LOL @ the Ken dickriding in that SWF post. I’ve played Ken before and know that he’s a total monster, but at least give CPU his credit for winning. EVO rules were for with items on, so saying that items were the only reason he won is kinda pointless. In a sense it’d almost be like saying that Ken only won all those Melee tourneys because of Marth or something lame like that. Use what is available to you. I’m not a fan of items either (although it does seem like one of the few ways to make Brawl interesting), but it’s not like they were turned on for just that one match, or they were only usable for CPU. To say that Ken is the better player is one thing, but there’s no need to try to shit on CPU’s accomplishment in Ken’s defense. What’s that lame phrase the smash community loves so much? “No johns”? 
I gotta say that “analysis” reeks of SWF bias, but that’s beside the point, but there are a couple points which really piss me off.
Go counterpick go.
I don’t get all this “Ken was the better player” crap, honestly. In some aspects, yeah. Technical skill comparison is no contest. However, he was having incredible difficulty handling the “one-dimensional” CPU in spite of it. Either chalk it up to lack of character match up experience or better timing to CPU. The lack of experience should be even more apparent thanks to that first match and Marth actually trying to attack an invincible ROB.
I’m not seeing the point in making this statement. Who cares what dealt the final blow? The cry of “cheap” is the cry of the scrub.
Go tiers go.
Beautiful thing this game is. No such thing as guaranteed combos. Even in traditional fighters, though, there are instances where normal follow-ups can be snuffed by super. It’s not exactly the first time this kind of thing has ever been possible in a fighter.
WOW is this twisted as hell. Ken both was missing a lot of knowledge vs. ROB and had a bad matchup in terms of the concept of Smashballs. Marth’s sucks. ROB’s don’t. When factoring in items into play, Marth drops a good notch, and ROB goes up considerably. The matchup does indeed go in ROBs favor.
Right. Items were in play, CPU knew items better. CPU won. The game that was placed in front of him for competition HE KNEW BETTER than Ken. What’s so hard to understand here?
What? A stage that causes some characters a disadvantage? HEAVEN FORBID! The question one must really ask is: is this a stage that gives such an incredible advantage to one character that it guarantees victory? Who knows at this time. There’s far too much still unknown before taking it out of play. Without it in play, we’ll never know for sure.
This is the whole problem I have had w/ SWF for YEARS, ever since I ditched the community. The problem is they want the least amount of disadvantages as possible in the name of “balance”. That’s fine and all… when you’ve spent a few years proving something is so imbalanced that it becomes the only logical choice. We’re so early in this game’s life, and we’re watching a community not really give the game a good try as is. Just adopting historical views on a previous game in the series. Oh sure, they’ve spent a couple of weeks on it before writing it off, as the majority view wants to emulate Melee as best as possible. No one will give it the time of day because no one’s used to change.
Another big issue I’ve had is the typical view of skill from most SWFers. Technical skill is nice and all, but that barrier should be the LAST one should have to hit to become competitive in a game. Execution shouldn’t be the barometer for skill. The ability to outplay your opponent shouldn’t be the one who can hit the buttons in the right manner at the right time each time. Spacing, mindgames, and adaptation should be far more treasured. In a game like Brawl, when you remove strategical aspects from the game, you limit those skills. The more you limit them, the more prominent technical skill becomes.
That being said, the future of items play is still way up in the air. It hasn’t been explored at all, really, though what has been explored has found a lot that initially wrote off as broken to be unknown. They may just as likely roll back in that favor too. We don’t know yet.
Take Smashballs, for instance - the biggest hotbutton item. At this point, it’s debateable on their validity. On one end, the fight over the Smashball adds strategic depth, but a number of Final Smashes pose a big problem: invincibility. The problem with invincibility is not “that it gets cheap kills”, but it dumbs down the game to run and chase for 10-20 seconds. The feasibility of such run and chase is irrelevant. Once it’s active, a number of Final Smashes put the game to a halt until it’s over. IMO, this part of it doesn’t contribute any strategic depth, in fact takes a bit away. Due to the fact there’s no reliable method’s of breaking a Smashball on spawn without being easily interrupted (yet), I can’t say they shouldn’t be in play. However, as people discover good setups for quick breaking (I did see ROB do a nice one that looked difficult to punish), it may make them too powerful to the point where “run and wait for Smashball” may be such a strong option that it becomes the only one.
I think my point of all this is that we can’t say one way or another on anything as of yet. There’s a few stages that are painfully obvious of their imbalance (NPC/Summit/Temple/WarioWare/MarioBros), but we’re all so inexperienced in this game, turning everything off so early on just seems so… scrubby. We should be giving the game its fair shake for a while, even if it means playing in a way that is “not liked”. If only to explore the game’s true depth.
As it has been said many many times before, itemless play isn’t necessary an illegitimate mode of play, but neither is items play. Hell, Time and Coin might be legitimate. You don’t know. I mean, look at how they “fixed” Time mode. Kill followed by suicide tactics back in the Melee days are pretty impossible, considering one would not only have to kill, but avoid their opponent for 15 seconds before suiciding in order to not give them a point. It might actually be viable in teams play. Who knows right now. Explore the game with the various options for more than an hour with an open mind and you might find something new that’s actually worthwhile.
Even Tomo Ohira said that Watson only beat him because of cheap moves. 
But nevermind we all know that Tomo was the biggest scrub ever.
c-c-c-c-combo breaker
But seriously, where’s the point when you use a 100% sound and safe strategy but still get punished for that?
So it’s again the items that make CPU better than Ken?
Because items won’t be part of the standard ruling. This was clear to many SWFers beforehand.
Even Keits joked about Skyworld in the finals.
But you HAVE to look at the history.
Items were used in tournaments for nearly 2 years in Melee on the West Coast. They REALLY gave items a chance. You can see a match from the legendary series between [media=youtube]UQGbwERf4eA"[/media] from TG4 in 2003.
But eventually items were abandoned just like in SSB64.
You can’t critisize them for being sick and tired of giving items a chance again.
Don’t know where you have THAT from. ^^
Tech skill was NEVER ranked above everything else, it’s always the mindgames and everyone on smashboards with a sane mind will agree on this.
In top level play mindgames will always beat tech skill, just look at the matches between Ken and Bombsoldier for this.
Tech skill may beat everything else when you can COMPLETELY lock and shut down your opponent and don’t give him time to do anything but this was extremely hard even in Melee and practically impossible in Brawl due to the lower hit-stun.
As said above, SWF won’t be messing around with items for 2 years again.
Even the EVO staff said they will make an itemless tournament (of course in case Brawl makes it into the lineup).
Saying “I used a cheap move” and “wah wah I lost because of a cheap move” are two totally different things.
Nothing in this game is 100% safe. That’s the beauty of this game.
Yes. CPU knew items better than Ken. Plain and simple. Had Ken known a lot more about items (such as the bumper’s KO ability, or ROB’s FS being invincible) he more than likely won. Items got the win, but not because they randomly fell in CPU’s favor, but CPU had better knowledge and MADE USE of the advantages and mitigated the disadvantages. This is what made him better.
Except that HERE, they WERE. They knew well ahead of time. Point’s moot.
You’re talking about the person who wants Summit/NPC/Temple in play here. Of course he’ll make a joke, but the fact an imbalance exists doesn’t immediately strike a stage down without question. Wanna come back in a couple years after seeing consistent problems and try this again? Or just cower under the scrubdom while the big boys actually give it the time of day?
First off, you’re looking at the history of a different game. SSB64 is not Melee. Melee is not Brawl. The game has changed on a multitude of levels each game that changed how to play the game.
Second, you’re talking someone who watched that video LIVE. I’ve been around a lot longer than you think, buddy. And I’ve been an arguer for items in Melee since the beginning. Only when the argument of exploding capsules being “detrimental” to play did the pro-items movement step aside then. Funny enough, only a small few of them even give a fuck about the series anymore. It put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths when the scene turned into what it did.
I know you’ll instantly cry over semantics, but it’s like if we saw Akuma pop up in A3, saw that he still had his air fireball, and banned him again immediately after.
Finally, I’m not sure what you’re getting at with this video even for Melee. TG4, no one had experienced a capable Marth, and at the time, Ken was LEAGUES ahead everyone there. He took TG4 with ease. The only advantage Sam had over Ken was a superior item knowledge, which far from helped him (he didn’t even kill once).
I very well can. They’re all infants in terms of competitive gaming. Most of them jumped in with Melee. The concept of a new game meaning a fresh start is completely missing from them, especially considering that the options to ban things from play are simple and available from the start. Meanwhile, those that have experienced OTHER competitive games that have gotten sequels understand the concept.
Uh huh. And this belief gets shat on the second you listen to the majority and all the QQing over no l-cancelling, no wavedashing, near-no dash dancing and overall no “advanced techniques” from Melee. THIS IS TECHNICAL SKILL, and it’s been treasured most by the SWF crowd, even though they’d not like to admit it.
EVO is considering an itemless tournament IN SPITE of their difference of opinion. Why? 'cause they don’t want to be the only tourney in town to build interest in a game. The same exact thing happened to Apoc when he wanted A3 way back when. He told them it’d build interest in the game again. Ponder told him the same thing he told us after EVO: build the interest first, then we’ll talk. That’s our next goal. We’ve already seen success, and now we just need to prove its stability.
Holy crap! I didn’t know this vid was on Youtube!
I wonder if people know that Sam picked Icicle Mountain for the second match and beat Ken on that stage, and then Ken picked Mute City for the third match and won the set. This match, in part, helped make what is now known as “Dave’s Stupid Rule.”
I should have been at Evo, dammit!
And here it is…
While they say they didnt practice ‘much’, the next sentence goes on to describe HOURS of research on all the characters and stages. Like it or not, this is probably a ton more than anyone else at evo had put into it.
You are amazingly 3 months late to this party. The proposed ruleset had almost everything on. SWF freaked, and EVO decided to compromise between the rules SRK was throwing around and what SWF wanted (less stages, no items). The result is the Evo ruleset, with about half the items on a quite a few perfectly acceptable stages banned.
PLEASE do your research on how this all went down before you continue to make inane and irrelevant points. PLEASE.
Stop this. Its irrelevant who is a better playing without items. Ken and CPU both knowingly showed up to a tourny with different rules. With those rules, CPU was the superior player. He beat Ken in two separate sets. Who wins in a different style of tournament means nothing. The argument for items has never, ever, EVER been that “the same people who win without items will win with items”. The argument is that the results will be just as consistent as any other fighting game tournament… meaning that if we ran the same event with the same people again, CPU would win it again.
PLEASE make points that actually have meaning in the discussion in the future. These do not.
So um, basically…CPU won because he put in the research and the work? How exactly is that “the worse player winning”? That day, CPU was the better player because he did his homework and used everything to his advantage. Flat out.
But that’s exactly what he said. 
"…he [Mike Watson] pulled cheap moves all the time and won…"
That’s very arguable and I think you know it.
Like I said before, it’s kinda sad that the newcomer item player beat the sound playing smash legend “just” with hours of practising items and stages.
That really showed the power of items and how they can beat 5 years of competitive experience. And before you say that Melee is a different game, the general mindgames can be applied on Brawl as can be things like DI.
Yes, that’s why they didn’t take the tournament seriously, nor do they take the winner of this tournament seriously now.
Yes, SSB is different from Melee as is brawl and fact is that items are banned in both SSB and Melee in spite of different gameplay.
The only things I cry about are insults and rudeness, other than that you can write whatever you like.
I don’t remember Akuma being banned in A2 or even being top tier (in fact I don’t remember seeing good Akuma players except for Jeff Schaefer), so I don’t see why he should’ve been banned in the beginning of A3. :\
Nah, I was just posting the vid to show that there actually were tournaments with items for those who maybe don’t believe that, nothing more.
Tech skill, very roughly speaking, is the ability to perform difficult combo strings, it’s similar to what people call “flashiness” in traditional fighters (for example Mattsun would be considered a techskill Ken in ST).
What you mean are just the ATs that are need to be able to keep up with the competitive pace (except for WD maybe).
That’s exactly what I mean.
EVO will adapt to please the majority of the community and won’t support it’s own community. Don’t get me wrong but that way item play is doomed before it can unfold because it doesn’t even get backup from it’s own big tournament.
That’s why CPU doesn’t get the appreciation he maybe deserves.
I did read the threads I could find concerning the EVO ruling but unfortunately all of them didn’t mention how the rules were formed. The only thing I read on SWF was that Mr Wizard was invited to the SBR but didn’t take their ideas into account.
Seems like I searched too unthoroughly.
I was only trying to show him why SWF doesn’t respect him. I apologize if it sounded like it was my own, harsh opinion.
Are you guys serious? You guys are still arguing about this? And one of the people arguing still has his "No Brawl @ Evo"avatar. XD
Oh well, Stubborn people proven to be stubborn.
God…Please get this: When SWF members tell you Ken was the better player, it wasn’t just based on technical skill and execution. The spacing of his attacks was more accurate, and his decisions in close range were generally more astute. Whenever items were not on the field, CPU was being tossed around like a rag doll. However, once a momentum-shifting item appeared, he raced for it and abused it. The fact that the match-up gives ROB the advantage as it is without items makes Ken’s stand very respectable. He’s someone who put in YEARS of his life into Melee, and dominated because of it. His experience meant nothing against the randomness of items.
I still believe there’s a huge difference between “dealing” with items and “dealing” with Cable’s AHVB rape or Chun-Li’s huge cancel window on her c.mk and amazing ground game. Every aspect of our traditional fighters has to be practiced and honed, whereas usage of items in Smash is extremely easy. People talk about the “hours” of practice CPU put into the items. The fact that somone could spend MONTHS practicing using their character’s non-item game and get gimped by that little of an amount is ridiculous.
I truly think the Brawl ruleset needs to be looked over again. The current competetive structure of the game doesn’t balance out the game’s aspects whatsoever, nor does it help balance the cast all that much.
No one here is saying Ken’s trash. Not by a long shot. All the people that made top 8 were top notch. What we’re saying is that in this scenario, CPU was the better player. The reason behind it should be totally irrelevant.
Claiming that items are “easy to use” shows your ignorance on the matter. Sure, anyone can figure out in a second what each one does. Learning to do what you need to right, as well as to stop people from doing something right is a whole different ball of wax, and takes a great deal of knowledge and skill to be adept. The level required? Kinda depends on your opponent. A fool player that rushes each item and activates/wields/fires instantly without forethought is going to get owned by the person who knows how to handle the actions themselves. Someone who mentally stops and thinks of the current situation at hand, decides the best course of action, be it obtain the item or no, and then, if obtaining the item, figures out when to do the various actions WITH said item, doesn’t come to you in moments. Complaining that lack of knowledge in a KEY FACTOR of the game’s design is a little on the scrubby side. It’s no different then complaining that you didn’t know about guard breaks in MvC2 when Cable makes you eat AHVBx# after a new character enters, even if that character could have indeed done something about it.
At this point, most of us would rather have no brawl at all at evo than have it without items and stages.
Ken was absolutely the better player in every aspect of the game. Except items. CPU’s capability of using the items (including the inherent randomness of them) was superior to Ken’s. Thus, he won. End of discussion.
I don’t even know why people are bothering to argue that point.
CPU was the better player because he won (note the bolded portion of your post.) No one forced ken or any of the people at evo who don’t like items to participate, it’s not like someone told him items were on 2 seconds before the match he along with everyone else knew items would be on way before evo started.
If I agree to play azen for $500 while blindfolded and handcuffed while using ganon I would have no one else to blame except myself for the loss because I agreed to it in the first place so all that matters is that he won and I lost.
I don’t think this is true. But I guess neither of us can prove it.
I would like to point out that a single tournament does not prove a better player, just a better player that day.
Right, so that makes CPU’s victory meaningless and it’s totally okay to sit there and insult his abilities as a player, both cheapening the match and indirectly bashing Ken in the process (Because remember, this is the person that beat him :P).
Seriously, I would not be surprised if CPU never bothered to participate in a tournament again because of this BS.
I don’t remember saying all that stuff.
Seriously, man. You need to calm down.
Right, you didn’t. Sorry.
My tangent more applies to the thread at large. Which is getting to where it needs to be closed, honestly.
If being good with items means all other forms of skill is not even close to as important doesn’t that kinda prove that items remove all aspects of those skills in favor of items ?
At this stage in the life of this game? No it doesn’t. It overshadows other aspects right now simply because even the most rudimentary functions of items aren’t understood, so those that do have a huge advantage over those that don’t. To pull a Melee example, those that understood l-cancelling had such an advantage over those that didn’t that the rest of their game could and would be totally mitigated. It was an essential piece of knowledge that instantly set you a great deal apart from those that didn’t understand.
I believe that once people really get down to understanding the mechanics of items play well, it will integrate into the rest of their game. Not overshadow, not replace, not vanish, but mesh with every other aspect.
I fully agree that w/o Smashballs in play, CPU most likely would not have won, but the fact is, they were, CPU knew they were, Ken knew they were, they picked their characters and stages accordingly, and the outcome was that CPU won. Does that outrightly mean they shouldn’t be in play? No. Not yet. Why? Both sides managed to get Smashballs when they could.
One player wasn’t always getting free Smashballs, CPU just was able to put his to better use. ROB’s FS is very good, Marth’s… not so much. Does that mean they shouldn’t be in play? No. Not yet. It adjusts tiers a bit, but that’s not necessarily a problem. If they actually show that they have foolproof methods of quick breaking and get to the point where “wait for Smashball, get Smashball, own” becomes such a dominant strategy that it becomes the only one, they might get the boot. That’s how it’s supposed to work.