Would you trade variety for balance?

[Quillion]

It's subtly implied (at least, I think...) that Sakurai is very reluctant to do balance patching because it ruins the varied amount of playstyles of the game. It's not hard to see where he's coming from, since Fragile Speedsters are just inherently favored by the core gameplay. This is a completely understandable position.

If balance were as close as can be to ideal, the speed gap between the fastest characters and the slowest characters wouldn't be that big. This way, not only can the slowest characters keep up better with the faster characters, but it also evens out the relative skill caps between characters. Yes, that is important; if you are more skilled with one character than another is skilled with another character, you deserve to win. Skill trumps cap-level effectiveness in an ideal game.

On the other hand, there are much less playstyles the game has to offer. You have less characters like Bowser and Ganondorf who rely less on tech skill and more on reads to get solid hits and characters like Samus who relies on ranging to make up for a fairly weak melee game. Judging by fans of both Smash U and traditional fighters, this style of play does appeal to some people (not us, of course).

So what do you think? Would the trade-off of variety be worth it?

 

[Combo Blaze]

I preffer buffs over nerfs. Make everything OP, fast and fun. Balance shouldn't only mean slowing things down and making things weaker.

 

[Quillion]

I preffer buffs over nerfs. Make everything OP, fast and fun. Balance shouldn't only mean slowing things down and making things weaker.

But wouldn't those buffs reduce the variety? What do you think of that?

 

[EPsilon933]

Why have more tournament viable characters if you end up with less diversity among that cast? The idea of having more tournament viable characters is to increase character diversity in competitive play, but making every character more similar to each other goes against that idea

 

[Flippy Flippersen]

Falco is slow he's top 3 on most tierlists. Falcon is the fastest in the game he has hard matchups against fox falco and sheik, 2 of which are way slower than him.
Speed isn't everything. Truly balancing the full cast means either making every character a fox reskin or a new set of toptiers. (Albeit with less terrible characters) I like fox but I don't like him enough to sacrifice all other characters just play a different color of fox every week of the year.

 

[Stride]

With how bad some Smash characters are and the reasons that they're so bad, they could easily be buffed without sacrificing their uniqueness; at worst they would lose their endearing uselessness. Melee Zelda isn't going to become less interesting because she gains more than 2 viable moves in neutral. Melee Game & Watch mains aren't going to complain that having a functional shield takes all the personality out of their character.

There are ways to improve the characters without homogenising them; even if there are some properties that any character would benefit from (high mobility, good hitboxes, etc.) there's no reason to suppose that improving a character would mean giving them all of those properties in the same way, or at all.

 

[Massive]

No, I wouldn't, and fortunately we don't have to.

 

[Quillion]

With how bad some Smash characters are and the reasons that they're so bad, they could easily be buffed without sacrificing their uniqueness; at worst they would lose their endearing uselessness. Melee Zelda isn't going to become less interesting because she gains more than 2 viable moves in neutral. Melee Game & Watch mains aren't going to complain that having a functional shield takes all the personality out of their character.

There are ways to improve the characters without homogenising them; even if there are some properties that any character would benefit from (high mobility, heavy weight, good hitboxes, etc.) there's no reason to suppose that improving a character would mean giving them all of those properties in the same way, or at all.

But think about the prospect that making the characters better would make the skill-to-reward ratio much lower and skill caps would be uneven. This is very important because if this is ignored, the winner would win because of the character alone and not because of skill with the character.

 

[Spak]

If you make the game completely balanced with no diversity, that means you only have (effectively) one character with multiple skins. I would rather have a non-balanced diverse game because we could always ban a character if he's super OP.

 

[Deleted member]

i think knowing that some characters are lower down the teir list is still what gives the game its friendly fun type of feel, people know that the character is substantially weaker than others means its not serious and thats what makes it fun, so not i wouldnt switch it for the world.

 

[Quillion]

i think knowing that some characters are lower down the teir list is still what gives the game its friendly fun type of feel, people know that the character is substantially weaker than others means its not serious and thats what makes it fun, so not i wouldnt switch it for the world.

Now here's a position I don't get: why would competitive-level balancing hurt its friendly fun appeal? There are already broken characters at the casual level (not implying that casual Melee exists anymore) and competitive balancing wouldn't change that.

 

[Binx]

You can have a character that is slow but has other strengths, for instance bowser could have super armor on certain moves, or he could have same fast long range attacks that can help him combo into his other moves, for instance his up b is actually a pretty good move but because it cant combo into kills it stops him from being viable. He lives a long time but his recovery is so poor, what if bowser could up b then jump, there would be all kinds of ways for him to hit you up use his aerial ub and then jump into uair, this would probably still leave him as a worse character than fox but as a much better character than current bowser.

I think balancing the game in that sort of way could add a lot of character depth and versatility. I love melee just the way it is but I feel like it could be a slightly better game if more characters were viable but the engine remained the same.

 

[BBOY15]

You can have both variety and near-perfect balance. It just takes a lot of trial-and-error and adjusting. Just look at Project M; there isn't even a tier list because it's so well balanced.

 

[Spak]

You can have both variety and near-perfect balance. It just takes a lot of trial-and-error and adjusting. Just look at Project M; there isn't even a tier list because it's so well balanced.

It doesn't have a tier list right now because they are constantly updating and balancing. There were heavy nerfs and changes to nearly everyone last patch, showing that the game is FAR from near-perfect balance. They are still working out the rough edges after the Great Buff of 3.0

 

[Quillion]

You can have both variety and near-perfect balance. It just takes a lot of trial-and-error and adjusting. Just look at Project M; there isn't even a tier list because it's so well balanced.

It doesn't have a tier list right now because they are constantly updating and balancing. There were heavy nerfs and changes to nearly everyone last patch, showing that the game is FAR from near-perfect balance. They are still working out the rough edges after the Great Buff of 3.0

Another issue (which I think keeps getting ignored) is that some characters take less skill to use at top level than others. And it's just unfair if one character takes no skill at all yet is better than all the rest (like Brawl Meta Knight and pre-1.0.6 Smash U Diddy).