My break with the smash community as a whole, or: why more settings SUCKS.

The smash community is massively competitive. Super Smash Bros Brawl, while perhaps not at the level of Street Fighter, World of Warcraft, Counterstrike, or Halo, has one of the largest competitive communities out there (in fact, those are the only four that came to mind when I was considering larger competitive communities!). But here's the problem... they are scrubs when it comes to how they consider elements of gameplay. Sure, they take their advanced techniques and moves nicely, and very rarely ban tactics (or characters). No, they're incredibly competitive in that regards. If all there was to brawl was 1v1 on a small selection of stages, and the only setting available was with a 1.0 damage ratio, 3 stocks, and 8 minutes, then they would be a perfect competitive community. But... it isn't. And they aren't. The problem with brawl is one of its greatest strengths as a game, but one of its greatest weaknesses as a competitive game-it gives the player too many options.
Imagine in street fighter if you could decide not just the length of the set, but also if there was chip damage or not, and if you could jump block like in TvC. What's the most competitive option? Even though it's not clear at the first glimpse, there is one, and if the community decides that they think that it's better without chip damage, then when it comes out that the game is miles better with chip damage, do you think the community will want to change? What if they didn't even logically think about it from a competitive perspective in the first place, but just decided because either they thought it was more fun that way, or worse (here's looking at you, inui), a few influential tournament organizers thought it was better that way?

This is the problem with the brawl community. Brawl has a lot of settings. First, you set if you want to play normal brawl or special brawl. As most special brawls are fairly gimmicky, and not really that fun or competitive over lengthy amounts of time, we go to normal brawl. Then you select the mode: time, stock, or coin. Coin mode was never even looked at, but rather considered something like special brawl-you ignore it and hope everyone else does too. It may be competitive but nobody gave a fuck. I'm tempted to agree with them; it's very stupid and seemingly random. Time and Stock were both looked into and it was decided that stock + time (also a setting) would be the best. It's a fair competitive decision to make, honestly, and supported by lots of testing. And then you have a bunch of cosmetic settings (how to select stages; I'll get to that later but it doesn't really matter for the competitive community, score on/off, etc.). And then you come to the big fish in the barrel. The damage ratio, the item switch, and the stages. Let's start with damage ratio.

The damage ratio of the game determines how much attacks knock you back. The higher it is, the more knockback things have. I think it's worth mentioning that it took two years for people to even LOOK at this. Never mind that brawl is plagued by fixed/low-knockback throws that allow for ridiculously strong and easy chain throws, or that with higher damage ratio, there's more hitstun and therefore a few more combo strings. Nobody even bothered to look at it. And when someone finally brought it up, I can say, to the credit of the community, certain fractions took it seriously. But there was a very large number of people who basically said, "We don't care about this, even if it is more fun/better". They weren't interested in any kind of results that would show that, say, raising the damage ratio would lead to a more competitively deep and balanced form of gameplay. But I suppose you will have a hell of a hard time quantifying that... It gets worse.

Items were played for a while in Super Smash Bros Melee, but then turned off because of explosive capsules which you simply could not turn off without removing items altogether (IIRC they saw Ken, the best melee player of the time, lose to a random in a tournament match because of a bomb spawning on him, and this was the last straw for most of them). They could (and did) often fall completely randomly in front of an attack of yours and cost you a stock, if not the whole match, leading to massive inconsistencies. In brawl, however, you could remove only those explosive items, and be left with items and did NOT lead to excessive inconsistency, but rather raised the depth of the game intensely. There is a heavily playtested version of brawl known as "Item Standard Play" with a well-balanced list of items, which is actually really fucking competitive. Sure, the items are somewhat random, but not to the extent that it would cause major inconsistencies in gameplay.
Now what do you think the brawl community's reaction to this discovery was? "LOL ITEMS GTFO". Yeah, they basically said "fuck you" to something which added an immense amount of depth, gave each character the tools to deal with most of the "broken" strategies in the game. What's worse, the person who started the project, Jack Kieser, got the nickname on the forums, "That Items Guy" (despite the fact that he didn't like the format himself, and that he had only really started it as part of a bet to prove someone wrong). I suppose it is arguable... After all, the items do lead to minor inconsistencies. But not enough to make a large difference. And this time, what's really bothersome isn't necessarily that it was decided against, but rather how it was decided against-with snap judgement and personal preference. Not the will of the competitive community or anything of the sort, simply "We like it this way". And this STILL isn't the worst of it.

Then we get to stages. Brawl has various built-in settings for stage selections, but none of them are really that competitively balanced (random is, well, random; turns doesn't account for a fair round one or fair terrain at all, same with loser). So it's up to the community to create its own version of stage selection. And it's really very different from region to region. The only things that remain the same are that there is a list of starter stage from which each player strikes to find the most fair stage for the matchup, and then the loser gets to choose a stage from either that list or an additional list of "counterpick" stages; normally stages that offer a large advantage to various characters. However, there are SERIOUS differences in the stagelists between regions. And what's worse, most of the community has, again, reached a snap decision that unmoving stages are better than moving stages. No, not "non-random is worse than random" (technically true). Moving is worse than non-moving. This is INCREDIBLY wrong if you're looking for competition. It leads to people advocating stagelists where almost every stage in the game is banned! Remember, this is a game where the stage, regardless of its shape and form, has a massive working on how the match runs. Even the stage Final Destination, which is a perfectly flat stage with no platforms, movement, or hazards has a massive influence on how the match runs, simply because no other stage has no platforms, and very, very few stages have no movement or hazards. However, this snap decision has made its way through the community, and people just don't think about it. It doesn't matter if you point to how the game is more competitively deep if you legalize Jungle Japes or Rainbow Cruise, those stages are "different" from your typical flat stages, so they aren't wanted. Hell, even to get them to accept one of the most balanced and fair stages in the game (Pokemon Stadium 2; added bonus: it's flat with platforms!) was really hard. Why? Because the stage is "Gay" and "Changes your physics" (it has one segment where your traction is seriously reduced due to ice, and one section where your gravity and fall speed are severely reduced due to windmills from the ground; neither of them are degenerate or would allow you to ignore any basic part of gameplay)-neither of those are actual reasons to ban anything, but they did it anyways.

If you are designing for competition, and decide to add a lot of settings, you will be putting a lot of work into sand. But if you want people to pay attention to things like stages and optional settings, do this:

• Put in a built-in, legitimate stage selection method which WORKS. No game does this. Soul Calibur, Brawl, later Tekken titles... they all make the same mistake. There is no good, built-in method, and this means it's up to the player to sort it out. This leads to lousy assumptions.

• Do not include stages/other elements which are obviously not intended for competition, or which are obviously "different", even if they are potentially competitive. The brawl community looked at stages like Temple Hyrule, WarioWare, and New Pork City, which trivialized competition, and decided that they might as well extend that to any stage which is even remotely questionable. For the latter thing mentioned, look at the "Mario Bros" stage, which although potentially competitively valid, is so ridiculously distant from any other element of brawl that it feels like a completely different game. Make it clear right from the start that every stage in the game is competitively viable and valid, and make it clear that they all belong. Similar to what they did with items; they saw bombs creating massive inconsistencies and decided that just about every item would end up doing the same.

• Make sure that the "default" settings are the very best you can think of for competition.

• Do not make things random. The brawl community would have a lot less trouble with stages like Frigate Orpheon, Halberd, Norfair, Pictochat, and Green Greens (the former two are tournament staples that get questioned occasionally; the latter three are stages that are almost always banned, mostly due to randomness, although norfair has become questionable for other reasons entirely) if they weren't so goddamn random. Items would be completely legitimate if they had at least set spawn points. But no, it's random.

And here's the big one: do not claim that your game was not intended to be competitive. By claiming this, you give the community complete liberty to reshape the game however they feel is correct. The competitive brawl community has never played with Damage Ratio 1.1. They have never played seriously on Skyworld or Onett (two questionable stages). They have never honestly given items a chance. And I see this as a major weakness in the community. I mean, the brawl community is, beyond shit like this, amazing. It may seem like I'm hating on it pretty hard... I'm not, I love the brawl community. You'll almost never see a video game scene which is more cutthroat and competitive and at the same time so casual and relaxed. I've gotten into bitter feuds with people on the forum and then gone to tournaments, met them, and they were really, really cool people. In fact, I think out of all of the smash tournaments I've been to, I've only ever met one person who I didn't find cool, or at least legit (he knows who he is; if you're wondering, it's probably not you). They're really eager to help new players, and the tournaments are often really laid-back. But if they have one major failing, it's their failure to accept logic. Most of them do not accept that there is a logical way to deduce how to make the game the most competitive game possible, and even if they do, they refuse to accept it, instead just ignoring it because they, as the majority, are able and willing to. It's incredibly irksome, and just feels very, very wrong.

It's not the end of the world, I guess-brawl is still a very fun, and extremely competitive game without moving/harmful stages, without determining the best settings, without items. It's just that belonging to this minority, and being right, and seeing the community laugh you off kinda sucks. You see, I really enjoy "gay" stages. REALLY. My favorite stage is Port Town Aero Dive, a stage which most smashers would laugh at because of the hazards that can kill you ridiculously early (tip: they're REALLY EASY TO DODGE) and the lack of ledges on the main platform (again, not an issue because there's a big fat hitbox below you that will bounce you back up if you fall off). I also really enjoy playing on Norfair (where jets of lava fly from all sides at the players), Rainbow Cruise (where the stage moves around a set path and disappears behind you), and Green Greens (where bomb blocks rain from the sky). And being right, and it not mattering, especially on an issue like this... it bites.

But enough about me johning. The point of this article is really about settings. They're an interesting game design tool, but they are ridiculously hard to implement in a way which the players will make the most of them. You're really best off not letting the players touch anything which is actually important.
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Competitive Gaming with fighting games: extra points 5

Step 8: Don't immediately dismiss Player vs. External Element.
This has been my message to the smash community for several months now, and it's just finally getting through my head that they don't care about logical reasoning regarding the stages that can be used in competition, but rather would just come to a general consensus over what "feels" right (and you can't really judge them for it... after all, it is just a game). And what feels right for them is that what should dominate in combat is the Player vs. Player aspect.
Time for a little background knowledge here. In Smash, each fight has the following setup: Player vs. Player (vs. Player) (vs. Player) vs. Stage (vs. Items). The items in brackets can be turned off by changing the game mode, or in-game settings. The ones outside of the brackets cannot be turned off-they can be minimalized, to an extent, but cannot be turned off. A more recent model slated the parts that you cannot turn off more accurately as Player+Stage vs. Player+Stage. What the smash community has tried to do is limit the effects that the stage has on competition. This means, in a game with 41 stages, banning all but between 3 and 15 of them (usually between 9 and 12), based on many of them emphasizing player interaction with the stage in a way they don't like, and forcing the first round of the match to start on one of the least interactive stages in the game.
However, when you think of it in competitive terms, how does removing the stage-based elements that move, or can hurt the player, in a game where each stage is massively different, improve the competitive depth of the game? As said, it's always going to be Player+Stage vs. Player+Stage, even on the most simple of stages. By allowing stages which are "different", there is no lowering of competitive depth (Perhaps due to overcentralizing strategies and/or randomness, but I covered that in my first post). Instead, when you remove stages, you drastically reduce the number of effectively different situations, leading to the competitive depth of the game being lowered.
This does not apply only to smash! Sure, building stage hazards into most competitive fighters is hard. But look at Tekken 4 (which unfortunately bombed). Its stages are so much cooler than any Tekken game before it. If you would, say, remove all but the flat, open stages, you would remove an amazing amount of competitive depth. Look at Soul Calibur's various incarnations-there's almost no reason to ever ban a stage! I mean, the "earthquake" stage from Soul Calibur 3 is exactly what I'm talking about-it's different and hazardous, and leads to some very, very cool mindgames-do I block the earthquake, or try to hit my opponent with a grab or a medium/overhead attack before it hits? Such "third-party interferences" can be incredibly refreshing, and an incredibly easy way to drastically increase competitive depth-as long as they aren't excessively random and are done intelligently (i.e. no lasers coming from the side of the screen in a game like Street Fighter). Warning: if you are not very clear about the fact that the stage variance is a competitive element, the playerbase very well may bitch and moan like nobody's business, and you won't even really be able to tell them that they're wrong.
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Competitive Gaming with fighting games: extra points 4

Go easy on the tech skill. Sure, hardcore tech skill can be great. Just ask any Super Smash Bros Melee player (the famous claim: Mew2king, one of the best melee players, cannot play Fox for the entire tournament because he's too damn hard on the fingers)-they love the fact that it's ridiculously hard to play the game at a competitive level at all, and they love the massive amount of skill involved. However, ask a Brawl player who doesn't play Melee (like me!) what they think of Melee, and you'll get a lot of people who simply can't deal with the ridiculous tech skill barrier. Just to make this clear, let me pull an example. One of the staple techniques of every character is the Short Hop Fast Fall L-Canceled Aerial. SHFLLing is something most pro players do multiple times a second. Here's how it works: You hit the jump button and release it within approximately 2 frames to keep your jump short (2 frames is the minimum, but it's never above 6, at least not among the viable characters). Immediately after your jump startup ends (same 2-6 frames), you press A plus a direction to do an aerial attack, and then after about another 10-20 frames, you press down to fall faster. Then, as you land, press L. The timing on all of this is very tight, and made even tighter by the almost complete lack of a buffer. And that's an AT that every character needs; some character-specific (but also essential!) ATs such as Waveshining with Fox or Samus's "Super Wavedash" are even harder.

Increasing the tech skill barrier does not negatively affect the depth of the game. However, until you raise it to a degree which is ridiculous, even at the highest level of human ability, you are hardly putting a dent in gameplay depth-SSBM pros nail nearly every tech skill requirement, and it reduces the game, at the highest level, back to what it would be if the tech skill was not there-it merely makes it harder at the beginning level. And what that does can indeed be negative-games with a higher tech skill barrier are far harder for an initiate to pick up and play. It leads to less players getting into the game in the first place. Imagine if the command for a hadoken in street fighter was 236463214 instead of just 236, and shoryuken was 412363214. Would it be a more fun game? Probably not. And at the highest level of play, it wouldn't be much deeper either. This can be an incredibly negative aspect. If you want a game with nothing more than a stupidly high tech skill barrier, I'd recommend Bop-It! Extreme or something similar-it's not deep, it's just difficult, technically.

Now hang on a minute, I hear the melee community screaming out, "but melee would be WAY LESS DEEP without, say, wavedashing!" Yep. It would be. And THIS is why you need to differentiate between two things: necessary tech skill and gratuitous tech skill.
Necessary tech skill is the kind of input you need to do a certain action which is not without a disadvantage. For example, in melee, do you always want to waveland? What about always short hop? You need certain commands to perform certain actions. Hell, games like Brawl, Melee, or Guilty Gear would be unthinkable without 5-6 buttons. I mean, pressing 236HP to do a hadoken is not an excessive tech skill requirement. It is, however, necessary to differentiate a hadoken from, say, a mid strong. Similarly, waveshining in melee. Doing it effectively requires very, VERY good timing. It's brutally hard, and the game has no buffer. But you don't always want to do it. And furthermore, you need those commands to differentiate the different actions in the game, and to pull off the tech, you need to input them with a very strict buffer.
Gratuitous tech skill... THE big example which comes to mind is L-canceling in melee. L-canceling is an advanced technique in which you press the shield button right as you land with an aerial attack. By doing so, you halve the lag on the landing. This AT alone turned melee from a solid game into an AMAZING game. But it's terrible design. Why? Because you would never not want to L-cancel if you could. In situations like this, it's usually better to cut out the tech skill. Melee would be exactly the same game at a higher level, but more approachable at a lower level (warning: making L-cancelling automatic still leaves you with a ridiculously hard game! Don't get too excited, Stubbyfingers). The tech skill isn't giving the game anything new at a high level-it's simply forcing you to do another (almost) frame perfect input in an already blisteringly fast game. This, similar to the example above of replacing Hadoken's 236HP input with 236463214HP, is not making the game a better game at all until you reach the point where the tech skill cannot realistically be achieved effectively, at which point... Eh, you're better off just dropping it altogether (see also: this RETARDEDLY HARD advanced technique with king DDD in brawl that nobody will EVER be able to do consistently. EVER!).

My advice: make certain "Advanced techniques" (special attacks, such as the street fighter supers/ultras or the TvC Hypers lend themselves especially well to this) very hard to execute, but make the normal stuff relatively simple to execute (note: DO NOT TRIVIALIZE IT. SNKvsC2 made this mistake by making every attack executable with a direction on one analog stick... this is a very, very bad idea! It makes the player feel very stupid, and simplifies gameplay too much. Some tech skill is good. No tech skill, or too much tech skill, or worse, Gratuitous tech skill, is bad).
(This is, honestly, more opinion than most things, but it's based on a fair bit of observation.)
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Competitive Gaming with fighting games: extra points 3

Tone down turtling. This does not lead to a more competitive game in and of itself, but it definitely leads to a more fun game. Give attacks high chip damage. Have a "block meter" that goes down as long as you are blocking, and ensure that you have a decent amount of blockstun (Super Smash Bros 64 almost got this one right, in fact, it went overboard-you can lock your opponent in their shields with fast, strong attacks until the shield breaks, giving you a free attack!). Make it so that projectiles encourage approaching with them (read: very slow, fairly large, easy to block, lots of startup, very low cooldown). Make your options out of block fairly poor; make sure that blocking your opponent's attack is either not easy to do safely (mindgames, not tech skill...), or not a good place to be in-Super Smash Bros Brawl does this very poorly; it has been said that grabbing your opponent out of block is one of the strongest moves in the game, and I'm tempted to agree with it. Make sure that the playing field is not set up in such a way that faster characters can run circles around slower characters (again: Brawl has several characters who can basically run away and spam safe options the whole game-not exactly a fun thing).
There are quite a few games where the gameplay devolves very quickly into extreme camping, runaway, and blocking everything. This is a very, VERY bad thing for a game's popularity. I mean, ask the SSBM crowd what they think of Brawl. And when a game isn't popular, it cannot garner competition because nobody will want to play it.
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Competitive Gaming with fighting games: extra points 2

Have each member of the cast have a well-balanced and expanded moveset. Again, directly related to point 3 in my old article. Having an expanded moveset makes keeping characters different easier; compare a hypothetical fighter, where each char has exactly 3 attacks, to one where each character has 18 different attacks-how many different possibilities will exist in each possible situation? WAY more in the latter. However, this point is completely defeated if one attack in the moveset is miles better than any of the others. Rule of thumb: if a move in a character's moveset is better in almost every situation than another one is, time to redesign one of the moves slightly.
Lemme just expand on that with a small example. Say you have a character with two attacks. They both have the same damage output, and the same range, but one hits on frame 2, while the other hits on frame 16 (assuming 60 frames per second). Obviously, the latter is horrible in comparable to the former. So what can you do? The moves are so similar that a change in effect is essentially necessary. Raise the range of the latter by a lot to make it a long-range poke like Dhalsim's low strong (and lower the range other one to make it a jab). Raise the damage output and knockback on the latter, and maybe add invincibility frames to make it a dragon punch like SF4's focus attacks, or charged rush attacks in DBZ: Budokai Tenkaichi 3. Make the second one stun harder, or have it aim at an odd angle (consider a forward strong against a dragon punch-the dragon punch is usually gonna get more use).
Also, a good part of this is not having moves that are almost always useless. Case in point: in Super Smash Bros (throughout the entire series, really), Captain Falcon's "Falcon Punch". It's got ridiculously strong damage and knockback, but it's got melee range and more than a second of startup (and moderate endlag as well!). This in a game where, if a move doesn't come out in 15 or less frames, you're going to have trouble landing it. This attack is almost always useless, and deserves a redesign-such as in Brawl Minus, where it still has the massive startup, but radiates flames after the strong hitbox comes out, which have a very, very large area of effect and long duration-suddenly, the move no longer sucks! This is the kind of thing you should be designing for. Even small changes can make huge differences.
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Competitive Gaming with fighting games: extra points 1

Have a large, well-balanced, differentiated roster. This is directly related to point 3 of my last article. Point for point:
-Large: Lots of options for players.
-well-balanced: Lots of viable options.
-differentiated: Lots of DIFFERENT viable options. Try to keep, at the very least, the base options ("Fragile Speedster", "Brick Wall", "Ryu/Mario/etc.")
Good examples of this are present fairly often in high-tier fighting games, but I think the best one to take is Guilty Gear XX Accent Core. The game has a cast of around 20 chars, and each of them plays radically differently. You can pick a character for whatever playstyle you want to keep (Chipp for the Fragile Speedster, Potemkin for the Brick Wall, Ky for the Ryu, and all kinds of different flavors in between). This is very hard to design for, but it's still worthwhile.
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Three steps to competitive gameplay

Competitive gameplay.


What does it mean to be "competitive"? What defines a competitive game, specifically a fighter? There are a few points. Some are necessary for the game to be (inherently) competitive in the first place. Others help the game to be more competitive. Let's run through things over...

Step 1: The game must be capable of supporting competition in the first place. In other words: two or more players (in the case of fighting games, almost always 2 players or teams, as adding more can and often will lead to inconsistencies) competing in a game with a condition to win/lose/draw. This is essentially the basic definition of a game that you can compete in. Every game which is to be designed competitively has this goal. A few games have/can be played competitively without this feature (a good example would be the "Super Mario Bros 3" competition at the end of the movie, "The Wizard"), but they were certainly not designed for competition, and are in this regard also not ideal, as they usually fail one or more of the following goals, and/or require outside influence (a points counter like in the Wizard, for example) (if you want to make a game like that competitive, simply add a speedrun/points contest mode). But this first step-the ability to "compete" at all-is the absolute basic needed to compete in a game.

Step 2: The game must be able to provide consistent results. The better player should almost always win. Again, for competition to be realistically possible, this is one of the most basic criteria.
Step 2.a. The game should be as non-random as possible. Super Smash Bros. Brawl is an amazingly competitive game. Its competitive community is huge, and the game is played for many thousands of dollars. It has a ridiculous skill ceiling, and amazing competitive depth even if you remove half the game (as the community has done). However, there is no denying that the game would be a better competitive title if most, if not all of the random effects in the game were set to a pattern. Some randomness is permissible-almost every top-caliber competitive game has some degree of randomness. However, go too far, and you lose track of the goal of consistent results; the better player may very well lose. And this is poison to competitive gameplay.

Step 3: The game should be as deep as possible. To pull the example of Super Smash Bros Brawl, there is a stage known as "Temple Hyrule", where you can run in circles away from your opponent for the whole match, keeping a massive wall between you and them. This means that the faster character, the character with the overall faster movement speed, will win every time, as soon as he gains the lead. For a character such as Fox, who has a projectile that moves incredibly fast, and who has one of the highest run, fall, and jump speeds in the game, it means that with and element like this, the game loses any and all depth. The "better player" will technically still win, but the entire question of "who is the better player" becomes senselessly trivial. Any idiot with an idea of how the stage works could beat a top player in an instant on that stage; the skill ceiling is ridiculously low. But I suppose I'm getting away with myself... What is "Depth"? Or rather, Competitive Depth?
Competitive depth is basically summed up through the number of effectively different situations that the game has to offer. Effectively different is important here, because there are effectively almost infinite situations in any fighting game. However, is it effectively different if you have Ryu backed up against a wall or halfway across the field when he does his normal bread and butter combo in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom? No. The only thing that would really make a difference there is if your back was close to the wall. Similarly, does it make a difference in Super Smash Bros Brawl if you are in a helpless falling state as King Dedede (a character with horrible air movement and a very high fall speed) if you are barely under the ledge of the stage, or if you're on the level with the ledge but too far away to grab it? No, not really-those situations are, effectively, equivalent. However, to use SSBB as an example again, if you are snake (a character with a very long but linear and fairly predictable recovery), it makes a gigantic difference in your position when you're offstage if you, say, have a jump or not-it's really the difference between life and death most of the time. Or even if you have set your remote controlled C4 mine (snake can use this mine as an extra recovery boost if he blows himself up with it). Such things are "effectively different" situations. There are trillions upon trillions of "literally different" situations in almost every video game simply by the game's various nature; i.e. when I get hit by Ryu's ultra in Street Fighter 4, whether I'm 10 pixels or 15 away from him, makes a difference... but not a huge one-I still got hit and I'm in, effectively, the same situation as if I had been 5 pixels closer to him or 5 pixels further away.
Another major defining feature of competitive depth is the number of options you have to deal with a situation. If you can always tell exactly what the best move is in a given situation, then the game is not deep. To pull the example with Smash again, in the matchup Sheik vs. Ganondorf, the Sheik player has one option that literally beats EVERYTHING ganon has-the chain. Sheik's chain whip can beat everything ganon has. The matchup is not deep because, no matter what ganon does, sheik can simply answer with the chain. Sheik just sits in the chain whip all day long and keeps knocking ganon away until the timer runs out. It's like in street fighter if you're playing Ryu and all your opponent is able to do is jump in->heavy punch (tip: SHORYUKEN!). The ideal thing in a competitive environment is that there IS no automatic "best option". You cannot tell, in most situations, what the best thing to do is. Especially in fighting games. For more details on this phenomenon, here's a great article in smash about "guaranteed options". If you're interested in this phenomenon, there's a great group of articles by Sirlin about it; he refers to it as "Yomi", and they're in his online book.
So why is this so important? Well, remember what I said above about trivializing "who is the better player"? Well, as far as competitive design goes, what is the difference between Tic-Tac-Toe, a game that is ridiculously dull and always ends in a tie, and Chess or Go, games that have gigantic competitive followings and that play out like national sports? The only real difference is exactly this-competitive depth. You have something like 5-6 situations in the game that are effectively different, and the best option in each case is immediately apparent. Compare to Chess, where you have several hundred thousand (this is just pulled out of my ass, it's probably way, WAY more) possible situations, not all of which are "solved" (the beginning of the game has several definable patterns, but there are a lot of them-people can't even decide on the best starting move!) (they are, however, solvable-there will, eventually, be a guaranteed best option for each position in chess, but it will be so complex that nobody will be able to memorize it). This is why chess-playing computers, although they get better and better, still lose to human grandmasters. This is why chess is competitive, and Tic-Tac-Toe isn't (or, at least, SHOULDN'T BE).
Keep in mind that "competitive depth" should NEVER be mistaken for randomness. There is a difference.


These three commands are the very basic rules when constructing a competitive game. Over the next little while, I'll be posting a group of articles about tips regarding exactly this in my genre of choice-fighting games.
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Wanted: Person who knows about video editing, person who is willing to do crude slideshows for video review series

I'm starting a series of video reviews. I will be doing the script and voice acting, but I know next to nothing about video editing, and visual media is really a weak point of mine (I can't draw worth shit). I was thinking to just make one or two, and potentiall try for weekly or biweekly reviews if people start taking interest. Lemme know in the comments section if you're interested.
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Arguing Against Subjectivity: Crafting a Video Game Ruleset

This will be the first post in my blog. It's directly copied from Smash World Forums, on my account there (Budget Player Cadet_). Perhaps a little background to anyone coming here from elsewhere... I'm a semi-professional (read: I want to be professional, but I'm very bad at actually playing the game) with a knack for theory and logical thought. This is directly related to the Super Smash Bros Brawl community, but even if you only know a little bit about the game, this is worth looking in to.

Typically, whenever a stage argument gets started, the most common thing that happens is that the people in favor of a more conservative stagelist say, "All ban criteria is subjective, therefore " and use that to stymie any and all arguments against legalizing a stage, be it Port Town Aero Dive, Distant Planet, Luigi's Mansion, or even stages like Jungle Japes or Rainbow Cruise!



Now, of course I realize that the criteria to ban a stage is arbitrary. After all, it's not like Sirlin's principles for competitive gameplay apply to a party game that we decided to make competitive... Does this mean we could just ban whatever the hell we want? Essentially, yes.



Wait, what?




We could, essentially, ban every stage except Final Destination. We could ban every character except Ganondorf, or ban every character except Metaknight. We could (and do) remove items comepletely. HOWEVER, as the competitive community, should we do this? No. And there's a very simple reason for this. We, as the competitive community, are obligated to make the game competitive. And one of the key elements of competitivity is the skill requirement of the game. It is THE determining factor that ensures that Chess is a very competitive game, while solitaire and tic tac toe aren't. It is the difference between a game where the first player to press A wins and a game like Brawl. We should therefore aim for the highest possible competitive skill requirement possible in the game. I think just about everyone will agree on this-a higher skill level in-game leads to a higher competitive bar; it foRainbow Cruisees you to be a better player in order to compete at the highest level.


Now how does this tie in with what I said above? Well, let's see here... What requires more skill-ganondorf dittos on Final Destination, or a version of brawl containing every possible character matchup with a massive selection of different stages?
This logic is the very best argument against banning a character who isn't shown to be absolutely pants-on-head retarded broken. A little excursion: by banning Metaknight, do we raise the overall skill level required at the top level of brawl? No. We lower it because people don't need to know how to fight against Metaknight, and Metaknight is not good to the extent that beating an opponent who doesn't main Metaknight with Metaknight is a walk in the park when both players are at an equal level-we don't have 100% Metaknight top-8s. So of course we don't ban Metaknight. Same as if we would ban Snake, or King Dedede.

It's also a good explanation as to why we don't ban King Dedede's infinites. Donkey Kong, as a character, requires miles less skill if he doesn't have to worry about King Dedede's infinites.
"But with the infinites legal, Donkey Kong is useless!"
With Sheik legal, Ganon is useless. And Donkey Kong is not useless, he's just horrid in that matchup. You can still run up against Donkey Kongs in bracket. You also can still run up against King Dedede's infinites in bracket as Donkey Kong, which, again, requires a massive amount of skill to deal with (or a secondary character, another skill-increasing element).

Let's talk about another one of my favorite areas: stages. After all, the arguments to subjectivity come up ABOVE ALL in that area. Example:

-Me: "Let's legalize Rainbow Cruise, there's nothing wrong with the stage"
-They: "Nah, let's not, we as a region just don't like the stage"
-Me: "That's an awful reason to ban the stage! It should always be legal! There's no reason to ban it!"
-They: "STFU ban criteria is completely subjective and therefore if most of our community thinks the stage should be banned it should be banned noob"

That's basically how **** goes down most of the time, when they don't just say "you'll never convince anyone" or "lalala I'm not listening" or "Why should we listen to BPC, he's not a tournament player". And I'm not the only one who gets argued against like that; basically anyone can get the "it's subjective" argument.

HOWEVER! Let's use the ideal above, which NOBODY should disagree with, the whole "The more skill required, the better" thing. And I've, in fact, covered this in one of my earliest stage-related threads. You not only need more skill to play on Final Destination, Pokemon Stadium 2, and Rainbow Cruise than just on Final Destination, you also need completely different skillsets! Whereas on Final Destination, you have to deal with your opponent with nothing between you and him on a flat surface. On Pokemon Stadium 2, you have to deal with your opponent, temporary extremely strong camping, temporary physics changes, and platforms that can be used to deal with projectiles. On Rainbow Cruise, you have to deal with a moving stage that will kill you if you can't deal with it. While specific skills transfer (The PvP element of gameplay is never really removed; spacing, zoning, good camping, good mindgames, and the like will always be helpful, regardless of which stage you're on), you still require completely different skillsets in order to deal with things like the movement on Rainbow Cruise, or the cars on Port Town Aero Dive, or even just the lack of platforms and hazards on Final Destination! (If all you really have mastered is juggling, you may do really well on BF, but once Final Destination comes into play, you're ****ed.




A few common counter-arguments:

"All right, then how about we let people counterpick you to Street Fighter 4 or Mario Kart Wii?"
I hope everyone, including the person who originally posted this, realizes how ridiculous this is. We are playing brawl. Not street fighter, not mario kart, but Brawl. Why? Because we want to and because it's the game we want to play. Going beyond brawl may require more skill, but we're trying to compete to see who is the best at THIS video game. Although a pentathlon-esque iron-man tournament with something like Brawl, TvC, and MetaknightW (best of 3; round one is one of the three games at random, round two is the loser's choice of one of the remaining two games, and round 3, if present, is the last of the 3 not chosen...) sounds like a very, very interesting tournament, we don't go to brawl tournaments to prove our prowess in other games. One thing I have not directly looked into is Damage Ratio and Items, but due to the fact that we know so little about the former and the latter is fairly random (sorry Jack), I'm going to leave them aside.


"And what about skill in the areas of Subspace Emissary, Home Run Contest, Brutal Brawl, etc.?
Now here's the big issue here. What exactly are we trying to demonstrate? How good a player is at the vs. mode in super smash bros brawl. Now... what relevance does that player's ability to deal with the HRainbow Cruise have to what we actually want to test? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.


"We don't want to foRainbow Cruisee our players to have skill in (insert stage-based element X here)"
Primary example being "We don't want to foRainbow Cruisee our players to have skill in adapting to stages".

See, this is where we hit the competitive/casual divide. In a casual community, you're perfectly justified to take a skill the game requires of you and that does not cheapen competition (like the ability to adapt to having all items on does, due to the extreme randomness allowing this skill to be tested allows for) or remove other skills (like the ability to circle camp; testing that skill negates virtually all other skills from the game, an extremely negative aspect), and simply remove it. In the competitive community? No way in hell. It's an in-game skill that the game requires of you that does not remove competitive viability or mitigate any other skills. Saying "We don't want to foRainbow Cruisee our players to adapt to stages" is akin to saying "We don't want to foRainbow Cruisee our players to be able to space" or "We don't want to foRainbow Cruisee our players to be good at brawl". There is no justification whatsoever for a competitive community to purposefully remove or mitigate a skill which is critical for being good at the game in almost every version.


"Your last two arguments contradict each other!"
No, they don't. The key here is that we're trying to test the players in their capabilities in the versus mode. This gives us fair reason to completely ignore the skills that have nothing to do with the versus mode. Why we can't apply this argument to various other parts of the game is their direct relevance to the versus mode. Being able to deal with stages is ALWAYS relevant to the versus mode of gameplay. Being able to deal with the stages involved in the versus mode is also directly relevant to a player's skill in vs. mode. In fact, I'd say it's fair to say that every stage in the game is directly relevant to a player's skill in vs. mode; just that certain ones such as Temple or Warioware are severely skill-mitigating, as stated before, to the extent that they cannot be legalized. I've covered this already, I believe.

Either way, the point is that there is no true contradiction. Disregarding skills that have absolutely nothing to do with what we want to check in a player has no relation to disregarding skills that have a DIRECT CONNECTION to what we want to check in players.


"Yes, now what requires more or less skill is subjective, good luck dealing with THAT."
And it's pretty easy to draw a line. Sure, you can still call subjective that having a stage like Port Town Aero Dive or Rainbow Cruise legal raises the skill level, but then you're entering into the realm of nihilistic "everything is subjective" and religious "god did it" logic.

So here's what you do:
Quite simply, if an element which is necessary to test a skill mitigates many other critical in-game skills, then it should be banned, and the skill that it tests is reasonably mitigatable. Primary example for this is circle Camping, because while circle camping is a part of the game, checking "who is the best at cirle camping" means not checking a player on a multitude of other in-game skills-in fact, almost every other in-game skill. Walkoff camping works in almost the same way. Fin camping? Same ****. Infinite Dimensional Cape? ...I'm seeing a pattern...

Circle camping-Broken, degenerate tactic
Walkoff Camping-Broken, degenerate tactic
Fin camping-Broken, degenerate tactic
IDC-Broken, degenerate tacti-




....






It appears we have found Sirlin's reasoning, and it also appears that we have found an almost ideal competitive backing for it. In other words? Sirlin is right, and his logic DOES apply to brawl, including stage selection. There is no competitive reason to not include stages, or any other gameplay element in this.
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