filler stuff
Yes, they would be legal. They would not be banned until proven they should be. It’s not hard to figure out.
Yeah, and the smash community already went through the whole items debate a long time ago. Many of those who were absolutely supportive of items changed their minds down the line.
I do feel that while this is a new game, history will repeat itself.
In the online srk tournaments it sounds like they weren’t much of a problem, but with the “playing to win” attitude and seriousness that comes with a large tournament, the exploits will start to come in quite fast.
For instance if I know I’m going to be entering an items tourney I’m going to exploit their unfairness as much as I possibly can… and I know I’m not going to be the only person to do this.
Edit: I ensure you items go farther than a lot of other things, for much less.
Also they’re random. But randomness is a Point of smash right? How about turning items on very high then?
you can exploit items, stages, and charecters, its part of the game.
The trick is figuring out what goes to far
points finger and draws circles
Good. Do it. Prove that you can beat other people consistently because of items. What will this prove? You’re good with items. Your opponents were not. You knew how to handle the item, your opponent did not know how to defend against it. You were able to understand how to control the match to keep items out of your opponents hands. Your opponents were not. The only way you’re going to be able to prove that items are bad are not by showing one person can be better with items on than off, but that no player can consistently win with them on.
Ok, debating this with you people has become meaningless. ( I knew it was in the first place but I wanted to take a shot anyways.)
Melee only became as deep as it did because of the removal of items, many SRK posters never experienced that game to its fullest and it shows.
I don’t blame you for your lack of experience deciding your opinion, (if I hadn’t experienced the tournament scene and style I don’t know what side of the fence I’d be on at this point.)
And it makes total sense that you wouldn’t just take our word for it.
History WILL repeat itself.
I don’t even know why someone like Alphazealot tries so hard to convince you guys, I for one don’t like running into walls.
Now go away. Goddammit.
I hate to tell you this, but Smash Bros. isn’t a traditional fighting game. Never was. Never planned to be. So comparing it to Street Fighter as most competitive Melee-style defenders so often try is an incorrect analogy. What it really compares to most closely is Power Stone; random, item and stage-based wackiness mixed with fighting. I’m not getting into the whole items or no items thing because I can play it either way (I did play competitive Melee), but if you wanna go brass tacks…Smash was originally meant to be random, as per what the developers thought when creating it.
Competitive Melee is actually a bastardization of the original goal, regardless of how fun or competitive it may be. So while I understand your position having played Melee for years in that way myself, there’s really no need to continue to attack people who want to test the game as it was meant to be played and see if it can work competitively. Nobody on SRK is saying, “play it this way no matter what happens”, they’re saying “let it be tested, it’s a new game”. If it works, then the game is changed forever. If not, then simply ban what we now know through rigorous testing does not work.
The rules and original tourny thread can be found here (including a link for some of the tourny match vids!)
http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=152025
In a nutshell, the settings were:
3 out of 5, double elimination
2 stock, 3 minute timer
All items on, Medium Spawn
No stages banned
First stage picked at random, double blind character pick after.
Loser each game may EITHER Keep same character and pick stage, OR Change character and new random stage chosen
Sudden Death is in effect
Thoughts:
I didn’t enter myself, to make sure I could keep things as organized as possible, and so people wouldn’t accuse me of skewing things in my favor. I think alot of people used the honor system, when requesting new random stages in game, and not me which was really nice. I didn’t announce any prize because I didn’t want to tempt people into trying to win at all costs, instead of trying to find / exploit broken stuff. However, after the tourney ended I gave Raph 1 month premium as his prize. For now, I think its good that we don’t dangle incentives like ranking or prizes quite yet, until a more stable ruleset is in place. We are still in the exerpimental/breaking phase of the game, and I don’t want to encourage people trying to cheat to win. Exploit stages/items/characters yes, but there’s only so much rules enforcement that can be done online.
Running an online tourney is probably alot harder to alone, than it is to do in person. Overall it went well, and I think the top players (from hearsay and my experience) came out on top. I find that very encouraging. I ran a 8 man round robin (4 rounds) afterwards, and I feel the top players still did the best. The not as advanced skilled players performed more or less the same also (not dissing their skills, the game is new to most people except cheater Raph who imported his game a month ago).
A few people sent me some replays of some of their matches, and for the most part, I don’t see anything horribly broken. People have complained about some of the stages, but I saw a match where a Donkey Kong on Temple (i think), got a stock lead and was the one running from a Zelda (now that I think of it, zelda shoulda probably changed to shiek). Conventional thought is that the faster char would take a stock advantage and run. I think this shows its possible the other way can happen. Some other vids show stage hazards and fast KO’s, etc.
I think its really important to mention that any results from a single 32 man online tourny should not be taken as definitive proof in any way or form. It is a small sample of people, and small sample of results, and other factors such as lag, game is still new, etc.
Again, as of right now, nothing seems -too- horribly imbalanced. People always groaned when I assigned them 75m or New Pork City, but different chars have different advantages on different locations. Isn’t that exactly what balance is?
However, this was a single tourney with 28 people. People can begin to notice problems/issues, but its hardly enough evidence that EVO staff will require to ban or change anything yet. Due to this fact, I believe that the next few (2 or 3 maybe) tourneys should be run with the EXACT same rules. We obviously can’t get an acceptible sample size for our experiments, but at least a few more tournies and results will give some credibility to it.
I think the random stage, double blind char pick, then loser picks stage+keep char or loser changes char+ random stage worked out pretty decently, but more feedback from the participants would be good. I think sudden death should be kept in, if not, a person wiht higher percent can run all day for a win. At least if you run, you have to risk still losing in sudden death. I like having the stage announced first, so both players can pick an according char, so no complaints of an autoloss on a certain stage. You knew what you were getting into, and whatever char you pick, may get counter picked by stage/char if you happen to win. The 3/5 seemed to work well, it gave enough time for people to counter pick chars/stages.
Replays. I got a few of them from people, but unfortunately no way to convert them from Wii to videos that can be posted on YouTube. Atreusna was able to do so, and posted a few already (in the tourny thread), big thanks to him. If we can get other volunteers to help out with converting+posting vids, I think that would be a HUGE benefit. Right now, replays will be the biggest evidence one way or another to show if something is completely unusable, and the more we can get, the better.
Thanks to everyone who entered and helped make this a success. People were patient for their opponents, generally prompt on reporting their results and just had a good time chilling and chatting in the room. I think these could be quite successful on increasing everyone’s skills AND to help Wiz and EVO decide on what to do about the Brawl behemoth.
Overall it went well, and people are requesting tournys once or twice a week. I’ll consider if I want to take that resopnsibility or if others want to start running/hosting their own too. We’ll see.
What went well:
1.) People had fun.
This is probably the most important aspect to any game’s success and longetivity. If something isn’t fun, they won’t play it, plain and simple. I think overall people enjoyed the tourny and the game for what it was. Despite losing or whatever stages they got assigned or items or lag, they dealt with it and played on. I don’t think there were many negative attitudes about the event, though some people already had some ideas of what should be banned or not (mostly stages).
2.) Bitching was kept to a minimum.
Sure there were complaints about bullshit and time outs and stuff. But overall, people manned up and accepted their losses and what went down. It was this attitude that make this headache bearable.
3.) Ran smoothly.
The whole tourney lasted about 3 1/2 hours. That included some delays on people adding friends codes, waiting on some matches to finish up, writing up brackets and stages then posting them, answering questions, etc. . For 28 people, I dont think that’s bad at all. Hopefully things will run even smoother next time with some of the stuff I learned.
4.) Replays and vidoes
We managed to get replays/videos and can hopefully back up our statements of what’s broken and whats fair. People who make a claim of something being unbalanced or unfair can now show evidence. Alternately, people who disagree with said statements, can now show evidence that supports their views. Most people hate new pork city, but someone noted that it was really easy to dodge PK Starstorm on it. Another noted that Landmaster (which people cry is insta KO) became completely useless on Mushroomy Kingdom stage. Again, certain chars have certain advantages on certain stages, while having certain disadvantages on other stages. That’s what balance should be in my opinion.
What to improve:
1.) MAKE SURE EVERYONE HAS A DEDICATED AND RELIABLE WAY TO BE ON IRC AND PLAY AT THE SAME TIME
This was the biggest slowdown of the tourney I think. This will be an absolute requirement in the future… One person was using hsi wii to connect to irc (nothing against you dude), but because he couldn’t be on IRC and set up matches/friend codes/etc at the same time, the tourney stalled horribly. You need to be able to be on IRC to send friend codes, see what stages the loser wants, hear tourney announcements etc. Another player kept getting booted off IRC for whatever reason for a large part of the night. Not sure what caused that, but this caused a pretty big slow down for the same reasons. From now on, please have a stable and dedicated IRC interface.
2.) EVERYONE NEEDS TO HAVE ALL STAGES AND EXTRA OPTIONS UNLOCKED
This first tournmanent, not everyone had the ability to set stock+timed matches unlocked. Granted the game has been out not too long a time period, and Final Round was this past weekend, but in the future… if you want to participate in a tourny, you MUST have all stages and extra options unlocked. The extra options unlocked only require 200KO’s in normal brawls. Quite easy to do with level1 CPU opponents or a 2nd player with no one playing and only hammer spawns on high. It can be done in a few minutes. And most stages are play a certain character a certain number of times, or certain number of brawls on a stage. This is also easily done with the 1hp stamina trick. For next tourney (and you have plenty of warning), there will be no excuses not to have both of these unlocked.
3.) PRE-ARRANGE LIST OF RANDOM STAGES
The rules for this tourny stated that the first stage per match would be picked at random. Since there was no fair way of determining if they would actually do random online (this is easily enforced in person), I created a list of random stages to assign to people. The way I did this was I took a list of all 41 Brawl stages. I then used a random number generator (www.random.org) and generated a whole bunch of numbers between 1-41, and assigned stages based on that list. That part was fine, however I should have converted the numbers into the actual stages ahead of time since I could not just announce a number, and having to look up what number corresponded to what stage mid tourny slowed things down a little.
4.) MAKE SURE EVERYONE IS THERE / FILL UP SPOTS
As it so happened, 2 people who were paired up with each other did not show. Therefore, it was not noticed until the 2nd round. The chances of that were actually extremely slim as we only had 4 no shows, but it did skew the brackets slightly.
5.) MAKE SURE PEOPLE ARE AWARE OF THE OPPONENTS GAMERTAG
Most people change their nick due to the 5 letter constraint on Brawl. However, it gets confusing for people and organziers to figure out who is who when their gamertag and irc name are completely different. Most are easy to figure out, but some have no relation and it gets confusing to remember who you played again and to find their names on friend list etc and to write otu results.
6.) REMIND PEOPLE TO SAVE REPLAYS FOR GOOD AND BAD
People kept replays, but alot of times they forgot to save them. I think most of the time they remembered to save replays was when they lost horribly, or had some dramatic finish. I would like people to try to remember to save replays more often, wins and losses, and especially videos that show both negative aspects of items/stages, and the positive aspects (non-broken sides) where things like handicapped chars winning on stages, or smashes/dragoons/etc being dodged, or items increasing strategies.
7.) FIND PEOPLE WHO CAN AND ARE WILLING TO CONVERT AND UPLOAD MATCH VIDS
Huge thanks again to atreusna. Posting match vids both strengthens the discussion instead of the stupid theory fighter thats been plaguing the evo rules thread forever. It also increases the hype and interest of other people who may not have fully given Brawl consideration. I think this is a HUGE part of the process, especially for Wiz and the EVO staff to better evaluate what settings/rules Brawl should be on.
DUDE WTF
you make it sound like theres actually skill in item usage!!! everyone knows that items are so random that you might as well have people draw straws from a hat to determine the winner.
thats bullshit. everyone knows that items swing the results so much that there can never be good players.
If you want to talk about original goals then why not make the rule-set 4 players FFA with all items on very high. You’ll have a real party game then. Do you even care what happens?
It is not about testing. That one video should of been test enough. Items are RANDOM. Randomness is not conducive to a competitive situation. Never mind that the game has items. If a perfectly good competitive game had some wacky setting that screwed match results, but you could turn it off. You would turn it off for competitive matches. Items are there in the game for fun, not for the competitive scene. This is because they are RANDOM. It’s not because they’re broken in the normal sense. It is because they’re random.
I predict this thread will turn into one great big bitchfest.
I wasn’t able to join yesterdays tourney, but I’ll join the next one if possible. Can I load my Wii SD card onto my laptop?
From what I recall, the SD card would save data from the match, but not the actual match itself. It needs to be run from within Brawl. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong on that, though.
Oh I see. I’ll just have to put my laptop in front of the TV to record it then :lol:.
if it takes no skill to use items and they make it so anyone can win why can i consistently beat a lvl 9 computer if its all luck?
try not to state opinion as fact.
This statement is correct. The replay has to be run from within the Brawl game itself and captured to a capture device.
No, it IS about testing. The original SF community was doing this 7 years before the Smash Bros. game ever came into existence. Things were tested before they were removed to ensure that even though something looks bad at face value, that there is not some other method of countering that can be discovered to actually counter what looks bad at face value.
Actually, that IS what I’m trying to point out. The fact that you’ve never delved into items enough to realize this just puts you at an ignorant standpoint to this. The only aspect of items that’s truly random is their placement. What you’re left with is luck that can be manipulated by controlling the stage.
Raph needs banned to give others a chance 
u r a noob. you r comparing to a computer.
look at the RESULTS!
1st Raph_Stryker
2nd Ceirnian
3nd Somnus91 (withdrew in loser’s finals)
4th TheDamned
5th Recipherus (tie)
5th Whats The Point (tie
8 selected players
1rd KwAza 4-0 (12-5)
2st TheDamned 3-1 (11-5)
3nd Reciperus 3-1 (10-6)
4th Tempest 2-2 (8-8)
5th Clever 1-3 (9-11)
6th Septimus Prime 1-3 (7-11)
7th Dios-X 1-3 (6-10)
8th Keits 1-3 (5-10)
kwazaa didnt even get 5th in the main tournament. but he beats thedamned in the round robin???
i bet you if items were turned off, the damned would have gotten first in that round robin like he should have. see??? randomness>>>skill, such that the results got tainted.
if you ran this tournament and its rules a hundred times with these same players, you will get the most random winners every time.
BUT
if you ran this tournament a hundred times with these same players WITHOUT items, you will get the same players at the top everytime, thereby demonstrating that they have skill, and that theres no skill when items r involve