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.
This is good. You might wanna turn off whatever's turning "for.ces" into "foRainbow Cruisees" (I added the period as I'm not sure if it applies to comments as well.)
ReplyDelete-incom from swf
LMAO that was me trying to remove a few abbreviations... xD I went through the document and replaced each instance of rc with Rainbow Cruise. Whoops...
ReplyDeleteI'm really sorry BPC but this is completely fail and in no way logical. Your version of the term competitive is incredibly deluded. All a game needs in order to be competitive is to allow competition. What is relevant to how the game should be competed in is what kind of competition people want. Now you may argue that the best kind of competition is that which requires the most amount of skill, a very idealistic position that is highly subjective and truth to be told makes little sense at all in the context. Why are you playing brawl at all if you think that greater difficulty allways means greater gameplay? Note that I'm using the term gameplay here, because I fucking refuse to missuse the term competitiveness like you do.
ReplyDeleteI think you will find that most people rather than wanting a game that's as difficult as possible are actually looking for other things in gameplay, one of theese things being variation, which is hurt by characters like metaknight and by the allowance of infinites. And your reasoning regarding Donkey Kong makes little sense aswell, the average skill level would go up if more characters were viable because people would have to learn more matchups in order to perform well at tournaments.
In the end your post contains little other than subjective opinions, preached out like some kind of missleading religious dogma. In the end it remains blatantly obvious that what is best for the competitive brawl scene is that which will help it prosper, and maximizing difficulty while sacrificing a fun and enjoyable gameplay will not do that. I suggest you drop the thought of coming up with a perfect philosophy and embrace the fact that what the majority desires is in the case of brawl probably what should be strived for.
If you can't accept this please go play melee or actual chess. You can't simply dodge this fact by saying ''well we are playing brawl duh'', you really need to ask yourself why we are playing brawl in the first place, what makes it a more appealing game than all the others? It's hardly the difficulty, so why do you praise this difficulty so? Makes no sense man....
/Hippieslayer
/Hippieslayer
To further make things clear, what decided whether or not a game can be played cometitively is merely whether or not is possible to compete in it, competitiveness once achieved can't be increased or decreased, a game of chess is not more competitive than a game of dice, it's just different in that the outcome is not decided by randomness but by the players skill. You would of course prefer chess, but that still doesn't allow you to missuse the term competitive the way you do.
ReplyDeleteEspecially when it has absurb consequenses such as you needing to call the japanese metagame non competitive when in truth it's more developed than the american and european in many areas albeit less in others. I respect your desire to play a certain kind of brawl, but I really dislike how you try to brand it as the universally best kind.
Also about Sirlin, he plays SF and doesn't have to deal with the kind of options brawl has, consider that SF4 could also have moving stages without elements of randomness that would add increased depth and need for skill, yet I sincerely doubt Sirlin would support such a notion for future SF games. Indeed you need to consider the reason why the fundamentals of SF hasn't changed despite the fact the series encompasses several games.
ReplyDeleteIn a competitive community you do NOT want randomness such as items in Brawl simply because it's random, and the very definition of randomness in this case is "Not Skill-based". Why you would even consider having that shit is beyond me. Having maps with elements like cars and Rainbow Ride-things makes other aspects such as the fairly random tripping even more potent. You could argue that one would (with skill) have the mindset to think of the edges of the map tighter, thus saving oneself from things like falling. But it's still random. If a bombomb (or wtf they are called) spawns ontop of a player, how fair is it if he looses due to this? How is it in any way skill-related by the other player?
ReplyDeleteDevelopers are not gods, they don't make perfect games and games tend to be in favor of the more casual players: if you want a competitive game, you tweak the rules to make it more skillbased. Brawl wasn't made to be a competetive game, but one has the ability to make it more competitive (a lot of which are part of the game option). Not having Rainbow Ride makes the edge constant and in less favour of characters less likely to trip. Competition would be meaningless to most players (especially the better ones) if more deciding factors were random.
You don't bring a shotgun to a sword-fight just because it exists in this universe. We are in a contest against eachother, not the game itself. The field of contest in this case happens to be Brawl. The rules are decided by the majority of the players competing in the game, just like in any other game. If you want to create your own tournements with your rules, you can do that. But you'll most likely end up with more of a mess like DoA tournaments with a different random button-masher winning every year.
"Why should we listen to BPC, he's not a tournament player" is a valid arguement. Why should you, if you don't have interest in competing, decide the rules of the contest? And if you do, I doubt you'd come anywhere in them anyway because even with items removing some good players, there'd still be lots of others keeping people not getting anywhere (with rules) out. Although I'm certain your examples are not how the discussion on rules "go down".
Why Sirlin's reasoning would be an authority on games is a bit weird since it's very much a subjective idea, Sirlin himself never states once that it's some kind of scientifically proven fact and he never even holds that tone throughout his article. By the way, it honestly seems you've misunderstood it (like many others by the looks of what discussions google turned up). I think he'd disagree with you. He probably wouldn't have liked Brawl in the first place, his examples are games with as few options as possible. And Sirlin's games could have randomly moving stages or randomly appearing items aswell, but they don't since it would be an unnecesary byproduct.
Ok seriously I've read more of Sirlin now, and you have obviously been cherry picking from him. He is of a completely different opinion than you.
ReplyDeletePlease consider theese quotes: ''For example, as designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, I made the statement that performing difficult moves is not part of the core concept of the game. It’s an imperfection that should be removed, so that there can be more focus on the essence of the game: strategy. Clearly, that is a troublesome statement if you believe that performing difficult moves is part of the essence of the game. I think subtracting some emphasis on that aspect enhanced the final product though.''
Sirlin does not think complexity and difficulty automatically benefit games of competition. And while he would never ban incredibly difficult AT's he would not consciously implement them either since they deterr from the central gameplay. Now we know brawls a special case because it's central gameplay is player crafted, still it exist and it's fairly cut out in stone.
''Valve’s Team Fortress 2 has a lot of things going for it, but it’s specifically the approach to map design that stands out as a case for subtractive design. Most games of this type would offer as many maps as possible. More is seen as better by marketing departments, after all. Valve deliberately limited the game to only six maps when it shipped, though.''
ReplyDeleteEven if you want a very liberal stagelist it will never be realised for theese reasons. If you truly want to improve the game then work within the boundaries of reality.
Here's a long one sorry:
''That's all well and good, but Japan has also shown signs of a soft-ban on another character in Super Turbo. I bring up this example because it lives on the threshold. It is just on the edge of what is reasonable to ban because it is "too good." Anything less than this would not be reasonable, so perhaps others can use it as a benchmark to decide what is reasonable in their games.
The character in question is the mysteriously named "Old Sagat." Old Sagat is not a secret character like Akuma (or at least he's not as secret!). Old Sagat does not have any moves like Akuma's air fireball that the game was not designed to handle. Old Sagat is arguably the best character in the game (Akuma, of course, doesn't count), but even that is debated by top players! I think almost any expert player would rank him in the top three of all characters, but there isn't even universal agreement that he is the best! Why, then, would any reasonable person even consider banning him? Surely, it must be a group of scrubs who simply don't know how to beat him, and reflexively cry out for a ban.
But this is not the case. There seems to be a tacit agreement amongst top players in Japan--a soft ban--on playing Old Sagat. The reason is that many believe the game to have much more variety without Old Sagat. Even if he is only second best in the game by some measure, he flat out beats half the characters in the game with little effort. Half the cast can barely even fight him, let alone beat him. Other top characters in the game, good as they are, win by much more interaction and more "gameplay." Almost every character has a chance against the other best characters in the game. The result of allowing Old Sagat in tournaments is that several other characters, such as Chun Li and Ken, become basically unviable.''
Metaknight comes to mind.
''“Some amount of collateral damage is expected in the mission.” Sure, ok.
“We are going to kill innocent people on this mission.” Wait, really?''
''Playing the game the way I advocate makes the game more competitive'' vs ''I prefer playing the game this way because I highly value complexity and difficulty while I care little for how enjoyable the game actually is'' Indeed you need to start actually arguing for your standpoints, (why do you value certain things?)rather than using verbal fallacies to cover up for them.
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ReplyDeleteHooooly shit. @Genn_D: good shit. I'll tell you what: I'm gonna take that stuff and refute it in a new blog post, because that's pretty serious business. Isaac's too, even though it's kinda, well, stupid.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-4-intuition.html
ReplyDeleteThis brings ADHD to mind, he disagress with you but has trouble voicing his opinions, yet there's the weight of his brilliance behind everything he says.
Oh well, I'ma stop making this wall of posts now, in any case I am thankful for your blog because it directed me to Sirlin's writing which has been very stimulating reading :O
Well, that one I can answer right away. You're misconstruing the relevance. ADHD is an amazing player, and he has the skills in that. But the skills in making a competitively deep and viable ruleset are different from those involved in playing smash. Therefore the "under the surface" knowledge can hardly benefit him at all.
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