How to make Custom Stages competitive viable?

[Metal B]

With the upcoming 3.0 Update, many people believe we may get the Stage Builder back. In the past many people were complaining about the weak stage selection for competitive play in Smash games. besides the game having an option, to create your own stages. Many competitive games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Star Craft or War Craft 3 used fan-made maps to expend competitive options … but this never really happend in Smash. PM shows, that the community aren't against fan-made projects in general.

So i wondering, why didn't the competitive community ever came together and choose a set of custom made stages?

My theroy is actually very simple: Distribution.
In Brawl you could save the stages on SD cards, but it was very hard to distribute the stages to a higher number of players. Knowing, where to get stages and which were popular was really hard. The online service on the Wii was also very poor, since you only would get random stages.
In Smash 4 you could share stages on Miiverse. But again people had to go look for it, not knowing if stages were popular and where to get them. Also you couldn't really choose custom stages online against other players.

So to answer my question, in how to make Custom Stages competitive, it really depends on Nintendo. The have to make the distribution of Custom Stages easy and allow players to play them online:

1. An actual platform, where people can search for Custom Stages, share there opinion and highlight popular choices, so that popular competitive stages actually are easier to find. Uploaders should also be able to update and delete there stages, so that people always will use newer versions. Of course, downloading and managing the Custom Stages should be easy too. Lastly if people play those stages, the name of the stage and of the creator should appear on the screen, so that if players share videos of there matches, the viewers can find those stages and version numbers for themselves.
2. Players should be able to play the Custom Stages online in Battle Arenas, so that they get used to them and want to see them appear in the competitive scene.

If Nintendo actually has a good distribution list with filters and likes, maybe Custom Stages can be a part of the competitive scene. Of course, the competitive scene have to be open for it, but if actually demand happens, the scene will follow.

 

[Falco_DJ]

Nintendo and Sakurai should give you an option to adjust blast zones, so if casual players want really small or large ones they can have them, but we should also get the option to have the same size blast zones as FD or Battle Field for all of us competitive players.

 

[kraw23]

Nintendo and Sakurai should give you an option to adjust blast zones, so if casual players want really small or large ones they can have them, but we should also get the option to have the same size blast zones as FD or Battle Field for all of us competitive players.

I want to make a spaghetti map. No horizontal blast zones, extremely tall vertical

 

[Idon]

They won't be. Trying to get a competitive standard when there's a literal infinite amount of possibilities would be impossible.

 

[Falco_DJ]

I want to make a spaghetti map. No horizontal blast zones, extremely tall vertical

lol

 

[Luigifan18]

Nintendo and Sakurai should give you an option to adjust blast zones, so if casual players want really small or large ones they can have them, but we should also get the option to have the same size blast zones as FD or Battle Field for all of us competitive players.

I agree, freely adjustable blast zones would be neat.

I want to make a spaghetti map. No horizontal blast zones, extremely tall vertical

That would be a hilariously bad idea for a competitive stage. Characters who struggle to kill off the top would be at an insurmountable disadvantage.

They won't be. Trying to get a competitive standard when there's a literal infinite amount of possibilities would be impossible.

Given that there's some degree of consensus on the layout and properties of a proper "competitive" stage, I doubt this will be as problematic as you assume. If anything, this will open the door to new layouts that branch out from existing accepted layouts, such as monoplatform, bilayer, and quadplat (i.e. Galeem/Dharkon's stage).

 

[Falco_DJ]

I agree, freely adjustable blast zones would be neat.

I'm glad you think so! My main idea when I say that was: if we want custom stages to be even close to tournament viable we need to be able to adjust the blast zones to an already tournament legal stage.

I am curious as to how hazards off would effect custom stages. It isn't a big deal though because we can just make them without hazards.

One of my request is that we have the option to arrange our custom stages on the SSS where we want them, or at least have a second page were we can adjust their position in the SSS to our liking. The ability to also create/edit the SSS icons would be an awesome feature as well.

I'm thinking that this stage editor will probably be more brawl style, with some touches from Wii U.

 

[Terotrous]

It'll never happen, there's just no way anyone would ever agree on a standard, even though if we had access to the blast zones we could theoretically design better balanced stages than most of the ones we're using.

 

[Deleted member]

I have this idea of making Battlefield stages with the Builder as a way to allow the use of any song available only in banned stages like Dracula's Castle.

If there's an agreement, these Battlefields could be used with the purpose of allowing the use of music from banned stages.

 

[ParanoidDrone]

As much as I'd love to use custom stages as a format to experiment with various layouts, I can't see them ever being used past the local level due to the inherent logistics involved in trying to ensure all setups have an identical copy of the stages in question. Which is really a shame IMO because there's a lot of inspiration to be had simply from looking at existing stages.

 

[Falco_DJ]

As much as I'd love to use custom stages as a format to experiment with various layouts, I can't see them ever being used past the local level due to the inherent logistics involved in trying to ensure all setups have an identical copy of the stages in question. Which is really a shame IMO because there's a lot of inspiration to be had simply from looking at existing stages.

Being able to bring your custom stages with you would be a lot easier if we had on-board storage on the Pro Controler and/or the joycons. For instance if you play Project M you have the ability to store name tags on your Wii Remote, so even though every one plays with a GCN controller you still had the option to bring a Wii Remote to a tournament and transfer your name tag.

Nintendo should have some way of letting us do the same thing with custom stages, and nametags! What I'm hoping for is that they make an amiibo that looks like the base of a smash trophy and will allow you to store any custom stage and a nametag. It would be a convenient way to bring custom stages to tournaments, and it would allow TOs an easy way to look at your stage.

Then TOs would just have to verify that your stage is suited for their tournament. Maybe they could put a sticker or something on your nametag once your stage has been verified as a legal stage.

 

[Luigifan18]

Being able to bring your custom stages with you would be a lot easier if we had on-board storage on the Pro Controler and/or the joycons. For instance if you play Project M you have the ability to store name tags on your Wii Remote, so even though every one plays with a GCN controller you still had the option to bring a Wii Remote to a tournament and transfer your name tag.

Nintendo should have some way of letting us do the same thing with custom stages, and nametags! What I'm hoping for is that they make an amiibo that looks like the base of a smash trophy and will allow you to store any custom stage and a nametag. It would be a convenient way to bring custom stages to tournaments, and it would allow TOs an easy way to look at your stage.

Then TOs would just have to verify that your stage is suited for their tournament. Maybe they could put a sticker or something on your nametag once your stage has been verified as a legal stage.

amiibo have very low data storage capacity, from what I've heard.

 

[Falco_DJ]

amiibo have very low data storage capacity, from what I've heard.

That's true. Amiibo have around 540b, or at least that's what most people think, in Gigabytes the amiibo have 0.00000054 Gigabytes. So there are some problems with how storing custom stages on amiibo would work. If Nintendo decided to let us put custom stages on an amiibo it would probably only store the location of each part used and the part used at each location. Doing it that way would allow the files to remain inside the game, and the amiibo would simply tell the game what and where to put the part. If it worked that way storing custom stages on an amiibo would not be a problem at all. Here is an example of how I think I the code might work:

Each part is represented by its ID. Here is an example of what a part ID could be and how it would work:

Empty space is 00
The ground is 11
Platforms are 22
Blast Zones are 99
The example stage I'm recreating is battlefield

99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99
99 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 99
99 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 99
99 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 22 22 22 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 99
99 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 99
99 00 00 00 00 22 22 22 00 00 00 22 22 22 00 00 00 00 99
99 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 99
99 00 00 00 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 00 00 00 99
99 00 00 00 00 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 00 00 00 00 99
99 99 00 00 00 00 00 11 11 11 11 11 00 00 00 00 00 00 99
99 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 99
99 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 99
99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99

In the game each ID's placement is where it's location would be on a grid, doing it this way would take up very little storage space and it would be very convenient since having such a small file size would allow anybody to create a ton of stages without worrying about storage on the Switch/SD card.

 

[Alsyght]

I doubt they ever will be if they don t emulate what’s legal about a stage that’s already in the game.

 

[Wigglerman]

The biggest issue is the mindset of the stage builder and their skill/understanding of what makes the legal stages legal and desirable for competitive play. Even some of the better stages I've played on have glitches everywhere (random holes in stages that allow you to fall, platforms not functioning correctly or poor stage size and such).

Then each stage would need to be play tested and evaluated by a select group at each tournament, then there'd likely be TOO many stages and it'd get too cumbersome for stage striking. God forbid there was a 'cycling' schedule for new stages to replace old ones, thus causing a whole new download session mentally to figure out stages and who is good/bad on each one, and so on.

I just don't think they'll ever catch on at a tournament level.