If they are a air based character, they can basically fly over. Otherwise, it's a normal another normal confrontation against a character on a small raised platform, something that is very hard to do, especially at a percent disadvantage. The safest way to approach it is to start by grabbing the ledge next to it, but if the opponent does that, it just allows the defender to run by and go back to the right side.
I'm not arguing that RC isn't a campy stage, I just find that Japes promotes it much more. I've seen many matches go to or close to time on Japes, when not as many on RC. If I begin to see more and more time outs happen on RC, then perhaps it could become a course for concern in my eyes. A lot of times the stage is picked to screw over characters with bad recoveries hoping for an easy gimp, especially on the part rising up. An easy gimp being a way to end a characters stock EARLY lol.
Collect data on Japes, then make statements like this.
Japes does generally last longer; it's a larger stage and harder to die. It has rarely ever timed out though. Most people have that "one game" they saw where someone timed someone out there that they think of. People still think of me vs. Jiano on Japes (and we didn't even time each other out there) for that!
Regardless, there is nothing wrong with going to time. That's what the timer is for. You have 8 minutes, you can do whatever you want with those 8 minutes, including running the timer.
More importantly, the stages with the most timeouts in all of MLG were Pokemon Stadium I and Smashville, followed by Battlefield. MLG's stagelist had a lot of stages (no japes, so not directly relevant) that people called "janky" that "encouraged timeouts" like Norfair and Green Greens and Pictochat and whatever, but the starter stages actually encouraged timeouts just as much if not more.
Regardless, timeouts themselves are drastically uncommon. Some players (like myself or Mew2King) deliberately go for timeouts and can't be counted as "natural" time outs. In fact, you'll find that many people are involved in timeouts more than others! It's more of a player/character issue than a stage issue.
For example, Chibo!
During MLG's season, you had three losing timeouts: two on smashville, one on battlefield. Two of them were against Fizzleboy, a MK/Dedede/IC/Lucario/whatever else he's playing now wonderboy from the midwest, and the other was from Allied's Wario. All 3 versus your ROB.
All 3 of them were over 100%. You actually had a lower % than allied, but had 37 ledge grabs. :B
You won your timeout against Reflex's Pokemon Trainer; you had 107 % to his 130%.
Looking at all the timeouts in the MLG data, you actually had the most timeouts in all of MLG! Congratulations! :B
The stages were Halberd, Smashville, Smashville, and Battlefield. Were these timeouts a result of the character (ROB)? The matchups (Rob vs. D3, ROB vs. Wario, ROB vs. MK, ROB vs. PTrainer)? Or was it the player (Chibo!)?
Looking at the stages, it is true that Smashville and Battlefield had more timeouts than other stages. They were also played more so you'd never know if one had more timeouts or not via a ratio, since matchups can change that so wildly (Lucario vs. Lucario might not timeout a lot, but Dedede vs. ROB might).
KirFlax and Mister Eric both had a timeout with ROB (meaning 6 total timeouts involving ROB). Again, we don't have a ratio because you can't find a true ratio given that each matchup has a different probability for timeouts. There were 15 Meta Knight timeouts, but there were waaaaaay more MKs than ROBs, and there were 8 Sonic timeouts and I don't even know how many of those there were.
Point is, even with all my data sitting at my fingertips, I can't narrow it down to decide what influences timeouts. I know the player can
sometimes. You were evidence of that, Chibo; you were more likely to have a timeout at MLG than anyone else. I know the character can sometimes too; ROB and Sonic were both timeout heavy. I know the stage can influence it; PS1 was played 227 times and had 9 timeouts while Smashville had 833 games played with the same number of timeouts. I'm gonna hazard a guess that PS1's 3.9% chance for a timeout dwarfs Smashville's 1% chance in a broader setting too.
Yes, it's true that Japes will increase the length of the average game. So does PS1 with its transformations. Yes, PS1 seems to lead to more timeouts; about 4% of the games on PS1 will be timeouts according to MLG's data. Is this acceptable?
What percentage of timeouts are acceptable to you?
My personal ruling on timeouts:
A) Each player must be able to effectively stall the timer in any way they desire to end the game in their favor
B) The other player must be able to effectively prevent or at least make incredibly difficult the aforementioned action
C) Some characters may be really bad at doing this, such as Olimar vs. Sonic on Pictochat when Olimar is a stock down. That is fine, and is part of the game's balance.
C prevents me from banning stages like Smashville of Pictochat on the basis that one character can stall one or two others under certain conditions. A prevents me from being an idiot and saying a stage should be banned because someone is attempting to stall.
B is the big one, and the one most people
should have with any stage.
So to end this long post of knowledge:
You want to claim Japes gives too many timeouts?
Gather some data.
Here's two ways to do it!
First, hold a tournament and collect data from every timeout you have. Don't announce this; go ahead and collect all data, it's useful too.
Find out how many timeouts you have on every stage, then get a ratio. Your ratio won't be the end-all (if Japes has multiple games of D3 vs. D3 throwing waddle dees at each other from platforms, it'll have more timeouts than Smashville's MK vs. Snake games. Na mean?), but it'll give you a good idea.
Unless there is a freakishly large amount of timeouts on Japes regardless of matchup, you don't have much of an argument for "timeouts are too common".
That's the first.
The second is more direct; hold a Jungle Japes timeout competition. Make it a tournament on Jungle Japes, one game sets, with a $1 entry fee. Every time you time someone out, you win $1. There will be a few that say things like "lol, I'll just pick Wario and camp in the water on the right"; watch their games and see how they succeed or fail. This will show you "B" from above. If Wario's water camping DOES break the stage for every character, well it'd need to be an autoban for Wario just the same as Fox or Sonic on Hyrule Temple. While it's true Fox and Sonic (and Pit, I guess) can be beaten on Hyrule Temple, it's rare and the game naturally devolves to the point to where the game is "gaining a % lead".
If Japes is the case where Wario can gain a percent lead (for arguments sake, lets say 30%) and stall out 100% of the time, that's huge. If Wario needs a stock lead, that's less huge but still important.
So go ahead and gather data before making an opinion based off of offhand observations. Your observations differ from mine greatly; while Japes would take longer around here, we never really had issues with it as a "timeout" stage ever. Luigi's Mansion might have been a timeout stage, but we never really collected data back then.
Besides, I remember the EC complaining about Norfair being the timeout stage. It had 81 games at MLG, and 0 timeouts (it was banned twice, once in one of your sets). Hows that for defying expectations?
As for the guy who said "why not lower the timer down a minute or two", that's a legitimate question that has been asked many times before. Given the fact that there were 37 timeouts at MLG
total out of the 3274 games recorded, that means we have a whopping 1.1% of timeouts. Is that
really so high that we need to alter the rules for games that would otherwise need the time?
If you want to decrease the timer, you'll need motive more than "timeouts are dumb". If you think tournaments run too long, that's something else entirely and woudl require a lot of work; Does the tournament run efficiently, are there enough TVs, are people late to matches, etc., etc., and only after answering all those can you determine if the time of games is the actual culprit.
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