Project M Social Thread

[Sanity's_Theif]

One question, was it ever found out how to extend the length of Link's clawshot to Melee Length?

Ok 1 more, anything on melee wall tethers? Or was that deemed impossible?

 

[standardtoaster]

Sniperfox is streaming Project M now.

 

[RaphaelRobo]

Toaster, what's your avatar? I've been wondering for a while. It feels like something I've seen before, but I can't remember what it is.

 

[9Kplus1]

It's kawaii, my nigg

 

[MonkUnit]

One question, was it ever found out how to extend the length of Link's clawshot to Melee Length?

Nope, haven't found out how to lengthen Link's clawshot, Lucas' snake, and/or Samus' grapple.

 

[kaizo13]

what about resizing Link's bombs?
they look like deku nuts in brawl

 

[Deleted member]

I think you missed the point of my post Max. I R Marf's post insinuated that he found these character traits to be overly abusable, and outside his definition of the bounds of acceptable character potential. I parodied these points as an example of the sort of pre-existing and even grandfathered-in levels of character absurdity that we're trying to balance characters against. I don't think Zelda's OP. I don't think Fox is OP. You raise a good point that the propensity of spacie-killer moves being liberally applied across the cast is in need of investigation, but the fact that the spacies, by and large, have options to simply not be in those situations in the first place makes that a difficult line to walk. It's the goal we've set for ourselves, though. I'm awaiting the proliferation of these characters in this demo to get widespread feedback on where these ideas stack up. I don't believe they're completely finalized, but I have confidence that they're moving in the right direction, and that they're close to where we ultimately want them to be.

I think you're going in the right direction too. I merely want you to consider the validity of the arguments that you come across. Even if they are unreasonable, people playing your game is not necessarily based on profound reasoning. The rest of my post is just a poke at perspective. Unfortunately, making a game that is perfectly balanced and making a game that is perfectly enjoyed are not likely to be the same.

The fact is, the characters you grand-fathered in have all been neutered in some way or another, with the prior-mentioned combos on fox, removing sheik's downthrow, marth's lack of stage presence, being restricted to non-brawl recoveries and so forth. I R Marf "found these character traits to be overly abusable, and outside his definition of the bounds of acceptable character potential" and I understand that logic. It has been at the soul of all of my recommended changes so far, even down to the same problem that I brought up about ROB a couple months ago. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I don't think he's far off either. Zelda is REALLY close to that line. Like if her anything was even just a little better I'd be saying the same thing except unlike I R Marf I have a basic grasp of phonics so it might sound more reasonable.

I think you're misreading the post. Because you suggest you disagree with Yeroc at the beginning, then make exactly the point Yeroc is trying to make, albeit with less irony. The point is that if you don't think Fox is OP, then Zelda is not OP, and you should stop complaining about her as though she is. You don't seem to think either is OP, so where are you even going with this?

You didn't even try to understand where I'm coming from, I have no interest in answering you legitimately.

 

[KingClubber]

Toaster, what's your avatar? I've been wondering for a while. It feels like something I've seen before, but I can't remember what it is.

Senki Zesshou Symphogear

 

[I R MarF]

Fox is overpowered. He has an extremely powerful pressure game and doesn't have any weaknesses which factor into his playstyle. Punishment susceptibility would have, but exceptionally safe moves and high mobility negate any such weaknesses and shine or whatever seems too useful. It has invincibility frames, is jump cancellable, hits on frame 1, and reflects projectiles. It also is capable of gimping some characters entirely on its own, from 0%. It guarantees followups or combo escapes in many situations unparalleled by the rest of the cast and should be more situational.

See how easy that was?

Inserting Fox into my original paragraph doesn't really prove anything for several reasons.

1st, You have failed to realize that Fox's weaknesses HAVE actually factored into his playstyle. Foxes must apply consistent technical skill, pressure, and unpredictability to conceal his punishment weaknesses. You probably view this as a "LOL its no different than Zelda teleporting to negate her mobility issues!"

But it is different. Fox's weaknesses encourage an emphasis on his strengths. It promotes particular playstyles over ones that could expose his weaknesses. This what makes characters like those viable in Melee interesting; when you play them, you have to learn how to correctly focus on their strengths and find a playstyle that is both comfortable for the character and yourself.

With Zelda, I don't get that sense of deep design or learning curve. Her mobility issues should be compensated by an emphasis on her other strategies, such as closing gaps and controlling space with projectiles. The teleport completely ignores this idea because IT IS a method of high mobility. As a result, it doesn't emphasize her existing strengths but lazily rounds off her game. This is why I disagree with the teleport.

2nd, Fox is the best character in SSBM. His punish game is absolutely broken and there are other characters that give more perfected examples of a weakness/strength system mentioned above such as C. Falcon, Marth, Ganon, etc.

However, I find it almost hilarious that you decided to switch out the words with Fox... almost as if you are suggesting that Zelda and Fox correspond in their level of brokeness.

However, I assume you're trying to say through your post that: "Fox is even crazier, but you aren't complaining about him!"

But that is a really poor message if you think about it. Its coming off as a justifcation for lazy, overpowered, and imbalanced design. Complaining about a character the P:M team has ABSOLUTE control over is completely reasonable. Fox being left in his imbalanced state (for the time being) is justified by fanbase interest and reference purpose. Using Fox as a shield against "Thats OP!" complaints is nothing short of an excuse to protect the poor design of other characters.

Your goal should be to make these characters a bare minimum in terms of viability (like mid tier at best) and work from there. Not buffing everything. They should also be designed in the respect of Melee characters who have strength/ weakness interactions in their playstyle. I have great faith in this project and I can see excellent design in characters like Snake and Sonic, but some of your other characters like Zelda and ROB are disappointing in their lack of apparent weaknesses.

 

[JCaesar]

Why don't you wait for the demo and play the game before you jump to conclusions? Pit would be a much better example of a character with no apparent weaknesses than Zelda or ROB btw.

 

[Master WGS]

Quick question -

Since Demov2 should be arriving within a relatively short while, I'm gathering up some color/texture hacks to throw on some characters. Unless the P:M team has altered skeletons or whatever for their purposes, so long as the textures I use are Wifi-friendly, I should be okay, right?

Spoiler

Or am I totally off-base and should I avoid textures all together?

 

[standardtoaster]

Yes, you should be fine.

 

[Eternal Yoshi]

Pretty sure there are posts that explain why changing others to have the bare minimum viability don't work out in the long run.

Long story short, the metagame ends up being a hollow copy of Melee's, and you now have less to refute away the "Just Play Melee" people and ultimately ends up being a waste of potential.

 

[I R MarF]

Why don't you wait for the demo and play the game before you jump to conclusions? Pit would be a much better example of a character with no apparent weaknesses than Zelda or ROB btw.

Could you disclose their weaknesses? And I am not alking about something like "ROB's big" but an actual fundamental weakness that calls for playstyle adjustments for compensation like C. Falcon's lack of defensive options or Marth having poor high percent game etc.

 

[I R MarF]

Sorry for double post

Pretty sure there are posts that explain why changing others to have the bare minimum viability don't work out in the long run.

Long story short, the metagame ends up being a hollow copy of Melee's, and you now have less to refute away the "Just Play Melee" people and ultimately ends up being a waste of potential.

But I am actually very curious if you could elaborate why minimum viability as a starting point/ Melee esqued design would not be effective. The appeal fo new characters in a melee setting seems like the main driving point here. Not amazing overbuffed characters.

 

[Eternal Yoshi]

Err.... I just gave you one reason, the metagame not having enough to distinguish itself from Melee's metagame due to the Melee Top tiers winning almost everything again.

They have a lot more years under their belt and it will be almost impossible for a newcomer or a not Melee top to catch up to respectable levels. Making them mid tier at best only makes this much worse.

 

[I R MarF]

Err.... I just gave you one reason, the metagame not having enough to distinguish itself from Melee's metagame due to the Melee Top tiers winning almost everything again.

They have a lot more years under their belt and it will be almost impossible for a newcomer or a not Melee top to catch up to respectable levels. Making them mid tier at best only makes this much worse.

I see where you are coming from. But do you understand how I disagree with buff everything approaches?

 

[curry9186]

Was Link's multi-stab removed?!?!?
The guy's on SNPR's stream can't get it to work.

 

[Eternal Yoshi]

It wasn't removed.

Going to sleep now.

 

[Oldeeber]

can some1 post the link to sniperfox's stream? i cant find it..

 

[ajajayjay]

http://www.twitch.tv/sniperfox1

 

[curry9186]

http://www.twitch.tv/sniperfox1


GAH! Friggin' ninjas

 

[kaizo13]

all he had to do was scroll up

 

[ph00tbag]

You didn't even try to understand where I'm coming from, I have no interest in answering you legitimately.

Unlike you, I can forgive you for not understanding where I'm coming from. If you did, you wouldn't have even bothered responding, since I said exactly what Yeroc is saying, and your response to him would have sufficed. The only difference between me and him is simply that I don't particularly find your post particularly salient, given the context.

The fact is, the argument you're trying to have has already been had. I know this for a fact, because I tried to have it nearly a year ago, and it had already been had even at that point. The absurdity of Melee Fox's options is the benchmark for acceptability. Near as I can tell, that's no longer up for debate.

Err.... I just gave you one reason, the metagame not having enough to distinguish itself from Melee's metagame due to the Melee Top tiers winning almost everything again.

I think the goal, if I'm reading Marf correctly, would be to also bring the S tier down a notch. Technically, I think removing Shiek's CG is a decent step in this direction, but then again, that's in contrast to the unstated goal of making everyone approximately as good as Melee Fox.

 

[Yeroc]

MarF, the reason I make my point the way I do is that Fox, in particular, has "weaknesses" that are inherent to playing the game of Melee. The degree to which he gets punished is more severe than say, Peach, but the decisions involved in mitigating the risk factors he faces are the same decisions that other characters have to make, on top of shoring up their inherent character flaws.

But Fox has tools that even help him cover these shortcomings. He has low range but he makes up for it with insane running speed and overall mobility. Getting grabbed is usually a particularly bad thing for Fox, but he has his shine, which is the safest move in the game, to both keep him out of trouble and even give him a hand with shirking it when he does get caught. Getting hit period usually costs Fox a lot more than other characters, but again his mobility is so nearly unparalleled that he is the single most capable character in "just not getting hit in the first place."

Other characters do not have many of these luxuries. Falcon's lack of a projectile forces him to adopt an unfavorable and risky playstyle against some charaters. Marth has to constantly be looking for opportunities to kill his opponent before completely losing the ability to KO anybody for the better part of the usable damage spectrum. Jiggs doesn't get comboed easily but dies to being sneezed on at times. These are shortcomings that these characters have to accept, and deal with accordingly, on top of the usual punish and avoid being punished. Fox is a single-minded killing machine who happens to get killed slightly more easily than others if he makes a mistake.

In practical scenarios, these differences don't amount to a large discrepancy, but it's there. Fox is in a whole different league of characterization. We're trying to balance a cast full of designed, systemic weaknesses against a character that's limited, essentially, by the fact that there's a human controlling him.

 

[nawgui]

It's somewhat ridiculosu to structure a game around the current top tier, then to suggest to "tone-down" said top tier. The problem with this is the same as troubleshooting a network in networking. When faced with an issue or trying to solve something (not to say that this is an "problem") you never change more than one thing at a time, that is to say then, you don't know if you actually solve your original issue given that you might have fixed it, but then broken something else because you altered another thing. You have to do one thing at a time.

In this scenario then, you can't balance the rest of the cast with the bar being current top tiers, then nerf the top tier. How will you ever know that you correctly balanced the rest of the cast then, or nerfed the top tier the right amount? It is either one or the other.

 

[I R MarF]

MarF, the reason I make my point the way I do is that Fox, in particular, has "weaknesses" that are inherent to playing the game of Melee. The degree to which he gets punished is more severe than say, Peach, but the decisions involved in mitigating the risk factors he faces are the same decisions that other characters have to make, on top of shoring up their inherent character flaws.

So you are saying that Fox's primary weakness is something the entire cast shares anyway? 1st of all, I already said that Fox is not the best example of an ideal strength/ weakness system. 2nd, my entire post was to show how Fox has to consider his weaknesses when forming an ideal playstyle in COMPARISON to Zelda/characters who are not clearly designed with a weakness to overcome. I think you may have missed my point. and 3rd, Fox's air speed and fallspeed are most definitely weaknesses which separate him from most of the cast. Few characters can be combo'd or gimped at Fox's percent ranges. Its also worth mentioning that Fox players are not typically able to recovery with just their jump giving their recovery a layer of predictability which increases the farther away they get hit from stage.

But Fox has tools that even help him cover these shortcomings. He has low range but he makes up for it with insane running speed and overall mobility. Getting grabbed is usually a particularly bad thing for Fox, but he has his shine, which is the safest move in the game, to both keep him out of trouble and even give him a hand with shirking it when he does get caught. Getting hit period usually costs Fox a lot more than other characters, but again his mobility is so nearly unparalleled that he is the single most capable character in "just not getting hit in the first place."

Again, Fox favors his strengths in the idea of compensation for his weaknesses. Trying to tell me that Fox is a great character with a ton of options is a moot point when I've been trying to say that he is at least applying different aspects of his game to work with them. Again, my point in my post was to show how Zelda applies MOBILITY to overcome MOBILITY weaknesses. This is the issue here.

Other characters do not have many of these luxuries. Falcon's lack of a projectile forces him to adopt an unfavorable and risky playstyle against some charaters. Marth has to constantly be looking for opportunities to kill his opponent before completely losing the ability to KO anybody for the better part of the usable damage spectrum. Jiggs doesn't get comboed easily but dies to being sneezed on at times. These are shortcomings that these characters have to accept, and deal with accordingly, on top of the usual punish and avoid being punished. Fox is a single-minded killing machine who happens to get killed slightly more easily than others if he makes a mistake.

Why are you telling me this when I completely agree with you?

Evidence I agree with you...

2nd, Fox is the best character in SSBM. His punish game is absolutely broken and there are other characters that give more perfected examples of a weakness/strength system mentioned above such as C. Falcon, Marth, Ganon, etc.

Also, your post in confusing, you say that everyone gets punished, yet proceed to say that Fox still gets punished harder. Is it a weakness or not?

In practical scenarios, these differences don't amount to a large discrepancy, but it's there. Fox is in a whole different league of characterization. We're trying to balance a cast full of designed, systemic weaknesses against a character that's limited, essentially, by the fact that there's a human controlling him.

Where are these systematic weaknesses? What's Zelda's? ROB's? etc?

And why would you balance a cast just around the BEST CHARACTER IN THE GAME? He is a single character that in no way represents the other 98% of the cast and all other possible MU combinations. I agree that making sure these new characters can compete is important, but with Fox specifically shouldn't be the be all end all. I do hope that one day, Fox and Falco are given slight adjustments either similar to PAL or new adjustments to lower their broken level.

But seriously, where are these weaknesses?

 

[jalued]

Where are these systematic weaknesses? What's Zelda's? ROB's? etc?

And why would you balance a cast just around the BEST CHARACTER IN THE GAME? He is a single character that in no way represents the other 98% of the cast and all other possible MU combinations. I agree that making sure these new characters can compete is important, but with Fox specifically shouldn't be the be all end all. I do hope that one day, Fox and Falco are given slight adjustments either similar to PAL or new adjustments to lower their broken level.

But seriously, where are these weaknesses?

I generally cant think of any fundamental weakness with zelda. I would personally prefer it if her upB didnt have an end hitbox, so she would have to either sweetspot or ledge cancel to have a safe recovery. Especially considering she can cancel her upB animation with a dash (from what i saw on sniperfox's stream) she doesnt need an amazingly good recovery as well as great onstage control

She does have a few problems against rushdowns, but any character that cannot do this will probably be a walkover for her

Having said all this, it's too late to go changing things without delaying the demo significantly, and maybe with time more flaws will be found.

 

[Wavebuster]

The reappearance hitbox doesn't actually come into play a great deal when recovering with that move. You deny her the option of sweetspotting the edge by edgehogging, and ledge invulnerability is so generous that it's easy to avoid this hitbox that way. If she has enough room to be totally unreachable out of the teleport, then it's quite likely she started the teleport in a position where you could have easily interrupted it offstage. It's not a fast move at all.

 

[Dark Sonic]

Mobility is still an issue for Zelda. A slow *** teleport is not good for just moving around in short bursts, which is really what you need to be considered "high mobility." Yeah she's hard to pin down because of the teleport, but she's not exactly hitting you with it.

Btw the trend in fighting games is for low health characters to end up being higher tiered than high health characters. This is because for some reason game developers have this notion that low health is an adequate balancing tool for giving characters super absurd neutral game option (and thus being less likely to be hit in the first place). Low health (or in smash's case, low survivability) is a minor weakness. It does not dictate your playstyle, but mearly lowers it's effectiveness by making litterally everything slightly more risky. You do not "compensate" for having low health, you basically just play normally and deal with the fact that you have a lower margin of error by...trying to not mess up.

 

[Yeroc]

It's somewhat ridiculosu to structure a game around the current top tier, then to suggest to "tone-down" said top tier. The problem with this is the same as troubleshooting a network in networking. When faced with an issue or trying to solve something (not to say that this is an "problem") you never change more than one thing at a time, that is to say then, you don't know if you actually solve your original issue given that you might have fixed it, but then broken something else because you altered another thing. You have to do one thing at a time.

In this scenario then, you can't balance the rest of the cast with the bar being current top tiers, then nerf the top tier. How will you ever know that you correctly balanced the rest of the cast then, or nerfed the top tier the right amount? It is either one or the other.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Nerfing the top tier would not be sufficient by itself to level the playing field, you'd still have to buff a lot of characters. By using the top 7 characters in Melee as our benchmark, we really are in a sense optimizing our workload. It's also preserving the play mechanics that have carried Melee over its 10 year lifespan with almost no signs of slowing down, I might add.

The original idea for the project was taking the existing metagame and improving it through better character diversity and balance. It was decided pretty early on that aside from smallish tweaks (Sheik's dthrow being the largest and it's arguably not small) we wanted to preserve the gameplay of the top tiers in Melee as much as possible. Making them worse would almost certainly destroy that. I agree that it would probably be easier to do that, though.

Let me take a moment to refine my earlier point. The difference between weaknesses in a character like Fox and a character like Zelda is that Fox's weaknesses only affect his performance, while Zelda's weaknesses affect her capabilities, which is what limits her performance. Compensating for a lack of mobility by playing defensively isn't the same thing as employing your versatility to play as offensively or defensively as the situation dictates to avoid being combo bait.

I was one of the developers pushing for more capability across the cast in an effort to balance against Melee top tiers at high competitive level. It isn't just about Fox. My examples tend towards Fox though because of the absurd ridiculousness that character represents. We want to approach that level of capability, but do so in ways that allow for there to still be character weaknesses that have to be overcome.

 

[Stunts]

Nice to see that this thread is rated five stars again

Are you guys announcing any more new characters?

 

[Shadic]

We plan on it, yes.

 

[`dazrin]

~1 week remains.

See you at Manifest, shadic/ matt#s :D

 

[Shadic]

Just as a note: The CSS that I'm bringing to Manifest is NOT the Demo 2 roster. Don't think I'm being cute and playful about that fact and secretly hope that I'm lying. I'm not.

And I am planning on bringing my recording setup. So we'll see how much matches I can get. I'm still trying to figure out how the get the thing 100% operational, honestly, so.

Using a Pinnacle 500-USB and Flash Media Live Encoder to record matches, because it's the only recording software that I can actually get to recognize my capture device for Audio Recording. If anybody is super experienced in that stuff, contact me tonight via IRC (Shadic on the P:M server, I'll likely be online even if I'm not on #ProjectM), AIM, and MSN. So.

But yes, the benefit of me having a working recording setup: Having recorded P:M matches of whatever top players I manage to seduce over to trying Project M. It's a two-day tournament and I plan on recording during all of it, (plus friendlies afterward) so.

 

[lordvaati]

But that's only if this Mango-skill-leveled Mario player plays lesser skilled players. If the player plays someone of equal skill using a better character, the better character would still have the higher chance of winning (barring character counters and whatnot), hands down. (If Mango were to split in two, one using Falco while the other using Mario, pretty sure that Falco would win by a significant margin.) So if a player could be winning lower-level tournaments with Mario, then that player would probably still be better off playing a higher tiered character in higher-level tournaments.
All in all, a significantly worse character (compared to a top-tier) would always be the inferior choice unless the player has put so much time into that character and disregarded the high tiers. But for top-level players, they know how the high tiers work, and will probably always do better with the high tier, given that the character tier gap isn't too big.

heh, reminded me of this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltqgP-Xgceg&feature=related

I'm just really lurking, so I have a few questions:

1.since Melee kirby was.............well, you know, will he even recieve any changes really(besides maybe getting Burner dash back)?

2. what are you going to do with DeDede, since he's the fastest faller with huge grab range a whatnot?

 

[nawgui]

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Nerfing the top tier would not be sufficient by itself to level the playing field, you'd still have to buff a lot of characters. By using the top 7 characters in Melee as our benchmark, we really are in a sense optimizing our workload. It's also preserving the play mechanics that have carried Melee over its 10 year lifespan with almost no signs of slowing down, I might add.

The original idea for the project was taking the existing metagame and improving it through better character diversity and balance. It was decided pretty early on that aside from smallish tweaks (Sheik's dthrow being the largest and it's arguably not small) we wanted to preserve the gameplay of the top tiers in Melee as much as possible. Making them worse would almost certainly destroy that. I agree that it would probably be easier to do that, though.

Let me take a moment to refine my earlier point. The difference between weaknesses in a character like Fox and a character like Zelda is that Fox's weaknesses only affect his performance, while Zelda's weaknesses affect her capabilities, which is what limits her performance. Compensating for a lack of mobility by playing defensively isn't the same thing as employing your versatility to play as offensively or defensively as the situation dictates to avoid being combo bait.

I was one of the developers pushing for more capability across the cast in an effort to balance against Melee top tiers at high competitive level. It isn't just about Fox. My examples tend towards Fox though because of the absurd ridiculousness that character represents. We want to approach that level of capability, but do so in ways that allow for there to still be character weaknesses that have to be overcome.

Sorry for any ambiguity I might have had in my original post. I am all in support for your position and what the PMBR is doing, my response was more for Marf's. I'm saying you can't use top tiers as a benchmark for so long then go ahead and nerf said top tiers (although it just sounds like Fox/Falco mainly according to his position). My original metaphor is that it is usually bad to try to balance something by changing two aspects at once, especially when one was reliant on the other (top tiers being the benchmark for the rest of the cast) You have to go with one or the other. The PMBR is going with balancing the cast around top tiers, therefore they should continue doing so (especially since I feel that it offers more diversity and balance in the same way that you do), and not nerf top tiers, as Marf suggests they should.

 

[9Kplus1]

DDD's grab range has been "Meleefied" (i.e, the hitbox has been adjusted to match DDD's hand). Aside from that, he's gotten many other changes, particularly his sped up Fair, the ability to AGT Waddle Dees / Doos, and the absence of superarmor on his Up B. DDD, currently at least, is a character based mostly around range. Picture Marth, but substantially heavier, larger, more kill power, far less mobile, and with multiple jumps.

 

[Sneak8288]

DL virtual audio cable and it will make the sound work with other programs

edit: @shadic, my quote function failed me

 

[Shadic]

DL virtual audio cable and it will make the sound work with other programs

Won't let me forward my Capture Card's line for some reason. Already tried.