First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Lee Harris. I was a leader in the Smash community up until a few weeks ago. I hosted large tournaments, was in the power rankings for the state with the 2nd largest Smash scene, and I was a member of the Smash Back Room (the private room that makes the tier lists, rule sets, etc).
Coming from a community that is about to shit itself, I’d like to post a few observations on my way over here.
1. Don’t ever, ever, ever have a private room where important decisions are made.
You can read the long version or the short:
2. EDITED: If something is absurdly, obviously broken and it is hurting the community, don’t be afraid to ban it.
I know this goes totally against everything that SRK is about and I have the same logic as 99% of people here, but since Smash wasn’t meant to be competitive, we had to ban quite a bit of things.
Allowing horrible things into the game is another issue with the current Smash community and rule set. I won’t even bring up the issue of MK being banned (even though over half the community wants him banned). That issue is still completely debatable and I agree that it’s too early to ban him yet. There are things, however, that are clearly broken that we’ve found from tournament experience. I’ll bring up the issue of a stage list.
Basically, the thought process of several SBR members who don’t play the game was, “let’s use it in tournaments for a year because there isn’t 100% refutable proof that it’s broken. Then if it’s found broken, we’ll ban it.”
That sounds nice and all, but there were tons of things allowed that were definitely broken and since it hadn’t happened in tournament yet, a few people wanted to allow it. Because of that, there were tons of stages that allowed for infinite off one grab, wall infinites off one down tilt, stage kills at 50%, stages where it is impossible to kill someone camping, etc. I know it’s hard for non-Smash players to understand, but to lose a match to someone you’re clearly better than because they counterpicked you to a stage where one grab means death is so fucking frustrating that it makes you want to punt a baby like a football. Add on top of that the infinite grabs D3 has on several characters and the broken character of MK, and the community’s spirit is dying. Attendance in most areas has dropped at least 50% recently.
Back in the Melee days, the community was tight because there was… how do I put this… a lot less “gay.” People played through the finals at their hardest and at every tournament the entire building would be watching the finals with excitement. In Brawl, you get maybe 5 people watching the finals because everyone is so pissed at the end of the day. Everyone gets infinited, killed by a ridiculous stage, or they get frustrated losing to MK because you fight an uphill battle regardless of character choice.
3. Don’t play a game that has fucking TRIPPING in it!..
Anywho, there’s my intro post. I’ve been playing a lot of GGAC, 3S, and SFIV when I get the chance (Arcade UFO and Planet Zero are both relatively close ;)).
You’re the same Lee Harris who won the GameStop tournament, right? We’ve met in real life once before. We played Brawl against each other. You beat my ass. Glad to see that both of us have moved on to bigger, better things. If you need any help, find the appropriate thread and don’t hesitate to ask. Most of SRK is actually pretty helpful.
I ain’t the Welcome Wagon. My typical welcoming address to someone is “Who the fuck are you?”, but you already answered that, so we move on to the next stage.
First of all, I’d like to point out that, contrary to what some retards here might say, Melee/Brawl etc. are “real games”. They’re even “real fighters”. They’re extremely unorthodox and require a completely different set of rules and mentality when playing compared to more traditional fare, and they obviously require some tweaking in the default rules in order to be made more fair and competitive, but they’re still fighters. So I wouldn’t say your transition is necessarily an “improvement”, despite how you’re feeling right now thanks to gay and drama in the Smash community, but more of a sidestep.
Regardless, I hope you find enjoyment among the more traditional fighters.
re: MetaKnight
It just so happens I was reading on another thread (the SFIV Prima Guide thread, where the guy who wrote the Brawl guide is responding to criticism that his guide was shitty) this issue of banning Metaknight recently, which I found a bit surprising. I am a very casual Brawl player - I’m interested in getting better, but between having no one to play against and Real Life? getting in the way (baby on the way in less than two weeks!), it’s kinda impossible - but I try to follow up on what’s going on in the tournament scene. Last I heard (around August) was that Metaknight and Snake were god tier. So has MK gone into a tier by himself all of a sudden? What makes him so much better now as opposed to three months ago? Or is it a kind of a slow decline, where he is just seen as being that much better than everyone else?
re: Banning
BTW, concerning your story about the SBR and your calls for banning MK early, you do realise that the SF community (SRK in particular) is extremely hesitant about banning anything? I have to see, based on what you wrote, much of the arguments against banning things that are “broken” are familiar: It generally takes time to tell whether something is actually broken or just really good, and if you ban things outright without rigorous analysis, you’ll never know which category they fall into. This week’s broken shit could be tomorrow’s merely good tactic. And typically, calls for bans have traditionally been 99% scrub whining. I’m not saying this applies to you necessarily, but know that as a community, SRK frowns on banning things. Hell, if the equivalent of Smash infinites and getting killed for one mistake were a problem, there would probably be almost no fighters to play!
SummaryPlz: The things you called upon to be banned in Smash don’t sound much different or any worse than what players of MvC2, CvS2, 3S, etc. put up with routinely.
Welcome to SRK, and good luck in your ventures with other games.
That was a pretty good read. Have you thought about writing more on your transition? It could be a good read or useful for others who might consider or are coming from Smash to other games (if the community is as assbackwards as you say it is, there’ll probably be more soon enough)
You’ll find a lot of people on SRK disagree with your point #2, or they would apply it in a VERY narrow fashion. You can look at the SC debates for that. Your opinions on banning seem closer to the SC community then the Capcom community at first glance.
I think a fair compare and contrast here would be between the Smash community and the SC community, and banlists. I’ll say this, while SRK disagrees with the SC banlist- I think it is well reasoned, just in a way that SRK folks don’t like necessarily.
Question- do you believe that SRK would do a better job of running Smash then the Smash community right now? Also, if Brawl is completely broken- why not do what the Capcom community does, reject the game and go back to Melee?
As for transitioning, the best way to get traditional fighting games down.
Get a 360. Pick up two games. VF5 and SF2HDR. Both are dirt cheap, $20 and $15 respectively. Get a 360 and PS3 stick, or a dual-convert custom. While 360 is better for netplay and learning, tournies are run PS3 standard due to people wanting to use their PS2 sticks, since the PS2 was the sole console for the past 4-5 years.
VF will teach you 3d fighter basics, if you can find comp. Most people have quit the game. SC4 is a semi-acceptable replacement if you want a game people actually play, but online play is questionable even on the 360 in SC4. Stick to 5/5 matches unless nothing else is avaliable. VF5 the online is fine though.
SF2HDR- if you become a good ST player, you’ll be decent in any good 2d fighter. This game will be a harsh mistress though.
> Question- do you believe that SRK would do a better job of running Smash then the Smash community right now? Also, if Brawl is completely broken- why not do what the Capcom community does, reject the game and go back to Melee?
I’m not Lee, but I thought I’d tackle this.
Regarding the first question, I think the short answer is “no”. The primary reason being, and I could be wrong here, that the majority of the Smash COmmunity has a different mindset than the traditional SRK mindset.
Unless I’m mistaken, the majority of the Smash Community only plays Smash and, moreover, has only ever played Smash. Thus, their history is completely different to those on SRK who grew up playing SF, or playingi in tournaments that ultimately were using the rules and run by people of the mindset that grew up with SF. SRK mindset has evolved from its humble scrubby roots of “no throws” to allowing pretty much anything that doesn’t lock up the game, regardless of bad match ups or character imbalances. This is primarily because of generally agreed-upon arcade standard, which has long been immutable after the game is releashed. If things are sufficiently egregious, they will ban it (Akuma in ST), but it’s extremely rare and usually not done. If the entire game is considered to be too flawed, they’ll simply chuck it and play something else.
Compare this to Smash. Because Smash rules are so malleable and they never had an arcade version per se, its players are used to tweaking and removing things they don’t like naturally. They eventually evolved a form of tournament-style rules, but in doing so they had to chuck a considerable portion of the game. In fact, I’d say their history is likely the opposite of SRK’s (or SRK’s predecessors to be more accurate) - whereas SRk players banned fewer and fewer things as time went along, Smash banned more and more things to make the game more “fair” (someone correct me if I’m wrong).
Now which approach is better is entirely subjective. Both sides have different communities with largely different mindsets. Both mindsets have their strengths and weaknesses. Even with players that overlap, I don’t think there’s, say, a 3S/Smash player (I’m sure at least one exists!) who is favour or banning Genei-jin Yun or not banning certain stages in Brawl. One group’s mindset doesn’t necessarily work for the other. SRK’s mindset might make the players who put up with the crap better at the games overall, at the expense of the many who get turned off quickly. Smash’s mindset might be considered to be “mollycoddling” players, but it could result in more overall players getting to enjoy the game.
Of course, there will be players on SRK’s side who would love to ban the likes of SAIII Yun and SAII Chun in order to see more characters at tournaments, and I’m sure (as Lee has pointed out) that there are players who think banning MK is scrub whining, and besides, if you ban him, the next character in the list (Snake?) becomes broken. But those are (definitely in the case of SRK, not sure about Smash) minority viewpoints, or at least not viewpoints of the majority of those who make the rules. For the most part, the viewpoints are incompatible.
Thus, I don’t think SRK would necessarily do a “better” job of running Smash. It would merely be different, and you’d have a different set of people (possibly more people) bitching.
As for the second question - going back to Melee - is there a sufficient contingent of Smash players who are disaffected by Brawl to warrant such a move? How many of those 6 million Brawl players play at a level that the stuff Lee mentions would affect them adversely? I know from my experience, most of my friends actually prefer the feel of Brawl to Melee (shitty tripping not included), but then again, most of us are not Smash tournament players.
I noticed some of the smash guys like SilentSpectre and etc still play Melee. Meh. I guess besides that the community is complete garbage now, not surprising. Seeing as Brawl was a hot buttcrust sandwich special. I only played it bcuz it had Wolf in it.
I see the fighting games your picking up are good to start off with. GGAC is good, and SF4 is already praised as another fg staple. 3S ,however, I can assume won’t be getting too much play in the future. SF4 is on it’s way to console in a few months, and 3S already gets a lot of hate from most folks so you probably won’t have too many ppl to play in it. I’m sure you still have a wii, and it seems like you are surrounded by competition so you should order Tatsunoko vs Capcom as a replacement for 3S. or even STHD remix for 360 or P3.
Nice, humble introduction. I think the problem that most new SRK members have is that they come off to a lot of people as if they’re entitled to something, when the community doesn’t really owe them anything. Respect given is respect earned.
Everyone else already gave some good points, but let me say this at the very least: SRK is not a magical mountain of democracy where the community decides everything. There have been many times when the competitive community has decided something (example: you should be able to switch Super Arts after a victory in 3rd Strike, GGXX Accent Core should be a featured tournament game) only to be completely overturned by the Evo tournament organizers, most of who no longer play any of the featured fighters competitively. There is also, you guessed it, a private admin-only section of SRK where these rule sets are discussed and decided. This is a double-edged sword, since if you let the community decide everything, we’d be playing Super Turbo, MVC2, CVS2 and 3rd Strike for 100 more years despite the multitude of quality fighting games released recently or soon-to-be released. Or, there may have been a banned character or tactic due to scrub complaints. Fortunately, we also have a precedent (Japanese tournament rules) for reaching a lot of decisions.
Also, these are only the rule sets for Evo, not other tournaments. There are regional tournaments everywhere else, and if the community strongly leans towards a slightly different rule set than Evo, the Evo rules won’t be adapted everywhere.
The nice thing about most of the games SRK plays, especially the newer ones, is that they’re designed with competitive play in mind. That doesn’t mean there’s any less bullshit to be had, but it does mean that we’re much less likely to NEED to ban something, so it isn’t going to become a fervent topic of discussion like, say, banning Metaknight. For example, El Fuerte was discovered to have an infinite in SF4, everyone went nuts, and then everyone realized he still sucked. Japan gives him a “C” or “D” tier ranking, even with the infinite. No point in banning a tactic if the character isn’t unbalanced.
I hope you get a lot out of SRK and enjoy the transition into new fighters.
I think 3S will survive SF4. As many people hate 3S, there are just as many who think 3S is far and away the best SF. You’ll never hear me say that outside of losing a bet though.
BTW I wouldn’t worry about SNK secret gnomes in Zurich coming up with weird rules. There are checks on anything stupid that happens, since there are other major tournaments, and other games. A bad ruleset can kill a game, but we’ve got other games, so it’s no big deal.
While there may be a private rule place, it pretty much applies only to Evo. Other places often do their own thing, especially for non-Capcom games. SC4 is a good example of this.
Also, with modern fighters such as SC4 and SF4, they often get patched after console release, which makes rulesets more evolved. SC4 got a post-release patch that fixed most problems. SF4 should as well.
Smash is not a real fighting game, its a party game for people that sucks at real fighting games. The only reason smash is at evo is because of money. Your typical scrubs overnumber real OG gamers,so that brings more money to the table for them. It’s sad. All these worthy fighting games and smash wasting space
Hey dude, welcome to the forums. I can sort of feel you on the point about smash, I honestly liked the game a lot, but after coming off hiatus and getting a feel for “competitive” play, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Tastes change Im sure, but I will admit even after having played standard 2d fighters long before it, smash has helped my overall game surprisingly.
Thats good to hear your a local texan, you should post in the Houston and Austin threads respectively, we are always searching for new blood and we’ll be more then glad to get you started in the right track in your new venture.
TBH, if you intend to make visits to arcades, I will admit there will be AC to play, but a new game called Blazblue came out, so you should give that a shot if you liked GG (austin has it now, but not quite yet in Houston)
It’s not that 3S gets a ton of hate…it’s more so the people that hate it are just very vocal about it and it’s easy to hate on cuz the game hasn’t changed a whole lot in the years that we’ve been playing it competitively. Outside of the mind games people use and the people that become skilled at them…the Japanese still mainly kill us in it outside of J.Wong and a couple other US players and that causes anyone who already had a distaste for the game to completely hate it. It’s rare to see anything but top 3 or 4 in the finals of a major 3S tournament. YCK make it tough as balls for anyone to move up into the higher part of the bracket unless you really know what you’re doing. Most of Evo staff generally having a distaste for the game doesn’t help either. It’s obvious that they’ve kept the game at Evo the last couple years simply because there’s a lot of 3S fans that love playing 3S.
The thing is…there’s a lot of people who simply like the way the game plays competitively and still being the biggest game at Evo last year means a lot. Many people still post in the 3S threads and most east coast major 3S tournaments still pull big numbers for 3S. There’s many ways to play it online now and you can basically “purchase” the game for free with those new online tools. Even with SFIV coming out Final Round looks like it’s going to do another 100 + man bracket for the game.
I definitely agree with slamming this whole “back room” nonsense.
I don’t agree with this idea that a non-tourney player is necessarily unqualified to analyze a situation and make a judgment call. (DISCLAIMER - I’m not saying that the “back room” individuals you alluded to were in the right, nor that there shouldn’t be debate.)
… I think a lot of issues with Smash could be solved if David Sirlin were to be in charge of developing the next one. I’m serious.
Well, to be fair, it’s not considered as a fighting game in Japan - belonging to its own genre - “vs. Action”. The problem is that while in Japan there have been other games in the “vs. Action” genre, Smash 64 was the first game in that genre to be shown in US.
On a related note, welcome here Lee. I knew Brawl would begin the segregation of yet again the segregated Smash community, but hey…
Welcome aboard, you’ll find banning debates are always rather heated. I think the only thing people tend to be okay banning is boss characters (assuming they retain all of their boss-ness, in SNK games they can be playable).
Also, you’re one lucky bastard to be living close to arcades to play at.
That Lee is from Louisiana but we’ve played in tournament before. He’s a cool dude
There’s this list that a guy named Ankoku was composing. He used some fancy math and calculated, based on tournament results, the standings of every character. The rest of the top tier are close to each other, and MK has over double the points of the character beneath him (Snake). He’s in the S tier while everyone else is in the A tier. In Melee tier list discussions, there were many, many pages of arguing trying to figure out who’s the best (Sheik, Marth, or Fox). That was 7 years after the game came out, too. When we did the tier list voting for Brawl, every person put MK as #1. He has absurd power, speed, mobility, range, and the best recovery in the game. He has a glitch that allows him to disappear and stay invincible/invisible for the rest of the match. He also has no bad matchups, which seems comparable to Yun, but you have to remember that the counterpicking system in Smash is a huge part of the tournament scene and every player has to pick up 3 or so characters unless you play MK.
Well, when I mentioned the things that should be banned, I was mostly talking about tactics/levels. I understand we needed lots of data on MK, but we have that now (Smash has had over 200 tournaments in the past 2 months alone). The thing is, most of our knowledge of what’s broken comes from Melee. We studied the stages, tactics, and attitude created by allowing them and it was ridiculous.
I know it may seem similar to something that happens in MvC2, but I promise it’s worse. Brawl is imbalanced in terms of defense as there is extremely little “shield stun” (block stun basically) and anyone can shield, release, and attack before many people’s attacks are even over with. This means that getting one grab or one infinite move off can literally be as simple as: 1. Shield, 2. Hit down + a, 3. Repeat step 2. It’s unbelievably easy to execute most of these “gay” things.
I think it’s also funny how the Smash community wrote off items so quickly and banned them completely when most of them are tournament viable, yet they are hesitant to ban things that allow massive amounts of one grab infinites and make people quit the game.
I appreciate the post
Yes Most of the Brawl community is actually new to competitive gaming and so even though a lot of people may say the right things, they are definitely saying them for the wrong reasons.
I appreciate the advice. My local gaming center has had a 3S arcade on free play for years and I’ve always messed around, but now I’m getting more into it. I’m also playing a ton of GGAC because it seems really technical. I’ll def work on those ST skills though
The reason the Brawl scene is booming compared to Melee is because Brawl is easy to pick up. Melee is extremely technical and many noobs don’t have the patience to learn. People who went to Melee tournaments and placed in the bottom 10% can now pick up Brawl in a month, pick MK or maybe another top tier, and place top 25%. That’s the reason most people won’t go back. There is still a decent sized scene, however. There was a Melee tournament a few weeks ago that pulled in ~150 people.
I believe they have the ability to debate many issues without tournament experience, but there are certain issues that you need experience to debate on. For example, if you are going to debate the broken-ness of a move (for example, the Ice Climber’s infinites), then you need to experience it in a competitive setting to have the best judgment. A lot of people who don’t attend called for the ban, but I have said from the beginning that it should be allowed. The ICs have a horrible grab range, they are slow, and they can be out played. I am 3-0 against probably the best IC player in the country (who is a better player overall than me) because I know how to work the matchup.
