As a format, the biggest question that gets asked is "Is this as chaotic as it looks?" The answer is... yes. Absolutely. It's nuts. It doesn't exactly feel that way when you're playing, though. I feel communication between the team becomes all the more important. Being able to call things like "Sheik's on high percent, kill her now", or "Don't worry, we still have the stock lead", or "Yo, I'm ready to PK Magnet, heal me up", or even stuff like "We're on Temple, don't go in the cave like I just did because Ike and Mario are just sitting there waiting to combo you into oblivion", has a pretty big impact. You can somewhat direct the team to act in a certain way or to achieve small victories rather than just flailing wildly and hitting anything that doesn't match your team colour. There have been a few times where someone's gone "____ is at kill percentage" when I'd not even realised - so as a Shulk player, I'd (apprehensively) flick to Smash and get the job done.
Naturally, you don't really need to communicate if you all just outplay them, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it's been a huge help at times.
As with Doubles, keeping a wider field-of-view on things is pretty important. If someone's getting 2v1'd, you'll want to go and get those players off your teammate's back. At the same time you don't want to fsmash someone and then realise your teammate was fast-falling in for the hit, killing your teammate and not the enemy.
Above all, it's insanely fun. Teaming up with your friends to take on all these other teams of Smashers feels awesome. We've only run ~4 or so events so far, but I've already bore witness to so many hype moments.
- Wii Fit Trainer going 1v4... and winning!
- Greninja fsmash -> Shulk
accidental footstool -> Mewtwo Shadow Ball -> KO true combo.
- Ally low% Greninja accidentally recovery Shadow Sneaking into enemy high% Ganondorf's recovering side-B. Ganoncide starts, ally Ness reacts and PK Fire's them out of it.
Will 4v4 ever be a thing?
Honestly... I'm hopeful. I like to think that if I show this format off to enough people it can gather a bit of a following. At the same time, I'm a realist. The Smash community
hates fun hates anything different is apprehensive when it comes to new things and unless it's ultra-competitive, it gets left by the wayside. I've heard it said that Melee is about technical skill, whilst Smash 4 is more about mindgames and punishes. I think that within Smash 4, Singles revolves around those mindgames and punishes, whilst Squads/Quads/Squaddles/WhateverWe'reCalling4v4 revolves around communication and strategising. However, as the number of remaining players drop, it moves more towards 1v1 when you need to be more reliant on playing smart, and tricking your opponent into doing something unsafe. So there's an interesting mix that varies over the course of the match.
Should 4v4 be considered a serious event like Singles and Doubles? Yeah.
Can we convince the majority of the Smash community of this? I wish.
) It was not run by myself and the local Smash community, but by another group - as such, the current rules and setup are a bit different to what's going on here. We're still getting the stream up and running for Smash 4, but we'll (probably) stream all our events once the system gets set up.
