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.