DACUS is understandable, but wavedash? You're 100% in control of the entire process, It's just an emergent factor of 2 well understood abilities, and the entire cast could put it to use.
To use, yes. To good use, Bowser would like a word with you, amongst others. And with the exceptions of Peach and Jigglypuff, the entire top tier of Melee relied heavily on the ability. Its results are not consistent with the properties of the component inputs, at least in my opinion. You call it an "emergent factor", but what it really is is an edge case: multiple tangentially related options come together in a not-particularly apparent way. It makes sense once it's learned, but perhaps I and all Smash players I've ever met are simply too casual, but not one of them discovered Wavedashing on their own across thousands of hours playing the game. It's not a maneuver you expect to appear out of a low airdodge, much less one that an average player can be expected to apply in their practice. And again, maybe I'd feel differently if it wasn't a competition-mandatory easter egg. But as it was deliberately included in the game, it makes zero sense for it to have not been included in any documentation.
Man, look. There are completely sensible mechanics that people in this community will sware to death is a glitch. L-Cancelling is commonly described as an "exploit" or "glitch", despite the fact it's clearly hardcoded in the game with a specific window, specific input, and specific effects. It wasn't even hard to do...L-Cancelling was exactly what you are describing, since it was added in place of Z-cancelling in Smash64.
But i'm convinced that such an idea would be lost upon the Smash community, they complain about anything that involves any amount of input past tilts/taps + a button.
L-canceling is known to not be a glitch. The bigger issue there is that it isn't publicized in the manual, or the game itself, only on an ancient website and, nowadays, through word of mouth/wikis/whatever. The game doesn't teach you how to L-cancel, you simply stumble upon it or are told that it works, then learn it. That's an entirely different issue. My only qualm with L-canceling is that it adds zero depth, only complexity - it is always the best choice when landing.
The most ideal scenario would be for Nintendo to design its characters with an amount of intended, emergent depth that would render advanced techniques worthless because they're included by design. But there's no indication this is ever going to happen in smash.
A game doesn't need a high technical gap to be competitive, it just needs to have a nice amount of respectful options and rules. Smash has been watering down those options and rules, and it's competitive nature suffers because of it.
I can't disagree that it waters down options, but as it does so by enforcing the rules via bugfixing, I cannot consider this a bad thing. If it's an intended design, then it should be designed within the current rules, and not as an exception to a rule. i.e. Yoshi soaring to impractical heights after pressing the button that normally leads to a very well-known height follows no conceivable form of reasoning (aside from whatever the computer did to make it happen).
This literally makes no sense.
How can you think you can create a competitive game, where 2 people practice at different intensity, yet still come out equally matched? The idea of practicing and improving is the whole point of competitive play. Mastery is the CORE of competitive games. It can't happen.
You want to bridge the gap between competitive and casual players? INCLUDE BETTER HANDICAP OPTIONS...Ironically, yet another feature that was drastically nerfed after Melee.
Not at all what I was saying. You mentioned that Nintendo's intent seems to be for friends to play and whoever to win, which at least implies a level of balance at the casual level. My point was that the game should
also be balanced for competitive play, which I thought was sufficiently obviously tied to "and yet having mechanics that grant good characters
better options and only give mediocre characters
less trash options does not result in balance." I apologize for the assumption.
I feel like a diehard Fox fan and a diehard Bowser fan should be able to practice to some arbitrarily defined level of "Perfectly equal skill" and they should be able to have at least close to an even 50:50 match where the winner is determined by who plays better that round. But they can't, because Fox is good, and gets indefinitely more mileage out of wavedashing, L-canceling, and virtually every other mechanic in the game, advanced technique or otherwise, than Bowser does. Virtually nothing in Melee can be done by an equally good Bowser player to stand a chance against a Fox player.
A
better player should always beat a
worse player. But two equally matched players at the highest level of skill should
not be forced by character imbalance to pick from a small subset of the roster of characters in order to stand a reasonable chance in the competition. I'm aware that there will virtually always
be tiers (whether due to the general play style or simply because of innate character properties), but that does
not mean that tiered character viability is a desirable game state. Balance patches are the biggest step towards that, and if you have to remove an unequally-beneficial property to better balance the game, then so be it. Balance with fewer options is far better than option-rich extreme imbalance.
Smash 4 should have used the opportunity to include a new button, or add a new mechanic. Air grabs, throw break, a different shield, a comeback mechanic, or maybe even a dedicated tech button that does something different for every character. That way it could keep its simplicity and just add another layer onto gameplay that doesn't have to worry about being better or worse than it was in Melee. But instead it's just dancing around the concept of being competitive without really putting forth any effort to make the step.
I agree on this point (after all, even Gamecube controller loyalists rarely need to use both shield buttons for the same function, or both jump buttons, and there's always reassigning control options). However, I don't think what they've done is make Smash non-competitive. On the contrary, all skilled play I've seen indicates that it's a very competitive game. It gives more validity to defensive play than Melee, more validity to offensive play than Brawl, and even across its character tiers, the tiers seem closer than they have in the past, at least to me.
All of that, and even without advanced techniques, players are still competing, and the better player is still winning (or the player using the better character, or the player better with the better character, or what have you). Any one of them would still beat any non-competitive-level player. The removal of technique has done nothing to dilute competitive play, it has simply made it more streamlined and understandable. Not only are these players still able to practice and improve their play both timing-wise and intellectually, but any up-and-coming player who watches a tournament can finally do so without suddenly seeing some mystical sliding that they've never run across in their own play.
It makes it easier to learn and play without making it easier to win. That is a sign of good design.
Even if the game ends up having the lowest skill gap in the series (which seems to be the direction this game is heading) I'm positive the gap will still be large enough to reward dedication and allow professional players to dominate at a high level.
Basically I feel that even without ATs the core mechanics of all Smash games are still deep enough and allow enough options to show a clear distinction between a "casual player, "good player," and "professional player." As long as that distinction is still there I'll be satisfied since I've always loved Smash at its core while ATs are just the cherry on top (most of them at least... some of them are jank and I'm glad they're gone).
Now whether this leads to a more FUN competitive experience or not is an entirely different discussion. As we've seen in this thread some are going to enjoy the accessibility, while others are going to be irritated with the lack of options. Then you have those that are neutral and are dedicated to learning this game regardless of how it turns out. It all comes down to personal preference really.
You captured my thoughts perfectly. Thank you.
Prawn
if this was unclear before, my apologies.
