I’ll be the first to admit this: I haven’t always been the nicest guy to the Smash community. After 2009 virtually every post I made - there were some notable exceptions - could be placed into one of the following categories:
This is gonna be my last post until Smash 4, if I decide to post here for that, and it’s going to be a kind of master post for ways to step up the competitive game and help Smash become a better sport.
1) Get better at data collection in every regard
Over the years there have been a ton of discussions about various ruleset changes, ranging from stagelists to character bans, stock counts, ledgegrab limits, chaingrabs, you name it. One of the things that has always been so great about Smash is that we have so many more choices than other fighting games when it comes to exactly the way we play the game, but we’re absolutely terrible at agreeing what the best options are.
There’s really no reason we should be debating these the way we do now. We should be just going by actual, hard data.
Data starts at simple stuff like we do now - The top 8’s characters, how much money they won. But it can go so much deeper than that. Stage choices, ban choices, order that stocks are lost, order in which individual games are lost, SDs, percent over match time, air time, ground time, times the stage’s geography caused something to happen that couldn’t happen on a neutral - this would be a stage-by-stage metric - the list goes on.
Doing this has a number of purposes, the first of which is allowing us to design a better ruleset. Knowing character matchup win ratios on every stage would allow us to see which stages are viable counterpicks and which stages skew matchups too heavily in favor of a single character. Knowing stock order would allow us to determine if rulesets like 2-stock or 1-stock actually alter tourney results in a meaningful way. Knowing how many ledgegrabs to expect from plankers / campers would allow us to actually set a limit that makes sense rather than settling on an arbitrary number.
The second purpose, and this ties into my next item, is that it would allow commentators to build better narratives and provide a better viewer experience.
2) Value improving the experience for low-level and non-players over players
This idea has always seemed particularly contentious to a lot of you, and I’m not bereft of understanding that viewpoint. Smash has been, for a very, very long time, purely a grassroots scene without any outside help. Any influx of players was largely due to our own private efforts; events like MLG, EVO, and even the game’s creator have, until very recently, not been very helpful in bringing in new blood. But that’s not the case anymore after the Smash doc and last year’s EVO, and definitely won’t be with Smash 4’s portable release and Nintendo taking the hype machine very seriously this time around. This brings with it an entirely new beast, one that we haven’t had to deal with too much so far: The non-player.
Bare this in mind: When I say non-player, I don’t mean somebody with literally zero Smash exposure. E-sports are not at the point where you see somebody who has never played a second of the game in their life investing much time into the game like you do with professional sports in the States. I’m using non-player in this case to mean somebody who plays the game casually but has no intent to play competitively or no easy access to the scene. It is these people who will drive the success of the community going forward.
Aside these players are the players who go to every tourney knowing full-well that they will lose, but compete nonetheless. These people become spectators in waves as the tourney progresses; by the end of Loser’s R2 half of the entrants are out. Another half of the remaining entrants are out after each additional round.
Just to give that last point some additional emphasis:
75% of the venue fee / entry money you receive comes from people who only play 2-3 sets.
There has to be a strong focus on making sure that the time they spend losing is not time they regret spending. And after they’re done making their pot contribution, you have to make sure that the players can enjoy their time as in-venue spectators.
There are several things that the community needs to improve in their tourney experiences as a whole:
Now, all of that being said, improving the experience for the 90% does not mean it should be done all at the expense of the top 10% or competitive viability. Items might be a more fun format and might bring in more people, but the community has long since agreed that it’s not a good format for competition due to the randomness.
I should also note that, because this ties into both #1 and #2, experimenting with rulesets is not a bad thing. I stated recently in State of Brawl that “the notion that ruleset differences prevent stagnation is ridiculous,” and this was unfair. I definitely don’t personally believe that a small variation in stagelist or something would alleviate much of somebody’s disillusion with a game, but it certainly can’t hurt and it might actually help attendance and viewership - On a small scale. We definitely need a standard for larger tourneys, but exactly what that means is fairly ambiguous and we should take some time to discuss at what point we decide to go with a standard over experimental variations.
3) Be a better inter-game community
I don’t really have much to expound on for this point. The disdain and lack of cooperation between games is ludicrous. Everybody needs to chill with that ****. There is literally no way it is not damaging.
4) Be better at bringing in and retaining new people
This is tied to virtually everything I’ve said so far, and it’s probably the most important of all of them. The health of the Brawl scene is literally tied to its attendance and viewership, just like any other competitive sport or game. There are a number of ways to go about this:
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“But Cyanide,” you say, after reading this prodigious wall of text, “Cyanide, you’re horrible at a lot of this! You barely exemplify any of the qualities you extoll here. Also, I would never say extoll!” And to that, I say this: I’m not perfect! And neither are you, or anybody else, really. I wouldn’t ever expect anybody to be able to put everything I have here into practice immediately. Change is pretty hard, and positive change tends to be even harder. It’s gonna take a lot of work from a lot of people, and there will be mistakes, many more mistakes than successes. The overall result, though, will be a stronger community more poised to launch Smash 4 into a position as possibly the most popular fighting game of all time, and hey, maybe we can even make it as successful as the MOBAs are, eh?
- Telling people in the tier list they were idiots for discussing the tier list and they could be using their time in much better capacities,
- Being a **** to Zero Suit players,
- Starting some sort of useful discussion and fading off into the void when I lost my motivation
This is gonna be my last post until Smash 4, if I decide to post here for that, and it’s going to be a kind of master post for ways to step up the competitive game and help Smash become a better sport.
1) Get better at data collection in every regard
Over the years there have been a ton of discussions about various ruleset changes, ranging from stagelists to character bans, stock counts, ledgegrab limits, chaingrabs, you name it. One of the things that has always been so great about Smash is that we have so many more choices than other fighting games when it comes to exactly the way we play the game, but we’re absolutely terrible at agreeing what the best options are.
There’s really no reason we should be debating these the way we do now. We should be just going by actual, hard data.
Data starts at simple stuff like we do now - The top 8’s characters, how much money they won. But it can go so much deeper than that. Stage choices, ban choices, order that stocks are lost, order in which individual games are lost, SDs, percent over match time, air time, ground time, times the stage’s geography caused something to happen that couldn’t happen on a neutral - this would be a stage-by-stage metric - the list goes on.
Doing this has a number of purposes, the first of which is allowing us to design a better ruleset. Knowing character matchup win ratios on every stage would allow us to see which stages are viable counterpicks and which stages skew matchups too heavily in favor of a single character. Knowing stock order would allow us to determine if rulesets like 2-stock or 1-stock actually alter tourney results in a meaningful way. Knowing how many ledgegrabs to expect from plankers / campers would allow us to actually set a limit that makes sense rather than settling on an arbitrary number.
The second purpose, and this ties into my next item, is that it would allow commentators to build better narratives and provide a better viewer experience.
2) Value improving the experience for low-level and non-players over players
This idea has always seemed particularly contentious to a lot of you, and I’m not bereft of understanding that viewpoint. Smash has been, for a very, very long time, purely a grassroots scene without any outside help. Any influx of players was largely due to our own private efforts; events like MLG, EVO, and even the game’s creator have, until very recently, not been very helpful in bringing in new blood. But that’s not the case anymore after the Smash doc and last year’s EVO, and definitely won’t be with Smash 4’s portable release and Nintendo taking the hype machine very seriously this time around. This brings with it an entirely new beast, one that we haven’t had to deal with too much so far: The non-player.
Bare this in mind: When I say non-player, I don’t mean somebody with literally zero Smash exposure. E-sports are not at the point where you see somebody who has never played a second of the game in their life investing much time into the game like you do with professional sports in the States. I’m using non-player in this case to mean somebody who plays the game casually but has no intent to play competitively or no easy access to the scene. It is these people who will drive the success of the community going forward.
Aside these players are the players who go to every tourney knowing full-well that they will lose, but compete nonetheless. These people become spectators in waves as the tourney progresses; by the end of Loser’s R2 half of the entrants are out. Another half of the remaining entrants are out after each additional round.
Just to give that last point some additional emphasis:
75% of the venue fee / entry money you receive comes from people who only play 2-3 sets.
There has to be a strong focus on making sure that the time they spend losing is not time they regret spending. And after they’re done making their pot contribution, you have to make sure that the players can enjoy their time as in-venue spectators.
There are several things that the community needs to improve in their tourney experiences as a whole:
- Better venue spaces: So many venues have next to no room to walk around in when every station is in use. Smash is probably only going to get bigger from here on out. Venues need to be larger, have an area for spectators to watch high-profile matches (Data gathering can help tell you which players are likely to create hype matches, but this is something we’ve been decent at doing intuitively), and be comfortable. The days of hosting 75+ person tournaments in basements need to be the most over.
- Smoother runtimes and stricter rule compliance: One of the things we run into a lot at our tourneys, because we’re grassroots and we all know each other and we’re all friends, is that we barely enforce things like DQ rules for no-shows at stations, people using TVs for friendlies and moneymatches when they’re needed for TVs, or people clogging venue walkways and exits. All these things result in tourneys that virtually always run over time and a frustrating time getting anywhere in even large venues. I haven’t seen an APEX final in two years because I have to open a business on Monday morning and the tourney is never done on time. It’s an extremely frustrating experience for a viewer, either on-stream or in-person, to not see the climax of a sporting event because the scheduling was poor or just ignored. And while it does suck to DQ friends and acquaintances, it’s not something you’ll really have to worry about in a long term. The behavior will stop pretty quickly once it’s clear there are consequences for non-compliance with rules.
- Better stream experiences: I’m gonna be brutally honest here: Most of the commentators we have for Smash are very, very boring. The goal of commentary is to enhance what somebody is seeing on the screen. Most commentators don’t do that very well. Now, to be fair, most games - not just video games - don’t have the best assortment of commentators. But even the most mediocre football commentator gets additional help from his statistics team that provides him with a metric ton of numbers to help build a narrative around the game he’s commentating. This allows him to give context to situations that might not have it at first glance; things like “This team has never beaten this other team on the road before” or “He’s never missed a third down conversion in the fourth quarter” that can create extra tension for the viewer. Chat interaction on Twitch also needs to get better. Giving people a solid reason to subscribe to streams - tangible benefits, maybe getting randomly selected for free venue at an upcoming tourney, sub emotes - gives them a solid reason to contribute to the success of a tourney money-wise without getting a chance to actually play the game.
- Less punishing play experience: One of the concepts I see a lot of mid and high-level players struggle with on a frequent basis in ruleset discussions is that not everybody actually has it in their head to try and beat M2K at every event they go to; not everybody intends to, or believes that they can become, a top level player. Before you read this as solely an advocation for Bo5/1s over Bo3/3S - it definitely is partially - there are several other things to consider. Amateur brackets allow people to compete with other people of their own skill level so you can’t get a crappy seed roll into M2K or Zero in Winners round one and then False or Keitaro Losers round one. Having more room for setups - this ties into venue issues - can allow people some free-play time if they’re out of the tourney (THIS IS AN IMPORTANT STIPULATION). And consider a lower stock count and shorter overall sets! Losing is a lot less demoralizing and a lot less likely to stop you from playing again if you don’t have to do it for a half and hour.
- Respect for skills is OK. Disrespect for lack of skill is not: This is actually a huge issue, and I really can’t stress that enough. Before somebody says “BUT CYANIDE YOU’RE BAD ETC” I’m not really that concerned about being personally targeted for that type of thing - I actually have a fairly decent sense of humor about my placings and overall performance in Smash - but it’s new players and returning players who aren’t confident yet seeing and experiencing that **** that’s the problem. People who are placing in the top 25% of tourneys should be role models in more than just playstyle for other players. I’m not going to bother calling anybody out in particular because harping on the past is not useful, but the ego-touting that goes on has to stop. I’m also not saying this is universal; there are quite a few players that are excellent role models for the community, some of whom I’ve been unfair to in the past, and I apologize to those of you who have been helping the scene. That said, there are far more of you who literally epitomize the opinion that, if you’re not in the top whatever the ****, you don’t matter to the community. This is a call to action for every Smasher - if you see this happen, call it out and stop it immediately. Please don’t go and find every previous instance of it, because that’s not helpful, and I’d like to give every Smasher a chance to not be that way rather than harp on past instances.
And for those of you who might think that I’m being ridiculous with this claim - either that it’s not a big issue or that it’s not even an issue - do some reading on the math of customer retention versus customer attraction. It’s better for all of us, strictly in a business sense, to retain our current viewers and players when we can, because it costs a lot more in time, effort, and money to bring in a new person to replace people we lose.
Now, all of that being said, improving the experience for the 90% does not mean it should be done all at the expense of the top 10% or competitive viability. Items might be a more fun format and might bring in more people, but the community has long since agreed that it’s not a good format for competition due to the randomness.
I should also note that, because this ties into both #1 and #2, experimenting with rulesets is not a bad thing. I stated recently in State of Brawl that “the notion that ruleset differences prevent stagnation is ridiculous,” and this was unfair. I definitely don’t personally believe that a small variation in stagelist or something would alleviate much of somebody’s disillusion with a game, but it certainly can’t hurt and it might actually help attendance and viewership - On a small scale. We definitely need a standard for larger tourneys, but exactly what that means is fairly ambiguous and we should take some time to discuss at what point we decide to go with a standard over experimental variations.
3) Be a better inter-game community
I don’t really have much to expound on for this point. The disdain and lack of cooperation between games is ludicrous. Everybody needs to chill with that ****. There is literally no way it is not damaging.
4) Be better at bringing in and retaining new people
This is tied to virtually everything I’ve said so far, and it’s probably the most important of all of them. The health of the Brawl scene is literally tied to its attendance and viewership, just like any other competitive sport or game. There are a number of ways to go about this:
- Advertise! I’ve seen an increasing number of scenes going out of their way to advertise the fact that they have tourneys on college campuses, conventions, and other game tourneys. And we have a huge advantage over other fighters that require a lot more entry time - Smash is accessible because doesn’t require button combo memorization and it has a very easily recognizable cast of characters.
- STREAM ALL OF THE TIME. Seriously! I find it bizarre that our top players don’t stream their practice sessions more. LOOK AT HOW FAST D1 WENT FROM NON-STREAMER TO A SUB BUTTON. The requirements to stream a console aren’t even that financially strict, and if you do a good job of it, you’ll make the money back via ads and subs and potentially bring more players and viewers to future events.
- Host exhibitions / smashfests / small tourneys whenever possible. A crappy venue like, say, your house (Not that your house is crappy, but it’s really not a good venue for large scale competition, unless you have a convention hall or a ballroom up in there) might not be good for SKTAR, but getting some quality playtime in with local players outside of tourney time is a great way to bring the playerbase together. Emphasize inviting newcomers and giving them a decent amount of play. I can’t stress enough how important it is to give newcomers a sense that they belong as quickly as possible. NJ/NY has been really great about this and it’s why I was able to get into the scene at all. If you’re already doing this in some capacity, fantastic! Don’t stop! Just try to be as inclusive as possible without getting kicked out of your apartment/house/dorm.
- Provide video content. Considering how easily accessible the game is an the enthusiasm of our community, the dearth of content is a little bizarre. As an addendum to that point, don’t assume everybody who will watch your video is an enthusiast. This actually applies to commentary as well; Most of your content should be targeted at newcomers and beginners, or rather, it should be comprehensible by them. Stay away from acronyms unless you’re willing to explain them on a fairly regular basis, for example; don’t use real names over player tags; and never assume expertise. Explain the concepts in your video / commentary such that it doesn’t feel like you’re talking down or assuming that they’re an idiot, but assume they just don’t know. A lot of you would be genuinely surprised at how many first-timers see the 15th video in your series first, so make sure it’s as accessible as the first or tell people to go back to the first video before continuing!
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“But Cyanide,” you say, after reading this prodigious wall of text, “Cyanide, you’re horrible at a lot of this! You barely exemplify any of the qualities you extoll here. Also, I would never say extoll!” And to that, I say this: I’m not perfect! And neither are you, or anybody else, really. I wouldn’t ever expect anybody to be able to put everything I have here into practice immediately. Change is pretty hard, and positive change tends to be even harder. It’s gonna take a lot of work from a lot of people, and there will be mistakes, many more mistakes than successes. The overall result, though, will be a stronger community more poised to launch Smash 4 into a position as possibly the most popular fighting game of all time, and hey, maybe we can even make it as successful as the MOBAs are, eh?
