On the topic of Fox/Falco hate

[JOE!]

Sveet, seeing as you're apparently the expert... who in the game solidly is a problem for the space animals?

 

[SunJester]

I think what really SHOULD put a nail in the coffin is that Sheik has already been nerfed. I know some people might say "lateral movement" or "her back throw is super good now!" but lets face it, she cannot endlessly chain throw over half the cast now. That's a nerf. This was a nerf needed so that the whole game didn't have to be rebalanced around floatier characters dealing with Sheik's down throw.

So now why is the game being balanced around two character with 12 years of meta-game development, who have no bad match-ups?

Its very inconsistent.

 

[Lex Jewthor]

I think what really SHOULD put a nail in the coffin is that Sheik has already been nerfed. I know some people might say "lateral movement" or "her back throw is super good now!" but lets face it, she cannot endlessly chain throw over half the cast now. That's a nerf. This was a nerf needed so that the whole game didn't have to be rebalanced around floatier characters dealing with Sheik's down throw.

So now why is the game being balanced around two character with 12 years of meta-game development, who have no bad match-ups?

Its very inconsistent.

Not that it matters much, but Sheik's imbalance was definitely a very unhealthy one. Chaingrabs to high percents on ANY character just aren't fun and don't promote good play, aren't difficult to pull off, and aren't fun to watch or perform. It looks to me like they tried to take a lot of CG's out. DeDeDe's is gone, a few of Marths from brawl are gone. While Fox and Falco have crazy options and can generally do stuff that's (almost) as guaranteed as a chaingrab is, it takes a lot more technical prowess, and is, admittedly, a lot more fun to watch from a spectator point of view.

I bring up spectators as that's quite an important part to any game that wants to have a scene. I play smash not only because I love playing it, but love watching it as well. I'd rather have spacies type play than some of the campy, run the clock type play Melee has been seeing with some of the Jiggs or Y. Links out there.

 

[leelue]

Does anybody tune out when they see Fox on screen or is that just me?
Seeing videos with the same character doing the same "why does this kill already" things is behind me. Zero excitement. Zero hype. All I get is "serves you right" if he loses.

On Sheik: I always found that confusing. People still play sheik. People still fear sheik. The reason why she was altered was different, but she shows the obvious truth: You can take the edge off and people still care about their characters (So long as they think it's fair at the end of the day). I remember Umbreon quitting sheik early, but idk he changed his mind. Probably because at the end of the day it wasn't *so bad*.
These things don't have to be so bad.

I would argue that the "completeness" of melee top tiers is design every character should aspire to have. We shouldn't make him less complete just because some characters aren't yet

I would prefer more well-roundedness, and less opportunity for polarization.

I play smash not only because I love playing it, but love watching it as well. I'd rather have spacies type play than some of the campy, run the clock type play Melee has been seeing with some of the Jiggs or Y. Links out there.

You didn't really post an opinion on fox changes, so excuse me while I imbue you with pro-spacie mentalities. I think you can have the same gameplay, but shave off knockback values here and there. Keep the gameplay the same, but make it so the end results arent so crazy. It'd be nice to live in a world where we don't have to have anti spacie tools on almost every character. Until then, I'll happily receive them, but it'd be nice.

 

[Nkguy01]

It's that shine brah...it kills at zero.

 

[leelue]

and
*list*

 

[Nkguy01]

I think what really SHOULD put a nail in the coffin is that Sheik has already been nerfed. I know some people might say "lateral movement" or "her back throw is super good now!" but lets face it, she cannot endlessly chain throw over half the cast now. That's a nerf. This was a nerf needed so that the whole game didn't have to be rebalanced around floatier characters dealing with Sheik's down throw.

So now why is the game being balanced around two character with 12 years of meta-game development, who have no bad match-ups?

Its very inconsistent.

Can shiek still down throw and jab-reset/ tech chase Falcon as easily as she used to?

 

[Nkguy01]

Does anybody tune out when they see Fox on screen or is that just me?
Seeing videos with the same character doing the same "why does this kill already" things is behind me. Zero excitement. Zero hype. All I get is "serves you right" if he loses.

Fox is a boring character to watch unless it's a player that knows how to use him in my opinion (i.e. Sfat, Uknown, Mango)...Also, Fox is a character that is more fun to play than to watch because pulling off all of the tech skill can be satisfying...at least if you're a nub like me.

 

[leelue]

falco is still kinda fun for me to watch, for what it's worth. But then again I'm not afraid of falco in this game.
I do think he's got blatantly stupid things, but playing sonic for so long made me desensitized to the bird some.

 

[Ace55]

So since we keep talking about 'anti-spacie technology' maybe it would be a good idea to gauge what people see as 'anti-spacie technology'.

Upthrows would be the first thing I would think of. In melee I estimate 90% of the cast has an upthrow that provides easy followups on spacies (and Falcon), in PM it's pretty similar. The good thing about this is that there is very little 'collateral damage', Against fastfallers it's a powerful tool, against the rest it only provides positional advantage. The bad thing is, spacies are some of the hardest chars to outright grab, so you'll need some way to force them into a position where you can grab them (techchase or combo basically). Melee DK has some of the best combos on spacies in the history of smash, but landing a grab is absurdly hard, so he still loses badly. So having an 'anti-spacie upthrow' certainly won't win you the matchup, but it does help a lot.

Second thing I would think of is absurdly good OoS options. Chars that lack a decent response to spacie pressure tend to get ***** by default. Chars that have have options like Bowser's/Snake's up-B OoS force spacies to approach the matchup differently. Again this won't swing the matchup if you're as bad as melee Bowser but give Falcon Snake's up-B and I feel the matchup would be drastically different.

Third thing would be techchase options. If Sheik wasn't as good at techchasing as she is spacies would **** her. Since they get put in a techchase situation after nearly every hit it helps a lot to be able to convert that into followups without needing a hard read.

4th thing: vertical combos. Obviously if you're going to combo spacies, you're going to need this. Much like the upthrows it's possible to keep the 'collateral damage' fairly low, because there are a lot of moves that will combo against them (and poor Falcon) only.

 

[leelue]

Two words
rhymes with Boning Attack

 

[traffic.]

Phoning Addicts

 

[B.W.]

Yesterday I was playing randoms. I never played Fox in Melee and I don't in P:M.

Needless to say when I randomed Fox I still felt the power. I also won every match as him with 2 or 3 stocks to spare. Fox is dumb.

 

[Vashimus]

Are you telling me you've never touched Fox in your life, even just to mess around?

 

[B.W.]

I've only ever played Fox getting him randomly.

 

[leelue]

I've played fox for probably about an hour and a half in my life

 

[Scythe]

He's pretty fun to play and learn, you guys are missing out.

 

[Strong Badam]

@Ace: The collateral damage isn't low. What happens when you give players tools to fight unfair characters based on their falling speed is that other characters with similar falling speeds are then unfairly punished due to the existence of the unfair characters. Wolf, Falcon, and to a lesser extent Lucas suffer heavily for no reason other than Fox/Falco exist. And Wolf is a very, very well designed character and it'd be shame to give him more bull**** just because of such a cycle when it's a simple task to address the real problem.

 

[Phaiyte]

Yeahhhhh that's probably one of the most unthoughtout things I've read in a long time. It's probably just one of those things that sounded good to him at the time until he sees the damage otherwise.

 

[leelue]

He's pretty fun to play and learn, you guys are missing out.

No

Also I haev no techskill I press B & down B to win tournament matches

 

[Phaiyte]

No

Also I haev no techskill I press B & down B to win tournament matches

I think you have to press A sometimes though

 

[leelue]

You must know about me, Junior

 

[Ace55]

@Ace: The collateral damage isn't low. What happens when you give players tools to fight unfair characters based on their falling speed is that other characters with similar falling speeds are then unfairly punished due to the existence of the unfair characters. Wolf, Falcon, and to a lesser extent Lucas suffer heavily for no reason other than Fox/Falco exist. And Wolf is a very, very well designed character and it'd be shame to give him more bull**** just because of such a cycle when it's a simple task to address the real problem.

Two and a half other chars is low imo, compared to the size of the cast. I still haven't heard how Fox/Falco could be nerfed without alienating spacy mains and still making a difference. Obviously PAL spacies would be fine with me (I'm used to it) but I still feel that would hardly make a difference. I don't feel like PM spacies are much better than PAL melee spacies.

 

[Phaiyte]

Well that's awesome and all, but feelings are not facts. Taken from everything you've said so far, I can see that you've probably never played a real fighting game on a competitive level, so I can partially understand why you think the way you do. Hurting characters that are already scratching where average should probably be is just not cool though, and is obviously not really the best answer. Wolf, Falcon, and Lucas are all in really good spots right now, and that shouldn't change just because you shed a few tears. It doesn't matter one bit what you think of the "collateral damage". If it's not broken, it's generally not a good idea to just go ahead and break it.

PAL does in fact make a huge difference though. Shorter range on Fox's upB means it's straight up easier to kill him with the entire cast. Easier to edgeguard/hog/knock him away from edge range/whatever. I'm not entirely aware of the rest of the actual differences because I've never messed with PAL myself, so I don't really have much else to say on that matter.

 

[The_NZA]

Two and a half other chars is low imo, compared to the size of the cast. I still haven't heard how Fox/Falco could be nerfed without alienating spacy mains and still making a difference. Obviously PAL spacies would be fine with me (I'm used to it) but I still feel that would hardly make a difference. I don't feel like PM spacies are much better than PAL melee spacies.

I don't know, I'd say making them all work 20% more for each kill at least makes it a bit easier. And it does nothing to alienate them.

Just look at those Armada Mango games. God forbid I say it, but Armada was WAY outplaying mango's fox. And still, in games I think 2 and 3, Mango still made it look close with a couple usmashes out of nowhere.

Also, SB's point is really really important. You might think 4-5 cast characters isn't that much collatteral, but the point of PM is that no cast member should be horrible collateral if possible. The extent with which anti-spacie technology needs to be silly to make things fair means heavy characters like wolf need to be silly in order to compensate, or they will be unplayable. That's an issue. More of an issue than maintaining spacie supremacy.

 

[Ace55]

Well that's awesome and all, but feelings are not facts. Taken from everything you've said so far, I can see that you've probably never played a real fighting game on a competitive level, so I can partially understand why you think the way you do. Hurting characters that are already scratching where average should probably be is just not cool though, and is obviously not really the best answer. Wolf, Falcon, and Lucas are all in really good spots right now, and that shouldn't change just because you shed a few tears. It doesn't matter one bit what you think of the "collateral damage". If it's not broken, it's generally not a good idea to just go ahead and break it.

PAL does in fact make a huge difference though. Shorter range on Fox's upB means it's straight up easier to kill him with the entire cast. Easier to edgeguard/hog/knock him away from edge range/whatever. I'm not entirely aware of the rest of the actual differences because I've never messed with PAL myself, so I don't really have much else to say on that matter.

'Real fighting game' as in not smash lol. If that's what you mean I have very little interest in traditional fighting games.

And thanks for schooling me in a game you don't know/play. I'm not gonna even get into that with you. Get PAL melee, play it for a couple of years then come back to me.

I never even stated that I thought these are changes that should be applied. I was just curious what people mean by anti-spacy technology and stated a few things what I think are obvious examples. As far as I care Fox/Falco are fine the way they are, and I've stated that numerous times.

 

[Bryonato]

Phaiyte is just a troll. It's best to ignore him.

 

[Deleted member]

On Sheik: I always found that confusing. People still play sheik. People still fear sheik. The reason why she was altered was different, but she shows the obvious truth: You can take the edge off and people still care about their characters (So long as they think it's fair at the end of the day). I remember Umbreon quitting sheik early, but idk he changed his mind. Probably because at the end of the day it wasn't *so bad*.

Sheik is always going to be feared as she is now because she's an extremely good character. That said, I think PAL sheik is an even worse design than the NTSC version. NTSC sheik, whether your character can be chaingrabbed or not, is just really, really good. Your best bet to beating her from a strategic standpoint is to abuse her weak approaches and to movement camp her, but once she gets you she can make up for that difficulty. PAL sheik is the same way except once she gets you, you light shield until your problems go away. Even if she's relatively better than a good portion of the cast, her lack of a punishment game makes her extremely polarizing around how well you can lame her out. Even if she's good, it's horrible going into every set knowing that you're going to struggle to do anything meaningful to the opponent.

I promised to not play project m until sheik's downthrow was fixed, and it was with a different method. That's why I changed my mind. If her downthrow was still the same as PALs I would not be playing this game. It was that bad.

I'd much rather watch YL and jigglypuff camping each other for 80 minutes in a set than watch fox and falco blink at each other. You can only watch the same 2 characters going through the motions for 60%+ of sets at every tournament for 5+ years before it gets so fucking boring.

 

[leelue]

I firmly believe that melee purists have done immeasurably more harm to this game than good.

 

[EpixAura]

The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to like the idea of just weakening space animals' kill potential.
Obviously, we can't change the things that make them... them. Shine, Nair, Falco's Dair, Fox's Uthrow Uair, and the like. We also don't want to change things that force spacie mains coming here from Melee to relearn things about the character that conflicts too heavily with Melee, such as recoveries and hitboxes.
The best option seems to be nerfing the knockback values on things like Fox's Usmash/Uair and Falco's Fmash/Bair. Since being able to do a running Usmash with the Cstick makes Fox incredibly overpowered for new players, it would also help to accommodate them into the game as well (Hell, even the best of us can get caught in an Ushmash->Usmash->Usmash combo with some of our fastfallers). Of course, this is more of an icing on the cake thing than the real intention.

 

[leelue]

We also don't want to change things that force spacie mains coming here from Melee to relearn things about the character that conflicts too heavily with Melee, such as recoveries and hitboxes.

Personally I think that when someone goes to play a new game they should welcome the opportunity to learn something new with their characters.

 

[The_NZA]

But leelue, if you really consider it, you are going to lose (many would argue) important players who might not even give the game a chance if it messes too much with teh fundamental way they play their most practiced character. And who knows, maybe M2k wouldn't have given PM a chance if Fox and Falco weren't the same. Now that he has––he's showing an interest in Ivysaur. Thats how you get people into the scene (if the scene matters much to you).

 

[TheReflexWonder]

In that theoretical situation, maybe those Melee players should play the game because it's better than Melee, rather than because it allows them to just play Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo GameCube with very little extra effort. The game is supposed to be a spiritual successor to Melee. If you need a character to be EXACTLY like the original in order to play it, you probably don't care much about the new game itself.

 

[The_NZA]

Hey I agree with you. I want these melee players to switch over, advance the meta game of some character that could use their well trained minds and all.

But I think realistically, you need the fox and falco to resemble their melee gameplay in order for the gateway drug to take effect. That's what'll get an M2k's to play Ivysaur.

But maybe you are right, and maybe the'll adapt. Maybe they'll enter the tourney's for the money if shine starts on frame 2 or 3 instead of 1, or if it lacks the invulneraility it seems to have.

The whole "comboability of these characters" argument that people use to explain their absurd design and kill power is so silly when you consider you have to grab them with most characters to begin these combos.

 

[leelue]

But leelue, if you really consider it, you are going to lose (many would argue) important players who might not even give the game a chance if it messes too much with teh fundamental way they play their most practiced character. And who knows, maybe M2k wouldn't have given PM a chance if Fox and Falco weren't the same. Now that he has––he's showing an interest in Ivysaur. Thats how you get people into the scene (if the scene matters much to you).

I don't give a **** if M2K "plays" project M. Because he doesn't. He picks fox and effortlessly uses him as another paycheck.

Drawing M2k < Making the best game possible.
The game is enjoying a glorious amount of success without needing an influx of popular spacie mains to make it so.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

The thing is, though, we (the designers) aren't specifically making a game to get M2K to play it. We're making a fun, fresh, reasonably balanced game that captures what made Melee great, and that should be good enough for such a player to give it a real shot.

EDIT: leelue with the steal!

 

[leelue]

The thing is, though, we (the designers) aren't specifically making a game to get M2K to play it

I definitely feel like I had the opposite argument with a pmbr member on smashmods back in the day. I feel like it was perceived that if M2K and Mango and Armada and HBox didn't like the game, it would fail. Which is proving to be wholly untrue.

I'm glad you'r a progressive pmbr member, but you have to know your opinion isn't shared by enough of you guys.

 

[The_NZA]

Hmm, I defintiely find it interesting to hear one of the developer's philosophys. To be honest, I don't really have a stake in watching mango or m2k play and I'm actually psyched that armada chose to play Pit. It is an exciting thing to watch. If you want to make Fox less silly, be my guest. I'd happily still play and praise your game, and it will still likely be my favorite smash brothers experience.

Love what you guys have done with Ness by the way (I think there's a bit more room for growth, though).

 

[Scythe]

you guys know there are plenty of long time melee players that do enjoy PM and don't play melee mains right?

 

[The_NZA]

I don't think that's in argument. Obviously silent worlf and others have come and picked new characters. The current discussion is about whether melee character vets need to be retained in order for the goal of drawing in Melee vets into the fold.

I don't really have an opinion on the discussion.