It's a two way street.
In order for a community to pull in new players interested into the competitive scene, they have to become willing to place the investment. If the will to invest is not strong enough, then we cannot bring them in. We can make tutorials, guides, skype chats, etc., but unless the player is willing to go out there grind at tournaments and most likely lose over and over again it's not going to happen.
I'm more interested in our community taking this temporary expansion in playerbase and convincing them to stay a while longer.
Whether or not they get anywhere after that is still up to them, but we can do better when it comes to helping them figure out how to do so.
You're simply describing how a metagame works. There's nothing said here that contradicts what I've stated.
As stated before, a tier list is a perception of what is the best, and what is the worst. In reality, nothing about it is what we would call an absolute. But it is shown as what is happening now. A tier list does not care about the future, nor does it care about potential. In fact, it cannot care about potential because that cannot be defined into data until someone taps into it.
Snake in Brawl was 2nd best in the game, now he dropped. Diddy was High Tier then jumped to 2nd best for a time, then he was replaced by Ice Climbers. Sonic was low tier but Sonic then became a solid mid tier character with enough push from his community.
I wasn't trying to contradict what you said, but rather expand on an important aspect of tier lists that you neglected to mention.
As we both stated, a tier list is merely the perception of the best and worst characters at any given moment, but I feel that the way they're created is flawed because of how volatile and fickle they can be.
As they currently are, tier lists only take into account the data of the last couple of final battles for tournaments. They don't showcase how many total battles were won by said character, they don't tell us whether their player was someone that only used that character or if they merely used them as a counterpick, and so on. The data that's represented is too vague to really be of use to anybody in any real capacity, but seems official enough to influence player character choice, which in turn causes the tier list to back itself up by... convincing players to adhere to it.
The very fact that a surprise win here or there causes huge shifts in a tier list's organization shows just how nonsensicle the data it represents is.
This doesn't deal with what I said at all. You're ignoring the reality that the game is not 100% balanced. There are obvious power gaps between characters and it's much more than just people using simple characters vs people using complex characters. There is, in fact, a best character and a worst character.
I never tried to say that it was perfectly balanced, and I think that the risk/reward part that I mentioned was the more relevant information, the simplicity just becomes a conduit to their spread throughout the playerbase. When that combination of low risk to high reward yield is coupled with ease of use it produces an overused character that dominates the metagame, such as Brawl's Metaknight.
It isn't really because they are simply 100% better in all situations, its because their toolkit allows them to take advantage of situations in an overwhelming number of scenarios.
We've had the game less than a year.
We JUST started using customs.
We JUST started setting up tournament rules and procedures, and they're not guaranteed to be completely finalized yet.
We don't know diddly-doo about who the best and worst characters are yet, because we don't even have a real standard yet.
I'm not sure what the point of this reply was, but I'll go on to say I actually enjoyed Brawl as a game and leave it at that.
I didn't say that you didn't enjoy Brawl, but if your only goal was to become the best Mario then it shouldn't matter how good he actually is in said game.
I mean, your only real competition are the other people playing as Mario, so if you gave up on that then it means that either you lacked the skill to make that journey or something about the way that game plays rubbed you in the wrong way.
I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.
You're more or less preaching the choir. The players that are maining their characters are finding new tech. The Samus boards and the Lucina/Marth boards are the most productive boards I've seen here.
The Marth and Lucina boards' productivity is likely related to Marth's high tier status from previous entires. There was already a powerful playerbase of figure heads with the ability to record frame data and so on from the beginning.
As for Samus, Sakurai had outright stated during development that the crew considered her to be the most powerful character
(which, now that I think about it, should've better tipped us off on the boosts that ground defensive play received more than anything else), so even if she turned out to NOT be the über character that people suspected, there were still plenty of players convinced to choose her at the beginning and figure her out.
Top/High level players are also using lower tiers and trying to make them viable as well, because they enjoy the character on a personal level, but know at their current state, they can't bank on them to win a tournament. That's about as simple as it gets.
Again, our metagame is in the baby stages still, its not even potty-trained at this point.
Heck, how many truly major tournaments have there even been since launch?
High/Top players were once new players that want to get better. It'd be best to look at the big picture rather than focus on one aspect.
I do believe that my original post exclaims that previous generations of players weren't really stilted on learning fundamentals because online play and media integration wasn't as prevalent.
To make my point clear, I disagree with the assumption that we as a community are not inviting newer players into our scene as much as we can. Not only do we have guides and tutorials, we also have guides to start your own scene and easy access to knowledgeable players through smashboards, facebook, twitch streams, and twitter.
Did you see my post about the possibility of having a Smashboards Youtube channel that conveniently collects every tutorial video under one banner?
What about the part where I mention that the character boards have numerous lurkers that rarely; if ever, visit the other character boards?
We can definitely up our integration, to think that we are literally doing EVERYTHING possible is just silly.
New players aspire to become like the top players. They see some cool stuff, figure it's awesome if they could be like that, and train to be the very best like no one ever was. Some copies other players, some just wing it. In the end, none of that really matters without the experience and the drive to learn and become better.
Agreed.
If a Luigi player wants to just run up and D-throw combo everyone into oblivion on FG all day, then that's his business. We can beat him over and over again and upon that point he'll decide if he cares enough to get better. In which case, we can teach him the fundamentals. But if he just doesn't care, then we can't do anything and he'll go about and do his own thing.
My point is that said player learned about said tech through media rather than here, ie; s/he saw it on Youtube.
S/he doesn't even know that there ARE fundamentals to learn, let alone know how to look for them. Its not like Youtube's bursting at the seems with video tutorials on fundamentals, but there are DEFINITELY advanced tech videos up the fricken' wazoo.
It doesn't matter if we have even a BILLION guides on fundamentals here, we're still not putting that information out where people would learn from it obviously, or else this wave of For Glory silliness wouldn't be a thing.
And we can't really say that's our fault either. If anything, it's the fact we're forced to explain the fundamentals outside of the game that really hurts it more than anything. These days, fighting games add extensive ways to teach and train with a character. Combo tutorials, basic lessons, training mode, etc. Best we have for Smash is training mode and that hasn't changed for the past two decades.
Exactly, Smash Bros. doesn't contain an in-game tutorial; and again, the massive spread of videos showing advanced tricks and the prevalence of online play is giving new players the wrong impression of where to start.
I've already had 13 people private message me across both here and on GameFaqs, thanking me for making mention of this, several of them even stating that THEY were these players and that I may have saved them by bringing it to their attention
(they shall remain nameless). The thread has nearly 1500 views in 2 days, and the overwhelming majority of votes in the poll suggest that most people disagree with your view that we're doing everything that we can to bring attention to the road that they should be walking.
Edt: On a side note, did you end up voting for Marina in the Smash Ballot?
I did like 2 dozen votes for unexpected characters, and she was one of 'em. :D
