-Dealing with lowered gravity when approaching and landing
-Air stalling due to lowered gravity
-Dealing with low traction and sliding on Ice
-Camping/Stalling behind permanent walls
-Stalling on one-of-a-kind ledges(electric)
-Camping from nearly unapproachable positions(electric)
Approaching around permanent walls, approaching around a unique camping position... There's more to it, believe it or not.
Are these really skill sets that will actually make the metagame more competitive? I believe otherwise.
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All the skills that these four stages require are not limited to their stage of origin. They are skills that improve a player's abilities on all other legal stages as well. The skills PS2 teaches are either already excellently taught on other stages or are PS2 exclusive and do not improve a player's abilities on other stages. Looking at the adversities that PS2 forces onto a player shows just this.
I'm going to stop you right here.
So what? So what if the skills are limited to that stage? There are a wide variety of skills that are limited to only one stage. In case you haven't noticed, RC is the only stage that forces you to deal with walkoffs, long-standing sharking, and such "extreme" stage movement. Halberd is the only stage still left that makes you deal with random hazards. Only certain stages enforce the skills behind sharking. But here's the thing-it doesn't matter. Even if only one stage enforces a certain part of the overall brawl skillset, it's still beneficial to overall game depth (as long as the stage doesn't severely detract from game depth by removing most other skills, as is the case on stages like Mario Bros). Just because it's "unique" doesn't make it banworthy, or even anything other than more competitive. Think about it-PS2 not only heavily reinforces the basic spacing/zoning/stage control/etc. skills that you need on every competitive stage with the simple platform setup of the neutral segment, it
also enforces other skills. This argument is akin to decrying yoshi's inability to jump OOS a "yoshi-exclusive skill" and wanting to ban it because of that. No, it's part of the game, including it doesn't remove depth but rather adds it, and you cannot separate like that.
Now, if the individual parts of the stage made it less competitive, you'd have an argument... Oh wait, here we go.
The lowered gravity on Air Transformation greatly hinders many character's approaches and decreases the amount of options they have in most situations. When approaching as most characters, floating in the air unable to fall out of the way of your opponent's next attack is always a bad position to be in and will almost always lead to you taking guaranteed, reliable damage. Is setting up generally unstoppable frame traps that can only be performed on PS2 Air really a necessary skill? The answer is no its not.
Oh ****. You just went and said it. "Necessary Skill". So what
is a necessary skill, eh? I have a problem with people saying "oh, this and that is not a necessary skill". What about DI? Is that a "necessary skill"? We should remove DI from the equation by forcing people to not momentum cancel or DI after they get hit. What about zoning and spacing? We should make the game a row of free hits; loser dies first. These skills cannot be called unnecessary for some reason, but the skills that PS2 brings to the table can?
The logic behind calling a skill "unnecessary" is simply not present. If it's in the game, it's necessary. The
only excuse for mitigating it is in cases like Perfect Planking, IDC, or Mario Bros-where it is so broken that all other skills would be neglected in favor of this one, and that would lower game depth.
Neither is approaching under low gravity. If we're gonna say playing under lower gravity enhances the competitive aspect of Brawl, then we might as well begin legalizing "Altered Gravity Counterpicking" and let the loser of a match choose to go normal, high, or low gravity on their counterpick. And that isn't happening anytime soon as we all know. The skills that PS2 Air exclusively brings to competitive Brawl are stage specific and do not help the metagame whatsoever.
Massive straw man. There's a difference between severely changing the game's mode of play and simply allowing people to choose a stage where certain physics aspects are changed from time to time. I'm not saying that playing under lower gravity enhances the competitive aspect of brawl, I'm saying that the ability to choose a stage that has this feature, along with others, does. Note the difference there.
Air stalling? Does it need to be stressed? Does it improve the "competitiveness" of Brawl? It doesn't. Why on earth would we want to stress stalling when the most obvious goal of most rulesets is to minimize over-stalling in matches?
Well first of all, most rulesets aren't doing that specifically to stop stalling, in case you haven't noticed. "Anti-stalling" rules?
Ledge Grab Limits, Anti-Scrooging clauses, the banning of stages like Bridge of Eldin, Temple, Corneria, and 75m, and part of the damn MK ban issue that STILL hasn't died have been all because of stalling.
Whoops, no. LGLs are because planking, as a tactic, is broken (for MK; it really should be an MK-only LGL). Anti-Scrooging clauses are rare. BoE and Corneria are banned for completely non-stalling related reasons; all 4 of them are banned for broken tactics. Nice try.
SECOND OF ALL. If such stalling is the most potent tactic in brawl, and not directly anticompetitive, then there is no reason to
de-stress (we're not the one changing the base position of the game here, you have to remember) it by banning stages where it works slightly better. Not to mention that PS2 is about as helpful in stalling as PS1 or Delfino.
And finally, you're missing a few things. The air segment causes the type of "the air is lava" position jockeying that is almost never seen elsewhere. You have to control your space on the ground extremely carefully, in a way that is rarely seen elsewhere, because if you leave the ground, it may be quite a while before you get back down. It makes fighting against chars like Snake or Falco a whole new ballgame. It reinforces strong positions, and for some characters allows very new ways of playing–just for example, let's take Sonic.
Sonic is RIDICULOUSLY GOOD on air. His fast ground speed means that if he wants to approach from the ground, he can. His upB and run speed ensures that wherever you are in the air, assuming he has good control over himself in low gravity, he can go and **** you over. Throw in that uair and you have a very dangerous character. And finally, with his spindashes, he has great horizontal momentum in the air, and with his dair he can get back to the ground basically at will. This segment of the stage, with its low gravity, allows for entirely new ways of playing for him-his air chasing has never been this good.
If you can't see how a character with aggressive tools like this on air doesn't provide something new and unique; or how this doesn't raise depth by forcing the opponent to deal with **** like this and getting sonic mains to learn the stage.
Low traction. It affects spacing and makes most normally reliable options very unreliable on shield. What does this give to the metagame? It can arguably force players to look for better, more reliable options that they normally wouldn't have looked for. But once they go back to stages without decreased traction they have those old, reliable options again, and the new, low traction options are now rendered inferior to the old ones. New approach options on a low traction surface add nothing to the "competitiveness" of the game at all.
...Wut? Not quite.
What ice does is nothing less than forcing the player to heavily reconsider the options that work. Unless both they and their opponent are virtually constantly airborne, they have to rethink their game plan at least slightly. **** that never worked before will now work, and certain strategies (especially those relying on shield pressure) work far worse. They have to figure out something entirely new. Case in point: MK's Jab. As far as I have seen, MK's jab on ice is amazing. Why? Because if you slide forward while doing it, the opponent gets trapped and can't SDI out or shieldgrab it. And when the last hit hits at close range, you can automatically get a free dsmash out of it. This is an entirely new option to watch out for. You have to be more careful when blocking too-things like UpBooS doesn't work nearly as good in this situation because you slide around so much. Plus there's the higher chance of tripping, which means especially chars like Olimar or Fox have to figure out something new on the segment in order to not slip around like morons.
Camping/Stalling behind walls. When is this ever going to be used outside of on PS2 Ground? PS1 Rock and Fire, and those were already reason enough to make PS1 Counterpick in two smash games.
Eeehhhh... Hate to break it to ya, but:
-PS1 is a counterpick in Melee because it's obscenely good for fox
-PS1 is
rarely a counterpick in Brawl, and should be a starter as well.
-Delfino reinforces this, as does RC, and Frigate at times.
Why would we further stress camping when stages like Japes and FD already stress them further than PS2 does? This skill also gives nothing to the metagame.
Neither does zoning. Remove all stages that have an emphasis on zoning plz. These skills give plenty to the metagame.
...Of course, the argument is ridiculous. You want an example of how this adds to the metagame? By forcing players to approach you on it. Prime example: Lucas. Lucas can force an approach from anywhere on ground. It's not impossible to approach from ground. It's hard, sure, but not impossible.
Stalling on PS2 Electric's ledges is obviously PS2 specific and is such a simple "skill" that it not only does not affect any other skills in Brawl, but it is on the same level as circle camping as it is arguably nearly unpunishable with your added options on the ledge.
Yes, stalling on it is easy... Care to put that to the test? In 10 matches, I bet you I can take the center from you at least once, or punish you on the ledge once. That is, you can't camp it perfectly. Also, approaching is hard
but not impossible. And, as usual, the stage forces you to
rethink how you play the game. It's common knowledge now how to camp electric, but for a pressure-based character like Fox, camping there might not be obvious. And for some characters, who are just bad at camping a position like that (again, fox is a good example), they have to think up new strategies to deal with this. For example illusioning through the person in the center a few times, or
something.
Camping on electric is no different than camping on any other stage outside the coveyer belts that get in the way on the main stage. Camping against someone on the right ledge should and in most cases will result in thirty seconds of stalling until the stage changes back to neutral, as the person on the ledge is miles away from a platform to escape onto and puts themselves at heavy risk when attempting an approach. From the left ledge the person can jump onto the left-most platform and approach from there. Regardless, the player in the center controls all platforms with juggling/sharking options and can only be approached via very unreliable and easily countered methods. Is camping from a position like this really necessary when few, if any situations in the game actually recreate a similar situation? It's a nice position to be in, and I know we all want to be in the middle controlling the match, but it gives nothing to the metagame besides a short 30 second stall-fest amongst all the thousands upon thousands of matches that will be played in the future on stages other than PS2. It hardly seems significant enough to use an ultimately stall-or-die part of a stage as justification for "neutralizing" it.
THEORYCRAFT WARNING. Seriously, this is purely theorycraft, and it's not even
good theorycraft (you
cannot cover the platform on the left effectively while holding your position in the center unless you're someone like Snake with C4, and even then it's questionable how long you can do that). And again, if you're willing to claim that this adds nothing to gameplay, I'm willing to claim that the lack of platforms on FD adds nothing to gameplay and that therefore FD should be banned.
So what skills does PS2 give to Brawl that increase the "competitiveness" of the game again?
N-O-N-E, NONE.
Proven extensively wrong in the rest of the post.
The most consistently stressed skill on this stage is stalling and no new, non-PS2 exclusive ones are stressed at all. Now going by your ideologies, "the more skill-sets the better" and "only skill-mitigating aspects should be banned from tournament play", PS2 should remain Counterpick and not move up to neutral. The skills that it requires almost solely focus on stalling. IIRC, stalling is a "skill" that mitigates all other skills in the game. So why does a stage that emphasizes stalling during a fourth of the match deserve to be a neutral?
It's skills focus on stalling in some matchups, but even then, you're spending well over half of the match on the "neutral" part of the stage. And if you're going to ***** about
that, then ban SV and FD. And again, I've shown you exactly how other skills can be stressed in a severe way on this stage.
It certainly seems to give characters who can camp and stall a clear advantage with a guaranteed 2 minutes of stalling per game.(MK on beginning of Rainbow Cruise anyone?)
In theory. Except that the characters that can camp and stall are usually the ones who aren't that good at camping
all 3 types of camping here.
inb4BPCposts"It represents what a neutral should be–****ing neutral."again.
You still haven't shown my why this isn't the case. The stage is
amazingly neutral in playtesting. Like, if you actually play on it and know what you're doing. You can theorycraft all you want; I could theorycraft Jiggs up to C tier and Brinstar as a
completely broken stage for Link. Doesn't matter when all the playtesting says "you're wrong".
