• Welcome to Smashboards, the world's largest Super Smash Brothers community! Over 250,000 Smash Bros. fans from around the world have come to discuss these great games in over 19 million posts!

    You are currently viewing our boards as a visitor. Click here to sign up right now and start on your path in the Smash community!

I know about less landing lag, but having a manual L-Canceling mode would be sweet

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
E Eternal phoenix Fire In terms of Street Fighter, I technically see what you're saying, but at the same time, it all depends on how many ways you can map all your buttons. I would only consider that sort of strange input command per move as a last resort if you simply couldn't do anymore with your buttons. I'm not sure how many buttons and moves there are in Street Fighter, but I highly doubt it's so many that they then resort to two control stick inputs and a button rather than two buttons like Pokken does.

Also, your two "technical aspect" examples in other fighters actually cost meter, which means they actually have skill-independent downsides, which means one of the main problems of L-Cancelling is already solved; those technical aspects have weaknesses that the high-level players cannot circumvent in any way.
I won't pretend that there are a bunch of fighting games that have unnecessarily complex inputs for moves just to be complex (helloooo SNK), but in general, Capcom fighters do operate on the principle of having as little buttons and inputs as possible. It's just that there are so many potential actions in Capcom fighters that having a whole bunch of commands is necessary to access them all. Thankfully, Capcom does a pretty good job of keeping them as simple as possible, to the point that rare unnecessarily complex inputs from the early days (like Zangief's grabs that require a 360 motion) have been simplified in recent times. A lot of fighter developers that follow the Capcom school of thought (like SNK) tend to forget that, though.

That said, Dragon Ball FighterZ is definitely a step in the right direction of not having a whole bunch of buttons and actions to keep track of. And that game came from a company (ArcSys) with a lot of former personnel of SNK at that.

Honestly, Teeb147 Teeb147 already points out the flaw in L-Cancelling that is still not addressed, and it's the main flaw with it, among all the others I mentioned. And all of the examples you give in the other games either are not the same thing, like the Street Fighter 4 deal, where options and choices are actually lost, or can be dealt with in a more streamlined manner with pretty much no depth to the game lost, or it's a simple balance issue, while the mechanic itself is still fine design-wise, in this case, the Yun vs Cammy dive kick example.

And even regarding the Street Fighter 4 and the frame links thing. First off, do frame links have literally no downside to doing them. Like is damage lost or is combo potential lost for some moves but gained for others? If they have a downside to doing them, then they automatically are not the same as L-Cancelling.

Secondly, even if it had a blatant downside, why would the developer bother gating those extra options to the player via a button press? It still causes an increase of the skill floor without raising the skill ceiling much at all.
Why are you so fixated on this idea of "needs to provide an option"? It just feels good to hit a button and get a result, okay? Honestly, L-Canceling just adds weight to the game's immersion. You can think of it as the character paying attention to the ground and bracing for impact. And you are the one who gets to enact that character's decision to brace for impact. Just because "you always have to do it" doesn't mean it can't have weight to the idea of doing it in the first place.

Besides, if the L-Canceling mechanic is improved beyond "you can mash on the way down and get the cancel" and is made to be distinguishable from normal landing lag on faster characters to the untrained eye (which Project M did with the white flash), it will provide even more enjoyment to the game. Shielding to force an L-Cancel miss would now have even more meaning, and the risk/reward duality would become a risk/skill/reward triality, making it so that if you read a shield, you can still respond with an L-Cancel.
 

Necro'lic

Smash Ace
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
654
Why are you so fixated on this idea of "needs to provide an option"? It just feels good to hit a button and get a result, okay? Honestly, L-Canceling just adds weight to the game's immersion. You can think of it as the character paying attention to the ground and bracing for impact. And you are the one who gets to enact that character's decision to brace for impact. Just because "you always have to do it" doesn't mean it can't have weight to the idea of doing it in the first place.

Besides, if the L-Canceling mechanic is improved beyond "you can mash on the way down and get the cancel" and is made to be distinguishable from normal landing lag on faster characters to the untrained eye (which Project M did with the white flash), it will provide even more enjoyment to the game. Shielding to force an L-Cancel miss would now have even more meaning, and the risk/reward duality would become a risk/skill/reward triality, making it so that if you read a shield, you can still respond with an L-Cancel.
Because options are what makes a game have depth, and a mechanic that has no choice but to be performed has no place in a competitive game. And the "weight to the game's immersion" can be done just fine via the visuals. But since you went down this route, why not instead of one direction on the control stick, you instead have to move the control stick for every step your character does? I'm not sure why you brought this up this immersion aspect for landing specifically other than to find some way to have an extra input that you are required to do. If that's the case, why bank on a fundamentally broken mechanic instead of gaining more movement "immersion" through more fairly designed mechanics like wavedashing?

And even if L-Cancelling is visually distinct, it still doesn't solve the needless increasing of the skill floor it brings. Why would we bother with this when so many better things can be done with less impact on a majority of the playerbase? And in your example, note that in neutral, any player would expect a defensive maneuver of some kind and just time the L-Cancel from there regardless. And that means the only real way for the opponent to mess with this flow is to actually get hit. In other words, there is still no downside with a huge upside, regardless of what is done to stop it, because when it is actually done, it is always the right choice.

I think my main point all around is that there are better ways to cause players to make mistakes than making a mechanic that adds no depth and needlessly increases the skill floor, alienating way too many people trying to play in a competitive manner. We can have both a low skill floor, and high skill ceiling.
 
Joined
Jun 4, 2006
Messages
8,377
Location
Long Beach,California
You bring up an interesting point pheonix.
but I think you should know that at high level play, you're just expected to get near 100% of your l-cancels. It doesn't bring anything 'more' than the same as auto-cancels.

Really, it Just takes time grinding it. It's boring, and to some it can just feel like barrier to fighting on even planes.

So, back to your point.. what you're saying would make sense if l-canceling actually brought something more, but the reason most people are ok with it being gone is because there's nothing lost. It's not like smash 4, where you can't land an attack safely.

If they outright removed a combo skill from street fighter, then that's not the same thing. If you can't combo like you could before anymore, the game lost something.
I would argue that it’s the same thing. It just like saying at a high level you’re expected to land one-hundred percent of your bread and butter combos at all times, but that doesn’t happen, as nothing is outside the scope of human error. There have been many instances a player has gotten a rogue hit or a combo string just to drop a combo to lead to a kill. Missing an L-Cancel in Melee puts you in a disadvantageous position.

Just as corners and footsies are critical to traditional fighting mechanics, given that smash bros is a platform based fighter, zoning is important: that is to maintain control over a fragment of the stage based on your position of said stage. When players are sash dancing back and forth, empty hopping, short hop aerials, etc, it’s checking the opponent in a similar way to that of street fighter with footsies and counter poking. A counter poke is essentially punishing your opponent for throwing out a move. Like if Ryu threw out his standing heavy attack in an attempt to force the opponent back into position, assuming you read that your opponent would do that, you can throw out a quicker attacking to punish his hurt box, leading to a counter hit position, reset to neutral, or potentially a combo, depending on your level of execution and/or confidence. Similarly let’s say it was Ganondorf vs Marth, Marth is on stage and sweet spots a recovery. Ganon is checking Marth’s recovery by throwing out a short hop fair. Let’s see the scenario with and without an L-Cancel:

L-Cancels: Marth can instantly drop off the ledge and recover with enough invincibility frames to get back on stage. And while Marth has options, Ganon has the advantage and counter this get up with a jab during the wave land.

Doesn’t L-Cancel: Marth has enough time to get back on stage and punish Ganon. He can probably jab, but he can easily get shield grabbed, or even ledge hop faired on reaction.

Missing an L-Cancel in this scenario causes the player to lose control of the neutral. It’s the same as an opponent escaping the corner in a traditional fighter. And while it may seem pointless to have to be technical to maintain positioning, it is necessary in traditional fighters to have not only proper spacing, but being technically proficient to keep your opponent pinned in a bad spot. Giving the player the ability to maintain space nonchalantly can cause an issue with character balance. But having that all available in an accessible fashion would force developers to neuter the strengths of some characters as not to give overwhelming strength to a character with low execution barriers. With that, you get games like Street Fighter V, with the exceptions of some characters like Ibuki. So figuring out how to balance that is definitely easier said than done.

As far as the one-hundred percent execution thing is concerned, I don’t feel like that’s a fair argument. Yeah, we expect these things to happen all the time, but when do people do things correctly all the time? It’s the same way we expected Zero to win one-hundred percent of the tournaments he entered in smash 4, but he didn’t. Kobe Bryant didn’t nail one-hundred percent of his fade aways. Stephen Curry, one of the, if not the best 3-point shooter in the world, hasn’t landed one-hundred percent of his jump shots. The only person who I can make an exception for is arguably Floyd Maywether, who has as of now is retired undefeated. But having another person like that is statistically insignificant. Honestly, people choke, a lot. Seeing someone get robbed of what was perceived as a secured victory due to a basic technical flub is a tale as old as time. These things will happen no matter how simple or difficult a game is. So I don’t think it’s fair to say that just because something can’t be executed one-hundred percent of the time that it should be dismissed as a mundane action.

I feel like if something is simple and effective as well as having the option to have options beyond that is the best way to motivate players. Dragonball FighterZ has done this fairly well with auto combos, as well as other games have as well. If you can have autocancelling as well as something better, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have it.

But this is assuming it’s not just the same L-Canceling. I’m all for a solid implementation or overhaul of the mechanic. And personally I had a blast learning to L-Cancel, it opened my eyes to the possibility of executing combos and moving better. It wasn’t dull at all, and I can still play a 99 stock against a cpu in Melee to completion and have fun just practicing tech. It’s definitely worth a shot, and it feels amazing when you get your movement and combos down right.
 

Necro'lic

Smash Ace
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
654
I would argue that it’s the same thing. It just like saying at a high level you’re expected to land one-hundred percent of your bread and butter combos at all times, but that doesn’t happen, as nothing is outside the scope of human error. There have been many instances a player has gotten a rogue hit or a combo string just to drop a combo to lead to a kill. Missing an L-Cancel in Melee puts you in a disadvantageous position.

Just as corners and footsies are critical to traditional fighting mechanics, given that smash bros is a platform based fighter, zoning is important: that is to maintain control over a fragment of the stage based on your position of said stage. When players are sash dancing back and forth, empty hopping, short hop aerials, etc, it’s checking the opponent in a similar way to that of street fighter with footsies and counter poking. A counter poke is essentially punishing your opponent for throwing out a move. Like if Ryu threw out his standing heavy attack in an attempt to force the opponent back into position, assuming you read that your opponent would do that, you can throw out a quicker attacking to punish his hurt box, leading to a counter hit position, reset to neutral, or potentially a combo, depending on your level of execution and/or confidence. Similarly let’s say it was Ganondorf vs Marth, Marth is on stage and sweet spots a recovery. Ganon is checking Marth’s recovery by throwing out a short hop fair. Let’s see the scenario with and without an L-Cancel:

L-Cancels: Marth can instantly drop off the ledge and recover with enough invincibility frames to get back on stage. And while Marth has options, Ganon has the advantage and counter this get up with a jab during the wave land.

Doesn’t L-Cancel: Marth has enough time to get back on stage and punish Ganon. He can probably jab, but he can easily get shield grabbed, or even ledge hop faired on reaction.

Missing an L-Cancel in this scenario causes the player to lose control of the neutral. It’s the same as an opponent escaping the corner in a traditional fighter. And while it may seem pointless to have to be technical to maintain positioning, it is necessary in traditional fighters to have not only proper spacing, but being technically proficient to keep your opponent pinned in a bad spot. Giving the player the ability to maintain space nonchalantly can cause an issue with character balance. But having that all available in an accessible fashion would force developers to neuter the strengths of some characters as not to give overwhelming strength to a character with low execution barriers. With that, you get games like Street Fighter V, with the exceptions of some characters like Ibuki. So figuring out how to balance that is definitely easier said than done.

As far as the one-hundred percent execution thing is concerned, I don’t feel like that’s a fair argument. Yeah, we expect these things to happen all the time, but when do people do things correctly all the time? It’s the same way we expected Zero to win one-hundred percent of the tournaments he entered in smash 4, but he didn’t. Kobe Bryant didn’t nail one-hundred percent of his fade aways. Stephen Curry, one of the, if not the best 3-point shooter in the world, hasn’t landed one-hundred percent of his jump shots. The only person who I can make an exception for is arguably Floyd Maywether, who has as of now is retired undefeated. But having another person like that is statistically insignificant. Honestly, people choke, a lot. Seeing someone get robbed of what was perceived as a secured victory due to a basic technical flub is a tale as old as time. These things will happen no matter how simple or difficult a game is. So I don’t think it’s fair to say that just because something can’t be executed one-hundred percent of the time that it should be dismissed as a mundane action.

I feel like if something is simple and effective as well as having the option to have options beyond that is the best way to motivate players. Dragonball FighterZ has done this fairly well with auto combos, as well as other games have as well. If you can have autocancelling as well as something better, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have it.

But this is assuming it’s not just the same L-Canceling. I’m all for a solid implementation or overhaul of the mechanic. And personally I had a blast learning to L-Cancel, it opened my eyes to the possibility of executing combos and moving better. It wasn’t dull at all, and I can still play a 99 stock against a cpu in Melee to completion and have fun just practicing tech. It’s definitely worth a shot, and it feels amazing when you get your movement and combos down right.
The difference between corners and footsies and L-Cancel is that the former has no set in stone correct choice, since the enemy can easily work against you by messing up your timing or choosing something you didn't expect, but that shows intent on the other player's part and is two players actually interacting. With L-Cancel, the best you got is someone advancing into your aerial and shielding to mess you up, which is a minuscule choice compared to all the other things wrong with the mechanic and still doesn't prove to be a meaningful choice on either player's part. Not to mention the needless skill floor increase that I still have to mention. For 99% of the time, L-Cancelling has no meaningful interaction between the players at all. It's just one person playing against the game rather than the person.

Something I'm noticing in your examples here is that your angle seems to be off of what was given in a game rather than what could be in that game. You bring up L-Cancelling limiting certain characters when the better thing to do would be to remove L-Cancelling and balance the game accordingly. Then you bring up Street Fighter V and their terrible balance practice of balancing around the lowest common denominator of players and then wrongly blame this on not having an execution barrier, when in reality, that balancing method is just bad regardless of execution barrier or not. You always balance around the highest level players. It's what makes sure the playing field is fair in a high-level competition.

Which leads nicely into the one hundred percent execution ideal. It's not an ideal of players, but the ideal of the designer in order to balance their game properly. Because you balance around high-level players, you should expect them to be able to use all tools given. Since L-Cancelling has no strategic value, there is really nothing a game designer can do to balance the mechanic that would affect high-level players, and thus it becomes a superfluous mechanic that the developers can't work with to make the game more balanced for competitive level play. This then leaves L-Cancelling's only tangible purpose as that needless technical barrier for lower-level players, when low-level players will already lose to high level players without this mechanic in place just by the nature of the game.

In short, there is nothing L-Cancelling adds that the game wouldn't already have, while it has negative consequences for the low-level players that doesn't need to be there. When you bring up poor balance practices, it isn't really supporting the idea of execution for the sake of execution, but just highlighting a poor balancing practice and nothing more.

And I feel that you're looking at this from too personal a perspective, since you bring up how you specifically like these execution barriers. The point is that you are a tiny minority compared to the vast majority of players who don't want harder execution barriers just for the sake of making things harder to execute. They want meaningful choices in their gameplay that actually involve what the enemy is doing, and if it happens to be hard to execute, okay, but it shouldn't be a baseline need for every single aspect of a game. You can have specific characters with a higher skill floor. That's fine. But L-Cancelling brings the entirety of the skill floor across the game higher for no important or worthwhile competitive gain.
 

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
Because options are what makes a game have depth, and a mechanic that has no choice but to be performed has no place in a competitive game. And the "weight to the game's immersion" can be done just fine via the visuals. But since you went down this route, why not instead of one direction on the control stick, you instead have to move the control stick for every step your character does? I'm not sure why you brought this up this immersion aspect for landing specifically other than to find some way to have an extra input that you are required to do. If that's the case, why bank on a fundamentally broken mechanic instead of gaining more movement "immersion" through more fairly designed mechanics like wavedashing?
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope

There's no need to go to extremes when L-Canceling is, again, simple but balanced. Personally, I wouldn't mind it being extended to include specials on top of the improvements I've already suggested.

But don't act like I don't have limits to making the game too complex. I don't want Smash to be Octodad or Surgeon Simulator. L-Canceling is a great way of adding complexity without going overboard.

And even if L-Cancelling is visually distinct, it still doesn't solve the needless increasing of the skill floor it brings. Why would we bother with this when so many better things can be done with less impact on a majority of the playerbase? And in your example, note that in neutral, any player would expect a defensive maneuver of some kind and just time the L-Cancel from there regardless. And that means the only real way for the opponent to mess with this flow is to actually get hit. In other words, there is still no downside with a huge upside, regardless of what is done to stop it, because when it is actually done, it is always the right choice.

I think my main point all around is that there are better ways to cause players to make mistakes than making a mechanic that adds no depth and needlessly increases the skill floor, alienating way too many people trying to play in a competitive manner. We can have both a low skill floor, and high skill ceiling.
There are many ways to mess up L-Canceling timing. You can spotdodge, roll backwards (assuming rolls aren't overly laggy as in pre-Smash 4), or angle the shield. Even Ultimate's new parry could be a great way to mess up L-Canceling.

I do admit that Melee's incarnation of L-Canceling is half-done, and Project M doesn't really fix this either. But all they need to do is add a punishment for error (missed attempt at L-Cancel doubles landing lag), a visual cue for getting it right (white flash), and disable the "rolling/mashing method" (you only get one chance at L-Canceling and that's it). Now it's a fully developed mechanic.
 

Necro'lic

Smash Ace
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
654
There's no need to go to extremes when L-Canceling is, again, simple but balanced. Personally, I wouldn't mind it being extended to include specials on top of the improvements I've already suggested.

But don't act like I don't have limits to making the game too complex. I don't want Smash to be Octodad or Surgeon Simulator. L-Canceling is a great way of adding complexity without going overboard.
I went down the slippery slope specifically because you mentioned immersion of having control of the character landing. I've never seen this argument for anything in a game ever, for something so minuscule, so I decided to up the ridiculousness of it to prove a point that that particular avenue of argumentation gets you nowhere.

I do think you have limits on complexity, but the fact you are banking on this specific form of complexity for the game, despite all the problems I've told you about, made it seem like you were reaching more and more on finding a way to make this fundamentally broken mechanic work in spite of all that I've pointed out.

There are many ways to mess up L-Canceling timing. You can spotdodge, roll backwards (assuming rolls aren't overly laggy as in pre-Smash 4), or angle the shield. Even Ultimate's new parry could be a great way to mess up L-Canceling.

I do admit that Melee's incarnation of L-Canceling is half-done, and Project M doesn't really fix this either. But all they need to do is add a punishment for error (missed attempt at L-Cancel doubles landing lag), a visual cue for getting it right (white flash), and disable the "rolling/mashing method" (you only get one chance at L-Canceling and that's it). Now it's a fully developed mechanic.
Firstly, you still ignore the skill floor problem that I've addressed multiple times. Second, your suggestion pretty much only fixes the risk/reward part involved in hitting a shield. It still has no choice involved in every other situation involving landing, it still gives no strategic value that the developers can work off of for high-level play, and it still causes a huge skill floor increase for little reason.

This is why this mechanic is fundamentally poorly designed. You just can't find an easy solution to fix all these problems without either removing it, or changing it to the point of it not even being L-Cancelling. And honestly, I'd still pick the former because it saves a lot of headache trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and because the mechanic's entire purpose is to mess with the meticulous self-balancing aspects of the fighting game genre itself.

Imagine a universal mechanic where you can bypass the mana cost and cooldown of using a spell in Dota or LoL simply by timing a button press for when the spell hits the opponent. It would basically be the L-Canceling of MOBA's. No strategic value, a single player going against the game rather than the other player, increased skill floor across the board, and for what? So people can feel good about grinding time doing an action that doesn't involve opposing player input in a game where the entire competitive purpose is to fight against other players?

This is just not worth it from a design standpoint, from a developer standpoint, from a casual standpoint, or from a competitive standpoint. It would only appease so few people at the detriment of everyone else involved with the game.
 
Last edited:

LancerStaff

Smash Hero
Joined
Jan 28, 2014
Messages
8,118
Location
Buried under 990+ weapons
3DS FC
1504-5709-4054
The reason an L-cancel toggle has no merit is the same reason other games don’t have input difficulty toggles. 99.9% of players won’t even try it. In a competitive game, nobody wants to handicap themselves.

Some fighters or other competitive games have similar toggles, but they come with drawbacks. They’re more like automatic and manual drifting in Mario Kart. Auto is easier... But significantly weaker. We even have auto steering, but it has no impact in “competitive” play because of it’s drawbacks.

Imagine if we had a toggle for max IVs in Pokémon. How many people would bother with breeding for IVs ever again? Hell, imagine if Street Fighter and the like had an option for the inputs with no drawbacks. Nobody would ever play with inputs ever again.
 
Joined
Jun 4, 2006
Messages
8,377
Location
Long Beach,California
The difference between corners and footsies and L-Cancel is that the former has no set in stone correct choice, since the enemy can easily work against you by messing up your timing or choosing something you didn't expect, but that shows intent on the other player's part and is two players actually interacting. With L-Cancel, the best you got is someone advancing into your aerial and shielding to mess you up, which is a minuscule choice compared to all the other things wrong with the mechanic and still doesn't prove to be a meaningful choice on either player's part. Not to mention the needless skill floor increase that I still have to mention. For 99% of the time, L-Cancelling has no meaningful interaction between the players at all. It's just one person playing against the game rather than the person.

Something I'm noticing in your examples here is that your angle seems to be off of what was given in a game rather than what could be in that game. You bring up L-Cancelling limiting certain characters when the better thing to do would be to remove L-Cancelling and balance the game accordingly. Then you bring up Street Fighter V and their terrible balance practice of balancing around the lowest common denominator of players and then wrongly blame this on not having an execution barrier, when in reality, that balancing method is just bad regardless of execution barrier or not. You always balance around the highest level players. It's what makes sure the playing field is fair in a high-level competition.

Which leads nicely into the one hundred percent execution ideal. It's not an ideal of players, but the ideal of the designer in order to balance their game properly. Because you balance around high-level players, you should expect them to be able to use all tools given. Since L-Cancelling has no strategic value, there is really nothing a game designer can do to balance the mechanic that would affect high-level players, and thus it becomes a superfluous mechanic that the developers can't work with to make the game more balanced for competitive level play. This then leaves L-Cancelling's only tangible purpose as that needless technical barrier for lower-level players, when low-level players will already lose to high level players without this mechanic in place just by the nature of the game.

In short, there is nothing L-Cancelling adds that the game wouldn't already have, while it has negative consequences for the low-level players that doesn't need to be there. When you bring up poor balance practices, it isn't really supporting the idea of execution for the sake of execution, but just highlighting a poor balancing practice and nothing more.

And I feel that you're looking at this from too personal a perspective, since you bring up how you specifically like these execution barriers. The point is that you are a tiny minority compared to the vast majority of players who don't want harder execution barriers just for the sake of making things harder to execute. They want meaningful choices in their gameplay that actually involve what the enemy is doing, and if it happens to be hard to execute, okay, but it shouldn't be a baseline need for every single aspect of a game. You can have specific characters with a higher skill floor. That's fine. But L-Cancelling brings the entirety of the skill floor across the game higher for no important or worthwhile competitive gain.
Again, you’re not using examples. You’re throwing out statements like “choice” for whatever reason. It’s not making something harder needlessly, it’s like I said in the Falco example, so you can just bust someone’s shield for free. Imagine if there was no L-Cancel for input in Smash N64, characters would just contact your shield once and free shield break without error. There are many characters who have “meaningless tech” to help them maintain pressure. Makoto from Street Fighter III Third Strike has Hayate Canceling. C.Viper from Street Fighter 4 has thunder knuckle cancel. What about Jin from Tekken, and the many characters in the series that cancel into stances to maintain pressure? Granted, it’s ingrained into the game, but why does how it’s inplemented matter more than its ability to function properly? L-Canceling can be seen pointless from players who don’t play the game, but for Melee’s sake it was done right. Sort of. Hence why having it wouldn’t hurt. Just because something is a choice doesn’t mean it’s optimum. There’s tons of combo videos of characters in games doing stuff that isn’t practical, but people like that. It doesn’t have to have some profound meaning to it. And you’re claiming that L-Canceling is playing against yourself, so to speak? Nah, no combos in Smash can make you feel that way. That happens in Marvel vs Capcom, but those series of hits are not easy to execute. Just because I’m making extra inputs doesn’t mean

Again, you keep saying that what I’m saying isn’t correct, but you give me no concrete information that supports your statements, or something to draw comparison. I typed it, I know what I said, you don’t have to repeat it to me. Can you at the very least tell me how you think the mechanic should work in a game like smash?

Also, wouldn’t balancing around the best players in the smash would be to have all these options available? It’s the same as curving a letter grade, but curving towards the highest grade, which changes nothing and you fail anyway.

Again, the whole “meaningful” choice thing is baffling me because I don’t know what that even means; you aren’t elaborating. This isn’t match.com lol it’s a fighting game. But I would really like you to explain what you’re saying clearly WITH examples.
 

Teeb147

Smash Legend
Joined
Nov 15, 2007
Messages
10,624
phoenix, I don't know why you make L-canceling out to be something that saves from crazy combos or shield breaking. If you practice it you're not going to miss it, so there's not much difference. Yes there's human error, but in this case it's just making an error that puts you at a disadvantage. I don't know about you, but I would rather it be consistent than have off chances where me or someone else flubs at it and loses a lot for it. ( it is a pretty big deal to have a safe hit on landing or not.)

I read your earlier bigger post, and if it wasn't that I think you believe what you say, I would've had to show you how many strawmen you've built. I don't think I have the time to point it all out to you. You associate l-canceling with so many things that aren't like it, it's so crazy, I don't think you have any idea how it looks. I'm not saying I couldn't get good points across but I don't have the time or dedication to do that right now, it feels like I'd be talking to a tree stump (not wanting to sound mean, it's just how far it feels from from getting something across).

I think there are people who just are attached to l-canceling because of how it's helped them feel like they were improving at things, and they don't realize it's not a great mechanic in general. I don't deny it can be given value. But there's other things to give more value to, both as a fighting game and as a game that's for lots of different people. I understand you like it, but there's so much more to consider too.

I might check the thread again at some point, but I'm done for now. Later.
In whatever case, enjoy playing :)
 
Last edited:

Necro'lic

Smash Ace
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
654
Again, you’re not using examples. You’re throwing out statements like “choice” for whatever reason. It’s not making something harder needlessly, it’s like I said in the Falco example, so you can just bust someone’s shield for free. Imagine if there was no L-Cancel for input in Smash N64, characters would just contact your shield once and free shield break without error. There are many characters who have “meaningless tech” to help them maintain pressure. Makoto from Street Fighter III Third Strike has Hayate Canceling. C.Viper from Street Fighter 4 has thunder knuckle cancel. What about Jin from Tekken, and the many characters in the series that cancel into stances to maintain pressure? Granted, it’s ingrained into the game, but why does how it’s inplemented matter more than its ability to function properly? L-Canceling can be seen pointless from players who don’t play the game, but for Melee’s sake it was done right. Sort of. Hence why having it wouldn’t hurt. Just because something is a choice doesn’t mean it’s optimum. There’s tons of combo videos of characters in games doing stuff that isn’t practical, but people like that. It doesn’t have to have some profound meaning to it. And you’re claiming that L-Canceling is playing against yourself, so to speak? Nah, no combos in Smash can make you feel that way. That happens in Marvel vs Capcom, but those series of hits are not easy to execute. Just because I’m making extra inputs doesn’t mean

Again, you keep saying that what I’m saying isn’t correct, but you give me no concrete information that supports your statements, or something to draw comparison. I typed it, I know what I said, you don’t have to repeat it to me. Can you at the very least tell me how you think the mechanic should work in a game like smash?

Also, wouldn’t balancing around the best players in the smash would be to have all these options available? It’s the same as curving a letter grade, but curving towards the highest grade, which changes nothing and you fail anyway.

Again, the whole “meaningful” choice thing is baffling me because I don’t know what that even means; you aren’t elaborating. This isn’t match.com lol it’s a fighting game. But I would really like you to explain what you’re saying clearly WITH examples.
A "meaningful choice" is usually illustrated as an ability, on the player's part, to use a specific tool or mechanic either suboptimally or optimally. This flows into every mechanic for the game. Let's take an easy Smash example using your Marth vs Ganon with Marth on the ledge, except leaving L-Cancel out of the equation, and just halving landing lag. Should Ganon go for Fair, something that could potentially kill, but whiff and have a bit of lag for Marth to get up safely, or pressure with Nair, something fast and safe, but most likely won't combo or kill? And let's turn to Marth's perspective here. What if Ganon banks on the Fair? If Ganon wishes to time the Fair to Marth's getup, he would simply stand still, leaving Marth the ability to just ledge attack or get up normal, whereas that most likely wouldn't work if he was spamming Nair. Marth could also roll, dodging the Nair entirely.

This is a bit scatterbrained, but the point is that each choice presented to the player can work in one situation, but not in another, and involves prediction on the part of what the other player is doing, will do, or following a pattern maybe. Imagine if Ganon stands still after doing Fair a lot, and Marth decides to counter it with normal getup or a ledge attack. Ganon then can react accordingly and grab Marth, or shield the hit. This is how competitive games work on a baseline level, and if the game is designed well enough, there will be no need for execution based things in this dynamic. Execution difficulty should be incidental to the design of the game, and for fighting games, it is an intrinsic result, just like it is for MOBAs, FPS, RTS, and really any video game involving real-time. You don't need to make something harder to execute intentionally in a fighting game; they do this well enough by themselves, and like I keep saying, there's no casual, strategic, or developer benefit to it.

As for all of those "meaningless techs", it all depends on how they are designed. If they have a reason not to be used, or are predictable and punishable by the other player, then they already have more of a purpose for competitive and developers than L-Canceling. But considering you said they were "designed around", I would assume the developers avoided these problems, as they should. Secondly, those are character specific techs, which, again, if designed around, is fine since the overall skill floor of the game is unharmed, and thus casual or low-level competitive play is not harmed by it. I think you misunderstand my problem with L-Cancelling as having an aversion to execution based things in any case when that's not true. This is why I always say I don't like execution for execution's sake. If you have a well designed option that is suboptimal sometimes, yet requires a bit more execution to do, and it doesn't mess with the overall skill floor of your game (unless you explicitly state your game as being "hard to learn" as well as hard to master), then it's okay by me.

L-Cancelling, almost cleverly, avoids all of these rules and causes a cascade of problems that I've mentioned throughout these posts. And I already explained to Quillion why L-Cancelling, as a concept, is fundamentally flawed, because the entire purpose of it is to mess with the self-balancing, skill-independent aspect of a fighting game that allows for easier balancing and depth. In this case, endlag. It's like having a way to remove bullet spread or damage falloff in a shooter, and suddenly a shotgun is now a mid range weapon instead of its intended close range design. It is the one advanced tech in Smash that I can safely say has no place in the series, or really any other game in the genre.

Last little thing, involving your question on balancing around high-level players means L-Cancelling should be supported. Two things:

One, L-Cancelling is not an option, it's an obligation. Because of this, the only barrier is execution, and balancing a game at a competitive level means expecting the player to be able to execute the tools you have at the very least, and the balancing aspect comes into how effective those tools are and thus dictates where, when, and why your players will use those tools, not that they simply can or can't.

Two, design and balance are two separate entities for development. Design involves tools that can be used, balance involves how good or bad those tools are. This distinction means for an "easy to learn" game, you design around low-level players, at least as a basis. Again, specific characters can have much higher skill floors should you want them to. You then balance these easily executable and understandable tools around high-level play, so in a competitive sense, they become eventually fair. L-Cancelling is a problem with design, not balance. It's why Quillion's idea of doubling landing lag if you mess up the L-Cancel does nothing to fix the plethora of problems.

I can't really give examples of how something like L-Cancelling could work, because it just can't, at least without compromising the design of a game on all levels for little gain.
 

#HBC | Red Ryu

Red Fox Warrior
Joined
Jun 15, 2008
Messages
27,486
Location
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
NNID
RedRyu_Smash
3DS FC
0344-9312-3352
I love the civility here with this and the discussion. I asked this question back on r/changemyview where I accepted some people like more technical inputs to help make the floor higher, but I still held onto the factor I don’t think it adds to the ceiling of the game or it barely does.

We do need input dexterity to matter, it seperates fighting games from chess or table top card games. It’s a part of what makes fighting games fighting games.

My issue here is still a common problem that I did reiterate, why would I never l-cancel because it is resourceless and not a real choice. Teching adds to Yomi and needs player interaction, perfect shielding is what you always want but that guessing game still adds something to the timing. Complex inputs in street fighter do add additional moves, the needed more input gives more to the game more than just skill tech.

But with L-Cancelling you aren’t really trying to outguess, especially if you do it in a tighter window outside of maybe ice climbers? Because then you can ignore that choice entirely. You aren’t deciding if you will do it or not you will do it.

I’ve heard counter arguments about optimized combos but I don’t agree with that. Good combo systems add reasons and choice to doing one combo over another. Meter is really good at adding depth to combo games as well as smash is with DI. Take smash 4 Charizard, how they act to my dthrow can change what I do and how I space or what I am for. Peach in melee/PM is the same for me.

With L-Cancelling I don’t see it adding enough to justify itself, whereas everything above does for me.
 

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
Input barriers exists so that you have to maintain composure while pressing the advantage, as well as give you options. And while that creates room for error, it gives you the opportunity to sharpen your execution and learn to to maximize the effectiveness of your commands. L-Canceling is akin to frame links in Street Fighter and other traditional fighters, where if you press an an attack button at a precise time, you can combo a move that doesn’t normally combo into itself, creating the possibility for fresh combos, block strings, etc. it was also argued to be arbitrary and pointless, and was removed from Stree Fighter V. And look at the game now, it’s a shadow of its former self, because instead of pushing a player to move forward the development team opted for the mundane. Now the game is just releasing DLC to keep it afloat, and in my opinion, is genuinely boring to watch, as it gets redundant. Perhaps if frame links existed, we would at least be able to see some originality in players.
Necro'lic Necro'lic : Although I do agree that E Eternal phoenix Fire has a hard time distinguishing "tech with choice" from "tech without choice", here's something they posted that actually has reason.

People actually dislike SF5's 3F input buffer because there's little reason to practice and experiment with combos. Of course, it didn't help that combos were simplified as well, but many still believe that even the simple combos would be more fun to land if they were OFLs.

Believe it or not, these "arbitrary" barriers do contribute to the enjoyment of the game.
 

Necro'lic

Smash Ace
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
654
Necro'lic Necro'lic : Although I do agree that E Eternal phoenix Fire has a hard time distinguishing "tech with choice" from "tech without choice", here's something they posted that actually has reason.

People actually dislike SF5's 3F input buffer because there's little reason to practice and experiment with combos. Of course, it didn't help that combos were simplified as well, but many still believe that even the simple combos would be more fun to land if they were OFLs.

Believe it or not, these "arbitrary" barriers do contribute to the enjoyment of the game.
Of course simple combos wouldn't be fun to land. Combos are another example of this one sided, single player, independent of your opponent, mechanics, at least how I've seen them in Street Fighter. Imagine if they had the buffer, while also doing something similar to Smash with DI, so the opponent could actually react to what you were doing in the combo instead of it just turning the game into a temporary button minigame irregardless of the opponent's say in anything?

This doesn't highlight the need for execution barriers more than it highlights the overall shallowness of combos, at least without some defining limiter or player interaction within it. Would we rather have no frame buffer at all? What would be the point of that other than to make the game difficult, again just for the sake of it? Adding a buffer doesn't subtract from anything for a vast majority of people, and it makes the game more responsive overall.
 

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
I mean, considering that traditional SF inputs and the like are going the way of the dodo, I firmly disagree.
Where are you getting this idea from? As long as there are more actions than can be put on every single controller button in fighting games, SF motions will still be a thing.

If you're talking about overly complex ones like a 360 motion, pretzel motion, or even the Z/Dragon Punch motion, then yes, those are dying. And good riddance to them; DBFZ being almost entirely based around QC motions is a step in the right direction for fighters.

Of course simple combos wouldn't be fun to land. Combos are another example of this one sided, single player, independent of your opponent, mechanics, at least how I've seen them in Street Fighter. Imagine if they had the buffer, while also doing something similar to Smash with DI, so the opponent could actually react to what you were doing in the combo instead of it just turning the game into a temporary button minigame irregardless of the opponent's say in anything?

This doesn't highlight the need for execution barriers more than it highlights the overall shallowness of combos, at least without some defining limiter or player interaction within it. Would we rather have no frame buffer at all? What would be the point of that other than to make the game difficult, again just for the sake of it? Adding a buffer doesn't subtract from anything for a vast majority of people, and it makes the game more responsive overall.
Your knowledge of fighting games is quite limited. Yes, combos in traditional fighters are essentially one-sided tests of skill, but they play a big role in allowing players to experiment and improve beyond just playing footsies and throwing out a poke every now and then.

It ties into the risk/skill/reward triality I've been talking about. Getting in close is required for combos, making it inherently risky, and without skill, the reward won't be very great. But as your skill improves, the risk/reward ratio becomes much more even.

The same could apply to L-Canceling if the mechanic was more refined. Either don't try for the L-Cancel and get no landing lag, or risk missing and getting double landing lag to get rewarded with half landing lag.
 

Necro'lic

Smash Ace
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
654
Your knowledge of fighting games is quite limited. Yes, combos in traditional fighters are essentially one-sided tests of skill, but they play a big role in allowing players to experiment and improve beyond just playing footsies and throwing out a poke every now and then.

It ties into the risk/skill/reward triality I've been talking about. Getting in close is required for combos, making it inherently risky, and without skill, the reward won't be very great. But as your skill improves, the risk/reward ratio becomes much more even.

The same could apply to L-Canceling if the mechanic was more refined. Either don't try for the L-Cancel and get no landing lag, or risk missing and getting double landing lag to get rewarded with half landing lag.
That bolded part of the first paragraph right there is enough to figure out that combos that have that are not the greatest competitive mechanic, at least more than what they could be. The point of a competitive game isn't just to show off skill on one player's part, but to show you can outplay the opponent. Why not have combos do both? You know what would take more skill to pull off? Having to combo your opponent, while also reacting to how they are moving so you can keep the combo going. I'm not sure how you can treat it as skillful, when the alternative that I pointed out has much more skill involved.

On top of this, why would you want an aspect of a competitive game that is basically a single player minigame, thus ignoring the multiplayer aspect of it entirely? Especially when it can easily be avoided like how Smash does with DI? It seems again you judge these mechanics based off of what is in a game rather than what it can be. Are combos in these games skillful? Sure. Could they be more so? Absolutely! So why would we try to excuse the faults of the old version when we already have a better version of the same concept?

Also, I already told you why your suggestion would only fix up one small problem with L-Cancelling, while ignoring all others, because your change treats the mechanic like it's imbalanced, when it is just a broken mechanic that inherently ruins the skill-independent competitive design aspects of the game.
 

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
That bolded part of the first paragraph right there is enough to figure out that combos that have that are not the greatest competitive mechanic, at least more than what they could be. The point of a competitive game isn't just to show off skill on one player's part, but to show you can outplay the opponent. Why not have combos do both? You know what would take more skill to pull off? Having to combo your opponent, while also reacting to how they are moving so you can keep the combo going. I'm not sure how you can treat it as skillful, when the alternative that I pointed out has much more skill involved.

On top of this, why would you want an aspect of a competitive game that is basically a single player minigame, thus ignoring the multiplayer aspect of it entirely? Especially when it can easily be avoided like how Smash does with DI? It seems again you judge these mechanics based off of what is in a game rather than what it can be. Are combos in these games skillful? Sure. Could they be more so? Absolutely! So why would we try to excuse the faults of the old version when we already have a better version of the same concept?
As a matter of fact, a lot fighting games have counterplay to combos. They're called reversals, and they generally have invincibility at the start of the move to pass through an opponents offense and stop it. They can be executed while you're in hitstun, or

That said, reversals tend to have drawbacks of their own. Some games make them cost meter, but the most common drawback is to limit them to essentially being the defensive version of a one-frame link. This is another example where having a limited frame to execute something enhances the game; you can't just hold a button when the opponent just starts a combo and reversal from there, after all.

Also, I already told you why your suggestion would only fix up one small problem with L-Cancelling, while ignoring all others, because your change treats the mechanic like it's imbalanced, when it is just a broken mechanic that inherently ruins the skill-independent competitive design aspects of the game.
You act like choice is the only form of depth, and that is absolutely not true. Choice is definitely a valuable form of depth, but execution is another one as well. While choice does matter in providing options to the player that can be rewarded or punished depending on how the opponent is playing (whether that be the CPU or a human), execution allows the player to feel like they're doing something more once they've made a good choice.

Back to ARMS, said game's utter lack of execution beyond making a choice between punching, grabbing, and defensive maneuvers drains its appeal to the eSports crowd despite absolutely having tons of ways to apply those choices.

And if we're talking about other genres, choice does not make open world games inherently better than linear games.
 
Last edited:

Necro'lic

Smash Ace
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
654
That said, reversals tend to have drawbacks of their own. Some games make them cost meter, but the most common drawback is to limit them to essentially being the defensive version of a one-frame link. This is another example where having a limited frame to execute something enhances the game; you can't just hold a button when the opponent just starts a combo and reversal from there, after all.
I'd be fine with the first, but I'd rather not with the second, unless it had some other actual downside involved. Otherwise, we then go back to the non-choice problem, and also the needless skill floor increase when the first option doesn't have that problem, even if it was hard to land as well as costing meter.

But really, I feel we aren't agreeing here fully because this is based on degrees. I tolerate a certain amount of execution, and can tolerate more of it when there are skill-independent downsides attached to the actions too. You seem to tolerate a high amount of execution regardless of skill-independent downsides. It's obvious that basing this discussion simply on skill is not going to end because it's a spectrum of what me and you individually tolerate lol.

You act like choice is the only form of depth, and that is absolutely not true. Choice is definitely a valuable form of depth, but execution is another one as well. While choice does matter in providing options to the player that can be rewarded or punished depending on how the opponent is playing (whether that be the CPU or a human), execution allows the player to feel like they're doing something more once they've made a good choice.
Choice is the only form of depth that ends up mattering at a high-level is what I'm saying, at least when it comes to designing a competitive video game. And I already know execution has its place, I never disputed this. I'm saying that when it comes to designing a competitive game, it doesn't matter nearly as much as meaningful player choice or spectator value, so finding ways to make your game harder to execute just for the sake of making it harder to execute is not a good route to go.

Back to ARMS, said game's utter lack of execution beyond making a choice between punching, grabbing, and defensive maneuvers drains its appeal to the eSports crowd despite absolutely having tons of ways to apply those choices.
And going back to spectator value, this is what is making the ARMS competitive scene inert more than easy execution, because there are aspects of the game that are hard to execute, mostly involving the rush attack and countering the rush, but also character specific abilities like Byte and Barq and using Barq's "third punch" for shield pressure, the spring dashes from Spring Man and Max Brass, Ninjara's shield warping and air dash warping invincibility, among others. The reason ARMS has a meh amount of competitive coverage is because the game looks boring when watching it, but suddenly becomes fun when playing it. This is the main story I've heard from 90% of the players who thought ARMS was boring at launch, but then caved in and played it. "The game looks so slow and boring, there's no advantage state, everything is unsafe on shield, everything is neutral". And then they actually play it, and end up thinking the game takes skill to work with, there actually is execution involved, and it gets super heated. All of this without those needless execution tests like L-Cancelling.
 

Teeb147

Smash Legend
Joined
Nov 15, 2007
Messages
10,624
Just a small note about what I just saw... careful holding a side, because usually what matters is a bigger picture of both. I mean..
It's a combination, for depth. look at wave dashing, it takes a lot of execution to use its full potential, and it adds a LOT of options (freeing up choices?). It's a choice that, including with spacing, uses lots of execution, and if you can use it well leads to even more choices. Lots of depth.
L-canceling (compared to auto-canceling) doesn't add options, and isn't really a choice ( you just always do it to be on even plane.)-> No depth, besides maybe a personal feeling of satisfaction or something.
Just wanted to say that. :)
 
Last edited:

Octavium

''Fear doesn't stop death, it stops life.''
Joined
Aug 27, 2014
Messages
508
Location
Your retina to your occipital lobe as you read.
I would prefer an optional melee-like mode, featuring melee-like physics and tech. There's not reason not to, why keep the Smash Bros community split if both scenes could move on to the new game. Then the new game would get all the rep.

Also, adding melee-like physics have been accomplished quite well by fans, Smash 4xm and Project M, so I dont think it would take much of Sakurai's time to add this.
 
Last edited:

san.

1/Sympathy = Divide By Zero
Moderator
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,651
Location
Rochester, NY
NNID
Sansoldier
3DS FC
4957-2846-2924
I love the civility here with this and the discussion. I asked this question back on r/changemyview where I accepted some people like more technical inputs to help make the floor higher, but I still held onto the factor I don’t think it adds to the ceiling of the game or it barely does.

We do need input dexterity to matter, it seperates fighting games from chess or table top card games. It’s a part of what makes fighting games fighting games.

My issue here is still a common problem that I did reiterate, why would I never l-cancel because it is resourceless and not a real choice. Teching adds to Yomi and needs player interaction, perfect shielding is what you always want but that guessing game still adds something to the timing. Complex inputs in street fighter do add additional moves, the needed more input gives more to the game more than just skill tech.

But with L-Cancelling you aren’t really trying to outguess, especially if you do it in a tighter window outside of maybe ice climbers? Because then you can ignore that choice entirely. You aren’t deciding if you will do it or not you will do it.

I’ve heard counter arguments about optimized combos but I don’t agree with that. Good combo systems add reasons and choice to doing one combo over another. Meter is really good at adding depth to combo games as well as smash is with DI. Take smash 4 Charizard, how they act to my dthrow can change what I do and how I space or what I am for. Peach in melee/PM is the same for me.

With L-Cancelling I don’t see it adding enough to justify itself, whereas everything above does for me.
I generally agree with this post. It is a bit more complex than always wanting to L-cancel. I believe the key point is the weight of considering the risk and reward for your actions as well as the opponent's ability to control it.

Contrast L-cancelling with perfect shielding. Other than light shielding/angling your shield and what not, there is very little the opponent can do to trip up your L-cancel timing. With perfect shielding, it is a full commitment to an action, and aiming for the perfect shield requires more forethought since you are attempting to synchronize your timing with the opponent's. If this occurs in neutral, there are numerous options to take into consideration.

When optimizing combos, one must think of the positioning of the edge/platforms as well as hit the proper combo starter to get into such a situation. Even after that, one must take into consideration the opponent's DI and SDI.

With L-cancelling, none of this applies. It doesn't matter what your opponent is doing.
A more involved, but limited version may be something along the lines of requiring you to buffer something (except for walking) when landing an aerial. This small change makes it so that the attacker must commit to another action straight away to receive less lag.

I think decreasing landing lag and having a more involved parry system was the correct choice.
 

Flowen231

Smash Apprentice
Joined
Apr 20, 2015
Messages
193
I would prefer an optional melee-like mode, featuring melee-like physics and tech. There's not reason not to, why keep the Smash Bros community split if both scenes could move on to the new game. Then the new game would get all the rep.

Also, adding melee-like physics have been accomplished quite well by fans, Smash 4xm and Project M, so I dont think it would take much of Sakurai's time to add this.
I wonder which community would compete on the big stages if this was the case. While the idea of having 2 playstyles in 1 game is very romantic, I doubt TOs would let the same game go on stage twice.
 

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
I generally agree with this post. It is a bit more complex than always wanting to L-cancel. I believe the key point is the weight of considering the risk and reward for your actions as well as the opponent's ability to control it.

Contrast L-cancelling with perfect shielding. Other than light shielding/angling your shield and what not, there is very little the opponent can do to trip up your L-cancel timing. With perfect shielding, it is a full commitment to an action, and aiming for the perfect shield requires more forethought since you are attempting to synchronize your timing with the opponent's. If this occurs in neutral, there are numerous options to take into consideration.

When optimizing combos, one must think of the positioning of the edge/platforms as well as hit the proper combo starter to get into such a situation. Even after that, one must take into consideration the opponent's DI and SDI.

With L-cancelling, none of this applies. It doesn't matter what your opponent is doing.
A more involved, but limited version may be something along the lines of requiring you to buffer something (except for walking) when landing an aerial. This small change makes it so that the attacker must commit to another action straight away to receive less lag.

I think decreasing landing lag and having a more involved parry system was the correct choice.
Again, the only reason why L-Canceling in its current state is hard to mess up is because it's mashable. Yes, mashing is discouraged at the high level, but it takes away from the skill that should be required.

That's why I advocate for L-Canceling to be nonmashable and have doubled landing lag on a miss. There would be more of a reason to screw up an L-Cancel and more of a reward beyond having a miniscule window to escape shield pressure.
 

LancerStaff

Smash Hero
Joined
Jan 28, 2014
Messages
8,118
Location
Buried under 990+ weapons
3DS FC
1504-5709-4054
Where are you getting this idea from? As long as there are more actions than can be put on every single controller button in fighting games, SF motions will still be a thing.

If you're talking about overly complex ones like a 360 motion, pretzel motion, or even the Z/Dragon Punch motion, then yes, those are dying. And good riddance to them; DBFZ being almost entirely based around QC motions is a step in the right direction for fighters.
I don’t believe many fighting games are using all the buttons on a controller, or at least effectively...

Anyway, new fighters are more and more forgoing any sort of motion inputs and instead using Smash styles ones. Old games are slowly phasing them out. DBFZ skipped over anything more complex than a quarter circle, yes... I wouldn’t be surprised if a sequel did away with them entirely.

Let’s put it this way... If we had that crap in a platformer or adventure game or literally anything else besides a fighting game people would be ****ting on it from here to the moon and back again. So clearly it’s not expanding past the genre. Now fighters are abandoning it and becoming more mainstream... Gee, wonder why.

BTW, no Melee players want unmashable L-canceling.
 

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
I don’t believe many fighting games are using all the buttons on a controller, or at least effectively...

Anyway, new fighters are more and more forgoing any sort of motion inputs and instead using Smash styles ones. Old games are slowly phasing them out. DBFZ skipped over anything more complex than a quarter circle, yes... I wouldn’t be surprised if a sequel did away with them entirely.
Can you name three fighters with Smash-style inputs and not even a single QC input? No, you can't.

Fighting games have too much actions to just be limited to a few buttons and directions. DBFZ does cut out a lot of unneeded fat that has plagued tons of fighters, but it still has traditional fighter inputs anyway.

Let’s put it this way... If we had that crap in a platformer or adventure game or literally anything else besides a fighting game people would be ****ting on it from here to the moon and back again. So clearly it’s not expanding past the genre. Now fighters are abandoning it and becoming more mainstream... Gee, wonder why.
Because there's no reason to put all those extra actions in a platformer or adventure game in the first place. Fighters need a bunch of actions because there needs to be a large selection of ways to play against a human, but other genres don't need that.

BTW, no Melee players want unmashable L-canceling.
Only because a ton of Melee players have a hard time accepting that what Melee did can be improved and not just copied from one iteration of Smash to the next. IMO, this is the main problem with Project M. At least Ultimate is doing some things to improve a few Melee mechanics without just copypasting them over.
 

LancerStaff

Smash Hero
Joined
Jan 28, 2014
Messages
8,118
Location
Buried under 990+ weapons
3DS FC
1504-5709-4054
Can you name three fighters with Smash-style inputs and not even a single QC input? No, you can't.

Fighting games have too much actions to just be limited to a few buttons and directions. DBFZ does cut out a lot of unneeded fat that has plagued tons of fighters, but it still has traditional fighter inputs anyway.



Because there's no reason to put all those extra actions in a platformer or adventure game in the first place. Fighters need a bunch of actions because there needs to be a large selection of ways to play against a human, but other genres don't need that.



Only because a ton of Melee players have a hard time accepting that what Melee did can be improved and not just copied from one iteration of Smash to the next. IMO, this is the main problem with Project M. At least Ultimate is doing some things to improve a few Melee mechanics without just copypasting them over.
Blade Strangers, Pokken and Pocket Rumble. Like seriously bro. I hardly even play fighting games and I named those off in three seconds.

I’m going to disagree on that one... Especially when most of these movesets tend to be useless. Didn’t Cross Tag Battle parse down movesets too?

No, it’s because L-canceling is a crappy mechanic and nobody wants any more of it.
 

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
Blade Strangers, Pokken and Pocket Rumble. Like seriously bro. I hardly even play fighting games and I named those off in three seconds.

I’m going to disagree on that one... Especially when most of these movesets tend to be useless. Didn’t Cross Tag Battle parse down movesets too?
Touché. I'd like to note, though, that all three of those are smaller-scale efforts geared towards smaller audiences as opposed to big names that target large casual and competitive audiences alike.

That said, the big names are definitely taking much-needed steps towards simplification, but they still have a good deal of execution to keep games fun to learn and experiment with.
 

LancerStaff

Smash Hero
Joined
Jan 28, 2014
Messages
8,118
Location
Buried under 990+ weapons
3DS FC
1504-5709-4054
Pokken is a big deal... It had stronger launches than Capcom’s efforts, at least, and is still receiving support with patches and official tournaments.
 

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
Pokken is a big deal... It had stronger launches than Capcom’s efforts, at least, and is still receiving support with patches and official tournaments.
Pokkén fizzled out because of a combination of being a fledgling franchise (having Pokémon and Tekken's names on it couldn't overcome this), lacking execution making the game not fun to learn, being on the Wii U, and being a 3D Fighter when 2D Fighters are reigning supreme nowadays.

SF5 had a poor launch, but its playerbase has grown immensely thanks to Capcom's determination to keep it a big deal.

But even then, each Street Fighter subseries has a dedicated playerbase that loves the different ways to execute and learn for each game. Smash fans are cleanly divided between Melee players and newheads who always switch to the next game solely out of the next game being new.
 
Last edited:

Necro'lic

Smash Ace
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
654
Pokkén fizzled out because of a combination of being a fledgling franchise (having Pokémon and Tekken's names on it couldn't overcome this), lacking execution making the game not fun to learn, being on the Wii U, and being a 3D Fighter when 2D Fighters are reigning supreme nowadays.
Are you REALLY sure that lacking execution (in what way exactly, btw?) was really a deciding factor in it fizzling out? Because every other reason you give is FAR better at explaining this fizzling. Putting a reason that you want to be true in the middle of a bunch of good ones doesn't make the one you want suddenly hold water.

It's like a parent listing off good reasons why their kid can't have candy, but then ending it with "and because I said so".
 
Last edited:

LancerStaff

Smash Hero
Joined
Jan 28, 2014
Messages
8,118
Location
Buried under 990+ weapons
3DS FC
1504-5709-4054
Pokkén fizzled out because of a combination of being a fledgling franchise (having Pokémon and Tekken's names on it couldn't overcome this), lacking execution making the game not fun to learn, being on the Wii U, and being a 3D Fighter when 2D Fighters are reigning supreme nowadays.

SF5 had a poor launch, but its playerbase has grown immensely thanks to Capcom's determination to keep it a big deal.

But even then, each Street Fighter subseries has a dedicated playerbase that loves the different ways to execute and learn for each game. Smash fans are cleanly divided between Melee players and newheads who always switch to the next game solely out of the next game being new.
Pokken hasn’t remotely fizzled, and I’ve never heard anybody complain about a lack of execution ever. It’s on Switch too, remember, and it is primarily a 2D Fighter with a 3D mode mechanic to differentiate it from other games. I’m starting to think you haven’t even played it.
 

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
Are you REALLY sure that lacking execution (in what way exactly, btw?) was really a deciding factor in it fizzling out? Because every other reason you give is FAR better at explaining this fizzling. Putting a reason that you want to be true in the middle of a bunch of good ones doesn't make the one you want suddenly hold water.

It's like a parent listing off good reasons why their kid can't have candy, but then ending it with "and because I said so".
Pokken hasn’t remotely fizzled, and I’ve never heard anybody complain about a lack of execution ever. It’s on Switch too, remember, and it is primarily a 2D Fighter with a 3D mode mechanic to differentiate it from other games. I’m starting to think you haven’t even played it.
I didn't say that a single one of those problems was the cause of it fizzling out. The combination of all of them is what made it fizzle out.

And like it or not, execution is what makes the journey of learning a game fun. Necro'lic, you are correct that games should be balanced around the highest level of play, but if the process of learning the game isn't fun, no one's going to want to get to the highest level in the first place. The systems of a fighting game need to provide a challenge in learning them in the first place, and that challenge needs to be provided with a combination of making them flexible to allow for experimentation and a bit hard to execute so that there is more incentive to learn and practice.
 

Necro'lic

Smash Ace
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
654
I didn't say that a single one of those problems was the cause of it fizzling out. The combination of all of them is what made it fizzle out.

And like it or not, execution is what makes the journey of learning a game fun. Necro'lic, you are correct that games should be balanced around the highest level of play, but if the process of learning the game isn't fun, no one's going to want to get to the highest level in the first place. The systems of a fighting game need to provide a challenge in learning them in the first place, and that challenge needs to be provided with a combination of making them flexible to allow for experimentation and a bit hard to execute so that there is more incentive to learn and practice.
Experimentation is cool. L-Canceling has no experimental value whatsoever. It's why I riff on it specifically, yet want wavedashing and ledge cancelling, because not only are those actually good for experimentation, but they aren't fundamentally broken design wise.

And while I understand the drive for challenge, I'm afraid the challenge presented in multiplayer games is different than single player games. They need to involve both/all parties, and if you have a mechanic that is basically only dependent on a single player, then you just shouldn't put it in a multiplayer game.
 

Flowen231

Smash Apprentice
Joined
Apr 20, 2015
Messages
193
Sakurai explains why L canceling was removed in this nintendoeverything article. https://nintendoeverything.com/saku...es-and-additions-choosing-taunts-much-more/2/

"I feel that when it comes to techniques in games, the harder it is to pull off, the more it leans towards a core audience. For example, in the past, we had a feature where pressing the R Button can cancel out your landing lag, but we’ve since removed this. The execution is simple, but how you implement it has depth. The Short Hop Attack, which is usually hard to pull off, is an example. By simplifying the process of quickly tapping the jump button while executing an attack while in the air, anybody can use this technique, to an extent. This addition is one of a series of additions that drives at our core thinking with this game – the best competition happens after everybody can properly control the character."

In layman's terms, it didn't really add much depth to the game and only really existed as an entry barrier. I personally didn't mind it because it was something that I've been doing since 64 but I agree with him in the sense that it didn't have much purpose and we're better off without it.
 

LancerStaff

Smash Hero
Joined
Jan 28, 2014
Messages
8,118
Location
Buried under 990+ weapons
3DS FC
1504-5709-4054
Pokken literally had a major balance patch today. Most characters had new moves or commands added, even. Enough with this “fizzled” memery. Just because you say it over and over doesn’t make it true.
 

Quillion

Smash Hero
Joined
Sep 17, 2014
Messages
5,512
Sakurai explains why L canceling was removed in this nintendoeverything article. https://nintendoeverything.com/saku...es-and-additions-choosing-taunts-much-more/2/

"I feel that when it comes to techniques in games, the harder it is to pull off, the more it leans towards a core audience. For example, in the past, we had a feature where pressing the R Button can cancel out your landing lag, but we’ve since removed this. The execution is simple, but how you implement it has depth. The Short Hop Attack, which is usually hard to pull off, is an example. By simplifying the process of quickly tapping the jump button while executing an attack while in the air, anybody can use this technique, to an extent. This addition is one of a series of additions that drives at our core thinking with this game – the best competition happens after everybody can properly control the character."

In layman's terms, it didn't really add much depth to the game and only really existed as an entry barrier. I personally didn't mind it because it was something that I've been doing since 64 but I agree with him in the sense that it didn't have much purpose and we're better off without it.
When will you people realize that these "entry hills" (they're not barriers because they can be overcome with practice) are what encourage people to get to the highest level in the first place?

Besides, when everyone is a competitive player, no one is.
 

Necro'lic

Smash Ace
Joined
Aug 9, 2015
Messages
654
When will you people realize that these "entry hills" (they're not barriers because they can be overcome with practice) are what encourage people to get to the highest level in the first place?

Besides, when everyone is a competitive player, no one is.
It all depends on how the "entry hill" presents itself. If it manifests itself as a difficulty spike, then it's not a good one. One of the key aspects of game design is to not lose the "flow" of a player's skill. A difficulty spike is created when a player has an insurmountable task given to them in a very short amount of time, and since it is a danger to flow, it causes players to want to quit your game. L-Cancelling manifests with this difficulty spike, as I've shown and explained, and thus it is a danger to flow and therefore should try to be fixed or removed. I already said why L-Cancelling can't be fixed without turning it into something it's not.

And I'm not sure where you get this whole "everyone is a competitive player" spiel from. How does that even work?
 

Big-Cat

Challenge accepted.
Joined
Jul 24, 2007
Messages
16,176
Location
Lousiana
NNID
KumaOso
3DS FC
1590-4853-0104
If you want a challenge, just play a bottom tier.
 
Joined
Jun 4, 2006
Messages
8,377
Location
Long Beach,California
Blade Strangers, Pokken and Pocket Rumble. Like seriously bro. I hardly even play fighting games and I named those off in three seconds.

I’m going to disagree on that one... Especially when most of these movesets tend to be useless. Didn’t Cross Tag Battle parse down movesets too?

No, it’s because L-canceling is a crappy mechanic and nobody wants any more of it.
And how successful are those games? Not very much, honestly. This is coming from someone who loves Pokémon Tournament, practices it, and even played against some of the best players like Bolimar.

And to address what you said about Dragon Ball FighterZ, there are half circle inputs for aerial tags and combo extensions. Half Circle forward + assist for a super tag, Half Circle back for a level 3. There are also special vanish inputs for sparking that allow you to hold down the buttons briefly to vanish and not do an attack, which is easier said than done, and costs sparking.

Cross Tag feels awkward since all of the attacking buttons are a mixed mess, and I personally feel like it suffers from over simplification.

I don’t understand why everyone is so up in arms about a player beating another player because they are mechanically superior. Even if I puts are simplified players with amazing reaction time like Zero are gonna handle you regardless. He ****ed me up in Mario Tennis lol. Even if you see someone do something basic like SH Bair into pivot grab read on an opponent teching in its still going to be impressive because having the ability to be technically precise in that moment is still going to be difficult without L-Canceling, and arguably more difficult without it assuming the aerial doesn’t have low landing lag.

Like 6WX plays with Sonic and you see him auto cancel his SH Bairs, it looks easy, but it requires you to know when to do the aerial and the exact frame when to fast fall so you have auto cancel frames, which is arguably more difficult than lightly tapping L or R. I mean, it works, but what if you could just L-Cancel it? You would still have the benefit of auto canceling moves since having no Lag is better than having the massive landing lag of Sonic’s Bair, but you can still benefit from using it to pressure the opponent by cutting that Lag in half, even if it’s not enough for a true follow up.

Auto cancels reward you for playing a character

L-cancels reward you for playing the game.

I don’t know man, I’ve played a lot of games with a lot of what many reluctant gamers would call “unecessary tech”, but they’ve honestly been the most fun and rewarding. And while there is a limit to it, and you don’t want to go down the path of KOF and the like, having L-Cancel isn’t anything close to doing a Power Gaiser with Terry Boggard, or doing a Deadly Rave with Geese.

I welcome lower landing lag and l-cancels obviously. I don’t feel like there’s no reason why it can’t be the game, especially if it will help characters like Bowser, who will definitely not have low landing lag on most of his aerials.
 
Top Bottom