The No-Johns Ruleset

[TheCrimsonBlur]

Guys

guys

guys

Pikachu is pretty good on Onett too

 

[Druggedfox]

Yes, fox is harder to beat on onett; no you won't be beating him or falco on cruise if they've practiced on the stage well enough. If Onett is impossible, and RC is 90-10 I don't consider that "viable". Of course you could shift the numbers around a bit, but just because its easier on RC doesn't immediately imply that its plausible.

Who said the spacy players are complaining about brinstar? As a spacy player, I could care less that I get bounced on the lava more; what I care about is the "random effect" that kishprime described. It doesn't matter if you know exactly when the lava's coming up, you can't control the pace of the match and how the lava effects it at the same time. I consider it to be pretty bull**** if I land a grab that will net me the kill, but don't get the kill because the lava came up coincidentally at the same time that I found an opening. If anything, I think spacies are *better* on brinstar than the vast majority of characters, my objection is with the stage itself.

I absolutely hate it when people who are in favor of keeping a stage legal assume that the people who want to ban it simply "don't know how to play on it", or that their character is bad on it. If fox was the broken on brinstar I would *still* be arguing that the random effect is undesirable.

 

[BigD!!!]

the brinstar thing wasnt aimed at you specifically, i mean youre arguing for the banning of rc too, but rather mostly just to the huge amounts of spaceys who do exactly what you said you hate, dont bother pretending they dont.

on the notion of landing a grab right at the time the lava was coming up, what sort of situation would that be? you tricked them into shielding? know that the lava is coming, jump on the top platform and then uair them when they bounce up. if you "found an opening" but the lava was coming, then it wasnt an opening for a grab, and thats something you have to know, just like knowing that you can abuse utilt and fsmash on plats on yoshis as marth, but nair wont work so well. i was in a tournament just last weekend, and i saw somebody break a shield on dreamland, the peach popped up onto the platform, and then the wind blew her off and she was awake again. thats probably just about the biggest bull**** thing ive seen in this whole game, on any stage, and it happened on a basically universally agreed upon neutral

i see what youre getting at with the 90-10 thing, and im saying that it should be shifted lower, and probably to the point where i'd say it is plausible. ive played plenty of space animals on cruise, i've seen plenty of them lose there to marths, falcons, ganons, ic's, jiggs, samus, peach, sheik, and probably a few more. spacies can run away a lot and navigate platforms better, but the bonus of rc is that while they do that theyre always just one good read away from a death at like 30% because they have to hang out on the fringe to actually take advantage of the level to its "broken" extent

 

[Strong Badam]

I'm for the banning of RC but not for Brinstar. The stage doesn't ****ing move.

 

[BigD!!!]

and as prime said, thats one individual opinion as to what makes a stage more or less viable. you could say the opposite and just say "the stage doesn't have ****ing lava" and it would seem just as reasonable

 

[Europhoria]

I remember reading a post by Hugs ages ago saying he wanted to be beaten by the player, not the stage. What if I mained ICs and you take me to a stage that automatically kills Nana for you, or at least does like 60%+ because of Nana's AI. Seems pretty unfair to go from playing like a high mid tier (I dunno where they are anymore) to something closer to the bottom of low tier because of the stage. You could still win the game, but then again you *could* still win if you played Pichu too.

Even if I play a high tier, what happens if I don't play a Fox/Falco. Like if I main Peach for instance, it just becomes win game 1 then 3/5 because otherwise I have to win 1-2 games (bo5 dependent) like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ8l-XQQ1Yg&playnext=1&list=PL5E24C6BE32608617 >_> Again not impossible, but technically neither is winning with Pichu. Even if you ban floats it's not like there aren't about a half dozen stages on your list (counting the borderline) where that's possible. You'd need 4 or 5 stage bans to prevent that from happening repeatedly. But in that scenario the fox could lose any 2 games and still win the Bo5

 

[BigD!!!]

that auto killing nana thing is a myth, ic's can and do win on cruise pretty often and ive only seen nana kill herself once on that level, considerably less than ive seen her kill herself on the neutrals

however, if that were true, i wouldnt want it to be legal

 

[Strong Badam]

and as prime said, thats one individual opinion as to what makes a stage more or less viable. you could say the opposite and just say "the stage doesn't have ****ing lava" and it would seem just as reasonable

no
my statement is objective and the alpha and the omega

 

[Grim Tuesday]

I main Ice Climbers and I like Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise as them. The "ICs are bad on counter-pick stages" myth is just that, a myth.

The only one you could really make a case for is vs. someone camping on Kongo Jungle.

 

[Ghostbone]

lol IC are terrible against someone camping them on Kongo Jungle 64 >.>

 

[Rubyiris]

why are we still debating this? play on mk2, enjoy life.

 

[Stevo]

I feel like the game has been played a cerain way for far too long to be able to do such a major shift back towards allowing more stages.

At this point it would be better to argue for smash 4 to allow more stages.

I agree the stage list bannings have gone too far, but "stay out of my combos, stage!" is too popular a feeling. People have practiced comboing characters on yoshis and battlefield for years and years. Whereas some people have probably played on brinstar under 100 times. I know I have personally only played on MK2 probably 2 dozen times myself. In comparison, I have played on dreamland thousands and thousands of times. (I still hear that song in my dreams)

10 years in people do not want to have to relearn that much.

I am not saying what is being discussed here is wrong, I just don't see it happening

 

[Kal]

I remember reading a post by Hugs ages ago saying he wanted to be beaten by the player, not the stage. What if I mained ICs and you take me to a stage that automatically kills Nana for you, or at least does like 60%+ because of Nana's AI. Seems pretty unfair to go from playing like a high mid tier (I dunno where they are anymore) to something closer to the bottom of low tier because of the stage. You could still win the game, but then again you *could* still win if you played Pichu too.

The notion of "playing against the stage" is not unique to stages with hazards. When Fox goes to FD against Marth, he has to play against the stage, because if Fox gets grabbed once it could mean death. "Playing against the stage" is something that goes on in every matchup, on every stage. Maybe you're not going out of your way to avoid lava on Dreamland, but a Marth is sure as hell going to remember that he can't fsmash through the platforms, and a Fox is going to remember that killing off the top is going to be a hell of a lot harder.

With that in mind, the entire idea of a "stage hazard" is nonsense; you can't come up with a definition of a stage hazard that isn't absolutely contrived. Any such definition would inherently reflect that you simply want to ban a specific set of stages. To a Fox playing against a Marth, FD's lack of platforms is a stage hazard, in the same way the lava on Brinstar is a stage hazard to Falco due to his fall speed and short recovery.

As for your example, you have a lot of conflicting notions at play. For one, what does it mean for a character to be high tier? Surely you must factor in stage selection for this? If how well a character performs on only the starter stages is used to place them on a tier list, then naturally this circular logic will lead you to conclude that they are "worse than they should be" on the remaining stages. But that's exactly the point: this logic you've put forth is circular.

Even if I play a high tier, what happens if I don't play a Fox/Falco. Like if I main Peach for instance, it just becomes win game 1 then 3/5 because otherwise I have to win 1-2 games (bo5 dependent) like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ8l-XQQ1Yg&playnext=1&list=PL5E24C6BE32608617 >_> Again not impossible, but technically neither is winning with Pichu. Even if you ban floats it's not like there aren't about a half dozen stages on your list (counting the borderline) where that's possible. You'd need 4 or 5 stage bans to prevent that from happening repeatedly. But in that scenario the fox could lose any 2 games and still win the Bo5

Now, this leads less into the whole "characters do worse here than they 'should' argument" and more into a valid question about how much turning these stages on centralizes the metagame. However, considering that essentially all of these stages were banned preemptively, I would be wary to assume that Fox and Falco will necessarily become as overpowered as you suggest.

It also seems that you are more worried about game balance than about the metagame becoming overcentralized (although these concepts are related, you can still have huge imbalance and lots of depth). Many posters have explained why game balance is not something we should concern ourselves with, for a variety of reasons, and I am in agreement. There are too many possible rulesets to test for balance, and, with the metagame evolving (at least, it should if the game is any deep), it is not possible to continually test for balance. If we wanted to balance the game in 2003, we would have looked for stages to minimize the impact of Sheik, Marth and Fox. If we want to balance the game today, we have to look for stages which minimize the impact of Fox, Falco and Jigglypuff. While I'm sure better arguments can be made (Sirlin's Playing to Win for example) for explaining why it's a bad idea to ban things for balance, I think my argument still holds: it doesn't make sense to try and balance a roster when the tier list is constantly changing.

------

Also, a quick remark on the slippery slope nonsense:

A slippery slope fallacy is to maintain that A - > B, B -> C, and so on until some Z, then conclude that A - > Z, without justifying the intermediate connections.

So, for example, "if we legalize gay marriage, then everyone will want to marry whomever they want, and we'll have to legalize all marriages" is an example of the slippery slope fallacy. You would need to explain why legalizing gay marriage would really lead to legalization of additional forms of marriage.

On the other hand, "if we start banning stages without reason, then we'll start banning whatever we want because we don't like it" is not a slippery slope fallacy; this has been demonstrated true with people wanting to take this line of logic as far as banning every stage except Battlefield. Moreover, the intermediate line of logic here has been justified:

[That's] exactly the problem with a lack of criteria; people can justify banning anything because it doesn't fit the game they want to play. More and more stuff gets banned as people decide they like less and less.

 

[_Xanatos_]

OP makes a lot of sense.

I think the community should be phasing stages back into the competitive scene instead of finding reasons to ban them. Not all randomness is bad, and stage variety requires more skill. Stages need to be reevaluated to find out which ones are actually 'broken'.

 

[ArstNeio]

Some other ideas to play around with:

First off, someone brought up the climbers. If it is true that ICs are horrendous on CPs (which many people are claiming is false) why does that change anything? Why is it okay that one character gets their best stages as starters while another gets his best stages banned? Isn't the most fair stage matchup dependent, in that the most fair stage in fox v. Martha will be different than fox v. Peach or samus vs. Climbers?



Second, what about letting people choose whether to CP a stage, whereupon the winning player can switch characters, or allowing the losing player to instead declare that he prefers to strike stages from the original list, but his opponent cannot switch chars.

Example: I lose against falcon on dreamland.
Scenario 1: I CP a stage like Mute City, upon which my opponent can switch chars (let's say he switches to peach), and then I pick my char.
Scenario 2: I declare that I'm not CPing, and I switch chars to Sheik. My opponent cannot switch, and we stage strike from the original list of starters.

This indeed makes things a little more complicated, but what do you guys think? It gives you other options if you don't want to counter pick a stage.

 

[Deleted member]

things would be better if sets were commonly played bo5

 

[-ACE-]

things would be better if sets were commonly played bo5

Truth .

 

[Stevo]

actually that is a good point

Tournaments should start setting enough time aside to run ALL bracket matches as bo5. some tournaments wanted to start doing this, but ran out of time.

especially with more polarised counterpicks like this thread is suggesting, it would be even MORE tough to come back from a frist game loss in bo3.

 

[TheCrimsonBlur]

actually that is a good point

***** I've been saying it for years.

bo5
bo5
bo5
bo5
bo5

srsly guys bo5
if a few people *****ing can make TOs across the nation to ban nearly every stage in the game, then making them do bo5s can't be too hard. They are already doing it in Europe with no problems at all.

bo5

 

[crush]

Most to's in america are terrible at running the event so tournaments that are supposed to end at 9 end at 1am and that's when they're doing bo3 looooooōöl

 

[Tee ay eye]

i hate you all

 

[adumbrodeus]

I'd love to see some additive ruling, especially since the latest wave of bannings came at the cusp of "jiggs is best character" paranoia and ended up overreacting in terms of stage lists because of it.

Slippery slope fallacy, how cute.

Slippery slope =/= reductio ad absurdium, same reasoning applied to a different situation isn't fallicious.

When the community decided it can ban based on randomness in general, kish correctly pointed out (via illustrating which stages have randomness that causes less of an effect on a match) that the reasoning justifies a ban on peach.


The only real case of slippery slope here is the fox argument, because making stages nonviable has never been used as reasoning for another kind of ban. Sheik argument is perfectly justified, though it obviously a matter of degrees.

 

[Mr.Jackpot]

What do super-conservative people think of the Smash 64 stage list?

 

[Smasher89]

What do super-conservative people think of the Smash 64 stage list?

Just ask random CF, they are all behind this, for real!

 

[ArstNeio]

Could you post the Smash64 stage list for those unfamiliar?

 

[ILoveKe$sha]

Final Destination – Fails no test.

Battlefield – Fails no test.

Dream Land – Fails no test. Random wind effect is minimal.

Fountain of Dreams – Fails no test. Random platform movement has affected matches, but is well below the Turnip Threshold. Many viable characters.

Pokemon Stadium – Fails no test. Transformations occur randomly, but players are warned well in advance. All odd stage characteristics are consistent and can be learned.

Yoshi’s Story – Despite having some of the most severe random effects of any “neutral” stage (Shyguy-induced extended hitboxes/bonus DI and Randall), it still seems pretty clearly below the Turnip Threshold.

Brinstar – Fails no test. On rare occasions, lava will randomly save players, but this effect is minimal and comparable to widely-accepted stages like Yoshi’s Story. At least three characters are strong on this stage (Peach/Puff/Ganon), with a couple of additional characters able to hold their own.

Jungle Japes – Fails no test. Klaptrap is in fixed zones of the stage that are completely avoidable until high % knockaways. I’m not aware of a single character or strategy ever dominating this stage, though some did attempt to play a lot of keep-away with moderate success.

Mute City – Fails no test. No randomness. It could be pretty strongly argued that the stage has a “two-character dominance” issue, but that doesn’t meet my criteria, since neither character is broken. In my opinion, it is one of the best stages for terrain adaptation and utilization and risk/reward play.

Rainbow Cruise – Fails no test. May have same “two-character dominance” that Mute has, but can’t ban it by my criteria.

Kongo Jungle 64 – Fails no test. Barrel is minimal in its random effects. Stage has unique geography that seems to have the potential to both cause major problems and give many benefits for a large number of characters. Run-away camping may, in fact, be a stage-breaking strategy, but it’s hard to see how multiple characters can’t use it to some extent.

Mushroom Kingdom II – Fails no test. No one ever effectively made a case for stage brokenness. It was removed by most solely for walk-off edges, which is a stage property that no one ever proved to be broken as a rule, just high-risk, high-reward. We kept it on at FCs even through 2007.

Corneria – Tough in multiple cases. At the very least, two characters seem to be viable here. Arwing lasers can come close to the Turnip Threshold, but I don’t think it crosses that line. Camping the right side of the stage was never proven to be broken, but Ness/YLink gun camping is still up in the air (though as Big D has noted, you can always go down and destroy the gun if you are that scared of it, forcing a fight on stage for the rest of the time).

All these but Jungle Japes. Jungles Japes should never be played on even for fun. Screw Jungle Japes.

 

[Strong Badam]

**** you you don't understand the power of cranky kong in the bg

 

[Varist]

I'd like to dispute Green Greens' legality. I love the stage but I don't think it's suited for competition.

The blocks cause many problems for mobile characters, most prominently Captain Falcon, who can't knee an opponent in the middle or on either edge when facing the blocks. If he does, he'll usually sail into the blocks after the knee and risk getting torched.

The walls and ledges next to the block containers are also very intrusive. Unintended wall jumps occur often enough to disrupt gameplay.

Grabbing those same ledges can also gimp you. If there is already a block in the center of the container, or a block falls into the nearest or center container, you cannot exit the ledge with a get-up attack (it will fail) leaving only a roll onto stage. The character on the ledge has far more options than they would have on the ledge of most other stages. Hence the character is easily punished (think Jiggs waiting for the ledge roll to Rest). The character cannot exit the ledge via manual ledge drop, they'll bump their head on the falling blocks above and plummet to their death with no second jump.

Also, about every fifth time I play the stage, I get saved from a vertical kill by ceiling teching on falling blocks. It isn't as frequent as other things but it's random and certainly match-changing if and when it occurs.

Last and certainly least, the tree blows the usual gust of wind which may or may not disrupt play depending on the circumstance.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

johnsjohnsjohnsnotabattlefieldclonejohnsjohnsjohnsbleghitssogayjohnsjohnsjohns

Fixed.

10chars

 

[Kal]

Varist, it's like you completely ignored the first post. Also, even given a different set of standards, simply summing up things which are bad about the stage without providing any analysis or interpretation isn't helpful. Even if I grant everything you say, you've done nothing but list things wrong with Green Greens. There needs to be some step going from:

These are the things wrong with Green Greens

to

Thus, Green Greens should be banned.

Nothing you've listed directly implies that the stage needs to be banned, even by a liberal standard of stage banning.

 

[Stevo]

obviously you guys have never heard of the "gay" test.


I would love to see a medium sized tournament strike from a larger pool of stages and see how many times the "extra" stages are played on.

 

[mesa23]

jungle japes is cool
i like mkII as well
this is a haiku

 

[Deleted member]

What do super-conservative people think of the Smash 64 stage list?

smash 64 is ****ed because every stage sucks, some more than others

 

[Kal]

I'm running into some issues with this ruleset. My stagelist is

DK Island: Jungle Japes
DK Island: Kongo Jungle
Dream Land: Fountain of Dreams
Dream Land: Green Greens
Eagleland: Onett
F-Zero Grand Prix: Mute City
Kanto Skies: Poké Floats
Kanto: Pokémon Stadium
Lylat System: Corneria
Lylat System: Venom
Mushroom Kingdom: Rainbow Cruise
Mushroom Kingdom I
Mushroom Kingdom II
Dream Land
Congo Jungle
Planet Zebes: Brinstar
Special Stages: Battlefield
Special Stages: Final Destination
Yoshi's Island: Yoshi's Story

However I cannot think of any way to make the striking process not unbearably slow while still keeping all of these stages legal. There are 19 stages which makes this a difficult process. I suppose a 3 - 6 - 6 - 3 would work, but that seems a little ridiculous.

Does anyone have suggestions?

 

[KishPrime]

You could just use the "unquestioned" 12 stages on for the first stage strike. 19 is a little bit of a crazy undertaking, though I do understand the sentiment for keeping them all in. We did 10 for an early Brawl tournament and that was fine with paper-and-pen available. You could also keep the 19 list for striking (print out half-sheets with pens for each station for this, like I mentioned earlier) and also do a 5-stage neutral set for players who both agree to use it, which some players would use and reduce the amount of time.

This is where a logic-bound ruleset starts running into practical TO issues.

 

[Kal]

I like the idea of using half-sheets with pens. What I'm more curious about is in what order strikes should be done. Should it just alternate between the players until only one stage is left, or should we come up with a different ordering, something like 1 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2?

 

[ArstNeio]

What about some sort of system where you do 2-4-4-2 and that'll leave you with 5 left, and then you can pretend those 5 are the 'neutrals' for that game and do them like we usually do?

 

[Kal]

So you would think a 2 - 4 - 4 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 1 system would work? Both players get 9 strikes, so it seems fair.

 

[slartibartfast42]

Use this ruleset at FC8.

The only problem I see is that on corneria, you are forced to attack a retreating/camping character from above, which makes certain characters way too good from what I've seen. But I have no definitive proof, and I can just ban it right away if we're stage striking, so it's not even an issue. We should be testing its viability.

As far as stage striking, I think that there should definitely be a 2-1 at the end or a 1-1 at the end. Letting someone get their choice out of more than two stages isn't very fair in my opinion.

 

[Kal]

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=309421

The **** storm begins! Sadly, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this for any more serious events we have planned. I'll do what I can.