TOGOpuff
Jigglyfy the world !
I've been playing brawl and watching streams for quite a long time now and everytime brawl is on stream it's the same hate. Everytime. That started bothering me and i started looking at brawl matches from a different angle. Finally i came to some conclusions that i want to share with the community about how tedious competitive brawl matches can become, not only for viewers but for players as well. All in all this thread is about an opinion. It is not meant to spread brawl hate nor is hate-brawl-oriented. It's just some points that i want to share with brawl community based on what i've been seeing in competitive streams all around and a attempt to help the commumity.
First things first, i'll start this writing talking about technical points. Brawl is way slower than melee, that's obvious, therefore it requires not less skill but a rather different techniques usage. To melee players, used to fast paced wavedashing game it's slow and untechnical when it's just a completely different techniques set with it's own technologies and possibilities. But this difference isn't flawless and competitive community has been losing space because of some matchups that aren't fun to watch nor play. Basically i will stand out here the terrible scenario that was 1 stock brawl #GOML grand finals (which just happened). Matchup was MK vs IC. We probably knew that would happen (or MK dittos or IC dittos). I don't remember the last time i saw a brawl grand finals without meta knight dittos or ice climbers vs meta knight or ice climber dittos. Mostly because of reliability and the huge difference between how better they are in comparison to others characters.
The regularity on which these characters reach finals everytime we see brawl matches and the terrible tiering we have that put A+ characters WAY below S and SS makes the game boring even before match starts. Adding the slow pace of the game and the metagame of both top tier characters we have a worst case scenario of who is punishing / pressuring better and the game becomes dull with skill spamming and easy hit landing. Specially when it comes to pro matches and tournaments where people don't want to risk their wins trying to play other characters or raising some freestyle high risk high reward combos. The 'unbeatable' matchups scenario becomes a real pain to brawl community as a whole and we lose the spotlight to more balanced melee and PM. Commentators have a hard time creating hype on finals because it seems we're watching the same movie over and over again and trying to take something new out of it. Won't happen.
With some wonders about this i hosted a basement brawl tournament with some friends apllying 1 custom rule: no high tier characters allowed (aka no IC or MK). We are not that high level players compared to beasts like M2k but i can say that playing lower tier characters increased game hypeness and matchup possibility, we had more fun playing it and was pleasant to watch. Freestyle combos came back and we could finally enjoy the game without that MK boring pressure. We also played 3 and 2 stock doubles casually and even more matchup possibilities (using lowest tier characters) happened.
I'm not saying that we should ban MK and IC from tournaments from now on because i don't even see this possibility as viable but i think that if we don't change something on brawl scenario we will keep losing space to other smash bros games and might end up forgotten on a corner with some random players doing 2 brackets of 4 players each in a black and white tv with $5 dollars on the pot. And i don't want this to happen. I can see some possibilities of escaping this scenario and i hope you people can also add your thoughts on this. mostly i thought about this custom rulesets to add hype to my gameplan:
> 1 stock brawl 3 minute matches (custom rule : no IC/ MK allowed)
> 3 or 2 stock doubles (custom rule: forbidden usage of 2 MK, 2 IC or MK/IC on same team)
(this is how i've been running tournaments from now on and has been working great on casuals as well)
* i know i said i wasn't saying we should ban MK and IC but i think this is still the fastest way to bring some hype to game and create new matchup possibilities and that's the solution i found to my small hometown community *
I know those aren't solutions and probably won't be applied to community as a whole and i also think lots of players will think i'm crazy by saying/doing this but i see competitive scenario is flooded with Dejávu matchups and terrible paced games and one way to add more hype to our scene would be taking out that which is making those "i know what's going to happen" matchups, and try to return to a freestyle oriented scenario. Brawl isn't broken because it's a bad game but because how we're exploiting the terrible tiering the game has and how boring/ not freestyle matches became. I think next step to keep brawl living will be adapting rules so we can renew / rebalance the game.
Any thoughts on this ?
First things first, i'll start this writing talking about technical points. Brawl is way slower than melee, that's obvious, therefore it requires not less skill but a rather different techniques usage. To melee players, used to fast paced wavedashing game it's slow and untechnical when it's just a completely different techniques set with it's own technologies and possibilities. But this difference isn't flawless and competitive community has been losing space because of some matchups that aren't fun to watch nor play. Basically i will stand out here the terrible scenario that was 1 stock brawl #GOML grand finals (which just happened). Matchup was MK vs IC. We probably knew that would happen (or MK dittos or IC dittos). I don't remember the last time i saw a brawl grand finals without meta knight dittos or ice climbers vs meta knight or ice climber dittos. Mostly because of reliability and the huge difference between how better they are in comparison to others characters.
The regularity on which these characters reach finals everytime we see brawl matches and the terrible tiering we have that put A+ characters WAY below S and SS makes the game boring even before match starts. Adding the slow pace of the game and the metagame of both top tier characters we have a worst case scenario of who is punishing / pressuring better and the game becomes dull with skill spamming and easy hit landing. Specially when it comes to pro matches and tournaments where people don't want to risk their wins trying to play other characters or raising some freestyle high risk high reward combos. The 'unbeatable' matchups scenario becomes a real pain to brawl community as a whole and we lose the spotlight to more balanced melee and PM. Commentators have a hard time creating hype on finals because it seems we're watching the same movie over and over again and trying to take something new out of it. Won't happen.
With some wonders about this i hosted a basement brawl tournament with some friends apllying 1 custom rule: no high tier characters allowed (aka no IC or MK). We are not that high level players compared to beasts like M2k but i can say that playing lower tier characters increased game hypeness and matchup possibility, we had more fun playing it and was pleasant to watch. Freestyle combos came back and we could finally enjoy the game without that MK boring pressure. We also played 3 and 2 stock doubles casually and even more matchup possibilities (using lowest tier characters) happened.
I'm not saying that we should ban MK and IC from tournaments from now on because i don't even see this possibility as viable but i think that if we don't change something on brawl scenario we will keep losing space to other smash bros games and might end up forgotten on a corner with some random players doing 2 brackets of 4 players each in a black and white tv with $5 dollars on the pot. And i don't want this to happen. I can see some possibilities of escaping this scenario and i hope you people can also add your thoughts on this. mostly i thought about this custom rulesets to add hype to my gameplan:
> 1 stock brawl 3 minute matches (custom rule : no IC/ MK allowed)
> 3 or 2 stock doubles (custom rule: forbidden usage of 2 MK, 2 IC or MK/IC on same team)
(this is how i've been running tournaments from now on and has been working great on casuals as well)
* i know i said i wasn't saying we should ban MK and IC but i think this is still the fastest way to bring some hype to game and create new matchup possibilities and that's the solution i found to my small hometown community *
I know those aren't solutions and probably won't be applied to community as a whole and i also think lots of players will think i'm crazy by saying/doing this but i see competitive scenario is flooded with Dejávu matchups and terrible paced games and one way to add more hype to our scene would be taking out that which is making those "i know what's going to happen" matchups, and try to return to a freestyle oriented scenario. Brawl isn't broken because it's a bad game but because how we're exploiting the terrible tiering the game has and how boring/ not freestyle matches became. I think next step to keep brawl living will be adapting rules so we can renew / rebalance the game.
Any thoughts on this ?