Legality Tentative: MBR Official Ruleset for 2012

[ShroudedOne]

I spent, like, an hour reading this. Ugh.

I agree with Kal (all his points) that we should go for an as objective as a ruleset as possible, but obviously, most people don't. I mean, attributing losses to stages seems silly to me in most cases (a counter-example would be Fox vs Ganon or something on KJ64).

But I guess if we're banning stages simply because people don't like them, then it's whatever. I don't personally use Brinstar/KJ64, so I guess it doesn't affect me. But it's kind of disheartening to see it go this way. *shrug*

 

[Kal]

I'm going to try and convince people Falco is bull **** in the same vein as Jungle Japes. Then we can ban Falco.

Then we can ban M2K. He's 7 feet tall and approximately black.

 

[TheCrimsonBlur]

Bones thats a really good idea. It should be noted that I don't think its as clean with an odd number of stages though.

 

[Redd]

This stagelist is great.

Now we just need to get rid of stadium. Oh and FOD. yayuhzz

 

[Bones0]

Bones thats a really good idea. It should be noted that I don't think its as clean with an odd number of stages though.

Odd or even doesn't really matter, you just need more than 5 stages because when you get to 5, the two bans from the player and DSRM start to add up and force you to either go back to the stage you struck to or cp yourself. If PS is ever removed from the rule set you could just remove DSRM or the player bans to alleviate the issue. Neither change would be a drastic adjustment from my current system.

If you did use my system with 5 stages (I'm sure there are better alternatives) you'd get sets like these (you can see how you'd be forced into the 3-2-4-3 pattern pretty firmly because of a lack of stage options, but it still wouldn't result in any jank cps, and you'd still have at least 3 different stages per set):

Best of 3:
3-2-4

Best of 5:
3-2-4-3-3

Best of 7:
3-2-4-3-3-2-4

 

[Archangel]

This games winner is!, Bones0!

 

[TheCrimsonBlur]

Odd or even doesn't really matter, you just need more than 5 stages because when you get to 5, the two bans from the player and DSRM start to add up and force you to either go back to the stage you struck to or cp yourself. If PS is ever removed from the rule set you could just remove DSRM or the player bans to alleviate the issue. Neither change would be a drastic adjustment from my current system.

If you did use my system with 5 stages (I'm sure there are better alternatives) you'd get sets like these (you can see how you'd be forced into the 3-2-4-3 pattern pretty firmly because of a lack of stage options, but it still wouldn't result in any jank cps, and you'd still have at least 3 different stages per set):

Best of 3:
3-2-4

Best of 5:
3-2-4-3-3

Best of 7:
3-2-4-3-3-2-4

Yeah, I was just thinking about 5 stages, I didn't think about 7.

Pretty cool mr. bones

 

[Wake]

Two reasons.
1. Rainbow Cruise is one of Fox's better stages.
2. The stagelist & ruleset is not created in the hopes of making the game more balanced. Its goal is mainly to increase consistency of results, and give Tournament Organizers something to start with when making a ruleset for a tournament..

Interesting. Thanks

 

[Deleted member]

Cactuar: I think sculpting the stages directly is the wrong way to "balance" the game. Instead, we should be mapping stages that caters to community desire and letting the characters balance themselves out. Obviously, character "goodness" is relative and it's going to change for each and every character for every rule set, so catering to the best characters only somewhat and then to the community only somewhat has no logical goal and ends up looking half-assed.

I wasn't around for this set of rule voting, but I don't think copying and pasting my prior rule set with a few debatable clauses is a good way to go about it either. I hope the amount of resistance to the tentative changes is indicative to you that you might be doing something wrong. Our prior rule set project was accepted almost unanimously by the community at large.

Ultimately, the MBR should be catering to the community, not catering to itself. It's not about elitist opinion vs opinion, the goal is to get more people going to more tournaments to enjoy the game that brings us together.

I'm posting this publicly so other people can add their opinion on the subject. But it's still directed at you personally.

 

[Niko45]

There isn't very much resistance.

It's just 3 people or so writing wall after wall after wall of text.

 

[Winston]

I spent, like, an hour reading this. Ugh.

I agree with Kal (all his points) that we should go for an as objective as a ruleset as possible, but obviously, most people don't. I mean, attributing losses to stages seems silly to me in most cases (a counter-example would be Fox vs Ganon or something on KJ64).

But I guess if we're banning stages simply because people don't like them, then it's whatever. I don't personally use Brinstar/KJ64, so I guess it doesn't affect me. But it's kind of disheartening to see it go this way. *shrug*

What's subjective about Cactuar's methodology, though? My impression is Kal is just arguing that Cactuar's methodology is arbitrary and based on his personal ideas about what is good for the game.

If you are saying that Cactuar's ideas about what's "good" for the game are subjective, well then duh. No right way to play etc. etc. That doesn't make the libertarian approach any more objective in that sense, though. I would really like to hear Kal explain why the "if it's not completely broken don't ban it" perspective is inherently correct. My impression that it was just popularized by Sirlin as a heuristic, but people cite it as some sort of gospel. It need not be the law that governs our game, which is very different from most other games that people play competitively.

If the whole issue is the difficulty in drawing the line between "player vs. player" focus and "player vs. stage" focus, that's just an issue of definitions. It's clear that there's a spectrum, with something like FD on one end and Floats on the other.

If the issue is that this ruleset is disagreeable to some minority of the community that wants more stages, why is that an issue? No ruleset is going to please everyone.

 

[FerrishTheFish]

If the issue is that this ruleset is disagreeable to some minority of the community that wants more stages, why is that an issue? No ruleset is going to please everyone.

Everyone seemed to like the old ruleset just fine. If you don't want to play on Brinstar or Rainbow Cruise, just institute Taj's Better Rule and leave them as CP stages.

Totally agree with you that Sirlin doesn't know anything about Melee, though.

 

[Winston]

What's Taj's better rule?

And if you just read the thread and notice that a lot of people have expressed that they actively like the changes, it's clear that many prefer this one. (That doesn't make it better necessarily; I'm just refuting "everyone seemed to like the old ruleset just fine".)

Change is always controversial, and dissension tends to be voiced the most when the change is announced, not after it's become the accepted norm.

 

[FerrishTheFish]

[COLLAPSE="Taj's Better Rule"]A player may ban ONE neutral stage or ALL counterpick stages.[/COLLAPSE]My point about, "Everyone seemed to like the old ruleset," is that nobody is going to stop playing Melee if we keep it, right? People miiiiight stop playing if we take away all but the most basic of stages, but more likely new people who don't know better won't want to start playing if all they see are big platforms with maybe a few smaller platforms on top (this I think was Umbreon's point).

And of course, if you would just read the thread you would see that I posted Taj's Better Rule on the previous page /troll

 

[Beat!]

Everyone seemed to like the old ruleset just fine. If you don't want to play on Brinstar or Rainbow Cruise, just institute Taj's Better Rule and leave them as CP stages.

Totally agree with you that Sirlin doesn't know anything about Melee, though.

I thought the old ruleset had a pretty bad stage list lol. I live in Europe, though, meaning I've played with the awesome european ruleset all the time, so I never really cared that much to voice my opinion about it.

 

[Winston]

"Everyone seemed to like the old ruleset," is that nobody is going to stop playing Melee if we keep it, right? People miiiiight stop playing if we take away all but the most basic of stages, but more likely new people who don't know better won't want to start playing if all they see are big platforms with maybe a few smaller platforms on top (this I think was Umbreon's point).

I guess that could be the case. I have a really hard time imagining new players, of all people, being turned away by a limited stage list.

 

[Metal Reeper]

^That is the last thing on their minds.

 

[FerrishTheFish]

I guess that could be the case. I have a really hard time imagining new players, of all people, being turned away by a limited stage list.

I would agree ... if we weren't competing with Brawl, which is much more user-friendly, has greater character selection, AND has a more exciting stage list.

 

[Metal Reeper]

PS and FoD should be the only counterpicks. I have NEVER seen first game go to FoD.

 

[FerrishTheFish]

PS and FoD should be the only counterpicks. I have NEVER seen first game go to FoD.

I have. That's one of my favorite stages for Link

 

[Winston]

what I mean is that new competitive melee players tend to be the ones who like the stages with the least interference. It doesn't really have anything to do with competing with Brawl.

 

[ShroudedOne]

Okay, Winston. So:

The threshold for what makes a stage legal honestly has nothing to do with random stage elements or whatever other nonsense you want to port over here. It is based on what has been seen to be fair or not. It is opinionated and biased, but that is how it has always been.

You want there to be these systematic mechanisms for removing stages. That is an opinion for what methodology to use. We tend to remove stages that everyone hates or that everyone believes is a negative influence on the outcomes of tournaments/matches. That is also an opinion. And one that heavily outweighs yours. While I may be the messenger, I didn't really write the message.

The community wants to see the top level players duking it out on as even of a playing field as possible. Does anyone really want to see Armada beat Mango because Mango got hit into the lava? No. They want to see Armada beat Mango because Armada outplayed him and ****ing earned it. When Peach players get a bomb kill randomly, the community doesn't say "Good **** Peach" (unless sarcastically), they say "That sucks dude". It has no place in competitive play, but we can't just remove Peach's bombs. We don't collectively spend so many thousands of dollars to travel to nationals just to watch people getting swatted around by random **** or stages that we all know to have janky bull****, just because it is arbitrarily determined by random dudes who don't have understanding of the current metagame to be under the Turnip Threshold.

The first paragraph: Cactuar says it himself, that the stage list hasn't been determined by random stage elements, that can be objectively identified. It is based on what people think is "fair or not." Without a defined set of rules to determine what "fair" is (besides the more obvious things, of course), it just comes down to what people believe fair is, which is subjective (as opposed to a structured definition of fair, without the bias).

The second paragraph: "We tend to remove stages that everyone hates or that everyone believes is a negative influence on the outcomes of tournaments/matches. That is also an opinion. And one that heavily outweighs yours."

Removing stages because 'everyone' hates them doesn't mean that the stages ruin competition necessarily. It just means that people don't like them. Thus, not an objective reason to remove them (since it's based on what people feel about them). Kal was saying that you can't really get rid of stages simply based on people's opinions of them, because that's subjective, and by the same logic, you could ban Jiggs, or Sheik, because "everyone" hates them.

The third paragraph: "The community wants to see the top level players duking it out on as even of a playing field as possible."

This, again, obviously subjective. In this, he essentially says that they are catering to the community and their wants with the stage list, not necessarily what can be objectively defined as fair. Why should the opinions of how people envision their Grand Finals matter in stage legality?

I'm not saying that it's necessarily bad that the MBR is catering to the likes of the community (not that I necessarily agree, either), but I'm simply pointing out that Cactuar's points were subjective, and that Kal was offering a more objective basis for determining if stages should be legal or not (more objective, not necessarily all-objective).

 

[FerrishTheFish]

I agree that removing stages because "people don't like them" is wrong because that just chokes the development of the metagame down to "what people like," and "what people like" is having stages that they don't have to adjust to or learn or use their second on. It completely denies the possibility that some new advancement in the metagame could make an unpopular-but-basically-good stage a popular-and-also-good stage.

Also, I don't know about others, but when I see a Peach pull out a bomb, I say, "Good ****, Peach," without a hint of sarcasm. Because that **** is hilarious.

 

[JPeGImage]

This argument may be long and over with (a day in smashboards time is a ****ton of time sometimes), but I just wanted to give my rebuttal to a few of the statements that immediately followed mine. You can reply, or just ignore this if you think it wont get anywhere. I just feel like I should still comment on them all the same.

EDIT: I just read one of your recent posts about the process of the determination of the stage list, cactuar. And, while I understand (and have understood) that you aren't the only person making/talking about these decisions and that my voice alone will do very little in influencing the stage list, I would still appreciate a reply if you ever get the time. Im more interested in hearing a response on the basis on the concept of what Im saying (and the game itself) and less about trying to get a result from it (even if the tone of what I say sometimes says otherwise. . . this whole thing was written in direct response to what was said)

And I believe FD has a far bigger CP element to it than either of those.

Wouldn't fd have a bigger "Ban" element to it, seeing that there exists a tactic that can easily exploited by some of the top 8-10 (chain grabs/techchases to 60-80%, pretty much)? This has, most likely, been spoken about ad-naseum, but I havent really read up on the discussions here much.

If we were to go down that road, a more logical approach would actually be to make BF the only neutral/first stage, and leave the others as CPs.

I actually dont see a big problem with this, but I thought asking about the possibility of bumping 4 neutral stages to CP would be a much bolder step than getting 2 bumped.
And, like rone said, the degree of the "cp element" appears to come into play so much more in the two stages that are more under the spotlight.

I completely agree, and i find it even more falcon main'y that both you and jpeg think FoD and Yoshis are worse than a level like FD

jpeg your entire argument for YS was randall. that merits such little value. it may randomly be near you sure, and it's not even guaranteed to cause you problems. taj vs mango anyone?

honestly i cant even remember the last time randall benefited me when playing you

Can you please get off the idea that this idea was backed by who I mained? I cleared made a case for chars that I didnt use in tourney (and yes, it's also more than two other chars). It only just so happens that I run into the said problems with this stage more often because I play the character I do. Stop getting those two concepts mixed up.
And you cant play results in this case. Just because there is no glaring benefit from a stage doesnt mean that no benefit is gained from it, even if it's simply being put in a better spot to get an early kill on me. It shouldnt matter whether or not you are able to capitalize on it. . . .
Should I make a buzz everytime randall intervenes in my play for you?

and youll have to explain that "taj mango" reference for me next time I see you. . .

BF is the only stage that would be considered neutral if "having CP elements" was the only qualifier to being a CP.

Unless youve alrady went over this before, I'd be kind of curious as to why BF isnt the only neutral.

Indeed. The problem still stands though, that you are choosing FD and DL and the "other two" based on bias. So basically, you have one neutral stage and two advantageous stages to Falcon. And you want to remove the two stages that counterbalance having FD and DL as neutrals. . . . It is because it guarantees you a play on a stage that is advantageous for Falcon. . . . .
Removing FoD and Yoshi's is purely advantageous for Falcon players. . . . .

That's not fair. Why am I not able to make an argument towards ban on two stages
simply because they may or may not hurt my char? It prevents us from the slightest possibility of our opinions to be acknowledge unless we agree with everything that goes on (at least in this case). It's a clear catch 22.
And, to top it off, I probably wouldnt notice this half the time if I didnt play the character and run into this problem 22 thousand times before, but I cant complain about it because that makes me biased?
I thought I explained my case pretty well to the point that I could avoid the bias stigma. =S

And as far as wanting to eliminate the two stages that counter-balance FD and DL, stages that give my character an big advantage. . . really???
This might be a little off topic, but to what extent does fd and dl really swing ANY mu in my favor? DLs "advantage" on a pure recovery basis hardly exists anymore w/ the current mean level of play. Anybody with competent edgeguards should have no more problems edgeguarding falcon on dl than he would on FoD. . . . He can survive jigg's rest at higher %s . . .
I mean, sure, there's room for the character to run, but your still talking about a stage that has both characters engaging each other in a neutral environment. Is the speed of falcon THAT much of an overall advantage in that, the existence of space, there is created an edge for him?
I mean, if you really really think that a pure neutral engagement becomes a decent advantage for a faster char the more space that exists, then MAYBE Im looking at this with a bias??? . . iono. . .I just dont currently see an advantage there, though.

I also don't understand the argument that the cloud is random. I've met plenty of people who are perfectly capable of accounting for it, since it's on a timer. It's not all that hard to memorize where it will be and when.

So by that, it's fair to say that the lava on brinstar shouldnt be a problem to people? It ALSO follows a pattern, no? Problem is, same with brinstar, you cant decide when youre going to be knocked to one side of the stage or the other where randall might be floating. My point with him was that chars with poor horizontal recoveries have the potential to get completely screwed over by randall so much more often, against their will, than chars with better horizontal recoveries (spacies' up and side b, peaches float, jigg's 5 jumps) who can avoid this hazard.

You can easily give a counter-argument, saying that randall doesnt actually damage you. As Cactuar said during the SotG, stages that actually damage the players should have been never considered to be a legal stage (or you said something of the like)

But, if you think about it, cant you also quantify the risk of getting your double-jump ganked almost the same way as you can quantify the dmg from brinstar+the potential follow-up by the opponent?
I think you can.
Just because you arent getting damaged by a potential cp element, it doesnt mean that it isnt doing damage.
Obviously, IM not trying to compare those two or measure each of them up to the other in the slightest, but Im not making an claim that YS should be a ban or brin should still be a cp.

what do you think?

Man, let's just freaking have a tourney with like, every stage legal, even mute city. It'd be so fun. Not competetively as good imo but it would be pretty fun. Doin the same thing all the time does get kind of boring tbh

I like the "even mute city" part . . .
I think this idea should be explored more as a side tourney. . .
Random Banned stages only tourney anyone?

Spoiler

and yes bias

=D

 

[Winston]

ShroudedOne, you've got me there. I admit to not reading the entire thread/misinterpreting things that have been said.

I believe Cactuar's personal view on what's good for the game (competitive merit, player vs. player, etc.) can be expressed objectively if we try hard enough, though.

 

[Mew2King]

id be fine with a bf only neutral but i don't think many would agree to it lol. Maybe you can have a poll and see?

i dont really care much either way tho tbh. A decent case can be made for many different rulesets in this game

 

[Archangel]

I can't stand battlefield ledges....but on the other hand I play Marth so idk .


btw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wPNyVUeayk

Shameless.....

 

[Kal]

ShroudedOne, you've got me there. I admit to not reading the entire thread/misinterpreting things that have been said.

I believe Cactuar's personal view on what's good for the game (competitive merit, player vs. player, etc.) can be expressed objectively if we try hard enough, though.

All of these notions of "objectivity" are less important than they seem. You can't make objective anything, honestly, because some nihilistic *** hole can take it to the absolute extreme and make everything out to be equally arbitrary.

My main point is that minimalist banning is fairest. There is no well-defined, objective (gotta be careful throwing this term around) standard for banning things, but we can agree that things which are broken deserve to be banned (otherwise, we have a shallow game). In essence, that is all we can agree on.

So rather than subjecting people to your subjective preference, you basically say "anything goes as long as it doesn't break the game."

If you haven't read Playing to Win, I'd suggest you read it for more on this. But outside of simply being fairest, it's also about respecting your losses and trying to overcome them, rather than scrubbily deciding for yourself (or by the faux-authority that is the MBR) that some losses are legit while others aren't.

As KishPrime puts it:

If I may sum it up as follows - what we're saying is that when I get hit by a car and my opponent takes advantage, I blame myself for letting myself get in a bad position. When you get hit by a car, you curse your bad luck and blame the stage for interfering with your match.

 

[Strife]

If the issue is that this ruleset is disagreeable to some minority of the community that wants more stages, why is that an issue? No ruleset is going to please everyone.

Again, I just don't think that those who want more stages are such a small minority. They are simply the least influential and least known members of our community. I think if a poll was conducted on having more stages we'd have a comparable amount of people wanting more stages as we'd have peopl wanting the stages to remain the way they are.

Just because most of the mbr wants less stages doesn't mean the entire community does. The mbr is not representative of the smash community. They are outliers.

Edit: Another thing that bothers me is that the stagelist is catering more and more to spacies, like Tope said below. In fact I'd bet that the majority of people in the mbr who want less stages are spacies players. This is a problematic because they're making the game better for spacies(who are already the best)

 

[Tope]

More stages > Less stages IMO. Spacies only having 6 stages to play on just makes them better and better. At least have brinstar on so they have to ban that.

 

[Beat!]

@Kal
I can't speak for anyone else, but I, for one, wouldn't dream about "blaming the cars" if I lose on a stage with hazards/whatever. I would be very well aware of that I lost simply because my opponent played better than I. I would NEVER blame the stage for that.

No, the reason why I don't like those stages is because they are the opposite of what I value in competitive play. For me, winning on a stage like RC or Brinstar isn't nearly as satisfying as winning on, say, Battlefield. Not because of some perception of imbalance or randomness or whatever, but because those stages support player vs STAGE vs player, instead of player vs player. IMO, ideally, any sort of eventual mid-match adjustment to how you play should be forced by the opponent, and not by the stage.

I'd imagine that at least some of the other "less stages"-advocators would agree with me on this. Like I said though, I can't really speak for anyone else.

 

[Winston]

More stages > Less stages IMO. Spacies only having 6 stages to play on just makes them better and better. At least have brinstar on so they have to ban that.

This new ruleset (brinstar off + no bans) is almost identical to brinstar on + 1 ban for spacies players.

All of these notions of "objectivity" are less important than they seem. You can't make objective anything, honestly, because some nihilistic *** hole can take it to the absolute extreme and make everything out to be equally arbitrary.

Agreed; I brought up the point of objectivity mainly in response to ShroudedOne (and also Crimson I think). I'm not putting particular value on it myself.

My main point is that minimalist banning is fairest.

Fairest in what sense? I'm not trying to be the nihilistic ******* that you described, but I really want to know. Who is the restrictive stagelist unfair to? We're not equating fairness with character balance, are we?

There is no well-defined, objective (gotta be careful throwing this term around) standard for banning things, but we can agree that things which are broken deserve to be banned (otherwise, we have a shallow game). In essence, that is all we can agree on.

agreed.

So rather than subjecting people to your subjective preference, you basically say "anything goes as long as it doesn't break the game."

This doesn't follow from the above. What logic are you using to go from the premise (that all we can agree on is that truly broken things should be banned) to your conclusion (that minimal banning is the fairest and/or best)?

like I said previously,

"I would really like to hear Kal explain why the "if it's not completely broken don't ban it" perspective is inherently correct. My impression that it was just popularized by Sirlin as a heuristic, but people cite it as some sort of gospel. It need not be the law that governs our game, which is very different from most other games that people play competitively."

edit: I just skimmed Sirlin's "What should be banned?" article again, to make sure I didn't forget anything. The article doesn't really raise any objections that are relevant to the stage discussion.

If you haven't read Playing to Win, I'd suggest you read it for more on this. But outside of simply being fairest, it's also about respecting your losses and trying to overcome them, rather than scrubbily deciding for yourself (or by the faux-authority that is the MBR) that some losses are legit while others aren't.

As KishPrime puts it:

If I may sum it up as follows - what we're saying is that when I get hit by a car and my opponent takes advantage, I blame myself for letting myself get in a bad position. When you get hit by a car, you curse your bad luck and blame the stage for interfering with your match.

First of all, this is still ignoring the "non-random stage hazards still induce effectively random results because the timing of events caused by the player vs player is effectively random" point. That's a really, really key point I think.

Second, that attitude is still a value judgement about what skillset we want to reward. The libertarian stagelist just chooses rewards stage familiarity and stage-specific tactics. I don't see how that's inherently better.

 

[Strife]

This new ruleset (brinstar off + no bans) is almost identical to brinstar on + 1 ban for spacies players.

I'm not sure you get the point. Now spacies only have good stages and they wouldn't really care to ban anything. Before they would ban brinstar(which isn't so awful) and we'd ban PS But now they have PS, and we don't have Brinstar so the balance is lopsided in their favor.
This stage list definitely is better for spacies.

 

[Winston]

^ So Jigglypuffs and Peaches never had to worry about getting picked to Rainbow Cruise?

heaven forbid the Fox player actually had the willingness to hardcore camp on Kongo Jungle 64

I'm not saying that things are perfect now, but if you were okay with the stage balance before I don't see how this is a huge change.

 

[Bones0]

PS and FoD should be the only counterpicks. I have NEVER seen first game go to FoD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7dONbAxNVQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhmm6CSqYXc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmHJ8sX2rb4

Just started with Kage vs. Jeff cause I remembered and found the other two just by clicking like 3 different videos with FoD in the thumbnail.

 

[ShroudedOne]

Well, I would think that the fairest ruleset would be one with as little bias as possible (objective), but I guess I didn't realize how loaded that word was.

I sometimes hear, "If we wanted no player vs stage interaction, then we would play a 2D fighter, like SF or MvC," from people who want an expanded stagelist. On the other end, I hear that it's healthier for competition when we strive to make matches as close to player vs player as possible. It's hard for me to say for sure, to be honest, because you can play these stages most of the time, anyways. So perhaps nationals and regionals won't allow you to CP Falco to Mute City as Jiggs, or CP Ganon to KJ64 as Peach, or camp it up on RC. You can still do that at smaller tournaments. Sure, you won't get that beast CP when you need it in Apex pools, but perhaps that will get you to learn your character more, and not be so reliant on stages.

I think that we should try to remember what we want out of this game, as a community. We essentially have the greatest thing: Melee. Do we want to have variety in our list, or consistency? Above all, we should try to remember that the first purpose of this game is to have FUN.

tl;dr: It doesn't matter anyways.

 

[Krynxe]

Many people seem to be thinking "Ban PS or return BS" for space animal balance. The only genuine reason I see for the banning of BS is when the lava rises fully, character are often forced to move to the only available platform and this is often very advantageous for one of the players. This advantage doesn't seem to be character specific however, and therefore truly isn't unbalanced. The lava is an equal hazard to both players, some characters are simply better at avoiding it. This is no different than, say, peach having a better recovery than falcon on any other stage. The lava, actually, often serves as a better recovery tool for those weak weaker recovery options. The lava is not an exception, being hit by it is either the fault of yourself or the fault of your opponent, the same as any hazard or punishment should be.

 

[Bones0]

Being completely honest, I wasn't aware anyone had fun winning, let alone losing on Brinstar or RC. They are very much maps picked solely for how broken they are, not for how fun they are. Or at least that's the vibe you generally get both from spectators as well as the players (no one was hyped when PP cped M2K to RC at RoM).

 

[Bones0]

Many people seem to be thinking "Ban PS or return BS" for space animal balance. The only genuine reason I see for the banning of BS is when the lava rises fully, character are often forced to move to the only available platform and this is often very advantageous for one of the players. This advantage doesn't seem to be character specific however, and therefore truly isn't unbalanced. The lava is an equal hazard to both players, some characters are simply better at avoiding it. This is no different than, say, peach having a better recovery than falcon on any other stage. The lava, actually, often serves as a better recovery tool for those weak weaker recovery options. The lava is not an exception, being hit by it is either the fault of yourself or the fault of your opponent, the same as any hazard or punishment should be.

No one is arguing BS is too good for certain characters. People are just tired of random stage hazards interfering with game play, such as lava. You can't really call something balanced just because it has the potential to screw both players over equally. The lack of consistency is what people take issue with.

 

[ShroudedOne]

And that's a fair point. Personally, I have fun on MC and RC (sometimes), but if I was in a tournament set, I guess I'd want as little "BS" as possible. Or maybe some to benefit me. I dunno.

And Bones, the argument that I've often heard people make for banning Brinstar was that it was "auto-win" for Peach/Puff. A lot of people, by the same hand, know this to not be true, but that's often what I, at least, hear getting thrown around.