Tournament Initiative

[KishSquared]

Something has bothered me about the Brawl+ community for a while now. People are very quick to suggest very arbitrary and subjective modifications to Brawl that might or might not be needed, and values for modifications are based on a "gut feeling". The most laughable example of this is the 11.75% hitstun that people are religiously devoted to because it "feels right". No one can say what specifically is wrong with 12% that makes hitstun just too much (in other words, what broken combos exist in 12% but not 11.75?).

Something that the Brawl+ community has been incredibly apathetic about is hosting tournaments. Can someone let me know if there's been any Brawl+ tournaments held other than the one that the Ship held last month? Tournaments are the tell-all of brokenness. If a code brings anything unexpected to the game, competitive players will find it an exploit it. Until that happens, though, we have NOTHING to base our opinions on.

We need to host tournaments, even if they're small regional or local ones. We need to make an effort to find out whether the codes we're creating are valid or not. Without this kind of hard data, we'll continue to create codes that may well break the game in the hands of competitive players. And we don't want to find this out suddenly at a major tournament featuring Brawl+.

 

[Dark Sonic]

We have moved far away from 11.75% by now (most are using 8 or 8.5% by now), but I see your point. We really need to get some TOs in here (or host tournaments ourselves, but I have no idea how to organize that kind of stuff)

 

[KishPrime]

Well there you go. I guess we must've gotten someone thinking.

 

[KishSquared]

Wow, I'm out of touch. We were fighting 11.75% pretty hard, we used 9% for our tournament. Glad to hear that's gone, haha.

You raise a good point, though. I don't know if many TOs that are interested in Brawl+, it's mostly players. Hosting a tournament is as easy as finding a place to host and posting to get people to come. Use Tio to run the brackets if you aren't familiar with how they work, it's a spiffy little program that makes your life easier.

Tournaments are needed to give Brawl+ life. Without a tournament scene, we're creating codes so we can play with our friends, most of who probably don't even notice the problems we see with Brawl. I want Brawl+ to be big, with regular regional tournaments. It may never be on Brawl's level, but there's no reason that it can't be decently big.

If no tournaments are held, popularity for Brawl+ will wane very quickly and it'll again just so you can play it against your own friends.

 

[shanus]

I have been in talks with a local venue here about hosting a B+ tourney and they seem cool with it.

I have hesitated in holding one though until we had ironed out a few more values for a semi–official codeset for consistency sake. This is very important though, and must be expanded on. I intend to hold one at some point this semester or early summer.

In terms of getting attendees though I was thinking something like a melee/B+ tourney like this:

Melee singles
B+ Singles
Melee Doubles

This way we try and get more people to try it out?

 

[KishPrime]

That's what we did, and no one wanted to enter Brawl+.

You can still try...

 

[Deleted member]

I'm gonna be holding smashfest starting in 1 or 2 weeks here with the main focus on B+ (with melee as backup), and I'll try to get TOs interested to organise B+ side events, so it will at least be played by people.

 

[Almas]

I'm starting to attend tournaments across England starting a fortnight from now, and I'll be taking B+ to them. Hopefully I can garner an interest - many people do seem genuinely keen to try it.

 

[Dark Sonic]

Well there you go. I guess we must've gotten someone thinking.

That and we got a whole bunch of other codes that helped out the offense, so the hitstun was kind of OP.

Dash dancing and dash canceling make it much easier to fake out opponents (and thus land hits), the gravity and fast fall changes let you get to the ground faster (and most character's ground speeds are faster than their aerial ones, especially with the dash speed increase) and overall the offense just got...faster. So the hitstun was just too much.

 

[shanus]

That and we got a whole bunch of other codes that helped out the offense, so the hitstun was kind of OP.

Dash dancing and dash canceling make it much easier to fake out opponents (and thus land hits), the gravity and fast fall changes let you get to the ground faster (and most character's ground speeds are faster than their aerial ones, especially with the dash speed increase) and overall the offense just got...faster. So the hitstun was just too much.

Yeah, I mean if you watch the combo vid in my signature for instance (which is an outdated codeset mind you), all of those were done with 9.5% hitstun which is considered too high now!

 

[KishSquared]

That really cements the point that an arbitrarily-determined value for a code that makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy is no basis for a decision. We need competitions to show us how these codes will be used in high-level play. And for that, we need tournaments.

There are only, what, 11 of us back here? We can't host all the tournaments, we need other TOs or Brawl+ players to take initiative. Maybe even offer the incentive of being allowed back here if anyone hosts a Brawl+ tournament with 10 or more participants, shrug.

 

[shanus]

That really cements the point that an arbitrarily-determined value for a code that makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy is no basis for a decision. We need competitions to show us how these codes will be used in high-level play. And for that, we need tournaments.

There are only, what, 11 of us back here? We can't host all the tournaments, we need other TOs or Brawl+ players to take initiative. Maybe even offer the incentive of being allowed back here if anyone hosts a Brawl+ tournament with 10 or more participants, shrug.

Its not that its on a basis of feel persay. Its just that the values change as new codes which alter game dynamics come out. For instance, gravity modifications + dash speed required us to lower the hitstun so that you wouldn't be 0-death combo'd every time. Its hard to pinpoint a value which is the perfect hitstun, but we can certainly tell when there is enough, and when there isn't. At around 8-8.5%, with the current codes, a lot of fancy combos are possible barring fantastic DI. We are trying to make it so a variety of combos are possible (escapable with proper DI), but to give some reward for certain move connections. We don't want all moves to link 0-death, we just want some moves to yield connections which the player knows they can work with, and potentially alter to get unexpected DI, i.e. they anticipate DI to the right to avoid a knee and eat a rising uair instead.

Edit: Think darkrain combo 3 as an example!

 

[CT Chia]

I agree with everything said here. (I also thought that 11 some percent was waaaay too much lol)

I held a Brawl+ tourney way back in October, I think I was the first person to hold one with like 13 entrants or something like that. I sorta blackmailed people to enter it lol. It was a melee biweekly and I had a $2 venue fee, but you wouldn't have to pay the $2 venue fee if you entered the Brawl+ tourney which was only $3 lol. It was fun, but had mixed reactions. Half the ppl loved it, half the ppl hated it.

Though it was pretty primitive overall considering how long ago the tourney was. I forget exactly what codes I used, I have it listed on the first post of the DSO biweekly thread in atl north. I've always used a sort of unorthodox code set with like MAD, 1.125x hitstun, xtra hitstun (i think 9? i forget), and manual L canceling. The one main thing I found out was that MetaKnight was COMPLETELY broken in those rules. The extra gravity made it much harder to DI out of the tornado, and with that and MAD, it was too easy to chain tornado. The 3 MKs there got top 3, even though some of them were easily outclassed by other players in attendance there in regular Brawl. I have some vids on my utube channel (ElChibo) from the tourney, including some of Scar's Brawl+ Falcon. Too good.

 

[shanus]

I agree with everything said here. (I also thought that 11 some percent was waaaay too much lol)

I held a Brawl+ tourney way back in October, I think I was the first person to hold one with like 13 entrants or something like that. I sorta blackmailed people to enter it lol. It was a melee biweekly and I had a $2 venue fee, but you wouldn't have to pay the $2 venue fee if you entered the Brawl+ tourney which was only $3 lol. It was fun, but had mixed reactions. Half the ppl loved it, half the ppl hated it.

Though it was pretty primitive overall considering how long ago the tourney was. I forget exactly what codes I used, I have it listed on the first post of the DSO biweekly thread in atl north. I've always used a sort of unorthodox code set with like MAD, 1.125x hitstun, xtra hitstun (i think 9? i forget), and manual L canceling. The one main thing I found out was that MetaKnight was COMPLETELY broken in those rules. The extra gravity made it much harder to DI out of the tornado, and with that and MAD, it was too easy to chain tornado. The 3 MKs there got top 3, even though some of them were easily outclassed by other players in attendance there in regular Brawl. I have some vids on my utube channel (ElChibo) from the tourney, including some of Scar's Brawl+ Falcon. Too good.

You clearly just need to replace every Wii at COT4 with B+. I think the main problem people have is they havent seen how the game has changed from the months ago when we only had a few codes.

I think if we have this viral video so to say of what Brawl+ can do I think it could be a nice way of updating B+'s image.

 

[MookieRah]

I would try to host a Brawl+ tournament, but we need some local people to buff up the pot, and it would be hard to just START with a Brawl+ tournament when so few people know about it. I would literally have to host a Brawl tournament/event and have Brawl+ setups to introduce people to it.

I'm also in a terrible location, and to make matters the people that would come to this event hate me because they (the anime club) had a tournament in which they didn't have their **** together and promised me that 1st place got 50% of the pot, and instead they gave me $50... (There were 50 people that entered too, and at 10% a pot I should have made $250...). Of course when I was pissed about it the entire club totally jacked on me and claimed that the host was an excellent TO... The ironic thing is that the host knew he totally ****ed it up, and we kept talking and he knows how to better run a tournament, but the point remains that my situation blows hardcore. /rant

What I can and will do is help promote any decent sized Brawl+ tournament. It might not be a bad idea to actually create a website for Brawl+ so people can go and check it out. Maybe exploit MyFace (Myspace/Facebook/Twitter/etc) to raise awareness. I don't mind doing some design work for it, but I am going to say I can only do so much due to the fact that I'm currently working on my last semester of college and getting my portfolio together.

 

[shanus]

What I can and will do is help promote any decent sized Brawl+ tournament. It might not be a bad idea to actually create a website for Brawl+ so people can go and check it out. Maybe exploit MyFace (Myspace/Facebook/Twitter/etc) to raise awareness. I don't mind doing some design work for it, but I am going to say I can only do so much due to the fact that I'm currently working on my last semester of college and getting my portfolio together.

i hear you, I'll do what I can do. I'm also in my last semester of college and have many many other things at hand, but I'll do my best to try and get a tourney up and running at some point.

 

[CT Chia]

very nice ideas mookie, il also see on my end about whippin up something bigger than a side event at a biweekly.

 

[KishSquared]

But again, rather than taking the entire load on ourselves, we need to try to convince other Brawl+ players to host tournaments too. And maybe offering the incentive of allowing Brawl+ TOs back here would encourage some of the fanbase to act and host.

 

[Almas]

I agree, to some extent. You run the risk of people seeing it as a 'buy in' though.

 

[The Cape]

Gonna have a fest in a few weeks and have Brawl+ as a main game. Look out for anything that seems really stupid or broken. I can report those findings.

I would like to host a tournement, but I would firstly like to have a more agreed upon ruleset, and secondly have more of a visable showing to the community (more vids and such).

 

[shanus]

A piece of good news is that interest seems to be on the rise. I've gotten over 1000 views of this combo video of Brawl+ in just the 1 day its been out so far, so I think thats pretty promising! I guess I'll need to keep up the pace and really work on more killer vids.

 

[KishSquared]

Hey, we hosted a Brawl+ tournament a month ago. Don't feel like the game isn't ready for tournament play. I've seen several people say that they want to wait for a more complete ruleset, but that's frankly never going to happen. You've gotta work with what we have, otherwise we'll never host anything because we're waiting for that legendary complete ruleset

 

[The Cape]

Chibo, do you have a Brawl+ crew down there in Philly? I would like to get some game time/testing time with you guys next time I am in Philly (in March)