"Official" 'Item Standard Play' Thread UPDATE 8/21

I just clicked on the link; it works. At least, it works for my computer.

EDIT: I know; if I didn’t value people’s opinions, there’d be no reason to make a thread like this. But, such a vast majority are against (just as a for instance) Smash Balls in 1v1, and such a minority (vocal as you may be) are for them that it will take a truly large amount of evidence to prove that they are competitively viable in 1v1 without turning the game into a Smash-Ball-campfest or a Landmaster-a-thon. Theory fighter, to be frank, won’t do that, which to be honest is why I hope that EVO allows Smash Balls; at least we’ll have a (semi-)large scale tournament to base our judgments on.

Probably one of the better arguements against the Smash Ball is that it has been proven that it’s flight trajectory, ability to be broken, and ability to be knocked out of someone favor the loser. Gonna have to find the link to that though.

[edit] http://forums.shoryuken.com/showpost.php?p=5145028&postcount=97

Those are features of the smash ball, sure, but not reasons to turn it off. Many games, especially nintendo games, are programmed to favor the loser. An easy solution is to play 2 stocks, so you are never behind by more than 1. Also, this ‘favoritism’ can be learned and used to predict other aspects of play (like how safe it is to hold onto the smash ball, or which way its likely to turn in the air)

You can’t really mean for people to play with two stocks… can you? That’s WAY too short of a match to account for variance. It completely defeats the purpose.

I know its hard to fathom, but yes… 2 stocks, best 3 of 5 was working GLORIOUSLY in our test tournaments leading up to the Evo Rules Compromise.

Smash community is one of the only ones who is dead set on the idea of matches being a long as possible. This is simply not necessary, and in fact, longer sets accomplish a lot more for ‘variance’ than longer matches.

2 Stock, best 3 /5 is the best format to play items on, hands down.

Hell, 2 stock 2/3 is better than 4 stock 2/3 IMO.

3 or 4 stocks are just too long. You don’t need that many stocks to determine the better player.

Supers favoring the loser has been around since KOF.

In older KOFs, when your character got within a certain low % range of life, their DMs became SDMs which were capable of wiping out large amounts of life and had much more priority behind them than the normal supers.

So I see no reason why this is even an argument against Smash Balls. Not only that, but Lucario has the same mechanic. His power doesn’t just go up on a factor of his %, it also goes up by a factor of how much he’s losing. So do we ban Lucario now?

Ultimately, it boils down to this: So what if they favor the loser? It might be a problem if it were a reason to allow yourself to lose enough to get that advantage, but it’s one easier Smash Ball, at that kind of a margin that’s not really a problem, just part of the game.

in the case of the Marth one he has to hit you first, right? that’s up to the skill of the players to determine. for instance, since he’s gonna try to hit you, usually that means you may be able to hit him too, which could even knock the smashball out of him. Fighting when you have a smashball on you is dangerous

If you can’t counter it, defend against it. If you can’t defend against it, minimize the damage. If you can’t minimize the damage, then just take the damn hit and try to win. If you can’t do that, find others who can’t do that and complain about it.

Everything in every game favors SOMEONE or SOMETHING. Thats the nature of these games. Trying to pick what we like and do not like is far too subjective a criteria to base any type of ban on, yet thats what we as a group have done in many situations for years. We are older and wiser now, lets not make those mistakes anymore.

And I have seen this argument a few times, as well.
I don’t understand it. Items are entirely random in spawn and position of spawn. How does one ‘camp’ a Smash Ball repeatedly without a very poor opponent?

Man, that’s what I said! …then I saw Fox’s blaster. And Falco’s. And Lucas’ PK Thunder. And pretty much anybody with a long range projectile. Then I saw lots of people camping for Smash Ball spawns (on top of the regular projectile camping/spam that is oh-so-prevalent in Brawl).

Fair enough, didn’t even think of it that way. While I’m still iffy about Smash balls in tournament play, you make a point about favoring the loser not being that valid.

I am having a very hard time imagining this happening in actual match o_o. Lucas decides to play PK Thunder ball and get grabs chain-grabbed by Marth or something. Fox and Falco’s blaster means they’d spend a lot of time vulnerable for a short time in the air. How does this occur?

At any rate, if that’s how people play the game…what is the problem?

Oh please. Yes, Lucas makes getting the ball look easy, but only if you decide to fight his projectile for it. With some characters, the best strategy vs. Lucas when a Ball appears is to stick to him like glue, and wait for him to try PK Thundering for it. When he does, give him your best shot (I’d say eating a Reversed Warlock Punch he gave up for free would make him think twice about trying to camp the ball).

Other projecitle characters’ attempts on the ball can also be thwarted by using yourself as a meatshield. Granted, you’ll take some damage from it, but making sure they can’t get the ball easily is going to frusrate their plans and make them go after it personally.

It’s this aspect to obtaining the Smash Ball that makes Final Smashes and Super stocks in other games apples and pears (not oranges) in comparison. There’s no real way to deny your opponent from gaining meter, other than completely shutting them down (and in some cases, even hitting them gives them some), but here, it’s completely possible. The only real similarity is that both give the user something extra special to use.

Jack, in response to your link describing your idea of balance (I can open the link at home, couldn’t at work, don’t know why).

It all sounds like a scrubby way of making your own rules. It reminds me of the time people said that you couldn’t throw in SF2 because they couldn’t block it, or giving the second round to the loser so you could play three rounds.

Ha… I can see why you’d say that, considering it was a list with literally no precedent to work off of. Remember, no one had even played competitive Item Smash since around 2003 IIRC, so no one knew what good criterion were for balance. I came up with the first draft of those 3 back when I was working alone, and as more people on SWF joined in the project (that’s where it started, obviously), we smoothed out the edges into something we thought was acceptable. Mind you, all of those criterion are specific to Smash, seeing as no other fighter has anything near what Item play is in SSB, so I’m sure there are things that are applicable (or not) to other fighters (or fighters in general) that we don’t address because they don’t apply to item Smash.

Here’s the problem. It’s really hard to say, at the beginning of a game’s life, what’s worth removing from play. It is of most of our belief that until proven otherwise, nothing should be removed. The only reason Evo’s ruleset is what it is, is due to compromise. If you remove without a lot of experience backing it up (not theory and doom prophecies), then yeah, I’d see where you’re coming from. But NO ONE at this point can make that call, because the game’s just too new.

And I entirely agree… which is my we state, very clearly, that this is a WIP and that Tournament Organizers ALWAYS have the final call. This isn’t like the SBR, where their word is (for all intents and purposes) law in the Smash community. This is groundwork for future competitive item play. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Pokeballs are broken as crap, but Smash Balls have a ton of ambiguous ground. It’s ‘banned’ now in our list, sure, but we always reserve the right to revisit this list at a later time, when new and more relevant information is presented. The simple fact is that all-item play would degenerate with the current metagame. It’d be nice for it to work, but the metagame isn’t stable enough right now to handle it, so we ban some things based off the knowledge and experience we could amass in 3 months (5 if you include Japan) to make the game stable enough so that it doesn’t implode (competitively speaking) before the metagame has a chance to evolve and mature past ‘Snake v. Metaknight’ and projectile/grab camping.

Besides, if we listened to all the doom prophesies, we wouldn’t even be attempting this in the first place.

Which pokeballs are broken actually ? from my experience, I’ve rarely been killed without being able to do a thing to retaliate when a pokeball comes into play. A lot, if not all can be dodged or rendered innefective by staying away from the pokemon itself. Sure sometimes the opponent will set-up his pokeball so, if a good pokemon appears, you can’t do much, but that’s not broken at all, it’s a good strategy.

And just so you know, the term ‘metagame’ doesn’t mean what you think it does when you use it (3 times in your post, alone). What would more appropriate to use it simply ‘strategy’. Metagame has a whole other meaning.

Umm… how about all of them? They are all invincible, come out by throwing down (easiest and least punishable method) which happens in very few frames, don’t hit the user… So what if you can dodge them? There is no risk to using them (outside of a powershielded Pokeball, but like I said, no one will risk that because you can just throw them down) because all the user gains is benefits and all the opponent gains are disadvantages. We can’t have an item with those properties awarded, essentially, by random drop. And I know what you’re going to say, ‘But Jack, you must have never considered the fact that you have to pick it up first!’ Not good enough. The list of benefits to the user FAR outweigh any ‘difficulties’ you might have going up to an item and pressing ‘A’. There is no risk to using them, unlike the Assist Trophies, which have a few frames of punishable animation forced upon you when you pick it up.

Oh, and ‘metagame’ is used the way I use it in the general Smash community, so it doesn’t matter what Wiki says; that’s how ‘jargon’ works.