So, custom moves are a big problem we have to figure out awfully quickly. I've been talking to people and playing a whole lot these past few days, and here's basically what I'm seeing. Most people believe that custom moves are a promising system in terms of the gameplay, but the big problem is logistics. Very few have 3dses with everything unlocked, and most people have no real intention of doing the many hours of grinding to unlock Wii Us fully, especially TOs who own a lot of set-ups, and there's a big worry that solutions to this situation will just take too much precious tournament time to be viable as everyone has to go through the long process of setting up custom moves on a per character basis. Many players seem to believe that nationals won't solve these problems and will just ban custom moves and thus don't want to deal with customs on even a local level since they won't be legal at nationals. I'm here with the solution to the problems so they can be legal, but we as a community will have to do a bit of work getting it together.
@DeLux and I did some testing on the time tonight. Via stopwatch it took me 40 seconds to transfer custom moves for a character from a 3ds and only 20 seconds to build a new moveset from scratch with stuff already unlocked, and no, my menuing wasn't perfect or even close so this is the real time it would take for ordinary players. These are both fast and reasonable numbers, but we might be apprehensive about attaching this to every last set in a tournament and more critically we would need a fully unlocked 3ds for every set-up which would be very difficult to arrange. However, the Wii U has 10 slots for movesets, and these are stored once imported from 3ds indefinitely. I think the solution is in pre-loading these slots.
I propose we set aside the first 6/10 sets for the known most popular builds. It's just the nature of the balance of the game that a relatively small handful of custom builds will be used by the overwhelming majority of players. I propose a community project by which we decide on what the six best non-default builds for every character are on the basis of what would be popular to actually pick in a tournament. We can have each character board mull this over and decide on their character's top eight. Make all of these on a 3ds and before the tournament import them to every Wii U that will be used. Once these are in place which has to be done once ever, any player will be able to pick those common builds for a time cost of approximately 2 seconds (you just scroll down a list and click on which one you want). Slots 7 and 8 are left to 2222 and 3333 so moves can be explored more easily by all players in this early metagame. The last two slots are left free for players to import their own builds from their personal 3ds units if they want to be one of the odd ducks that doesn't prefer one of the mainstream builds though I would stress this will represent less than 1% of players. That 40 second loss to import is comparable to the time it takes to set up custom controls and a nametag, and it won't be one we eat very often.
Eventually this game will be hacked and we'll be able to unlock all custom moves automatically. I doubt it will even be that long; Dantarion is already rendering smash 3ds's files human readable, and Wii U hacking has progressed further than some might imagine (look up Mr. Bean's Mario Kart 8 hacks). When this happens, we'll be able to easily unlock all customs on all Wii Us and those odd ducks who don't like mainstream builds will take 20 seconds instead of 40 and will no longer be required to own a 3ds. That will be an improvement and it is inevitable that it will occur in the future so I believe we can not worry too much about the short term requirement for odd ducks who like strange builds to own (or borrow) a 3ds. That one facet of this is merely a temporary problem, and I don't think it's a terribly big one in the first place.
I believe this represents a complete solution to the logistical problems both in terms of move unlocking and in terms of set-up and selection time, and it scales indefinitely even to national scale events with ease (actually substantially faster to load up on each set-up than unlocking the characters and stages). We don't have a backroom so I'm not sure what powers that be we have around to help organize this project, but we should be able to get it done in a pretty big hurry and get things set up to actually use customs on a practical level without slowing down tournaments in any kind of way at all. If anyone sees any possible improvements to this proposal or has serious concerns, let's sort that out, and then once that's done, let's get cracking.
@DeLux and I did some testing on the time tonight. Via stopwatch it took me 40 seconds to transfer custom moves for a character from a 3ds and only 20 seconds to build a new moveset from scratch with stuff already unlocked, and no, my menuing wasn't perfect or even close so this is the real time it would take for ordinary players. These are both fast and reasonable numbers, but we might be apprehensive about attaching this to every last set in a tournament and more critically we would need a fully unlocked 3ds for every set-up which would be very difficult to arrange. However, the Wii U has 10 slots for movesets, and these are stored once imported from 3ds indefinitely. I think the solution is in pre-loading these slots.
I propose we set aside the first 6/10 sets for the known most popular builds. It's just the nature of the balance of the game that a relatively small handful of custom builds will be used by the overwhelming majority of players. I propose a community project by which we decide on what the six best non-default builds for every character are on the basis of what would be popular to actually pick in a tournament. We can have each character board mull this over and decide on their character's top eight. Make all of these on a 3ds and before the tournament import them to every Wii U that will be used. Once these are in place which has to be done once ever, any player will be able to pick those common builds for a time cost of approximately 2 seconds (you just scroll down a list and click on which one you want). Slots 7 and 8 are left to 2222 and 3333 so moves can be explored more easily by all players in this early metagame. The last two slots are left free for players to import their own builds from their personal 3ds units if they want to be one of the odd ducks that doesn't prefer one of the mainstream builds though I would stress this will represent less than 1% of players. That 40 second loss to import is comparable to the time it takes to set up custom controls and a nametag, and it won't be one we eat very often.
Eventually this game will be hacked and we'll be able to unlock all custom moves automatically. I doubt it will even be that long; Dantarion is already rendering smash 3ds's files human readable, and Wii U hacking has progressed further than some might imagine (look up Mr. Bean's Mario Kart 8 hacks). When this happens, we'll be able to easily unlock all customs on all Wii Us and those odd ducks who don't like mainstream builds will take 20 seconds instead of 40 and will no longer be required to own a 3ds. That will be an improvement and it is inevitable that it will occur in the future so I believe we can not worry too much about the short term requirement for odd ducks who like strange builds to own (or borrow) a 3ds. That one facet of this is merely a temporary problem, and I don't think it's a terribly big one in the first place.
I believe this represents a complete solution to the logistical problems both in terms of move unlocking and in terms of set-up and selection time, and it scales indefinitely even to national scale events with ease (actually substantially faster to load up on each set-up than unlocking the characters and stages). We don't have a backroom so I'm not sure what powers that be we have around to help organize this project, but we should be able to get it done in a pretty big hurry and get things set up to actually use customs on a practical level without slowing down tournaments in any kind of way at all. If anyone sees any possible improvements to this proposal or has serious concerns, let's sort that out, and then once that's done, let's get cracking.
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