Re: Your Scene. Your Community

[err]

well this was just a post in that possible tier list thread but

a) this was WAY off topic

b) that thread got closed thank god.

here goes. don't kill me; im not dilligent enough to respond as swiftly as you guys. so build off each other. allow me to just present a situation.

***
Im going to first propose this here, with perhaps a stronger message to follow perhaps right after we all get situated with a final build.

I saw someone on page 2 mention that he didn't find t!mmy's evaluations valid, simply because t!mmy lacked B'roomer status.

i'll pretend he was joking. it makes sense that he was joking. god i hope it was just him joking.

because if 10,000 freakin members just sit aside and let MELEE backroomers decide the fate of our community, i'll be shocked. This is the time, if ever, where we could see a shift in power within the community.

NO. im not saying "omfg brawl is a new game and ken and isai sucks and i can beat hugo" (isai don't kill me)
--good smashers will always be good smashers. perhaps the path to perfection in this game will be easier for those of us that have really gotten good in the last 2-3 years, seeing as we don't know if L-cancelling will return, and that's likely what most ppl in that cohort have to worry about more than anything else ( missed L-Cancels are the bane of the average-smashboarder's existence, oh and spacing geez who couldn't use more of that?)


NO im not neccessarily stating that the power within the smash community is held by any particular persons/factions/etc.
only a dumb*ss would state that. This community is divided regionally, locally, etc. Hell I live in georgia and am the best smasher in a 30 mile radius and I get ***** at state tournaments. Florida would sht on my face in this game, and when i started playing, Florida sucked (tipman FTW).


BUT I do feel like there is some sense of power invested in those that are winning tournaments. And while that's great that people have champions to look up to, do you really want the same people who are sweeping tournaments now to be the ONLY people creating tournaments for Brawl?>

anyway i'll be da*ned if this community is NOT shaped by collective action and popular consensus. Chillindude829 and ChuDat and Manacloud won't determine the future of Smash. I guess its as easy as the fact that if you don't like how a tournament will be run, don't go. form your own tourney, convince people to not attend theirs, etc.

We don't need to be celebrity-centric. fvvK the backroom. yes im bitter! I want to read some intelligent discussion from time to time, and its entirely private? This isn't a free internet, and I respect the fact that the powers that pay are those that can organize their site however they wish, so i wont b*tch on that. but the melee general board is svamped with the same crap same crap same crap same crap every hour! it'd be nice to know there's a light at the end of the tunnel

but really. this community is going to get *ing huge. We need structure, but I don't believe that we need to just throw ourselves at Melee's Power Ranking Members to guide the way. It's your community. You think Final Smashes should be allowed? Make tournaments. Keep items on, and throw a melee tournament at the same venue to guarantee some attendance. Then you can test items out in Brawl. It's really next summer or never, peeps. Melee gamers are going to want to let go (if they haven't already); hell I'm a nobody -- I just like combo-ing people -- and I've got bigger sht to do in my life right now (university, robotics, film&television), so naturally there will be prominent members of the Smash community who just don't want to keep paddling. Let them go, and move on. Many are used to that already.


Oh and Nealdt fVking rocks. I love your site and don't care if I'm contradicting myself when I state that you need to keep your shtuff goin. I like what you do, my friend. keep at it.

but seriously, people betch about Manacloud all the time: Make your own Brawl scene. Make him come to your tournaments and buy $40 t-shirts and then ... [this is already turning to flame and I didn't even want to flame this guy. Danmg Mike you got a way about you, online]

We're going to all have to do some experimenting with Brawl. next summer is going to be something wonderful, though. I imagine tournaments every freckin weekend across the nation, different rule-variations for many of them, certain levels banned/not banned, perhaps competitors in a set will get to strike two stages each and we can just leave more levels available for random.

OR if there is ONE or TWO SPECIFIC character that is/are just TOO BROKEN for an otherwise neutral stage, BAN said character from being used on that stage! Then learn a secondary character for the level, and get better! Dave's Stupid Rule will likely remain, so say MetaKnight is wicked broken on Yoshi's Story. We ban use of MetaKnight from that level, and you can only play that stage once per set (you can't just dicck your opponent's main for an entire set)

well this is entering the realm of the theoretical so i think i should stop. god I hope someone reads this post.

This is your scene.

 

[worldjem7]

I completly agree with what you're saying. Brawl should be treated as a brand new game where everyone is at the same general level and not be dictated by the famous,and/or pro, players from Melee. Especially after seeing the results from the demo it looks like Brawl will HAVE to be played differently from Melee, at least from a technical standpoint. Tournaments should be run by anyone who's willing to do so and test out for themselves different rules to find out what works or what they like.

p.s. I wrote this from my Wii.

 

[err]

viva la wii browser!

[edit] (check's worldjem's location)

I knew I loved Canada;

 

[Conformal_Invariance]

<3 you lots.

You make several good points, and I find myself in a state of blissful agreement with you.

Keep truckin', man.

 

[Smo]

Good post matey. It's true that we shouldn't let the better players completely control the way people play. Personally, I agree with most of their decisions, such as stage banning and no items. However, I know that other smashers may not and if they want to play Smash their own way and still enjoy community and competition, then good for them.

 

[o6ograveo9o]

this post is genius, ive always thought that letting the most popular/better players decide what everybody is going to do was idiotic. now i can uderstand banning certain stages for competitive play due to hazzards and such. but most only use final destination. first off taht stage is kinda boring... i mean yea, its got a neat background kinda, but its just flat... thats it, its just flat, its like fighting on a 2x4 its small and flat. personally i think larger levels are much better. i play on hyrule temple most of the time. but enough about that. i do think that brawl will be completely different, making some people better than they were in melee and some people worse. therefore i dont think anybody should be thought of as a superior player when playing brawl for the first time, for all we know some nub could **** chudat or ken or Isai ect. when first playing, because it isnt melee 2.0 and it isnt 64. i think everybody should start off as being the same level, face it, all experienced players will know a little more about the game, but we are all basically noobs at brawl when it comes out, theres not much more that we will know how to do than whats covered in the instruction manual.

 

[po pimpus]

I guess what you're saying is this:

"I don't like the way Melee's Tournament rules evolved, and I want to make sure that Brawl is at least experimented with."

That's a valid concern and totally your opinion. I think Melee's rulesets turned out pretty well considering
how broken some of the characters are(looking at you Fox, Marth, and Sheik). I never did fully agree with some of the stage bans, and even though I'd like to see items in play, I understand that explosive crates/barrels/capsules are just too random.

Back to your point, though, letting a select few determine the entire course of a community without any collective input is just silly. It would be nice if once Brawl kicks in to gear competitively, some of the bigger tournaments (FC, anyone?) allowed for attendees to put in suggestions/vote on the rules. That way, everyone would be an active participant in the evolution of competitive Brawl.

Of course, even if someone else's tournament rules aren't to your liking, you could always host your own tournament! With the way most are approaching Brawl's future rules, I think that is something I would like to do. That way, you EVERYONE can have a tournament that they can enjoy competing in, and not just be there because it was the only game in town.



So do it, Smash community! Determine your own course through the future competitive state! Be bold, be forceful, but also, most importantly, be FAIR.

 

[Foe]

Lots of respect for that post err. I agree 100%.

 

[err]

I guess what you're saying is this:

"I don't like the way Melee's Tournament rules evolved, and I want to make sure that Brawl is at least experimented with."

depends on how i intepret 'evolved' in that sentence. I was not part of the melee community during the formation and standardization; After joining I familiarized myself with how the game is played at tournament level. So I would need input on how it was standardized, but mostly I think that the community has found the optimal way to play melee (with the exception of tiny melee, which I've always found to be superior to standard melee jk ).

4 stock count keeps tournaments flowing at a decent pace in melee, and still allows room for a comeback when you're getting thrashed, but we obviously won't know if we need fewer/more stocks in Brawl tournaments until some time next year.

And I've never actually liked items in melee (beyond team battles and FFA). I always felt like fox/falco were untouchable with those ****ed reflectors up against item attacks (scrub, i know. but my samus was beastly in item melees). Health items are just game changing and far too heart-breaking at times. Can't imagine being edgeguarded by an opponent and witnessing a heart container spawn on stage!

I have just always felt like smashers in my area can play on some of these banned levels just fine. Last week we tossed each other all over classic Yoshi Story, and I couldn't believe that it was banned over some lame-*** campers. A fairly decent level (albeit slightly large, though isn't it on par with Corneria?), Definitely worth considering omitting from pool play for the sake of time, but why is this not available in brackets (or perhaps finals?) Any decent smasher knows that Jiggs needs to be killed vertically (if you waste stock trying to send it off the side, you're.. wasting stock), and that ceiling isn't quite near Dreamland64's (off the top of my head: I'm about to check for sure).

Termina: Great Bay is a beautiful stage for friendly gdorf dittos. Those can boil down to Fair fests, with each character trying to avoid getting sent to the left. (and of course on the lower platforms the reoccuring theme seems to be: "he who gets hit, dies")
Thats just an example of a level that could almost have been tourney worthy (i would certainly not make it legal in any tournament i'd host, of course, but i wanted an example of a level that i'm sure most of us enjoy combo'ing people across at 3-4 in the morning)

so um I guess "yes" to the rest of your post, po-pimpus (didn't include it all sorry people but you all do have scrollbars, right?)

I want to see lots of variations in tournaments, specifically re: stages and((maybe)) items. If a character is so ****ed broken on a level, ban said character from the stage and force people to diversify. It won't weaken that specific character's overall usage - or perhaps tournament hosts will enact rules like (no more than two seperate occurences of tether recovery stalling for longer than 2 zips to the ledge; absolutely NO stalling of the sort in the second half of the (8 minute) match or any time when you're up in stock)

THE crappy part with that is that tournament hosts will certainly have to be more vigilant, and we all know that this just isn't feasible when we start throwing FC's and Pound's et al.
Perhaps, then, to avoid tether stalling, we remove time limits from bracket rounds and reduce stock to 3 if people are dead set on playing so campily. I suppose during pool play, other pool participants can enforce these rules, too, but again I'm moving far too deep into the theory behind an unfinished build of the game.

So yea, I look forward to our community's growth in size and maturity. We're going to need patience and flexibility to reach the level of stability we're at with Melee. I really hope that we can host tournaments where we aren't sacrificing the breadth/depth of the game (namely, stages) because of broken camping characters and overly lame stall techniques.

Seriously, who wouldn't love to see at least one finals match taking place all across New Pork City?

okay. get to it, guys. Sorry if I'm getting anyone else all too excited far too soon

 

[fr0st2k]

Im working on my own site actually. And i the idea is to get te community involved, instead of having a few tourny-leets involved in making the decisions the way they like it.

I dont disagree when people say that tourney goers are better. Although i do feel like saying that going to a tourney doesnt make you intelligent. In fact, since you play the game so often, it would probably make you dumber.

http://71.224.178.228:80/mysite/mypage2.html

theres the beginning of the site. Still needs lots of work. PM me if youre interested in working on it.

In the end though, tournaments are for discovering who the BEST player is. Period. That means tournaments should be expected to lower or eliminate whatever could hamper that discover.

This is false. This has been the consensus of the smashboards tourney goers. Actual, a select few or have been deignated the leader of the smashboard forums. The rest are sheep.

There is no reason a tournament couldnt be about who is the best with items on. Why are there poker tournaments?

Personally, i prefer no items. But to completely erase a whole side of the game seems very elitist to me. As if a bunch of arrogant biased twits all stood up together with their arms crossed and said, "this is how were doing it, so there."

Of course, I completely understand that anyone could have made their own tournament, but to want to be the main "community" for Brawl, you have to be more open, and make many different rulesets. Its very unprofessional not to.

 

[AlphaZealot]

Some stuff is already in the works.

Also, the current consensus in the backroom is to allow a good period of experimintation with rules etc. before outright banning things. That probably means 1)tournaments with items, final smashes, etc. 2)tournaments with different rule structures (set stages instead of advanced slobs, you name it) and 3)every stage, every character etc. If anything the backroom wants to promote diversity this time around, Melee became to rigid to fast and under almost no logic (it was really just a TO here and there with a popular tournament, and those rules just kept getting past on).

In the end though, tournaments are for discovering who the BEST player is. Period. That means tournaments should be expected to lower or eliminate whatever could hamper that discover.

 

[err]

Also, the current consensus in the backroom is to allow a good period of experimintation with rules etc. before outright banning things. [ . . . ]

Yeah, see... select people are holding these discussions in password-protected forums. Discussions leading to decisions that encompass a very *n large community's direction. How many members constitute (nearest power of two will suffice) the backroom/senate?

They are representing over 76,963 members.

If anything the backroom wants to promote diversity this time around, [ . . . ]

well maybe more decisions should/will be decided upon by the 'general' users.

In the end though, tournaments are for discovering who the BEST player is. Period. That means tournaments should be expected to lower or eliminate whatever could hamper that discovery.

QFT.
So there arises that conflict between finding all unique apects of the game, and keeping the beast alive. MLG wants a product (though everyone knows Halo3 is sufficient), And many of the best want the recognition they deserve. Hell, If I could win like PC, I'd want to get a lock on the rules ASAP and start collecting big money from companies that are willing to host large-scale competitive circuits.

but I believe that the best will be recognized despite certain hindrances along our path to standardizing the tournament game. We can assume that items will be phased out fairly swiftly; even when they ARE present in tournaments, they're hopefully going to be chosen such that they wont be the game-breaking variety., and at some point everyone will probably find that 4stock,8minute,noItems was right from day one.

These decisions will be a popular consensus of the community. Should backroom members standardize the game in a format not fitting to the desires of the popular community, you can expect to witness the dissolution of interest in the afformentioned tournament scene, with many favoring to attend other (perhaps smaller) tournaments with varied rulesets. Then we have conflict, and that discovery is sufficiently hampered until we reach an discrete accord pertaining to Tournament styles*. At some point after, we will have a firm tournament plan and can move forward to proving who's the best like we've always wanted to do (though I longly, wrongly believed tournaments to be the grounds to define the metagame. What is humanly possible given some characters and a context. As I think on it now, those are simply the fruit of the labors of the tournament-goers. And that's what I've always placed the most focus on from tournament videos. The unimaginable scenarios, the combos that just shouldn't be possible. The sheer enjoyment of the game. Then the matter of who won, who was playing better that weekend, who is the better player ). [Please no one degenerate this into a "play to win" thread. We ALL know ALL about that aspect of the game, and too many semi-decent players strictly adhere to that philosophy which could feasibly hinder their game. Isai mad props to you on just looking sexy and playing just cos you have to! I will babysit your children for you, bro!]



*re: "tournament styles" - ( bracketing, stock, time limits, character and stage counterpicks, character bans, stage bans, <X>character-on-<Y>stage bans, camping/stalling bans, [haha by the sounds of it i dont want this to be very diverse at all! though in acutality, we can theoretically keep more non-neutral stages in tournament play if they are indeed made non-neutral by only select characters ( we don't yet know if gliders/multi-jumpers hold distinct advantages or not so lets leave this topic for later ) ] )

<This is a new game I'm referencing, which explains my thoughts, harmonious with those of many other SWF members, that we just don't know what we'll have to trim to keep it fair and competitive and balanced (not asking for much there, given Melee)>


But I guess I'm ultimately stating the obvious: Melee's backroom isn't deciding the fate of the community.

Let's try not to compromise so much too soon.

 

[Lemon Drop]

Very nicely done. I totally agree with you. Though how many people are really deciding the fate of the tournament scene in the back rooms?

 

[Endless Nightmares]

The way I think of it, the Smash Backroom is the unofficial Government of tournament Smash. They gather to intelligently discuss the issues of Smash, come to an agreement, and the majority of community members accept it (or don't). Tournament smash is really shaped by the decisions that the Backroom makes. Rules, bans, tier lists, etc. Sure there is a bit of variation (tournament directors can choose whatever neutral/banned stages they want, other rule variations) but there is a static consensus on certain things (Brinstar Depths and Hyrule being banned for example) just because they are the best decision. It's great that there is some kind of a standard for the way that tournament smash is played, organized, and run.

Even if there is not an official "Backroom" for Brawl, I think that a trusted group of smashers; preferably the most skilled, most respected, and most knowledgeable; continue to gather, have intelligent discussions and continue to help the tournament community come to a general consensus on major Smash issues. The Backroom simply helps the community stay unified, and I think it's great that such a large group of people can agree with the Backroom and positively accept their ideas, and if something doesn't seem right, they can let them know in a respectable manner.

Of course, I'm not saying any of this to disagree with you, I just thought I'd add my two cents (or dollars lol) about the importance of a Backroom-like congregation. I hope that another one forms for Brawl eventually, not right away of course.

I completely agree with all the points you made. (except banning "broken" characters on certain stages where they have an advantage, that's what stage bans in tournament sets are for!)

 

[AlphaZealot]

whoops, totally left a few things out.

The backroom never really decided ANY rules regarding melee and hasn't had a decent rule discussion until the last few months (for the first time we are reviewing EVERY stage in Melee and generating a lot of discussion). The people who decide the tournament rules are usually the tournament organizers. That is, the people who run tournaments. The general idea that holds true is that if the rules are whack people wont attend. In the end though just about all decent tournament organizers in the country are in the Smash backroom, (FC, OC, Pound, MLG, etc.).

The only thing the MBR puts out officially is the tier list, which is based on tournament Smash.

 

[Endless Nightmares]

In the end though just about all decent tournament organizers in the country are in the Smash backroom, (FC, OC, Pound, MLG, etc.).

Ah, my mistake, I guess that's why I came to the conclusion that the Backroom determines the rulesets for tournament play.

So we came to an agreement on this kind of thing without the help of the Backroom? That's even more amazing to me.

 

[po pimpus]

Well that's good then. I was hoping that the various major tourney organizers were involved in Backroom decisions. I'm also glad to see that this topic managed to generate an intelligent discussion as well, without a bunch of flaming and name-calling. Score.

This should be a very interesting time in the development of Competitive Smash. A new game to dissect and enjoy, new players entering the fray, and a new breed of tournaments. Should be quite an entertaining year in 2008...

 

[TheMagicalKuja]

I very much like this topic.

Keeping an eye out here for future developments.