Stale Moves

[KishSquared]

I notice that stale moves are completely eliminated in Almas' first codeset. Is that intentional?

Stale moves needs to be reduced for sure, but not outright struck from the game in my opinion. What does everyone think about it? How much should it weaken with each hit, and how low should it go?

At our Brawl+ tourney, we used a 3% linear reduction that brought a move down to 78% strength at its most stale. Honestly, it felt like it was too much still. Should it maybe be:

2% reduction the first 3 times it's in the queue
3% reduction after that?

 

[shanus]

I notice that stale moves are completely eliminated in Almas' first codeset. Is that intentional?

Stale moves needs to be reduced for sure, but not outright struck from the game in my opinion. What does everyone think about it? How much should it weaken with each hit, and how low should it go?

At our Brawl+ tourney, we used a 3% linear reduction that brought a move down to 78% strength at its most stale. Honestly, it felt like it was too much still. Should it maybe be:

2% reduction the first 3 times it's in the queue
3% reduction after that?

I think you missed out on the whole talk about it a while before. Knockback reduction is a huge minus with stale moves. Not only does it add uncertainty into combos, but uptilts are a HUGE problem with stale moves. The ideal solution is to introduce a semi–aggressive stale moves code which reduces ONLY the damage to the move itself if repeated within I'd say a 5 hit window. However, such a code has yet to be made.

 

[Almas]

I think you may also slightly misinterpret how stale moves works.
The game remembers, for each character, the last 9 moves used (which also connected). The staleness of each move is based on the position in the list a move it, as well as how many times.

The overall damage/knockback done by a move is 1-(the sum of the different stale move penalties). Moves which were more recently performed are higher on the list, and have a larger stale move penalty - I believe the last move used has something like a 10% penalty, while the one that is ninth on the list has a 0.5% penalty.

So your method of '2% if it is in X times, else 3%', or whatever, wouldn't work.

 

[MookieRah]

I'm pretty sure all of us here would agree that we should have some stale damage on stale moves, but until then I don't see a point in including it. The Brawl version of stale moves is a lame mechanic that was just put into place because the developers weren't capable of making all of the character's have movesets in which it would be a good idea to use all of their moves. They wanted to simply prevent spamming the same move to kill, but they didn't do a good job of giving characters a handful of kill moves! They also didn't realize that many moves that were great for KO's are also great for dealing damage. I'd rather preserve knock back on moves as they currently are, and wait until we can find a way to make it to where stale moves don't affect knockback.

 

[KishSquared]

Actually, we did figure out how it works, and that idea would work fine. I simplified the language a bit, but you just base the percentage lost with how many times the move is in the queue. Regardless, it's possible to come up with our own values.

Ultimately Mookie, I agree with most of what you say. I mean, in Melee, I never had to hold myself off from spamming usmash with Fox in order to save it for use as a kill move. Still, that doesn't mean that the concept is inherently flawed. Keeping a move reserved to kill with does take some skill.

If we include it, it should be very minor. I think that outright eliminating it goes against Smash in general. Stale moves has existed since 64, and I'd like to see it implemented in some form or another.

 

[leafgreen386]

I think eliminating it goes against sakurai in general. Not smash. Unless we can implement it in its melee form (damage only) I really don't think that it should be in at all.

 

[KishPrime]

It wasn't damage only in Melee...try it out with rest. I had people survive stale rests in team matches all the time. It was just very minor.

 

[leafgreen386]

Huh? If it wasn't just stale damage in melee, then there had to be different multipliers for damage and for knockback, because moves could stale in damage in melee just as much as they stale in brawl. Are you sure what you were seeing wasn't simply the move sending them less distance because they were at a lower percent then they would normally be at after getting hit?

 

[MookieRah]

Yeah, someone mentioned before that B moves in melee had stale knock backs, but all the A moves didn't.

 

[leafgreen386]

Ah, right. I remember now. Yeah. Specials could be subject to a knockback reduction due to stale moves, but it was just for specials.

 

[Deleted member]

one stupid thing is that the list is too long in my opinion, 10 moves is just too much. someone mentioned tilts against this, but those are the very moves that shouldn't stale. so shortening the lenght might be an option too. it's not too hard to code sice we would just write zeroes to all the, say 5, last values in the list

 

[KishPrime]

It's amazing how much I don't know about Melee still.

 

[KishSquared]

Agreed. There was really only stale moves for knockback on B moves? That explains so much!

In that sense, maybe we should eliminate stale moves altogether after all.

 

[KishPrime]

Yeah, that totally changes my opinion, since the only reason I wanted it in was because it was in the old Smashes. It's a terrible idea. "Instead of balancing the moveset, let's just make it so that moves get worse if you use them too much because we did a poor job of balancing and giving you reasons to use other moves." As it stands, I don't see a reason to include it anymore at all now.