So I started looking into customs with a sort of morbid curiosity since the consensus is basically "they're good" and from a lot of parties (you most definitely excluded) there is such an air of confidence in this statement they feel the need to downplay the intelligence and legitimacy for people with concerns (it literally happened to me the moment I opened my mouth).
I think it boils down to impatience. It's easy for people who are emotionally invested in a discussion to fail to recognize when there are multiple audiences. They hear the same concerns and questions again from a different source, but think "Jesus, we just talked about this, are you stupid?" Hopefully as a community we can minimize this sort of communication breakdown moving forward.
Moving on, though, what big name players have put their hands into the waters with customs? Who's not only putting lab time in with these, but winning events? I'd like their opinions on customs, because if anyone is going to discover how to abuse character's when these drop, it'll be them.
Nairo is quite familar with them, as is NAKAT iirc? Dabuz and boss are loud proponents, as well as random regional voices like Bwett, DeLux, and others.
And hey, I'm no M2K, but I'm currently the best player in the St. Louis area based on our local results. (Flow-Yo is right on my tail though; competition is stiff!)
could we here a little about how the cast looks post-custom?
Here is
My Tier List (with and without Customs).
While the nebulous B tier/C tier area will probably see a VAST overhaul, most of the toppest of tier characters in this game are so good because of their normals, aerial speed, and the combos those two allow. Diddy will not stop being Diddy, nor Shiek Shiek.
Absolutely. As I said in another post: Anyone who expect customs to turn the tier list upside down are in for a rude awakening.
Balance does improve, but things don't change that much. No one, imo, leapfrogs into the top 8, much less the top 2.
In fact, I'd posit the assertion that they literally only get better from here when you let them replace or modify existing moves they use less often or that are overly niche for strait up better tech. Battering Banana combos and being able to drop Shieks side B for something better both come to my mind. If we're looking for variety we'd want to see characters get power-level appropriate upgrades, no? But I mean, if testing has proven we do, please share with me. I haven't had the opportunity to literally sit with all of this tech and do lab work.
The good news is, Diddy has trash customs and Sheik has mostly trash customs.
Diddy's neutral B options are trash.
Diddy's side B options are pretty good moves, but nothing compared to default Monkey Flip's godliness.
Diddy's up B options seem like dubious side-grades at best.
Diddy's Battering Banana Peel is the only one worth considering, and I think default is generally better since it can setup smashes and grabs.
Sheik's Piercing Needles are really good (shield damage bonus), but do less damage, have less range, and you can only use 3. Neat, but probably not good. Paralyzing Needle is just bad.
Sheik's Gravity Grenade is "well, better than the default I guess, but still not a move you should ever use." The third is pretty lackluster as far as I can tell.
Sheik's up B options are interesting but not worth giving up Vanish's recovery range and KO power for.
Sheik's down B options are both really good moves. But, like Diddy side B, they are nothing compared to Bouncing Fish.
Note how almost any character in the game would gladly trade most the moves in their movesets for Back Flip, Battering Banana Peel, Piercing Needles, or Pisces. But Diddy and Sheik just laugh and leave them in the trash.
Most of these feel like strait upgrades to a character's kit. Just strait upgrades.
So, there are actually extremely few straight upgrades--even if you count stuff like Kong Cyclone, Dark Fists, and Jumbo Hoop. (Moves which are so good the disadvantages can be ignored.)
Many moves that people THOUGHT were pure upgrades have actually shown to have serious disadvantages. Gust Cape is a good example--it's less damage, a full 4 frames slower, and significantly laggier. Mario has to actually pay quite a bit to gain that windbox...
The truth is, on average customs are balanced very conservatively. You'd expect the default (and each custom) to be the best option on average 33% of the time. But when I went down the list for my personal preferences, I marked the default as the best option
over 60% of the time.
I mean I'm optimistic we're taking lessons from Pokémon's absolute mess of a system and leaving the customs that people choose for their character as open information to both players going in; meta's based on "build guessing games" result in a lot of prediction based play and a lot of bad reads that just don't properly translate in non-turn based play, and I was afraid we were going to see incomplete information. That was baseless and I'm glad.
An extremely valid concern to have had. To be blunt, anyone who wants tourney rules where customs are chosen without the opponents knowledge (hard to do on Wii U anyway!) is just wrong.
There
must be complete information in this sense. This isn't poker or pokemon.
Power Creep. How much power creep do we get out of these customs? "None" is an incorrect answer because we are literally giving all characters new options, and almost all of them gain something from at least one of those options. I'm just curious if it's enough to care about, because often, it isn't. I mean power creep as a term only exists because persisting games like LoL and whatnot KEEP getting power increase after power increase until the game's fundamentals can't maintain the stress.
Put it this way. Take the bottom tier of a with-customs character tier list, and tier those characters next to without-customs the rest of the cast. If most/good chunk people are walking away with a +2 tier ladder increase or higher, the game miiight be worse off for this, because characters would be getting so much stronger the games fundamental principles would be warped because of it. But that's extremely unlikely.
Yes, the increase is pretty tame. But more importantly, this isn't a repeatable event.
We aren't going to be asking for like,
more customs next year.
Melee had over a decade to development with way less characters than us AND only one moveset each. Smash 4 has been out for a handful of months, and people already feel so concerned that the game might not develop as richly and deeply as it's predecessors (or how spectators find it camping/boring, yadda yadda) and are already feeling the need to innovate at the tournament level. While I see the whole Palutena/Miis angle, I feel like people are just experiencing too much false pressure to make big changes.
Anyone who is taking the attitude that we "NEED" customs to "FIX" Smash 4 has an entirely wrong and poisonous attitude.
Smash 4 is a fine game without customs, a truly incredible game. And if you don't think so, it's extremely unlikely that just Palutena or WFT becoming more viable is going to change that.
But it
is a better game with customs not banned, mostly because of the modest balance improvements to several otherwise low-tiers. I don't want customs because I dislike Smash 4; I want them because I love it, and would prefer to play it competitively at every character's maximum potential.
