What data?
Go to any YouTube channel. VGC, Team Spooky, Tourney Locator, Clash, EGOfficial, pick one. Watch them. Tell me how many sets played on Smashville. Tell me how many game one's played on Smashville.
Heck. Ignore your biased opinion for a moment, go to a tournament literally anywhere, and see which stages are played game one.
I'll give you a hint. It starts with an "S" and ends in "mashville."
And whenever I see this, I remember that I see people consistently counterpick Ice Climbers to Smashville in Brawl - You know, IC's second-best stage - just because they were comfortable there. And people are counterpicking Shieks to SV or BF, despite those being Shiek's best stages in almost every matchup. As I keep saying, there's a methodological problem here:
player preference is screwing with character/stage balance. But in what we're trying to test, we don't
care about player preference! Every time a CF counterpicks a Shiek to Smashville, this creates a problem for this method, because, big shocker, Smashville is clearly a counterpick for
Shiek in the matchup. It shows that people will favor SV even when it's clearly against their favor.
Like, looking at the recent Smash videos on Team Spooky's channel, I see a lot of different starters. The first time I saw SV, it was a Mario counterpicking Shiek there.
That. Should. Not. Happen. To be honest, that's just straight-up player error. Much like starting Battlefield against DK (which, by the way, also happened for some
bizarre reason in the DKWill/Vex set). The player's personal preference is getting in the way of them getting the most out of the engine - that, or they just lack experience. It's like if people kept on striking Sonics to FD - you'd immediately see the problem, and you wouldn't try to draw conclusions about the game's balance based on that, right?
And how is data from a 3 starter list useless? Because it's clearly not. It still provides data. It won't show that Smashville is being chosen more over say, Lylat Cruise, excluding counterpicks. But it will tell you what the pick ratio is between Battlefield, Final Destination, and Smashville. That's important information.
If one stage has a ton of platforms and another has no platforms, and there's one in the middle, and if most characters, superficially, favor more or less platforms, it's blatantly obvious that that's where they're most likely to end up. Come on, work with me here. What are the
primary differences between those three stages? All three are predominately flat+plat with very little movement, so let's see differences...
- Size: FD is large, BF is small, SV is in the middle
- Platform layout: FD has no platforms and thus negates platforms as an element of gameplay, BF has tons of platforms and thus requires platforms as an element of gameplay, SV has one moving platform.
Those are the most significant differences, and they both form a continuum where Smashville is neatly in the middle. If one player strikes BF, the other is almost certain to strike FD for the same reasons. As a result, gathering data from three-starter is
useless, because starting on SV is all but guaranteed in most matchups. Any matchup where one side has a preference about stage size or platform layout, you're going to SV. And those are really the significant differences, so if there's
no preference, guess what happens? That aforementioned smashville bias comes into play and it just sort of defaults there. So you should expect to see Smashville
drastically overrepresented in 3-starter striking.
You're calling this Smashville-bias as if to say that the players do not have a legitimate reason for the stage choice. Which is ridiculous, since everyone plays on it. This isn't like how players are ignorant about Wuhu Island because they've hardly every played it and can't form their own conclusions. Smashville has been the most played on stage since Brawl's release.
Right, and you don't see how this might have something to do with a bias? Like, look upthread. Luigi Player can't even imagine that some players might have an easier time remembering the transformations on other stages over Smashville. And players may very well have a legitimate reason for the stage choice. Personal preference
is a legitimate reason! It's just not something we care about when talking about stage striking and ruleset design, because personal preference is completely arbitrary. If a ZSS and a Shiek are doing FLSS and they end up on Smashville, the fact that the ZSS is okay with that and meant to go there because he likes the stage does nothing to mitigate the fact that he ended up with one of the
worst stages for him in that matchup, and that optimal play would dictate almost any other stage before it.
First of all, a scientific method is not flawed because it lacks sufficient data. A scientific method is flawed if the due process was not conducted correctly.
Or if the experimental design ignores crucial confounding factors.
Secondly, the source data being biased does not matter.
In this case it very explicitly does. If we're trying to measure "what is the most neutral stage in the game for the most matchups", and our methodology is "check where people start the most", but this data is tainted by people going to Smashville
even though it sucks for them in the matchup, we have a clear problem with the methodology!
It matters if the scientists themselves adhere to bias, and this affects the due process. If we wanted to conduct a study on coffee and its ill or beneficial effects on human health long term, you don't throw out all the available data collected just because coffee drinkers are often people who smoke, and thus present an external factor that can effect the results. You control for these variables and see what results you get when these are excluded.
So how do you propose we control for this variable?
Even with all that said, like I mentioned before, you're just assuming there is this Smashville bias that's inherently there without giving the competitive community the credit it deserves. Your perspective on Smashville as a stage puts you in the minority here.
I'm not assuming that there's a bias, I'm going off of what we know about which stages are good or bad in given matchups and noticing that a lot of people are picking SV in situations they wouldn't if they didn't have a clear bias in favor of the stage.
And you don't need to 'have access' to the development teams original design philosophy to draw conclusions about the stages and their design. It's pretty clear what you have. You have stages with flat spaces, with platforms, and a hybrid of them.
So how do the various stages of Delfino, Skyloft, and Wuhu fit into this picture? How does Mario Circuit fit into this picture? How about Lylat? How could you consider these stages archetypal when it seems like there are far more stages that move, attack the player, transform, have pass-through floors, etc.? And the assertion that it's fair to assume that these are balanced as a result... Well, that's even sillier.
I don't know if you were around back when Brawl was at MLG, but Dazwa and MK26 put in the work to aggregate data from the 2010 circuit, including stage ban, stage counterpick, character choice, et cetera. Final Destination was the
most banned stage. Even if you remove Metaknight from the data, it's still the most banned stage. 12 characters banned Final Destination more than any other stage; for 19, it was in their top 3. Now, Smash 4 doesn't have quite that kind of divide. There aren't as many characters who hate flat surfaces with no platforms, nor are there as many characters like Falco or ICs who are a huge pain in the ass there. But it proves a point - simply because a stage appears archetypal (and you can make the same argument about BF/SV/FD and it's just as silly in Brawl, mind you) does not mean that it's balanced or neutral in the majority of matchups, or, indeed, at all. This argument just falls apart at every level.
Lylat Cruise places a burden on the ban phase. This can be due to a general dislike of the stage. Lylat has a tendency to sway matches due to the tilt, and players will avoid it for that reason even if both players are equally matched on the stage.
Disregarding this, assuming the players are competent with the stage, Lylat Cruise fails to counter balance the list as a platform oriented option the way Battlefield does because the tilting makes it a sub-optimal choice for many characters.
???
Strike it. You have two strikes. Also, I feel the need to repeat this; player preference is something we need to
aggressively ignore to death in this discussion. Who cares if most people will just automatically strike Lylat first? That's their problem, because they are playing poorly. Much like the ZSS who will counterpick a Shiek to SV, if Lylat isn't bad for them and they strike it because they don't like it,
they made a mistake.
Here is an example. Olimar versus Ike. Olimar versus Ike is not a favourable match up for Ike. On flat or spacious stages, Ike has a very hard time dealing with Olimar's ground based defensive options because of the distance the Pikmin can travel, the projectile based damage, and Olimar's size. Ike needs to utilize platforming in order to equalize the odds. Battlefield is the obvious 1st choice for Ike, which a smart Olimar would ban. Clearly Final Destination is going to be banned by Ike for reasons I addressed. Normally this would be the part where Town & City and Lylat Cruise would be banned, and game one would begin on Smashville. However, because Ike needs to rely on auto cancel forward air, which Lylat Cruise really hurts via stage tilt, on top of the fact that the edge tilting can ruin Ike's chance of coming back to the stage, this is a very ideal choice for Olimar to take. Olimar benefits from these platforms in the match up, and unlike Ike, does not rely as heavily on his aerials and does not have his recovery impeded by the stage. All Olimar has to do now is ban Smashville, and Olimar is at an advantage. Ike now has to choose between Town & City, which is a pseudo Final Destination for half of its cycle, and Lylat Cruise which we just went over. If Ike bans Lylat, the choice comes down to Town & City and Final Destination.
Do you seriously want to tell me that for a character who relies on platforms, Town&City is
worse than Smashville? Yeah, I'm not buying that. And congratulations, you found a matchup which seems to get worse with 5 starter. Of course, what you might be ignoring is how it plays out with
full list stage striking. How does that work? Where do they end up if they strike from all 9/11/13 legal stages? I personally don't know; I know next to nothing about the matchup, but it's an important question to answer.
Here's another example. Lucario versus Captain Falcon. Lucario versus Captain Falcon is not ideal for Lucario. Lucario does not do well against characters that have the ability to take his stock lead early. On top of this, he has a lot of difficulty dealing with Captain Falcon's neutral because his burst options, dash grab and dash attack, put Lucario in to a mix up situation in which his options are very limited. In order to mitigate this problem, Lucario needs to utilize platforms. Once again, Battlefield is the obvious choice. Captain Falcon loves Battlefield too, however he does not rely on it as much as Lucario in order to even the odds. Captain Falcon would ban Battlefield if he is knowledgeable on how the match up goes. Lucario in turn is going to ban Town & City. The low ceiling does nothing for Lucario in this match up and makes him die early to Raptor Boost reads and up airs, along with giving him little ability to escape from or mix up against Falcon's neutral game. Once again, we're at a cross road where the burden Lylat places on the match up puts a character in a tight spot. While it's better than Town & City, Lucario is not going to do as well on Final Destination as he will on Smashville, and Lucario does not want to go to Lylat Cruise either because it screws up Aura Sphere, Force Palm, and puts Lucario in situations where he will often have to land on the stage to avoid dying while recovering, succumbing him to a free punish. While it's not amazing for Captain Falcon, he does fine on Lylat by comparison, who has relatively lagless aerials and a much more forgiving up special given the context of the stage dynamics. Falcon bans Smashville, and Lucario now has to fight an even harder up hill battle.
Let's ignore for the moment that I
seriously doubt that Lucario is as bad on Lylat (especially after they fixed the ledges) as you claim - how does it mess with Force Palm, exactly? Again,
same question. How does the matchup play out on FLSS? Yeah, it looks bad. Maybe that's because CF is simply a lot better on a lot more stages than Lucario is? Maybe Lucario is getting an unreasonable advantage when he gets Smashville in round one.
And of course, these are just two matchups. How about the Shiek-Pikachu matchup, where it goes from two stages out of three that Shiek loves to two stages out of five that shiek loves, while adding one that Pikachu loves? It'll probably strike to FD or T&C, rather than SV or BF, a much more fair pick in round one. How about the ZSS-Luigi matchup, where ZSS is no longer shoehorned into one of her worst stages in that matchup (SV or FD) and instead can strike both and end up on Lylat, T&C, or BF, all of which are considerably less counterpicky for Luigi? How about Ganon-Sonic, where, again, we avoid the obnoxious SV/FD paradigm and instead can get a stage which
doesn't suck total ass for Ganon.
You can try to boil it down to "oh look now there are more platform stages and that biases the list" all you want, but you know what
really biases the list? Having two of the stages with the
least platform coverage in the game on a 3-stage list.
ParanoidDrone
. We can integrate it into our play. It's not at all basis for an argument regarding stages as tame as TnC & SV.
) and not get stuck on there during those times. Somehow this works for me, and most other people, yet ostensibly good players like Reflex or L_P whine about this. I have no idea where the disconnect is here. 
