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Well they can gentlemen's to any stage, but it just ends up that 90% of matches are on Smashville.
LiteralGrill
's Hypest group dislikes Skyloft and Wuhu Island? If good reasoning is presented I may go with it.
This thread loves PS2, Wuhu, and Skyloft. You'll find some criticism, but not much.Alright, it seems about time for my monthly post in this thread. Again, I am still very torn between a few stages.
May I ask why @
My online tournament that is almost ready to be held so far has got this as a solid list:
Starters(7):
Final Destination
Battlefield
Smashville
Town & City
Duck Hunt
Delfino Plaza
Lylat Cruise
Counterpicks(6):
Kongo Jungle 64
Castle Siege
Skyloft
Wuhu Island
Halberd
Pokemon Stadium 2
Whereas the Counterpick stages will be voted upon for what should be allowed.
I'm all for FLSS but didn't want it to exceed 9, and to make it simpler, I kept it down to 7. Fair bet in my mind.
As usual, here are the usual 13 stages. All CPs will be voted upon as already stated. To keep it simple, I didn't allow Omega Stages, but that may change in the future or sooner than later depending if the demand is there. I plan to have a very professional tournament to become a good TO and Player as time goes on and Smash U develops.
I am interested in criticism for each of the CPs. In particular, Skyloft, Wuhu Island, and Pokemon Stadium 2. All criticism is helpful ^^
That's because despite sitting in training mode for a half hour I was only able to get hit by the island once. Eventually I said "**** it" because I have better things to do with my time.
The_Jiggernaut
since he asked.
If you read what I said you'd see that I agree with your philosiphy, however after personally spending hours trying to find when scenery hits and having no luck finding documentation on it I've come to the conclusion that it's such a minor tell if its there at all it may as well be random.
Not the exact sort of tell you were hoping for, but as far as I'm aware Skyloft is only a danger when flying around the underside of the island and a brief moment when the stone wall around the giant statue apparently clips through the platform.
We've allowed stages that ACTUALLY randomly save people before (Yoshi's Island Brawl) so when there actually is a tell, even if it's very slight, I don't find it right to remove it.
YIBrawl also randomly kills Ness/Lucas sometimes if they need to use PK Thunder.
The platforms are on a timer aren't they? Even if they aren't they're platforms that can come up on a static stage in the same spots not random pieces of flying scenery that can kill/save you that last a fraction of a second.
AFAIK the support ghosts are completely random. And they can in fact randomly save people who are falling or have been spiked with no forewarning. They can also kill Ness/Lucas by getting in the way of their PK Thunder.
Thank you for the response! I understand, yet, I'm still at square one.@ATH_ Us TOs don't have an issue with Skyloft, it's the general player base. I personally would keep Wuhu and PS2 legal but we're all a team and we work together to come up with compromises and such.
You can tell when the background swoops into the foreground, its pretty obvious. Also, you can definitely use it to your advantage like this
Well I would sit down and try to provide evidence that the stage is broken in some way.
It's just very hard to explain in words to that kind of detail, but it's obvious to most people who have played a lot on this stage. The mechanic is that, while the stage is traveling, the physical landmass has a hitbox. If that landmass moves within the play area while traveling, it's possible to hit that hitbox. Skyloft has a really huge number of possible travel patterns that would be honestly unreasonable to document in full, but the shape of the island is static and you can tell from the background if you're swooping close or not. It's not really random except insofar as the travel patterns are, but there's just so many possible permutations that it's a lot easier to tell people "just learn the shape of the stage and the mechanic, get some experience, and you'll know too". It's pretty much a mental iceberg thing. It's entirely possible to learn, but if you do, it will inevitably be on the "underwater" part of your mental iceberg: the part consisting of the things you know but can't explain. See also: explaining the very precise pattern of movement your legs must take to allow you to walk. You know it, but I sure bet you couldn't explain it in enough detail for someone who knows nothing about walking to emulate it.
With regards to everyone's comparison to Yoshi's Island (Brawl):
Guys.... I have some bad news. There is more than one area of the stage that can kill you. The one shown in this video is not the one that I've experienced.
Yoshi's Island Brawl is 100% random. Only in PM is it not, but that really doesn't matter. In Brawl and Smash 3DS, they are random. There's also no difference from being randomly saved and being randomly killed. Randomly saving my opponent is the same as randomly saving me. If I go in for a clutch edge guard or spike that would kill both me and my opponent, but my opponent gets save and I die how is it any different. Even if it wouldn't kill me, it still puts my opponent in a much better position then I am because he's on a platform and can safely recover and now I have to avoid his edge guard. And at least Skyloft has warning from the background from when it's going to happen, unlike Yoshi's Island. Also, are these hitboxes on Skyloft really any better than Delfino's Blast zones shrinking while transforming. Both would kill you earlier than expected, you know both are coming, the only difference is Skyloft has a significantly smaller chance to kill you since you can save yourself with DI and recovering and whatnot. You should also be able to react to your opponent's DI or your launch trajectory to use the stage to your full advantage. I mean if your being sent to die and you notice the stage is coming into the screen, you can DI towards it to try and save yourself, and you can always hit your opponent into it like in the gif.
I was not aware that they were truly random events, thanks for clarifying. I disagree that being randomly killed and randomly saved are equivalent. There is an extreme difference between a situation being reset to neutral and the game outright ending. I can't say that any more simply.
Firefoxx
between Delfino's changing blastzones and getting hit by Skyloft, I think the real difference is consistency. Delfino's Blastzones change on every single transition. It becomes part of the flow of the stage. When the transition ends, the Blastzones will change, so act accordingly.
But on Yoshi's it doesn't set to neutral. If you attempt to perform any offstage game whatsoever, if my opponent gets saved by the platform they are immediately in a better position then me. Even if it did reset to neutral, it randomly took the momentum out of my favor, unlike on Skyloft where the stage hitting you continues your momentum. Also I wouldn't call the inconsistent. I mean it is set, but it's not necessary to memorize where it is. All that's required is paying attention to the screen and noticing when it's happening. The stage hitting you on Skyloft isn't at all banable as it doesn't create over dominating strategies or marginalize player skill. For Omega stages, you don't need to memorize every one. The only one you need to know is the one you want to counterpick too. You can just look and see if the stage has walls if your opponent picks one you don't know. Omega stages might have trivial differences, but if you pick FD it's not because it has walls its because its a long stage that lacks platforms.I was not aware that they were truly random events, thanks for clarifying. I disagree that being randomly killed and randomly saved are equivalent. There is an extreme difference between a situation being reset to neutral and the game outright ending. I can't say that any more simply.
If you know you're on a stage that can randomly save an opponent (always in the exact same place, unlike the rising platform in Duck Hunt, but I digress) DO NOT do a suicide spike. I feel that this is common sense.
About the differences being brought up here and by @
Meanwhile, Skyloft's Hazards are so inconsistent that we haven't been able to even test when they kill. If Skyloft had a stage hazard in the form of a Rockface sticking on every single transition, then I would happily argue that the situations are the same. It would be a much more useable stage is this was true. Because you would naturally play according to this and it would become part of the stage's flow. But they're just wildly inconsistent instead. Should we ban it? I don't know. But I don't think it's acceptable to simply expect people to memorize the motions of the platform when no one in our community even knows how many hazards are even on the stage. If we keep it, it's because the random events don't justify the ban.
This part of my post suddenly became an essay, so sorry to those of you that don't like reading. There's a TL;DR version at the bottom.
There's this... privilege I've noticed amongst gamers that grew up with the NES and SNES where extreme amounts of memorization is no big deal. In fact, it's romanticized. People who have spent 40 hours memorizing small details to surprise and beat players of a similar skill are put up on a pedestal and the player that didn't put the time in is criticized for not being as much of a gamer as the other. It's a hugely problematic viewpoint that I will be coining as "NES Privilege."
NES privilege is the phenomenon in which gamers who grew up on the old video game consoles directly value the number of hours pumped into a game, while also not valuing time as a limited resource. As in, they glorify spending many hours of play while not realizing that there are a lot of great or necessary other things that the time could be used for.
This mentality comes from the days of old where we spent entire summer vacations only playing games. When we were growing up, we had no responsibilities and nothing BUT time. We could amaze friends with our tricks we picked up through the multitude of hours played to beat our single player games in new and interesting ways. And that was valuable to us. But we aren't those kids anymore. We've grown up, and we have things to do. We gotta go to jobs, have relationships, and make our own lunches. Yet this idea that it is valuable to stick 40 hours into a game sticks with us still.
Basic design philosophy states that a game should be easy to learn and hard to master. Part of this means that the number of hours needed to learn the game's mechanics should be small, and that's in direct violation to NES privilege. That's NOT to say, however, that depth and interesting and undiscovered interactions between characters makes game bad, that's all part of "Hard to master". By mechanics, I mean the using all of a character's moves consistently, learning how to recover, and learning the stages.
One of the largest cases of NES privilege in our community is the expectation that everyone must memorize every Omega stage and the differences between all of them. Don't think that's a thing? Since we allow someone to counterpick ANY Omega stage their choose, the other player must know what details that stage has in order to properly choose if he will switch characters or not. I don't wish to open up the discussion of how different or samey Omega stages are. It very much matters to Megaman if he can walljump off of the walls or if the walls do not allow walljumping, and that cannot be denied. Thus, the Megaman player must memorize all of the omega stages that have walls and all of those stages that do not allow walljumping. It takes an extreme amount of study, either by playing the game or looking through smashboards to learn these differences. Another part of NES privilege is even expecting a player to know that they must start learning the game like a literary work before an English exam.
If you claim learning the Omega stages or memorizing every permutation of Skyloft's travel only takes 14 hours (I'm imagining it takes more, actually) you are telling a person who only has 2 hours of free time due to having a life, job, and responsibilities that they must do nothing else but play Smash for a week straight before they can properly play against those of equal skill level. That is absolutely NOT reasonable. Especially when learning ACTUAL advanced techniques takes time as well.
Instead, of valuing these things, we should be building the game to have the least amount of exploitable technicalities possible and the smallest amount of hours needed to learn the core of the game. This will allow more people to reach the highest level of play, and will be better for the community as a whole.
TL;DR
Expecting everyone to pump 40 hours into a game to learn non-skill based details in order to play at a competitive level is bullsh*t, especially when it can be easily avoided. People shouldn't be glorifying the simple number of hours spent playing a game, but instead how skilled a player is at the game. People that glorify this have NES Privilege.
Also, this is a call to normalize the Omega stage list by choosing a handful and banning the rest, while keeping the Ban FD=Ban Omegas rule. If we allow someone to pick any Omega stage they want, it forces everyone to have to memorize the entire list, and that's silly for reasons discussed in full above.
I don't think anyone's actually going to try to find all the hazards because its easier to just pay attention during a match for the stage, and it's not worth banning the stage over since the uniqueness it brings is worth more than the slight annoyance that is the hazard. It should be on every stage list.
This feels like a silly argument. How do you get more skilled at a game? By practicing. What does practising do? Build muscle memory.
Not by me despite my position as unofficial stage guru. I feel similarly to Piford in that trying to actually document all possible instances of Skyloft forming a damaging hazard is not worth the trouble given the sheer number of possible flight paths (assuming there's a unique path between each pair of valid start and end transformations) and it's simpler to just note the broad strokes. Namely, when the stage flies around the underside of the island, it's possible that the rock may be close enough to hurt players. There's exactly one exception to this I can think of, that being the wall around the goddess statue, which also comes close enough to be a hazard depending on how the stage is flying around.
Knowing how to DI diddy's dthrow to avoid the uair kill is a non-skill based detail, but it is pretty necessary to play at a competitive level against a competitive diddy. Same with Pacman's the bonus fruits and the hydrant. Is that much different from stage knowledge?
ATH_
your stage list is alright but you should run either 5 or 9 starters in my opinion so the striking process is even.
I'm not really concerned as to how bad a situation these platforms create on Yoshi's story. Being able to act and read your opponent in the given situation is fundamentally different than the game ending. It's fine if you don't think that either should be in a stage, but they are absolutely not equivalent.
I think you're missing my point a little. Obviously you get better at a game through playing it. I will obviously not deny that. But there is a significant difference between time spent developing muscle memory and time memorizing facts. It has to do with something called "transferable skill". Basically, you want as much time spent learning how to be good at a game to pertain to skills that you can use in other games, (ie transferable ones) and as little time possible spent learning things that only help you in the game itself (how to navigate difficult menus, learning the terms the game throws at you etc)
Every game has some amount of random facts required to know for it to function. Smash is no exception. The important thing is that we limit these amount of details without removing any functionality. Memorizing Pacman's fruits, the effects of G&W's hammer, or even knowing what a character's smash animations are... these are all facts to memorize. But they're necessary. We as a community have made it clear (in both our good choices and our mistakes) that banning characters is dumb. We pretty much unanimously want to keep all characters in. (As a side note, knowing how to DI something is a skill, and needing to know its existence doesn't somehow invalidate that)
Krysco
that there are 162 unique paths on Skyloft and @
madworlder
added that there are 54 unique transitions. Most of these transitions are extremely visually similar. An unknown amount of these 54 transitions have a stage hazard that can directly lead to a loss of stock.
ATH_
points out, it's about how much is too much when it comes to learning a stage. In my opinion, this is a few stops past the getting off point.Hey again, AA! I was surprised when you abruptly stopped responding to my thread about the Omegas. I suppose we can discuss it further here if you'd like.
