Is anyone ready to talk about about tournament legal modded stages?

[OninO]

Hi guys,

The 20XX pack is taking off, and as a result it's introducing modded stages (along with other amazingly useful things like always neutral start) to the masses (kind of). The 20XX mem-card version will spread awareness of modding possibilities even further. I'm not sure if it's at all possible to inject modded stages via mem-card, but I think not. In any case, Wiis are hella cheap, and form the backbone of my (admittedly small) local scene's setups.

So, to the point, modded Green Greens is amazing, Frozen Pokemon Stadium is also amazing. Fourside needs a bit of work IMO, but not much. What are people feeling with respect to allowing these more competitively oriented modded stages into the roster?

Look forward to hearing from you guys!

 

[AirFair]

I like the stages we play on already, and I think it's fine. It wouldn't hurt to play on the stages first. Variety isn't bad. Who knows?

 

[anikom15]

Well it would require that 20XX be the only version of Melee allowed....

 

[Spak]

I think vanilla Melee is fine. We have a nice stage list, banning has finally gotten to a fairly-intuitive state, and it seems like it is too much hassle for too little reward.

 

[hariooo]

As much as I like the current stagelist it's only ever been culled. Introducing new tournament legal stages would be a breath of fresh air just in terms of spurring a lot of new discussions over matchups and stage specific tech that has been relatively stagnant.

The logistics are the big issue but with 20XX being released to memory cards soon, the barriers to entry are reduced considerably.

 

[AirFair]

Well, it might even help some lower tier characters. Floaties used to dominate Mute City when it was still legal.

 

[OninO]

Interesting thoughts guys.

It'd definitely be a significant shake up. I imagine if it were to ever happen, it would happen via the streaming of local tournaments who are giving it a try. Hopefully people can be exposed to it by watching the stages played in a more serious setting. Most of the modded ones I've seen are definitely not what I would call janky, also the platform variations offer some interesting mixups from the ones we've become accustomed to.

I think I'll try and host a mini-tournament smash fest and upload the vids to youtube.

 

[Mastodon]

I ran it by some of the smashers I know. They thought I was crazy. I think they're crazy. I'm not sure who's actually crazy.

Admittedly, I think the ones we have now are fine, but I would love to have some new additions and maybe even simply some improvements on the current stages. But I dunno, thats just, like, my opinion, man.

 

[JipC]

Imo the only 2 stages on 20XX hack pack worth adding are frozen PokeStadium and Dreamland
I'm gonna try to gentleman's rule to one of them next time I'm on a 20XX setup.
Edit: Oh yeah forgot about Fourside, they should try to make it a 1:1 Smashville clone, obviously with the Fourside graphics (the building, the moving platform being literally a platform moved by a construction vehicle
Editedit: Also I think it should only be legal if/when the memory card loading method becomes viable. Not everyone has the spare time or HDD to go through the modding process and making/installing the custom 20XX iso.

 

[Bones0]

Too many people don't use and have no interest in using 20xx. You can't start including stages in a ruleset if the majority of the people entering have no way of practicing on them. Obviously you can argue they should just go get a Wii and set it up, but that provides a significant barrier for new players to enter the scene and for veteran players to continue playing.

You are also going to be facing HUGE balance repercussions. Who is going to be designing the stages? Somewhere along the lines, a lone individual is going to be the one determining if Green Greens' ceiling should be 50 feet above the stage or 500 feet. These differences are going to have a huge impact on the metagame, and there's no form of government around the Melee scene to determine what's good and what's bad. It's a bad idea to establish anything comparable to the PM dev team (even though they seem to do a pretty good job), and leaving it up to popular vote is an even scarier thought.

With all this in mind, I'm not entirely against including mods for tournament use. I have been a supporter of the idea to freeze PS, DL, and remove the Shy Guys on YS for a while. These changes, unlike entirely new stages, do not demand players get a 20xx setup because they already have minimal impact on games and practicing on the default versions is almost the same as practicing on the hacked versions. I actually think this is already a viable TOing option if you have a Action Replay disc and a ton of cubes. Since you don't need to leave the disc in the setup, you can go through all of the cubes one by one and remove the memory card once it's loaded (not 100%). For the Wii setups, you can just have a tournament standard hack that has the same frozen stages as the AR codes.