side then throw someone to their death regardless of chain grab or something. If this was the case, maybe tournament officials could deem that as stalling?

 

[Parasol]

Judging from past discussions, walk-off stages will again be banned in competitive play, the reason not necessarily being because of chain-throws and whatnot, but because edge guarding in general is a huge part of character balance. Characters with multiple jumps and recovery options, for instance, can take more risks off the stage in an attempt to gimp and solidify a kill; this is the appeal to these types of characters, and in turn they are likely lacking in other areas (combo potential, damage output, knockback, et cetera). Adding in walk-off stages kind of screws up the whole dynamic of picks and counters, as selecting a character for their edgeguarding ability could instantly be made mute in the counter-pick of a walk-off stage.

 

[LiteralGrill]

Judging from past discussions, walk-off stages will again be banned in competitive play, the reason not necessarily being because of chain-throws and whatnot, but because edge guarding in general is a huge part of character balance. Characters with multiple jumps and recovery options, for instance, can take more risks off the stage in an attempt to gimp and solidify a kill; this is the appeal to these types of characters, and in turn they are likely lacking in other areas (combo potential, damage output, knockback, et cetera). Adding in walk-off stages kind of screws up the whole dynamic of picks and counters, as selecting a character for their edgeguarding ability could instantly be made mute in the counter-pick of a walk-off stage.

Wouldn't someone picking a character think of that when picking?

And wouldn't that maybe allow more characters to have a better competitive edge, making the meta not always as stale with all the same characters?

 

[Mr. Mumbles]

Never been a competitive player myself so I don't mind walk offs. I don't really have much more to say about this.

 

[Parasol]

Wouldn't someone picking a character think of that when picking?

And wouldn't that maybe allow more characters to have a better competitive edge, making the meta not always as stale with all the same characters?

It wouldn't allow for more viable characters so much as it would negate the effectiveness of those characters who rely on that angle. Characters with very little edgeguarding potential will more-or-less perform the same on either type of stage, whereas those characters that revolve around their aerial superiority will only be hurt. There are other reasons, too, like the ones mentioned above (encouraged camping, unpreventable chained deaths, et cetera), but for the sake of preserving character balance is the primary reason for steering clear of walk-off stages.

 

[peeup]

Why are walk-offs banned due to D3 infintes (among others I'm sure) if ICs can do an infinite on any character on any stage with any amount of room?

 

[Neo Zero]

Judging from past discussions, walk-off stages will again be banned in competitive play, the reason not necessarily being because of chain-throws and whatnot, but because edge guarding in general is a huge part of character balance. Characters with multiple jumps and recovery options, for instance, can take more risks off the stage in an attempt to gimp and solidify a kill; this is the appeal to these types of characters, and in turn they are likely lacking in other areas (combo potential, damage output, knockback, et cetera). Adding in walk-off stages kind of screws up the whole dynamic of picks and counters, as selecting a character for their edgeguarding ability could instantly be made mute in the counter-pick of a walk-off stage.

This is true, but there has always been more obvious reasons that a lot of these stages are banned. Provided no few characters basically win MUs because they can basically 0-death on a walk off, why not? I guess the edge guard meta game would likely invalidate the chance of a stage being neutral, but why not a counterpick. If I'm Link and your Meta Knight, isn't having that option of this pick important. Heck its basically what counter picking is, to help even a match up by hindering, removing a tool they have while enhancing your game and tools. The ground game, stage control, even things as simple as "projectile spamming" are very important parts of the game too. Heck part of your post seems to state that doing so would take away from some characters, but the huge thing is it adds to other characters as well, and should be a huge part of the meta game.

 

[[Corn]]

Why are walk-offs banned due to D3 infintes (among others I'm sure) if ICs can do an infinite on any character on any stage with any amount of room?

D3 only has infinites on 3 characters, otherwise his chaingrab ends at the edge of the stage it is also very easy to do. IC chain grab has a very large execution barrier due to the tight timing varying on every single character.

Walk offs arent just banned because of stuff like D3, its because it elimates the skills of edgeguarding and gimping. Hell some characters have great ground games and poor air games, part of your air game is off the edge. People can also hide offscreen where they are hard to see or have an extremely large advantage.

Im sure they will be banned again.

 

[BridgesWithTurtles]

As already stated, the ledge game is one of the most engaging parts of the Smash Bros. gameplay, so a lot of characters become not only less useful, but also less fun to play as, in my opinion. I personally enjoy walk-offs well enough, though I'd prefer for them to at least have bottomless pits to provide for at least some kill options reminiscent of off-edge play. 64's Mushroom Kingdom, Melee's Mushroom Kingdom II are some of my favorite stages. Onett is also great, despite not having any pits at all. Melee's Yoshi's Island was just awful though. It's like it couldn't decide if it was a bottomless stage or a walk-off.

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

Walk-offs are very different, but I don't think it's fair to say they're less strategically interesting than stages with ledges and pits. It's just different, and in general, sitting by walk-offs is built to work poorly. In Brawl at least, most fthrows have high base knockback while most bthrows have high knockback growth. This means that is someone is camping near the edge going for a throw and the other guy runs up to throw them, the guy running up needs to have dealt less damage for his throw to kill than the defender does. Most characters have a good aerial that can snipe people sitting there as well, and you can't sit too close to the edge anyway since if you're very close you take continuous damage.

As per the character balance, this is a dangerous topic to bring up for stage legality (does anyone really think Final Destination is even in the top half of character balanced stages in Brawl?), but regardless, you have to think of it as a whole. You can say that someone like Kirby is hurt by walk-offs, but you could equally say he's helped by ledges and pits. There is no such thing as a "neutral" stage so the value of any stage geography to a character is always relative, not absolute. The real question is whether the balance across the entire cast is better or worse, and I'm not sure that's obvious. For every Kirby that was good and suddenly doesn't seem good, you have a Ness who wasn't so good but is suddenly good. Then you have someone like Jigglypuff who would seem to hate walk-offs, but she makes up for the loss of her gimp game by being one of the very best characters at dealing with camping near the walk-off (extremely high base knockback on her throws, very strong and safe pressure with her aerials against a stationary opponent). If you made a tier list just for Mario Circuit, would it really represent worse balance than a tier list for an arbitrary other stage?

We should definitely give these stages a full and fair shot in smash 4. There are really only two types of stages we should day 1 ban from singles:

1. Stages with structural loops that enable infinite run-away. This is just obviously degenerate, and most of these stages don't enable real gameplay (think Temple).

2. Stages that are really and truly match decidingly random. I'm not talking about Norfair which people whine about but isn't like this at all since there's a rhythm to the hazards and you can react to them. I'm talking about WarioWare in which the game will randomly make one player invincible while making the other an even bigger punching bag.

Further note that some of the stages in category 1 may be acceptable for doubles; smaller and weaker loops are not inherently broken in doubles play (like Summit sized loops, not Temple sized). We could argue the merits of having different stage lists for singles and doubles, but it's a factor to think about.

In the long run though, we have to design our rules around a community consensus. Both Melee and Brawl (Brawl being the faster acting case) had these silly shrinking stage lists. At first we allowed almost everything. Then we banned a few things that were maybe or maybe not justified depending on your principles. Some regions banned more than others; a few went straight to banning almost everything. Then over the years we "negotiated" and just kept banning stuff constantly. I don't think the average player even cared about stages other than that they didn't want to play on stages they weren't familiar with (which as anything got banned anywhere, the number of people unfamiliar with it would swell!). This was a pretty horrible way to do things, and we need to avoid repeating it. I figure the game will need a few weeks for us all to seriously play on all of these stages and get a general idea about what's going on with the game, and then as a group we have to figure out exactly what we have on our hands and what precisely we're going to do. Then we make a stage list based on what we as an overall group believe (vocal minorities not getting all the votes) and, short of any truly metagame shattering discoveries, we need to stick to it. The procedural details of how we go about this are things we're going to need to work out sometime in the next year or so; at least we have tons of time!

 

[smashbrolink]

I've never minded them, personally.
It all factors into stage control, except in DDD's case since he can basically freebie anyone out of a stock with that chain grabbing.
But that's why picking the right stage is important to fair play in Brawl, too, I guess.XD

 

[`dazrin]

Walkoff stages are inherently not good for competitive play.

The edge is the most dynamic part of smash, and it's one of the core elements of the game that makes it unique to other fighters. Without it, the gameplay becomes significantly more dumbed down, as various strategies and aspects of depth of the game is lost. To illustrate a little better, it gives players less options to defeat their opponent. Core elements like edgeguarding and recovering well are no longer a part of the experience, and as a result, the game loses a dimension of depth.

This only gets worse when you add in silly things that "break" the game, like infinites and such that just aren't fun for either player, or the audience watching. This is why walkoff's are looked down upon when you look at the game in a competitive point of view.

 

[Toph_87]

I will be giving these Walk Off stages a chance with an open mind, but I can tell you that the majority of competitive players automatically dislike/dismiss walk off stages for reasons stated by other users in this thread, so expect the backlash once the games are out.

 

[Ghostbone]

Walk-offs are extremely gimmicky compared to ledges.

Sure ledges technically aren't the "standard" as there's no real standard stage, but they're clearly what the game's designed around. I mean recovery is an integral part of smash's appeal (YOU MUST RECOVER), and that doesn't exist on walk off stages.

I mean it will still be good to approach them with an open mind for the next game but the mechanics look basically the same as brawl/melee, so stages with walk offs will likely be banned again.

 

[FalKoopa]

I don't really mind them. Unless it's dem chaingrabs. (D3 and Falco)

 

[DakotaBonez]

Walk offs allow them to make stages more true to the games, because floating islands or mountain peaks don't make sense at times.

I hope the next stage builder gives us the option to adjust the blast zones so we can make walk offs as well.
Only problem with them is that you can instantly throw people out if ya hide just on the edge, but I mean character's have enough options to stop their opponents from camping there.