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Meta SSBU Stagelist Discussion

Terotrous

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I'd like to propose something nuts. We seem to be in agreement that we refuse to run stagelists with some stages hazards on and some stages hazards off. But many of the stages we're currently running are the same either way, so what if we made a stagelist for Hazards On? This would allow us to get the good version of Smashville, which I desperately miss under the current ruleset. I think the following stages are ones that could potentially be considered under hazards on, and the bolded ones are better than their Hazards Off counterparts.

FD
Battlefield
Smashville
Pokemon Stadium
Town and City
Yoshi's Story
Yoshi's Island Brawl
Dreamland
Fountain of Dreams
Arena Ferox

Frigate Orpheon
Prism Tower
Skyloft
Lylat Cruise
Halberd


So a tentative list could look something like this:

Starter:

FD
Battlefield
Smashville
Yoshi's Island Brawl
Town and City

CP:

Arena Ferox
Pokemon Stadium
Lylat Cruise
Yoshi's Story
Frigate Orpheon / Prism Tower / Skyloft / Fountain of Dreams


Honestly, I feel like this list is better than what we have now. We lose some of the pokemon stages, but they're all pretty similar to FD anyway. In exchange, we get a bunch more dynamic stages under counterpick and we get the good version of Smashville back. I'm sure there'll be some whining about shy guys or whatever but Melee has dealt with them for 20 years. Of course, running mixed hazards is probably the best, but I still think a tournament running something like this would be interesting.
 

ParanoidDrone

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A global hazards-on ruleset loses both PS1/2 and Kalos, which are proving to be popular stage picks. I have a difficult time seeing such a switch picking up any momentum.
 

Terotrous

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A global hazards-on ruleset loses both PS1/2 and Kalos, which are proving to be popular stage picks. I have a difficult time seeing such a switch picking up any momentum.
I don't see why you would lose PS1, it's always been legal in previous games, but you do have to deal with its transformations again (which really aren't that bad IMO).

You do lose Kalos / Unova, which is why Mixed Hazards is clearly best, but if I had to choose between Kalos / Unova and proper Smashville, I'd take Smashville in a heartbeat. Being able to have things like Arena Ferox (which is a demonstrably far worse stage with hazards off) is just the icing on the cake.

I'd also love to have Frigate Orpheon with the flip back (the flip is always super hype) but I know I'll be shouted down on that one so I gave options for that stage.
 
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ATH_

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I'd like to propose something nuts. We seem to be in agreement that we refuse to run stagelists with some stages hazards on and some stages hazards off. But many of the stages we're currently running are the same either way, so what if we made a stagelist for Hazards On? This would allow us to get the good version of Smashville, which I desperately miss under the current ruleset. I think the following stages are ones that could potentially be considered under hazards on, and the bolded ones are better than their Hazards Off counterparts.

FD
Battlefield
Smashville
Pokemon Stadium
Town and City
Yoshi's Story
Yoshi's Island Brawl
Dreamland
Fountain of Dreams
Arena Ferox

Frigate Orpheon
Prism Tower
Skyloft
Lylat Cruise
Halberd


So a tentative list could look something like this:

Starter:

FD
Battlefield
Smashville
Yoshi's Island Brawl
Town and City

CP:

Arena Ferox
Pokemon Stadium
Lylat Cruise
Yoshi's Story
Frigate Orpheon / Prism Tower / Skyloft / Fountain of Dreams


Honestly, I feel like this list is better than what we have now. We lose some of the pokemon stages, but they're all pretty similar to FD anyway. In exchange, we get a bunch more dynamic stages under counterpick and we get the good version of Smashville back. I'm sure there'll be some whining about shy guys or whatever but Melee has dealt with them for 20 years. Of course, running mixed hazards is probably the best, but I still think a tournament running something like this would be interesting.
I've proposed a similar solution before, however that's all that it is, a solution. As in, if we end up with only 5 stages that are all starters (due to conservative banning that leads to that), then we might as well use Hazards On. I'd say Lylat, Ferox, Skyloft, Prism Tower, Frigate, and Halberd would all be terrible with Hazards On. However, if we only have 5 stages, it can give us a boost to at least 7 stages.

Otherwise, it's pretty pointless. You're definitely not the first to recommend it, but I appreciate the tenacity. ^^

We've been discussing mixed hazards in some ways, I personally think it should be fine if only a very small chunk of stages are hazards on, such as Smashville, Town & City, and Fountain of Dreams (if it gets fixed).
 

MarioManTAW

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Messages
843
Regarding hazard toggle, I think hazards off is far superior to either hazards on or hazards mixed. In general, I see very little, if any, reason to have hazards even partially on.

Stages that are in consideration for legality that could be considered "better" with hazards on than hazards off:
Yoshi's Story
Fountain of Dreams
Yoshi's Island
Smashville
Arena Ferox
Town and City

This is already a fairly small list of stages, but before taking a look at some of the stages we might lose if we did exclusively hazards on, let's first just see why even some of these potential picks might not be entirely positive.

First of all, Arena Ferox, while yes, a significantly better option with hazards on than with hazards off, would still be a contentious pick to even be legal due to temporary walls and ceilings. The fact that they are temporary does makes this stage better with hazards on than off, but they would still make the stage unlikely to be legal.

Next, for Fountain of Dreams, while moving platforms might make the stage more different from Battlefield and thus possibly better, it still lags the game, and thus, like Arena Ferox, would be unlikely to be legal with or without hazards.

The Yoshi stages both have platforms that come up on the sides periodically, affecting recovery and offstage game. They both also have Fly Guys that show up on stage sometimes, acting as an active hurtbox, and on Yoshi's Story specifically, they bring food items even with items turned off. On Yoshi's island, the middle platform also tilts only when hazards are on. For Yoshi's Island, this means you get offstage platforms (maybe good, maybe bad), a tilting platform (maybe good, maybe bad), and stage hurtboxes (bad). This would not necessarily be ban-worthy but would not likely be a reason to turn hazards on either. For Yoshi's Story, you gain Randall (which most see as purely positive), but then have to deal with both stage hurtboxes and stage-spawned items. The Smash community has, in the past, dealt with stage hurtboxes, but never have we had to deal with stage-spawned items as any stage which spawned items would not do so with items turned off, until now. We could handle hurtboxes if we needed to, but I'm not sure what consequences might occur if items were to spawn on a stage. Overall, while hazards-on Yoshi's Story might not need a ban based on this alone, I think it demands at least a bit of caution.

For the Animal Crossing stages, I see two main changes: moving platforms and stage hurtboxes. While both stages gain moving platforms (assuming you treat these as purely positive), they also would include hurtboxes in the form of the balloons. Again, I don't think stage hurtboxes are likely that big of a deal, but they are a consideration. For the moving platforms, I'm not convinced they are purely positive, but for the sake of argument, we can assume they are.

As you can see, even this short list of stages which could be better with hazards on is somewhat debatable, and the actual list might be more like this:
Smashville
Town and City
Yoshi's Island
Yoshi's Story (if we decide food is okay)
(Also note that all 4 of these are already widely accepted so this would not add any new stages.)

Now let's take a look at the possible stages that either are worse or straight up need to be removed with hazards on:
Brinstar
Pokemon Stadium
WarioWare
Lylat Cruise
Pokemon Stadium 2
Castle Siege
Unova Pokemon League
Mushroom Kingdom U
Skyloft
Kalos Pokemon League
Wuhu Island

Of these, we almost certainly lose (from typical accepted):
Pokemon Stadium 2
Castle Siege
Unova Pokemon League
Kalos Pokemon League

We also lose (from wider possibilities):
Brinstar
WarioWare
Mushroom Kingdom U
Skyloft
Wuhu Island

This would leave us, from this list, only Pokemon Stadium and Lylat Cruise as possible candidates, both of which would be undoubtedly worse, if even legal.

Is it really worth it to have 4 already legal stages become "better" (even that is arguable) at the cost of the complete loss of 4 others and with no new stages added?

Finally, my opinion on hazards mixed: don't. Have you not heard the TO's? During the early weeks, several events were tried on a relatively small scale and had a number of reported issues. There were also likely more issues than were reported, and these would be even more massive if something like this were to be tried on a large scale. While from an idealist perspective, hazards mixed might improve some things, from a realistic TO's perspective, it would not be worth the hassle.
 

Shieldlesscap

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Messages
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Hot take: Legalize every single contentious stage for a massive stagelist with 3 bans.

It worked for... THAT game (I’m not too involved with its community, idk how much caution to use when mentioning it), so why not for Ultimate

(This post is mostly ****posting but I wouldn’t exactly mind it either)
 

ATH_

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Hot take: Legalize every single contentious stage for a massive stagelist with 3 bans.

It worked for... THAT game (I’m not too involved with its community, idk how much caution to use when mentioning it), so why not for Ultimate

(This post is mostly ****posting but I wouldn’t exactly mind it either)
Sure. I'll bite.

We begin with our starters. I've already made a post about how I believe the 5 starters should be chosen, and I will be using those starters here. For the record, I'm ordering stages in the order: Triangle/Triplat, Semi-Central Biplat, Central Monoplat, Open/Wide/FD-Like, and Unique Layout.
  • Battlefield
  • Pokemon Stadium 2
  • Smashville
  • Town & City
  • Lylat Cruise
With our starters 3 of them are of average size, 1 of them is large, 1 of them is small. We have one of each primary layout type and 1 unique layout as our 5th starter. Now what? Let's add in chunks. Remember: Tri -> Bi -> Mono -> FD.
  • Yoshi's Story
  • Unova Pokemon League
  • Yoshi's Island (Brawl)
  • Final Destination
Genuinely, I believe these 9 stages to be quite the optimal list. With this we have 2 of each type of stage and 1 unique layout. With 2 bans or p3p1 this is perfect. However, we can do it one better. Next chunk.
  • Midgar
  • Castle Siege
  • Halberd
  • Kalos Pokemon League
  • Frigate Orpheon
Now we're really cooking with fire here. This is my experimental 14 stage list that I'm going to run when I have more time to kick start online tournaments. This gives us a third set of the 4 layouts, and to further balance it gives us one more stage with a unique layout. 3 bans / p4p1 and we're good. Honestly, I love this list as is. It requires character-first to work (because of Halberd mostly) but that's okay. I'm for character-first anyway. Midgar isn't talked about enough, I love the stage and I think it's a great large alternative to Battlefield.

Sure, we've already got a list that requires 3 bans, but let's go further. See what'll happen, I'm curious.
  • Mushroom Kingdom U
  • WarioWare Inc
  • Rainbow Cruise
  • Duck Hunt
Now this? This is beautiful. I'm not saying WarioWare or MKU are the worst stages ever, they're not. None of these stages are. However, in my opinion adding these stages bring unnecessary imbalance. The list was fine before them but here we are. Rainbow Cruise is surprisingly fitting here, with its large terrain but small blast zone it brings something no other stage has before. Back to business though. Now, to we push to our very limit!!!
  • Skyloft
  • Green Greens
  • Wuhu Island
  • Great Plateau Tower
  • Tomodachi Life
Hell yeah, now we've done it! We have 23 stages and require 5 bans at LEAST. It's sickening how intense this list is. We've got all the favorites with all the best music. It's still somehow playable, albeit a bit on the sloppy side. The Legalize Wuhu person would be proud. Who even needs DSR when you have this many stages right? It's literally pointless!! We have totally reached our... limit.

But... screw limits, right?... what if... what if we tried to add more?

To go even further beyond!!!
  • Kongo Jungle
  • Brinstar
  • Delfino Plaza
  • Kongo Falls
  • Dracula's Castle
  • Spear Pillar
  • Mario Circuit
  • Peach's Castle (64)
  • Jungle Japes
  • Pilotwings
  • Tortimer Island
  • Wily Castle
We just add 3 stages to each layout! But we're not done here! We still can add stages with completely unique layouts to what we already have!
  • Prism Tower
  • New Donk City Hall
  • Reset Bomb Forest
  • Gamer
  • Arena Ferox
  • Norfair
  • Port Town Aero Drive
And last but certainly not least!
  • Big Battlefield
Finally, we've done it. Our stage list is 42 stages strong. We have 8 bans or p9p1. Matches take an hour to complete, as 40 minutes are spent deliberating over which stage to go to. Headlines about 2 week long video game tournaments ruining productivity, or causing anti-social tendencies, etc.

But none of that matters. We've done it. That's all that matters.

Let's watch the world crumble, shall we?

Okay, despite the over dramatic shenanigans, I had a lot of fun making this. I hope others enjoy it too, I certainly thought it was hilarious while making it. Sounded like fun, and it was!
 

Terotrous

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I've proposed a similar solution before, however that's all that it is, a solution.
Yeah, I found your post while searching back through the topic to see if I could find any explanation for why Prism Tower is universally hated in ultimate, despite being considered one of the best stages on 3DS and not changing at all between games (I still don't understand this, the logic seems to simply be "we hate all traveling stages" rather than anything about the stage itself). It's interesting that we came up with the exact same list of starters even though I hadn't read your post.


Next, for Fountain of Dreams, while moving platforms might make the stage more different from Battlefield and thus possibly better, it still lags the game, and thus, like Arena Ferox, would be unlikely to be legal with or without hazards.
Has it actually been shown to lag the game in 1v1 on the latest patch? I was looking for a source but couldn't find one (though I did find several suggesting it had been fixed).


Of these, we almost certainly lose (from typical accepted):
Pokemon Stadium 2
Castle Siege
Unova Pokemon League
Kalos Pokemon League
If Castle Siege was typically accepted, I don't think I'd have this opinion, but it isn't, and seems to be moving closer and closer to being universally banned. Unova seems to be relatively rare too. The main reason I would consider hazards on is because of the many stages that get better with Hazards Off, most of them are typically banned anyway, so we're not losing much.


Finally, my opinion on hazards mixed: don't. Have you not heard the TO's? During the early weeks, several events were tried on a relatively small scale and had a number of reported issues.
I think there is a relatively easy way to do it.

Create one ruleset per stage, with hazards either set to on or off.
Each ruleset has only that one stage set to legal in its random stage select.
So you now basically use the rule selection screen as the "stage selection", and just press Start to select the stage on the actual stage selection screen.

It's somewhat annoying to set up but it seems relatively foolproof afterwards.


Finally, we've done it. Our stage list is 42 stages strong. We have 8 bans or p9p1. Matches take an hour to complete, as 40 minutes are spent deliberating over which stage to go to. Headlines about 2 week long video game tournaments ruining productivity, or causing anti-social tendencies, etc.

But none of that matters. We've done it. That's all that matters.

Let's watch the world crumble, shall we?
I kind of feel that if we're mainly concerned about stage balance and how fast it is to run a tournament, we could run this super compact stagelist instead.

Starters:

Smashville (Hazards On)

Counterpick

Smashville-FD
Smashville-BF

1 ban.

Super balanced! And you never have to worry about music issues or distracting backgrounds!

In all seriousness I feel that we're headed in this direction even though the number of viable stages is way higher than it's ever been.
 
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Lore

Infinite Gravity
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Hot take: Legalize every single contentious stage for a massive stagelist with 3 bans.

It worked for... THAT game (I’m not too involved with its community, idk how much caution to use when mentioning it), so why not for Ultimate

(This post is mostly ****posting but I wouldn’t exactly mind it either)
Not sure which game you mean here, but if you mean Melee, there's no need to worry about harassment. Melee is usually not too bad, and the vocal minority ass holes from there will just get infracted if they harass people. :)

On the 42 stage list: It's glorious, and I love it. There are zero issues with any of it, obviously. Not a single one.
 
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MarioManTAW

Smash Ace
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Jun 10, 2016
Messages
843
Has it actually been shown to lag the game in 1v1 on the latest patch? I was looking for a source but couldn't find one (though I did find several suggesting it had been fixed).



If Castle Siege was typically accepted, I don't think I'd have this opinion, but it isn't, and seems to be moving closer and closer to being universally banned. Unova seems to be relatively rare too. The main reason I would consider hazards on is because of the many stages that get better with Hazards Off, most of them are typically banned anyway, so we're not losing much.



I think there is a relatively easy way to do it.

Create one ruleset per stage, with hazards either set to on or off.
Each ruleset has only that one stage set to legal in its random stage select.
So you now basically use the rule selection screen as the "stage selection", and just press Start to select the stage on the actual stage selection screen.

It's somewhat annoying to set up but it seems relatively foolproof afterwards.
Yes, FoD still lags the game (play Ice Climbers and see for yourself, it may not be an issue for other characters, but I definitely noticed with ICs).

Honestly, from what I can tell, there aren't even many reasons to turn hazards on at all. It honestly seems to boil down to people whining about Smashville not moving. I get that the moving platform makes the stage more interesting, but it's a perfectly good stage without it and I don't think the platform improves the stage from a balance perspective, does it?

Yes, that could work, but yes, it would be annoying, both for TO's and for players. You would have to set up a number of rulesets for each setup, and for a large tournament with hundreds of setups, that would be not only tedious, but also error-prone. With so many rulesets, it is entirely possible to mess up something simple and accidentally affect outcomes of later games (remember 0.9?). From a player perspective, it would matter less, but might still take longer to go all the way out to the rules, which could add up over a large tournament and slow down the schedules. Another issue that is brought up frequently concerning hazards mixed is "what if players forget?" which may or may not be a valid concern.

Overall, there just seem to be so many issues with hazards on/mixed and so few things they improve that it just wouldn't be worth it.
 

ATH_

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Yeah, I found your post while searching back through the topic to see if I could find any explanation for why Prism Tower is universally hated in ultimate, despite being considered one of the best stages on 3DS and not changing at all between games (I still don't understand this, the logic seems to simply be "we hate all traveling stages" rather than anything about the stage itself). It's interesting that we came up with the exact same list of starters even though I hadn't read your post.



Has it actually been shown to lag the game in 1v1 on the latest patch? I was looking for a source but couldn't find one (though I did find several suggesting it had been fixed).



If Castle Siege was typically accepted, I don't think I'd have this opinion, but it isn't, and seems to be moving closer and closer to being universally banned. Unova seems to be relatively rare too. The main reason I would consider hazards on is because of the many stages that get better with Hazards Off, most of them are typically banned anyway, so we're not losing much.



I think there is a relatively easy way to do it.

Create one ruleset per stage, with hazards either set to on or off.
Each ruleset has only that one stage set to legal in its random stage select.
So you now basically use the rule selection screen as the "stage selection", and just press Start to select the stage on the actual stage selection screen.

It's somewhat annoying to set up but it seems relatively foolproof afterwards.



I kind of feel that if we're mainly concerned about stage balance and how fast it is to run a tournament, we could run this super compact stagelist instead.

Starters:

Smashville (Hazards On)

Counterpick

Smashville-FD
Smashville-BF

1 ban.

Super balanced! And you never have to worry about music issues or distracting backgrounds!

In all seriousness I feel that we're headed in this direction even though the number of viable stages is way higher than it's ever been.
Prism isn't the worst stage, but it suffers from a lot. Semi-Soft terrain is extremely polarizing. Even with character-first, you really shouldn't have more than one semi-soft stage and there are other better stages.

An issue I personally have with the stage is how long you stay on the walk-off form. Halberd never comes back to it. Prism does constantly.

Also, if it wasn't clear my last post was entirely satire after the initial 14 stages. ^^
Yes, FoD still lags the game (play Ice Climbers and see for yourself, it may not be an issue for other characters, but I definitely noticed with ICs).

Honestly, from what I can tell, there aren't even many reasons to turn hazards on at all. It honestly seems to boil down to people whining about Smashville not moving. I get that the moving platform makes the stage more interesting, but it's a perfectly good stage without it and I don't think the platform improves the stage from a balance perspective, does it?

Yes, that could work, but yes, it would be annoying, both for TO's and for players. You would have to set up a number of rulesets for each setup, and for a large tournament with hundreds of setups, that would be not only tedious, but also error-prone. With so many rulesets, it is entirely possible to mess up something simple and accidentally affect outcomes of later games (remember 0.9?). From a player perspective, it would matter less, but might still take longer to go all the way out to the rules, which could add up over a large tournament and slow down the schedules. Another issue that is brought up frequently concerning hazards mixed is "what if players forget?" which may or may not be a valid concern.

Overall, there just seem to be so many issues with hazards on/mixed and so few things they improve that it just wouldn't be worth it.
Totally. Except I believe that if the list agreed upon for majors boils down to 5 starters and nothing else? Then we might as well use Hazards On instead.

If FoD gets fixed (big If but I have faith) and people aren't vehemently against PS1 then we could have at least 7-8 stages.
  • Battlefield
  • Final Destination
  • Smashville
  • Town & City
  • Fountain of Dreams
  • Dream Land
  • Pokemon Stadium 1
  • (Yoshi's Island)
  • (Duck Hunt)
  • (Yoshi's Story)
Where stages in () can be considered but likely not for one reason or another. In theory this is slightly imbalanced due to there being 2 triangle triplats, but Dream Land is slightly smaller and PS1 is a good bit bigger so I'd argue that it's good enough. Definitely a more interesting 7 stage list than any purely-starter list out there.

Of course this is just if FoD gets fixed AND if we are reduced to 5 stages. Neither of those things have happened yet. Only time will tell if this kind of list will be useful.
 

Terotrous

Smash Champion
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Honestly, from what I can tell, there aren't even many reasons to turn hazards on at all. It honestly seems to boil down to people whining about Smashville not moving. I get that the moving platform makes the stage more interesting, but it's a perfectly good stage without it and I don't think the platform improves the stage from a balance perspective, does it?
I definitely feel that it does. Having the platform move constantly changes the dynamic of the stage, which prevents any particular playstyle from gaining prolonged advantage. It plays quite differently with the platform always in the middle, where characters who can land easily and can use the platform in their combos now see minor but constant advantage here.


From a player perspective, it would matter less, but might still take longer to go all the way out to the rules, which could add up over a large tournament and slow down the schedules. Another issue that is brought up frequently concerning hazards mixed is "what if players forget?" which may or may not be a valid concern.
I was just fiddling with the setup, and you can set the "Stage Selection" option to "Random", which causes the stage selection screen to be completely skipped (and since random only has one stage to choose from we know which stage we're getting based on the rule chosen). So that way it should be 100% identical in terms of selection time for the players.


Prism isn't the worst stage, but it suffers from a lot. Semi-Soft terrain is extremely polarizing. Even with character-first, you really shouldn't have more than one semi-soft stage and there are other better stages.

An issue I personally have with the stage is how long you stay on the walk-off form. Halberd never comes back to it. Prism does constantly.
I just tested it, Prism's initial walkoff lasts for 9 seconds, subsequent walkoffs last about 14 seconds. A full cycle of Prism takes almost exactly 2 minutes. So it spends about 11% of the time being a walkoff.

Moreover, I don't necessarily agree that temporary walkoffs are degenerate. Obviously, on a permanent walkoff, people can just camp the blastzone, which is super degenerate, but on a temporary walkoff, if they try that, you can just take center stage and then you gain advantage state when the platform leaves, making this strategy questionable at best. I'd want to see evidence that there's some clever way to abuse this before I'd consider banning a stage over it.

As far as semisofts, your current stage list doesn't contain one (and my stage list didn't contain any other semisoft). Which other Semisoft were you preferring? IMO Prism Tower is by far the best semisoft, especially if hazards are on, because then Halberd has the claw and the cannon to deal with. I also have a vaguely similar opinion here where I feel that sharking hasn't yet been proved to be degenerate in SmashU, plus if there's only one stage you can always just ban it anyway.
 

Akiak

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Prism is definitely my favourite semisoft too, just because of what it adds to the stagelist (btw you can group the semisofts together if you're using pXp1 so they effectively occupy only one spot)
 

ATH_

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I just tested it, Prism's initial walkoff lasts for 9 seconds, subsequent walkoffs last about 14 seconds. A full cycle of Prism takes almost exactly 2 minutes. So it spends about 11% of the time being a walkoff.

Moreover, I don't necessarily agree that temporary walkoffs are degenerate. Obviously, on a permanent walkoff, people can just camp the blastzone, which is super degenerate, but on a temporary walkoff, if they try that, you can just take center stage and then you gain advantage state when the platform leaves, making this strategy questionable at best. I'd want to see evidence that there's some clever way to abuse this before I'd consider banning a stage over it.

As far as semisofts, your current stage list doesn't contain one (and my stage list didn't contain any other semisoft). Which other Semisoft were you preferring? IMO Prism Tower is by far the best semisoft, especially if hazards are on, because then Halberd has the claw and the cannon to deal with. I also have a vaguely similar opinion here where I feel that sharking hasn't yet been proved to be degenerate in SmashU, plus if there's only one stage you can always just ban it anyway.
To tackle your points one at a time:

1. Prism's initial walkoff lasts 9 seconds, subsequent walkoffs last about 14 seconds. About 11% of the time the stage is a walkoff.
Alright, I'll give you that, it isn't for that long. Was more of a side-thing I decided to mention that irks me, but it's not that big of a deal. Though, overall my point that there really shouldn't be more than one semi-soft stands. You can group them if you'd like, if you're using pxp1, but the logic behind the balance of that is still a bit fragile.

2. Temporary walkoffs aren't "degenerate" and don't have the same kill-strategies of permanent walkoffs.
Sure, but there's other problems with walkoffs than just kill strategies. Characters can't die by their own recoveries if you're on a walk-off, players can (and have) gotten killed to temporary walkoffs due to high percents putting them too close to the blast zone, there isn't a means of utilizing your recovery if you get hit far away, because there's no terrain to return to. I'm not the most knowledgeable about walkoffs myself, but I'm sure someone else would like to step in and speak about the pros and cons of them.

3. Your current stage list does not contain a semi-soft, which do you prefer? Prism is by far the best. Sharking hasn't yet proved to be degenerate in Ultimate, plus if there's one semi-soft you can ban it anyway.
Allllrighty. This is where we mostly disagree. To start, my stage list does have a semi-soft, Halberd! That's my experimental list, but Halberd is definitely on there. The thing is, Halberd isn't on there to be some sort of semi-soft representative. It's there because it fills a role better than any other stage, which is to be an average-to-large central monoplat. It happens to be a semi-soft, which means I'm not willing to put any others on the list. If I grouped them together (and I do use pxp1), that adds a layer of obscurity to the role that Halberd is supposed to fill. If you're speaking of my more conservative list (the 9 stage one) then yes, there is no semi-soft on there, because I believe that for a list that small there shouldn't be one.

Halberd isn't always a semi-soft. It's a walk-off for about 10 seconds, then it's in its flying form for about half the time. When it lands, it's solid terrain for the other half the time. In my opinion, there is nothing better about a semi-soft, so a stage that has solid terrain half the time is by far better than a stage with no solid terrain other than a walk-off. As well, it fills a role. It has a purpose being there. What role does Prism fill on a list? Sure, you could probably argue that Prism is better than Frigate (I disagree but I respect it), and have it fill the role of a unique layout stage. However, that would be throwing away the potential Halberd has at filling a much more important role. If you're using a list of say, 10 stages (2-2-2-2 of each layout then the 5th starter and one other unique layout) personally I think that unbalances the list a bit. Though, admittedly, that's just preference. I don't have any evidence to say it really unbalances anything. So you go for that if that's what you want. In a larger list though (such is my experimental 14 stage list), Halberd is far more useful.

The main downside Halberd has is it's take-off transformation from the ship being disruptive. I am still putting it through thorough testing, but so far it doesn't seem nearly as bad as I initially thought. To clarify, I'm not talking about the take-off at the start with the walk-off, I'm speaking of when you're on the Halberd itself and the stage transforms back to its flying form. The floor sinks into the terrain and the animation takes a while.

The logic "if there's one semi-soft you can ban it anyway" really doesn't work. That is admitting that the list is imbalanced, and it assumes that you're playing a character-first ruleset. Character-first is by no means the standard. If you're banning the semi-soft every match in fear that your opponent may go Meta Knight or Pit, then the list you're using is imbalanced. If you're running it yourself and it's character-first? Go for it, test it out. Bring back the data you find!
 
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MarioManTAW

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I was just fiddling with the setup, and you can set the "Stage Selection" option to "Random", which causes the stage selection screen to be completely skipped (and since random only has one stage to choose from we know which stage we're getting based on the rule chosen). So that way it should be 100% identical in terms of selection time for the players.
The problem with that is that it doesn't automatically bring you back to the rules menu.

Typical process:
-Match ends
-Game automatically takes you to stage selection
-Stage is selected
-Game takes you to character selection

Process with a method like yours:
-Match ends
-Game automatically takes you to character selection
-Players then have to manually exit to the rules menu
-The ruleset with the correct stage is chosen
-Game takes you to character selection

That "manually exit to the rules menu" step is where the slowdown occurs, and it's an issue regardless of whether stage select is set to Random or not.
 

ATH_

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The problem with that is that it doesn't automatically bring you back to the rules menu.

Typical process:
-Match ends
-Game automatically takes you to stage selection
-Stage is selected
-Game takes you to character selection

Process with a method like yours:
-Match ends
-Game automatically takes you to character selection
-Players then have to manually exit to the rules menu
-The ruleset with the correct stage is chosen
-Game takes you to character selection

That "manually exit to the rules menu" step is where the slowdown occurs, and it's an issue regardless of whether stage select is set to Random or not.
Actually! Not many are aware of this but there is actually a button on the character select screen that takes you directly to the rules menu! This skips going back to the stage selection menu entirely. As well, pressing the button is instantaneous, there's no "hold the button for a full second" wait.

If stage selection is set to random, then when a game is over it won't take you back to the stage selection menu, but to the character select instead! I know Terotrous was saying a similar thing, but the key difference is after a game completes, not just before.

The main issue with mixed hazards through rulesets is that it takes Forever to set up. For smaller tournaments it should be feasible, but for a major? Ouch, that's going to take a whole day unless you have 50 people doing it.

Either way, it's really not that large of a difference. I'd say it's worth a shot even if it takes a few seconds longer per stage.
 
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Terotrous

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Sure, but there's other problems with walkoffs than just kill strategies. Characters can't die by their own recoveries if you're on a walk-off, players can (and have) gotten killed to temporary walkoffs due to high percents putting them too close to the blast zone, there isn't a means of utilizing your recovery if you get hit far away, because there's no terrain to return to. I'm not the most knowledgeable about walkoffs myself, but I'm sure someone else would like to step in and speak about the pros and cons of them.
Personally I feel that these things are just differences rather than flaws. Yes, it's true that you don't have to use a recovery move to survive during a walkoff, but by the same token, the opponent can chase you more easily for longer combos or to control space since they can't fall off either. And it's clear that in any walkoff, center stage is important, if you're stuck at the side when the platform leaves you may have to try to recover normally and that leaves you open to getting edgeguarded.


What role does Prism fill on a list?
I guess the biggest appeal of Prism is probably that it's a transforming stage with no janky transformations that works with both hazards on and hazards off. The only potentially bad thing I can see about it is that it's a Semisoft but I kind of feel like we haven't adequately tested Semisofts to prove that they're really broken in Ultimate. Most people are just sort of alluding back to Brawl but various system changes to things like ledge grabbing and so on would seem to reduce the power of sharking quite substantially.


The logic "if there's one semi-soft you can ban it anyway" really doesn't work. That is admitting that the list is imbalanced
Not really, by that logic the presense of any bans suggests the stage list is imbalanced. We accept that some counterpick stages give some character some moderate advantage, what we want to eliminate is stages that give characters extreme advantage, so this kind of rests on the theory that sharking is super busted in this game. Also, I feel that if sharking is severe enough to ban prism, it would probably get Halberd banned as well, even though you can't shark for part of the stage the fact that you could be sharked like half the time would still be enough to really swing the match.
 

ATH_

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Personally I feel that these things are just differences rather than flaws. Yes, it's true that you don't have to use a recovery move to survive during a walkoff, but by the same token, the opponent can chase you more easily for longer combos or to control space since they can't fall off either. And it's clear that in any walkoff, center stage is important, if you're stuck at the side when the platform leaves you may have to try to recover normally and that leaves you open to getting edgeguarded.



I guess the biggest appeal of Prism is probably that it's a transforming stage with no janky transformations that works with both hazards on and hazards off. The only potentially bad thing I can see about it is that it's a Semisoft but I kind of feel like we haven't adequately tested Semisofts to prove that they're really broken in Ultimate. Most people are just sort of alluding back to Brawl but various system changes to things like ledge grabbing and so on would seem to reduce the power of sharking quite substantially.



Not really, by that logic the presense of any bans suggests the stage list is imbalanced. We accept that some counterpick stages give some character some moderate advantage, what we want to eliminate is stages that give characters extreme advantage, so this kind of rests on the theory that sharking is super busted in this game. Also, I feel that if sharking is severe enough to ban prism, it would probably get Halberd banned as well, even though you can't shark for part of the stage the fact that you could be sharked like half the time would still be enough to really swing the match.
Oof, you really don't seem to understand some of the things I'm saying here. Sure you could look at them as differences rather than flaws, that's entirely subjective.

When I ask "what role does prism fill" I'm not asking what makes it unique. It's more rhetorical than literal. The role is fills it a unique layout stage. On stage lists, this is the first game ever where we actually get to really decide what layouts are the best and make lists accordingly. It's imperative that we balance these layouts and give variety to them. When I speak of 2-2-2-2 I'm talking about 2 Triangles (Battlefield, Y's Story), 2 Semi-Central Biplats (PS2, Unova), 2 Central Monoplats (Smashville, Yoshi's Island Brawl), and 2 FD-likes (T&C, FD). That list alone is not balanced, however, and requires a 5th starter of a unique layout. I made a post about this already that goes into much further detail, but the conclusion is that Lylat is by far the best unique stage we have.

Now, roles are extremely important here. A stage is not simply included because it's balanced, it has to keep the list balanced too. Unique layout stages offer a slight tip of the scales of balance. Unlike the 4 primary layouts which all have clear yet subtle advantages / disadvantages to groups of characters, the unique stages mess with that balance. We need a 5th starter though, so that gets a pass. Now, sure, on a larger list you can push for more unique layouts, but what makes Prism better than Frigate? In my opinion, nothing. Frigate is by far a better unique layout stage and fills that role much better. So how big of a list are you making that you want to include all of them? You want the unique layouts that don't tip the balance too much, and semi-softs certainly do.

"Not really, by that logic the presense of any bans suggests the stage list is imbalanced." Now you just sound silly... Again, you either didn't read what I said or didn't know the terms. Here's a run down of Character-first.

Character-first: Players choose characters before stages in games 2 and beyond. This makes it so stages with polarizing factors (such as semi-softs) can be allowed to a certain degree, because you know in advance what stages their character is good on. In standard rulesets, you do not know their character first because the stage is picked first. This means that semi-softs are almost completely terrible without character-first.

Bans do not suggest the list is imbalanced because we plan our lists otherwise. Say you have a regular 2-2-2-2 with Lylat as the 5th starter. You get 2 bans. Why? Becuase then you can ban any one layout against your opponent. You put them on their second-best layout every time. In pXp1 it's even more pronounced, because your opponent approaches you with their best stages and you get to pick their third best, and they can never force a layout on you. With that knowledge in mind, reflect over what I said again: "The logic 'if there's one semi-soft you can ban it anyway' really doesn't work. That is admitting that the list is imbalanced." Do you get what that means now? It means that in lots of matchups or simply due to player preference you are making your list based on the logic "if they don't like it they'll just ban it" which completely invalidates the reason of having bans in the first place!

Counterpicks should bring you to a stage where your opponent has some sort of advantage against you, unless their character just sucks on a ton of layouts. However, if you are forced to ban a stage that imbalances the list so your opponent can get their 2nd best instead of their 3rd best stage, then you've got proof you've imbalanced your list. Your own logic is advocating for the creation of an imbalanced list.
 
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Shieldlesscap

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Not sure which game you mean here, but if you mean Melee, there's no need to worry about harassment. Melee is usually not too bad, and the vocal minority *** holes from there will just get infracted if they harass people. :)

On the 42 stage list: It's glorious, and I love it. There are zero issues with any of it, obviously. Not a single one.
(I was making a joke about how Nintendo doesn't like people talking about PM, which had 21 legal stages and 3 bans)

Remind me to actually make a ruleset with the 42 stagelist later.
 

Terotrous

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When I ask "what role does prism fill" I'm not asking what makes it unique. It's more rhetorical than literal. The role is fills it a unique layout stage. On stage lists, this is the first game ever where we actually get to really decide what layouts are the best and make lists accordingly. It's imperative that we balance these layouts and give variety to them. When I speak of 2-2-2-2 I'm talking about 2 Triangles (Battlefield, Y's Story), 2 Semi-Central Biplats (PS2, Unova), 2 Central Monoplats (Smashville, Yoshi's Island Brawl), and 2 FD-likes (T&C, FD). That list alone is not balanced, however, and requires a 5th starter of a unique layout. I made a post about this already that goes into much further detail, but the conclusion is that Lylat is by far the best unique stage we have.
I feel like this is oversimplified. Sure, the platform layout of the stage matters to some degree, but the size of the stage and its blastzones is at least equally important. PS2 isn't considered one of the worst stages for heavy characters because of its platform layout, its because of its size. Coversely, Unova is actually a pretty small stage, and is thus actually a pretty good stage for heavies despite the fact that the platform layout is almost the same.

I also think we definitely wouldn't ever want to put 2 nearly identical stages on the stage list (taking into account all of platform layout, stage size, and blastzones), because that forces characters who dislike that stage to waste multiple bans to get rid of it. As such, I feel like the first goal of making a stagelist is to choose a decent variety of viable stages, then we can start tweaking the exact picks as necessary to ensure that no character type has an inordinate advantage. Right now, it seems to be fairly widely accepted that most common stagelists favour speedy characters and zoners and that heavy characters suffer.

So the real answer to the "what role does Prism fill on a stage list" is really "which character type do you think has an advantage here". I feel like this stage probably favours heavy characters and multi-jumpers, though it's a bit hard to tell because some transformations may favour different characters. Actually, part of the reason I like this stage is for the same reason I like Hazards on Smashville, I feel that dynamic stages inherently limit campy or abusive strategies by constantly changing the stage layout.

I think we're also coming to the question of "why do we include multiple stages on a stagelist at all?". After all, if all you want is balance, my 3-stage list of Hazards-on Smashville, BF, and FD is about as balanced as it can get, while also being super fast to run. However, I think it's fairly clear that most people consider the ability to adapt to different stages to be a fundamental part of what makes a good Smash Bros player. In that sense, I think you can make a reasonable argument for having a stage like Prism on the list simply because "it's different", as long as it's not broken to the point that certain strategies are overly dominant. In the past, this was basically how we made stagelists, we just took all the viable stages and then gradually sorted them into starter and counterpick, it's only been with the release of Ultimate that we've started throwing away a bunch of previously legal stages purely for the sake of keeping our stagelists small. IMO, this is the wrong direction for the game, not only does it throw away one of the best aspects of Ultimate as a game, but it also creates a competitive scene that's both less interesting to watch and to play.
 
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Sean²

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I think the walkoff portion of Prism Tower greatly encourages periods of no player interaction. Because no one wants to inadvertently be carried off the side when they have nowhere to escape to. So the start of the match, and every time it returns to that transformation, you're going to run into people not fighting. Not quite as bad as the fire/rock transformations of PS1, or the statue transformation on Castle Seige, but that will be a huge contention point with players. We ran into this issue with Delfino when it was legal - and it mostly helps projectile characters as they can temporarily camp the blastzone. Periods of no player interaction are bad for the game's survivability.

At this point, I think the only soft stage that can be possibly viable is Skyloft. It's the only soft/semisoft transforming stage that stops transforming when hazards are set to off. Pound had it legal, but modified their ruleset again and killed it off.
 

MarioManTAW

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At this point, I think the only soft stage that can be possibly viable is Skyloft. It's the only soft/semisoft transforming stage that stops transforming when hazards are set to off. Pound had it legal, but modified their ruleset again and killed it off.
Wuhu Island.
 

Terotrous

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I think the walkoff portion of Prism Tower greatly encourages periods of no player interaction. Because no one wants to inadvertently be carried off the side when they have nowhere to escape to. So the start of the match, and every time it returns to that transformation, you're going to run into people not fighting.
I don't think this is really the case, clearly center stage is the strongest position to be in, so unless one player is willing to wait on the side of the screen (and risk an edgeguard situation later) there's going to be combat. Plus, even if your opponent is content to wait it out you could play any character with a charge move and get free charge.
 

ATH_

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I feel like this is oversimplified. Sure, the platform layout of the stage matters to some degree, but the size of the stage and its blastzones is at least equally important. PS2 isn't considered one of the worst stages for heavy characters because of its platform layout, its because of its size. Coversely, Unova is actually a pretty small stage, and is thus actually a pretty good stage for heavies despite the fact that the platform layout is almost the same.

I also think we definitely wouldn't ever want to put 2 nearly identical stages on the stage list (taking into account all of platform layout, stage size, and blastzones), because that forces characters who dislike that stage to waste multiple bans to get rid of it. As such, I feel like the first goal of making a stagelist is to choose a decent variety of viable stages, then we can start tweaking the exact picks as necessary to ensure that no character type has an inordinate advantage. Right now, it seems to be fairly widely accepted that most common stagelists favour speedy characters and zoners and that heavy characters suffer.

So the real answer to the "what role does Prism fill on a stage list" is really "which character type do you think has an advantage here". I feel like this stage probably favours heavy characters and multi-jumpers, though it's a bit hard to tell because some transformations may favour different characters. Actually, part of the reason I like this stage is for the same reason I like Hazards on Smashville, I feel that dynamic stages inherently limit campy or abusive strategies by constantly changing the stage layout.

I think we're also coming to the question of "why do we include multiple stages on a stagelist at all?". After all, if all you want is balance, my 3-stage list of Hazards-on Smashville, BF, and FD is about as balanced as it can get, while also being super fast to run. However, I think it's fairly clear that most people consider the ability to adapt to different stages to be a fundamental part of what makes a good Smash Bros player. In that sense, I think you can make a reasonable argument for having a stage like Prism on the list simply because "it's different", as long as it's not broken to the point that certain strategies are overly dominant. In the past, this was basically how we made stagelists, we just took all the viable stages and then gradually sorted them into starter and counterpick, it's only been with the release of Ultimate that we've started throwing away a bunch of previously legal stages purely for the sake of keeping our stagelists small. IMO, this is the wrong direction for the game, not only does it throw away one of the best aspects of Ultimate as a game, but it also creates a competitive scene that's both less interesting to watch and to play.
Apologies for not responding for a few days, have been busy. Also, I'm kinda choosing to opt out of this debate because I feel like I can't convey what I'm saying to you without going into every single last detail of how a stage list is created.

However, let me debunk a few of the utterly ridiculous claims you're making in your response:

1. Platform layout matters but the size and blastzones are equally important.
Yep. That's why I consider them. Check out my most recent detailed post for a stage list and see how deep I delve into it (outdated). Next.

2. Unova is actually a pretty small stage.
False. Do more research next time. Terrain is 4 units wider than Battlefield (what the community considers average) and the blast zone is only a couple units closer. It's essentially an average-sized variant of PS2. Next.

3. We shouldn't put two "nearly identical" stages on the same list because it forces a player to use multiple bans on it.
False. I assume you're talking about stage layout when you say you're forced to use multiple bans. The reason it's okay to have multiple stages of the same layout-type is because we want a more balanced list. Every single stage has pros and cons for every single character, therefore the more variance the more balance. Now, please listen to this next sentence very carefully: Forcing multiple bans on a layout is fine because as I said, you are giving your players more bans depending on how many stages of a specific layout there are! If you're using the basic 2-2-2-2 list, then you the amount of bans says different things! 1 ban? You believe players should get their best layout but not their best stage. 2 bans? You believe players should get their second best layout. 3 bans? You believe players should get their second best layout but not their best variant. Also, pXp1 solves a lot of this.

4. So the real answer to the "what role does Prism fill on a stage list" is really "which character type do you think has an advantage here".
Nope. Next. (I don't have the patience right now to explain a third time what I mean by role. Apologies.)

5. I think we're also coming to the question of "why do we include multiple stages on a stagelist at all?". After all, if all you want is balance, my 3-stage list of Hazards-on Smashville, BF, and FD is about as balanced as it can get, while also being super fast to run.
Nobody's coming to that question except for you. Your list of 3 stages is actually quite imbalanced, believe it or not. FD is not the most balanced open stage, and more of the community is beginning to agree about that. You can't pick a third stage because we're limited in that sense. Unova would be better, except the ledges hurt teleporting characters. PS2 would be great, except it's huge. Overall, PS2 is probably the better option though considering Smashville is small. Try not to have such an ego over a clearly satirical thing you made? I'll give it to you that it would be fast to run, sure, but who gets the strike? It'd be better to run 5 starters anyway, and again, at that point we might as well use Hazards On for FoD (when it's fixed) and potentially other stages.

6. In the past, this was basically how we made stagelists, we just took all the viable stages and then gradually sorted them into starter and counterpick, it's only been with the release of Ultimate that we've started throwing away a bunch of previously legal stages purely for the sake of keeping our stagelists small.
Alright, so here's the thing. You're right here that in previous games we would take all the viable stages and make Starters / Counterpicks from them. However, look at those games. Those lists are and have always been thought as unbalanced. Melee has 3 triangle triplats of its 6 allowed stages. 64 has only one viable stage, a triangle triplat. Brawl was decent, but still had Hazards Castle Siege and Halberd. The difference is we have so many more viable stages in this game, that for the first time ever, we can actually craft what a good stage list looks like! In Project voldeMort, they did the same thing because the devs had control over what stages were like. We can do that too, now. We're not throwing away stages to keep lists small, this is our first time to actually get a really good really balanced list in an official title.

One last thing, I'm not against the testing of Prism Tower. As you said, it hasn't been proven that sharking is a serious deal. So let's run it and see what happens. Muno was running it before but stopped after a while. Why don't you run a tournament and get some feedback from your players? Ask them if an aspect of the stage felt polarizing or not. Data is more valuable than banter.

I don't mean to come off with an attitude, I simply don't have the patience to sit and explain every little detail to the finest degree just so someone understands what I'm saying. I'm vouching for the lesser-appreciated stages too, y'know.
 

Sean²

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I don't think this is really the case, clearly center stage is the strongest position to be in, so unless one player is willing to wait on the side of the screen (and risk an edgeguard situation later) there's going to be combat. Plus, even if your opponent is content to wait it out you could play any character with a charge move and get free charge.
Maybe just me, but I think transforming stages (especially those with walkoffs) in general are still asking for trouble. No matter how long they last. You’re going to get ****** over in some way on that stage. It happened on Delfino, happened on Castle Siege, happened on Halberd. And I was a big fan of Delfino back when that was a generally legal stage. I guess the most recent legal stage that compares to Prism the best would be Halberd. Mostly due to the liftoff sequence. I have seen and experienced a lot of shenanigans you can do on that stage, and truthfully, with the plethora of potential viable stages we have now, I really don’t see a fit for a stage where you can get stuck in a rapid jab as the stage lifts off, only to unnecessarily kill you (note: this actually happened to me on Halberd, in a tournament match. I lost as a result. It still gets to me a bit to this day. I had a ton of momentum over the guy going into that game, and that moment just destroyed it). Hence why it’s more favorable to camp it out and jump on as the platform appears, or scramble to keep stage control before the platform lifts off. The focus shifts from fighting the other player to fighting the liftoff clock.

https://youtu.be/EhjeHSBQTMo

Check out that match. Albeit they were friendlies, but you can probably see what would happen on that section in tournament. Just amp it up tenfold.

There are a good 15-20 or so stages when mixing hazards on and off that have immensely better competitive viability than this one, with “faults” that are actually arguable in nature. Prism’s are there in plain sight. I think it needs to go in the same pile as Halberd and Delfino.

If it started already past the liftoff point and never returned back to it at any point whatsoever, I could see this as an arguable stage. But as it is, the negatives outweigh the positives.
 
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Terotrous

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Nobody's coming to that question except for you. Your list of 3 stages is actually quite imbalanced, believe it or not. FD is not the most balanced open stage, and more of the community is beginning to agree about that.
That's why FD is counterpick. BF is not totally balanced either. However, the fact that you get one ban means you go to either your preferred stage of FD / BF or Smashville, which gives the person who lost the previous match mild advantage but nothing significant. I actually don't think it can get more balanced than this.


Alright, so here's the thing. You're right here that in previous games we would take all the viable stages and make Starters / Counterpicks from them. However, look at those games. Those lists are and have always been thought as unbalanced.
And the stagelists in Ultimate are widely considered unbalanced too because people always cry "too jank!" whenever anyone tries to put a small stage on the list.

If anything, I would say the stage balance has gotten worse compared to Brawl / 4, because pretty much the only stages that have been added are large biplats that favour zoners.


You’re going to get ****** over in some way on that stage. It happened on Delfino, happened on Castle Siege, happened on Halberd.
I think one area where I differ from most people here is that I don't think occasional wacky things happening due to the stage is a bad thing. Interesting stage interactions are always hype. Go look up any Melee highlights video and count how many clutch Randall saves or Shy Guy techs there are. Everyone loves them. I feel like our current push towards having only the blandest, safest stages possible is taking a lot of the soul out of the game.

Obviously we don't want stages where the stage dominates the match every game but for it to have impact on occasion is fine IMO.


https://youtu.be/EhjeHSBQTMo

Check out that match. Albeit they were friendlies, but you can probably see what would happen on that section in tournament. Just amp it up tenfold.
It seemed fine? The interaction at the beginning is roughly what I'd expect to see during this portion of the stage. Bayo got stage control and forced Link to the ledge, gaining fairly significant advantage from it. I wouldn't call this "not fighting".

During the return to the platform, they mostly do the same thing, minus a couple cases of accidentally aiming moves the wrong way (I'd guess they weren't trying too hard anymore since the match was pretty one-sided). Had Bayo gotten the shield on Link's DA at the end, she easily could have backthrown him off the side and edgeguarded, possibly for a stock.

The most noteworthy thing about that match was that Bayo was having trouble sweetspotting the ledge, which wouldn't be the case on a stage with a hard platform. Some of this is probably just inexperience with the stage, but this could be a consideration in terms of counterpicking this stage if your opponent has a recovery that's difficult to snap with.
 
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Sean²

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That's why FD is counterpick. BF is not totally balanced either. However, the fact that you get one ban means you go to either your preferred stage of FD / BF or Smashville, which gives the person who lost the previous match mild advantage but nothing significant. I actually don't think it can get more balanced than this.



And the stagelists in Ultimate are widely considered unbalanced too because people always cry "too jank!" whenever anyone tries to put a small stage on the list.

If anything, I would say the stage balance has gotten worse compared to Brawl / 4, because pretty much the only stages that have been added are large biplats that favour zoners.



I think one area where I differ from most people here is that I don't think occasional wacky things happening due to the stage is a bad thing. Interesting stage interactions are always hype. Go look up any Melee highlights video and count how many clutch Randall saves or Shy Guy techs there are. Everyone loves them. I feel like our current push towards having only the blandest, safest stages possible is taking a lot of the soul out of the game.

Obviously we don't want stages where the stage dominates the match every game but for it to have impact on occasion is fine IMO.



It seemed fine? The interaction at the beginning is roughly what I'd expect to see during this portion of the stage. Bayo got stage control and forced Link to the ledge, gaining fairly significant advantage from it. I wouldn't call this "not fighting".

During the return to the platform, they mostly do the same thing, minus a couple cases of accidentally aiming moves the wrong way (I'd guess they weren't trying too hard anymore since the match was pretty one-sided). Had Bayo gotten the shield on Link's DA at the end, she easily could have backthrown him off the side and edgeguarded, possibly for a stock.

The most noteworthy thing about that match was that Bayo was having trouble sweetspotting the ledge, which wouldn't be the case on a stage with a hard platform. Some of this is probably just inexperience with the stage, but this could be a consideration in terms of counterpicking this stage if your opponent has a recovery that's difficult to snap with.
Everything you're mentioning here, we've discussed to death. I wholeheartedly agree that there should be more stages, and crying Jank at every little nook and cranny of a stage isn't productive or a true argument. If you don't believe me, look at a post of mine from January:


Quoting myself here because I have some revisions after heavy testing. All stages still Hazards OFF.

STARTER:
Battlefield/Midgar/Fountain of Dreams
Final Destination/Wily Castle
Smashville
Town & City
Pokemon Stadium 1/PS2/Unova Pokemon League
WarioWare
Kalos Pokemon League

COUNTERPICK:
Dreamland
Yoshi's Story
Lylat Cruise
Yoshi's Island Brawl
Castle Siege
Rainbow Cruise
Frigate Orpheon

_______________________
  • Removing Dreamland as a starter as getting yourself pineappled is still easy on this stage. My testing partners and I noted more SDs on this stage than any other. This is the only flat, neutral stage I ran into that had this as an issue. It may be pointless to leave it on as counterpick even, if FOD gets fixed in the future. Same with Midgar and BF, but leaving the option since it's still early. I'd say in the long run, BF and a fixed FOD could be the standard layout triplat stages (Then you have a triplat that has a slightly different main platform that can help recovery mixups.), with Yoshi's being a counterpick because it's much larger. Marked stages in Blue that I think have immediate replacements.
  • Fountain of Dreams is Yellow because of the graphical issues. This stage is still very playable as a starter without them. Until those are fixed, it should remain banned.
  • In my opinion, I think FD should 100% be a counterpick. This stage gives huge advantages to some characters. And if you use the argument "Well, just strike/ban it", then you shouldn't say banning WW is a waste of a ban. I'm going to ban WW against DK the same way I'm going to ban FD against heavy zoners. But I'm leaving it as a starter for now as it is still a popular stage.
  • If there's one odd contention point to any non-neutral stage being banned, it's because of slopes. I think this is a ridiculous notion. This is what solidifies these stages as counterpicks.
    • If someone beats you handily on a flat stage, choosing another flat stage has a negligible chance of changing game 2's results. You may have a different platform layout, and that can help a couple characters, but in other matchups, it can help to change up the main platform as well.
    • E.G. the main point of a counterpick. If someone is much better than you, they'll be able to beat you on a non-flat stage as just as easily.
    • Another reason announcing character switches needs to come first.
    • I think a lot of people who have issues on slants can't find a legitimate reason to do so, but just find them annoying. I think that's too subjective of a reason to call for a total ban.
  • Rainbow Cruise is only janky for Ness. And that is that is totally situational. The wall has very little effect for everyone else. The bow of the ship has gotten the Lylat treatment so you can't get stuck under it. You can pineapple yourself under the stern of the ship, but only if you're way under. It's about as easy as getting stuck under Smashville.
    • The only other thing we found is that it's a bit hard to see your character when you're offstage. But WW is similar in this aspect.
    • The midstage slant near the bow makes for some interesting situations, but not in a bad way. It can be used to your advantage without being broken.
    • You can put yourself into a favorable position when your opponent is on the stern, if you stand right by the wall. However they have an escape route via the floating platforms so they're not completely trapped. Getting someone in total disadvantage in this situation requires a read of some kind.
  • Frigate and Castle Siege are generally seen as more favorable to RC.
    • Frigate: sharking through the moving platform is possible. But it's riskier than going for a ledge since the main platform is not sharkable. Totally feasible counterpick.
    • CS: Right side wall was the only partially annoying thing here. The slant had very little effect on the end result of matches since it's a very small stage.
  • I think we should maybe pick between PS1 and 2 for a standard at some point as well. Maybe PS2 because Unova could fit in as the smaller biplat to PS2's larger platform - and it has walls to assist bad recovery characters with walljumps.
  • The rest of the stages are all fine, basically no jank whatsoever that affected match outcome.
  • As per my previous post, 3-5 bans would work with a stagelist like this. Banning any of the very similar stages would ban them all.

If I had a big scene in my immediate area I'd offer this to a TO or even try to do it myself at something, but turnout is miserable where I live. A lot of TOs won't risk it, which is the biggest issue. Hoping to test it out more online one of these days to pull more data since I nor my training partner don't play every character at their 100% optimum level to see what may be broken on some of these stages.
You can see here I'm all for a bigger list.

I did a bunch of rigorous, real match testing on just about every stage that wasn't gargantuan or primarily composed of actual jank. I try differentiate actual jank from opinionated jank, which is what we hear about most often. So stages that promote circle camping/hit and run, stages with caves of life, etc. were all struck from my list from the start. I also intentionally removed sharkable stages, simply due to the fact that a lot of recoveries just don't work on a majority of them. You sacrifice the ability to snap to ledge for the ability to be able to go through the stage. This solely helps characters with good recoveries, who arguably do not need stages to help them recover. Characters with bad recoveries do, as they already have an inherent handicap. I think you may be able to get away with one soft stage (likely hazardless Skyloft). Give the player a chance to use their ban on it if they don't think they can recover there. Having multiple is bad. However when I posted this, to be as fair as I could to every character, I just removed them all as there are enough fully solid stages to go around.

I'd like to also point out, that I'm in agreeance that Melee has some hype moments that are, in part, affected by stages. But if you think about it, they also used to play on Corneria and Mute City. Things were not always perfect. I think early meta is the best time to test stages for viability, so considering Ultimate has the most viable stages of any Smash game, Randall can only help bad recoveries, and really does no harm to anyone. If Shy Guys didn't drop food with hazards on in Ultimate, I'd be all for adding hazards on Yoshi's Story for the exact same reason.

So, the last thing I looked at. What stages actually promote player interaction, and what have parts in it that cause players to disengage combat? Player interaction is integral to the survivability of the game as both a player and spectator sport. Hazards on PS1 is a great stage, but has two transformations that promote little to no player interaction, as approaching is riskier than just waiting for them to be over. Melee has been contested over this stage for years for this reason. However, a lower number of viable stages are what has discouraged banning it. Walkoffs promote low player interaction. Truthfully, so do transforming stages. Moving stages as well, as the focus switches from your opponent to surviving the stage's movement.

I'm slowly moving toward the mixed hazards army as some stages are 200% better with their hazards on, but some are 200% worse. Smashville and Town are infinitely better. Yoshi's Brawl has the support ghosts, which can be useful for some. But, Frigate is horrible with the flip. As it disengages combat and requires you to jump or take massive risk. It's a free reset to neutral for a lot of people. Lylat is bad with hazards on, with the stage tilting constantly. Then there are some obvious ones like Kalos and PS2.

There's nothing wrong with interesting stage interactions, but you have to take into account as to how "interesting" they can be. Do they interrupt the flow of the game? Do they universally invalidate recoveries? Do they promote heavy camping and/or low player interaction?

Also, though my previous post states I'm for it, I'm slowly inching away from team WarioWare now. As I think the question "Do combo setups turn into kill setups?" needs to be asked as well. It's not just heavies and poor range characters that it helps, it's quite a few characters. Several of which are likely candidates to be top 15 in the game. If they extended the blastzones a tiny bit, I'd be back on team WW in a heartbeat.
 

ATH_

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Gotta love debating with someone who takes all of your points out of context and not as a whole. I'll jump back into debate when someone else mentions something new because right now we're just going over some of the more basic stuff again. It isn't worth it or productive.

"That's why FD is a counterpick" and if you believe making any slightly imbalanced stage a counterpick fixed your problem you are so far beyond wrong.
 
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Terotrous

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I try differentiate actual jank from opinionated jank, which is what we hear about most often. So stages that promote circle camping/hit and run, stages with caves of life, etc. were all struck from my list from the start.
Right, I think everyone is 100% in agreement that these are degenerate.


I also intentionally removed sharkable stages, simply due to the fact that a lot of recoveries just don't work on a majority of them. You sacrifice the ability to snap to ledge for the ability to be able to go through the stage. This solely helps characters with good recoveries, who arguably do not need stages to help them recover.
This part I'm not convinced on, though. How easy it is to snap the ledge with a recovery is not generally a defining trait of how good a recovery is, due to the fact that snapping the ledge on most stages is fairly trivial. For example, from that video you posted, it's clearly easier for Link to snap the ledge than Bayonetta, despite the fact that Bayonetta's recovery is clearly better (it goes much further and also allows for more variation). Characters like Palutena and Pikachu also may have trouble snapping the ledge on a semisoft despite otherwise having great recoveries. I actually think the truth is the reverse, that many of the best recoveries actually do very poorly on semisofts and thus this kind of stage may level the playing field to some degree.


So, the last thing I looked at. What stages actually promote player interaction, and what have parts in it that cause players to disengage combat? Player interaction is integral to the survivability of the game as both a player and spectator sport.
I'm also totally in agreement here, I just don't agree that a stage like Prism promotes low player interaction. There's plenty of footage of this stage from 3DS and yet I've never seen a match representing the kind of "nightmare scenario" where players just sit there and wait out transformations. At best you might have matches where two zoners spend a transformation throwing projectiles at each other but this is a big part of their neutral on any stage.


Hazards on PS1 is a great stage, but has two transformations that promote little to no player interaction, as approaching is riskier than just waiting for them to be over.
I really wish the hazards off version of PS1 was simply to modify or remove the two problematic transformations rather than to turn them off entirely, particularly considering PS2 exists. One of my biggest gripes about Ultimate in general is that the Hazards off version of many stages are so poorly thought out. Many other stages could be viable with small tweaks (ie, remove the rock in Kongo Falls, remove the Cage in Find Mii, etc), and many of the tweaks they did make ruin stages (ie, Fountain of Dreams, Smashville, etc).


But, Frigate is horrible with the flip. As it disengages combat and requires you to jump or take massive risk. It's a free reset to neutral for a lot of people.
The flip can also obviously offer massive reward as well, if you get a timely hit on the opponent just before or during the flip it can create an early kill or a crazy gimp situation, both of which are always super hype, though the flip is so chaotic I can see why they'd probably prefer not to have it particularly when the no-flip version is available. That being said, I do think hazards on Frigate is still a viable stage if we were doing a hazards on ruleset for whatever reason.


Also, though my previous post states I'm for it, I'm slowly inching away from team WarioWare now.
I've been off Team Warioware for a while now, I think you can make a decent argument that it's simply too much of an outlier compared to the rest of the stages (a similar argument can be made for, say, Mushroomy Kingdom U, but on the "too big" side of things) but I'm still firmly part of team Castle Siege.


Gotta love debating with someone who takes all of your points out of context and not as a whole.
You say that as though you weren't also only responding to a couple lines out of my post and generally ignoring or missing the point of most of it.

Like for example, when I mentioned that we could make a stagelist with only 3 stages, you chose to nitpick the inclusion of FD (even though I think this is wrong, FD is a very balanced stage for many matchups, it's only polarizing in some cases), rather than addressing the underlying issue of "why do we want a large stagelist period?". If we agree that, say, the 5 starter stages are the most fair stages, why do we bother with counterpick stages at all? Just allow the loser of each match to pick the next stage or do 1 ban and there you go. That clearly gives better balance, avoids controversy in stage selection, and also speeds up the stage selection process.

The only reason I can come up with for why we bother with the concept of counterpick stages is because we want to allow more stages in tournament.
 
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Akiak

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I think you might be limiting yourself by making a sort of stagelist 'template' and then attempting to fill it out with the most appropriate stages.

Stages are complicated things with a lot of different factors at play. Slants, ledge-to-blastzone, walls, platform height, 'open-ness' etc.

All of these affect wether a player will choose to go to that stage (or wether a certain character is good on that stage)

It isn't really the case that platform layout is the most important factor and should be the driving balance point when adding stages. I mean, if that's your opinion, then ok, but it's definitely not an objective truth.

FD-likes ('open' stages) tend to be quite polarising in a certain direction (for certain characters) in a way that we pretty much understand quite well. Other layouts though (triplats, biplats, monoplats) aren't that obvious. In S4, triplats were pretty polarising, perhaps as much as FD, due to the relevance of ladder-combos. In Ult, this isn't really the case (or at least it doesn't seem like it so far), and the triplat is fairly ambiguous, much like the biplat and monoplat.

Basically, it's best to just judge stages on their own merits, imo.

That being said Halberd is probably my second favourite semisoft (and tbh, as much as I like Prism I do just dislike semisoftness in general, and Halberd at least has less of it)
 

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Soon I'm going to send my updated stage list with deep reasoning, so that should be a fun post to write. So far it's looking like I have two different lists to write about (2-2-2-2 and 3-3-3-3) so I can go over a ton of the deeper intricacies about each stage and why I believe those lists are very balanced.

I think you might be limiting yourself by making a sort of stagelist 'template' and then attempting to fill it out with the most appropriate stages.

Stages are complicated things with a lot of different factors at play. Slants, ledge-to-blastzone, walls, platform height, 'open-ness' etc.

All of these affect wether a player will choose to go to that stage (or wether a certain character is good on that stage)

It isn't really the case that platform layout is the most important factor and should be the driving balance point when adding stages. I mean, if that's your opinion, then ok, but it's definitely not an objective truth.

FD-likes ('open' stages) tend to be quite polarising in a certain direction (for certain characters) in a way that we pretty much understand quite well. Other layouts though (triplats, biplats, monoplats) aren't that obvious. In S4, triplats were pretty polarising, perhaps as much as FD, due to the relevance of ladder-combos. In Ult, this isn't really the case (or at least it doesn't seem like it so far), and the triplat is fairly ambiguous, much like the biplat and monoplat.

Basically, it's best to just judge stages on their own merits, imo.

That being said Halberd is probably my second favourite semisoft (and tbh, as much as I like Prism I do just dislike semisoftness in general, and Halberd at least has less of it)
Finally, a decent argument. You're right that stages are much more complex than simply their layout/zones. In this game, we are actually able to craft a list that we find balanced because we have so many options. In my opinion, sorting the stages by size/zones/layout we can see the patterns I'm speaking of where the viable stages are divided into 5 categories and we can use that to our advantage. A stage list should be fair game for any one character, but doctoring the list to ensure that every single character works as intended has never worked.

I personally do believe that 4 of the 5 layout types (because the 5th is just all explicitly unique stages) have very distinct qualities about them. It is much more complicated than simply saying "all triangles help X character", I am simplifying it in debate because it goes too deep to tackle without spending a week forming a conclusion.

If we do as you say and look at the merits of each stage without categorizing, it's quite easy to see that it turns out that we have certain stages that similarly benefit certain characters. I suppose another way to put it is that my argument is not a hypothesis proven by testing, it's a conclusion I've come to through testing. It's where you end up when you compare all of the stages together. You can get rid of the labels, but the innate properties of the stages are still there.

Do note, I'm not saying "have 2 of each layout and a 5th starter and you're good", because it's far more complicated than that. There has to be variance. You don't want both FoD and Battlefield, because they're nearly identical. You use Yoshi's Story instead, because it's significantly different, but still provides pros and cons that it shares with Battlefield. Of course, because it's smaller, it helps heavy characters. As well, because it has walled sides, it helps recoveries of certain characters. There are things that these stages do not have in common, but the overwhelming majority of advantages and disadvantages are shared between stages of the same layout.

Now, okay, let's entertain the concept that maybe this is correct but it falls apart when you look at how each layout is balanced against each other. What happens if all four layouts support one type of character? What happens if 2 of the layouts are too similar and basically inflate the list with even more stages of a similar type? That's entirely possible, but I don't believe that to be the case in this game. The most likely example is Triangles being too similar to Semi-Central Biplats, so let's look at that.

When we look at the layouts abstractly, it definitely poses an issue. However, these layouts are not abstract in-game! So let's analyze how similar their advantages are in-game. Pokemon Stadium 2 is one that a lot of people will agree is definitely different enough from any Triangle-stage, even Midgar. Top players have already gone over that, so I'm going to skip it. What about Unova though?

Well, what are the differences? Unova has:
  • One less platform.
  • Platforms are about 5 units higher up, meaning a lot of full jumps don't reach.
  • Walled sides
  • Odd-shaped walls that have been known to kill Teleports
  • Darker background with flashing lighting effects
Is this enough? How can we know it's enough? Well, we can compare it to how we compare other stages to find out if it's enough, but first let's go deeper on each specific point.

One less platform: You can't do many extended combos without the top platform, this is all known and well. It also means that as certain characters (most notably Mewtwo but also a lot of others) with poor landing options you don't have one of your best options. Conclusion: There are plenty of characters who benefit from and are at disadvantage because of there being one less platform.

Platforms are about 5 units higher up: Lots of full jumps don't reach, similar to the differences between PS1 and PS2. While this means neutral is much different than on Battlefield, I think the main important thing is that extended ladder combos are even more difficult to pull off or impossible with these platforms. Some characters (such as Greninja, Yoshi, Cloud, Peach/Daisy, Ike, Inkling, etc) rely on only needing one jump to reach the platform to extend their combos (and keeping them true). Conclusion: I don't know from those characters which specifically reach and don't reach the platform (I'd bet Greninja could but Yoshi can't) but there are tons of characters who have combos that are made untrue due to the platforms being different.

Walled sides: I barely have to talk about this because the community seems to agree that this is a pretty big deal. Wall jumps can save characters with really poor recoveries. Not being able to retreat below a stage means edge guarding is much more powerful. Wall jumps allow for more mixups and edge guards. The list goes on and on. For some characters this means a whole extra jump. For others it can mean your opponent's character gets a pretty nice advantage at the ledge.

Odd-shaped walls: This has been mostly fixed as of the recent update, but if you're caught teleporting beneath the shape of the wall then you're very likely to go flying off to the blast zone. This is a huge factor of Unova that can really turn the tides against any character with a teleport. Gives them less options, gives others more punish opportunities. It's key to recognize that this is a point of knowledge, and not unavoidable. It's an adaptable trait of the stage, it is not absolute.

Darker background with lighting effects: This is underestimated, but many top players (ZeRo, Esam, Mew2King, Salem, others too) have talked about how on stages like Unova and FD it can become really really difficult to see certain projectiles. Most notably, Snake's grenades (as well as others). This is something that sets it further apart from Battlefield, where the lighting is bright and projectiles are very clear. Note that none of these players have said that it is a broken aspect, but rather note it as an aspect of the stage.

So is this enough? Well, that's subjective, but in my opinion yes. If we look at a stage like Yoshi's Story, we see walled sides, taller platforms, smaller blast zones, and smaller terrain. If those four things are enough for YS to be different enough, then I'd believe that makes Unova different enough.

If you have any other two layouts/stages you believe might be too similar, let me know. I believe that if you look at every single viable stage you'll find this pattern, and I'll take this into much deeper detail with my next stage list post. They all have aspects that are adaptable and aspects that make them very different.

I am paying a lot of attention to what makes these stages unique from one another, the categories are short-hand to help describe concepts to other people. Maybe I should abandon that line of short-hand, though.
Right, I think everyone is 100% in agreement that these are degenerate.

This part I'm not convinced on, though. How easy it is to snap the ledge with a recovery is not generally a defining trait of how good a recovery is, due to the fact that snapping the ledge on most stages is fairly trivial. For example, from that video you posted, it's clearly easier for Link to snap the ledge than Bayonetta, despite the fact that Bayonetta's recovery is clearly better (it goes much further and also allows for more variation). Characters like Palutena and Pikachu also may have trouble snapping the ledge on a semisoft despite otherwise having great recoveries. I actually think the truth is the reverse, that many of the best recoveries actually do very poorly on semisofts and thus this kind of stage may level the playing field to some degree.

I'm also totally in agreement here, I just don't agree that a stage like Prism promotes low player interaction. There's plenty of footage of this stage from 3DS and yet I've never seen a match representing the kind of "nightmare scenario" where players just sit there and wait out transformations. At best you might have matches where two zoners spend a transformation throwing projectiles at each other but this is a big part of their neutral on any stage.

I really wish the hazards off version of PS1 was simply to modify or remove the two problematic transformations rather than to turn them off entirely, particularly considering PS2 exists. One of my biggest gripes about Ultimate in general is that the Hazards off version of many stages are so poorly thought out. Many other stages could be viable with small tweaks (ie, remove the rock in Kongo Falls, remove the Cage in Find Mii, etc), and many of the tweaks they did make ruin stages (ie, Fountain of Dreams, Smashville, etc).

The flip can also obviously offer massive reward as well, if you get a timely hit on the opponent just before or during the flip it can create an early kill or a crazy gimp situation, both of which are always super hype, though the flip is so chaotic I can see why they'd probably prefer not to have it particularly when the no-flip version is available. That being said, I do think hazards on Frigate is still a viable stage if we were doing a hazards on ruleset for whatever reason.

I've been off Team Warioware for a while now, I think you can make a decent argument that it's simply too much of an outlier compared to the rest of the stages (a similar argument can be made for, say, Mushroomy Kingdom U, but on the "too big" side of things) but I'm still firmly part of team Castle Siege.

You say that as though you weren't also only responding to a couple lines out of my post and generally ignoring or missing the point of most of it.

Like for example, when I mentioned that we could make a stagelist with only 3 stages, you chose to nitpick the inclusion of FD (even though I think this is wrong, FD is a very balanced stage for many matchups, it's only polarizing in some cases), rather than addressing the underlying issue of "why do we want a large stagelist period?". If we agree that, say, the 5 starter stages are the most fair stages, why do we bother with counterpick stages at all? Just allow the loser of each match to pick the next stage or do 1 ban and there you go. That clearly gives better balance, avoids controversy in stage selection, and also speeds up the stage selection process.

The only reason I can come up with for why we bother with the concept of counterpick stages is because we want to allow more stages in tournament.
Already said I don't want to have to delve into the deepest reasoning behind literally every aspect of this thread. You can answer your own questions by reading the thread up to this page.

I read all of your post, and as I said I wanted to respond to the ridiculous things you were saying. You however are cherry-picking things I'm saying and choosing to respond only to what you disagree with when you don't acknowledge any of my reasons that are very clearly stated. Instead you choose to put words in my mouth and frankly, it's insulting.
 
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Terotrous

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I read all of your post, and as I said I wanted to respond to the ridiculous things you were saying. You however are cherry-picking things I'm saying and choosing to respond only to what you disagree with when you don't acknowledge any of my reasons that are very clearly stated.
Honestly, I think you're just tilted right now. I made the exact same comment about how the platform layout isn't the only or most important thing about the stage several posts earlier, and I think it's fairly clear that if you only focus on that you may end up with an unbalanced stagelist (by, say, overrepresenting large stages). I also don't think I've ever really misrepresented your posts and my first post was actually agreeing with your choices for starters in hazards on. You just seemingly felt like picking a fight for whatever reason. Maybe you misunderstood that my comment about running a list with only 3 stages was intended in jest, in the same fashion as your 42-stage list (which is why I quoted that part)?


Basically, it's best to just judge stages on their own merits, imo.
I think that if our goal is to create the most balanced stage list possible (though it's worth noting that not everyone agrees that this is the point of a stage list), we'd want to review "which characters do well on these stages", and try to ensure that all characters have a generally even number of stages where they do well. Of course, this is almost impossibly complex so a more practical method might be to put something together that looks decent and then look at results or reported imbalances.

Right now, it seems like the #1 imbalance is for heavy characters. The stagelists we're commonly seeing run favour large stages where Zoners are strong (ie, PS2, Kalos), while usually eliminating smaller stages like Lylat or Castle Siege for silly reasons. Besides these (and Warioware), Brinstar and Prism Tower might also be possible considerations for small stages (Prism is the smallest out of Prism / Halberd / Skyloft by a decent margin).
 
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Sean²

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This part I'm not convinced on, though. How easy it is to snap the ledge with a recovery is not generally a defining trait of how good a recovery is, due to the fact that snapping the ledge on most stages is fairly trivial. For example, from that video you posted, it's clearly easier for Link to snap the ledge than Bayonetta, despite the fact that Bayonetta's recovery is clearly better (it goes much further and also allows for more variation). Characters like Palutena and Pikachu also may have trouble snapping the ledge on a semisoft despite otherwise having great recoveries. I actually think the truth is the reverse, that many of the best recoveries actually do very poorly on semisofts and thus this kind of stage may level the playing field to some degree.
I think you misinterpreted what I meant by semi soft stages helping good recoveries. Good recoveries don’t need to snap, because they can just go right through the stage. I’m talking Inkling, Pikachu, etc. The list could go on. It adds risk, but they’d still come back.

But there are characters who just cannot reach that far with their recovery and must attempt to snap. Think what you want about how good the character is, but I play Wolf. He’s not exactly known for his ledge-snapping skills. Semi soft stages almost delete side B as a recovery option. And sometimes, you need to use it as his up B has bad diagonal distance. Numerous times I have aimed it perfectly for what would normally be a clean snap, only to go inside the stage platform and fall right through. I know Wolf isn’t the only one with this dilemma, either.

Unless you’re Little Mac, dying from a single offstage exchange shouldn’t happen often. Especially if you’re the one going out for an edgeguard and just trying to come back.

Hence why I say one semi soft stage could be feasible. Give your opponent a chance to ban it, then if they don’t, your gain. And why risk walkoff shenanigans when there are a couple who already start on their floating formations?



On another note though, your comment on Frigate (don’t feel like quoting again, on Mobile) is not really realistic. I would say your situation would happen in tournament under 5% of the time. The other 95+% of flips will result in both players disengaging and jumping. I’ve been to a multitude of Brawl tournaments in years past - this is almost always the case.

Honestly, all this conversation is telling me now is that Hazards Off was a good idea, but poorly implemented. As in, what designates a “hazard” in the dev team’s eyes? Apparently Smashville’s moving platform is seen on the same level playing field as the Yellow Devil.
 

ParanoidDrone

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I think you misinterpreted what I meant by semi soft stages helping good recoveries. Good recoveries don’t need to snap, because they can just go right through the stage. I’m talking Inkling, Pikachu, etc. The list could go on. It adds risk, but they’d still come back.
A lot of up specials have significant landing lag, and you'd have at least *some* distance of helpless freefall to deal with as well. Would that not be a factor in choosing to recover through the stage?

Unless you’re Little Mac, dying from a single offstage exchange shouldn’t happen often. Especially if you’re the one going out for an edgeguard and just trying to come back.
Or Chrom or the Belmonts. <.<

Honestly, all this conversation is telling me now is that Hazards Off was a good idea, but poorly implemented. As in, what designates a “hazard” in the dev team’s eyes? Apparently Smashville’s moving platform is seen on the same level playing field as the Yellow Devil.
"Good idea but poorly implemented" could apply to a lot of things in Smash, come to think of it.
 
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Sean²

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Like I said, it adds risk. Regardless of that, it’s another option for them to recover. They can goof their recovery and still manage to come back. If it has a hitbox or they can’t act out of it, even better. Or multiple jumps.

I also can imagine some spikes through the stage occurring more frequently. Ivysaur, anyone?

Anyway, I feel like there isn’t much else to discuss on the topic of semi soft stages. I still think we could get away with one at the very most, as a counterpick, and would be willing to bet Skyloft would be the choice.
 

Terotrous

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I think you misinterpreted what I meant by semi soft stages helping good recoveries. Good recoveries don’t need to snap, because they can just go right through the stage. I’m talking Inkling, Pikachu, etc. The list could go on. It adds risk, but they’d still come back.
I feel like for most characters, recovering through the stage is a strictly inferior option to recovering to ledge, except maybe for Pikachu / Pichu, largely because they have no way to mix-up between the two options. If Inkling is directly below the stage on a semisoft, for example, you know they have to recover through the stage, there's no possible way they could snap ledge from that position, which allows you to exploit their landing recovery fairly easily. Pikachu and Pichu can probably mix it up due to the insane flexibility they have with their recoveries, but they get to recover for free from pretty much anywhere anyway so I'm not sure if this makes a huge difference to them.


But there are characters who just cannot reach that far with their recovery and must attempt to snap. Think what you want about how good the character is, but I play Wolf. He’s not exactly known for his ledge-snapping skills. Semi soft stages almost delete side B as a recovery option. And sometimes, you need to use it as his up B has bad diagonal distance. Numerous times I have aimed it perfectly for what would normally be a clean snap, only to go inside the stage platform and fall right through. I know Wolf isn’t the only one with this dilemma, either.
Although I think some of this is probably just lack of familiarity with the stage (after all, there's nothing random about whether or not you snap, there's a specific position on the stage from which you must use SideB to get the snap, with more practice you'd probably either get a feel for it or pick up on a visual cue to know you're in the right spot), the ability to limit the recovery of some characters could make these stages a reasonable counterpick option against them. Like I said, I think it's actually often the case that the better characters are hurt more by this, as a lot of the weaker characters tend to have UpBs that follow very simple trajectories (this is normally a bad trait) but it makes them easy to snap with. It also makes tethers more viable.

I don't know for sure whether or not a stage like Prism would improve the overall balance, but I think there's at least some interesting dynamics to these types of levels, and I'd like to see them tested at least a bit more before they're written off.


On another note though, your comment on Frigate (don’t feel like quoting again, on Mobile) is not really realistic. I would say your situation would happen in tournament under 5% of the time.
That's probably true, after all, things like Randall saves and platform ghosts are also fairly rare, but that's part of what makes it so hype when it does happen.


Honestly, all this conversation is telling me now is that Hazards Off was a good idea, but poorly implemented. As in, what designates a “hazard” in the dev team’s eyes? Apparently Smashville’s moving platform is seen on the same level playing field as the Yellow Devil.
That's definitely my opinion towards it. I actually feel that Ultimate is filled with great ideas that aren't implemented well (the Final Smash meter and the Squad Smash mode are two other examples), but that's a topic for another time. I also think it's super regrettable that some stages that could potentially be great with hazards off (ie, Pyrosphere, Rainbow Road) straight up aren't in the game at all.


Anyway, I feel like there isn’t much else to discuss on the topic of semi soft stages. I still think we could get away with one at the very most, as a counterpick, and would be willing to bet Skyloft would be the choice.
I guess I'd be fine with Skyloft, but it definitely wouldn't be my first choice. As a quick point of comparison, Skyloft has blastzones that are a fair bit bigger than Prism, with 7.5 more on both sides and 20 more at the top.
 

ParanoidDrone

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That's definitely my opinion towards it. I actually feel that Ultimate is filled with great ideas that aren't implemented well (the Final Smash meter and the Squad Smash mode are two other examples), but that's a topic for another time. I also think it's super regrettable that some stages that could potentially be great with hazards off (ie, Pyrosphere, Rainbow Road) straight up aren't in the game at all.
Oh do not even get me started on this. I could legit write up a lengthy list of simple (in concept, anyway, IDK about in code) changes to currently-banned stages that would drastically improve them, even if they end up still not being allowed overall.

Modders plz. ;_;
 
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