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That's a **** post, and you're a **** for making it.
OK, I'm genuinely angry now. Thanks for making me a hypocrite.
What points on stage/char diversity? Two pages back, someone said that "diversity is desirable in a metagame" without any sort of evidence. There were no "points," you idiotic qunt (censor dodge, not affectionate aussie term). As for congo being fairer:
1. What do you mean by "fair"? Do you mean more neutral? I'd argue that random barrel saves and a lack of ledges make it luck-based enough to beat out DL's wind. I think that rotating plats mess up or aid combos often enough to be considered a luck-based element as well. I think that slanted floors are icky, but I guess they don't lead to an undesirable metagame so I'll leave them out. I don't think that the slightly higher rate of gimping on DL is undesirable at all, actually, because gimps are great fun (I say this as a falcon main), they're escapable sometimes, and they don't happen that much more often on DL than on Congo.
2. Who said I wasn't considering it? I didn't address an argument for its being the sole stage because no one had presented an argument up to this point.
Yeah you really are a hypocrite. I'd make some snide crack but it's hard to make fun of something like that :/
And you seriously need evidence for why diversity is desirable in a metagame? Can you give evidence why camping not being the dominant strategy is desirable? It goes without saying. I know this is a terrible argument but I don't see how somebody can genuinely disagree with this :/
Circle camping does NOT happen on DL. It is the main problem with both hyrule temples.
hyrule 64 isn't as bad as melee hyrule. If you don't tihnk you can run around a circle and not fight people while lasering in 64 though--just look at genesis GF's, that's ALL boom does.
I'd argue that random barrel saves and a lack of ledges make it luck-based enough to beat out DL's wind. I think that rotating plats mess up or aid combos often enough to be considered a luck-based element as well.
is battlecow the sort of person who gets mad and frantically presses start to have a rematch with the same characters
because i can totally see that
random barrel saves - to be quite honest, these don't happen a huge amount of the time to begin with, and every character can track and punish use of the barrel
lack of ledges is not really a problem because ledge DI is meh, reverse ledge DI ill concede
the whole damn floor being a platform leads to plenty more recovery options for a number of characters - fox isn't instantly killed because he can choose somewhere to land and has low landing lag, characters can jump through the stage from the ledge, etc
Ness can actually recover on Congo via jumping through the bottom of the stage and uairing - and it can be legitimately difficult to edgeguard. Therefore, Congo Jungle cures cancer. Good game.
I don't think we should be striving for stage diversity
One stage feels more comfortable to me, I don't have to **** around with annoying CP's and the rules become simpler, more natural, and every game is of equal value in a set, vs. winning on the one neutral match then having easy wins on your CP's and hard wins on theirs.
Poor point, stems from laziness and nothing else, since CPing is part of the game, as is stage striking.
You're talking as if DL is a neutral. Not true. Pika, Falcon, Kirby, arguably DK, Yoshi and Mario will CP to dreamland regardless, given a choice. That's not because it's neutral, it's because they're better there.
CPing Hyrule is done by Fox, Link and people who don't want the DL CP characters' footprints on their faces.
nobody CPs Kongo except people who main dark Samus.
This is honestly the dumbest thing I've heard all week. And I've seen all of my relatives this week, so that's saying a lot. You're blowing me away, man; I always thought you were one of the not-stupid people.
CP'ing is "part of the game" and therefore not annoying? Well, first of all, it's not part of the game, it's part of a metagame that evolved because of the presence of multiple stages and the need for >1 game sets. Second of all, it wouldn't be part of the game if we 1-stage'd it like we should. And how on earth would "laziness" make someone opposed to stage striking? Are you saying that I'm opposed to it on the basis of the mental effort it takes me to decide which stage to CP to or something? Lol.
Nobody CP's congo because no one knows anything about who has advantage on congo because no one plays friendlies on Congo because no one likes playing on Congo. Not saying this makes it noncompetitive, just saying that certain characters probably gain more from congo than DL.
Try again.
@ SK- A bunch of low tiers are going to have better MU's against fox on DL than on Congo. I'm not sure that Congo as sole neutral will result in any increases in char. diversity over DL, much less significant increases.
Why would you advocate a single legal stage when that stage clearly benefits a good half the cast significantly more than the others?
Nobody CPs Kongo because there is most likely no character that benefits significantly more from Kongo than they do from DL or Hyrule, duh. The other part is that Kongo is an annoying stage, as agreed upon by everybody here.
Knowing matchups is part of knowing the game. Same applies for stages. In a game like Smash, where environments are diverse and not linear, not having control over your preferred stage is stupid. Maybe it doesn't matter to a Falcon main like you, who can literally say 'not Hyrule', and not care even if you do get CPed to Hyrule.
@Battlecow I wasn't asking about Congo's impact on character diversity. I was wondering whether you think we should strive for character diversity since earlier you pointed out there was no evidence given for diversity being a desirable metagame trait.
And sorry, aa, but I don't agree at all with that being the reason Congo is rarely counterpicked. I don't really see the basis for your assumption that DL or Hyrule always give a larger advantage in any match-up. I really feel, given nobody plays on that stage, nobody actually knows what the **** are the good match-ups on that stage - hell, as the one disagreeing with your assumption, I would probably almost never pick that stage.
@Battlecow I wasn't asking about Congo's impact on character diversity. I was wondering whether you think we should strive for character diversity since earlier you pointed out there was no evidence given for diversity being a desirable metagame trait.
I do think that character diversity is desirable in a metagame. I'd need some time to formulate thoughts on why, exactly, but I guess... characters seem like an element of the fight, instead of something getting in the way of the fight, like stages.
That said, I mean VERY LIMITED character diversity. I wouldn't like having to learn 500 matchups. IMO, 10 viable characters>12 viable characters>6 viable characters>15 viable characters>3 viable characters
And sorry, aa, but I don't agree at all with that being the reason Congo is rarely counterpicked. I don't really see the basis for your assumption that DL or Hyrule always give a larger advantage in any match-up. I really feel, given nobody plays on that stage, nobody actually knows what the **** are the good match-ups on that stage - hell, as the one disagreeing with your assumption, I would probably almost never pick that stage.
despite what people say, the stage really is a bit random, with the middle platforms impeding most conventional combos that aren't u-tilt x4 > basic followup
i can't claim to know more than most people do about this stage, it just doesn't feel like it favours anyone nearly as much as DL's layout/size or hyrule's size/tent
should enforce solo kongo neutral just to get some info about the stage
I've been following this vein-bulging blood-pressure-raising heated debate over stages with some interest, but it seems to be going nowhere fast / degrading into ad-hominem attacks so I thought I'd throw in some hopefully well-reasoned controversies to stir up the pot. My thesis which I attempt to justify below is that stages are not the holy grail, and that the perfect stage does not exist, so get over it and find some other way to make the game fair. Spoiler tags are used for asides.
While smash is not chess, nor do I think attempts to make it like chess are likely to end well, I understand the desire to establish an equalizing ruleset by which player skill can be measured without skews from game imbalances. I just think people are going about this in the most complicated and strangest ways (i.e. arguing endlessly about stages), and sometimes I am a bit confused over what the end goal is exactly.
As an example, I'm a bit surprised by how widely accepted is the notion that stages can make asymmetric character matchups "completely fair" or even "close enough to fair for tournament purposes". To my mind, there are just too many variables in the characters themselves for stages to be equalizers. Imagine if a stage editor existed in 64, and all you pro smashers out there with, I am sure, a much deeper understanding of character matchups and meta-game than mine were asked to design a Link vs Fox stage that was completely "fair" for both characters. How would you even begin to (a) design such a stage and (b) justify its fairness in a logically sound manner? And to conclude this little thought experiment, what would the odds be that such a theoretically perfect stage just happens to exist as one of the preset playable stages?
To recap:
defining how exactly stage features affect every aspect of character balance is hard, esp when the character metagame itself is still incomplete;
even if we did figure out what the perfect stage looks like, it probably isn't any of the existing ones;
thus, why are we bothering to argue about stages anyways? The current stage striking system seems reasonable enough so that no one is ever forced to play a matchup on a stage they hate most (hence the striking). If anything I think revising the stage striking system so that the Hyrule-haters rarely or never have to play on Hyrule would be a more productive debate topic.
Since finding an "fair" stage in the sense of equalizing character differences is next to impossible, I think it may be acceptable to many to settle for a stage without random elements (e.g. tornadoes). After all, this is why items are banned
even though I think it is worth testing out strategic use of certain non-broken items like motion-sensor mines to somewhat alleviate camping issues even if Mario, link, pika, ness, and probably others can safely remotely detonate them
. By that standard, Congo would indeed be the least random
non-banned, as Yoshi's is also zero-random
stage, since the [thread=287151]Congo barrel and platform movement has been shown before to be completely deterministic[/thread], while no one seems to know a pattern for Dreamland's wind or Hyrule's tornadoes.
As a side note, everyone calling Congo random needs to get the facts straight. Your not being able to keep track of the completely non-random movement does not make it random - it just means you lost track of it. People memorize Poke-Floats in melee all the time.
It seems like a lot of the angst over stages stems in part from 64's lack of a Final destination-like stage, hence the ever-repeating doomed quest for a holy grail of a substitute. Since no stage comes close, general dissatisfaction and grumbling inevitably results. Which brings me back to my original point: stages are not the holy grail; they won't fix your problems; and on top of that all the stages suck anyways. Just come up with a stage striking system so that you can get rid of the ones you hate most, and deal with it.
My final thoughts on camping. Taken to its theoretical extreme, unless I am mistaken, Fox has the highest tier strategy currently known in the game: run away and laser is unbeatable due to nobody being fast enough to catch him. You can try to fix this by giving him nowhere to run, but as has been pointed out, circle camping can still happen even on the smallest playable stage, Dreamland. But that doesn't really matter because if you were actually playing to win (like I assume Boom was in the Genesis GF's), that's exactly what you would and should be doing, and if you were playing to win against such a fox, you would also be fox and lasering / reflecting lasers right back. Unless of course you have a better counter but I thought the lack thereof was the reason for the whole quest for the anti-camping holy grail stage anyways.
That does not mean that Isai wasn't trying to win. It could be that he was trying to win with a self-imposed extra set of restrictions (finding less passive-aggressive low-tier counters to Fox camping) and failing.
So basically my argument still boils down to: stages won't solve your problems. If you hate being camped, either don't play people who play to win and play for fun instead or, if you do enjoy winning, learn to enjoy camping as well. If you are being camped, pick an even better camper. If the game play breaks horribly as a result, maybe the game is indeed horribly broken, but stages still won't save it. A better idea is probably to ban camping instead of stages.
If you actually read all of that, I commend you, and thank you for your time.
~ The Pink Kirby
if you can somehow know exactly where the barrel and platforms are on hyrule at any given time past the first loop of music, then good for you
and dreamland's wind was shown to have some cause a while back iirc, forget exactly what though
and as for an actual address of the post, i don't feel camping is such an enormous issue that we need to ban it yet, let alone ban the stage that supposedly enhances camping to such a degree - i realise this is slightly contradictory, given the ban of sector z and saffron primarily for camping - but for whatever reason, there isn't evidence of gamebreaking camping happening in hyrule as of yet aside from the genesis stuff, in which DL was camped too, suggesting hyrule is not the only facilitating factor for it anyway
it's fine to pre-empt problems, but only if you're sure the problem poses some viable threat to gameplay, the community or whatever it is you value about the game, and i don't think camping has come to be like that yet
whenever i run small tournaments, i just let an honour system do the work: camp and you are allowing yourself to be physically abused after the match (or during if it's really gay) - and yes, i am serious
Pink Kirby: i don't understand the point of your post, it seems to be saying that we shouldn't even bother discussing the validity of stages since a perfect stage does not exist? should we unban all the banned stages then since they're not perfect? we should at least be discussing whether hyrule should be banned or not rather than just going "oh well stages are broken anyway let's just live with it".
That's exactly the point - since it's entirely deterministic there is nothing random to blame the movement on. It takes some amount of mental concentration and skill to keep track of the movements and work it effectively into your gameplay. If you can do it, you should be rewarded for it by that advantage you gain over opponents who can't, as opposed to being rewarded by a tornado serendipitously being in the right place to KO your opponent for you. This was, if I am not mistaken, the whole point of eschewing randomness.
whenever i run small tournaments, i just let an honour system do the work: camp and you are allowing yourself to be physically abused after the match (or during if it's really gay) - and yes, i am serious
cool stuff. I'd make a joke about the last airbender if I knew anything about the series. So it seems DL isn't really random either.
Pink Kirby: i don't understand the point of your post, it seems to be saying that we shouldn't even bother discussing the validity of stages since a perfect stage does not exist? should we unban all the banned stages then since they're not perfect? we should at least be discussing whether hyrule should be banned or not rather than just going "oh well stages are broken anyway let's just live with it".
Yes my point exactly is people are fixating too much on stages. The real issues it seems are random stage elements, personal preference, camping, and character balance. Stages can only do so much to discourage camping without being the size of a sardine can, and certainly can't be relied on to fix character imbalances. The stage striking system is the current method of "living with it".
However, if the consensus is people dislike random elements, if my opinion counts for anything I am all for stripping Hyrule of its "neutral" status (w/e that means) and leaving Peach, Congo, and DL as "neutrals" or the predominant tourney stages.
As far as personal preferences, this I think is an issue already solved by the stage striking system. The striking system, if it works properly, ensures that both players end up playing one of their least disliked stages and both get to strike their most disliked stages.
Even though I didn't suggest it, the unban all stages might actually work but you would have to increase the number of stage strike rounds proportionally. Chances are, the broken stages would never get played anyways as both players would strike them fairly soon. It's still probably easiest to leave the obviously broken stages banned (MK being very notable example), but it could be reasonable to allow matches on Saffron or Zebes if both players agree to it, and the striking system seems a fairly efficient, non-inflammatory method of arriving at such an agreement.
i dislike the idea that there's even a tiny chance that a tournament match could end up being played on sector z, especially when some tournaments have a lot of new guys who don't understand how much a stage can influence the game. granted if they don't know this they probably wouldn't be going far in a tournament anyway, but it seems heartless to think i could be watching a fox running away lasering a luigi or something
other than that i advocate the stage strike system we already have that you do as well, but i believe stages have a huge impact and should be talked about to decide which stages should be legal and which should not.
Yes, theoretically, you can keep track of where it's going in your head at all times - but that's irrelevant. Realistically speaking, it is random in terms of its relevancy to the ongoing match. The players aren't going to plan their moves based on where the barrel is at the current moment, they're going to make their moves based on their opponent's decisions (unless they suck). If an opponent happens to leave an opening in their spacing at a certain point in the match, the other player will obviously capitalize on it. If that capitalization leads to a gimp, and the person being gimped ends up being saved by the barrel, then their being saved was unintentional and "lucky" - regardless of whether or not they knew that their being saved was going to happen due to them mentally keeping track of the barrel's location.
The barrel is merely the game giving you an additional recovery option that can help you survive. It'll still be pretty hard to use it in a way that you don't get killed out of it. Recovery options in 64 are usually all crap and this one is not an exception. However, having more options is always nice. Call it "luck" or its use "unintentional" but I don't see how those terms can't be attributed to Hyrule's tornado or Dreamland's wind. Also, iirc players like M2K do keep track of Randall (the cloud) on Yoshi's Story in Melee, so even if it doesn't sound realistic, one could probably be able to do the same with the barrel in KJ64.
whenever i run small tournaments, i just let an honour system do the work: camp and you are allowing yourself to be physically abused after the match (or during if it's really gay) - and yes, i am serious
Yes, theoretically, you can keep track of where it's going in your head at all times - but that's irrelevant. Realistically speaking, it is random in terms of its relevancy to the ongoing match. The players aren't going to plan their moves based on where the barrel is at the current moment, they're going to make their moves based on their opponent's decisions (unless they suck). If an opponent happens to leave an opening in their spacing at a certain point in the match, the other player will obviously capitalize on it. If that capitalization leads to a gimp, and the person being gimped ends up being saved by the barrel, then their being saved was unintentional and "lucky" - regardless of whether or not they knew that their being saved was going to happen due to them mentally keeping track of the barrel's location.
This is not so much a "Congo is random" argument (since it has been proven otherwise) as much as it is a "I dislike having to deal with moving parts" argument. While that's perfectly fine, I just wanted to separate those points before they get any further confused. Because of the stage striking system, if you dislike Congo you should never have to play on it (CP rules aside). As to the other point, as King Funk has pointed out, it is not unrealistic to keep track of the barrel by itself.
They can be attributed to Dreamland and Hyrule. I was just wanted to show that it can be attributed to Congo as well. I have nothing against Congo.
And how the hell is it a "I dislike having to deal with moving parts" argument? My argument is a legitimate point that shows that Congo can add random elements into a match regardless of whether or not it LITERALLY is random. Nobody is going to incorporate the consideration of where the barrel is into their metagame unless they seriously suck.
They can be attributed to Dreamland and Hyrule. I was just wanted to show that it can be attributed to Congo as well. I have nothing against Congo.
And how the hell is it a "I dislike having to deal with moving parts" argument? My argument is a legitimate point that shows that Congo can add random elements into a match regardless of whether or not it LITERALLY is random. Nobody is going to incorporate the consideration of where the barrel is into their metagame unless they seriously suck.
Perhaps that could have been better phrased as "moving parts lead to unintentional things happening". I can see how the original wording could probably be offensive and apologize if any was taken.
You have to be careful though: random and unintentional are two completely different ideas. Unintentional refers, obviously, to something you didn't intend to happen. It has very little to do with randomness. Falling into the barrel can be as unintentional as accidentally running of the stage with a n-air instead of doing an f-smash and self-destructing. When I say random, I mean anything controlled by a little pseudo-random number generator inside the game code, which is essentially impossible to predict
(really impossible as opposed to just hard or not worth the effort, since it would essentially require the ability to trace the game's code inside your head in real time)
. Hyrule tornadoes fall under that definition. Motivated people have done testing in the past to show that [thread=297660]Dreamland wind[/thread] and [thread=287151]Congo platforms and barrel[/thread] do NOT fall into that definition since both follow relatively simple patterns / rules.
With those definitions, basically what you are saying is that Congo's moving parts lead to unintentional things happening. I agree - most people myself included don't bother to keep track of the barrel, so many unintentional things happen. Another unintentional thing that happens when people play smash is they get KO'ed. I'm sure very few people intend for that to happen, the point being that it is not terribly useful to list every unintentional thing that could happen.
What I do object to is the assertion that nobody could conceivably keep track of the barrel, especially in light of it being pointed out that there exists at least one Melee player (M2K) who is known to keep track of a stage object (cloud on Yoshi's) with a very similar movement pattern. I'm also a bit confused by your last statement that people who do incorporate the barrel into their meta-game are worse than those who don''t. However since you state that you don't actually have any problems with Congo I suppose this little discussion is moot anyways.
keeping track of the barrel is barely worth the effort, incomparable to randall
and only a single named player doing it is attributable to being an outlier, especially because m2k is incredibly good with the technical stuff like that
Why would you suck for learning or trying to learn something that could turn out to be useful, even if it's just in some extremely rare of specific situations? If you're not willing to incorporate anything and everything you learn or find out into your gameplay, there's no way you can ever become a good competitive player of any kind.
But if by "sucking" you rather meant that a player would adjust his position purely according to the barrel and not to his opponent, then you're completely misinterpreting what we meant by "keeping track of the barrel": a player with a minimum of common sense would obviously focus on his opponent rather than a single element of the stage. But what if he could do both? Imagine he gets a grab in the middle of the stage with Mario on Fox at around 80-90%. He could then choose to f-throw or b-throw based on what he thinks the barrel's current position is to give his opponent one less option for an easier edgeguard.
You might think I'm theorycrafting, but being conscious of stage elements/hazards that are out of the screen is not something that hasn't been done before.
True, randall the platform is much more useful than explosive huge stun time barrel. Both worth and effort are still very subjective and player dependent though. People also sometimes forget worth works in the negative direction - if something causes enough problems for you it can be worth the time to learn how to avoid it. Zebes acid would be an example (enormous damage, hitstun, and knockback yet completely predictable cycles). [/quote]
and only a single named player doing it is attributable to being an outlier, especially because m2k is incredibly good with the technical stuff like that
The barrel movement is in sync with the platforms so the player could always look at those . It'd still take some large amounts of determination to do.
Sorry, Pink Kirby, but I don't really understand why you wrote that long post at all.
-I don't think anybody claimed stages can make terrible match-ups even.
-I don't think anybody claimed that a perfect stage exists in this game, or that they are searching for one.
-Stage striking only allows somebody to avoid their hated (but legal) stage for the first game, unless you are suggesting the entire set is played on the first stage chosen. You know how the counter-pick system works, right?
And I really didn't like the general mindset you presented in that post. There is no perfect stage, so we should just "deal with it"? I see no reason why we shouldn't try to create the fairest stage list possible. It may never be perfect, but it can certainly be better. Same goes for character balance - no, nobody believes achieving perfect character balance with a stage is possible, but some stages can be more balanced than others.
Oh, and how do you plan on enforcing a ban on camping? And why would you ban a playstyle in the first place? There's nothing inherently wrong with camping being present - only with camping being too powerful.
Sorry for being a bit late.
P.S. Randall is a lot easier to keep track of because of the in-game timer. I really don't see the relevance anyways.
