- Joined
- Feb 27, 2008
- Messages
- 26,560
Howdy y'all, some of you may know me as a former community leader for Project M. In addition to being a lead developer, I was the project manager of PMRank 2016 and 2017. I also ran Project M's section of The Big House throughout the title's tenure at the tournament series. I observed and participated in the stagelist/ruleset discussion from early on (2012) through to its finality in ~2016. And of course, I was a "top player" in the title for about 4-5 years, being thought of as top 10 worldwide for a short stretch and top 50 for the entirety. I also participated as a member of the Melee Back Room when it was active. I wanted to share with you some wisdom that I gleamed from my experiences, if you care to listen.
I will grant context, backstory, as well as my own personal opinion/conclusion. If prompted for an elaboration or further information, I'm happy to grant it. However, for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, I do not have any investment in its ruleset at this time. I plan to participate casual-competitively as a player and to not become involved in ruleset discourse. I am giving this information so that your process may be more informed than ours was. In that context, I have no intention of defending my position to those who may disagree. You are welcome to read my points and disagree with them, or discuss amongst yourself if my conclusions may serve you, but I will not respond to you strictly to defend my position or points.
I will also note that I haven't read enough of this thread with the academic rigor I'd require of myself to properly participate in back and forth discourse here. I won't waste your time in that regard.
With that in mind, here are some various topics of discussion, brief overview of what I observed on them, and my conclusion.
Stage pick procedure accessibility
Smash's gameplay mechanics are a lot more accessible than most games when trying to transition from a more casual playing experience to a competitive one. But stage selection procedure is routinely complicated and the average player doesn't have a deep understanding of it. With a larger stagelist, this is undoubtedly going to become more daunting for new players to deal with, hurting retention of first-time tournament attendees. I recommend looking at this issue seriously as it can matter a lot. The confusion of a nervous first-tourney-set player going "Okay so now what? You ban a stage and then... I pick one? Oh gosh, what should I pick... I pick That one! Oh gosh they can change their character? I picked a bad stage to fight that new character!" is a tough problem to solve. If the community finds that the majority of tournament sets begin on a particular stage, perhaps we should consider making that always the first stage of the set in pools in order to reduce this difficulty for new players.
Stage pick procedure duration
A big issue as both players and spectators alike is just how long it takes to select a stage, be it through striking or counterpicking. With a particularly large stagelist, analysis paralysis can happen easily, and even going through a usual process can take a long time. This was one of many reasons (in addition to a higher standard of quality) that drove Project M to a shorter stagelist. It takes forever to ban from 19 stages and then pick a stage. You can implement timer rules, but they aren't enforceable en-masse and require overhead to enforce even deep in the bracket. To that end, I recommend at least considering the average time it may take to carry out your stage selection procedure as an important part of it.
"Starter" vs. "Counterpick" and possible argument against Full List Stage Striking
What many may not know is that the distinction between Starter and Counterpick is vestigial of a time where the first stage of a set was chosen via random chance in Super Smash Bros. Melee. It felt bad and unfair if the randomly selected stage granted a large advantage, so we chose more normal stages for that process. Ultimately, those "starter" stages ended up being our full stage list, leaving us with the 6 that are legal. In this context, there's not much reason to have a distinction, is there? With stage striking we fairly select the first stage of a set. However, there are a few issues with Full List Stage Striking
1. It necessitates an odd number of even stages.
2. Theoretically "fair" stage striking procedure for 9+ strike lists are not necessarily intuitive, nor heavily tested.
3. Striking from a large list of stages takes a long time. See: Stage Pick Procedure Duration
If you must have stage striking at all, stick to lower counts of stages for striking.
On "Group" based stage striking/banning
A style of stage selection which was tested heavily during Project M's earlier builds was the concept of group bans. Stages would be grouped in logical ways. These stages are rather large, these stages are small, perhaps these stages over here are the goldilocks stages. Group them up, allow players to ban a group rather than a specific number of stages, and we're off to the races. We found there were a number of issues with this strategy.
-The granularity of reasons for desiring to ban a stage could not be effectively represented in a group ban system. Perhaps I wanted to ban Dracula's Castle against Mario not because of its size, but because of its walled sides allowing for Super Jump Punch walljump recovery. Similarly, I'd want to ban Green Hill Zone for that same reason, yet here I am forced to ban the likes of Dreamland in addition to Dracula's Castle, rather than GHZ. This resulted in a significantly decreased sense of player agency while influencing stage selection.
-Group ban stagelists required a sufficiently high number of stages to be viable. As our standards for what is a "good" stage went up, we wanted to remove stages once thought viable for newfound reasons, be they expressed here in my teachings or elsewhere.
I personally advise against utilizing a group ban system long-term. It is fun and viable early on and with high amounts of stages. I believe you will run into similar problems we did if you attempt to use it long-term.
On Character First or Stage First Counterpick Order
I believe this exercise to be futile, but I'll briefly state that I think it's complete horse**** that we allow a player to change their character after knowing which stage they will be playing on. We should require players to delcare their characters first, as we do with stage striking, because why on earth would it make sense to select the stage without knowing the characters who will conduct combat on it? This ruling (by comparison) strengthens counterpicks for those who can play multiple characters, while negatively impacting players who main a single character. Playing multiple characters is already extremely advantageous in the notion of counterpicking your opponents character, the advantage of which is not possible to remove in any conceivable ruleset.
It seems Nintendo finally caught on to the erroneous selection order the competitive community has used for 4 full installments, though, and built this sham into the UI/UX flow of the game itself.
Stage Redundancy
A unique problem Project M had and that I expect Smash Ultimate to have is the concept of stage redundancy. In this case, two (or more!) stages exhibit nearly identical gameplay, or perhaps identical gameplay except one is inherently less fair. An example was Pokemon Stadium 1 (with transformations) and Frozen Pokemon Stadium 2 (did not transform). Those who are used to older fashioned "reduction of nonviable stages from the full list" styled stagelist construction may be tempted to leave both legal. However, this creates several problems.
-Characters who are powerful on this stage force players to use up most or all of their bans on these stages, or they are forced to play on them despite attempting to ban them during counterpick process.
-The two stages do not grant sufficiently different gameplay. It is uninteresting to view gameplay on different stages when the interactions and expected outcome are not influenced by the stage being different.
-In the case where one is strictly less fair, why have both when you can have just the better one?
These problems eventually drove us to remove stages that served similar purposes. Why have 5 huge stages when you can have the best 2? This one created more issues when the number of large stages and small stages was imbalanced, granting advantages to those characters who preferred a particular stage size. Why have Frozen Pokemon Stadium as well as Pokemon Stadium that randomly transforms into 3 different banned stages during gameplay? Just pick the best ones, by whatever criteria you find appropriate.
A Higher Standard of Quality
In all currently released official Super Smash Bros. titles, the want for competitively viable stages has not been satisfied well. In that context, we have been forced to deal with some not-so-fair stages, because our stagelist construction is that of reducing from a pool of poor stages rather than building a pool of excellent stages. We do this because executing a best of 5 tournament set on the 3 or 4 actual good stages becomes rather bland (See: Smash 64). So we put up with ****ty stages. Pokemon Stadium (SSBM) randomly transforms into 3 different bannable stages. Lylat Cruise (Wii U) ****ing stops attacks halfway through and ruins lives. Halberd (Brawl) attacks the players! With a huge pool of stages, though, I would love to see the full stagelist be full of "great" stages and not settling for less than excellent.
lastly
Who is the ruleset for?
A question I'd like everyone to ask yourselves when crafting a ruleset is "who is the ruleset for?" I think we all like to aggrandize the concept of an objective "best" ruleset by metrics such as "fairness," "competitive integrity," or "testing the best skillset most effectively," or the like. Those were certainly things I cared about a great deal. However, ultimately a ruleset is needed so tournaments participants agree to compete under such, and will agree with its results. If a significant majority of your community wants the ruleset to be a certain way, it should probably be that way, because they are more likely to agree with the results of your tournament if you align the goals of your ruleset with the goals of your competitors. If a vast majority of your players want items and make it known, you should make items legal. You don't need to concern yourself with establishing criteria that prevents items from ever being legalized, because no one will ever want them legalized. The will of your players should work out most issues, though it may take longer than commanding action would.
**** top player privilege
Ban a character as soon as they're obviously broken. If Nintendo patches them and makes them fair again, bring em back. Let's not deal with Meta Knight or prepatch Diddy Kong again.
Godspeed, Smash Ultimate community!
-Strong Bad
I will grant context, backstory, as well as my own personal opinion/conclusion. If prompted for an elaboration or further information, I'm happy to grant it. However, for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, I do not have any investment in its ruleset at this time. I plan to participate casual-competitively as a player and to not become involved in ruleset discourse. I am giving this information so that your process may be more informed than ours was. In that context, I have no intention of defending my position to those who may disagree. You are welcome to read my points and disagree with them, or discuss amongst yourself if my conclusions may serve you, but I will not respond to you strictly to defend my position or points.
I will also note that I haven't read enough of this thread with the academic rigor I'd require of myself to properly participate in back and forth discourse here. I won't waste your time in that regard.
With that in mind, here are some various topics of discussion, brief overview of what I observed on them, and my conclusion.
Stage pick procedure accessibility
Smash's gameplay mechanics are a lot more accessible than most games when trying to transition from a more casual playing experience to a competitive one. But stage selection procedure is routinely complicated and the average player doesn't have a deep understanding of it. With a larger stagelist, this is undoubtedly going to become more daunting for new players to deal with, hurting retention of first-time tournament attendees. I recommend looking at this issue seriously as it can matter a lot. The confusion of a nervous first-tourney-set player going "Okay so now what? You ban a stage and then... I pick one? Oh gosh, what should I pick... I pick That one! Oh gosh they can change their character? I picked a bad stage to fight that new character!" is a tough problem to solve. If the community finds that the majority of tournament sets begin on a particular stage, perhaps we should consider making that always the first stage of the set in pools in order to reduce this difficulty for new players.
Stage pick procedure duration
A big issue as both players and spectators alike is just how long it takes to select a stage, be it through striking or counterpicking. With a particularly large stagelist, analysis paralysis can happen easily, and even going through a usual process can take a long time. This was one of many reasons (in addition to a higher standard of quality) that drove Project M to a shorter stagelist. It takes forever to ban from 19 stages and then pick a stage. You can implement timer rules, but they aren't enforceable en-masse and require overhead to enforce even deep in the bracket. To that end, I recommend at least considering the average time it may take to carry out your stage selection procedure as an important part of it.
"Starter" vs. "Counterpick" and possible argument against Full List Stage Striking
What many may not know is that the distinction between Starter and Counterpick is vestigial of a time where the first stage of a set was chosen via random chance in Super Smash Bros. Melee. It felt bad and unfair if the randomly selected stage granted a large advantage, so we chose more normal stages for that process. Ultimately, those "starter" stages ended up being our full stage list, leaving us with the 6 that are legal. In this context, there's not much reason to have a distinction, is there? With stage striking we fairly select the first stage of a set. However, there are a few issues with Full List Stage Striking
1. It necessitates an odd number of even stages.
2. Theoretically "fair" stage striking procedure for 9+ strike lists are not necessarily intuitive, nor heavily tested.
3. Striking from a large list of stages takes a long time. See: Stage Pick Procedure Duration
If you must have stage striking at all, stick to lower counts of stages for striking.
On "Group" based stage striking/banning
A style of stage selection which was tested heavily during Project M's earlier builds was the concept of group bans. Stages would be grouped in logical ways. These stages are rather large, these stages are small, perhaps these stages over here are the goldilocks stages. Group them up, allow players to ban a group rather than a specific number of stages, and we're off to the races. We found there were a number of issues with this strategy.
-The granularity of reasons for desiring to ban a stage could not be effectively represented in a group ban system. Perhaps I wanted to ban Dracula's Castle against Mario not because of its size, but because of its walled sides allowing for Super Jump Punch walljump recovery. Similarly, I'd want to ban Green Hill Zone for that same reason, yet here I am forced to ban the likes of Dreamland in addition to Dracula's Castle, rather than GHZ. This resulted in a significantly decreased sense of player agency while influencing stage selection.
-Group ban stagelists required a sufficiently high number of stages to be viable. As our standards for what is a "good" stage went up, we wanted to remove stages once thought viable for newfound reasons, be they expressed here in my teachings or elsewhere.
I personally advise against utilizing a group ban system long-term. It is fun and viable early on and with high amounts of stages. I believe you will run into similar problems we did if you attempt to use it long-term.
On Character First or Stage First Counterpick Order
I believe this exercise to be futile, but I'll briefly state that I think it's complete horse**** that we allow a player to change their character after knowing which stage they will be playing on. We should require players to delcare their characters first, as we do with stage striking, because why on earth would it make sense to select the stage without knowing the characters who will conduct combat on it? This ruling (by comparison) strengthens counterpicks for those who can play multiple characters, while negatively impacting players who main a single character. Playing multiple characters is already extremely advantageous in the notion of counterpicking your opponents character, the advantage of which is not possible to remove in any conceivable ruleset.
It seems Nintendo finally caught on to the erroneous selection order the competitive community has used for 4 full installments, though, and built this sham into the UI/UX flow of the game itself.
Stage Redundancy
A unique problem Project M had and that I expect Smash Ultimate to have is the concept of stage redundancy. In this case, two (or more!) stages exhibit nearly identical gameplay, or perhaps identical gameplay except one is inherently less fair. An example was Pokemon Stadium 1 (with transformations) and Frozen Pokemon Stadium 2 (did not transform). Those who are used to older fashioned "reduction of nonviable stages from the full list" styled stagelist construction may be tempted to leave both legal. However, this creates several problems.
-Characters who are powerful on this stage force players to use up most or all of their bans on these stages, or they are forced to play on them despite attempting to ban them during counterpick process.
-The two stages do not grant sufficiently different gameplay. It is uninteresting to view gameplay on different stages when the interactions and expected outcome are not influenced by the stage being different.
-In the case where one is strictly less fair, why have both when you can have just the better one?
These problems eventually drove us to remove stages that served similar purposes. Why have 5 huge stages when you can have the best 2? This one created more issues when the number of large stages and small stages was imbalanced, granting advantages to those characters who preferred a particular stage size. Why have Frozen Pokemon Stadium as well as Pokemon Stadium that randomly transforms into 3 different banned stages during gameplay? Just pick the best ones, by whatever criteria you find appropriate.
A Higher Standard of Quality
In all currently released official Super Smash Bros. titles, the want for competitively viable stages has not been satisfied well. In that context, we have been forced to deal with some not-so-fair stages, because our stagelist construction is that of reducing from a pool of poor stages rather than building a pool of excellent stages. We do this because executing a best of 5 tournament set on the 3 or 4 actual good stages becomes rather bland (See: Smash 64). So we put up with ****ty stages. Pokemon Stadium (SSBM) randomly transforms into 3 different bannable stages. Lylat Cruise (Wii U) ****ing stops attacks halfway through and ruins lives. Halberd (Brawl) attacks the players! With a huge pool of stages, though, I would love to see the full stagelist be full of "great" stages and not settling for less than excellent.
lastly
Who is the ruleset for?
A question I'd like everyone to ask yourselves when crafting a ruleset is "who is the ruleset for?" I think we all like to aggrandize the concept of an objective "best" ruleset by metrics such as "fairness," "competitive integrity," or "testing the best skillset most effectively," or the like. Those were certainly things I cared about a great deal. However, ultimately a ruleset is needed so tournaments participants agree to compete under such, and will agree with its results. If a significant majority of your community wants the ruleset to be a certain way, it should probably be that way, because they are more likely to agree with the results of your tournament if you align the goals of your ruleset with the goals of your competitors. If a vast majority of your players want items and make it known, you should make items legal. You don't need to concern yourself with establishing criteria that prevents items from ever being legalized, because no one will ever want them legalized. The will of your players should work out most issues, though it may take longer than commanding action would.
**** top player privilege
Ban a character as soon as they're obviously broken. If Nintendo patches them and makes them fair again, bring em back. Let's not deal with Meta Knight or prepatch Diddy Kong again.
Godspeed, Smash Ultimate community!
-Strong Bad
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