The anticipated impact of Custom Special Moves on gameplay and balance (Statistics!)

[guedes the brawler]

It's important to keep in mind that "gamebreaking" here means "actually game-breaking", as in freezes, infinites, or totally degenerate gameplay. We're not going to ban a move for being "really really good"; both Melee and Brawl did just fine with a bunch of "really really good" moves.

I mean, Melee Rest was literally a frame-1 OHKO. If we can live with that, we can live with just about anything.

Assuming those moves don't "break the game" thanks to factors out of th eplayer control, isn't it possible just to ban the strategy rather than the move? like how Infinite Dimensional cape got banned?

 

[kujibiki57]

"Custom options have never worked well in any other competitive game."

Street Fighter 4 does just fine with multiple Ultra options. Usually one option is better at a competitive level than the other, and the character would be worse if they were forced to use the weaker option.

Additionally, many games in other e-sports genres have many customization options, such as League of Legends. (However, these are much more comparable to equipment than custom special moves.)

This is something that I can say indeed works. Even if a move looks superior to both other options, there still may be niches that work for the others.

Two good examples of games with custom moves that work are:
Melty Blood: Not exactly custom, but each character has three "moons", which highly alter the way they play by changing some moves.
This is so impactant on the game that each character as a position in the tier for each moon (For example, Satsuki-Crescent Moon is on tier A, while Satsuki-Full Moon is on tier C)

Touhou Hisoutensoku: The game basically revolves around customizing your character. Every character has to pick a "deck of cards" before starting the match. Those decks are composed of 20 cards, which are, generally, chosen from around 40+ cards (and each card can be put up to four times in each deck, meaning that you might have up to 20 and as few as 5 different cards on a deck).
These cards alter the moves of a character permanently in a match (just like in sm4sh), alter super moves, and may do other things (like regenerate health, buy more cards, push your opponent away, etc.).


Those games above work wonders with their custom systems, and I have no reason to believe that sm4sh won't either.

 

[DairunCates]

This is something that I can say indeed works. Even if a move looks superior to both other options, there still may be niches that work for the others.

Two good examples of games with custom moves that work are:
Melty Blood: Not exactly custom, but each character has three "moons", which highly alter the way they play by changing some moves.
This is so impactant on the game that each character as a position in the tier for each moon (For example, Satsuki-Crescent Moon is on tier A, while Satsuki-Full Moon is on tier C)

Touhou Hisoutensoku: The game basically revolves around customizing your character. Every character has to pick a "deck of cards" before starting the match. Those decks are composed of 20 cards, which are, generally, chosen from around 40+ cards (and each card can be put up to four times in each deck, meaning that you might have up to 20 and as few as 5 different cards on a deck).
These cards alter the moves of a character permanently in a match (just like in sm4sh), alter super moves, and may do other things (like regenerate health, buy more cards, push your opponent away, etc.).


Those games above work wonders with their custom systems, and I have no reason to believe that sm4sh won't either.

I'd potentially throw Arcana Hearts in here as well. It's not particularly well-balanced, per se, but the Arcana aren't the major factor of that.

For those that don't know, Arcana Hearts in a Japanese Doujin fighting game where each character has their moves slightly mutated by an arcana selected at the beginning of a match. If memory serves, there's about 8 of them, and they pretty decently change how each character plays. Most characters have obvious favorites of which one you should use with them, but they're all pretty viable. The game never really saw a lot of tournaments, but that's primarily the small scale of its sales (being a doujin game and limited availability in the US). It was seen as pretty competitive though.

Edit:

That won't do much as you'll know what is good vs what pretty early on. And since SSB won't have meta changing patches like say Hearthstone does you won't get an evolving meta.

That, once again, depends on how much the character variance is. In a game like Street Fighter: 3rd Strike with characters like Jun having a +32 matchup against a 19 character cast, the metagame is not gonna evolve because there really is just no reason to not use Jun if you want to win.

Evolving metagames HAVE existed before balance patches were a thing, though. Certain characters rise and fall in popularity as people discover hard counters for popular or powerful strategies. Street Fighter 2 actually has a decent amount of focus on counter-picks compared to a lot of games (It doesn't hurt that half the roster is considered top tier, apparently). So, while E. Honda is actually very strong against characters without projectiles, and is fairly high tier, he's weak against several commonly used characters in the game. So, his popularity tends to fluxuate based on whichever characters are common at the time. This is actually one of the main reasons Street Fighter 2 stayed the king of fighting games for so long.

Even games like Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (where a handful of characters tend to always stick around) tends to see certain characters rise and fall in popularity without their tier ranking necessarily changing. Nova is considered decently high tier and he used to be very popular, but he doesn't see much use anymore. Ditto with Rocket Raccoon. Similarly, almost every team in UMVC3 now has to have a Morrigan counter almost solely because of Chris G.

Even in something like Melee, with only about 5-6 commonly used characters, you're gonna see Sheik become more or less popular as a character based on how many Marths vs. Fox/Falco/Jigglypuff mains are being played at the time.

Finally, I personally wouldn't use Hearthstone for an example on changing meta. Hearthstone is actually pretty poorly balanced (quite intentionally so, for the sake of selling more booster packs), and the majority of its evolving meta comes from Blizzard having to frequently hard nerf common strategies at the time. Forced evolution of the metagame isn't the same as an organic evolution. I really do feel that Hearthstone gets cut a lot more slack than other TCG's in terms of balance purely because it's Blizzard doing it, honestly.

 

[LancerStaff]

Actually, there were multiple instances of usable equipment, such as the +8 overall defence whatever-it-was (which I quickly turned into a Phosphora Bow, while still managing to keep the +8 Overall Defence mod) and the Brawler Claws with +4 Walking Speed and +4 Shot Cancellation.

The weapons you get off the treasure hunt and the weapons decent players make are about as far appart as some kid's lvl 100 Charizard he used throughout the game to a bred and EV trained Blaziken.
And SC is only +1 at most.

 

[Thinkaman]

Assuming those moves don't "break the game" thanks to factors out of th eplayer control, isn't it possible just to ban the strategy rather than the move? like how Infinite Dimensional cape got banned?

Bans have to be both discrete and enforceable. In other words, it has to be unambiguous to everyone that the banned strategy is being used, and it must be possible to prevent the game from allowing it or detect proof that it occurred. This very rarely applies to strategies.

Essentially the only time a strategy can be banned is something specific that infinitely stalls or freezes the game. This is because a TO can be reasonably called over to judge the situation, since by nature stalling is indefinite. Nothing else meets the criteria.

For example, you can't make a rule against "using too many Falco lasers." What is too many? Who is to say? It's not discrete.

You also can't make a rule against "Falco can't chain d-throw more than twice in a row." How are you going to enforce that? Are you going to have the TO supervise ever Falco game? It's discrete, but not enforceable.

If something like the IDC glitch or various melee freeze glitches happens again, then sure--we can ban the strategy. If a move creates a viable infinite somehow, then we can consider banning the move.

But once again, we don't ban moves for being "really really good", and Smash has gotten along just fine with lots of "really really good" moves in the past. I bet that not a single custom move option in Smash 4 is as good as Brawl Shuttle Loop or Melee Rest.

 

[JamietheAuraUser]

The weapons you get off the treasure hunt and the weapons decent players make are about as far appart as some kid's lvl 100 Charizard he used throughout the game to a bred and EV trained Blaziken.
And SC is only +1 at most.

Ah, guess I misremembered then. Didn't realize the max Shot Cancellation mod was +1, since I don't actually spend enough time on Uprising to know stuff like that. Still, I'd say a more apt comparison is some semi-competitive's EV-trained (but not IV-bred. Maybe bred for beneficial Nature, though) Charizard versus a properly IV-bred and EV-trained Blaziken. The first guy knows what he's doing, but still feels like using his favourites and doesn't want to sink that much time into it. It's not "stupid" so much as "non-optimized".

 

[HeavyLobster]

and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the 666 different matchups in Brawl.

Melee fans were right! Brawl really is the devil! How did I not see this sooner? (jk. Actually, I think your math is a bit off in terms of the actual number of Brawl MUs)

 

[A_Phoenix_Down]

I just would have loved to see custom moves portrayed differently by giving drawbacks to the more powerful versions. That way, it would be tougher to adapt to each character without it being overpowered... as well as being able to take your custom fighter online.

 

[Thinkaman]

This is something that I can say indeed works. Even if a move looks superior to both other options, there still may be niches that work for the others.

Two good examples of games with custom moves that work are:
Melty Blood: Not exactly custom, but each character has three "moons", which highly alter the way they play by changing some moves.
This is so impactant on the game that each character as a position in the tier for each moon (For example, Satsuki-Crescent Moon is on tier A, while Satsuki-Full Moon is on tier C)

Touhou Hisoutensoku: The game basically revolves around customizing your character. Every character has to pick a "deck of cards" before starting the match. Those decks are composed of 20 cards, which are, generally, chosen from around 40+ cards (and each card can be put up to four times in each deck, meaning that you might have up to 20 and as few as 5 different cards on a deck).
These cards alter the moves of a character permanently in a match (just like in sm4sh), alter super moves, and may do other things (like regenerate health, buy more cards, push your opponent away, etc.).


Those games above work wonders with their custom systems, and I have no reason to believe that sm4sh won't either.

Thanks, I only knew a tiny bit about Melty Blood. This is interesting!

Melee fans were right! Brawl really is the devil! How did I not see this sooner? (jk. Actually, I think your math is a bit off in terms of the actual number of Brawl MUs)

36 characters yields 666 matchups. (36*(36+1)/2 = 666) This is counting Samus/ZSS as two characters, Zelda/Sheik as one, and Pokemon Trainer as one.

 

[<π]

Melee fans were right! Brawl really is the devil! How did I not see this sooner? (jk. Actually, I think your math is a bit off in terms of the actual number of Brawl MUs)

With 39 selectable characters in brawl there are at least 39x39 match ups. That is 1521 match ups.

http://supersmashbros.wikia.com/wiki/Character_matchup_(SSBB)

this new game is going to be CRAZY with custom moves. each character is going to have 3x3x3x3=81 possible customization per character. Around 50 characters with that many customizations. 50x81=4050 different customization across the whole game!

that means 4050x4050=12352500 match ups between all the different customization! Can wait tto see the new match up charts.

EDIT:
I did my math wrong huh?

 

[Thinkaman]

The number of matchups between N elements is N*(N+1)/2.

For example, Starcraft has 3 races and 6 matchups:

1. Terran vs. Zerg
2. Terran vs. Protoss
3. Zerg vs. Protoss
4. Terran Mirror
5. Zerg Mirror
6. Protoss Mirror

3 * (4) / 2 = 6

 

[san.]

(36 * (36 + 1)) / 2, 666.

Edit: Whoops, you're right

 

[HeavyLobster]

Thanks, I only knew a tiny bit about Melty Blood. This is interesting!



36 characters yields 666 matchups. (36*(36+1)/2 = 666) This is counting Samus/ZSS as two characters, Zelda/Sheik as one, and Pokemon Trainer as one.

Ok, my bad.

 

[Mr.Showtime]

The problem with the analysis (albeit really good) is it works on the assumption that there will be an option that is superior.

That's not how it works. Consider Awesomenauts. In that game, each character has 6 upgrades to their special moves. Some are worse than others yes, but others are chosen based on style or perference. For instance, on Yuri's timewarp, I got Heal, Fast Forward, and CC Immunity on it. Others will get a Lifesteal for it. I'll only grab lifesteal if I'm fighting Ayla, Vinney or another Yuir. You can do this with any character. With Lonestar's Dynamite, I get extra Stick, lifesteal and DOT, but you can replace the DOT for Explosion size, bounce and blind. All of them work. Yes, there are bad upgrades (Penny's and Swiggins seem to complain the most), but a lot of them are style or based on other upgrades you selected.

For Smash, it will be the same thing. Take Mario's fireballs. You may go normal or maybe orb. But maybe fast isn't good. You may chose them based on match-up (perhaps Orb is good against certain characters). So you can't look at this in a linear fashion because it's not. It's going to be living and breathing.

Although I agree with most things you write about, I'm going to have to disagree here.

There are examples of competitive games giving players an option to switch moves, talents, or some other type of customization. Look at League of Legends (talent system) and even Street Fighter 4 (via choosing 2 Specials or 1 of the two). There are definitely more out there as well.

What I see with this game is that custom moves will be used mostly as counter-play. If you say counter-play is unfair, we already have counter-play via choosing different characters or stages, add a new variety to counter-play would be amazing. The other thing that this can represent is possible combination of skills using different skill sets. For example, you know of a great combo with Mario's regular fireballs, but giving him faster fireballs with no hit-stun is negate those combos. You chose to play with faster fireballs instead because your opponent's play style is campy. This is how you innovate the counter-play in tournaments.

However, I will agree that it is too early to say that customizable move sets are 100% playable. This also means that it is still to early to say that it should be 100% banned. I feel that people need to look at the situation closely and test before jumping on the ban train. Unless there is something unreasonably broken then these should not be allowed. For the most part, they seem to ME (please note this is an opinion) as a great way to innovate counter-play.

(This type of play opens decision making which is amazing in the competitive scene. Should I risk losing a combo to counter my opponent? Am I used to playing that way? I should probably practice all styles and different techniques to be able to play my character to the fullest.) -All things players should ask themselves before playing each match with customizable moves turned on.

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

I think now would be a good time to point out what a big game smash 4 is looking to be. We have 51 characters (counting each Mii Fighter archetype as one character) so that's 1326 match-ups, just barely under double what Brawl had! Any given character will appear in 51 of them so that's 51 chances for each of the 81 custom moveset load-outs to be useful (it gets more complicated if you assume certain custom moves would be useful in response to other custom moves and not just particular enemy character, but let's not assume that). If we go into this game trying to use the full diversity it offers us, this game has the potential to last us for many years without getting stale just on its variety alone. Just think about how the process will go as the early metagame evolves; games shed diversity as players figure them out, but with this much raw stuff, it's going to take a long time to really boil the game down to less stuff since innovative players will be finding the virtue in the elements the rest of us didn't get around to properly exploring for years (and having this much stuff around probably means our final pool is bigger too). If we want this game to be as big as it can be, this kind of diversity and the opportunity it represents for new players is something we should definitely embrace.

 

[Fishbowl]

I'm so glad to see such open minded consideration for a new competitive mechanic! For a while, I was worried that custom moves were going to be swept under the rug just because of a few loud conservative attitudes.

Thank you Thinkaman, you are a talented rhetorician and I believe your work here will be pivotal in changing the community's attitude.

Now let's just hope that all the custom moves don't completely suck (or are ridiculously overpowered...)

 

[DairunCates]

I'm so glad to see such open minded consideration for a new competitive mechanic! For a while, I was worried that custom moves were going to be swept under the rug just because of a few loud conservative attitudes.

Thank you Thinkaman, you are a talented rhetorician and I believe your work here will be pivotal in changing the community's attitude.

Now let's just hope that all the custom moves don't completely suck (or are ridiculously overpowered...)

No reason to worry. The sane people were just the quiet majority/were finishing up their super long analysis posts .

 

[<π]

The number of matchups between N elements is N*(N+1)/2.

For example, Starcraft has 3 races and 6 matchups:

1. Terran vs. Zerg
2. Terran vs. Protoss
3. Zerg vs. Protoss
4. Terran Mirror
5. Zerg Mirror
6. Protoss Mirror

3 * (4) / 2 = 6

Lets see...

Customizations per character
Each of the 4 specials have 3 variations.

AAAA = 3^0 = 1 (No variations)

AAAA
BAAA = 3^1 = 3 (variations on just one speacial)
CAAA

AAAA
BAAA
CAAA

ABAA
BBAA = 3^2 = 9 (variations on just 2 specials)
CBAA

ACAA
BCAA
CCAA

Continuing the trend...
3 special moves with variation on all 4 moves is:
3^4 = 81 custom moves load outs per character

Custom move load outs within the game
number of custom move load outs per character(81) times the total number of characters (guessing about 50)
81x50 = 4050 custom move load outs in the game

Match ups between each individual custom move load outSo using the formula @ Thinkaman provided:
4050 x (4050+1)/2 = 8,203,275 match ups between the custom move load outs

If you played each custom move load out against every other custom move load out once for 5 minutes (that is 41,016,375 minutes total) with no breaks it would take you 78 years to get through them all.

 

[DairunCates]

If you played each custom move load out against every other custom move load out once for 5 minutes (that is 41,016,375 minutes total) with no breaks it would take you 78 years to get through them all.

Can't wait for the Evo chants of "One more century. One more century."

 

[shrooby]

You know, strangely, the first thing I thought of as a comparison when considering costume moves in professional play was not another fighting game...

...It was Pokemon. Very weird, I know. They really have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They're completely different genres, after all. But hear me out.

The biggest part of Pokemon is deciding what kind of role you want your Pokemon to play on your team and basing their moveset around that (disregarding stats spreads and held items as it's not relevant).
A huge part of any Pokemon match is figuring out what moveset your opponent has.
You can't just be "prepared for Salamence." You have to be prepared for physical-based Salamence, mixed-attacker Salamence, etc.. You enter the match knowing that your opponent is using Salamence, but, in the middle of a match while you're trying to keep your Pokemon alive, set up entry hazards, boost stats, etc., you have to figure out what moves that Salamence is running. It's an interesting element of uncertainty which doesn't make the game any less "competitive." In fact, if every Pokemon was stuck to one single moveset, I can't imagine it would be as interesting.
Is there a chance that one particular set of moves could be objectively the "best" on a particular character? Yes, and, indeed, this happens in Pokemon too. (Gen2 Snorlax comes to mind. There's a standard moveset which just about everyone uses because it's ridiculously effective.) But it's more than made up for by the variety of other Pokemon that don't have an objectively "best" set of four moves. The same could be the case for Smash. Yes, maybe Jigglypuff with neutral-special (1), side-special (3), up-special (3), and down-special (2) could clearly be the best set for Jigglypuff, but it could be much less clear which set of four specials is the "best" for Robin, Diddy Kong, Bowser, Palutena, what have you. Perhaps, at most, there are three or four movesets for these characters that players agree are all very effective. With one not necessarily being more effective than the other ones. This degree of uncertainty with, for example, which of the three "standard" set of four specials Palutena is running could make her a much more effective fighter than if she were stuck to a single default set. This degree of uncertainty is something Palutena has over other characters that have a fairly standard set of four "best" specials, like the aforementioned hypothetical Jigglypuff.
But having a clearly "best" set of four specials isn't necessarily that bad either. Not having the potential for variability is something other fighters have that Jigglypuff doesn't, but Jigglypuff can still be extremely effective without such variability like Gen2 Snorlax. (Okay, maybe not as effective as Gen2 Snorlax. That thing's just monstrous, but you get the idea.)

To summarize that point, basically, the degree of variability is just another aspect of a given fighter which they may excel at or not excel at. Just like having more or less landing lag on aerials, larger or smaller shield, faster or slower walking speed or air speed, etc..

Now, yes, I know Pokemon is a turn-based RPG and Smash is (platforming) fighter. Again, they really aren't related in any way. (Other than the presence of Pokemon representation in Smash itself, I guess), but it seems like an interesting comparison to me. At least in regards to the impact of uncertainty and variability.

 

[DarthLuigi36]

One of the biggest questions to ask is "Should custom specials be hidden knowledge?". This is assuming that option is even possible (It is not in SF4 or UMvC3).

Would it advance competition to let players secretly choose their specials? It could potentially make things very interesting, both for players and spectators. You'd have to be very careful approaching Mario, because you don't know for sure if he has his Fire Orb combo available, until Mario actually reveals what he's got up his sleeve. The Mario player might actually have regular Fireballs, but he refrains from using them at first to keep that mind game open. Or, you might have to recover from off stage in a different way, because you're not sure if Kirby has his jumping Swallow which could catch your usual recovery.

By keeping the specials hidden before the match, a lot of strategy can develop. Do you use your awesome special to get that KO right now or do you do something a bit less optimal, keeping that special hidden for later?

It gets even deeper into the mind games once counterpicking starts. Fox's 3rd Up B may be better for recovery against Toon Link, but maybe it's less optimal if Toon Link goes with some bizarre, usually suboptimal setup. Do you risk going with Fox's 3rd Up B in this case? You could stick to the other options, in case Toon Link switches to that suboptimal build which would otherwise beat your 3rd Up B. If Toon Link doesn't go with that suboptimal build though, you are missing out on an advantage.

Of course, it may just be easier on everyone if special moves were revealed before the matches, and counterpicks were public. That in itself offers strategy too, since everybody is going in knowing everything. Perhaps a mix could be done, with the first match being done blind, but no subsequent matches.

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

I think as a practical matter it won't be possible to have custom moves be hidden knowledge on Wii U since we all share a screen; even if ther are imports from 3DS, hiding your set-up seems like it might be difficult. Personally I'm assuming that everything will be known ahead of time (and it's easy to force that to be the case), but I don't think this will actually be a critical point either way.

As per counterpicking, yeah, double blind special moves game one is deifnitely necessary. For game two onward the procedure should be stage selection, winner character, loser character, winner moves, loser moves. I don't think triangular balance situations with particular custom moves will be that common, but this is the most fair way to address the possibility.

 

[Hratis]

I'll start off by stating this, OP you're post is brilliant and I'm ecstatic about the community showing signs of accepting change.

I've noticed a lot of comments in regards to how custom move sets will be dealt with on the tournament scene, set-up wise.
I don't know much about the Amiibo's yet, but could it be possible to have custom move-sets bound to a name like custom control schemes, saved to the Amiibo and transferred into any console? This might be hoping for too much out of a new trinket, but it'd be an amazing way for people to plan out a strategy ahead of time.

 

[Crudedude]

I'm surprised that no one has brought up Mortal Kombat X which is doing something similar letting their character has three versions of specials, characters, whatever you call it, play style I guess is closest. Almost every fan in Mortal Kombat approves (all the comments I read so far) of the variation, so I don't see how custom move set is not competitive worthy. If anything custom move set will or at least, and let's all hope open up to more gameplay and that's what we really play for. Also I don't see palitenia being competitive worthy if custom moves are not custom worthy since she has a wide range of moves and players can change it.

 

[HullabalooFTW]

Wow awesome thread, great analysis, I'm definitely pro custom moves, so many possibilities, I can't wait to see how much custom moves affect the game, I just know once it releases I will be so hyped to try and unlock every custom move and see how they play, especially for my mains haha.

 

[DairunCates]

I'm surprised that no one has brought up Mortal Kombat X which is doing something similar letting their character has three versions of specials, characters, whatever you call it, play style I guess is closest. Almost every fan in Mortal Kombat approves (all the comments I read so far) of the variation, so I don't see how custom move set is not competitive worthy. If anything custom move set will or at least, and let's all hope open up to more gameplay and that's what we really play for. Also I don't see palitenia being competitive worthy if custom moves are not custom worthy since she has a wide range of moves and players can change it.

Oh yeah. They are doing that, aren't they? To be honest, I somewhat forgot because Mortal Kombat's never really been up my alley. That's a good point though.

 

[NewGuy79]

so for any one still worried about unlocking stuff for the Wii U smash it's been confirmed through the Japanese smash brothers guild that the 3DS will be able share your custom move sets from your 3DS version of smash to your Wii u version of smash.

 

[Smash_Veteran_Amtoj]

This was a great read. I hope this game does well competitively with all the new possibilities it brings.

so for any one still worried about unlocking stuff for the Wii U smash it's been confirmed through the Japanese smash brothers guild that the 3DS will be able share your custom move sets from your 3DS version of smash to your Wii u version of smash.

Sweet. What about characters?

 

[NewGuy79]

This was a great read. I hope this game does well competitively with all the new possibilities it brings.


Sweet. What about characters?

unfortunately no confirmation on that yet, however we can infer that if they allow you to bring over custom moves then characters will come over as well. how awkward would it be to bring over your favorit set just to realize that you can't use it till you unlock the character for it.

 

[Sykkamorre]

Just quickly on the note of equipment.

There may very well be the option of disabling the stat boosts/reductions, simply allowing stylised choices with no drawbacks.
For the sake of time however, I'd assume they'd need to be pre-built and imported.

 

[Gidy]

Buffs for characters should #banned , but I think custom moves should be useable.

The only thing I'd be concerned with is that it seems you have to unlock special moves, which may prove to be a hassle for tournaments to organize.

That said, custom moves definitely seem like they could help breath new life into the metagame. I'm also sure there will be a fair amount of people who'll want to play as Mii Fighters, and banning custom moves would mean we'd have to probably ban them.

What could be wrong with it? They already have to unlock the characters so along the way custom moves shouldn't be too much of a problem. For tournaments have people organize custom moves a day prior to play.

 

[<π]

Honestly I'm not even against items either. especially for 3ds tournaments where set up is nonexistent. Commited top level players are likely all going to end up with the best items. So they will all have access to the same levels of power. (just like how everyone COULD play melee fox or COULD play metaknight)

Plus if it is anything like KI:U the items will have trade off.More damage + Easier to KO. Stronger KO power +weaker sheild. Increase speed + random tripping .

I think there is and should be room for item tournaments as well.

 

[Tristan_win]

Wonderful thread, I especially like how the argument was made that customize specials help enforce aggressive play which is a refreshing outlook on this subject. Customize moves add such a unique layer of depth to smash and it's going to be a true joy to see what styles get form due to the additional options.

The only concern I might mention is for the meta's of under played characters. With the extra options to distract people it's going to be much harder for small communities to set up a primary style for their character which means mastery of said character will be much slower then a top tier character where everyone mimic the most popular style.

BUT this is rich man deep meta problems and people would be crying no matter what.

 

[the8thark]

Finally, I personally wouldn't use Hearthstone for an example on changing meta. Hearthstone is actually pretty poorly balanced (quite intentionally so, for the sake of selling more booster packs), and the majority of its evolving meta comes from Blizzard having to frequently hard nerf common strategies at the time. Forced evolution of the metagame isn't the same as an organic evolution. I really do feel that Hearthstone gets cut a lot more slack than other TCG's in terms of balance purely because it's Blizzard doing it, honestly.

Actually I think HS is a good case. The issues with Hearthstone are:
1. The RNG nature. SSB does not have this apart from a few RNG based moves and when/what items spawn.
2. Based on point 1, you can have overpowered card combos. They only occur right 1 in 10-20 matches but when they do it';s insta lose for the other player. hearthstone does not have this either.
3. Blizzard thinks an overused card is unbalanced and nerfs cards based on this. In a way Blizzard still do not know how to balance a card game properly. Blizzard fail to understand how point 2 here can totally wreck card games.

Despite all of this HS is pretty well balanced as a game. SSB on the other hand won't have the RNG factor but it will have some moves used a lot more than others and hard counters to certain moves and character/stage choices. And when they are known, there's not much you can do about it. You just choose the counter to what you think you'll vs VSing. It'll be a science. You guess what moveset/character you'll vsing and what stage that'll be on and based on that you'll chose a counter. The same moveset/character/stage will have the same counter every time. It will never change. Unless there are patches that update/change the characters or moves or stages. Blizzard does these hard changes and this forces the meta to change and adapt to the changes. SSB with none of these patch changes (I assume) won't have any of these changes for the meta to react to. So once the initial meta is worked out, it won't change unless something in learnt about the game that no one knew before.

 

[DairunCates]

Actually I think HS is a good case. The issues with Hearthstone are:
1. The RNG nature. SSB does not have this apart from a few RNG based moves and when/what items spawn.
2. Based on point 1, you can have overpowered card combos. They only occur right 1 in 10-20 matches but when they do it';s insta lose for the other player. hearthstone does not have this either.
3. Blizzard thinks an overused card is unbalanced and nerfs cards based on this. In a way Blizzard still do not know how to balance a card game properly. Blizzard fail to understand how point 2 here can totally wreck card games.

Despite all of this HS is pretty well balanced as a game. SSB on the other hand won't have the RNG factor but it will have some moves used a lot more than others and hard counters to certain moves and character/stage choices. And when they are known, there's not much you can do about it. You just choose the counter to what you think you'll vs VSing. It'll be a science. You guess what moveset/character you'll vsing and what stage that'll be on and based on that you'll chose a counter. The same moveset/character/stage will have the same counter every time. It will never change. Unless there are patches that update/change the characters or moves or stages. Blizzard does these hard changes and this forces the meta to change and adapt to the changes. SSB with none of these patch changes (I assume) won't have any of these changes for the meta to react to. So once the initial meta is worked out, it won't change unless something in learnt about the game that no one knew before.

Except that Blizzard having to constantly release balance patches isn't an organically evolving meta, it's a forced one. Overpowered deck A doesn't wane in popularity because people learn how to put basic counters to it in their deck without completely changing their deck, Overpowered Deck A wanes in popularity because Blizzard gives a hard nerf to a card that usually was poorly designed in the first place. One of the biggest reasons for this is that Hearthstone has a LOT of cards that have exponential effects. It's legitimately hard to balance a card like this, and Hearthstone tends to favor towards the way too powerful side of things. Unleash the hounds was a pretty infamously bad example of this. There wasn't a lot of counters to it. You were basically limited to not summoning a lot of monsters when playing a ranger, which if you didn't specifically have a beatstick deck, wasn't a terribly great position to be in.

That said, just because a game has limited complexity (and the term limited here is a bit underwhelming when <3 pointed out that it would take almost a century to test all of the match-ups), doesn't mean that it has a limited metagame. This one is a bit hard to explain though. So, I'll give it my best shot here...

The famous Spanish writer has this story called, "The Library of Babel". In it, a group of people find a library that contains every single possible permutation of a 400 page book that can be written. The number of books is astronomically large, but it's a finite number, and it, by traditional definitions, contains all of knowledge. Of course, this is mostly useless as the books are 99.999999999999...% gibberish and of the ones that do make sense, most of those are flat-out inaccurate or small differences from other books (Like the version of Hamlet where Hamlet sees his father's ghast). However, keen thinkers have pointed out that the information in the library is actually infinite due to contextualization.

The most obvious first reason here is that knowledge isn't always capable of being portrayed in only words. However, the second, and more relevant reason for the knowledge in the library not being limited is because the works themselves can reference themselves. For instance, Book #1059839 might initially seem to be gibberish, but Book #9583 actually explains that this book is encoded with messages and gives you instructions to crack them. In fact, this code is not only relevant to Book #1059839, but several of them that have the same certain sequences of gibberish in them. Once decoded, one of these books itself may explain or change some fact in a completely different book, and the re-contextualization of THAT book drastically changes the meaning of another one somewhere. This keeps going until you actually manage to change the meaning of the original book that told you to decode the first set of books. It goes in an infinite loop.

Of course, most of the books are still useless and no one would live long enough to even get to the point where they were discovering these codes, but the whole thing is a thought experiment. It points out how something with finite resources can actually have a non-finite number of solutions. It merely requires that the thing in question reach enough content and complexity. With a century of match-ups to try, it's fairly safe to say that this'll probably reach that level. That's how an evolving meta-game works. Discoveries made later in the meta-game re-contextualize our understand of some things we thought we understood earlier. The discovery of a new advanced technique will drastically change which characters will be high tier and potentially promote some that we thought were initially garbage. That, in turn, will also increase the popularity of even weaker characters that act as a good hard counter for these more over-used ones.

You actually almost saw this effect in Melee actually, but it just didn't have enough content to create the loop. Still, the metagame has evolved a LOT since when the game was first introduced. There are entire techniques and combos that were popular 3 years ago that are not even viable for most people anymore. While the makeup of which characters are played hasn't changed much, how they're played has changed a lot. Brawl didn't see this, because, while it had more options, it didn't see as strong of a competitive atmosphere AND it had a runaway character that was just objectively better than most of the cast in some pretty important ways. However, this game not only seems more competitively focused overall, but it actually has enough content and characters that the idea of a character not having a good hard counter this time around is pretty astronomically low (The odds of a runaway OP character actually decreases as the number of characters increases. Brawl was somewhat of a fluke in this sense).

So, yeah. Barring the fact that, with the ridiculous size cast here, I wouldn't count on us learning the full set of match-ups anytime soon, that still doesn't mean that the metagame is going to stagnate. The rise in popularity of some characters will inherently necessitate the need to come up with counters for them, and we're likely going to have the tools available to find something for that with or without balance patches.

 

[Gidy]

From D1:

I have a friend in Japan that confirmed custom moves are accessible via character select screen. #SUGOI #SmashBros

 

[KingBroly]

If true, that's going to be a major reason why custom moves are tournament legal.

 

[DairunCates]

From D1:

I have a friend in Japan that confirmed custom moves are accessible via character select screen. #SUGOI #SmashBros

Does this mean D1's changed his opinions on whether these moves will be banned or is he just relaying some information for us?

 

[the8thark]

Except that Blizzard having to constantly release balance patches isn't an organically evolving meta, it's a forced one. Overpowered deck A doesn't wane in popularity because people learn how to put basic counters to it in their deck without completely changing their deck, Overpowered Deck A wanes in popularity because Blizzard gives a hard nerf to a card that usually was poorly designed in the first place. One of the biggest reasons for this is that Hearthstone has a LOT of cards that have exponential effects. It's legitimately hard to balance a card like this, and Hearthstone tends to favor towards the way too powerful side of things. Unleash the hounds was a pretty infamously bad example of this. There wasn't a lot of counters to it. You were basically limited to not summoning a lot of monsters when playing a ranger, which if you didn't specifically have a beatstick deck, wasn't a terribly great position to be in.

That said, just because a game has limited complexity (and the term limited here is a bit underwhelming when <3 pointed out that it would take almost a century to test all of the match-ups), doesn't mean that it has a limited metagame. This one is a bit hard to explain though. So, I'll give it my best shot here...

The famous Spanish writer has this story called, "The Library of Babel". In it, a group of people find a library that contains every single possible permutation of a 400 page book that can be written. The number of books is astronomically large, but it's a finite number, and it, by traditional definitions, contains all of knowledge. Of course, this is mostly useless as the books are 99.999999999999...% gibberish and of the ones that do make sense, most of those are flat-out inaccurate or small differences from other books (Like the version of Hamlet where Hamlet sees his father's ghast). However, keen thinkers have pointed out that the information in the library is actually infinite due to contextualization.

The most obvious first reason here is that knowledge isn't always capable of being portrayed in only words. However, the second, and more relevant reason for the knowledge in the library not being limited is because the works themselves can reference themselves. For instance, Book #1059839 might initially seem to be gibberish, but Book #9583 actually explains that this book is encoded with messages and gives you instructions to crack them. In fact, this code is not only relevant to Book #1059839, but several of them that have the same certain sequences of gibberish in them. Once decoded, one of these books itself may explain or change some fact in a completely different book, and the re-contextualization of THAT book drastically changes the meaning of another one somewhere. This keeps going until you actually manage to change the meaning of the original book that told you to decode the first set of books. It goes in an infinite loop.

Of course, most of the books are still useless and no one would live long enough to even get to the point where they were discovering these codes, but the whole thing is a thought experiment. It points out how something with finite resources can actually have a non-finite number of solutions. It merely requires that the thing in question reach enough content and complexity. With a century of match-ups to try, it's fairly safe to say that this'll probably reach that level. That's how an evolving meta-game works. Discoveries made later in the meta-game re-contextualize our understand of some things we thought we understood earlier. The discovery of a new advanced technique will drastically change which characters will be high tier and potentially promote some that we thought were initially garbage. That, in turn, will also increase the popularity of even weaker characters that act as a good hard counter for these more over-used ones.

You actually almost saw this effect in Melee actually, but it just didn't have enough content to create the loop. Still, the metagame has evolved a LOT since when the game was first introduced. There are entire techniques and combos that were popular 3 years ago that are not even viable for most people anymore. While the makeup of which characters are played hasn't changed much, how they're played has changed a lot. Brawl didn't see this, because, while it had more options, it didn't see as strong of a competitive atmosphere AND it had a runaway character that was just objectively better than most of the cast in some pretty important ways. However, this game not only seems more competitively focused overall, but it actually has enough content and characters that the idea of a character not having a good hard counter this time around is pretty astronomically low (The odds of a runaway OP character actually decreases as the number of characters increases. Brawl was somewhat of a fluke in this sense).

So, yeah. Barring the fact that, with the ridiculous size cast here, I wouldn't count on us learning the full set of match-ups anytime soon, that still doesn't mean that the metagame is going to stagnate. The rise in popularity of some characters will inherently necessitate the need to come up with counters for them, and we're likely going to have the tools available to find something for that with or without balance patches.

What you say is very true. That does not mean SSB4 will have an organically evolving meta. It will just take a while for the meta to become established because of the large roster plus custom moves. Without balance patches, there's a finite amount of information you can learn from SSB4. I do agree with you that it will take years for the pros to learn everything there is about SSB4.

Character popularity does not really change this much. Once you know all the moves, then you know all the counters to them. If a different move is more popular next month, you just adjust your game play to counter it. You're not learning anything new, just adapting to use a wider bade of knowledge. This hurts the players who know enough to win at the current meta and nothing else. When the popular moves change a new meta evolves and either you know the entire game and just counter the new moves with what you've learnt or you get wrekt for a while because you only learnt up the previous meta and not the entire game's moves.

You could call the above an evolving meta. For the good pros they are not learning anything now but constantly adapting their knowledge the ever changing meta. That is there is not any objectively better characters and movesets. If there is, then this goes out of the window. This is because the pro scene is not about playing who you like, it's about wining, and the pros always use the best.

I agree with you that no one will learn every move and counter anytime soon. I think will mean it'll take a while for a stable meta to occur.

 

[Gidy]

Does this mean D1's changed his opinions on whether these moves will be banned or is he just relaying some information for us?

Who Knows. It's too early to even call if they competitively viable are or not.