The following is a long post, but it's only long because I'm replying to 3 people. Just find your name =P
To Prisonchild:
there might not BE a replay
If there's no replay...OK, in
some cases, restart the match or make the pauser lose. E.g. If It's difficult, or controversial, to tell if the pause caused the death.
But if both players can describe the game-events perfectly...
Player A: "Player B (Luigi) UpB'd me at 300%, with no obstacles, and did not fall into a blast zone because "GAME SET" appeared immediately after my death, with Player B surviving. He paused after I got hit by the UpB."
Player B: "Yep that's what happened."
...why not just let Player B (Luigi) win? Player B would have won anyway. The pause did not cause Player A's death.
The TO should rule that Player B is the winner. Your position supports
panicky ruling, because of the snowball effect (I presume): "This will lead to more and more controversial cases." But controversial cases can be dealt with under my view: fine, restart the match or make the pauser lose. But in simple, easy, uncontroversial cases, like the one above, there's no need for a
panicky harsh ruling! Let's not become paranoid and extremist with regard to pausing.
prisonchild said:
and even then it's up to the discretion of one person, that leaves tons of variance since it won't always be the same person making the call. one TO could call it one way, another could call it the other way.
If it's an easy case, all TOs will likely be in agreement. OK fine,
hypothetically, a TO could be completely uninformed about SSB (e.g. thinks Player A could win in my example). But, there have been, to my knowledge, no TOs who instantiate this characteristic.
If it's a hard case, i.e. the TO doesn't know if the pause caused the death -> ok, restart the match/DQ the pauser. But why are we grouping together easy cases and hard cases? Why are we punishing the clear winner in a guaranteed win?
Perhaps it's because we, as a community,
just hate pausing, right? Pausing is full of negative connotations: it messes up our combos, it ruins the flow of matches etc. etc. But should we let our disgust of pausing
in general turn us into extremist rule-setters, with regard to clear-cut cases? I don't see why we we should.
prisonchild said:
for competitive smash players I don't see how hard it is not to pause. as sweet a KO as that video was, there is no reason to pause there in a competitive match. and if you do it inadvertently, you get the same punishment even though it was a guaranteed kill. that way there's no wiggle room, no excuses, etc.
First, note the part I bolded: I'm glad you understand the concept of a guaranteed kill.
Next: It is very easy to pause by accident. It's happened so many times in recent tournies (sensei, m2k, a japanese player I think?). There may be no reason to do it, but just because someone
does do it, I still don't think we should make him/her lose in guaranteed wins.
prisonchild said:
I dunno as harsh as 'my ruling' may be it makes it pretty cut and dry.
Rules that are simple, short, and sweet are sometimes good. But not always.
**Side note: The best situation is to just have EVERYONE remove their pause button. Unfortunately, this clearly cannot be realized in ~100-man tournies. A minority of people just won't do it -- for whatever reason. Should we start banning people from playing if they don't take out their start button? Hmm...
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To Sangoku:
Sangoku said:
Wasn't there a Melee match where a dude suicided during a star KO and lost the match? No guaranteed kill until you hear "GAME SET".
Bolded part is simply not true. In my youtube link posted above, the players have effectively won the moment the upB and falcon punch landed. Of course, you could only know that after Vwls unpaused (yes...perhaps the player could have been sent to the sky lol, and got the falling animation, with vwls and sextc fall to their deaths before they win...). But since we know what happened (i.e. who won) the decision should be an easy one, no?
There
are guaranteed kills in this game. I do
not include
non-guaranteed kills under that heading, for obvious, obvious reasons.
To Clubba:
Clubba said:
No such thing in a 1 stock vs 1 stock scenario, unless its not possible to kill yourself faster than they would die, and testing that possibility is not feasible in tournament.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. In that melee match, the guy who fell to his death loses. It's as a simple as that. The opponent's pausing
after the hit will
have no effect on whether or not that guy dies. There should be no controversy here. We can watch the replay, observe that the guy fell to his death even though he thought he won, and despite the fact that he was close to winning, he loses.
Also, in your sentence, you do actually admit that there are guaranteed kills (bolded part).
The most persuasive part of your stance, I think, is the following: in some cases, it is difficult to determine whether or not a pause causes a death or not.
But the game works like this (below is a hypothetical situation, frame counts may not be the same as real ssb moves):
Frame 1:
Player 1: Attack animation begins (attack comes out in 3 frames, i.e. it will come out on frame 4)
Player 2: *is within Player 1's attack hitbox range* (Player 2 can input an attack, but all attacks possible by Player 2 come out in 4 frames, so the attack will come out on frame 5)
Frame 2:
*Player 1 pauses*
*Player 1 unpauses*
...
Frame 4:
Player 1: Attack comes out. Hits Player 2. Let's say it kills Player 2.
---
In the above example you CAN figure out if a pause caused a death or not. And it should be clear what follows: Almost all SSB examples are like the one above. There is one exception: CLASHES. But you will know who dies after the clash because the match continues after the pause >_>. So you can still tell if the pause caused the death or not. If the player would have died anyway, the pause did not cause the death.
Let's say there is a situation a little more complicated than the one above. Let's say we do not have the exact frame counts memorized for both characters (very plausible), so we don't know if the pause caused the death.
In that case, what is wrong with letting an experienced player use their past experience of SSB to determine who should win? Let's think about what happened in M2K vs Han Solo:
1. Sensei and Nintendude after reviewing the match (post-tourney) predicted that Han Solo would have died anyway.
2. I TAS'd the match (by looking at the exact frame of M2K's Fsmash animation, which you can tell by looking at Kirby) and they were correct.
If they made the decision during the tourney, which they didn't because they weren't confident enough, it would have been the right one!
Some TOs will not be knowledgeable enough and will make the wrong decision (but who cares about these small, side-tourney-TOs with no good players
anyway? [where they don't even know how to Z-cancel, for example]). But the good TOs have been right so far. So, given past decisions (e.g. M2K vs Han Solo), why is it such a bad thing for good TOs to decide? Why are we underestimating our judgment abilities, when we've got this amazing, knowledgeable, high level player base?
