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Thanks, just a quick Banjo related question before I forget! I tend to go ham on opponents, is it possible to play Banjo aggressively?
It's possible, but I feel it's very easy for him to get punished by keen opponents so I generally try to poke and look for an opening before straight up chasing. If you do try playing aggressive make good use of his N-air. It's really big and has multiple hits so I like to use it for pressure.
As much as I hate dealing with annoying strategies like zoning and camping I would argue that part of becoming a better player is learning to deal with these "cheap tactics". In a tournament setting people are going to do whatever they can to win and any good player worth their salt should be able to adapt and punish.
You aren't wrong on that, but it leads to fighting very lopsided opponents. You'll probably get good against very specific strategies but be unfamiliar with the rest. Competitive players will analyse you and use whichever strategy works against you and they will have a field day when they realise they can just use a straightforward approach. And it's not like you won't run into such tactics at all in arenas.
You run into people fighting you straightforwardly in quick play too. The main reason I don't use arena is because it's like quick play except you have to wait if more than one person joins and you can't change character in line.
I got deep into Elite Smash using R.O.B. without using any of those strategies. My strategy is to pick the best character and win.
If you get higher this stops in my experience.
I second this. It all comes down to whether you "play to win" or "play to improve" because they aren't necessarily the same thing. I've seen countless spammers in QP that have just enough skill to make their run-and-gun tactics work against even competent opponents due to the online lag. The problem is that it doesn't even matter who wins that matchup, neither of you really improve. The spammer will just keep up the annoying cowardly tactics and if you win, all you did was adapt to a trash strategy that you'll likely never see in a live tournament. If people want to get better competitively, they need to learn optimal movement, timing, spacing and tech from others that are legitimately trying to do the same. That's not to say that such people aren't on QP, but finding them is almost as inconsistent as a random arena.
Sounds about right, haha. On the real though, the most frustrating thing about those degenerate campy playstyles is the fact that you can really only consistently counter that by doing the same yourself (be sure to take the first stock, and hold on to your stock lead for dear life as you circle camp the hell out of them for the rest of the match) or you most likely get hit over and over again with the bull**** and ****ery they use against you. For the life of me, I just can't bring myself to play this way against people (online or otherwise) even though in a normal, controlled setting, it's relatively easy to download them and beat their ass for their lame, one dimensional playstyles.
I think you can really start doubting yourself as a player, if you go down far enough the rabbit hole. I am currently thinking of just dropping Quickplay and random public Arenas altogether and just focusing on playing against people on Discord or Smash Ladder, who will at least have a certain base level that you can feel you can learn from.
I wouldn't blame you if you dropped QP at the very least. I feel like public Arenas can still have some players who are quite solid even if it takes more effort to find them (usually in the glorious smashers, veteran or elite categories). I think there's still an incentive to win because you don't want to get knocked to the back of the line if you lose, but without GSP completely distorting people's measure of their self-worth and skill levels (and resorting to any and all methods no matter how lame they are to preserve this skewed perception of themselves), players usually are left with no choice but to play as solidly and sincere as possible if they want a consistent win streak and remain "king of the hill" for a while in any given arena. But there is a distinct advantage of just doing 1v1 arenas with people in discord, since you can get training partners and really get deep knowledge of certain MUs if the people you play with are willing to keep coming back to play you for long periods of time and you're both committed to actual adaptation and counterplay to each other's playstyles and habits so you both can play those MUs as well as possible.
So what about big tournaments with big money prizes? They give an even greater incenstive to win than GSP. Are they not competitive?
Nowhere in my post did I ever imply major tournaments with large prize pools were "non-competitive", so I'm not sure where you're getting that from. Plenty of people can certainly play very "lame" for the sake of winning sets at those events, but the key difference is that for the high/top level players that do this, it's because it's the genuinely "optimal" way to play their character (i.e., Wrath and his Sonic); whereas on QP, bad internet connections and input delays are abused much more with these overly campy playstyles for the sake of farming GSP. Plus more than likely, these wifi warriors don't know (or are unwilling to have, at the very least) other playstyles once they get adapted to. Not to mention that these Wifi tournaments require LAN adapters to make everyone's online connections more stable overall (this obviously isn't even an issue at all under normal life circumstances where offline in-person tournaments can commence), and this is almost never the case on QP. What I was doing was simply comparing and contrasting the trend in behaviors and actions I've seen between players on quickplay and battle arenas, you're bringing in something entirely different to the conversation when you bring up major tournies and their prize money awards. It's simply apples to oranges.
I guess I misunderstood. I thought you were saying that the incentive to win is too big with GSP on the line.
naw it's horse****
Well, I do believe that 95% of players (maybe even more) on quickplay do care far too much about GSP, which tends to influence what their playstyle is to maintain/grow from wherever they are with their GSP. This sentiment has no bearing at all on whether or not major tournaments are "competitive" (WiFi or offline), because it's pretty self-apparent that they are (barring any hiccups caused by lag during WiFi tournies). I tried highlighting the relevant differences as I see them between QP players and battle arena players on average in the rest of my post, and still maintain that major tournaments and the players who enter them bring a notably different mindset and the playstyles are usually more varied even when looking at just one top or high level player (due to the demands of adaptation being so high at this level). Anyway, yeah...hopefully by the end of this, whatever misunderstandings we had are cleared up.
GSP can useful in order to prevent frequent switching between normal QP and Elite QP. A switch will prevent one from rematching and it costs a little more time thus it's nice to be far above or below that. GSP also helps with getting competitive rulesets and good opponents.
It really doesn't help that much.
For me it does. With low GSP I even get FFAs (while voting for 1v1) while with high GSP my opponent almost always has 1v1, 2 or 3 stock, BF or Omega, no items, etc; despite me voting for all stages. That's quite a difference. And the people are normally about equally good as I am.
