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We also won't know the true balance of the game until it's actually finished, let alone having just a few days to play it. I hope the game doesn't require too many patches, I mean I'm excited we have a console and online system that can allow patches now, but I want it to be as balanced and polished from the get-go and not reliant on huge patches.
Ahh, gotcha. I played the game but to be fair I never played Zelda too much in Brawl.
Brawl's balance team was over 100 of people. Melee's was 1. This one is 12 which if I'm right is an average balance team. Maybe more.
Lots of room to mess up with 100 people balancing. 15 players in Melee, 50ish in 4, 1 balancer in Melee, 12 in 4, seems fair enough to me, I think balancing will be much better in Smash 4.
I worded that poorly. I meant balance is not achievable only getting closer to it is.
I certainly hope so. This may sound elitist, but in the end I don't care about how many people are on the balancing team so long as it's the right people. There are a ton of people who have really funny ideas about game balance, but there are also people who know how to do it well.
From what I've seen of their balancing tactics it seems like they are on the right track, sure there are a few things that stick out as iffy but it's not as simple as saying "do that instead," because like you said changing one things alters hundreds of match-ups and sometimes they are gonna have to pick the lesser of two evils and it will be our job as competitive players to make the best of the characters we chose to main. But yeah, glad he has more help than just himself, but is keeping the team small enough to keep the things under control.
Well, I think even this statement is poorly worded. It's too general, and assumes a definition which is not mutual in our understanding the word 'balance'. . . the implications from such, I should say.
) a qualifying question is necessary, who is the opponent picking? What stages are there? The more questions are necessary to arrive at an answer to the first, the GENERALLY more balanced a game is.
Is there an official source for this because I've heard that the team was super small and that made it flawed, then I've heard that it was too big and that made it flawed, I'm pretty sure Sakurai said it was large and that caused mistakes. I just did some quick research but couldn't find the article I thought I had read this.
I don't really like the strawman argument that he starts with. It sounds like he's trying to say that scrubs are the only ones who care about balance. That's wrong on a massive number of levels. Imbalance in the worst case is 'spamming the god-tier character's single move over and over' and no competitive player really wants to play that game. Look at any multiplayer game that has any amount of scene to begin with. Is SF dominated by spammers? Is Smash? Is GG or BB? I don't see a lot of spamming going on in higher levels of play. This also spills into other genres. Is every Chess match the same? Is every M:tG match the same? Not really.
That scene actually didn't grow very much and I'm not even sure if its still around.
Then in that case, he should know firsthand that games like Street Fighter II are appreciated by more than just a small group of maniacs.
How recent was that interview? I've seen that quote be used years ago. I think his mindset may have changed with his recent focus on making the came cater to competitive players.
Street Fighter is. But competitive Smash is literally 1% of the fanbase.Then in that case, he should know firsthand that games like Street Fighter II are appreciated by more than just a small group of maniacs.
The competitive scene is growing rapidly though. With things like the doc and the Melee community being so strong after so many years, a lot of casual players are starting to turn their heads and look at the competitive scene with great interest, and then after something like the Invitational where everyone was watching the pro smashers be supported by Nintendo, I dunno I think Smash 4 will have a great competitive community than any other Smash at launch.
The main draw for me is that, before, I never had any real time/energy to spend on Smash since most of my time, energy, and money was going to college (and before that high school). Now I'm graduated and I have time for it.
To those who have said this i present to you this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHK4x4qB9ME
Last years E3
Not proving any points huehueThen in that case, he should know firsthand that games like Street Fighter II are appreciated by more than just a small group of maniacs.
A lot can change in a year for Nintendo and how Sakurai handles the game. The competitive scene has received a lot of light in the past year and he has acknowledged it and embraced it a lot more in the past year. Not to say that that interview is irrelevant, but it may not be the best representation of how he feels.
I hope that's true. I want Zelda to be good.
You're probably right, but I still thought it'd be worth showing as it's possible he's already planned out most of the game by then.
The competitive scene is as big as it's ever been, and is still a measly 1%. Most people still don't even realize that the players at the invitational were known players. Those that do are mostly against competitive play. The only thing I've seen change is the understanding that most stages are basically unplayable.
I don't want the game balanced by players at all. I wouldn't mind balance patches down the road however. Some people on this forum act like balancing a fighting game with 39 characters is an easy task, particularly in a game like Smash that has a ton of variables. You mention meta knight, but it took the smash community a good while to realize just how powerful he was, so I imagine it's much more difficult to have that realization in the middle of development. If there was an opportunity to patch the game, Sakurai may have chosen to do so. Hopefully that happens with the new game. But there is no such thing as a perfectly balanced fighting game. Smash is no different.
Is there a place where you get that "1%" statistic or is that just a guess? Seems like an incredibly low exaggeration.
It's an overestimate, actually. If everybody on Smashboards owned a copy of Brawl, then that'd be 1% of it's US sales. Basically any competitive player in the US has a Smashboards account, so I'm not missing a significant amount. But not everybody here is competitive, and other regions have much less competitive players from my understanding.
I don't really like the strawman argument that he starts with. It sounds like he's trying to say that scrubs are the only ones who care about balance. That's wrong on a massive number of levels. Imbalance in the worst case is 'spamming the god-tier character's single move over and over' and no competitive player really wants to play that game. Look at any multiplayer game that has any amount of scene to begin with. Is SF dominated by spammers? Is Smash? Is GG or BB? I don't see a lot of spamming going on in higher levels of play. This also spills into other genres. Is every Chess match the same? Is every M:tG match the same? Not really.
You might say 'well yeah because these games aren't that imbalanced'. Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is 'games that are winnable by invoking the same boring strategy (and anything repeated enough times will get boring) over and over never become super popular', or to put it in fewer words: 'games that are horribly imbalanced are boring'.
For an example, I used to be really in to the Kingdom Hearts TCG, but when I tried to go 'hardcore' for it (there was a comparatively small card pool so it wasn't hard to collect all of them) I realized that the game's meta was completely dominated by 3 or 4 cards, and that these 3-4 cards completely shut down entire deck types and card categories that otherwise would've been awesome, and these cards also had no counter which was why they dominated. The few people who actually kept playing it thought that this was fine, but I did not.
Most notably, Dark Decks (playing as Ansem or Dark Riku as your character card) were completely shut down by Monstro and Stealth Sneak, because Monstro shut down the friend spam that Dark Decks relied upon (you could use Heartless as friends (the game's versions of allies or summoned creatures), while Light decks used Disney and FF characters as friends), and Stealth Sneak was an impassible wall if you didn't have a card like Peter Pan or Hercules, which Dark Decks couldn't have. King Mickey was broken (and this alone would've been okay because it's freaking MICKEY) and you never wanted to not have him in your deck because there was never any situation where he wasn't exactly what you wanted at the time. Oh, and while the game had tons of awesome magic options, someone could simply drop Phil down on the table (Phil prevents the casting of Magic cards) and there would be noting you could do about it.
To put this in Smash terms so we're all on the same page: This would be the same as if there was only one tourney viable stage, and this stage was a solid counterpick stage for over half the cast. Also, everyone gets a special assist trophy or pokeball and they get to pick which pokemon or assist comes out on the fly. Oh, and it's also perfectly possible to ensure that the villain characters will never, ever KO you even if you're at 999% damage. That's... about as close as I can get for an analogy of how bad the balance was.
What's that? You've never heard of a Kingdom Hearts Trading Card Game? Well... now you know why.
Competitive players want and care about balance more than 'scrubs' do. Unless I misunderstand entirely, I thought scrubs just wanted to be able to beat seasoned pros without putting any time or effort into the game. If competitive players didn't care about balance, they wouldn't be making tier lists to begin with. I mean, it's not like the entire competitive scene is trying to force space animals to be top tier in Melee, or is trying to force Meta Knight to dominate Brawl. They're just realistically assessing the balance of the game according to what they know about it, after giving it a lot of study. Being realistic and honest with yourself isn't bad in any way, and doing that much research proves that you do, in fact, care.
I admit that in Smash I'm a casual (I know about ATs but I don't do the tourney scene), I don't have a problem with the existence of tier lists, but I DO think that any character who isn't competitively viable in a multiplayer game is a waste of potential. It just makes sense. I mean, why only have 4 viable characters when you can have 10? 20? Sure some of the characters are going to be weak but you can't really avoid that. Perfect, absolute fairness isn't necessarily going to make or break a game. It's an ideal, but that ideal is secondary to the ideal of 'actually having a fun game to begin with'.
Anyways, the fact that he opens with a condescending straw man argument that is the exact opposite of accurate really makes me wonder if he has anything meaningful to say, but he looks like he might so I guess I'll read on.
Edit: I never would've kept reading if this was just some article I ran across at random, but since it was linked here and somewhat recommended I did read on. He actually says some good stuff but I still don't agree with the opening statement.
He's saying complaints from scrubs are vague. They usually use "balance," "fairness," or "honor," as their complaint and he explores what that really entails. All that being said, I think you were insulted as a casual player and that is just not the case. Scrubs can be casual players, but not all casual players are scrubs.
I actually read Sirlin's Playing To Win a long time ago. That series of articles (now a book) is part of why I can even understand (parts of) the competitive community to begin with. Before that, the "competitve scene" to me was just some mysterious far-off thing that I had no real attachment to and, while they could probably hand my ass to me, I didn't care because I was likely to never face a pro in my entire life.
I'm sure if you factor in the amount of people who play competitively, the ones who eventually want to but haven't really dove in yet, the people who like to watch competitive play but don't participate, and the people who don't mind the game being competitive but still play casually, then you will probably get a percentage much higher than 1%. The way you put it just makes it seem as if the other 99% hate competitive play making it obsolete when that probably is nowhere near the case.
The other 99% don't hate competitive play they just don't care about it. Even if is higher then 1% it probably isn't by much at all.
