Rainbow Cruise and Brinstar should both be banned

[Makke]

.....................

 

[C.J.]

What about them? They're not permanent so walkoff camping isn't relevant.

Are you referring to DDD/Falco/other characters with a CG? Note how they have terrible aerial mobility. Camp the overhanging platforms.

Next to no character gets a large benefit on CS and the ones that do well on a specific variation of it, either do badly on other parts or get camped way too easily on their "strong" part of the stage making it useless.

 

[Makke]

......................

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

The best post was on the first page (40 ppp baby). Gheb nailed it. Brinstar is a bad competitive stage. The environmental hazards are every bit as pervasive as something like, say, Spear Pillar, and the sharking is just the cake's icing.

Rainbow Cruise I could go either way, but I don't think MK is a very good argument for it. As a ZSS player RC and Brinstar are two of my favorite CPs for non-MK characters, so he isn't the only good character on these stages.

 

[John12346]

Spear Pillar's hazards are completely tame... all of them.

Anything that isn't "circle camping" as an argument for Spear Pillar not being legal is merely a CP quality...

Anyway, all that side, what exactly is it about Brinstar that makes you think it's eligible for illegality?

 

[Kantrip]

Even the stage flipping completely upside-down?

 

[John12346]

What's so bad about that? Upside down spin, as well as the left-right flip don't even cause gameplay changes...

Real talk, I did some messing around with Spear Pillar the other day. It only took me two or three matches to figure out how to appropriately move during these changes. It's really not that hard.

 

[Kantrip]

I suppose it's just the timing of the thing. Is the effect that occurs random? If so, the stage randomly inverting your controls on you is a bit extreme when you take into account the input or DI or what have you that you may be inputting at the time.

 

[Tesh]

If there is no warning on those changes, Spear pillar would be out with pictochat anyway. But I could have sworn the pokemon in the background always screams before every effect. Probably wouldn't be enough time though.

 

[John12346]

Lemme do this from memory, then.

The following things happen immediately after a Pokemon roars:
- A third of the top level of the stage breaking
- Time slows down(Dialga)
- Screen flips horizontally(Palkia)
- Screen rotates 180 degrees(Palkia)
- Screen tilts slightly(Dialga only, I think)
- Gravity decreases(Palkia)

And the following things are a delayed effect:
- Laser beams(Which can be shielded, mind you!)
- Pokemon jumps onto the stage(Dialga) (The cue for this is when Dialga roars, and nothing happens immediately afterward)

It seems that, after listing them down, the effects that can cause damage happen on a delay, and serve some warning to the players. As far as mechanic/stage changes, those do seem to come without warning, but I can't really see any of them gimping/killing any players like the dreaded diagonal line on Pictochat or something, y'know?

Also, I should point out that, when Palkia flips the screen horizontally, or rotates the screen 180 degrees, your control input doesn't change. It does take a little getting used to, but it's very simple to adapt to and take advantage of once you get the hang of it.

To be honest, if the bottom half of Spear Pillar didn't exist, and circle camping couldn't happen on this stage, I'd probably even go out of the way to argue for its legality.

 

[ぱみゅ]

Balanced Brawl Tried that, and failed because the stage breaking with no warning gimped characters very easily.

I rally like the stage, though...

 

[Ghostbone]

You can't circle camp on Spear Pillar because of the hazards lol.

Maybe in like, Sonic vs Ganondorf you can, but between any characters of at least kinda similar speed or anyone vs Snake or Falco or something you can't circle camp.

 

[Tesh]

uh...most of the time u can. having to stop and shield a laser doesn't stop circle camping because that laser also stops people from approaching you.

 

[Ghostbone]

uh...most of the time u can. having to stop and shield a laser doesn't stop circle camping because that laser also stops people from approaching you.

Naa just go play on the stage

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Spear Pillar's hazards are completely tame... all of them.

Anything that isn't "circle camping" as an argument for Spear Pillar not being legal is merely a CP quality...

Anyway, all that side, what exactly is it about Brinstar that makes you think it's eligible for illegality?

First of all, stages are eligible for legality, not for illegality. Most stages are illegal.

Anyway...

1. Stages that have extremely or persistently pervasive and intrusive elements should be banned. This does not include brief hazards like Halberd's. Hazards are what make Smash unique, but they should ideally be minimally pervasive. To elaborate, I care much more about the intrusiveness of these elements than their randomness or other factors. Examples: 75m, Brinstar, Flat Zone 2, Luigi's Mansion, Rumble Falls

2. Stages that promote camping in an unreasonable way due to size or other factors. Examples: New Pork City, Hyrule Temple, Hanenbow

3. Stages that allow characters to become impossible to attack for any substantial length of time. I think the golden rule here is that if a stage is arguably broken in one of the other two ways and also allows a character or characters to render itself virtual invincible, the stage could be banned. Examples: Rainbow Cruise (gliders flying under the top part of the stage), Delfino Plaza, Halberd

Add: Not sure how I feel about walk-offs. Traditionally we've just outright banned stages that design around them, but only one permanent walk-off stage fitting my above criteria would even remain legal: Mario Circuit.


Potentially legal stages using this criteria (obviously some discussion is needed):

Battlefield
Castle Siege
Distant Planet
Final Destination
Frigate Orpheon
Lylat Cruise
Mario Circuit
Pokémon Stadium 1
Smashville
Yoshi's Island (Brawl)
Yoshi's Island (Melee)

Only a few of these look questionable, and mostly because some of them include walk-offs. I don't see the item spawn on Distant Planet as a problem. I don't see the walk-offs on one side to be a huge problem either because both stages that legally have one-side walk-offs are on slopes which changes the physics. Mario Circuit is a concern, but then, you can ban it and it is an otherwise pretty good stage. If you disagree on these philosophies, you probably don't like some of this list. Personally I'd be OK with Yoshi's going.

I guess I have a pretty liberal stage view, but I also see some stages we have legal as being pretty ridiculous too.

 

[Ghostbone]

Halberd's hazards are worse than Brinstar's.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Why? They're pitiful. You can SDI out of them. They appear once every 3 minutes or something. I don't see the problem.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

Ghost is just salty about my KO at the end of this set:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65uAfscyG4#t=16m44s

 

[WindMajor]

Why did you keep on going to the left in that Mario Bros. match? o___o

 

[Grim Tuesday]

Testing out different strategies and shiz, Mario Bros. is a metagame all to itself.

 

[Ghostbone]

Mario Bros is amazing.

Also being forced to shield because a hazard might randomly attack you, which leads into a kill by the opponent is bull****

Brinstar's lava follows a pretty set pattern, and doesn't discriminate against players.
Lava might "affect" the game more, but it has less of a random effect.

Also every 3 minutes? A hazard occurs like every 20-30 seconds >.>
Though I'll admit the claw is really the only problematic one, it's still ********.

 

[-LzR-]

Halberds hazards are really good. They are easy to avoid and you can only laugh is someone gets hit by one and the rewards is also pretty good for managing to get your opponent to get hit by them.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

I disagree with the claw being the only problematic one.

Watch how I abused the laser in my match against Btmans, though I guess that could be just me out-playing him, still a pretty gay edge-guarding tool.

 

[Ghostbone]

Halberds hazards are really good. They are easy to avoid and you can only laugh is someone gets hit by one and the rewards is also pretty good for managing to get your opponent to get hit by them.

It's not only about it hitting you, it's about how your opponent can punish you for avoiding them.
e.g. In my match vs Grim, I was forced to shield as the claw may have hit me (and it did hit my shield) then if I didn't Jump OoS immediately I would have just been uair > uair > nair'd in my shield which probably would've killed me.
I ended up getting hit by uair anyway and dying.

But you can see in this situation the game basically decided I should lose, randomly.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

No matter what Ghost did in that situation, I could've countered with either, as he said, an uair > uair > nair or even just waited until he rolled or something and shuttle loop'd.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Meta Knight

 

[Ghostbone]

Meta Knight

Could've been G&W and it would have been similar. (though i wouldn't have died, I would have taken damage)
Nair too good.

 

[Player-1]

From personal experience, the laser affects the match more than the claw, but that's just because when it locks onto me I usually put the laser in a position that would be advantageous for my character in the MU.

 

[-LzR-]

Being able to put your opponent in a bad situation with the claw takes some skill which is exactly what we want to test here.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

From personal experience, the laser affects the match more than the claw, but that's just because when it locks onto me I usually put the laser in a position that would be advantageous for my character in the MU.

^This^

Edge-guarding with the laser can be brutal.

 

[Tesh]

Halberd gives fair warning. Even if you were already offstage when the crosshair first pops up, you have a good 5 + seconds to get ur butt back into a good position OR just jump into it and SDI out the other side.

Those hazards give the same warning as stadiums or more. Plenty of time to deal with the situation and reset or get outplayed and fall.

 

[Ghostbone]

Being able to put your opponent in a bad situation with the claw takes some skill which is exactly what we want to test here.

Because it's totally skill having the hazard randomly target your opponent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyb7BwVZP68#t=15m39s
Here's another example, there's nothing Acid could do to avoid the claw.
If he air-dodged he would have fallen and died.
If he up-b'd Leon would have easily F-smashed or up-smashed or something.

Claw randomly deciding to take your stock, and there's nothing you can do about it >.>

And Tesh, there's a difference between a warning for something that's always the same and isn't biased against the player, and something that is, like Halberd's claw.
You get about 13 seconds of warning that it will hit someone, but you only have half a second to react to it deciding to hit you, or the opponent.

 

[-LzR-]

Too bad he put himself into a ****ty situation even with about 7 seconds of warning. Totally the stages fault.
I also heard it targets either the winning or losing player, not sure which, and that it can't change targets by simply touching the opponent. Essentially it's not random at all.

Also randomness is irrelevant if it doesn't matter or can easily be reacted.
If Pictochat gave a 5 seconds warning about the next drawing, it wouldn't be banned so often obviously.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

Keep in mind that Ghost isn't trying to make a case for Halberd to be banned or anything like that, he is just explaining why the hazards are worse than on Brinstar.

 

[-LzR-]

Oh, well they obviously are worse than Brinstar, but neither are problematic and won't allow yout beat a better player or anything.

 

[Ghostbone]

I also heard it targets either the winning or losing player, not sure which, and that it can't change targets by simply touching the opponent.

Except it doesn't either target the winning or losing player, you can actually go and test this if you wish, or watch the previous two videos posted.

And anyway yea, my point was originally to counter SFP's post saying Brinstar's hazards are worse than Halberd's.

Really people have a serious issue of confirmation bias with stages, and also with their subjective opinion.
It's evident when people say that RC as a stage is broken due to camping aspects, and then say it's the fault of scrooging, and not smashville that games can often time out.
It's also evident with Brinstar, when people complain about the hazards, simply because they occur more often. And then use the terrible logic of,
The hazards are slightly random
They occur lots
So Brinstar randomly decides the victor.
They affect the match, but they don't have a random effect.
Which is contrary to Halberd, which occurs less often (actually idk if it occurs less often, well I mean if we only consider the ship part), and are randomly biased against a player, but people don't care about the hazards on Halberd since it's such a well established legal stage.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Realistically, the acid on Brinstar doesn't really feel less random.

I saw this quote my m2k, kind of agree:

if you can always predict when the acid is going to rise with it's various different patterns then god bless you

Anyway, I gave a different criteria for hazards that explicitly excluded randomness as a factor so evoking randomness doesn't really refute me. I don't think randomness really matters. If a large meteor randomly fell from the sky on Smashville that did 2% and didn't cause any knockback or hitstun you probably wouldn't care, but if that same meteor happened once every 20 seconds like clockwork but dealt 50% to, or killed anyone hit with it, you'd probably want Smashville banned. Severity and pervasiveness are much more important.

 

[ぱみゅ]

inb4Onett.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

I have no problem predicting Brinstar's acid.

Mew2King so bad.

 

[Ghostbone]

Realistically, the acid on Brinstar doesn't really feel less random.

I saw this quote my m2k, kind of agree:




Anyway, I gave a different criteria for hazards that explicitly excluded randomness as a factor so evoking randomness doesn't really refute me. I don't think randomness really matters. If a large meteor randomly fell from the sky on Smashville that did 2% and didn't cause any knockback or hitstun you probably wouldn't care, but if that same meteor happened once every 20 seconds like clockwork but dealt 50% to, or killed anyone hit with it, you'd probably want Smashville banned. Severity and pervasiveness are much more important.

Well it depends on how extreme the meteor is, if it's on a similar level to the bullet bills in Melee on Peach's Castle, it'd be ridiculous to ban smashville, if it did just cover the whole stage every 20 seconds though to the point that it's unavoidable and makes the game unplayable, then yes it should be banned.

But that has no relevance in our game, I can't really think of any hazard like that, which makes a stage bannable. (I guess the items on Mario Bros.?)