Official 'Item Standard Play' Thread (65k views. Not bad for a side project, huh? :P + Poll in OP)

[1048576]

Gooey bomb is stupid for killing people for attacking.

Team Healer is stupid for being entirely luck-based. There's no strategy for who to throw it at. The only time I'd ever use it is if I'm against someone better than me and I need some luck to win.

 

[§leepy God]

The Pitfall? Is this a good "I want to talk about it", or a bad "I want to talk about it"? lol

♪ Mostly a positive talk since Pitfalls depend mostly on both strategy and if the player forgets, lol. †

Personally I think that Metal Box should be nautral. Why is it CP anyway? Because it can spawn on someones attack accidentally activating it?

Aside from that that will almost never happen, it is not such a big deal. Metal Box isn't like the Shrooms that interupt your actions, and neither will it kill you or cause damage like bombs. And everything else, as stated in the OP, cancels each other out in R/R to make it a good balanced item.

So IMO Metal Box should be neutral.

♪ Meta Box is more of a hassle than help, if your knocked off the stage, it's not easy recovering unless you have a character with more than one mid air jump or a great recovery. With the Metal Block, the player against it has to grab, or perform a string of combo's to knock it off of you. Though not so much help, but it's also useful in a way, if your percent is high, you won't die my attacks that can kill you, but other than that, Metal Box is like a mini risk/reward. †

Gooey bomb is stupid for killing people for attacking.

Team Healer is stupid for being entirely luck-based. There's no strategy for who to throw it at. The only time I'd ever use it is if I'm against someone better than me and I need some luck to win.

♪ I thought you avoid characters that the Gooey Bomb is attracted to. †

♪ Team Healer is not luck based, it's just who and where you throw the Team Healer to, just don't throw it at the wrong character is all. †

 

[1048576]

Oh god, please read the thread. Gooey bomb is stupid because it kills you for attacking the air upon which it spawns. Nothing you can do about it. It's just blind luck.

Team Healer sometimes heals, sometimes hurts. Read the ****ing op. I'm sick of arguing with ******** people.

 

[§leepy God]

♪ And I'm sick of arguing with people with an attitude problem. Post nicer or don't post at all. †

♪ Team Healer does minor damage to the character thrown if fail to heal, nothing too dangerous or a death worthy to be counter pick or ban. Gooey Bomb is debatable yes if people have a problem with it. †

 

[GunmasterLombardi]

Oh god, please read the thread. Gooey bomb is stupid because it kills you for attacking the air upon which it spawns. Nothing you can do about it. It's just blind luck.

Team Healer sometimes heals, sometimes hurts. Read the ****ing op. I'm sick of arguing with ******** people.

Better said than done.-_-

 

[GunmasterLombardi]

No, that's why they should be banned.

There's no excuse to get hit by a spawning explosive because you shouldn't be using charged smash attacks or VERY laggy moves when you know anything can happen at the time.

Chances of getting hit by a spawning explosive during an attack is approximately 100 to 1. And that's WITH using lots of laggy moves and charged smash attacks, which again, you shouldn't be using.



Edit: Excuse my double post...

 

[1048576]

believe it or not, jabs trigger an explosion too, and it's not like you're going to avoid it if it spawns right next to you as you're jabbing.

The unlikelyhood of the event does not balance the ridiculous effect on match outcomes combined with the dearth of strategy required to achieve or mitigate that effect, IMO.

 

[fullynick]

Can I just say, I am so glad something like this exists.

Even if items eventually are proven to be 'broken' it is great to see some actual thought put into banning them, rather than just a blanket 'no items' with little or no testing.

 

[kuenzel]

Just a thought, in a doubles 2v1 situation, a grab/grab release --> homerun seems a little unfair given it could even be executed in the few seconds a partner is off the screen/recovering/respawning for a free kill most of the time. Enough practice can pretty much eliminate the chance of you hitting your partner.

Any thoughts?

 

[1048576]

You can, and should anyway even without the HR bat, prolly avoid getting grabbed with both opponent's nearby while your partner is recovering.

Also, you can mash out during the HR Bat wind up time at low-medium percents, right? I don't know for sure, just asking.

 

[kuenzel]

Also, you can mash out during the HR Bat wind up time at low-medium percents, right? I don't know for sure, just asking.

Probably if you're REALLY fast, but a grounded grab release has alot of lag for the person grabbed in most cases... I can picture it being enough for the around 2 seconds of start up lag from a HR bat

 

[Jack Kieser]

Holy crap, there's a LOT of hate on this page. First of all, keep it civil. Seriously, there's no need to post like a **** in a discussion thread. Be nice or go away.

Next, the odds of a Gooey Bomb falling on you are way less than 100:1. First of all, they can't even BE in the first match. Second match, assuming they are the only thing turned on and nothing is banned (highest chance scenario), you have a 20:1 chance of one spawning at all, which is a rough estimate based off of how many items are in the available pool; this doesn't include individual types (like a piece of food, which has ALL SORTS of possible types). Depending on how the PRNG calculates item drops, the chances could be almost half of that (40:1). On top of that, you have to factor in the number of times an item will drop at all. In a 1v1 game, that's about once every 30-45 seconds, which makes it about 10-14 spawns (liberal estimate). On top of THAT, you have to factor in the chance of the item choosing a spawn point that is next to you out of all available spawn points (who knows how many per stage). AND you have to factor in the chance that you'll be attacking at the moment of the spawn. So, yeah, less than 100:1. And even so, the Gooey Bomb will only kill at ~88%, which is the highest kill % of all explosives in the game (save the Smart Bomb, but that doesn't count), so you have to factor in the chance that you'll even BE that high in %. Sure, 22% damage is nothing to scoff at, but it's not nearly as big of a deal as people are making it out to be. This is not going to be happening every match, or even every match the bombs are activated in, or even every SET the bombs will be active in.

Either way, this project takes the same stance that everything else in fighting games should have: until it becomes a problem in actual matches and tournaments, it will stay unbanned. If one Final's match is decided by a Gooey spawn, too bad. If it becomes an everyday occurrence, then we'll consider banning it.

Second, yes, the Team Healer can and will hurt your teammate. The reason for this is because Team Attack is on, and so it sometimes considers your teammate an enemy, which is also why Pit's / Dedede's FS's home in on your partner.

As for the HRB double team... yeah, that's the point. If someone is unskilled enough to get caught and double teamed while the opponent has a HRB, it should, at least, make for a good match video.

 

[1048576]

Grounded grab release is 30 frames except for Ness and Lucas. I don't know what the bat's wind-up time is.

If team healer can hurt or heal everybody randomly, then how the heck are you going to use it in any manner other than pure luck? You'd think this would be answered by now since three people have addressed me since I brought it up.

Jack, you banned several items before the first tourney before you actually saw a problem, right? Also, let's look at your math. You have 20 items, and 12 spawn. (Do we know for a fact that Gooeys spawn less frequently than other items, like food?) There could be duplicates, but there could also be duplicate gooeys, so 60% seems like a good estimate for the likelyhood of a G-Bomb spawning in a match in which it is legal. This means there have to be 120 different places the size of a typical character model to attack for the odds of getting owned to be less than 100:1, assuming a two player game in which both players are attacking at a rate in which they would get owned if a gooey spawned on top of them.

 

[Jack Kieser]

Well, I thought it was already answered: you get lucky. If Judgment can randomly hurt you or your opponent, how are you supposed to use it in any other manner than pure luck? Simple: you use it and hope for the best. There's plenty of stuff in Brawl like that, Judgment being the best example. You just use it. So it's luck-based; I thought we already explained that people who play ISP like a little luck. It can't heal / hurt any player by an amount significant enough to invalidate a match, so just pick it up, throw it, and hope for the best. If you don't want to risk it... then throw it off the stage.

And, unfortunately, there are ALWAYS circumstances that are an obvious abhorrence of the basic rules of our game; there stages like that, tactics like that, and items like that. I'd love to be a part of a community that works more like a traditional community that would basically play all-Brawl from day 1, continually finding problems and working over years to ban as little as possible. I think the item debate, if anything, has shown us that this community simply doesn't work like that. Had I had access to large tournaments, top players, and the highest level of testing, I would have started at square 1 and worked my way from there.

But I didn't. No one who was involved in this project had anywhere NEAR optimal testing scenarios for items.

If you read all of our threads, you'd have seen the various test posts spread around the multiple threads we've had over the course of this project and seen how hard we tried to create a scientifically unbiased and rigorous testing environment, given how little we had to work with. I think we did rather well, all things considering. If you don't, hey, that's your right. But do us a favor and point us to the posts and threads of YOUR 3+ month game-balancing project, your rigorous testing environment, and posts chronicling the success of your project at a multi-state tournament with top players.

This project did as well as it could do. I think there are plenty of posts here that express that we've done an above-par job, as far as we still have to go. And, for the record, no one at WHOBO at all complained about a Gooey Bomb screwing over their match / set, at least not to me. That's a LOT of matches.

 

[1048576]

I'm pretty sure the no items people have tested in their environment too.

I thought the idea was that items add depth to the game by increasing the needed strategy to win because the player has to interact with them. I'm not seeing any added depth at all from the team healer. It's basically a random handicap imparted on a player at the beginning of the match. If it healed your partner more often than it would be different, but as it stands now, this item only degenerates the required strategy.

The comparison to g-dubs hammer is not apt because you know good things are going to happen if you connect with it, and if you are in a position to connect with it, you can choose another move and evaluate the risk/reward of hammer - fair or whatever. Also, you can't remove the hammer.

Besides, logic > experimentation. If you can prove something mathematically, you don't need to demonstrate it scientifically.

 

[Jack Kieser]

Actually the main idea was to ban as little as possible; added depth is why most of the people who enjoy items play would rather play that way (but given how busted vBrawl is anyway, that's not saying much). If you really want to know, the only reason this thread exists is because I made a bet with Yuna that it would work. Some people wanted to play with items, so we worked with the assumption that items in general work and banned as necessary; Team Healer may not add super-depth like other items do, but it doesn't break anything either, so it's not banned. Simple as that. It's not needed, per se, but that's not the point.

Oh, and logic is not inherently better than experimentation; they are two sides of the same coin. The IC infinite grabs are proof of that. On paper, they own. In practice, they don't. Logic can be a pointer towards how things SHOULD work, but that doesn't always mean that's how it WILL work. In a community that bans as a last resort ONLY, what actually happens is more important that what SHOULD happen.

EDIT: Ok, so I made a thread about this in the Workshop, but basically, hackers have found files in stages that correspond to item spawns in some capacity; all we know for certain right now is that without this file, items won't spawn at all, no matter what your settings are. There's a chance, however slight, that spawn point data could be held in these files, which could mean that there is also a chance that, sometime in the future, we could control WHERE items spawn. It's a long shot, but it's worth investigating. So, if you have any Brawl hacking skill (or hell, even hex editing skill), check out the Workshop (thread title: Item Spawning). Do it for the children.

 

[Eternal Yoshi]

Thanks to BrawlBox, we can now control player spawn and item spawn.

In Brawl, there are many spawn points located at ModelData[100]/3DModels/StagePosition/Bones/StagePostion.

The Translation tab is where the XYZ coordinates are. I successfully changed spawn points and blast zones with this.


Here are the names for the predetermined spawn points.

Item0E
Item0N
Item1E
Item1N

etc.

 

[Jack Kieser]

Umm... could you be more specific?

 

[Eternal Yoshi]

Oh. Didn't see this post.

In that directory of Brawlbox, you will find the spawn points for items. You can change them by altering the X,Y,and Z coordinates.

Just be aware that the first part (in this case is Item0E) is the left and uppermost spawn point range. The second one is the right and lowest spawn point range.

If you don't want the variable, then make the X and Y coordinates of Item1E and Item1N the same.

 

[Jack Kieser]

Ok, so if I'm reading this correctly, "Item0E" is an upper-left bound, and "Item0N" is a lower-right bound, both of which make a box which the games then allows items to spawn in.

If that's the case, why do stages have "Item1E" and "Item1N"? I know Norfair has more than that. What are those used for?

 

[Jack Kieser]

Sorry for the double post, but...

It is now possible to (kind of) control spawn points of items! Allow me to explain. Early in this thread, there was a big debate over whether Brawl had a hard-coded list of spawn points for items on each stage, or if the game randomly/procedurally determined where an item will spawn. I'm happy to report that the answer is...

...BOTH!

See, in each stage PAC file, there is a section called ModelData[100], and nested deep within this file is a list of bones for each stage, some of which are assigned to item spawns. Using the positions of these bones (stored in (X, Y, Z) format under "Translation"), we can create boxes of areas where the game will allow items to spawn, at which point the game will randomly select a point inside this valid area to spawn items.

This is VERY important. This means that, with hacking, we can find the most balanced and fair areas to spawn items on each stage and restrict item spawns to only those areas!

In order to test this, anyone with Homebrew can download my hacked test PAC for Final Destination. This file restricts item spawns to the diamond in the middle of FD, high above the respawn platforms. Go ahead; turn Gooey Bombs on and see if any spawn on top of your Smash attacks now! The added height means you can react to item spawns, and the small central spawn area means that stage control is actually TOTALLY important (plus, the time it takes to go get an item and return to edgeguard means players recovering have a fairer time).

Test this out, and maybe we can hack all the spawn points to be fair and balanced on each stage!

(Above copypasta'd from OP. Many, MANY thanks to Eternal Yoshi for showing us this!!)

 

[Liquid Gen]

It works 100% and I love it.

I'm going to work on getting items to only spawn on Battlefield's top platform right now. <3 this

 

[MysteriousSilver]

I'd love if we could get this solid for every stage. It would totally change the way the game is played, but it'd be awesome.

 

[GHNeko]

This would make items even more legal in Brawl.

Good ****.

 

[AvariceX]

Not only would items be viable when controlled, they could fix a lot of this game's problems. Planking for instance would be a lot less viable if you couldn't grab the cracker launcher (or whatever) that only spawns in the middle of the stage.

 

[Jack Kieser]

Alrighty then. So, it sounds like hacking the spawn points is a good idea that people could get behind (I'm glad to hear that FD's basic hack works, too). Let's get to discussing where we could place stage spawns then. I'll update the OP to let people know the current pace of the debate, but let's do things in the order of the SBR-B Stage List for consistency's sake.

FD is pretty much done. Battlefield, anyone? Where do you guys think we should put the BF spawns? Remember: we're aiming for fairness here.

 

[MysteriousSilver]

Either top platform or center of the stage on the bottom.

I think that the spawn points should be located in the center most of the time, equally distant from spawn points for the characters, unless there's some kind of stage hazard.

For example, on Pictochat, it should be kept outside of the bottom-left, to give a sort of risk-reward for hanging out in an area where you could be hit.

 

[Lovely]

With modded spawn, some items are banned or in counter pick might switch, I think Bob-Omb or Deku Nut might be counter pickable, but those items kill at low percents, hmm.

 

[GreenFox]

I like this idea I think it'd be another way to play the game but no means replace what we have now for competitive play.

 

[adumbrodeus]

Middle of bottom of battlefield, it awards the player for maintaining control of the stage whereas top platform is generally the worst area to be, so spawning there is blue shell effect, to the point where it could encourage poor play depending on the items enabled and the match-up. Since blue shell effect is a primary critique of items in competitive play, bottom center, optimal position in the stage.

Oh, and logic is not inherently better than experimentation; they are two sides of the same coin. The IC infinite grabs are proof of that. On paper, they own. In practice, they don't. Logic can be a pointer towards how things SHOULD work, but that doesn't always mean that's how it WILL work. In a community that bans as a last resort ONLY, what actually happens is more important that what SHOULD happen.

If logic disagrees with experimentation, you are doing at least one one of them wrong.


Our community has issues with both.


They are two sides of the same coin, but they should always have the same conclusion.



That said, experimentation is inferior from the strict sense using a finite amount of tests due to the fact that you cannot prove a positive universal statement (ex. "all Xs are Ys") nor prove a negative existential one ("Z does not exist") while logic can do both.

With modded spawn, some items are banned or in counter pick might switch, I think Bob-Omb or Deku Nut might be counter pickable, but those items kill at low percents, hmm.

Worth considering, with set spawn points, there is no excuse for f-smashing the bomb as it appears, so the incentive is to cover the area, but not have an actual hitbox there.


That said... bomb-ombs, Deku nuts, and other powerful explosives still have the issue of being very overpowering, some tentative explosives maybe (the argument for banning gooey is gone), but not the powerful ones, at least in my opinion.

 

[Flayl]

I completely agree that there is no argument for banning gooey bomb with custom spawn points.

 

[Jack Kieser]

I'm pretty sure that if we place the spawn box as a pixel-high range just below the top platform (about as long as the platform, maybe a little smaller), we still shouldn't have a problem reacting to spawns, especially if you're using ground attacks. I mean, you might still have an unlucky Up-Smash, but on the whole that should be enough space. I'll look at the file and see if I can get it done; I have a presentation for class tomorrow, so I might need until tomorrow to fine-tune the placement (BrawlBox isn't very good at telling me where the X/Y/Z axis' are on a stage ).

EDIT: Ok, I added a test PAC for Battlefield. Let me know if I should change anything. DL Link is in OP.

 

[Tidal]

Isn't it possible to drop items from high up between the top and lower platforms onto the ground? I think if you were to do that you would have two safe spawn points.

 

[Zero_Saber]

I generally like the list of items (Neutral, Counterpick, and Banned). The only one I disagree with is the Hammer, not because I think it's too strong but because Ike and Marth can both completely negate any positive effects it gives the opponent. I know when I personally play with one of these characters and a hammer appears I let my opponent grab it then jump at them countering (it normally takes no more than 2 to knock them off the stage). While the opponent can just not grab it if the Marth/Ike player grabs it they get an incredibly powerful weapon that KO's at low percent.

Potentially all I am saying falls under what a Counterpick item should be, but it seems to me that 2 characters have a massive advantage over all others where this item is concerned.

 

[Vex Kasrani]

I generally like the list of items (Neutral, Counterpick, and Banned). The only one I disagree with is the Hammer, not because I think it's too strong but because Ike and Marth can both completely negate any positive effects it gives the opponent. I know when I personally play with one of these characters and a hammer appears I let my opponent grab it then jump at them countering (it normally takes no more than 2 to knock them off the stage). While the opponent can just not grab it if the Marth/Ike player grabs it they get an incredibly powerful weapon that KO's at low percent.

DDD can bair it and MK can tornado it, Hammer seems to lose to alot of moves, so if you think its not safe to pick up leave it alone lol.

 

[Jack Kieser]

Actually, there is NEVER, and I'll repeat it, NEVER a good reason to pick up a hammer (black variety). Most people don't realize this, but every single hammer swing animation in the game is beaten out by BASIC SHIELDGRABBING. Not even powershield -> grab is necessary. If your opponent actually picks one of those up, run to the nearest edge and camp; if he is smart, he'll stay away. If not, you get a free gimp (just bthrow and forget).

 

[Sleek Media]

Too long to read, but I get the idea. Now that someone has figured out how to "neutralize" item spawning, how about making them standard in tournaments and shutting up all the purist hardcore crybabies?

 

[Jack Kieser]

That probably won't happen any time soon since spawn point neutralization takes homebrew (or at least Smash Stack) to use, and most TOs won't want to go through all that effort for "mere items". It's a nice thought, but it has about as much chance of becoming standard as Balanced Brawl (which is really sad, because BBrawl is REALLY GOOD. Seriously.).

That's fine, though, since this project was never really intended to be a tournament STANDARD.

 

[MK26]

Controlled item spawns looks awesome.

...

Why not just have one long, thin box really high up for all simple stages?

 

[Jack Kieser]

Well, the simple ones are all neutral, and I suppose the only one that wasn't really "simple" was BF (due to the platform layout). The rest of the neutrals could benefit by just having a small box high in the center, but I still would ask for community input.

This always was a community project, and so we'll always want community input on big changes.