The Custom Legal Stage contest

[TDK]

If you've been following the character competitive impressions thread recently, you've seen that the stage list isn't exactly perfect in Smash 4. The Current legal stage list is just 7 stages - Battlefield, Final Destination, Smashville, Town & City, and Lylat Cruise are starter stages with Dream Land (64) and Duck Hunt being the only counterpick stages. While this doesn't seem too bad, there are a few problems with the stage list. First off, tri-platform stages are almost ubiquitous, and it's very easy to strike to that stage for the first game, and these stages benefit a lot of top metagame threats such as and greatly due to their extended upper blastline combos being even easier. Additionally, two of the stages, Lylat Cruise and Duck Hunt, both have certain issues, With Duck Hunt generally favouring more mobile characters that can run away better and Lylat being... okay at best and a broken mess at worst.

Because of this, and because removing Duck Hunt and Lylat would ultimately hurt the metagame by reducing the stage list to things that favour vertical finishers even more, we're going to have a custom legal stage contest to see if we can come up with some good, competitive stages!

The Rules
1. The stage must be able legal in competitive play. A box with lava on the inside walls, for instance, wouldn't be counted. However, I'm not discounting stage hazards entirely, though, so if you can work it into your stage without it being too obtrusive or centralizing, good on you.

2. Be creative! I know there's only so much you can do to make the rigid requirements of a legal stage, but making and FD clone wouldn't be the most inspired thing and would ultimately end up under the "miiverse" brand - not legal because it has nothing to offer over FD.

3. When you go to post your stage, you should include a picture of your stage, a way to download it (so other people can eperiment with it!), and a short paragraph detailing what your stage is and why it would work for competitive play.

~

Instead of me judging it, the community is going to be able to post their thoughts and opinions on it, wether or not it would give certain characters an advantage or disadvantage, and how well this stage would benefit the competitive scene. After a period of time (About a month, to give people time to create, build, and test their ideas), we'll vote on which stage we think is the best for competitive play!

Enjoy, and happy building~

 

[FamilyTeam]

I'll do my best (I just got the Wii U version yesterday, what a coincidence!), but for now I cannot share it. There are a few things going on with me right now that don't allow it.
Stage builder is too limited, as well... that doesn't help with what we can make. Still, I'll try to come up with something neat

 

[ParanoidDrone]

I've made a small collection of custom stages over the months since the game launched, so this is a good opportunity for me to polish some of them off and present them to people that care.

Before I start that though, I did a spot of data collection. (Surprise!) With the idea of easier/harder KOs in mind, I took a look at KO % in training mode, with Mario as the target and Bowser's fully charged fsmash and usmash as the attacks in question. All custom stages were drawn to match the silhouette of Final Destination visible in the builder.

From the ledge, Bowser KOs Mario off the side at 22% on Battlefield, 18% on a small stage, and 24% on a medium stage.

From ground level, Bowser KOs Mario off the top at 54% on Battlefield, 49% on a small stage, and 55% on a medium stage.

I then did some additional testing to see how much of an impact moving the stage around had. It seems that moving the stage by one grid unit (as seen in the snap-to-grid mode) affects KO % by approximately 1%. In other words, when I shrunk the FD-lookalike stage by 1 unit on both sides, Bowser KO'd Mario at 25% instead of 24%. When I put Mario on a platform 5 units overhead, Bowser KO'd him at 13% instead of 18%.

Lastly, the FD silhouette is not accurate. It's a little bit smaller than the real thing by about 2 units on each side, 4 units total.

Conclusion: A medium sized stage is your best bet unless you're deliberately making a stage designed for early KOs a la Melee Yoshi's Story.

And now, five of my created stages along with my rationale for their design. I posted them to Miiverse using the ingame share feature, although I cannot recall offhand how other people would go about downloading them for themselves.

Spoiler: Utopia

I wanted a sort of asymmetric duality for this stage; horizontal KOs are easier on the left a la Smashville, while vertical KOs are easier on the right a la Battlefield. The general layout was inspired by New Pork City, of all stages.

Miiverse link.

Spoiler: Obsidian

The core concept of this stage is a walkoff that can't be camped. I accomplished this by covering the walkoff with lava, forcing players to recover back to the middle of the stage. (Ignore the gaps in the picture, the game's pictures go past the blast line because...reasons, I guess.) My first choice would have been a conveyor belt of some sort, but that isn't a thing in the stage builder, unfortunately.

Miiverse link.

Spoiler: Conveyor

This was something of an experiment to see if a stage with a constantly moving portion of the floor could work. I'd have liked to make it solid, but that's not really a feature the builder offers, so you can fall through it and jump through it in the middle. Also worth mentioning are the ledges; they are difficult to sweetspot.

Miiverse link.

Spoiler: Tower

Unlike the previous stage where the hard-to-sweetspot ledges were something of an accident I left in because why not, this time around it's very much on purpose. The ledges themselves aren't anything special, actually, but the walls underneath are made of lava and will hit you sideways if you touch it. If you're someone like Villager, you can probably still get back, but for most of the cast it's a death sentence, so precision when recovering is important, as is avoiding stagespikes. The platforms hang over the ledge to create additional options when recovering high.

Miiverse link.

Spoiler: Shift

This one was something of a happy accident. The platform over the stage is made of two individual platforms, the inner one moving half the distance of the outer one. As a result, the two cross over each other frequently, with the unexpected side effect that a player standing on either platform at the time stays in place until they finish crossing each other up. I thought the effect was interesting enough to be the focal point of a stage.

Miiverse link.