(LEGALITY) Custom Special Moves: Maybe. Modifiable Attributes: No.

[Nstinct]

If you want to see the scalding FLUDD here's the full length Mario Fastball, Electro Cape, and Scalding FLUDD clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGHahndbEck#t=2m42s

 

[JoeInky]

If you want to see the scalding FLUDD here's the full length Mario Fastball, Electro Cape, and Scalding FLUDD clip

Watching that in slow motion, it seems like the shocking cape doesn't reflect projectiles at all but lets mario travel through them.

Though it could just be a bug due to miis being new or some different way in which that projectile works.

 

[Anuran]

I will give no credence to anything Sakurai claims is unbalanced, by the same virtue as I will also never have faith in anything he says is balanced. Something he could think is completely broken could be rendered a complete joke in a week of play.
Seen here. Believe it also might have been briefly discussed at the round table.

Could just "Like" the post if all you are going to do is agree with it and not add any of your own thoughts. The minimum 10 character limit is there for a reason.

To be fair the first one was over 10 characters.

 

[Coonce]

Watching that in slow motion, it seems like the shocking cape doesn't reflect projectiles at all but lets mario travel through them.

Though it could just be a bug due to miis being new or some different way in which that projectile works.

If you look on the right side, there's a large explosion which I believe was from that green spark the Mii shot. I wouldn't be suprised if that had no hitbox on it until it exploded. But if that's the case, that's a pretty terrible air-to-air choice the Mii made.

 

[JoeInky]

If you look on the right side, there's a large explosion which I believe was from that green spark the Mii shot. I wouldn't be suprised if that had no hitbox on it until it exploded. But if that's the case, that's a pretty terrible air-to-air choice the Mii made.

Yes the explosion is from the green shot, though it might go a set distance and then explode or it might explode on contact until it goes a certain distance and explode anyway, really hard to tell at the moment.

But I can see why they'd make it not reflect projectiles, if the shocking cape could also reflect then what would be the point of the regular cape? It doesn't seem to be any slower or anything from what I could tell.

 

[PizzaWenisaur]

@Jiggy37

Good point. Maybe I'm a bit too pessimistic. A lot of high tier characters have B-moves that aren't that useful.
So the way I see it, someone could either play with a viable Ness, or play with a super-charged Captain Falcon.

I'm not one to just choose the best characters - but even can't deny how fun Fox feels in SSBM.

 

[mimgrim]

"We've made it so that customization options, including special attacks, will be disabled when you're playing online in With Anyone mode. After all, we have to think about game balance, and it's crucial for anonymous players to be able to use reliable tactics against one another. When you're playing in single player, battling with friends online, or playing locally, you're free to play however you want--with or without customization."

So I interpreted this comment in today's PoTD as Sakurai not including custom moves in Anyone mode, emphasis on Anyone, because anonymous players won't know what the other player would be using and tactics used for default movesets might not work for custom movesets. It's basically so anonymous players can know what to expect of their opponents character.

That doesn't seem like a reason to ban them in competitive play.

Going by Sakurai's judgment for anything competitive related is flimsy though.

 

[Kuraudo]

Once something gets banned it will not be unbanned.

A little late to this since I know someone must have already said it already.

"Once something gets banned it will not be unbanned."

Unless it's Meta Knight. >_>

 

[Hong]

"We've made it so that customization options, including special attacks, will be disabled when you're playing online in With Anyone mode. After all, we have to think about game balance, and it's crucial for anonymous players to be able to use reliable tactics against one another. When you're playing in single player, battling with friends online, or playing locally, you're free to play however you want--with or without customization."

So I interpreted this comment in today's PoTD as Sakurai not including custom moves in Anyone mode, emphasis on Anyone, because anonymous players won't know what the other player would be using and tactics used for default movesets might not work for custom movesets. It's basically so anonymous players can know what to expect of their opponents character.

That doesn't seem like a reason to ban them in competitive play.

Going by Sakurai's judgment for anything competitive related is flimsy though.

Yes.

I take it strictly as referring to the fact some specials are a lot worse not to know about before-hand than others. He never once implied that the specials are vertical in scale, some kind of power creep with tiered upgrades, just that they can be unfair if the opponent is not aware of them.

I suppose technically they could have just shown a screen before the match starts that lists what everyone has equipped, though I guess the trade-offs in game-flow would be too great with the already sizable loading times.

 

[Kokusho]

Sakurai wants the Online mode vs Anyone to be as welcoming as possible, he doesn't want anyone to goes out saying it's unfair and feel bad and stuff. So of course He'll ban everything a new player may not appreciate. To much complexity can be unsettling at first.
Now, from what we have seen so far, no custom move seems to be straight up better than another, there is always a trade off. It's obvious that for some moves the gain will far outweight the loss and be considered unbalance but it still means that in some situation it would have been better to have another move. Which means Sakurai cares about balancing custom move (as he should, thoses are not random power ups like items are ), so we should considere thoses for competition.

Also Smash4 is not Mélée, no matter how much we try and want Smash4 to play like melee it won't. We have to embrasse what makes Smash4 stand on its own and the insane amount of content it has is a big point.
Melee was extremely focused on pure skill over anything else, there were very little strategy or metagame outside of a few select counter pick of stages and characters.
Smash 4 seems to have a skill ceiling far lower than Melee, but with custom moves it adds depth and complexity to the metagames aspect in an interesting way.

 

[JoeInky]

Again, it seems to be all about matchups.

Against a heavy character with a bad recovery? Use normal DK punch and you have a good finisher move.
Against a light character with a good recovery? You have no problem getting them off the stage but using the storm punch can help you keep them off it (maybe the storm punch also affects projectiles in some way to make it an anti-zoning tool).

 

[Kokusho]

Sure but it seems you can also tweak your recovery (cf mario's super ultra jump) with custom move. Basically you trade recovery lengh for safety, or offensive power.

 

[JoeInky]

Sure but it seems you can also tweak your recovery (cf mario's super ultra jump) with custom move. Basically you trade recovery lengh for safety, or offensive power.

Yeah but that's the same kind of thing though really, you can either use the custom moves to help your matchup (going to have trouble getting back on? switch to the better recovery that does less damage etc) or you can just use which ones fit your style of play the most.

 

[Kokusho]

What I hope is that custom moves are different enough to allow different player to play differently regardless of the matchup.
For exemple someone could play a certain character more defensively with a lot of long range attack and a very good recovery, but another person could play it much more aggressively with short range but powerfull/fast specials and maybe a more deadly up-B.
What I don't know is if both opponent should know prior to the start of the match what move the other have chose.

 

[JoeInky]

I think we'd have to wait until the 3DS version has been released so we can check just how different the custom moves are, but in terms of picking them it could go multiple ways:

Have people pick characters first so they know which character each are playing and then blind-pick custom moves
Pick characters and then have both players pick specials one at a time (player 1 neutral > player 2 neutral > player 1 side > player 2 side etc)
Have people pick characters first so they know which character each are playing and then blind-pick custom moves and then after that allow some form of counter-picking (if the moves are various enough to make that much of a difference).

I think the second method would work the best (though it technically favours the second player so you might have to do RPS to see who picks second), but it all depends on what all the customisations are.

 

[HeroMystic]

A little late to this since I know someone must have already said it already.

"Once something gets banned it will not be unbanned."

Unless it's Meta Knight. >_>

While the Brawl Backroom banned Metaknight, TOs still have superiority over them. So technically Metaknight was never banned since so many TOs were against it anyway.

 

[mimgrim]

A little late to this since I know someone must have already said it already.

"Once something gets banned it will not be unbanned."

Unless it's Meta Knight. >_>

That "ban" never really went through in the first place. Many regions ignored the BBR's ruling on the banning of MK, which is also when the BR became a joke to people basically, with the biggest and most important one being SoCal, where Apex is held. He dun count.

The only counter example to my statement is Wobbling to an extent, but one counter example does not make a counter truth because there are way more examples that favor the statement.

 

[Galespark]

Here is why there's no customization options available in online mode:

 

[JOE!]

One thing I don't think has been touched on is the banning of *specific* special moves, or combinations thereof.

Thoughts?

 

[LiteralGrill]

One thing I don't think has been touched on is the banning of *specific* special moves, or combinations thereof.

Thoughts?

We can't agree on stages ever, I can't imagine us even getting close to agreeing on specific moves.

 

[JoeInky]

Here is why there's no customization options available in online mode

People will use this as proof that customisable moves are unbalanced, but the phrase "reliable tactics" heavily implies that they're only banned because you won't know which custom moves another player is using until they actually use them due to random online games working differently to every other mode, casual players would hate that.

One thing I don't think has been touched on is the banning of *specific* special moves, or combinations thereof.

Thoughts?

I think it should be an all or nothing thing, we either keep them all or we ban them all, if you start banning only some custom moves but not others, people are going to start getting pissy. What if we find out that a certain move is somehow overpowered against a certain character but not against anyone else? If we ban it then you have people complaining about other certain moves being over powered against certain characters and then you have the people that play the character saying that the move is the only way they can make that matchup more fair and it just becomes a massive cluster****.

Nothing that we've seen so far seems to imply that this will be the case though, I'm definitely allowing custom moves at any tournaments I host going off the information we have so far, unless there's some sort of massive backlash against it in which case I'd be very disappointed.

 

[Malex]

What I hope is that custom moves are different enough to allow different player to play differently regardless of the matchup.
For exemple someone could play a certain character more defensively with a lot of long range attack and a very good recovery, but another person could play it much more aggressively with short range but powerfull/fast specials and maybe a more deadly up-B.
What I don't know is if both opponent should know prior to the start of the match what move the other have chose.

Personally, I don't feel that the opponent has to know. I think competitive players will eventually become familiar with all the possible special moves. Then it will just boil down to seeing each of them. It isn't like Mario trades a fireball for a rocket launcher. It's still a fireball. The player will just have to be wary of which type until Mario uses one. Not really that big of a deal. I highly doubt that a custom move will change a special so drastically that it would have to be announced.

I think we'd have to wait until the 3DS version has been released so we can check just how different the custom moves are, but in terms of picking them it could go multiple ways:

Have people pick characters first so they know which character each are playing and then blind-pick custom moves
Pick characters and then have both players pick specials one at a time (player 1 neutral > player 2 neutral > player 1 side > player 2 side etc)
Have people pick characters first so they know which character each are playing and then blind-pick custom moves and then after that allow some form of counter-picking (if the moves are various enough to make that much of a difference).

I think the second method would work the best (though it technically favours the second player so you might have to do RPS to see who picks second), but it all depends on what all the customisations are.

I am against anything that adds a lengthy amount of time to matches. At this point, I believe it is a safe assumption that we will be able to use Amiibos. Hopefully for both custom moves and control schemes. Unless there is some type of display on the CSS, it will be hidden information. Which, as I said, isn't really that big of a deal.

One thing I don't think has been touched on is the banning of *specific* special moves, or combinations thereof.

Thoughts?

Well, it depends, I guess. I feel that the gut reaction with one OP custom move will be to ban them all. However, assuming that only a small amount of custom moves are ban-able, then using them will just be grounds for a lost match / ejection from the tournament.
If a combination of specials are too OP, then you just find the essential piece or just ban the combination.
If you can use the specials ABC as an infinite-combo, just don't allow an ABC set up.

If ABC, ABD, ABE, ABF is an infinite, don't allow A and B, but they can have one.

 

[Kokusho]

In brawl we could customize our control scheme and bind it to our user name. Maybe in smash4 customization will also be tied to player name.

 

[JoeInky]

In brawl we could customize our control scheme and bind it to our user name. Maybe in smash4 customization will also be tied to player name.

Too much trouble to have it bound to the player name, when you're entering your name or customising your controls it's fine but you won't know which character you're going to be against to choose accordingly.

I am against anything that adds a lengthy amount of time to matches. At this point, I believe it is a safe assumption that we will be able to use Amiibos. Hopefully for both custom moves and control schemes. Unless there is some type of display on the CSS, it will be hidden information. Which, as I said, isn't really that big of a deal.

I highly doubt that we won't be able to customise our moves via the CSS, I also doubt the amiibos will store the special moves for every single character and even then you still have the problem of maybe wanting to change a few moves to counter a certain type of character you're facing, making the amiibo pointless.

I don't think people should worry about this aspect so much, they'll be customisable from the CSS, it would be stupid not to do that.

 

[mimgrim]

One thing I don't think has been touched on is the banning of *specific* special moves, or combinations thereof.

Thoughts?

i'm gonna be honest and say it should be an all or nothing type of deal.I mean just the sheer amount of combinations that there will be is stagerring. Like has already been stated, if there were to be 50 characters in the game there would be 600 moves to customize in total, including default specials. Each character would have like what 144 possible combinations? And in total that would be what 7200 combinations in total? I probably did my math wrong, so someone correct me if I did. But even if it is wrong, it is still going to be a ridiculously high number that just isn't pratical to bane certain ones over others. The sheer amount of possibilities is just staggering lol. And this isn't even taking into account of how there is a big possibility that one combination might be broken against one character but weak against another.

 

[Wazygoose]

After reading through this thread, I think everyone has said what there is to say. Just to add my two cents, it seems that at this point the biggest issues people are worried about are

(1) How long it will take for players to set up their special moves -- unless it is unreasonably slow, I don't think this will be a problem, but we'll have to wait and see
(2) Some moves or move combinations will be unbalanced -- imo this can be addressed over time, and doesn't warrant totally banning the other hundreds of character options in the game

I definitely think Miis and Palutena should be allowed. I mean, why not? People will develop familiarity with the game pretty quickly, and meta takes a long time to develop anyway. The Miis can have different sizes, but I don't see why that would be an issue--either it won't make a difference, or there can be an agreed on default size. We shouldn't ban four characters because they have moveset variety.

I dunno, I guess I hear people complain and worry all the time that Smash 4 won't be deep enough to truly be competitive, so it is insane to me that a feature that is completely unique to this iteration of the game go unused, especially since it has so much potential to give more depth. Unless this makes the game take a really, really long time to set up (and there could be imposed time limits, something to address it somehow), it's what makes this Smash different from all the others. I don't know why we're even talking about banning it otherwise. It would be shameful waste.

To change the subject, I think that this means that if Ganondorf makes it back, he has a good chance of getting his own moveset, and same goes for Falco Wolf Lucas et al. If one character can just change movesets to give the variety of all the others, why include them at all or keep them the same?

Back to the issue at hand, PLEASE everyone let's give custom specials a chance.

 

[JoeInky]

I don't think Ganon, Falco, Wolf and Lucas will end up with their own moveset honestly, the customisation moves will just be more like fox will get a weaker cancellable laser and a charge laser like SF64 whereas falco will get a double laser and an angled laser or something like that.

I mean if toon link didn't get his own moveset despite having more canon options than falco and wolf, I doubt they'll get their own moves.

I do think ganondorf will have one of his specials changed though.

 

[Malex]

i'm gonna be honest and say it should be an all or nothing type of deal.I mean just the sheer amount of combinations that there will be is stagerring. Like has already been stated, if there were to be 50 characters in the game there would be 600 moves to customize in total, including default specials. Each character would have like what 144 possible combinations? And in total that would be what 7200 combinations in total? I probably did my math wrong, so someone correct me if I did. But even if it is wrong, it is still going to be a ridiculously high number that just isn't pratical to bane certain ones over others. The sheer amount of possibilities is just staggering lol. And this isn't even taking into account of how there is a big possibility that one combination might be broken against one character but weak against another.

There are 3 rules laid out by Sirlin to ban something.

Enforceable, Discrete, and Warranted.

Let's assume that X number of custom moves are warranted to be banned. They are just too good. Let's look at the next two.

Enforceable: Can it be reliably detected and that the player is purposely using the banned action?
Yes. It is a custom move that is "turned on" at the start of the match.

Discrete: Can it be precisely defined?
Yes. It is the custom move in question.


See? Easy to ban. If Super Fireball is too OP, it isn't allowed to be used. If it is, the player in questions automatically forfeits the round/match/is ejected from the tournament, depending on the TO and their rules.

 

[Byxis]

It'd be messed up if Falco and Wolf where alternate costumes of Fox but each of Falco and Wolf's specials served as Fox's custom moves.

 

[Malex]

It'd be messed up if Falco and Wolf where alternate costumes of Fox but each of Falco and Wolf's specials served as Fox's custom moves.

As a fox player, I would prefer to see new and exciting changes. However, I find that an acceptable way to include "more" characters on the roster.

 

[wafflini]

i'm gonna be honest and say it should be an all or nothing type of deal.I mean just the sheer amount of combinations that there will be is stagerring. Like has already been stated, if there were to be 50 characters in the game there would be 600 moves to customize in total, including default specials. Each character would have like what 144 possible combinations? And in total that would be what 7200 combinations in total? I probably did my math wrong, so someone correct me if I did. But even if it is wrong, it is still going to be a ridiculously high number that just isn't pratical to bane certain ones over others. The sheer amount of possibilities is just staggering lol. And this isn't even taking into account of how there is a big possibility that one combination might be broken against one character but weak against another.

50 characters each having 24 different movesets equals 1200 total different possibilities.

I wouldn't normally correct you but this is the second time ive seen ridiculous math in this thread and it was bothering me.

 

[Malex]

50 characters each having 24 different movesets equals 1200 total different possibilities.

I wouldn't normally correct you but this is the second time ive seen ridiculous math in this thread and it was bothering me.

wat.... ok first of all


Each character has a default set + 2 variations right? That makes a total of 12 moves per character. 4 moves, with 3 possible options at each. That means that there are 3^4 possible combinations.

3^4 = 81 possible variations.

Assuming there are 50 characters, that means that it is 81 * 50 = 4,050 possible character lay outs.

 

[GUIGUI]

(...)
>Should still be banned for a 3-6 month period after the game launches (it needs to be tested and there is no way everyone will have all the parts for initial tournaments. This problem will be easier to remedy if someone uploads their save file off an sd card)

(...)

That's the point I disagree the most with. If anything, using Custom should be allowed for the first 3-6 month and from there we can actually see whether or not custom make a tournament better or not. Large scale experiment will be the only real test to see if using custom as potential to add fun, complexity and strategy, or kill the game. I would simply suggest that during that time, the money bargained remain reasonable so that not too sore feeling emerge from that if it turn out the system is broken.

 

[LiteralGrill]

There are 3 rules laid out by Sirlin to ban something.

Enforceable, Discrete, and Warranted.

Let's assume that X number of custom moves are warranted to be banned. They are just too good. Let's look at the next two.

Enforceable: Can it be reliably detected and that the player is purposely using the banned action?
Yes. It is a custom move that is "turned on" at the start of the match.

Discrete: Can it be precisely defined?
Yes. It is the custom move in question.


See? Easy to ban. If Super Fireball is too OP, it isn't allowed to be used. If it is, the player in questions automatically forfeits the round/match/is ejected from the tournament, depending on the TO and their rules.

You forget that our community has banned lots of things in the past that under that criteria would be legal simply because "they don't like it". Top players and TOs alike have done this. While it's a good system if the people themselves don't support it it means nothing.

 

[wafflini]

wat.... ok first of all


Each character has a default set + 2 variations right? That makes a total of 12 moves per character. 4 moves, with 3 possible options at each. That means that there are 3^4 possible combinations.

3^4 = 81 possible variations.

Assuming there are 50 characters, that means that it is 81 * 50 = 4,050 possible character lay outs.

You should be using 4! not 3^4

 

[JoeInky]

You should be using 4! not 3^4

He's talking about combinations of specials, not the amount of specials they have.

e.g Normal Neutral, Normal Side, Normal Up, Custom down 1 and Normal Neutral, Normal Side, Normal Up, Custom down 2 are two seperate variations for one character, each character has 81 potential combinations of moves.

 

[GUIGUI]

Incidentally, I don't understand why would anyone talk about banning Palutena completly. I mean, we don't even know how she work. Sakurai seems to have said she is a special case, but I'd be damned if I knew what it was. He only said the custom rules didn't apply to her because of her own move set, but he didn't said exactly why or what it was about her move sets that made her special.

This why to flimsy to already rule a ban on her.

 

[Disfunkshunal]

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, we do know what makes her different. The vast majority of fighters have four special moves with each one having two other variations, Palutena has twelve special moves.

 

[WritersBlah]

Really, here's my only shpeel with the whole issue. How the heck is this game ever going to develop a proper tier list when there's literally thousands of moveset combinations to evaluate? The proper thing to do would be to somehow have both vanilla matches and custom matches coexist without one gaining more traction than the other. That way, we can evaluate character strengths/weaknesses on a base level, and then we can find out which custom moves better suit each character (or even if certain custom moves should be banned outright.) Now, here's he kicker though: as has been stated before, we can't ban custom move matches, even temporarily, because the Smash community almost never unbans anything. But if we don't have any vanilla matches to compare, it'll be really tough to determine a proper tier list to make sure custom moves are set fairly. So...how do we fix this?

 

[Malex]

Really, here's my only shpeel with the whole issue. How the heck is this game ever going to develop a proper tier list when there's literally thousands of moveset combinations to evaluate? The proper thing to do would be to somehow have both vanilla matches and custom matches coexist without one gaining more traction than the other. That way, we can evaluate character strengths/weaknesses on a base level, and then we can find out which custom moves better suit each character (or even if certain custom moves should be banned outright.) Now, here's he kicker though: as has been stated before, we can't ban custom move matches, even temporarily, because the Smash community almost never unbans anything. But if we don't have any vanilla matches to compare, it'll be really tough to determine a proper tier list to make sure custom moves are set fairly. So...how do we fix this?

There are more combinations in pokemon. They have a tier list.

I'm not sure why everyone thinks that "thousands of combinations" is so hard to handle. In reality, it is testing 12 special moves per character. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm pretty sure we'll all be at least using them on the first day (assuming they don't require to be unlocked). From there people will pick what they think is best / supports their play style, and will go to tournaments / play with friends, and the work will do itself.