Proposed Ruleset for Smash 4 Tournaments

[Grim Tuesday]

A tournament in Smash that had "Only flat non-walkoff stages" wouldn't be scrubby if it was being done because the TO wanted to have it specifically test character vs character with nothing interfering (Note: Not player vs player. That happens even with stage hazards/items/whatever)

I don't really care for a debate on whether scrubby is the right word or not, because it honestly doesn't matter. As long as you agree that this is equally as valid as a liberal stage list that keeps most of the stages legal, I'm satisfied.

The justification being used in the ruleset here is that allowing stages with stage hazards tests player skill less effectively. That's scrubby because it's been explained many times why stage hazards don't reduce the skill cap -- leaving it as "I don't like to deal with it so I want it banned".

Hold on, this conflicts with the above statement that a TO who wants to test character vs. character with nothing interfering isn't scrubby. Which statement do you stand by?

 

[LiteralGrill]

If the answer has to be "both sides can never agree" like it's being suggested heavily in a lot of recent posts, why not include "but both sides won't treat each other poorly this time" to that criteria?

I know I have plans for the 3DS scene where I'll probably run a more liberal stagelist. It's not a problem until someone from another board comes in and tries to bash everything I do can call me a scrub, stupid, idiot, etc. (Especially an etc. Don't EVER call me an etc.!) and starts ruining the events for everyone enjoying them (which has happened often in the past.)

If that at least could happen, it would be satisfying.

 

[MopedOfJustice]

By the way...why the heck does a tier list matter to you so much? I've never let a tier list decide the fate of me picking a character in any game. You're probably going to look under my profile and say "Oh ahaha ya sure buddy, you play as MK in Brawl". I choose characters based on my personality or taste. Meta Knight was always my favorite Nintendo character back in the SNES days, and seeing him as a playable character instantly made me want to play as him.

Me too. I always liked the Meta Knightmare speed-runs, and he was the second character I used (I always play as Kirby in my first match of a new Smash game). I find that a character's style and, well, character is often very often the base of how they fight, along with how they actually fight in there own games. For that reason, I find that if you like and are more inclined to a character's style, then that character's fighting style should come easily to you. I just hope that MK is more like how he is in Kirby games in terms of his actual attacks (give him Link's dair, make his neutral-A the sword combo, make Mach Tornado white, etc).
This, of course, doesn't apply to characters like CF or Fox or GW, but it applies to Mario characters, Kirby and MK, Link and a some others.

On a side note: Does anyone else agree on the "Pending" system Raykz and I suggested?

 

[LiteralGrill]

On a side note: Does anyone else agree on the "Pending" system Raykz and I suggested?

I'd agree if there was a safeguard that "forced" people to take the stages that were no longer pending. Most TOs won't have any reason to force their players to learn a new stage when they are already used to the stagelist they have.

 

[MopedOfJustice]

I'd agree if there was a safeguard that "forced" people to take the stages that were no longer pending. Most TOs won't have any reason to force their players to learn a new stage when they are already used to the stagelist they have.

Well then, you make it sound like the only option is to have all of them legal until banned, which would end up something like this:
Player loses on a strange but balanced stage he was unfamiliar with.
Player complains that the stage is unbalanced (which isn't actually known at that point).
TO takes note of this complaint.
After a couple tournaments, TO has complaints for several different stages, often many for each. He realizes it's either eliminate the "offending" stages, which he actually knows little about, on a technical level, or let his tournament die of the infectious gay-saying (word spreading of a stage being bad or "gay," with no evidence).
He picks the former.

 

[LiteralGrill]

Well then, you make it sound like the only option is to have all of them legal until banned, which would end up something like this:
Player loses on a strange but balanced stage he was unfamiliar with.
Player complains that the stage is unbalanced (which isn't actually known at that point).
TO takes note of this complaint.
After a couple tournaments, TO has complaints for several different stages, often many for each. He realizes it's either eliminate the "offending" stages, which he actually knows little about, on a technical level, or let his tournament die of the infectious gay-saying (word spreading of a stage being bad or "gay," with no evidence).
He picks the former.

Normally what other fight game communities do is still leave it there for quite a while to see if anyone can get around the strategy. MK's nado was deemed 100% unpunishable at one point for example, but it was proven later after much testing there was a solid punish method anyone could perform.

I'd recommend if a TO sees there is a problem and is getting complaints, give them to the stage experts and give them some time to solve the issue. If they can't and the stage involves you either doing it or losing, it should be banned.

BUT you sadly are correct that unfortunately it will more then likely turn out that way as it has been in the past. TOs need more of a backbone so real testing can happen, but few will do so sadly

 

[[Corn]]

Normally what other fight game communities do is still leave it there for quite a while to see if anyone can get around the strategy. MK's nado was deemed 100% unpunishable at one point for example, but it was proven later after much testing there was a solid punish method anyone could perform.

I'd recommend if a TO sees there is a problem and is getting complaints, give them to the stage experts and give them some time to solve the issue. If they can't and the stage involves you either doing it or losing, it should be banned.

BUT you sadly are correct that unfortunately it will more then likely turn out that way as it has been in the past. TOs need more of a backbone so real testing can happen, but few will do so sadly

Im actually a bit interested. What solid/reliable thing can be done to punish the Nado? Only thing that pops up is characaters with large pivot grabs or attack him from above.

 

[LiteralGrill]

Im actually a bit interested. What solid/reliable thing can be done to punish the Nado? Only thing that pops up is characaters with large pivot grabs or attack him from above.

Just make sure you have exact context here, back then you just ran into people and used Nado, you never moved back a bit afterwards because it was supposedly 100% unbeatable and MK players had no fear.

But certain moves of certain characters do outprioritze nado and just stop it, you just gotta learn your main for those, I can't list them all. (But a random Kirby one for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plz8RN5FoNw)

There was once a video for a "universal" method but I can't find it. I was fortunate and didn't have MKs in my area so I never learned a lot of it when I played seriously.

 

[Overswarm]

Im actually a bit interested. What solid/reliable thing can be done to punish the Nado? Only thing that pops up is characaters with large pivot grabs or attack him from above.

You can run in, shield, and spot dodge at the end at the right time with any character to punish. If the tornado is going to autocancel it has to be high enough to where there are multiple frames of MK falling that you can grab or attack him out of.

Any character can attack the tornado from above, but that's mostly irrelevant.

To combat the tornado you basically walk away from the nado, run forward, shield and tilt your shield up so it doesn't shield poke, and then spot dodge at the appropriate time and punish when you are out of your spot dodge (leaving your shield up after costs you precious frames, so time your spot dodge correctly).

 

[MopedOfJustice]

Just make sure you have exact context here, back then you just ran into people and used Nado, you never moved back a bit afterwards because it was supposedly 100% unbeatable and MK players had no fear.

But certain moves of certain characters do outprioritze nado and just stop it, you just gotta learn your main for those, I can't list them all. (But a random Kirby one for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plz8RN5FoNw)

There was once a video for a "universal" method but I can't find it. I was fortunate and didn't have MKs in my area so I never learned a lot of it when I played seriously.

Cool, can Green Missile or Green Tornado do that?

 

[LiteralGrill]

Cool, can Green Missile or Green Tornado do that?

Test it and find out, I got no idea XD

 

[metalmonstar]

Some story stuff

I get that you are trying to present that we should give everything a fair shot before ruling it out and that one of the biggest flaws in this community is how we make decision based on hunches and "peer pressure," but I just have to comment on the little story. I have never changed my ruleset at the start of a tournament due to some update from smashboards or any other entity. The ruleset is in place long before the tournament starts and the players willingly came to the event knowing of the ruleset. Next tournament, sure I will look into adjusting the ruleset but certainly not on the fly like that.

I would like to treat Smash 4 with a clean slate. Melee and Brawl are pretty much lost causes at this point. No one is going to want to go back and test stages.

I say for the first couple of weeks we leave all stages unbanned. We note who wins and which character for each stage to get an idea of how things are shiping up. Then we allow multiple bans depending on the size of the stage list. We note which stages are being banned. From there we should have a good idea of which stages are starters, counterpicks, and possible bans. We keep this up until we have a reasonable and scientific stage list and ruleset.

I think we should have a seperate process for items. Items is more of preference rather than being game breaking. I think it we start of with this alternate format it will stick better rather than going "no items" then reconsidering 3 months later and trying to make a legitimate format out of it.

 

[Overswarm]

You seem to have a tenuous grasp of what these words mean, or at least defining them. Stalling is more than the act of making the game unplayable. In competitive play, it's about avoiding the fight with the other player in order to win the match (by whatever margin). Camping is not only making the game difficult for the opponent. If we stripped other essential aspects of another concept, edgeguarding could be defined as making the game difficult for your opponent, or even just slapping the controller. Camping is isolating yourself from the other player while still preserving the fight (such as firing at the other player.)

I literally wrote the definition for what Stalling is. It's copy/pasted into nearly every tournament you have or ever will enter.

he act of stalling is banned: stalling is intentionally making the game unplayable: Such as becoming invisible, continuing infinites, chain grabs, or uninterruptible moves past 300%, and reaching a position that your opponent can never reach you.

Camping is a colloquial term that focuses primarily on the course of non-action as an active and participatory (to mean non-mandatory) function in competitive gameplay. I.e., "he's not attacking me, he's just sitting there by the edge".

He doesn't have to approach. He doesn't have to attack. There's never been a rule for this because not only is it not enforceable, it degrades gameplay.

If you want to invent your own definitions of stalling and camping, go for it, but I don't care to hear them.

Once again I get a notification from someone who didn't read my post. I don't recall ever saying I think stalling is not fun or unfair, though I admit to some degree I do. However, I do remember saying stalling is bad gameplay because it makes the game no longer becomes a fighting competition, but a cat and mouse one.

"You didn't read my post, but you happen to be spot on", then?

It's painfully obvious where your motivation comes from.

If you were a general, everyone would line up in red coats and take turns firing at one another until there was a victor.

Smash is about mobility and character strengths. If you can win by running away with Akuma and throwing out fireballs and teleports, do it. If you can win by running away with Wario until you get a fart charged, then waiting for your opponent to make a mistake and dealing 46% in one go? Do it. It's what the game is designed around. No one cares if you get your underwear all bunched up because people aren't holding the control sticks towards each other the entire match.

I would agree on a minimal level the anime fans are using the same reasoning as I am, in that we're both using preferences to guide what we think should be legal. However, those preferences are greatly different. I think the competition should be almost strictly between the two players. I am not sure exactly what their guiding preference is, but if they also think that the competition should be between two players, then I am not sure how allowing the opponent to recover is competitive.

Preference has not place in a stage list. None. Absolutely none.

Their reasoning is the exact same as yours. Literally the exact same.

"I don't like it, and that's not what I consider an honorable fight". The difference is only that they're just slightly more scrubby than you are. They see someone going off stage and stopping the recovery as a huge roadblock that no one should have to overcome. It doesn't matter to them that others can overcome it; they don't want to deal with it.

You're the exact same. Wario running away? Olimar having trouble on Rainbow Cruise? Boo hoo, this is awful and dumb and I want people to attack each other! No one should have to overcome camping and running out the timer, amirite?

You're an anime convention kid.

I guess it isn't inaccurate to say that if the crowd doesn't want to see edgeguarding, it will probably be banned. With that being said, I don't see how your reasoning follows:

Oy.

Quilt believes stalling removes the aspect of fighting between the players, but I, OverSwarm, am going to disregard that and say he doesn't like it because it isn't fun or fair.

Incorrect. Overswarm corrects his definition. I don't care what Quilt says or thinks. We have a standing definition, I wrote it, it was approved by about 40 people in the BBR and used in tournaments for years.

Some anime fans think edgeguarding isn't fun or fair.

This is known as an "example". They aren't important, it's their faulty reasoning that is.

Quilt and the anime fans don't think something is fun or fair.

Don't care about what they think, care about their reasoning.

Therefore, we (?) should ban edgeguarding.

AGHAGLKGLHSKG.

NO.

You're like that kid in class that reads Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and throws a hissyfit because he believes it's immoral to eat babies no matter bad a food shortage could be.

Oy.

*WOOSH*

There are forms of stalling that can sometimes be dealt with, but they are still a significant detraction from the match, making the time a benefactor rather than your ability to approach or at least KO the other player.

Which is FINE. Seriously. There is nothing wrong with camping. Stalling, by the way, literally has no counter. If you're stalling you cannot be stopped reliably, consistently, or reasonably. If you can pick up Wario and win every match against everyone by just running around all day, DO IT! Show that it's actually stalling and not just playing smart. Once you show that it's uber and unstoppable, it can be focused on on the ruleset.

Why ban camping? Why ban stages that allow more camping than others? Why ban edgeguarding? Why ban chaingrabs?

If you're going to ban one for your current reasoning, you're in line to ban all of them. The beginning and end of your reasoning is "personal preference". "I feel" and "I think" can get the hell out of a ruleset discussion.

I don't think stalling is good for the game for stated reasons, but I never said stop stalling, and you are making a bad comparison when you put my stance on the same level as someone that wants something removed (especially altogether!) I really believe that certain forms of stalling are hard or impossible to penalize (perhaps due to being able to recognize intention), so making them illegal would have little consequence.

I don't even know WTF this paragraph means. You wrote an entire paragraph that says nothing.

Actually, we more often than not do make rulesets that appease people (the success of this varies.) The latter in your statement is usually a result of the former.

Making a ruleset to appease people results in a super small community or a super large community, both with ****ty rulesets. If we're making rulesets to appease the masses, I'm running all stages FFAs with items and making bank on the entry fees.

I never once said that some stalling is unskillful, I said it is a win that isn't based on fighting skill, and most competitive players in any fighting game are only interested in fighting skills.

P.S. This thread makes me sad

What, exactly, do you think "Fighting Skill" is? Actually, nevermind. I don't care. Because there's no such thing as "fighting skill". There's winning and losing, period. You can win by playing well and lose by placing worse than your opponent. That's competition.

There's no honor. You chaingrab, you edgeguard, you camp, you spam projectiles, you pick the best stages possible, and you do it over and over again until you're shown to be so unstoppable that a legislative body has to stop you.

That's competition.

 

[[Corn]]

You can run in, shield, and spot dodge at the end at the right time with any character to punish. If the tornado is going to autocancel it has to be high enough to where there are multiple frames of MK falling that you can grab or attack him out of.

Any character can attack the tornado from above, but that's mostly irrelevant.

To combat the tornado you basically walk away from the nado, run forward, shield and tilt your shield up so it doesn't shield poke, and then spot dodge at the appropriate time and punish when you are out of your spot dodge (leaving your shield up after costs you precious frames, so time your spot dodge correctly).

I knew of the method, but Ive never really seen it done reliably.

Reminds me of the AntiMK planking thing.

 

[Chiroz]

Long Post

So are you advocating for playing Smash 3 minute timer, all items on all stages or am I getting something wrong?

Obviously preference has no value on ruleset (yes I know you said stage list but you also quoted the group of kids who didn't want edgeguarding which is part of a ruleset they created themselves,so you obviously believe preference should not be a part of any rule making).

If preference has no value then you shouldn't change a single thing about Smash once you open the box.

Why put the mode on stocks? It allows matches to actually have a victor and not end in draws you say? What's wrong with draws? You cannot decide a victor? But what is wrong with that??? What is wrong with having everyone just draw each other?

Oh, it is more competitive to have a winner? Is it really? How is it more competitive? Both players are still practicing their very best to get better each day and they still use all their skills to win every game they play, the options just don't allow them to break ties most of the time because they are limited.

So wait, you say we should do stocks? Blasphemy, don't go including your preferences in my Smash!

There is no 100%, completely objective reason without any hint of preference as to why we should use stocks, or why we should ban Hyrule Castle, or why Wario Ware should be banned.

So is it really more competitive or more logical sound to play with stocks than with a timer? With items off instead of on?

Not really. The competitive players just prefer the game to be decided by the skill of the players and not by arbitrary modes or elements included in the game.

This is why we make rulesets. To keep the parts of the game we like and mold the game to be the one we desire it to be. In this case, we want a game that has to do about certain skills involving the confrontation between 2 players and the physics allowed by the programming in the game. Sometimes these things are overshadowed by other elements such as random spawning items or infinite chaingrabs and so we as a community discuss and decide whether or not these elements that detract from the skills we prefer overstep the imaginary boundary we have set ourselves for "dealing with it".

If they do it will end up in a ban, if they don't they will probably end up included in the game, albeit maybe with some limits or maybe not.



Edit: Just as a note I will say this. There is no correct way of playing Smash, stop sounding so elitist. People can play the game the way they want to between their friends. If a group of kids wants to play with no edgeguarding, they can, you are no one to tell them that is wrong.

I used to play on Hyrule Castle, only Pokeballs and Hammers, only Marth on 5 minute timer with my cousins before I started getting serious. But I wasn't playing the game wrong, I was doing what I preferred. Me and my cousins came up with this ruleset through many hours of playing and noticing what we preferred and what we didn't. We obviously loved swords as we would only pick Marth, Roy and Link and we are (or were) huuuge Pokemon fans which lead to pokeballs being included, it was our own ruleset and we were happy with it. As I kept gaining experience at the game my taste changed and as I got a better understanding of the game and wanted to play with people of much higher skill level, I adjusted and so did my own preferences.

The competitive scene is just that, a biiig group of friends. Or not friends to be technical, rather people who agree to have the same mindset towards the game. With this mindset come a certain set of preferences, which most of the time agree, at least to a certain degree. These preferences are then enforced into a ruleset, but not everyone share the exact same preferences, which is why these discussions arise.

 

[Overswarm]

I knew of the method, but Ive never really seen it done reliably.

Reminds me of the AntiMK planking thing.

I did it all the time with ROB. It won't work if you don't have a full shield (if you don't you have to powershield the initial hit), but it's workable. Most have other ways of getting around it (such as character-specific moves). Tornado really isn't that good, it's just a noob destroyer.

So are you advocating for playing Smash 3 minute timer, all items on all stages or am I getting something wrong?

The latter.

Obviously preference has no value on ruleset (yes I know you said stage list but you also quoted the group of kids who didn't want edgeguarding which is part of a ruleset they created themselves,so you obviously believe preference should not be a part of any rule making).

If preference has no value then you shouldn't change a single thing about Smash once you open the box.

Let's see where you're going with this...

Why put the mode on stocks? It allows matches to actually have a victor and not end in draws you say? What's wrong with draws? You cannot decide a victor? But what is wrong with that??? What is wrong with having everyone just draw each other?

Oh, it is more competitive to have a winner? Is it really? How is it more competitive? Both players are still practicing their very best to get better each day and they still use all their skills to win every game they play, the options just don't allow them to break ties most of the time because they are limited.

So wait, you say we should do stocks? Blasphemy. There is no 100%, completely objective without any hint of preference as to why we should use stocks, or why we should ban Hyrule Castle, or why Wario Ware should be banned.

So is it really more competitive or more logical sound to play with stocks than with a timer? With items off instead of on?

Not really. The competitive players justprefer the game to be decided by the skill of the players and not by arbitrary modes or elements included in the game.

This is what we in the business call "stupid" and "obtuse".

When we refer to competition, we aren't talking about "hey let's see who has the longest big toe on their right foot" style competitions. We're talking about people practicing and training and inevitably playing with a ruleset that brings about consistent victories without having any overcentralized aspects of the game that drain from the playerbase or metagame.

Stock was determined primarily because "Time" victories fit into an equalized distribution model, while Stocks inevitably produced a positively skewed distribution. This in itself makes Stocks more competitive. While Time matches would work just fine when there are large degrees of skill (I would never lose a time match to a 2 year old, for example), as the difference in skill (S) becomes smaller, the distribution equalizes along that group. If you were to run a Swiss format tournament 3 rounds in or so in both a positive and negative direction, you would find that each subgroup would have a definition of S that closer to 0 the deeper you go. The closer S is to 0 means that the outcome of each individual game is less indicative of future victories, or at least should. For Time matches, the closer S is to 0 means that the outcome of each individual game is less indicative of future victories... but S doesn't have to be anywhere closer to 0 for that to be the case.

For stocks, it is the opposite; the closer S is to 0 is directly proportional to how little a correlation there is between one victory and another. If you ran a Swiss format event, each individual group may have an S that leads closer to 0 but it doesn't effect the distribution. It's an inherent flaw in Time matches. Because Time rewards the "last hit" (so to speak) regardless of player input (two players could be fighting as hard as possible, but a 3 minute timer would not allow them to finish a 6 stock match, for example), you get an incomplete data point and an inability for S to properly define itself outside of broad terms. In stocks, S = 0 would mean that the games could trade back and forth, but even an S of 0.1 would be enough to create consistent results. More importantly, Stock matches correctly define S and can do so at a rapid pace.

One downside to Stock matches is that at the very tip-top of play, or whenever two independent parties that lack information are playing, there is a staggering drop-off in the importance of individual games. This is because as skill increases, the factors that result in a win or loss are compounded. Winning or losing an individual game doesn't really matter that much unless your S is very close to 0. In reality, most Grand Finals sets are already determined by the time you're there; the players just don't know it yet. Proper analytics will allow you to correctly determine the victor in common sets. How often do you see your #1 and #2 players fight each other, and how often can you call who will win? Probably fairly often.

Because S can only be properly defined when a lot of information is at play, we typically have larger sets for finals. 3 out of 5 or 5 out of 7, typically. You'll find that before S is properly defined, matches are closer to random distribution, but as a set goes on the better player typically wins out.

Edit:

Quick example. You vs. the best player in your region (or whomever). 1 stock match of a 99 stock match. You get 100 tries. Which is more likely to net you a win?

The 1 stock match, because S isn't properly defined.

Now same question. You vs. the best player in your region (or whomever). Standard 3 stock 8 minute match, or a 3 minute match? 5 minute? 8 minute? 20 minute?

The longer the timer the closer defined S is, but still not as accurately defined as in stocks.

This is why we make rulesets. To keep the parts of the game we like and mold the game to be the one we desire it to be.

This is incorrect. If this was the case, every ruleset would be different and random characters would be banned just because people hated them. Rulesets aren't a popularity contest. They're impartial. They have to be, otherwise the result of the tournament is pointless.

In this case, we want a game that has to do about certain skills involving the confrontation between 2 players and the physics allowed by the programming in the game. Sometimes these things are overshadowed by other elements such as random spawning items or infinite chaingrabs and so we as a community discuss and decide whether these elements that detract from the skills we prefer overstep the imaginary boundary we have set ourselves for "dealing with it".

If they do it will end up in a ban, if they don't they will probably end up included in the game, albeit maybe with some limits or maybe not.

That is incredibly arbitrary and has absolutely no place in a ruleset. If you disagree, I'll fly you out to a tournament here and you can play under the Overswarm ruleset of "this guy can't chain grab because he's good at it, but this guy can because it doesn't cause anyone trouble" and "he can't play on FD because he has pocket ICs".

Rulesets are impartial, or they're worthless.

The only "preference" based decision you could really call out that I know of is the exclusion of items, but even then that's not so much preference as it is historical precedent. Items were originally banned because they spawned explosive capsules and boxes and the like. They were tried in Melee and the final straw was Eddie (midwest Ganon) warlock kicking and a box spawned, he hit it, it exploded, he died. That's what banned items. Before that it was west coast vs. east coast, one for and one against.

Brawl tested out items extensively as well, including items tournaments and several BBR discussions. We looked heavily into their usage. At the time we believed to have found a trend of items spawning towards the losing player; I'm not sure if that is correct at this point in time. We found that Smash Balls and items spawning near the player (as well as people that were behind literally spawning with their final smash) resulted in "rubberband" play that was inappropriate for a competition because it did the same things time matches did: pushed for an equal distribution. This time on a stock level rather than game level. Another big thing that we saw but didn't get into much was the fact that items could be picked up accidentally during spawn; this was huge to me, but we didn't look much into it. Seeing Chu Dat's Sonic pick up a heart out of the air randomly with an attack was an alarming thing that pointed to random results as a possibility.

That said, I'm not against items being used. I personally think that Brawl would have been a lot better WITH items and we would have been able to get a much more healthy scene. Brawl has a ton of ATs using items and it would have pushed Brawl in a new direction that would be more familiar to outside players, but we have a lot of historical precedent for lack of items that's hard to turn around and we had preliminary evidence that items were causing a rubberband effect as well as many items being "too good" and the game revolving around them, especially for characters like Sonic (remember that "overcentralization" and "random results" talk a while back?).

So, please. Spare me the diatribe about how it's perfectly okay to infuse preference into rulesets as long as it happens to be the preference you agree with.

 

[ぱみゅ]

As most of you know, the BBR will most likely be responsible for handling the S4BR at the beginning, meaning at least I will be on it.
And this thread actually helped me think on ways to manage the rulesets for Smash 4 (in case other BBR members didn't follow this thread, at least I did and will try to get it to work).

Maybe something along the lines of making different formats:
-"Basic" - Few stages, all characters (if possible), few rules. Small, simple and easy to remember.
-"Advanced" - More stages, more strategies. For consolidated communities that won't lose players for trying different playstyles.
-"Pending" - Stages and rules that are yet to be tested. TOs can be encouraged, maybe rewarded for helping out. Basic and Advanced formats are subject to changes based on the results of "Pending" events. Testers may have to fill sheets (thanks for the idea OS) with notes about players, characters, win rates, and notes about glitches, possible abuses, etc. Maybe make the results confidential so this don't discourage other TOs to test stuff out.

 

[LiteralGrill]

As most of you know, the BBR will most likely be responsible for handling the S4BR at the beginning, meaning at least I will be on it.
And this thread actually helped me think on ways to manage the rulesets for Smash 4 (in case other BBR members didn't follow this thread, at least I did and will try to get it to work).

Maybe something along the lines of making different formats:
-"Basic" - Few stages, all characters (if possible), few rules. Small, simple and easy to remember.
-"Advanced" - More stages, more strategies. For consolidated communities that won't lose players for trying different playstyles.
-"Pending" - Stages and rules that are yet to be tested. TOs can be encouraged, maybe rewarded for helping out. Basic and Advanced formats are subject to changes based on the results of "Pending" events. Testers may have to fill sheets (thanks for the idea OS) with notes about players, characters, win rates, and notes about glitches, possible abuses, etc. Maybe make the results confidential so this don't discourage other TOs to test stuff out.

Question: if the BBR is going to be handling the rules from the beginning, will there be some serious evaluation of current members based on activity as of now, and possibly a chance for people invested in the new games to have a shot getting in?

I know personally, I'm investing my heart and soul into everything 3DS version related. I never was a name in Brawl, never intend to be either, but every tiny bit of knowledge I may have of previous discussion and info I may gain in the game hands on would be beneficial to the group. I don't want BR vets just making decisions when there is some new blood hungry to jump in and help and may have a lot to offer, not just myself. I see people on various boards already showing amazing potential to support the scene, and I'd enjoy not seeing Brawl bias effect a ruleset like Melee bias did if possible. Couldn't a new BRoom be formed for the game, using some of the BBR as a base but considering others? And there needs to be a seperate BRoom for both games. 3DS WILL have a scene, it can't be ignored.

 

[MopedOfJustice]

I get that you are trying to present that we should give everything a fair shot before ruling it out and that one of the biggest flaws in this community is how we make decision based on hunches and "peer pressure," but I just have to comment on the little story. I have never changed my ruleset at the start of a tournament due to some update from smashboards or any other entity. The ruleset is in place long before the tournament starts and the players willingly came to the event knowing of the ruleset. Next tournament, sure I will look into adjusting the ruleset but certainly not on the fly like that.

I would like to treat Smash 4 with a clean slate. Melee and Brawl are pretty much lost causes at this point. No one is going to want to go back and test stages.

I say for the first couple of weeks we leave all stages unbanned. We note who wins and which character for each stage to get an idea of how things are shiping up. Then we allow multiple bans depending on the size of the stage list. We note which stages are being banned. From there we should have a good idea of which stages are starters, counterpicks, and possible bans. We keep this up until we have a reasonable and scientific stage list and ruleset.

I think we should have a seperate process for items. Items is more of preference rather than being game breaking. I think it we start of with this alternate format it will stick better rather than going "no items" then reconsidering 3 months later and trying to make a legitimate format out of it.

Of course. I meant to put in a disclaimer that it was meant as a caricature, but not in any way representative of how tournaments are run in that sense. I just wanted a situation with players, TOs and the voice of reason, and that was the first thing I thought of.
I'm pretty sure no TO would say "It has homosexual tendencies, which drastically interferes with the normal play style, and gives Kirby a distinct advantage." The purpose was to convey the attitude, not how a tourney would actually go. You can also see this in the TO calling PS3 (the assumed "Pokémon Stadium 3") the "PlayStation3," as a joke about how little they actually know/think about it, they just hear "Unban X" and respond "No, X is gay." Knee-jerk reaction, see?
Also, in the first scenario he did say "It's too late now, besides..." recognizing that the tournament can't change last minute, and the second time he isn't even properly listening to ashton, and not even thinking about what he's saying (hence the PS3 joke) which in no way implies that a change could actually be made.
As for the third scenario, it wasn't meant to be unrealistic (hence "Meanwhile, in a parallel universe:") (also hence: Ash Catch'Em {instead of ashton}, the players Geno-cide and PacMan {who named themselves for 2 characters who, in our world, could never be in the game} and the Pokémon in the audience {Randon Audino, a pun on "Random Audience [member]}).
I think that justifies my use of artistic license.

 

[Chiroz]

When we refer to competition, we aren't talking about "hey let's see who has the longest big toe on their right foot" style competitions. We're talking about people practicing and training and inevitably playing with a ruleset that brings about consistent victories without having any overcentralized aspects of the game that drain from the playerbase or metagame.

Stock was determined primarily because "Time" victories fit into an equalized distribution model, while Stocks inevitably produced a positively skewed distribution. This in itself makes Stocks more competitive. While Time matches would work just fine when there are large degrees of skill (I would never lose a time match to a 2 year old, for example), as the difference in skill (S) becomes smaller, the distribution equalizes along that group. If you were to run a Swiss format tournament 3 rounds in or so in both a positive and negative direction, you would find that each subgroup would have a definition of S that closer to 0 the deeper you go. The closer S is to 0 means that the outcome of each individual game is less indicative of future victories.

For stocks, it is the opposite. If you ran a Swiss format event, each individual group may have an S that leads closer to 0 but it doesn't effect the distribution. It's an inherent flaw in Time matches. Because Time rewards the "last hit" (so to speak) regardless of player input (two players could be fighting as hard as possible, but a 3 minute timer would not allow them to finish a 6 stock match, for example), you get an incomplete data point and an inability for S to properly define itself outside of broad terms. In stocks, S = 0 would mean that the games could trade back and forth, but even an S of 0.1 would be enough to create consistent results. More importantly, Stock matches correctly define S and can do so at a rapid pace..

This can be summarized into: I want a mode which allows me to tell victors easier as the mode that comes by default is lacking in doing this. Keyword: WANT. It's a preference.

You once said: Who said the norm was x, why isn't it y?

Why should you judge a mode under who can correctly interpret S? Because what you want is to interpret S, that is your objective, not the games. So under your goal of finding S then, yes, you can objectively quantify the quality of Timer and Stock, yet how did you choose this goal? Was it not preference?

This is incorrect. If this was the case, every ruleset would be different and random characters would be banned just because people hated them. Rulesets aren't a popularity contest. They're impartial. They have to be, otherwise the result of the tournament is pointless.

Yet every rule amongst different communities are different. Rules are, and have never been impartial. Even laws are partial to the human belief of what is good or fair against what is evil or wrong. You can however have impartial clauses dictated by a set of understandings which in this case would attribute to preferences.

You understand that the game should be played in a way where the most skillful player always comes out on top. That is a preference that you have (and I also share), and so out of this understanding you can make clauses which can hold a certain degree of unvariability. Say: I want to attain an experience out of this game that is unhindered by random factors or degenerative elements. From there you can define what is considered degenerative or what is random or what is fair or not, but this all came from your preference of having the game be defined only by a certain subset of skills.

That is incredibly arbitrary and has absolutely no place in a ruleset. If you disagree, I'll fly you out to a tournament here and you can play under the Overswarm ruleset of "this guy can't chain grab because he's good at it, but this guy can because it doesn't cause anyone trouble" and "he can't play on FD because he has pocket ICs".

Rulesets are impartial, or they're worthless.

That said, I'm not against items being used. I personally think that Brawl would have been a lot better WITH items and we would have been able to get a much more healthy scene. Brawl has a ton of ATs using items and it would have pushed Brawl in a new direction that would be more familiar to outside players, but we have a lot of historical precedent for lack of items that's hard to turn around and we had preliminary evidence that items were causing a rubberband effect as well as many items being "too good" and the game revolving around them, especially for characters like Sonic (remember that "overcentralization" and "random results" talk a while back?).

So, please. Spare me the diatribe about how it's perfectly okay to infuse preference into rulesets as long as it happens to be the preference you agree with.

I will believe that you are just exxagerating what I said in order to make me look ridiculous so that you can feel like you are winning the argument as I am certain that you are smart enough to grasp what I mean.

Different communities have different rulesets. That is non-debatable. Rulesets are not impartial, as if they were then everyone would play the game in the exact same way. Even 10 year olds with no knowledge of this community would play the game exactly the way we play it, which is not the case.

Rules are developed "impartially" to achieve a subjective goal. The goal itself is always completely based on preference.

So what do you do when a partial rule allows you to get closer to the goal that every other rule is based around? Do you completely forget about what the original goal actually was and just dismiss the rule itself? Or do you only care about the goal and don't even analyze the partiality of said rule or the implications of it?

Your answer is the former.

My answer is: We discuss it on a rule by rule basis and thus, when a discussion arises, so too will preference play a part of the arguments to be said.



BTW: You keep talking about overcentralization, yet when a comment is said about certain aspects of stages such as RC being radically overcentralizing, forcing the metagame on the stage to be a certain way always and probably shifting the tier list to the point where picking a character not good on such stages would involve losing, you only say: "Adapt to it".

We understand that flat/plat stages do the same (albeit to a much lesser degree than RC does, refer to my previous posts) only in a different direction. But the fact is that the goal we have set matches the direction flat/plat stages take the metagame, while it doesn't match the direction RC/walk-offs/etc. takes it. Overall it is a matter of preference, including those stages would shift the metagame in a way that is not preferred by most competitive players, and if they were to be included, so to would the majority of the people just leave.

At the end of the day, if you want a stage to be legal, you need to convince people why playing on it won't detract from the skills they prefer to be dominating the metagame. You cannot tell someone to follow a rule completely objectively as sometimes rules go against the very same reason they were introduced (which is why laws keep getting small clauses and exceptions as time go by and is why there are chapters just for one single law), that is why court rooms exist in real life.

You cannot argue that what humans as a whole have come to understand as the better way of making rules (laws in this case) are wrong. Or maybe you should discuss that exceptions and clauses are wrong to be there, there shouldn't be a "preference" saying that sometimes this law isn't to be enforced, everyone should just be guilty. Black and White.

 

[Overswarm]

As most of you know, the BBR will most likely be responsible for handling the S4BR at the beginning, meaning at least I will be on it.
And this thread actually helped me think on ways to manage the rulesets for Smash 4 (in case other BBR members didn't follow this thread, at least I did and will try to get it to work).

Maybe something along the lines of making different formats:
-"Basic" - Few stages, all characters (if possible), few rules. Small, simple and easy to remember.
-"Advanced" - More stages, more strategies. For consolidated communities that won't lose players for trying different playstyles.
-"Pending" - Stages and rules that are yet to be tested. TOs can be encouraged, maybe rewarded for helping out. Basic and Advanced formats are subject to changes based on the results of "Pending" events. Testers may have to fill sheets (thanks for the idea OS) with notes about players, characters, win rates, and notes about glitches, possible abuses, etc. Maybe make the results confidential so this don't discourage other TOs to test stuff out.

Just as an FYI, the BBR will likely be worthless when it comes to stages and giving out any orders. They have no teeth whatsoever and they wouldn't ban people from the BBR that didn't even play the game. Umbreon was in there for pete's sake! He's a smart guy and one of the few whose opinions I respect, but he believed some silly, silly things because he just didn't play the game. So good luck with that. That and the whole "affirmative action" thing in allowing/not allowing people to join based off of how heavily their region was represented. A good thought, but dumb in practice.

As for "creating formats", I can tell you right now it doesn't work. We tried that so that way TOs could look at a list and say "if I want to be conservative, I can pick this list of stages. If I want to experiment, here are the ones that have been tested out of my region and have been deemed acceptable, and this group over here are stages that have no consensus yet".

Sounds good on its surface, end result is "hey, so why don't ban those 'advanced' and 'pending' stages?" and "Hey, my TO only uses the basic list and now I have no counterpicks and the Ice Climbers have 7. What gives?"


Tell the BBR to grow a pair and kick people out that don't play the game, and do one thing and one thing only: show the results of testing stages.

That's all the BBR is going to be good for. Gathering facts and data. Find the height of all the characters, find the fastest walk speed, list their run speeds, jump heights, weight, etc. Show how fast the mid-weight character dies from center stage both vertically and horizontally from an attack with medium knockback.

That's about all you'll be able to do well.

Oh, and start ******** at them now to confirm hard numbers. "if a character is shown to have X% usage and/or Y% victories/points by Z months, the character being banned will be brought up internally and discussed with a future timetable and % set at that point. Not before or after", things like that. "A stage will be considered a counter-pick if it is assumed a character in an otherwise even matchup will win E% of his matches on that stage and/or an F% increase from what he typically would get on stages not considered advantageous or disadvantageous." You get the drill.

 

[Dr. James Rustles]

Camping is a colloquial term that focuses primarily on the course of non-action as an active and participatory (to mean non-mandatory) function in competitive gameplay. I.e., "he's not attacking me, he's just sitting there by the edge".

You've demonstrated you have a poor understanding or at least communicating what camping is again. What you're describing is a lesser form of stalling. Putting distance between yourself with no intentions to engage the opponent on any level during the match is stalling.

IHe doesn't have to approach. He doesn't have to attack. There's never been a rule for this because not only is it not enforceable, it degrades gameplay.

Let's take a hard look at your train of thought.

Overswarm: There are not rules against camping (actually, in this case against a lesser form of stalling) because:

1. It isn't enforceable
2. And it degrades gameplay.

You are literally saying we don't have a rule for something because it degrades gameplay. There's definitely a strong implication we encourage degraded gameplay. Good game, Overswarm. Perhaps you'll win the genetic lottery next time.

If you want to invent your own definitions of stalling and camping, go for it, but I don't care to hear them.

I didn't, actually, especially for stalling, as I seem to recall sharing a certain community wiki page to the definition... hmm, what was? Oh, yes, something else you didn't read:

Given the above definitions, I have no doubts when I say I am referring to stalling:

...

It's painfully obvious where your motivation comes from. If you were a general, everyone would line up in red coats and take turns firing at one another until there was a victor...

What motivation? There's no way to deduce how my actions as a general would follow from what my "painfully obvious" motivations are.

It's what the game is designed around.

Again, you're seeping into irrelevancy and false assertions.

Their reasoning is the exact same as yours. Literally the exact same. "I don't like it, and that's not what I consider an honorable fight". The difference is only that they're just slightly more scrubby than you are. They see someone going off stage and stopping the recovery as a huge roadblock that no one should have to overcome. It doesn't matter to them that others can overcome it; they don't want to deal with it.

Strawman: I have never said I don't consider stalling an honorable fight: I don't consider it a fight at all. You keep ignoring my stance, which is that I prefer elements that involve the two players in the fight and not the stage.

AGHAGLKGLHSKG.

NO.

Yes. I am not responsible for the thinking on your part. You can't justify it at this point. The beauty of a forum is that you get an opportunity to think about what you say before you actually say it. Also, you suggest I am some kid who read A Modest Proposal too literally and that doesn't follow from anything.

Why ban camping? Why ban stages that allow more camping than others? Why ban edgeguarding? Why ban chaingrabs? If you're going to ban one for your current reasoning, you're in line to ban all of them.

Nobody is talking about banning edgeguarding or chaingrabs or camping. Granted I were to ban them for whatever you think my reasons are, what then? How are you contributing the discussion at all here? Where are you going with this?

I don't even know WTF this paragraph means. You wrote an entire paragraph that says nothing.

I was telling you you're completely misrepresenting how and what I think. I also I was expressing a point of agreement (or at least a concession) with how some things couldn't be banned because how difficult they would be to enforce. I think I communicated my thoughts at least moderately well, but looking back I guess I writing on an eighth grade level is setting the bar too high for you.

Making a ruleset to appease people results in a super small community or a super large community, both with ****ty rulesets. If we're making rulesets to appease the masses, I'm running all stages FFAs with items and making bank on the entry fees.

...But the masses aren't showing up to tournaments!

What, exactly, do you think "Fighting Skill" is? Actually, nevermind. I don't care. Because there's no such thing as "fighting skill". There's winning and losing, period. You can win by playing well and lose by placing worse than your opponent. That's competition.

To suggest there isn't such a thing as fighting skill is your wildest and most false assertion yet. If you're only seeing the winning and losing aspects, how do you connect the beginning of a match to the result? "You can win by playing well?" With what? Not having fighting skills? Amazing. Simply amazing. I want to shake the hand of Mango, who apparently has won many tournaments without any fighting skill.

EDIT: P.S. This thread makes me sad

 

[LiteralGrill]

A few recent posts (wont mention any names... hint hint) are reasons that both scenes have deteriorated on both sides. Drop the ad hominem, quit the stupid insults and actually talk.

 

[MopedOfJustice]

A few recent posts (wont mention any names... hint hint) are reasons that both scenes have deteriorated on both sides. Drop the ad hominem, quit the stupid insults and actually talk.

When I "actually talk," it's ineffective at communicating on a forum.
The petty name calling isn't that bad here, no one has said anything like that to me, and what insults there are are towards arguments more than the people arguing, save for several "You have no idea what your talking about"s, which is to be expected.

 

[LiteralGrill]

When I "actually talk," it's ineffective at communicating on a forum.
The petty name calling isn't that bad here, no one has said anything like that to me, and what insults there are are towards arguments more than the people arguing, save for several "You have no idea what your talking about"s, which is to be expected.

Those are okay, but a certain debate (cough Overswarm and Quilt) is going beyond a little name calling. Ad hominem is never a form of argument, and them using it against each other is just a repeat of how arguments happened in the past that never changed anything. The insults just flew and kept flying and even are still flying in places today instead of reasonable conversation.

 

[Overswarm]

This can be summarized into: I want a mode which allows me to tell victors easier as the mode that comes by default is lacking in doing this. Keyword: WANT. It's a preference.

Again, "obtuse".

You once said: Who said the norm was x, why isn't it y?

Why should you judge a mode under who can correctly interpret S? Because what you want is to interpret S, that is your objective, not the games. So under your goal of finding S then, yes, you can objectively quantify the quality of Timer and Stock, yet how did you choose this goal? Was it not preference?

The people who decided to attend a tournament did. If you're looking for a preference, attending a tournament is a preference. The entire IDEA of a tournament is to determine S. That's what we're making the ruleset for.

Did you even stop to think before you wrote that, or are you just coming from the position of "well I was right when I started, so he must be missing something"?

We make the rulesets for tournaments.

Tournaments are designed to measure skill differential in clear and distinct terms.

"Time" doesn't do that. "Stocks" do. That's not preferential thinking. That's making a ruleset for something that has been defined for centuries.

But hey, I guess if you're still interested in who defined tournament you can consult a "History of the English Language" course and then move on the Middle English and French until you stumble upon "torneiement" and say "Oh, that's how". If you find the individual guy who made it up though, let me know because I'd be interested.

Yet every rule amongst different communities are different. Rules are, and have never been impartial. Even laws are partial to the human belief of what is good or fair against what is evil or wrong. You can however have impartial clauses dictated by a set of understandings which in this case would attribute to preferences.

If you want to sound smart and lack the vocabulary to properly express yourself, pick up a thesaurus. I write in a verbose form with a plethora of words because I prefer precise language and had years of schooling on it, not to lord over someone with superior use of the English language. If it makes you uncomfortable, just relax.

Rulesets vary slightly from community to community, but they are not different. We're all playing the same game. You don't move from EC to MW and suddenly find yourself playing FFA with items on time in every tournament.

To be more specific, driving 20 minutes in one direction and 20 minutes in another in your home town won't result in a different tournament environment.

You understand that the game should be played in a way where the most skillful player always comes out on top. That is a preference that you have (and I also share), and so out of this understanding you can make clauses which can hold a certain degree of unvariability. Say: I want to attain an experience out of this game that is unhindered by random factors or degenerative elements. From there you can define what is considered degenerative or what is random or what is fair or not, but this all came from your preference of having the game be defined only by a certain subset of skills.

It's not a preference. It's the inherent design of a tournament. If the tournament wasn't designed to have the most skilled player come out on top then it isn't a tournament at all!

If you come into a basketball game and say "um, excuse me, but I'm much shorter than the other people here. Would it be possible to make a rule to where I make more points, or they make less? Maybe rearrange the team to have an average height, or perhaps prevent them from dunking since I am unable?" you'd be attempting to solve "random elements" (such as height) but would be making a mistake.

You don't get to say "I want" anything. At all. The only exception to this, ever, is if we see a history (not a threat) of decreased tournament attendance as a direct result of something.

ICs wobbling shouldn't be banned. Let's say Wobbles won EVO and then everyone said "**** Melee, **** Wobbling" and stopped attending tournaments altogether nationwide.

What do you do? It's illogical to ban Wobbling, but by taking the logical action you lose the community. The right thing to do is the wrong thing to do: you ban Wobbling and move on as a community, at least until it falls apart under its own weight.

There's no such issue with stages. Actually the opposite, as larger stage lists increase tournament attendance in accordance with population.

When I make rules, it's to fit a tournament style competition. When I pick stages, it's "what do we need to remove", not "what do I want to add".

I will believe that you are just exxagerating what I said in order to make me look ridiculous so that you can feel like you are winning the argument as I am certain that you are smart enough to grasp what I mean.

It's hyperbole. An exaggeration meant to indicate a specific point. That point being "arbitrary **** has no place in a tournament".

Different communities have different rulesets. That is non-debatable. Rulesets are not impartial, as if they were then everyone would play the game in the exact same way. Even 10 year olds with no knowledge of this community would play the game exactly the way we play it, which is not the case.

Different communities have slight variations of the same ruleset. Most of them use a variation of the Unity Ruleset, of which I was one of the original people writing for it. Most of the language on it is still a combo of me, the kishes, and AZ.

It's not an accident. We all play the same game.

Rules are developed "impartially" to achieve a subjective goal. The goal itself is always completely based on preference.

This isn't true, as stated above. The only "preference" is choosing to attend a tournament. Fixing a ruleset to what a tournament is defined as is not an act of preference, or at least shouldn't be.

So what do you do when a partial rule allows you to get closer to the goal that every other rule is based around? Do you completely forget about what the original goal actually was and just dismiss the rule itself? Or do you only care about the goal and don't even analyze the partiality of said rule or the implications of it?

Your answer is the former.

My answer is: We discuss it on a rule by rule basis and thus, when a discussion arises, so too will preference play a part of the arguments to be said.

It comes down to two things: overcentralization and random results. That's it. Everything else is derivative of those two.

BTW: You keep talking about overcentralization, yet when a comment is said about certain aspects of stages such as RC being radically overcentralizing, forcing the metagame on the stage to be a certain way always and probably shifting the tier list to the point where picking a character not good on such stages would involve losing, you only say: "Adapt to it".

We understand that flat/plat stages do the same (albeit to a much lesser degree than RC does, refer to my previous posts) only in a different direction. But the fact is that the goal we have set matches the direction flat/plat stages take the metagame, while it doesn't match the direction RC/walk-offs/etc. takes it. Overall it is a matter of preference, including those stages would shift the metagame in a way that is not preferred by most competitive players, and if they were to be included, so to would the majority of the people just leave.

And acting on that preference is wrong.

When someone ******* about a stage being "too hard", of course I'll tell them "adapt to it". What idiot wouldn't?

"Aw man, ICs on FD are too hard for my Dedede".

Freaking duh, you picked the wrong character on the wrong stage. The IC player is taking advantage of the fact that you can only play one character and that character is super limited. You either need to learn this matchup and that stage super, super well or you need to pick a secondary.

If it's so bad that the ICs win against EVERYONE on FD and do so convincingly, then yeah, you've got a problem. Otherwise, stop whining and get back to competing.

Preference has no place in a stage list. Just because you want Olimar and ICs to be good and G&W and Wario to be bad doesn't mean you should get your way.

At the end of the day, if you want a stage to be legal, you need to convince people why playing on it won't detract from the skills they prefer to be dominating the metagame. You cannot tell someone to follow a rule completely objectively as sometimes rules go against the very same reason they were introduced (which is why laws keep getting small clauses and exceptions as time go by and is why there are chapters just for one single law), that is why court rooms exist in real life.

WTF are you talking about?

The onus of proof is on those who want to ban a stage.

Here, do some research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof

If you want to argue on that point, you're going to have to talk to some professors of law and philosophy, because that one has kinda been set in stone for a while now.

You cannot argue that what humans as a whole have come to understand as the better way of making rules (laws in this case) are wrong. Or maybe you should discuss that exceptions and clauses are wrong to be there, there shouldn't be a "preference" saying that sometimes this law isn't to be enforced, everyone should just be guilty. Black and White.

I'm just going to assume you're in early college and haven't gotten into the whole "law" stuff yet.

 

[LiteralGrill]

But hey, I guess if you're still interested in who defined tournament you can consult a "History of the English Language" course and then move on the Middle English and French until you stumble upon "torneiement" and say "Oh, that's how". If you find the individual guy who made it up though, let me know because I'd be interested.

Geoffroi de Preulli invented tournaments pretty much. Just had to throw the fact that I knew something so random in here.

 

[Overswarm]

Geoffroi de Preulli invented tournaments pretty much. Just had to throw the fact that I knew something so random in here.

That is awesome.

The Knighthood, Chivalry & Tournaments Arms and Armour Glossary
Though many chroniclers attached the term ‘tourney’ to some very early endeavors,even biblical ones, the first recorded instances appear to be:

- Geoffrey of Malaterra’s account of a 1062 siege in which the participants ‘tourneyed’
- Chronicle of Tours: ‘Geoffrey de Preuilly, who invented tournaments, was killed an Angers.’ (1062)

 

[Chiroz]

The people who decided to attend a tournament did. If you're looking for a preference, attending a tournament is a preference. The entire IDEA of a tournament is to determine S. That's what we're making the ruleset for.

We make the rulesets for tournaments.

Tournaments are designed to measure skill differential in clear and distinct terms.

You now agreed with a point I made 2-3 posts back in which I said we make rulesets to fit a certain preference.

Tournament play is a preferred way of playing by some, not only that but "tournaments are designed to measure skill". That is why it was designed, so it was done to fill in a certain want, a certain preference. Last but not least, we make rulesets for tournaments. As thus rulesets are used to fir a certain preferred goal, which in this case is: "measure skill differential in clear and distinct terms."

No arguments there.

If you want to sound smart and lack the vocabulary to properly express yourself, pick up a thesaurus. I write in a verbose form with a plethora of words because I prefer precise language and had years of schooling on it, not to lord over someone with superior use of the English language. If it makes you uncomfortable, just relax.

I don't know exactly what you are getting at. I am not trying to sound smart, I actually debate and speak this way. I sometimes get confused about some grammatical things because I speak 3 languages since I was very little and sometimes I think ideas in another language and translate them as I am writing them which sometimes causes my grammar to be wrong. Still I consider english to be a primary language for me (even though my countries native language is Spanish) and I believe myself to be proficient at it, as such I will excuse myself if I am making horrible grammar mistakes, there is no excuse.

Rulesets vary slightly from community to community, but they are not different. We're all playing the same game. You don't move from EC to MW and suddenly find yourself playing FFA with items on time in every tournament.

To be more specific, driving 20 minutes in one direction and 20 minutes in another in your home town won't result in a different tournament environment.

Depends on where you look at. There are many communities that do Pokemon only tournaments or All Items tournaments. Are these communities as big as ours? No, but that isn't relevant. Do they exist? Yes, they do.

What I was trying to get across is that if there was 0 partiality in rule making then no other ruleset would ever arise.

It's not a preference. It's the inherent design of a tournament. If the tournament wasn't designed to have the most skilled player come out on top then it isn't a tournament at all!

If you come into a basketball game and say "um, excuse me, but I'm much shorter than the other people here. Would it be possible to make a rule to where I make more points, or they make less? Maybe rearrange the team to have an average height, or perhaps prevent them from dunking since I am unable?" you'd be attempting to solve "random elements" (such as height) but would be making a mistake.

You don't get to say "I want" anything. At all. The only exception to this, ever, is if we see a history (not a threat) of decreased tournament attendance as a direct result of something.

As I understand (I am not a huge basketball fan, so I might be wrong), there are plenty of rules that were introduced solely due to preference. Things like having a ball timer was introduced because teams kept stalling and it wasn't the sport the NBA wanted it to be because viewers kept complaining of these stalling techniques.

You seem to misinterpret what I mean. I am not trying to say any one person's desires are to be met. I am saying that a community is formed to give informed decisions about the rules. Your example makes no sense when compared to my claim, let me try and do an accurate one.

Going by your own example, what is the logical reason for there to be a 3 pointer line? Is there a logical reason? why is it placed at that exact same distant? Was there some sort of psychics calculation involving the weight of the ball and the overall strength of every single player? Those are very arbitrary rules, are they not?

There are basketball courts with closer and farther away 3 pointer lines than an official NBA court, yet why is the official the one used in tournaments? (Don't go saying because its official). Can you argue that no other court with a closer or a farther line is better to prove skill? I would believe the farther the line, the more skill it requires, would you not? Then why is the official used? Is it not because of popularity and overall acceptance of the NBA community (including fans)?

ICs wobbling shouldn't be banned. Let's say Wobbles won EVO and then everyone said "**** Melee, **** Wobbling" and stopped attending tournaments altogether nationwide.

What do you do? It's illogical to ban Wobbling, but by taking the logical action you lose the community. The right thing to do is the wrong thing to do: you ban Wobbling and move on as a community, at least until it falls apart under its own weight.

But you said yourself preference should never be a part of it, so how can you claim we should do the illogical thing?

There's no such issue with stages. Actually the opposite, as larger stage lists increase tournament attendance in accordance with population.

When I make rules, it's to fit a tournament style competition. When I pick stages, it's "what do we need to remove", not "what do I want to add".

as larger stage lists increase tournament attendance in accordance with population.

If you can prove this then what you are saying is that larger stage lists are preferred and thus there should be no problem unbanning any and all stages. As soon as people can tell that said tournaments rally more players and more competition it will become the norm. You can win the whole argument proving that competitive players attend these tournaments more so than they do conservative ones.

Different communities have slight variations of the same ruleset. Most of them use a variation of the Unity Ruleset, of which I was one of the original people writing for it. Most of the language on it is still a combo of me, the kishes, and AZ.

It's not an accident. We all play the same game.

Most of the communities you acknowledge do. There are many, many more communities you just don't care about because they don't share your own preferences. I've personally attended random character tournaments with over 20 entrants. Not many, I know, but the tournament still existed and a community for it was there, and so a ruleset was created for this community, even if it was just for that day.

And acting on that preference is wrong.

When someone *****es about a stage being "too hard", of course I'll tell them "adapt to it". What idiot wouldn't?

"Aw man, ICs on FD are too hard for my Dedede".

Freaking duh, you picked the wrong character on the wrong stage. The IC player is taking advantage of the fact that you can only play one character and that character is super limited. You either need to learn this matchup and that stage super, super well or you need to pick a secondary.

If it's so bad that the ICs win against EVERYONE on FD and do so convincingly, then yeah, you've got a problem. Otherwise, stop whining and get back to competing.

Preference has no place in a stage list. Just because you want Olimar and ICs to be good and G&W and Wario to be bad doesn't mean you should get your way.

Quite the contrary, it is you who just wants to shift the metagame arbitrarily. I am not debating whether a stage should be banned because it is "too hard". I am debating that a stage should be banned when it shifts the metagame away from what I believe is fun and competitive. You might have a different definition of what fun and competitive is from my own definition, but here is where the preference card comes into play. How many people prefer your metagame to mine? That is the question.

Obviously introducing a stage like Pictochat wouldn't change the metagame as much, but introducing one like RC just might. If for example there were 3 different stages just like RC and people learned the ins and out of every character on those stages the game would then devolve into who has the better character to stall and win out the match in these stages. Assuming same skill level, you could just CP that stage for a incredible skew in matchup. You would basically have an almost assured win against any character that isn't decent in any of those stages.

Flat/Plat stages also have bad matchups and morphs the tier list just the same, but it isn't the same as having a 7-3, 8-2 matchup (I haven't played Brawl in 3 years, if there are matchups this bad you can inform me now). But none of this is what I am debating, what I am debating is that the whole way we play the game would change. It would change from what it is now, to a stall and wait game, since most people would just try and take you to those stages because of the huge matchup skew.

This new playstyle just doesn't emphasize on what is fun about Smash for me. It doesn't emphasize on what is competitive for me. You might think you have an objective definition of what competitive but you don't. Competition is present in any mode, with any element on Smash, it is just what type of competition do we want. Do we want the luckiest person? The most knowledgeable person? The most skillful person? The smartest person? Etc. Basically what I am saying is the reason most people don't like it is because of what the optima strategy is on the stage, it is not about which character is better or which one is not, it is about the gameplay the stage causes being stale and not emphasizing on player interaction, which is what people want out of a fighting game, most people don't care about skills that don't involve the second player at all. (Except when it is an astonishingly hard skill).

WTF are you talking about?

The onus of proof is on those who want to ban a stage.

Here, do some research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof

If you want to argue on that point, you're going to have to talk to some professors of law and philosophy, because that one has kinda been set in stone for a while now.

Right now, people are set in their ways about having these stages banned. You can argue semantics or get me any proffesor of Law of Philosophy to argue with me but it won't change the fact that psychologically people are wired to stick to what they believe and continue habits until they are shown otherwise. So quite honestly it could matter less what you discuss with me here, there is a lot convincing to do to the community as a whole if you want a more liberal stagelist independent of who you believe should be convincing who.

I'm just going to assume you're in early college and haven't gotten into the whole "law" stuff yet.

I don't study law. But I am about to finish my master's if you want to know.

I was just referencing the fact that rules are not "set on stone" which is what you keep saying. Why are there court rooms if not to review specific scenarios where a law was broken? (Well there is also proving guilt, but we are not discussing that currently). Why are different laws reviewed from time to time in order to amend them and include new clauses in order to close loopholes or to create an otherwise needed loophole?

I wasn't debating laws at a very deep level, I was merely mentioning that the one ruleset system that is known as the "best" by humanity as a whole is always being reviewed and changed on a case by case basis, exactly as I tell you that stages should be reviewed on a case by case basis and not just allowed randomly because they fit your criteria of what is fair and said criteria should be completely impartial to all stages.

Also different countries and states have different laws because of different preferences by the people, just like how Gay Marriage is illegal in some places, yet it is being legalized slowly almost everywhere. At the end of the day, rules and laws are there to achieve a certain goal, sometimes under some specific scenario the same exact rules might drive us further away from the goal it was set to attain. It is then that we, as logical people, must intervene and analyze how we should proceed. (This decision is based on a preference, one that says that achieving said goal is more important that following an incomplete rule).

 

[[Corn]]

Flat/Plat stages also have bad matchups and morphs the tier list just the same, but it isn't the same as having a 7-3, 8-2 matchup (I haven't played Brawl in 3 years, if there are matchups this bad you can inform me now). But none of this is what I am debating, what I am debating is that the whole way we play the game would change. It would change from what it is now, to a stall and wait game, since most people would just try and take you to those stages because of the huge matchup skew.

Just to inform you that matchups like that do exist, but are only really prevalent at the extreme low tiers.

 

[Overswarm]

You now agreed with a point I made 2-3 posts back in which I said we make rulesets to fit a certain preference.

Tournament play is a preferred way of playing by some, not only that but "tournaments are designed to measure skill". That is why it was designed, so it was done to fill in a certain want, a certain preference. Last but not least, we make rulesets for tournaments. As thus rulesets are used to fir a certain preferred goal, which in this case is: "measure skill differential in clear and distinct terms."

No arguments there.

That... That's the opposite of what I just said. Like the entirely exact opposite.

To clarify:

You once said: Who said the norm was x, why isn't it y?

Why should you judge a mode under who can correctly interpret S?

Because it's part of a tournament.

Because what you want is to interpret S, that is your objective, not the games.

Because it's part of a tournament.

So under your goal of finding S then, yes, you can objectively quantify the quality of Timer and Stock, yet how did you choose this goal?

Because it's part of a tournament.

Was it not

preference?

No.

Making a rules don't come from preference, they come from the guidelines of what a tournament is. Just because attending a tournament is preference doesn't mean the qualifications of tournament rules or the definition of a tournament is preference.

Do you go to church and say "Well, this is all preference, isn't it? What we say the 10 commandments are is just a choice!" because attending church was a choice made by preference. An existing concept is not defined by the methods of approaching that concept, nor can you redefine that concept by the factors existing within it.

I don't know exactly what you are getting at. I am not trying to sound smart, I actually debate and speak this way. I sometimes get confused about some grammatical things because I speak 3 languages since I was very little and sometimes I think ideas in another language and translate them as I am writing them which sometimes causes my grammar to be wrong. Still I consider english to be a primary language for me (even though my countries native language is Spanish) and I believe myself to be proficient at it, as such I will excuse myself if I am making horrible grammar mistakes, there is no excuse.

Less grammatical mistakes and more an increasing trend of awkward word usage that is out of character from your previous posts; I troll a lot and people tend to do that when they feel intellectually threatened. I don't like it that much because it's an easy target, so generally tell them to relax.

Depends on where you look at. There are many communities that do Pokemon only tournaments or All Items tournaments. Are these communities as big as ours? No, but that isn't relevant. Do they exist? Yes, they do.

What I was trying to get across is that if there was 0 partiality in rule making then no other ruleset would ever arise.

What you're trying to tell me is "there's no right answer". If that's the case, why are you even talking? Just pack up your bags and go home.

What I'm trying to tell you is there is a right answer. You can point out an anime convention or 4 high school kids playing in their mom's basement or whatever as radical differences, but they don't have the same goal as us.

When the goal is clearly set, to define the victor of a tournament, to clarify S as clearly as possible... it comes to the same conclusion. There is a right and a wrong. Can someone have an items tournament? Yeah, they can. But for each individual aspect, it helps or hinders the definition of S.

You could make the argument that preferential rulesets could be created in the sense that one could be only slightly better at defining S, so slight that it wouldn't be noticable to any but the most intense observations.

Our ruleset arose organically, or at least originally started to. It started with items on and all stages, and then people turned off stages when they realized "hey, Player A normally wins 100% of the time but on this stage it's 50/50 against Player B" and turned off items when they realized "Hey, I was going to win and then this crate exploded and I died" or "I was comboing this guy and a star man spawned on him".

Every little thing is like that. Yeah, there's people saying "we should ban that stage, it's gay". I heard that all the time in Melee. A lot of it stuck. Those are bad changes, and they hurt the game.
[/quote]

As I understand (I am not a huge basketball fan, so I might be wrong), there are plenty of rules that were introduced solely due to preference. Things like having a ball timer was introduced because teams kept stalling and it wasn't the sport the NBA wanted it to be because viewers kept complaining of these stalling techniques.

You're taking the analogy in the wrong way. I'm not saying we're like the NBA. We aren't. I'm saying going into ANY competitive venture and suggesting that the rules be changed to your whims just because it's your own personal preference or it would help you and people who think like you is silly.

You seem to misinterpret what I mean. I am not trying to say any one person's desires are to be met. I am saying that a community is formed to give informed decisions about the rules. Your example makes no sense when compared to my claim, let me try and do an accurate one.

Going by your own example, what is the logical reason for there to be a 3 pointer line? Is there a logical reason? why is it placed at that exact same distant? Was there some sort of psychics calculation involving the weight of the ball and the overall strength of every single player? Those are very arbitrary rules, are they not?

The 3 pointer line was introduced for primarily non-game related reasons, but they weren't arbitrary. The idea was to allow the teams to "stretch the floor" and spread out and make size not that much of an issue; it was adopted by some rival leagues to the NBA, which forced them to add it on.

Regardless, I'm not quite sure how this pertains to smash. Sakurai has his own reasons for balancing the game the way he does and creating the characters he does. We use the tools we're given. To entertain your multi-linguialism, analogies aren't meant as literal comparisons. If I said "that's like telling a hockey coach you're not going to play with skates", I'm not actually talking about hockey. I'm talking about a situation with similar facets, such as foolishly ignoring the coach in a hockey game and putting yourself at risk.

There are basketball courts with closer and farther away 3 pointer lines than an official NBA court, yet why is the official the one used in tournaments? (Don't go saying because its official). Can you argue that no other court with a closer or a farther line is better to prove skill? I would believe the farther the line, the more skill it requires, would you not? Then why is the official used? Is it not because of popularity and overall acceptance of the NBA community (including fans)?

Because it's official.

Seriously, that's the reason. The NBA gives the reason, other people follow it. The NBA's reasoning typically has to do with crowd hype and anticipation; they move the 3-point line back farther over time because the % of shots made that are 3 pointers has been increasing. So still not arbitrary, but still not relevant.

But you said yourself preference should never be a part of it, so how can you claim we should do the illogical thing?

That was me listing an exception for you. It's like someone telling you "murder is wrong" but then you find yourself in a situation where you can shoot somebody to death before he blows up a building full of children. The correct choice is shooting the guy, but murder is still wrong. It just happens to be better than the alternative.

If you can prove this then what you are saying is that larger stage lists are preferred and thus there should be no problem unbanning any and all stages. As soon as people can tell that said tournaments rally more players and more competition it will become the norm. You can win the whole argument proving that competitive players attend these tournaments more so than they do conservative ones.

I did. It's called a "vocal minority". I had people complaining incessantly about my tournament having too liberal of a stage list, so they decided to drive up to Michigan to play in one of theirs. Michigan didn't have a full bracket. I had over 80. This is because most people don't even go to smashboards. They go to college, to bars, to restaurants, to their friends houses.

It doesn't matter to the vocal minority because they're interested in their interests, not community ones.

Most of the communities you acknowledge do. There are many, many more communities you just don't care about because they don't share your own preferences. I've personally attended random character tournaments with over 20 entrants. Not many, I know, but the tournament still existed and a community for it was there, and so a ruleset was created for this community, even if it was just for that day.

I've made and participated in multiple tournaments with experimental rulesets. I'm not sure what your point is. The rules these tournaments set aren't arbitrary. They don't say "we're playing smash", they say "we're playing smash with all items". There's a difference and you know it.

Quite the contrary, it is you who just wants to shift the metagame arbitrarily. I am not debating whether a stage should be banned because it is "too hard". I am debating that a stage should be banned when it shifts the metagame away from what I believe is fun and competitive. You might have a different definition of what fun and competitive is from my own definition, but here is where the preference card comes into play. How many people prefer your metagame to mine? That is the question.

What you believe is irrelevant! Beliefs have no place in it.

Yes, someone can say "I want to play in an items tournament". "I want to play in an FFA tournament". These can be totally legitimate tournaments! I agree that tournaments selected primarily from preference can exist.

But they aren't the right choice. Because they don't fit in line with what a tournament is about. Everything is legal until it shows it needs to be removed due to overcentralization or random results. The only exception, the only one, I listed earlier: mass exodus from the community. That's it.

Obviously introducing a stage like Pictochat wouldn't change the metagame as much, but introducing one like RC just might. If for example there were 3 different stages just like RC and people learned the ins and out of every character on those stages the game would then devolve into who has the better character to stall and win out the match in these stages. Assuming same skill level, you could just CP that stage for a incredible skew in matchup. You would basically have an almost assured win against any character that isn't decent in any of those stages.

Uh, yeah. That's good.

Flat/Plat stages also have bad matchups and morphs the tier list just the same, but it isn't the same as having a 7-3, 8-2 matchup (I haven't played Brawl in 3 years, if there are matchups this bad you can inform me now). But none of this is what I am debating, what I am debating is that the whole way we play the game would change. It would change from what it is now, to a stall and wait game, since most people would just try and take you to those stages because of the huge matchup skew.

Except that isn't true. You think it takes guns to increase a murder rate? Knives will do just fine. It doesn't have to be a 7-3 or 8-2 matchup (which, by the way, exist on those stages) to influence the metagame. You think it has to be extreme to influence the metagame?

Top Tier

SS:
(±0)

S:
(+2)

A+:
(-1) (-1)

A-:

(+2) (-1)

(-1)


Pop quiz, named 6 characters that do well on flat/plat stages. Oh, gee, I dunno, maybe MK, IC, Olimar, Diddy, Marth, Snake, and Falco. Just maybe.

You think that's an accident? "Oh, the best characters just happen to be good at flat/plat stages"? Of course it's not an accident. It's by design. Or maybe I'm just crazy, I'm just a little bit loopy, and Battlefield and Smashville are actually crazy out-there stages and I just never noticed.

All stages influence the metagame. You get a 60-40 matchup and you put in a stage that goes 20-80, that "40" will start winning a lot on his CP and it'll increase his odds quite a bit. You get a 50/50 and have a slight advantage in any way whatsoever and you get a snowball effect that makes the one with the advantage the winner and the other character falls off the map.

You think Olimar can even exist on stages that aren't flat, plat, and static? You think Diddy would excel the way he did? Look at Falco! Falco is a HORRIBLE character. His recovery sucks in Brawl, his primary method of dealing damage early game is getting a grab at low %, he can't fight anyone on the edge, and he has serious trouble landing kill moves.

Somewhere along the way, someone said "that just won't do" and said "you can't camp the edge against Falco" and "only flat/plat stages please" and up he went on the tier list. If you have access to the right forums you can see me calling out which characters were going to go up in the tier list.

You know what's REALLY crazy? It's the exact same list as last time. The characters were just rearranged! It's been those characters for a long, long time. The only difference is their placement amongst each other.

This new playstyle just doesn't emphasize on what is fun about Smash for me. It doesn't emphasize on what is competitive for me. You might think you have an objective definition of what competitive but you don't.

What is fun for you is as important to me as what my 5 year old cousin thinks is fun. As in it isn't, at all. I do have an objective definition of what competitive is. It's Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Who is the best, who can win in a tournament. Oh, a tournament? We should make some rules. How do we make these rules? Well, why not make them based off of a history of usage and ban things only when they become overcentralizing or create random results, thus ensuring a fair and predictable environment in which to compete?

Is that logic so hard to follow?

Competition is present in any mode, with any element on Smash, it is just what type of competition do we want. Do we want the luckiest person? The most knowledgeable person? The most skillful person? The smartest person? Etc. Basically what I am saying is the reason most people don't like it is because of what the optima strategy is on the stage, it is not about which character is better or which one is not, it is about the gameplay the stage causes being stale and not emphasizing on player interaction, which is what people want out of a fighting game, most people don't care about skills that don't involve the second player at all. (Except when it is an astonishingly hard skill).

Stale is subjective. ICs chaingrabs don't involve the second player the moment they start, we don't ban them. If people asked, we still wouldn't ban them. It'd be wrong to do so. You don't ban things because you don't like them, you look for reasons that stay true months down the road. If you ban it on personal preference it has a shelf life of about 15 minutes and can change immediately. You need reasoning. Logical, consistent reasoning.

There's only two reasons to ban anything: overcentralization and random results. That's it! If you can think of something else, go ahead and let me hear it, I'd love to add a third one. It'd make my job WAY easier. If your idea of another reason is "public request" though, you're going in the wrong direction.

Right now, people are set in their ways about having these stages banned. You can argue semantics or get me any proffesor of Law of Philosophy to argue with me but it won't change the fact that psychologically people are wired to stick to what they believe and continue habits until they are shown otherwise. So quite honestly it could matter less what you discuss with me here, there is a lot convincing to do to the community as a whole if you want a more liberal stagelist independent of who you believe should be convincing who.

You could make the argument, but Smash 4 is coming out and I'll likely be one of the TOs again breathing life into the midwest. I'll likely be a source of early information again and will fight tooth and nail to prevent stages from being arbitrarily banned because you're right in that people are set in their ways. Once a stage is banned, there's no going back. An individual tournament, maybe a region, but the community as a whole? Nah. We could ban FD for 3 months and we wouldn't see it return.

I was just referencing the fact that rules are not "set on stone" which is what you keep saying. Why are there court rooms if not to review specific scenarios where a law was broken? (Well there is also proving guilt, but we are not discussing that currently). Why are different laws reviewed from time to time in order to amend them and include new clauses in order to close loopholes or to create an otherwise needed loophole?

I wasn't debating laws at a very deep level, I was merely mentioning that the one ruleset system that is known as the "best" by humanity as a whole is always being reviewed and changed on a case by case basis, exactly as I tell you that stages should be reviewed on a case by case basis and not just allowed randomly because they fit your criteria of what is fair and said criteria should be completely impartial to all stages.

Also different countries and states have different laws because of different preferences by the people, just like how Gay Marriage is illegal in some places, yet it is being legalized slowly almost everywhere. At the end of the day, rules and laws are there to achieve a certain goal, sometimes under some specific scenario the same exact rules might drive us further away from the goal it was set to attain. It is then that we, as logical people, must intervene and analyze how we should proceed. (This decision is based on a preference, one that says that achieving said goal is more important that following an incomplete rule).

[/quote]

Laws aren't written in the way tournament rules are.

Funny that you mention gay marriage being illegal in some places. Slavery used to be too. Jim Crow laws, women can't vote, women can't hold office, women can't preach, children have to work, etc., were all preference-based, not evidence-based. Good argument for me.

There's no room for personal preference in tournament rules. You think Rainbow Cruise should be banned because it has a detrimental effect on the metagame? Prove it. It's not hard, I even outlined how you can do it in a previous post. I did it myself. Hell, you're talking to the guy who personally got several stages banned in Melee in the midwest by showing people "hey look at this". I'm living proof that you can, in fact, prove it. I tested stages all the time in Brawl and put to rest many misconceptions, and personally suggested the ban of many stages because of it. I want to keep all the stages, characters, and features I can.

I don't want arbitrary "don't fly under the stage, grab the ledge too many times, flick up on the c-stick in your down+b" rules. I don't want "how about we just play on this flat stage and see who is best on it". I want to have a reasonable framework so that anyone can sit down and say "oh, that's why that should be banned".

Someone says "I think Rumble Falls should be legal"? You say "Oh, that'd be fun. But did you know that there are segments that characters like Bowser and Donkey Kong can't survive? If they stage goes "speed up" randomly while they are in hitstun of any sort, there are segments that will prevent them from rising fast enough to make it."

They say "Oh, oh, I see. This results in a 100% win rate for the opponent and creates random results because it doesn't always occur. This is both overcentralizing and random in nature and is not fit for a competitive environment".

Done.


Before you respond, go take a good, hard look at the top tier of the Brawl tier list and tell me that Rainbow Cruise is a bigger threat to the metagame than 5 stages with nearly identical sizes, shapes, and layouts. Say it with a straight face.

 

[nat pagle]

Gay marriage, Juris Doctor, the NBA...this thread is getting out of hand.

 

[MopedOfJustice]

Gay marriage, Juris Doctor, the NBA...this thread is getting out of hand.

Don't forget when OS said (2-3 posts above) that knives increase a murder rate as much as guns, and that you have a choice to be Christian, but not to follow the "Ten Commandments," when in fact the opposite is true on all three accounts (with some exceptions to the second). He likely put several other things in there, but I gave up trying to read novels of straw man dialogue.
EDIT: He also mentioned Slavery, women's rights and child labor: "Slavery used to be too. Jim Crow laws, women can't vote, women can't hold office, women can't preach, children have to work, etc., were all preference-based, not evidence-based. Good argument for me."
I think that "These are humans" as evidence along with the logic "treat humans as humans unless you have a reason not to (on an individual basis)" is fairly objective, or at least logical with or without bias.

 

[LiteralGrill]

Yeah, the thread sure is getting interesting O_O

Though sometimes you gotta use examples to makes points I guess.

Anyways, I'm VERY interested on an answer about the BR and smash. People complain about Melee bias in rules, what about Brawl bias?

There's a curious topic, how will Brawl bias effect rules?

Also, we should consider just making a thread for stage theory discussion as this thread has kinda just gone there now

 

[MopedOfJustice]

Can I suggest that from now on we avoid analogies involving modern religion, gun violence, slavery, sexism/feminism/misogyny (in more extreme forms, at least), child abuse and homophobia? Also, animal abuse, except in reference to videogame characters, and ****.
Feel free to chime in if I missed anything.
EDIT: Mental impairment, with the possible exception of dementia. That's another one.
EDIT: Anime convention kids and other straw noobs.

 

[Dr. James Rustles]

Feel free to chime in if I missed anything.

Can we add anime convention kids to that list?

There's a curious topic, how will Brawl bias effect rules?

Could be, but as far as I understand there isn't as much consensus on Brawl. We should expect most Brawl players to be playing the new game, as they obviously weren't disenfranchised by Brawl. I honestly don't know how many Melee vets will transition to the new game. The game is reportedly much quicker. If it's fast enough and there's enough hitstun we could at least see more Melee elements like 4 stock matches.

 

[Chiroz]

Making a rules don't come from preference, they come from the guidelines of what a tournament is. Just because attending a tournament is preference doesn't mean the qualifications of tournament rules or the definition of a tournament is preference.

Do you go to church and say "Well, this is all preference, isn't it? What we say the 10 commandments are is just a choice!" because attending church was a choice made by preference. An existing concept is not defined by the methods of approaching that concept, nor can you redefine that concept by the factors existing within it.

Here's what you aren't understanding of what I am saying.

I am not arguing whether a certain stage should be banned or not. I am arguing that preference does play a part in the creation of a ruleset.

I am not arguing whether the 10 commandments are preference, I am arguing whether being Catholic/Christian is! And as a matter of fact it is, you don't have to be catholic or christian just like you do not have to want to play by tournament rules.

Tournaments as a matter of fact are preference just lie you pointed out, but that isn't what I was saying.

If I did a Smash tournament in order to test who the best Ganon player ever was, would I include the exact same rules you do? I would have to include an "Only Ganon Rule" too, my ruleset has changed under a Tournament setting. Fact is, they changed because my desired goal is to find out who is the best Ganon, that is a preference.

What if I want my tournament to be FFA, is it not still a Tournament? Is the definition wrong? It is still a tournament, only it isn't focused around the same goal as a 1v1 no-items tournament.

I am trying to tell you that the you only speak of tournament as if there is only one end-all-be-all type of tournament. There is not. In this community there is though and that is because we are making a Tournament environment specifically designed around the people who want to join this community. We are trying to appease the people in this community by doing what they want, giving them a system that allows for the most effective way to determine the most skillful player.

Everything from then on can be as objective and impartial as you want, but up until the moment you decide what your focus is going to be, it is all about preference.

What you're trying to tell me is "there's no right answer". If that's the case, why are you even talking? Just pack up your bags and go home.

What I'm trying to tell you is there is a right answer. You can point out an anime convention or 4 high school kids playing in their mom's basement or whatever as radical differences, but they don't have the same goal as us.

When the goal is clearly set, to define the victor of a tournament, to clarify S as clearly as possible... it comes to the same conclusion. There is a right and a wrong. Can someone have an items tournament? Yeah, they can. But for each individual aspect, it helps or hinders the definition of S.

Yes, this is all correct. All I've been arguing up until now is that in order to clearly set a goal and clarify S you need to clearly define what the preference is from the target demographic of your Tournament. What do you want your tournament to achieve, this is how you set this goal and how you can then procede to create a ruleset.

The 3 pointer line was introduced for primarily non-game related reasons, but they weren't arbitrary. The idea was to allow the teams to "stretch the floor" and spread out and make size not that much of an issue; it was adopted by some rival leagues to the NBA, which forced them to add it on.

Regardless, I'm not quite sure how this pertains to smash. Sakurai has his own reasons for balancing the game the way he does and creating the characters he does. We use the tools we're given. To entertain your multi-linguialism, analogies aren't meant as literal comparisons. If I said "that's like telling a hockey coach you're not going to play with skates", I'm not actually talking about hockey. I'm talking about a situation with similar facets, such as foolishly ignoring the coach in a hockey game and putting yourself at risk.

It doesn't pertain to Smash.

I meant to give you real world examples where rulesets are dynamically changed through preference, because you said that that should never be the case, ever, ever, ever. It was a literal counter-example to the one argument I've been trying to debate this whole time.

That was me listing an exception for you. It's like someone telling you "murder is wrong" but then you find yourself in a situation where you can shoot somebody to death before he blows up a building full of children. The correct choice is shooting the guy, but murder is still wrong. It just happens to be better than the alternative.

I never said banning a stage was right. I literally said every stage should be analyzed to see the repercussions it causes in gameplay and see if it should be banned (analyzing the alternatives). You are the one claiming everything is Black and White and rules are completely impartial to the situation (which you said so yourself). Going by your previous arguments you wouldn't shoot the guy, you would let him blow up the school.

I did. It's called a "vocal minority". I had people complaining incessantly about my tournament having too liberal of a stage list, so they decided to drive up to Michigan to play in one of theirs. Michigan didn't have a full bracket. I had over 80. This is because most people don't even go to smashboards. They go to college, to bars, to restaurants, to their friends houses.

It doesn't matter to the vocal minority because they're interested in their interests, not community ones.

Then why not rally that "silent majority" to speak up. If they truly prefer a liberal stagelist they will do it. Some people go to tournaments regardless of rule sets (like me), others do stop attending when there is a rule they don't like, some can't drive far away, while others don't care. 1 tournament having more people than another doesn't prove that more people attend Tournaments with a larger stage list. You need to do an actual research (well not you as in yourself, I mean as in several TOs), have the same TO host tournaments with different rulesets on the same exact place. Do this for several TOs and analye the results. Rally the silent minority to speak up for what they believe is right.

I mean you don't have to do any of this if you don't want to. But it is a foolproof way to get a larger stage list with no repercussions.

I've made and participated in multiple tournaments with experimental rulesets. I'm not sure what your point is. The rules these tournaments set aren't arbitrary. They don't say "we're playing smash", they say "we're playing smash with all items". There's a difference and you know it.

Again depends on the community, but yes, there is a difference. What I am trying to get at is that there is no "right" tournament. Any tournament is a tournament. Any game where both players are giving their best to win against each other is competitive, it doesn't matter how much luck is involed. Poker is a game which is heavily based on chance yet there are still tournaments around it.

The only reason our tournaments are like they are (1v1, no items, etc.) is because we want them to be so because of the goal we want them to achieve (showing without a doubt who the most skillful player is). And that is preference.

Note: I like this community and I love our ruleset, I have nothing against it, I am just showing you that the only reason we strive for a ruleset like the one we have is because we desire our tournaments to give us an outcome based on player skill and not on arbitrary elements.

Yes, someone can say "I want to play in an items tournament". "I want to play in an FFA tournament". These can be totally legitimate tournaments! I agree that tournaments selected primarily from preference can exist.

But they aren't the right choice. Because they don't fit in line with what a tournament is about. Everything is legal until it shows it needs to be removed due to overcentralization or random results. The only exception, the only one, I listed earlier: mass exodus from the community. That's it.

A tournament is a competition involving several people where each player tries to win.

A competition is when 2 or more people strive to top the other in a given activity.

So how exactly are their tournaments not the right choice? By clear definition it is still a tournament, it just doesn't have the same preference yours does.

It doesn't matter how random anything is in order to qualify something as a tournament.

The fact is we prefer a tournament where the victor is selected purely by player skill. A preference.

Except that isn't true. You think it takes guns to increase a murder rate? Knives will do just fine. It doesn't have to be a 7-3 or 8-2 matchup (which, by the way, exist on those stages) to influence the metagame. You think it has to be extreme to influence the metagame?

Top Tier

SS:
(±0)

S:
(+2)

A+:
(-1) (-1)

A-:

(+2) (-1)

(-1)


Pop quiz, named 6 characters that do well on flat/plat stages. Oh, gee, I dunno, maybe MK, IC, Olimar, Diddy, Marth, Snake, and Falco. Just maybe.

You think that's an accident? "Oh, the best characters just happen to be good at flat/plat stages"? Of course it's not an accident. It's by design. Or maybe I'm just crazy, I'm just a little bit loopy, and Battlefield and Smashville are actually crazy out-there stages and I just never noticed.

All stages influence the metagame. You get a 60-40 matchup and you put in a stage that goes 20-80, that "40" will start winning a lot on his CP and it'll increase his odds quite a bit. You get a 50/50 and have a slight advantage in any way whatsoever and you get a snowball effect that makes the one with the advantage the winner and the other character falls off the map.

You think Olimar can even exist on stages that aren't flat, plat, and static? You think Diddy would excel the way he did? Look at Falco! Falco is a HORRIBLE character. His recovery sucks in Brawl, his primary method of dealing damage early game is getting a grab at low %, he can't fight anyone on the edge, and he has serious trouble landing kill moves.

Somewhere along the way, someone said "that just won't do" and said "you can't camp the edge against Falco" and "only flat/plat stages please" and up he went on the tier list. If you have access to the right forums you can see me calling out which characters were going to go up in the tier list.

You know what's REALLY crazy? It's the exact same list as last time. The characters were just rearranged! It's been those characters for a long, long time. The only difference is their placement amongst each other.

I already said that flat/plat stages also shift the metagame and thus shift the tier list too, I wasn't denying that. What I am saying is that why is this even an argument at all. If we allow other stages (or ban new ones) the tier list will shift accordingly, but what exactly makes the other tier list better than this one. You keep saying why do we get to decide the tier list, the question is why should the tier list be as you desire it to be.

Players aren't trying to decide the tier list, they try to decide the metagame they want to play and so the tier list shifts accordingly to said metagame. What you want is to take away this preferred metagame and switch it with a different one and you are saying that you are doing it on completely objective claims which is what I am arguing against, it is a preference underneath it all, I hope my next paragraphs will explain it better.

There's only two reasons to ban anything: overcentralization and random results. That's it! If you can think of something else, go ahead and let me hear it, I'd love to add a third one. It'd make my job WAY easier. If your idea of another reason is "public request" though, you're going in the wrong direction.

Why are these reasons wrong? They don't go against the very fabric of a tournament. They do, however, go against our tournaments, which are based on the goal of finding out the most skilled player, its a want.

You could make the argument, but Smash 4 is coming out and I'll likely be one of the TOs again breathing life into the midwest. I'll likely be a source of early information again and will fight tooth and nail to prevent stages from being arbitrarily banned because you're right in that people are set in their ways. Once a stage is banned, there's no going back. An individual tournament, maybe a region, but the community as a whole? Nah. We could ban FD for 3 months and we wouldn't see it return.

If there is a silent majority you could unban any stage by doing an effort to rally said majority. You don't need them to come to Smashboards, there are many other ways to voice an opinion.

Laws aren't written in the way tournament rules are.

Funny that you mention gay marriage being illegal in some places. Slavery used to be too. Jim Crow laws, women can't vote, women can't hold office, women can't preach, children have to work, etc., were all preference-based, not evidence-based. Good argument for me.

How is that a good argument for you?

I wasn't arguing ethics or morals. I am arguing whether rulesets are created to achieve a certain goal driven by preference. I had a good argument for this but I won't go down this road, if you want to hear it just PM me.

There's no room for personal preference in tournament rules. You think Rainbow Cruise should be banned because it has a detrimental effect on the metagame? Prove it. It's not hard, I even outlined how you can do it in a previous post. I did it myself. Hell, you're talking to the guy who personally got several stages banned in Melee in the midwest by showing people "hey look at this". I'm living proof that you can, in fact, prove it. I tested stages all the time in Brawl and put to rest many misconceptions, and personally suggested the ban of many stages because of it. I want to keep all the stages, characters, and features I can.

I don't want arbitrary "don't fly under the stage, grab the ledge too many times, flick up on the c-stick in your down+b" rules. I don't want "how about we just play on this flat stage and see who is best on it". I want to have a reasonable framework so that anyone can sit down and say "oh, that's why that should be banned".

Someone says "I think Rumble Falls should be legal"? You say "Oh, that'd be fun. But did you know that there are segments that characters like Bowser and Donkey Kong can't survive? If they stage goes "speed up" randomly while they are in hitstun of any sort, there are segments that will prevent them from rising fast enough to make it."

They say "Oh, oh, I see. This results in a 100% win rate for the opponent and creates random results because it doesn't always occur. This is both overcentralizing and random in nature and is not fit for a competitive environment".

Done.

I did that, yet all you said was that these certain players should just stop playing those certain characters. They should learn to deal with it by choosing a new main and then they should just learn to adapt by playing the new metagame.

Go read my past posts and find the 2-3 posts I solely talk about RC and how it can be abused pretty easily. The fact is when playing on a stage like RC there is much less interaction between players, as such skill is also less of a factor determining the victor. The optimal solution for most of the best characters on the stage is to not interact with your opponent except for very specific few times on a whole loop. By playing this way you throw out the window the so called skill level comparison that you say tournaments should have (because the less interaction there is between players, the less skill is involved). If what you desire is a tournament where the most important factor is skill, then RC isn't driving you towards that goal.

Before you respond, go take a good, hard look at the top tier of the Brawl tier list and tell me that Rainbow Cruise is a bigger threat to the metagame than 5 stages with nearly identical sizes, shapes, and layouts. Say it with a straight face.

RC is just an example.

If the choice was between having 5 RC's and having 5 flat stages which one would you think is worse off for the metagame? Which one do you think causes more overcentralization?

 

[DakotaBonez]

Holy sh#@, people are takin' this joke thread seriously. What's it at 400 posts of debating!?!

 

[ぱみゅ]

Just as an FYI, the BBR will likely be worthless when it comes to stages and giving out any orders. They have no teeth whatsoever and they wouldn't ban people from the BBR that didn't even play the game. Umbreon was in there for pete's sake! He's a smart guy and one of the few whose opinions I respect, but he believed some silly, silly things because he just didn't play the game. So good luck with that. That and the whole "affirmative action" thing in allowing/not allowing people to join based off of how heavily their region was represented. A good thought, but dumb in practice.

As for "creating formats", I can tell you right now it doesn't work. We tried that so that way TOs could look at a list and say "if I want to be conservative, I can pick this list of stages. If I want to experiment, here are the ones that have been tested out of my region and have been deemed acceptable, and this group over here are stages that have no consensus yet".

Sounds good on its surface, end result is "hey, so why don't ban those 'advanced' and 'pending' stages?" and "Hey, my TO only uses the basic list and now I have no counterpicks and the Ice Climbers have 7. What gives?"


Tell the BBR to grow a pair and kick people out that don't play the game, and do one thing and one thing only: show the results of testing stages.

That's all the BBR is going to be good for. Gathering facts and data. Find the height of all the characters, find the fastest walk speed, list their run speeds, jump heights, weight, etc. Show how fast the mid-weight character dies from center stage both vertically and horizontally from an attack with medium knockback.

That's about all you'll be able to do well.

Oh, and start *****ing at them now to confirm hard numbers. "if a character is shown to have X% usage and/or Y% victories/points by Z months, the character being banned will be brought up internally and discussed with a future timetable and % set at that point. Not before or after", things like that. "A stage will be considered a counter-pick if it is assumed a character in an otherwise even matchup will win E% of his matches on that stage and/or an F% increase from what he typically would get on stages not considered advantageous or disadvantageous." You get the drill.

Is a good thing Smash 4 is a new beginning isn't it?
I may actually have a substantial input there, instead of here where I pretty much am just an added number. I just have to insist hard enough.

Currently the BBR has been kicking people out of inactivity (at least they did it once or twice since I joined), but it isn't very noticeable as, well, Brawl is pretty much dying.

As for the formats, I really believe third-parties have to be able to look at the site and find a very simplistic ruleset they can remember and follow even when they don't know anything about the game (better to follow that than to just say "this ruleset is too long, we'll just go FD-only, 5-stock matches!").
The advanced format would be supposed to be directed to more experienced COMMUNITIES that know what they are doing and are able to translate their "basics" to a more complex scenario. If a TO or community as a whole doesn't want to follow a more complex ruleset, is their fault (and their loss, in case they travel to a big one using the advanced format). At least, that's how I idealize it.

Also, another ideal is to have actual data and feedback for every tournament and result used, the more feedback the more useful the S4BR will be, as we WILL have the tools to work, unlike in Brawl where it was all about pleasing the whiny masses, which included the disbanding of the URC and everyone adopting the Meta Knight infested metagame.

Hopefully, HOPEFULLY Smash 4 can mean a new beginning where the Backroom can begin do things well done.

 

[DakotaBonez]

So many esteemed members have flocked to this thread, this is how I always imagined the backroom.