Event - E3 Invitational 2014 Should Custom Movesets and Equipment be Competitive Standard or not?

[Nstinct]

Should the competitive rule-set stay true to the original character's move-sets with no equipment altercations? Or should the new options of further customization be a standard?

There are both positives and negatives to having it standard and keeping things vanilla (original.)


ps. Do share your opinions, but Please discuss this without aiming words at one another, be respectful. Thanks!

 

[KrymsonSkyz]

What, are you kidding...?

 

[Interfere]

I'd imagine that some customs would completely break the game.

I wouldn't mind it if there was some sort of guidelines for customs, but I'd doubt that the majority of the community would like customs to be in a competitive setting in the first place

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

So far the custom movesets look like they are done the "right" way. We won't know the balance until we actually play, but the way they work has no conflicts at all with running a tournament nor any obvious reasons they couldn't be balanced (it's a small number of options). The equipment thing looks more dubious, but we also know less about it so we'll see.

I was guilty of assuming this system was worse than it is before myself. Seeing that there are only three pre-built options per special move makes it very clear this system has a lot of potential and that it's imperative that we explore it fully before judging it.

 

[Nstinct]

The custom move-set we've seen for Mario's neutral B changes the way his fireball would be used, I'd assume they'd be wise enough to balance damage relative to AOE and attack delay the best they can. They're supposed to be "different" as opposed to simply being a "Level 2" of a move.

Or perhaps would Comp Rules restrict how much players can alter custom moves, such as only 1 or 2 moves?

Custom moves could even make up for what's considered a bad or unusable Special since a lot of comp players will rarely or never use certain moves in their character's move-sets. (I.E Bad to combo with, or to situational, etc. If the Villager's bowling ball were a special *it's not, but lets imagine* I'd seem reasonable that many players would swap it for a custom move.)

 

[Critzilean]

I can't imagine why custom moveset wouldn't be allowed at all, I can definitely see them being restricted though.

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

I can't imagine why custom moveset wouldn't be allowed at all, I can definitely see them being restricted though.

I really feel like it's all or nothing. We don't want a complex ban list of special moves; that would be ridiculous. Either the system as a whole works or it doesn't. If the game is overall fair with custom moves and thus a much better game (81 times more options!), we allow the entire system and don't ban that one we all find annoying or whatever. If we find that there are broken combinations, we don't use the system at all. It's pretty much going to turn into a huge mess if we try to use it but only kinda; this is a classic issue in which there may be good arguments on both sides but a middle of the road compromise is actually awful and far, far worse than either extreme.

Now, I think the stat equipment can be looked at separately, but that subsystem is all or nothing too. Either we allow free use of any and all stat equipment or we don't allow the system in any way at all. That's really the only way to do it and be fair; otherwise we get into very political ban lists and produce rules that will almost certainly be fundamentally less fair than all or nothing.

I mostly just asserted; let me explain why a bit. It's almost entirely certain there will be a spectrum of qualities from very strong (Mach Tornado) to very useless (Warlock Punch) with every level in-between represented. If you start banning, you have the classic "where do we draw the line?" problem, and the answer ends up being a hugely political question where what people find fun to use determines the rules as much as anything actually legitimate in terms of gameplay. This is political since fun is subjective, and it ends up being really unfair to players as the people who main the character who had the worst banned special move get screwed while those who main the character who has the best legal one get a massive reward despite the fact that the difference in quality between the two of them is probably very small and inevitably it will be a popular character winning and an unpopular one languishing which if you think about it is equivalent to tournament results being decided by majority voting instead of gameplay skill. Even worse, the frankengame we will end up playing will be basically a game of our own creation as opposed to the game we'll actually claim to be playing. We don't want to make liars of ourselves when we say that we're holding Smash Wii U tournaments, but that will be inevitable if we play a frankengame instead of some basic branch of the game itself.

So yeah, banning nothing is fundamentally fair (though it may be unbalanced). Banning the whole system is at least even handed and is fair (though it may worsen the game). Banning only a part of the system basically can't help but be unfair, and we should avoid it at all costs.

 

[Critzilean]

When I said restricted, I meant something more like a general rule on the matter. For example, I think limiting it to one custom move per match would be completely fair and not cause too many problems.
I do agree that "these 3 options are banned, but these 3 are OK", is rediculous. My bad I probably should have actually explained what I meant in my first post

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

When I said restricted, I meant something more like a general rule on the matter. For example, I think limiting it to one custom move per match would be completely fair and not cause too many problems.
I do agree that "these 3 options are banned, but these 3 are OK", is rediculous. My bad I probably should have actually explained what I meant in my first post

That doesn't really make a lot of sense either; allowing one or two or three has broadly similar problems where some characters are bothered by that more than others and for that matter doesn't actually solve any obvious design problems. If the system is broken, by far the most likely way it will be broken is specific special moves are very overpowered and highly spammable which this kind of restriction does nothing to fix since you would just pick the super overpowered one and not pick the ones that only helped you in a balanced way. It's human nature to want to compromise and find middle roads so I understand why you feel the way you do, but I think a hard logic approach to this really does favor a very rigid all or nothing and is the right approach to take in the long run.

 

[Nstinct]

According to the Polls and recent comments, it seems none are in favor of having equipment in comp.

 

[Chibi-Chan]

Whatever is allowed in online. If you can't use neither then it wouldn't be fair to allow either in competitive. And I did hear online is only Vanilla characters.

Equipment is out of the question regardless of anything... Only moves have hope.

 

[Light-Kratos]

For the glory mode is Vanilla only. If even Nintendo knows custom moves can't be used competitively, I don't see why we should think otherwise.

 

[Nstinct]

@ Chibi-Chan : Technically you can use it online, it's just only with friends. (Although I could be mistaken..)

For the glory mode is Vanilla only. If even Nintendo knows custom moves can't be used competitively, I don't see why we should think otherwise.

That's actually a very solid point.

 

[Heavy C4]

I can see custom moves sets being in the tournaments. Equipment however....eh.

 

[Deleted member 212841]

For the glory mode is Vanilla only. If even Nintendo knows custom moves can't be used competitively, I don't see why we should think otherwise.

Ban Battlefield :^)

I just want them to be given a legit chance and not see the community instantly jump to a conclusion and ban something that could be very interesting and unique.


Also, what happens if the vanilla special move is the one that is obscenely broken?

 

[Aninymouse]

I've made a lot of posts about this topic in the past, in the WiiU subforum. My stance has always been that we need to wait until we either have a LOT more information on how these perform, or wait until the game comes out, for us to make any definitive judgments about custom moves. My stance hasn't changed. We got more examples of how this is going to work at E3, but we haven't really seen it in action in a real match setting. We still know basically nothing, though a lot of my (pro-custom moves) assumptions have been proven correct thus far, like the number being not very high (12 moves per moveset, including the standard specials), most appearing to be very balanced in speed vs. power, etc. However, things like matchup theory, knockback, combo potential, techs, et all, are all still up in the air. The finer points need to be known.

A lot of the trepidation over the moves just comes from people's fear. Not everyone, mind you, but some people. Fear of the unknown, imagined fears of complications that aren't likely to arise (in my view), etc. What's the best antidote to fear? Truth. The more truth and facts we have on the subject, the more rational we can be.

I basically agree with everything @ Amazing Ampharos has been saying in this thread. I think that, while there will undoubtedly -- undoubtedly -- be some tournaments that ban them, I can foresee plenty of times when they will be legal, especially as the game is just being discovered early on. Maybe we will find them very pleasant to use, maybe they suck. It remains to be seen.

Now, how deep does the rabbit hole go?

This "equipment" mechanic seems to mirror the Smash Run stats, only it operates under ratios and not buffing the stats up as much as possible. So if you raise speed, you lose attack power, and so on. This "equipment" feature may or may not be just as viable as the custom moves, but we know less about this than we do about the custom moves! It was literally just mentioned in passing during the closed-doors Q&A session with Sakurai, to a few journalists. We really need to wait and see how good or bad this is, but I have a feeling the "equipment" thing will not be as widely accepted, due to the very real possibility that there will be a greater NUMBER of possible "armor" pieces relative to each character, than with the custom moves (which is a constant 12 moves per moveset standard, as I suspected).

What about the figures?

The figurines are a separate system altogether. They're a whole other feature that, while they do incorporate custom moves, are not responsible for how the player plays the main game, i.e. VS matches with friends and rivals. The figures load up computer-controlled characters with custom stats and abilities, who duke it out with other CPU-controlled characters. There may be other nuances, but we will not be using the figures at conventional tournaments. This game mode is akin to the arcade games in Japan where you buy cards for bugs or dinosaurs, scan them into the arcade machine, and then watch them battle the CPU and "grow," the results being saved to your character's account. It's essentially a totally separate game within Smash Bros.

Edit: The official website has further details on the "equippable items" feature:

http://www.smashbros.com/us/howto/entry2.html

It seems that there may be some merit to them, since they are likely controlled from the same submenu as the moves, however... I see a much greater increase to complexity, here. Like I said, there may be more than 12 of these per character. But let's say there's 12 armor pieces per character. The combinations of these armor attributes and the custom moves is a multiplicative number or results. The moves themselves are easily understood and researched, but the armor pieces are altering the more immaterial aspects of a character, such as their (possibly) speed, weight, launch resistance, knockback, power, etc. These are the kinds of changes that many, MANY people on this forum (myself included) are not keen on at all. It's just too technical. It cannot be mastered by a normal person. It's hard enough to balance a cast of, let's say, 45 characters or so, let alone a game where there are over 144 versions of each character. It's likely exponential, I'm just too bad at algebra to trust an exact calculation of mine.