Let's talk about L-Canceling.

[Kink-Link5]

That's what we mean when we mention the problematic nature of having high-lag aerials in a game supposedly meant to emphasize the aerial game. The exact opposite happens because just jumping is a relatively very high-commitment decision, while remaining grounded gives you the most stage control you could need.


Well unless you're Metaknight obviously.

 

[Vkrm]

If i have access to to all the same moves and why would the buttroller take more skill?

 

[Biz_R_0]

Because it's more difficult to use

 

[Vkrm]

How?

 

[Twinkles]

Wario has a fair bit of aerial mobility going for him though, don't he?

EDIT: Ninja'd to an impossibly terrible degree.

 

[Gea]

He was being sarcastic.

 

[Biz_R_0]

Wario has a fair bit of aerial mobility going for him though, don't he?

Not that much more than Falcon. Although, yes, he's tied with Wolf for third fastest right behind Jiggly.

 

[Arcansi]

Do you get a kick out of spreading misinformation Arcansi? Or are you just misinformed yourself to think Brawl's landing lag is anything remotely acceptable?

Acceptable is subjective.

From a competitive standpoint, brawls landing lag is fine.

I mean, it's not like brawls top tier character is mostly aerial...

 

[Biz_R_0]

How?

Because you're playing with your butt. Do I really need to explain why your butt isn't as easy to play video games with as your hands?

 

[Gea]

Not that much more than Falcon. Although, yes, he's tied with Wolf for third fastest right behind Jiggly.

When you said you supported auto-canceling, can you be a bit more specific by what you are referring to? I know you aren't talking about autocancels as they already exist in smash, but one of those proposed items within the thread like halved lag on hit?

Or do you mean just rebalancing aerial lag to be reasonable to begin with. Because if that is the case, there is no cancel at all. Aerials just have less lag.

Acceptable is subjective.

From a competitive standpoint, brawls landing lag is fine.

I mean, it's not like brawls top tier character is mostly aerial...

And is a character with every option to never HAVE to touch the ground while doing aerials. Not everyone's aerials have super fast frame data on a character with multiple mid air jumps and B moves that can end laglessly. This is still ignoring that in many MUs his weakest moments are when he is airborne.

 

[Biz_R_0]

Or do you mean just rebalancing aerial lag to be reasonable to begin with. Because if that is the case, there is no cancel at all. Aerials just have less lag.

This, basically.

 

[Gea]

That is honestly the best case scenario I believe will happen in Smash 4, but I can always hope since Bamco is helping.

 

[Arcansi]

Or do you mean just rebalancing aerial lag to be reasonable to begin with. Because if that is the case, there is no cancel at all. Aerials just have less lag.

As a side note I think this is the best option overall.

And is a character with every option to never HAVE to touch the ground while doing aerials. Not everyone's aerials have super fast frame data on a character with multiple mid air jumps and B moves that can end laglessly. This is still ignoring that in many MUs his weakest moments are when he is airborne.

Yeah, true.

I just now realized that when I typed landing with aerials I meant landing correctly with aerials, which in brawl means not getting the landing lag//getting the autocancel.

But it was misunderstood, and I can see why.

 

[Vkrm]

If anything l canceling should be a bit harder to prevent mashing. If all the buttroller does is make the game harder, whats the point?

 

[Biz_R_0]

If all it does is make the game harder, whats the point?]

Do you see it now?

 

[Vkrm]

Youve activated my trap card. The added difficulty positively impacts character balance. We went over this earlier.

 

[Kink-Link5]

Playing good opponents makes the game harder. Playing a non-advantageous matchup makes the game harder. Smashing the control stick to dash instead of it just happening on its own makes the game harder.

Do you seriously think pressing a single button to lower lag is difficult? The missed L-cancels in tournament don't come from technical error.


Honestly the, "You never don't want to do it," argument was more sensible than this.

 

[Biz_R_0]

Youve activated my trap card. The added difficulty positively impacts character balance. We went over this earlier.

You never actually explained how just not having ridiculous landing lag wouldn't solve this.

Playing good opponents makes the game harder. Playing a non-advantageous matchup makes the game harder. Smashing the control stick to dash instead of it just happening on its own makes the game harder.

The first is a direct product of skill that needs to exist because then there'd be no point to playing competitively, the second could be solved by having a secondary, and the third would either be a great thing or make the game literally play itself, depending on your meaning.

Do you seriously think pressing a single button to lower lag is difficult? The missed L-cancels in tournament don't come from technical error.

For newer players. Also, it's not that I find it hard, it's that it could easily be fixed by just reducing landing lag and the only thing it does is artificially make the game harder to learn.

Honestly the, "You never don't want to do it," argument was more sensible than this.

Did you ever actually refute that? Name one situation in which L Cancelling would have a negative effect if preformed properly.

 

[Gea]

Did you ever actually refute that? Name one situation in which L Cancelling would have a negative effect if preformed properly.

I'm pretty sure that was more or less conceded to be true, but that doesn't alone make l-canceling a bad mechanic. The idea is that you can have gameplay that is more "brokenly good" at the cost of being more technically demanding or easier to flub up, and l-canceling helps serve this purpose.

 

[Vkrm]

If you BAir Gannons shield with ness and you don't cancel ness stays really low to ground. A reversal sheild grab will whiff. If that argument wasn't ******** this is I would say to counter it.

 

[Biz_R_0]

If you BAir Gannons shield with ness and you don't cancel ness stays really low to ground. A reversal sheild grab will whiff. If that argument wasn't ******** this is I would say to counter it.

That is extremely specific.

I'm pretty sure that was more or less conceded to be true, but that doesn't alone make l-canceling a bad mechanic. The idea is that you can have gameplay that is more "brokenly good" at the cost of being more technically demanding or easier to flub up, and l-canceling helps serve this purpose.

This is bad because only people who can't consistently do it are being punished (aka people who are learning and would learn a lot faster if it wasn't for this). This adds nothing, it just subtracts if you don't do it.

 

[Gea]

It is true for a few other characters that squish rather flat upon landing versus characters with tall grabs as well. It hinges mostly on your opponent not having good matchup knowledge though. Ganon players should know which characters his grab can whiff against. Plus delaying the grab still works and any other punish is more likely to work versus you because no l-cancel.

Edit: To be fair, people who can't do anything consistently are punished for it. Run, walk, jab, whatever. I'm surprised no one has compared automatic l-cancels to Falcon's gentlemen between NTSC and PAL. In theory it isn't an actual buff, anyone who practices can gentleman on command. In actual matches it makes gentleman such a better option for Falcon because it is automatic. The falcon doesn't have to slow down at all or worry about timing.

 

[Vkrm]

Is there really a need to pander to lower skilled players?

 

[Arcansi]

Youve activated my trap card. The added difficulty positively impacts character balance. We went over this earlier.

Only to lower skilled players.

And we wouldn't want to...

pander to lower skilled players

now would we?

 

[Biz_R_0]

Is there really a need to pander to lower skilled players?

That mentality killed the fighting game scene until SF4. They only designed the games for top level players, people who were already good at the game. This resulted in newer players not being interested in the game because they became insanely difficult to learn, and most people who still played were the guys at the arcade who were unbeatable at SF2. Because of this, more accessible fighting games like Tekken, Soul Calibur, and SMASH BROS. rose to success. Please stop being selfish and accept that people who disagree with you are as important to the success of the game as you are.

Also, it's not pandering. You lose absolutely nothing except muscle memory skill for the sake of skill while newer players don't have a useless tech barrier to overcome and can focus on the actual fundamentals and intricacies of Smash. If anything, L Cancelling was a pandering to higher skilled players (Sakurai actually did say that Melee in general was pandering to hardcore players).

 

[Vkrm]

It only really affects the balance at the highest level, you know, where it counts. Most lower skilled player realize that they are what needs to change for them to do well. There isn't really a need to blame the game. I don't place too much faith in tourney attendance. I look at the games. Sf4 didn't do well because of how casual friendly it is. It's a fun game. Sfxt is just streamlined but most people hate it anyway. And I'd say sakurai doesn't know as much as he thinks he does.

 

[Biz_R_0]

It only really affects the balance at the highest level, you know, where it counts.

No, it doesn't. At higher levels everyone can already do it consistently, it is a problem for the people who can't. These are the people who auto L Cancelling would help, and you won't even notice a difference. Why not just sacrifice a button press for the benefit of others? Stop looking at it from your point of view and start looking at it from the point of view of a person who wants to get better but can't because they have to implement this mindless button press into their pattern in order to be able to be any good at all against people who can do it, even if they're better in every other way than those people.

 

[Vkrm]

If you're dropping games to people who Lcancel more often, learn to Lcancel more often. Be better at the game. I've been outplayed by people who play brawl exclusively and don't utilize canceling. It isn't as big a deal as you make it out to be.

 

[Biz_R_0]

I think you're missing the "learning" part. These people are learning how to do that, and they will not be good at all until they learn how to do that all the time and almost never miss. The problem is this mechanic could easily be automatic and benefit everyone instead of just punishing one group of people and rewarding the other. Please try to see this from someone elses perspective.

 

[JOE!]

@ Vkrm: Then why are you making such a big deal out of it dude?

Out of the 20-sumthin odd characters with 5 aerials a piece (over 120 instances of Lcancels), I've only seen like 2 examples where it'd be a bad idea to Lcancel, or where it can be messed with.

In your opinion, what would be the pros and cons of keeping vs replacing Lcancel?

 

[Twinkles]

If someone is better at all aspects of the game except L-Canceling, by all means they should be winning.

Pros of keeping L-canceling would be high-speed gameplay with execution requirement, which would keep the game fast and allow for quick aerial shield pressure without making shield pressure too broken because this form of rapidly hitting a shield with aerials has a pretty big execution requirement attached to it.

Cons would be the execution requirement I suppose

 

[Vkrm]

I don't see a problem with new players having to actually play for while before they become relevant in terms of skill. It wouldnt benefit falcon mains with that god awful ooS game.

 

[DrinkingFood]

I think this thread has come full circle. Here we are talking about "why you would ever choose not to do it" all over again, when that's already been discussed and answered. The game is not one sided, people. You shouldn't be analyzing just from what one player's options. Forcing players to L-cancel gives the OTHER player in a match the chance to cause them to miss it, through various means. In other words, ALR would be strictly safer in all cases because it removes the bit of risk associated with requiring proper timing to reduce the lag. No lag reduction whatsoever is just a horrible idea, for reasons Kink has already noted.

 

[Wobbly Headed Bob]

this thread

 

[Vkrm]

Cons would be the execution requirement I suppose

how many competent fighting game players would really see it as a con though?

 

[Snakeyes]

You need to take a logic class and learn what a straw man and an argument from analogy really are.

Your analogies are bad.

You attributed certain properties to l-canceling in order to say it shouldn't be there. I pointed out that those ATs share the same properties, thus they're analogous. Try again.

But they don't. You can think up hundreds of analogies and throw the entire Shoryuken Wiki at me, but it won't change this simple fact; There are very few (if any) traditional fighting games that require an "advanced technique" for an action as simple as following a jumping normal with a ground normal or special, beyond inputting the command for said normal or special with the right timing.

It's been the basis for my argument since the OP.

Also broken enough to be taken off the game? If you recall any of Sakurai's interviews, he didn't remove the ATs for breaking the game, he removed them because he wanted to make the game casual friendly. He wanted to remove the game's depth.

Hence the word broken being in quotation marks, Mr. Scholar. In this particular case it was due to the mechanic being “unfair” towards casuals who did not care or want to learn it.

Oh yeaah, let's just have Smash 4 have no landing lag so that like in Smash 64 Ness can just DJC dair and break shields with 0 tech skill requirement and Fox gets free pressure. Smash's gameplay is sufficiently different from other games for there to be value landing cooldown. Removing aerial landing cooldown from smash is like removing it from Soul Calibur or Tekken.

No one's asking for no landing lag at all. And now you're trying to bring 3D fighters into the mix too... do Soul Calibur and Tekken also have a mandatory advanced technique for every simple air-to-ground combo?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since no one posted actual frame data so far, I did a quick search on shield pressure to find out just how inescapable it can be and came across the following thread in the Fox forums. The spaceys are some of the worst abusers of shield pressure, right?

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=109595&

As far as I can tell, this is proof that any kind of shield pressure can be reliably countered with proper timing and/or buffering, even if the attacker has frame-perfect execution. Much more reliably than angling your shield and praying for a missed L-cancel anyway. So much for all the comparisons with inescapable blockstrings, huh? You'll probably say "oh, but the odd missed L-cancel provides an even bigger window of opportunity" but I'd argue that balancing out some of the faster aerials with a few (2-5) additional landing frames would achieve a similar effect without making shield-grabbing too powerful.

Also, the moment when you land after hitting a shield is greatly affected by your fast-fall timing. I wouldn't be surprised if a mistimed fast-fall due to shield angling also provided a small window to escape shield pressure. Keep in mind that many of the above pressure escape options all take into account Melee's very strong and versatile shine. Remove the possibility to jump cancel it, and most of these pressure strings immediately become much less effective.

And if all else fails, the defender can still shield DI away from the pressure. Shield DI could even be made a bit stronger overall at the cost of more shield damage so that it can't be abused, but I'm not sure we'd even need better shield DI considering all the other defensive options.

I guess the only way to really gauge the impact would be to hack reduced landing lag into Melee or Project M and see how a typical high-level match plays out.

 

[Wobbly Headed Bob]

Your analogies are bad.
But they don't. You can think up hundreds of analogies and throw the entire Shoryuken Wiki at me, but it won't change this simple fact; There are very few (if any) traditional fighting games that require an "advanced technique" for an action as simple as following a jumping normal with a ground normal or special, beyond inputting the command for said normal or special with the right timing.

It's been the basis for my argument since the OP.

Hence the word broken being in quotation marks, Mr. Scholar. In this particular case it was due to the mechanic being “unfair” towards casuals who did not care or want to learn it.


No one's asking for no landing lag at all. And now you're trying to bring 3D fighters into the mix too... do Soul Calibur and Tekken also have L-canceling?

Sometimes you have to ask yourself what makes some people think they're just magically competent at arguing. People don't pretend they can do calculus equations. What makes them think they can argue?

I blame the education system telling kids they're special when they're not. Also the tv and movies and anime.

I already did. And here you go:
Here's a hint:

The relevant properties are the execution requirements compounded with the notion that it is never beneficial for the executioner to miss the command.

Another argument in response has been furthered that hasn't been answered pretty early in this thread and I later made it in my post too; it explains the value in the potential of the opponent missing the command, and analogy has been drawn with other mechanics inside the game and outside of it for analogous cases.


VKRM's analogies are pretty straight-forward examples too. It's logically inconsistent to say that l-canceling is detrimental and Power-shielding, teching, and SDI are not when the same properties you use to claim that l-canceling is detrimental. In any case, you'd have to make a more elaborate case for l-canceling that isn't just ad hoc like it's been so far.

 

[Snakeyes]

I still see top tournament players drop combos and link in tournaments, so tech-skill requirement practically never stops being noticeable unless you're playing a silly game like Brawl. You're virtually suggesting cutting off risky, high-execution, high-reward mechanics in their entirety, when risky high-execution strategies often tend to incorporate yomi scenarios which would otherwise be too advantageous.

As long as DI and variable knockback are in the game, every combo will require prediction, execution, timing and still retain an uncertainty factor.

 

[Snakeyes]

*snip*

Sorry bro, I'm not falling for this again.

If you don't have an example of another fighting game that requires an extra hurdle for a basic air-to-ground combo, you've got no argument except having techskill for techskill's sake.

So, thoughts on the frame data?

 

[Vkrm]

Super cancel, or even special canceling. Why should we be looking at other fighters for examples. I like smash more than them anyway. Snake eyes is flip floping. Does it bar entry for new school players or is it so easy that it ought to be auto?