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Let's create a competitive ruleset including Spirits

D

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Spirits Competitive Ruleset

I really, really like Spirit Mode. Sadly, not everyone shares my enthusiasm about it. Some think the Adventure Mode was disappointing, others are just not interested. A minority of the Smash Community sees however a great potential in this mode, and they want it to be enhanced so it wasn't added for nothing.
Spirits are a major feature of SSBU and their absence from the competitive scene, while not surprising, is quite disappointing.
It's a shame that a mode which could open so many new possibilities is left aside, so why don't we at least try to make it work ?

What is the problem with Spirits ?

It's simple : Spirits outside of Spirit Mode are unbalanced. On the Spirit Board or in World of Light, stronger spirits would get you less rewards after winning a battle, encouraging you to make challenges harder so you don't end up with fewer skills or an underleveled team against bosses.
But during regular battles this doesn't matter at all, there's no reason to not want the most efficient team to win the fight.

Suppose a 1v1 fight, what kind of restrictions would both players have to take in account when selecting a spirit team ?

When we take a closer look at how Spirits are made, we can see they were not made randomly. The better is their stats and/or their trait, the less slots they will have for Support Spirits. If this was all there's to know about Spirits, the battle would always be fair and balanced, but the main problem isn't there.

The problem is their types.

Types are a HUGE problem. They provide an absurd advantage in attack and defense, it makes the battle litterally impossible for the disadvantaged player if they're both equally skilled in regular fights.
Types are what we must find a solution for, so let's imagine something that could make the battle fair despite them.

Ruleset proposition

From what I know most tournaments apply a best-of-3 rule, and sometimes a best-of-5. Considering this here are the ruleset I'm proposing :
  1. each player must have four teams of spirits, one for each type, that can't change for the duration of the set.
  2. for the first battle, both players must chose a team of the same color which is either chosen by both players, randomly selected or decided by a RPS game in case the players disagree.
    1. if after two or four rounds both players won the same amount of time, this step is repeated.
  3. the winner of the first round is forced to switch to their grey team, the loser gets to chose any of their team.
    1. during a best-of-5, if a player has two victories while the other doesn't have any, the current leader must chose any team apart from grey and declare it, only then the other player gets to chose any of his team.
    2. during a best-of-5, this step also applies after a player gets their second victory while the other only has one.
Other propositions

Let's ask Sakurai for new useful features that could help us integrate spirits more easily into the competitive scene ;
  • a setting that would deactivate spirits advantage. Thanks to this addition, there would be no need for a ruleset such as the one I proposed above.
  • a quick way to add a team to the team list in regular battles. Imagine going to a tournament and having to create a spirit team everytime, this would take a long time, and only one player could do it at a time. Now imagine if you could just input a code directly from the character select screen to add the team immediately. This code would be four to sixteen characters long depending on how much supports spirits there are. The numbers correspond to the spirit in-game number. Here are examples :
    • 0940 0945 1001 0025 corresponds to Super Macho Man, Piston Honda, Ibuki and Fox Luigi.
    • 0665 0676 corresponds to Black Knight and Azura.
    • 0137 0445 1001 corresponds to Donkey Kong & Lady, Ho-Oh and Ibuki.
  • a way to change/select the spirit's style from the character select screen. There are only two ways to switch style right now : going in "activities" and teaching the spirit again or having two separate copies with diffrent styles. What if we could just select it from a list so we gain a lot of time ? Even better, let's add this idea to the code I proposed earlier :
    • 094002 0945 1001 0025 corresponds to Super Macho Man with the Land Style, Piston Honda, Ibuki and Fox Luigi.
    • 013713 0445 1001 corresponds to Donkey Kong & Lady with the Overthrow Syle, Ho-Oh and Ibuki.
Bans

As said earlier, Spirits can be balanced if we remove their types from the calculation, but in any case there are spirits which just don't care about fairness. Here are examples of spirits that could be banned for being too strong :
  • Gold Mario, a support spirit who requires three slots to provide the Super Armor trait : makes the character insensible to multi-hit attacks, smash attacks barely make them flinch at low percent. The only attacks susceptible to affect the character are super powerful attacks like Roy's neutral B, counters and grabs.
    • Full Armor X, a primary spirit, also provides the Super Armor trait, but he's fair since he only has one slot and his stats are very low.
  • Ore Club trait support spirits, wich require three slots : this item is so broken, it provides Super Armor on smash attacks, has a long range, deals great damage, has a very high smash power and summons a huge tornado if that wasn't enough already.
  • Final Smash Meter : Final Smashes are still banned for being unbalanced, no question.
Alright, that is all for now. I hope my thread will catch some people's attention and will eventually start something important. If that's the case, I'll continue working on it.
 
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S_B

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Hate to say it, but I'll tell you the same thing I told people who so badly wanted to see final smash meters in competitive play: posting a suggestion about it won't do anything.

If you truly want to see this implemented in tournaments, you're going to need to:
1. Start hosting tournaments on a regular basis yourself with the ruleset you want to see.

2. Provide a large enough prize pool to get players interested. You're going to need a pot bonus of some kind to garner interest, as there are plenty of tournaments with regular rules you're competing with for attention.

3. Run this tournament regularly until it catches on and people adopt the mode (and there's no guarantee they will).

It takes blood, sweat, and tears to be a TO. In the days before SSB tournaments, it was up to players to become TOs and start organizing tournaments, and from that the community slowly grew to what it is today.

If you truly want to see a mode like this, you're going to need to put the work in to get it to catch on yourself, just like they did 20 years ago to get this community started.
 
D

Deleted member

Guest
Hate to say it, but I'll tell you the same thing I told people who so badly wanted to see final smash meters in competitive play: posting a suggestion about it won't do anything.

If you truly want to see this implemented in tournaments, you're going to need to:
1. Start hosting tournaments on a regular basis yourself with the ruleset you want to see.

2. Provide a large enough prize pool to get players interested. You're going to need a pot bonus of some kind to garner interest, as there are plenty of tournaments with regular rules you're competing with for attention.

3. Run this tournament regularly until it catches on and people adopt the mode (and there's no guarantee they will).

It takes blood, sweat, and tears to be a TO. In the days before SSB tournaments, it was up to players to become TOs and start organizing tournaments, and from that the community slowly grew to what it is today.

If you truly want to see a mode like this, you're going to need to put the work in to get it to catch on yourself, just like they did 20 years ago to get this community started.
I've no intention to become a TO but I was hoping this kind of tournaments could see the day anyway. Maybe was I too delusional.
But still, we can keep working on the idea so maybe we'll finally see it applied in real tournaments ? Who knows.
 
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S_B

Too Drunk to Smash
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I've no intention to become a TO but I was hoping this kind of tournaments could see the day anyway. Maybe was I too delusional.
But still, we can keep working on the idea so maybe we'll finally see it applied in real tournaments ? Who knows.
I understand, but experimentation is generally tough because competitive players like to have one ruleset because it avoids things like fracturing the playerbase. There already isn't perfect agreement on legal stage lists at this point. Getting players to agree on something as complex as spirits would be a DOOZY...

It's easier to have side events for things like squad strike because it's the same rules and gameplay as the regular game, you just have a different character for each stock.

With spirits, you have to consider that they were never really balanced with the idea of being used in competitive gameplay whereas the regular game (without items and whatnot) definitely was (they hired players from the Japanese tournament scene to balance it during development and everything).

What do you do if part of the playerbase decides that a particular spirit is broken and should be banned? You'd wind up with fragmented regions with different rulesets, which is the worst thing you can have because regionals create even more problems.

It's a neat idea, don't get me wrong, but having a standardized, uniting ruleset for play is the most pivotal element to any competitive gaming community. We saw tons of issues with custom moves from back in SSB4 as well. Spirits would meet with the same or a worse reception, I fear.
 

OnyanRings

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Spirits being one of my favorite features of Smash Ultimate, i also looked into a way to make them more balanced.

Ultimately, i don't think spirits will ever be used in a competitive setting but with that said, playing with friends using your ruleset has been a blast so far, so who knows ? Maybe i'll try to host a local tournament using these rules and see if people like it or not.
 

teluoborg

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As someone who has hosted side events using custom at tournaments during the smash 4 era here's why spirit will never be useable in competitive play :
1-you need to unlock them. If you host a tournament you need your ruleset to be useable on multiple setups. For GSC I used a hacked 3ds, made a specific custom equipment set for each character and spent close to 3h copying the sets from the 3ds to each wii u (and building the custom stages using a blueprint). And that was for ONE set. If you plan for every player to be able to use their 4 spirit sets on every console then you need to unlock them on ever console.

2-they need to be leveled up. You can't just unlock the spirits, since they level up during multi-player fights you need them to be max level so the balance doesn't change during the tournament. Good luck with that.

3-the rock paper scissors is too complex for nothing and its advantages are too big. This could be regulated by only allowing one type of spirit but even then the attack and defense stats vary greatly. Do you know how they work exactly? I know I don't.

So yeah. Customs were already a hassle to use in smash 4 but spirits are even worse. They allow for fun combinations (make 1 player with super armor vs a team of 3 players in stamina mode for an epic boss fight) but they're so unpractical no amount of theory crafting will ever lead to anything competitive.
 

durandal2

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Mar 29, 2021
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I don't know if this thread is active AT ALL because this is my first post here, but I have had the same thoughts and ideas and would love to hash this out with you (or whoever).

Have some pretty novel ideas that as far as I can tell get rid of a lot of the issues raised by previous posters and also would create an interesting dynamic that makes every tourney or set kind of unique.

For example, because of the sheer hassle of having consoles with every spirit unlocked:

  • TOs or organizers will operate on good faith that "a significant number of spirits are available on the console" (doesn't have to be all)
  • Players will create teams from whatever spirits are available after each round or set (on the fly)
  • Players have X time to create their team for any given round (60, 90 seconds or something)
  • Players cannot re-use a team they have already employed in a previous round

There are almost certainly ideal loadouts that every player would use all the time if the whole spirit roster was available, so doing it this way requires some real time thinking and doesn't create too big of a stall in-between sets. You get 1 minute to quickly assemble whatever you can find, and once you've used that team you have to change it up next match.

Every console is going to have some variance in what's available, and that makes every single set a unique fight that plays in to the whole idea behind "spirits on" gameplay (being expressive with your character and adding elements that you feel will give you an edge).

Not hoping for much replying to a thread that died a half-year ago, but here I am if anybody wants to chat about this.
 
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