That would be a rather idiotic assertion to make. I'm however uncomfortable with the idea that skill is finite and it is somehow consumed by chance events. This isn't a time-share villa by the beach where one can't coexist with the other.
What? Skill is finite. Go look at Mew2King in Melee and tell me that isn't skill. But then, imagine an exploding capsule spontaneously spawning right at he's about to tipper FSmash for the win. He was just about to win because of his incredible skill, but instead the game randomly killed him. There is a nonzero chance that the item will spawn. That means that at some tourney, OS, or Azen, or M2K (They would quit anyway) would lose to a scrub and not get first when they deserved it.
Well, your premise is flawed from the beginning. Smash isn't a perfect, ideal 100% skill-based game.
Lol. He said it was hypothetical. The point is, if you add items, whether it's a 100% perfect game, or Brawl, it reduces the skill required and increases the luck.
Firstly, any player worth their salt would be trying to edgeguard the recovering person anyhow. Which for a good bunch of characters means leaving the stage or chucking projectiles. Secondly, someone trying to grab a bomb to ensure a death will give the opponent more time to recover, hit the ledge and get key invincibility frames. Thirdly, unless they're under the stage the use of the air dodge will place the item in the recoverer's hands as air dodging while rising upwards is often unwise. Allowing the recoverer to retaliate against the other person, I might add.
So no, your claim isn't as reasonable as it looks at first glance.
Lolwut? He said nothing about recovering. You're responding to his point which was more like my M2K FSmash situation than your bizarre recovering situation. On the other hand, let's see what happens.
Marth just got knocked off the edge on Battlefield. There's a Bob-Omb sitting on the stage, and both players know it's about to start walking because of their now-innate knowledge of Bob-Ombs. The other player, an Ike, decides to sit on the leftmost platform and charge Eruption so Marth cannot recover high. Marth is given the choice of falling into a fully charged Eruption or going to the ledge. Marth drops beneath the stage as the Bob-Omb turns around at the ledge. Marth Dolphin Slashes, and dies because his sword hits the Bob-Omb. Seems pretty clever, huh? The Ike used the items to his advantage, and won. However, here's where the luck comes in. That Ike never would have succeeded if the random item spawn had not spawned a Bob-Omb at exactly the right time on the bottom level. It requires skill, yes. However, it increases the luck in the game, and the Marth could be justified in johnning about the item spawn.
Problem is, you're not fair to make the assumption because there's a significant degree of non-randomness in the randomness.
Firstly, all items have discrete spawn points on every stage. The player who controls the areas of the map that have spawn points will obtain more items. It might be a less tactically useful position to fight from, but that's a risk vs reward thing.
Secondly, item spawns are weighted. Surely even you have noticed you'll see 50 smoke balls for every bob-omb that spawns, right? The more items are on, the more this pool is diluted and you'll end up with very predictable sets of items appearing throughout most matches. Thirdly, (as is especially apparent with Smash Balls and the Dragoon) the game takes a pool of the available items each round and won't spawn other items each round.
Fourthly, items spawn at pretty regular intervals. On medium, items will spawn approximately every 10-20 seconds. Considering how closely people keep track of the clock anyhow, this should be trivial.
Considering you guys use a best of 3 format, the argument against item gimpage becomes weaker. With a full set of items, you're about as likely to get bomb-screwed as a peach is going to win all of her matches in a set by pulling bob-ombs.
The problem is, the items that spawn are pretty random. I can almost guarantee a Smash Ball in a Medium match with items on for any amount of time over 2 minutes. And then it becomes a match to run away from Sonic, Fox, Falco, Marth, and everyone who has gotten a Final Smash except Peach.
Items do not spawn regularly. If you average it, yes. If you actually watch a match, no. It is random. No way around the amount of items spawning.
No - you can't control the random number generator behind the luck. But you can make intelligent decisions and actions that put any actions by the random number generator in your favour. A player who does this will gain the advantage over an opponent who doesn't.
I never even mentioned anything of the sort. I'm just talking about items on the whole here, and the stigma about them. The SB community is too stubborn to budge unless the gods of the SBR decree it to be so and I never intend to bother to change that.
We have tested.
http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=164675 I'm fully in support of this. But you must realize that some items are just broken. If you had proposed something less radical than basically making competitive gaming item-and-stage dependent, then you might have gotten some support. But with stages like WarioWare, it's pretty obvious that the focus is to stall until the Minigames. That's how you win. On Big Blue, it changes the game from "knock your opponent off the edge" to "Knock your opponent onto the road." What we're concerned about it changing the game from an at least somewhat skill based game (Tripping and autosweetspot are taking away from that) to a game based on knocking your opponent into stage hazards and picking up items like capsules and getting Final Smashes. That's the problem. Your method and our method are different games.
In case you didn't notice, members of the Brawl scene are frothing at the mouth to turn on the hacks and make Melee 2.0. There's a lynch mob on Meta-Knight's door that's growing day by day as tournaments become who has the best Meta-Knight and everyone else is giving up and quitting or going back to Melee. I'm not so sure you can qualify the brawl scene as 'not broken'.
Regardless, I'm a scientist. I like to break things just to see what happens, learn and improve. It's a risk, but it can be fulfilling.
Everyone else is
not giving up or going back to Melee. They're playing the game. Metaknight may or may not be broken, but it's a reasonable debate. If a character dominates against the cast, they should be banned. If they create a different game, banned. Changing the game is what we don't want.
I thought the rhetoric of the anti-item players was that the better players would still consistently win and place in tournaments compared to those who were bad. Regardless, like I outlined above there is a lot less random in the random. Bad players will still lose. Good players will still win. It's not like the game suddenly becomes Pokeballs, Smash Balls, Assist Trophies and Bob-ombs on High.
You'll widen the standard deviation by a touch (The lower rankings of a tournament might shuffle around a bit, but I wouldn't expect much) but the average's going to remain dead centre where it is. The best will still win, time and time again.
Yes, bad players will lose, but good players would end up finding out how to manipulate the items to the extreme. The items become the center of the gameplay, and the question becomes who gets the Fan near them, or the Sticky Bomb. It's free damage, and definitely requires less skill. It's ridiculously easy to kill someone with a fan. Stupid easy.
Strangely enough, most game communties are fond of banning as little as humanly possible - the only thing other games actually tend to ban are Akumas.
Secondly, you're giving item appearances far too much weight. If it were really true, Peach should be causing far more upsets than she does in both games. Secondly, although you might not know this having not used them much but most of the items have had massively tweaked properties from the previous game. A thrown star-rod is no longer a guaranteed insta-spike for example. The Warp Star is slower. Pokeballs now have a specific pokemon rotation that usually results in masses of goldeen, bonsly or piplup.
An appropriate equivalent would be applying Melee's Tier list to Brawl's characters from the get go. Falcon was pretty good in Melee, so he's pretty good in Brawl, right? Items were broken in Melee, so they must be broken in brawl right? They're both equivalently valuable statements. Eg, worthless.
It is just a theory that the game is "better" without items for competition for brawl- there's no rigour to it. No results to back it. No research to confirm it. It's as valid as a politician's election campaign speech when push comes to shove.
See the above items standard rule list. There is testing. Massive testing. Two months.
You need to do
your research before arguing.
Strangely enough, these people you deride are the future of your community. Unless you're converting people from other hardcore fighting game communities. Which is unlikely considering what they all think of Smash in general.
These people do not care about the future of the community. They don't go to tournaments, and do not know what the word "Metagame" means. And I would suggest not insulting the game you're claiming to want to improve. It makes you look like a hypocrite.
So why is their opponent just sitting there, twiddling their thumbs waiting for Falcon to grab these killing tools again? Has his opponent gone to take a leak? Can you really envision that allowing a Falcon to smash a Meta-Knight who will pressure him to death?
Falcon is a bad example. Try Sonic. He just stalls by running away until a good item comes. It's easy, simple and it works. Besides, under your system he can just pick Temple or New Pork City and run away. Sonic is god with all stages and all items. You can't pressure, because he has no incentive to hurt you until he gets a Bob-Omb or a Fan or a Smash Ball.
Please consider the items-standard rule list.