Real talk: custom moves, to ban or not to ban?

[Kalierdarke]

Test them first. Assume, at least at launch, that they are balanced. Basically, pull a Smogon and ban things piece by piece until it all works well. I think they should be used, but without testing I cannot say for sure whether it's a good idea or not.

Don't pull a smogon, they knee-jerk ban things that have no reason to be banned just because they lost to it, even if it's stupidly easy to stop.

I'm personally all for custom moves and will be allowing them in tournaments, although it will need to be watched to see if any specific combinations need to be banned, but there's already plenty of others(players and TOs both) who show interest in custom moves so it's definitely going to be easy to catch problem combinations.

 

[ScubaGoomba]

Don't pull a smogon, they knee-jerk ban things that have no reason to be banned just because they lost to it, even if it's stupidly easy to stop.

I'm personally all for custom moves and will be allowing them in tournaments, although it will need to be watched to see if any specific combinations need to be banned, but there's already plenty of others(players and TOs both) who show interest in custom moves so it's definitely going to be easy to catch problem combinations.

So... pull a Smogon.

 

[JamietheAuraUser]

So... pull a Smogon.

But obviously don't be as extremely over-aggressive about bans as Smogon is. Because they really are incredibly aggressive about it, and almost every ban that is suggested goes through every time. It's not like "we're suspecting something and it may turn out to not be as OP as we think", it's "we're suspecting something, so it's almost certain to get banned because the ones who are going to put in the effort to reach are insane voting reqs are the ones who want it banned the most".

 

[ミスティック Speed]

3DS or Wii U, both should permit customizable moves in competitive play.

 

[Kalierdarke]

So... pull a Smogon.

Smogon doesn't test most of the things they ban. someone says to ban something, so they ban it.

hence, knee-jerk. They don't actually put much, if any, testing into whether or not something should be banned. Case in point, Swagger.

There's a difference between banning something just because a few people lost to it, or banning something because it is unbalanced. If we went by smogon rules, Ice Climbers and Meta Knight would be banned from brawl.

 

[JamietheAuraUser]

Smogon doesn't test most of the things they ban. someone says to ban something, so they ban it.

hence, knee-jerk. They don't actually put much, if any, testing into whether or not something should be banned. Case in point, Swagger.

There's a difference between banning something just because a few people lost to it, or banning something because it is unbalanced. If we went by smogon rules, Ice Climbers and Meta Knight would be banned from brawl.

If you went by Smogon rules, Fox and Falco would be banned in Melee because of their reflectors. Oh, and every stage except Final Destination would probably be banned too. Even Battlefield would've been banned... for its wonky ledges of course.

 

[Kalierdarke]

If you went by Smogon rules, Fox and Falco would be banned in Melee because of their reflectors. Oh, and every stage except Final Destination would probably be banned too. Even Battlefield would've been banned... for its wonky ledges of course.

pretty much.

 

[ScubaGoomba]

I'm not entirely certain you guys know the banning process? Bans go through about a week of testing and the bans are supported by a super majority vote. Swagger, for instance, was restricted to ubers after 63 play testers out of 77 testing it voted to ban.

It's also worth noting that, rarely, things are banned outright. Smogon operates in tiers and, while OU is most common, it's not the only one.

For reference, the Swagger ban thread: http://www.smogon.com/forums/thread...ss-round-2-voting.3503601/page-4#post-5359700

It's obviously self-selecting, but so are Smash bans. The people who do the testing are the ones active in the competitive meta game and that ascribe to whatever norms are common in the meta game.

 

[KingBroly]

I'm saying that Custom Moves shouldn't be allowed. They're not allowed in "FOR GLORY" mode, which is basically online competitive play. While it's odd for Nintendo to set standards to competitive play in their games, I think it should apply here.

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

I really shouldn't have neglected a thread like this just because the thread title was misspelled (sorry, but I really did).

Custom moves probably improve the balance of the game even if they're slightly less balanced as individual moves on average. That might not make a lot of sense, but it's a statistical argument. When you allow custom moves, you're basically allowing every special move to be a "best of three" situation instead of a "just this one" situation. Without going through the math, doing this introduces an upward effect on the mean value of moves but actually a downward effect on the variance so long as we presume that introducing new moves retains the same bounding (that is, no moves more worthless than Sing or more overpowered than Mach Tornado, probably mostly accurate). In other words, a typical character will have more powerful special moves than it would have without them legal, but a typical character will get more similar overall value from its special moves to other characters than would occur with custom moves banned. @ Thinkaman has actually developed the math here a bit and would explain a lot better than I am going to be able to do, but I do know enough about statistics to tell you that the theory is sound even if somewhat counter-intuitive.

That's why it's very important to very seriously give custom moves a fair shake; they are an incredibly promising system both in terms of gameplay depth and in terms of the fundamental effect that kind of system is expected to have on balance. The counter-intuitiveness of how the statistics work here is also important to keep in mind as a reason to be very lead-footed on bans; it's very likely that it will feel like banning custom moves or perhaps a few of the strongest variations will improve balance, but in the long run, going into that process has an expected outcome of making the game less balanced. 3DS just makes it easier since there are a variety of procedural hypotheticals that get brought up for Wii U that simply don't apply to 3DS; there's just no good reason to do anything but allow custom moves for 3DS based on our current knowledge.

Smogon is not exactly my favorite community in the world, but their runaway banning culture definitely has serious roots in the fact that they insist on trying to play 6v6 singles when modern Pokemon games are just not built well for that format which leads to the players trying to play them in that format ending up doing work that's more similar to game design than rule making for an already extant competitive game. That's not really analogous to smash so delving into the analogy further is really not very productive.

"For Glory" is not really designed to be a competitive format; it's more of a quickmatch feature for people who don't find the type of play in "For Fun" actually fun. It should not be considered or consulted when we make tournament rules.

 

[ScubaGoomba]

I think the 6v6 singles element compares pretty directly to 1v1 No Items, though. Smash is designed to be a party game that can also be competitive, with items and hazards as a core part of the gameplay.

All of that said, while we disagree about Smogon, we sound like we agree on the same general point: for a healthy Smash 3DS community, we need to err on the side of over, rather than under, inclusiveness. Custom moves should be allowed from the beginning because they do nothing but deepen gameplay and they can be stricken on a case-by-case basis.

 

[JamietheAuraUser]

I'm not entirely certain you guys know the banning process? Bans go through about a week of testing and the bans are supported by a super majority vote. Swagger, for instance, was restricted to ubers after 63 play testers out of 77 testing it voted to ban.

It's also worth noting that, rarely, things are banned outright. Smogon operates in tiers and, while OU is most common, it's not the only one.

For reference, the Swagger ban thread: http://www.smogon.com/forums/thread...ss-round-2-voting.3503601/page-4#post-5359700

It's obviously self-selecting, but so are Smash bans. The people who do the testing are the ones active in the competitive meta game and that ascribe to whatever norms are common in the meta game.

I'm saying that almost anything that ever gets suspected winds up getting banned because the only people willing to put in the dozens of hours to reach their sky-high voting prerequisites (who even has time for that?) are the ones who actively want it banned, while everyone else is like "naw, man this is stupid." I've been to Smogon before, I've seen how the debates go.

Also, their admins are seriously lock-happy. They lock perfectly legitimate threads that people are still having fun with just because they've "run their course".

 

[Raijinken]

I like @KaZe_DaRKWIND's idea of having Customs as their own tournament type. That said, I also like the idea of making specific ones (such as the hot super soaker) be allowed in regular tournaments, as they take otherwise virtually useless moves (at least going by what we know from Brawl) and make them worth using, at least situationally.

While I'd also love to see tournaments that allow stat customizations, the argument for making weak characters valid can go too far. If a weak character can become valid, a strong character can become even stronger. Imagine if stat customizations would let you weaken someone's knockback enough to continue comboing far past the "normal" damage threshold. Stuff like that gets hard to balance, but I can see it being a fun sort of event on its own. Nothing to win big and compete seriously on, but it, like Smash Run tournaments, could be a fun side event that could prompt some discussion over time.

And of course, the 3DS being player-level and presumably saving at least your main customization(s) (if not including several pre-saveable configurations) will make it much easier to swap them on or off during tournaments without taking up everyone's time. Depending on the tournament rules, such tournaments could be run including having to register with character lock and list your custom moves, stat changes, and any special properties (like the launch resistance or critical hits or whatever else we've seen). While you'd potentially lose some of the flexibility of a regular character picking scenario (unless you, for instance, let players pick three characters with all their changes), you can make the customizations and stats visible to the contestants before each round, reducing the unpredictability to a player with sufficient experience.

 

[RisingVexx]

In marvel vs capcom 3 you pick 3 characters and 3 assists, a total of 6 inputs.
If you pick a character an customize each one of his moves it would take 5 inputs.
Whats the problem?

 

[solitonmedic]

I really hope custom moves aren't banned.

They can really level the playing field in many tournaments, plus a few moves can aid a fighter pretty well, aka Little Mac's Numbing Lunge.

 

[Bedoop]

So... pull a Smogon.

They banned Aegislash.
AEGI-FREAKING-SLASH.
Don't pull a Smogon.

 

[Ganreizu]

Smogon doesn't test most of the things they ban. someone says to ban something, so they ban it.

hence, knee-jerk. They don't actually put much, if any, testing into whether or not something should be banned. Case in point, Swagger.

There's a difference between banning something just because a few people lost to it, or banning something because it is unbalanced. If we went by smogon rules, Ice Climbers and Meta Knight would be banned from brawl.

Their execution is irrelevant, the point was to use their model of selective bans to experiment until a ruleset that is tournament acceptable is found, not that we should BE smogon and go unreasonably crazy with it.

If his point was that we should solicit smogon for help, then you would be justified in posting this. Otherwise it's basically forum bashing.

 

[Raijinken]

When you think about it, if certain stat ranges and movesets become the meta for certain characters, that's really no different from only having 6 or so "viable" characters per game. Wonder why people think it'd be so odd.

 

[ParanoidDrone]

"For Glory" is not really designed to be a competitive format; it's more of a quickmatch feature for people who don't find the type of play in "For Fun" actually fun. It should not be considered or consulted when we make tournament rules.

Worth repeating. I honestly don't know why custom moves being banned in online play (and only public online at that) is considered an argument against custom moves. For crying out loud, the Mii Fighters in the exact same boat, but I don't see anyone seriously considering banning them.

 

[Raijinken]

Worth repeating. I honestly don't know why custom moves being banned in online play (and only public online at that) is considered an argument against custom moves. For crying out loud, the Mii Fighters in the exact same boat, but I don't see anyone seriously considering banning them.

No one seems to mention Miis much at all, I think the assumption is that (assuming weight class for them isn't just standardized) if Customs go, so do they.

 

[JamietheAuraUser]

No one seems to mention Miis much at all, I think the assumption is that (assuming weight class for them isn't just standardized) if Customs go, so do they.

And Palutena? You just stick her with her (seemingly pretty lame) defaults, or does she get the boot as well? I mean, I'd hate for things like Autoreticle and Reflect to be unusable just because they're custom moves.

 

[ScubaGoomba]

Their execution is irrelevant, the point was to use their model of selective bans to experiment until a ruleset that is tournament acceptable is found, not that we should BE smogon and go unreasonably crazy with it.

If his point was that we should solicit smogon for help, then you would be justified in posting this. Otherwise it's basically forum bashing.

Yes, this is precisely the point we were getting at. The Smogon model is a very good one to use when it comes to determining competitive balance, as it begins with everything and structures the default (Smogon's OU, for example) around what creates a "competitive" metagame. It's also nice because the tiering system allows every character a place to shine (nearly; I'm sure Sm4sh will have its own Spinda).

I wouldn't necessarily propose we have a series of competitive tiers for 3DS (although I do think it could be neat), but I do think that the model where there's one almost entirely unrestricted field, one main competitive tier, and a series of lower, more restricted tiers, is one to look to for guidance.

 

[Raijinken]

And Palutena? You just stick her with her (seemingly pretty lame) defaults, or does she get the boot as well? I mean, I'd hate for things like Autoreticle and Reflect to be unusable just because they're custom moves.

I'd have sworn Autoreticle was her default B, and Reflect was SideB. (that's judging by the Famitsu scans on this thread). But yeah, I agree, it's a silly reason to ignore characters. The Miis' weight affecting their fighting style may be a stronger argument, but I'm in favor of including them.

 

[Oatkeeper]

I'm all for custom moves but I'm wary about allowing custom equipment. Since custom equipment changes the base stats of the character it makes it akin to Pokémon's EV/IV system, and Pokémon is one of the most unbalanced games ever so maybe allowing that sort of stuff isn't the right way to go.

 

[JamietheAuraUser]

I'd have sworn Autoreticle was her default B, and Reflect was SideB. (that's judging by the Famitsu scans on this thread). But yeah, I agree, it's a silly reason to ignore characters. The Miis' weight affecting their fighting style may be a stronger argument, but I'm in favor of including them.

Huh, guess I was wrong then. I had it in my head Autoreticle was like her third neutral special. But yeah, either way it'd be a shame to disallow custom specials before we know how they work, even. To me, it makes no sense to pre-emptively ban anything at this point. Especially given how different this Smash looks to be compared to previous games in the series in some ways. I mean, with those new ledge mechanics and custom specials and all sorts of crazy things like that.

 

[Wyntir]

Do not ban!!!
Custom moves would add much more depth n strategy in the competitive field. Unpredictable matches will occur. Only thing is, can your set up be transferable easily n quickly? THAT will settle this debate.

 

[Oatkeeper]

Couldn't amiibo be used to transfer custom movesets?

 

[JamietheAuraUser]

Do not ban!!!
Custom moves would add much more depth n strategy in the competitive field. Unpredictable matches will occur. Only thing is, can your set up be transferable easily n quickly? THAT will settle this debate.

Doesn't have to be transferred at all. This is Smash 3DS we're talking about here, not Smash Wii U.

 

[Wyntir]

Doesn't have to be transferred at all. This is Smash 3DS we're talking about here, not Smash Wii U.

Right u r. As far as 3ds, shouldn't be a problem.

Couldn't amiibo be used to transfer custom movesets? I love cheese

That would be great for the wii u

 

[Thinkaman]

I posted a separate topic focusing on the gameplay implications, which is ultimately what drives a lot of the policy discussions:

http://smashboards.com/threads/the-...es-on-gameplay-and-balance-statistics.366457/

 

[Mightyno.M]

I was gonna say ban but maybe if one custom move makes a character more viable they would allow that

I'm not entirely sure as I did not play street fighter all that often and when I do I only stick to one of each but didn't you have different supers and ultimates that you had to pick from. Maybe it was just ultimates or maybe I am just wrong in general.

 

[Lozjam]

It will make so many more characters viable and provide a richer and more strategic meta game that will be more interesting to watch because of the differing matchups. So yes, for both the Wii U and 3DS versions. It will change the way we think about "teirs" and will make nearly every character viable. So it is waste to not use them.

 

[CatRaccoonBL]

For the 3ds version, if there is a competitive scene, then I can see custom moves being more accepted because it would be easier not to waste as much time.

Of course, there is also the problem of people sneaking in special equipment while on the customs screen, but depending on how all these things work, it could be easy to spot.

 

[Raijinken]

For the 3ds version, if there is a competitive scene, then I can see custom moves being more accepted because it would be easier not to waste as much time.

Of course, there is also the problem of people sneaking in special equipment while on the customs screen, but depending on how all these things work, it could be easy to spot.

As I think someone mentioned, just make it a disqualification offense if they're used, and don't be lenient about enforcing it (even on top players). I would hope most of the "serious" players would follow the rules voluntarily, but if there's a track record (or at least threat) of being caught, disqualified, and possibly barred from future tournaments (at least by that host), people might be more honest (or less, really hard to tell with humans).

Depending on how the customs screen is accessed, some tournaments may be able to afford having moderators watch the participants all the way to the match start so they don't try anything funny.

 

[Aninymouse]

So... pull a Smogon.

As a former Gen 6 competiitive player, I don't think you understand the contempt that many of us have for Smogon as it is today. Once upon a time they did a fine job, but now they've jumped the shark. I understand that your are trying to truncate your post and explain an abstract concept through association with a recognizable name, but... Just don't. I'm not the only competitive Pokemon player who laughs at how pathetic Smogon has become.

With that said, yes, I do see parallels between the "4 moves and stat allocation" between Smash 3DS and Pokemon. It's not a 1:1 comparison, but it's easy to see how it could have similar pros and cons.

 

[ScubaGoomba]

As a former Gen 6 competiitive player, I don't think you understand the contempt that many of us have for Smogon as it is today. Once upon a time they did a fine job, but now they've jumped the shark. I understand that your are trying to truncate your post and explain an abstract concept through association with a recognizable name, but... Just don't. I'm not the only competitive Pokemon player who laughs at how pathetic Smogon has become.

With that said, yes, I do see parallels between the "4 moves and stat allocation" between Smash 3DS and Pokemon. It's not a 1:1 comparison, but it's easy to see how it could have similar pros and cons.

No you're right; I'm analogizing based on the general model. I dropped off lurking Smogon around May, so I haven't seen much of what's gone on in more recent times, but I know where you're coming from.

The model, though, and not necessarily its application, should be considered pretty strongly for setting up Smash competitive rules. Start with everything and whittle down until you have a game that isn't completely polarized due to exploitable balance issues/glitches while still maintaining its heart.

 

[Kos-MosPlushie]

What we've seen so far leads me to think that the custom moves will be balanced (within reason, DK's infinite armor headbutt plus Kirby's Freezing looks kinda busted) or a change in look. I say keep them open but go over what makes a character busted with what move and what doesn't. Ban as you go, banning everything at the start screams of jumping the gun.

 

[Kalierdarke]

No you're right; I'm analogizing based on the general model. I dropped off lurking Smogon around May, so I haven't seen much of what's gone on in more recent times, but I know where you're coming from.

The model, though, and not necessarily its application, should be considered pretty strongly for setting up Smash competitive rules. Start with everything and whittle down until you have a game that isn't completely polarized due to exploitable balance issues/glitches while still maintaining its heart.

That's how they did it with melee, they seemed to have forgotten that model when Brawl came around, just copy/pasting the melee rules onto brawl without really testing stuff.

Hopefully we get a much better test to find a good "recommended" rule set for average tournaments. Just outright banning stuff without testing how it works in the new game isn't really a good idea, this goes for both customizations and items, but item discussion is for another thread.