Defending the Argument to Results

So a few days ago, I was approached by some people on my article, "Arguing against subjectivity: the appeal to results". There were some fairly good points in there, and some issues I'm sure more than one person has had with the article. So I figured, what the hell, let's make a blog taking apart a few of those points. First off, from a guy referring to himself as "HippieSlayer".

I'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.

I 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.

Just a moment... I'll give you the point with the infinites. It's very well possible that the game is more deep with infinites removed. But it's not exactly possible to show that conclusively. Especially when you consider that DK is widely considered to be worse against Metaknight than against King Dedede, infinite or not, at the moment. DK is not a viable character; none of the chars Dedede infinites are. The game is hardly more deep by slightly improving one of their worse matchups-if it is, you cannot prove it. Just as much that you cannot show that Metaknight doesn't invalidate a large enough portion of the cast by himself to make banning him the better option. This is a weakness in the philosophy, I suppose... But let's talk about the real meat of the post.

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....

Oh, it's the gameplay all right. But once you've gotten to the point of deciding which game you want to play, the rest of the opinion is not something necessarily shared even by the other people competing in the game. And if you do not want to play the most competitively valid version of a game, then you do not want to play the game, at least not in this form.

Now, as to the first paragraph, which is the actual meat of the post. I'm not just going on opinion here. If I am, then explain this one to me-why is Tic-Tac-Toe not a highly competitive game, but Chess is? Why does Go have more of an esteemed competitive standing than Checkers, a far simpler game? There is no other variable to isolate which is not completely subjective. And frankly, if it were completely subjective, you'd have a lot more cases of simpler games being prestiged with serious international competition. (Also, before you mention Rock-Paper-Scissors, I'm going to say in advance "you're wrong", because you are-the level of mindgames that goes into high-level RPS requires a shitton of skill; you have to work your way into your opponent's head very quickly, and this is not easy.)
Anyways, no. The fact that there's one variable that can be isolated and correlated to the competitiveness of every competitive game, and no other that isn't completely subjective, points very heavily to causation in my eyes.

Also, you know what? Let's talk about pure competition, in and of itself. The goal of competition is to figure out who the best player is in a certain discipline. This is only possible when the game is so hard/complicated that skill is non-trivial. When two players play tic-tac-toe, it's impossible to tell who the better one is. When two players play ANY solved game, and play ideally, it's impossible to tell who the better one is. So in other words, unless the game is sufficiently complex, competition is trivial. Perhaps it's fallacious to extrapolate from that to "the more complex, the better". However, it does feel like a point in favor of the above correlation being causal.

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.

Except you can quantify competitiveness. Not easily, granted, but here's the question: which is more competitive, Chess or Tic-Tac-Toe? After all, they're both games that CAN be solved (games where physical skill do not play a role are almost always solvable). What makes chess more competitive? Simply the fact that more people play it competitively? Seems like quite a stretch.

Especially when it has absurd 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.

The Japanese run many anticompetitive rules. The fact that they ban any stage which is remotely interactive lowers the competitive depth of the game severely, removing entire skill groups from the game. It's still competitive. It's just not as competitive as, well, most other rulesets (not to mention the ground time limit, which they use and I have torn apart on several occasions as a scrub rule which is ridiculously stupid).

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.

Well, first of all, Sirlin knows brawl pretty damn well. He made a series of instructional videos for it, remember? Second of all, how would moving stages on Street Fighter work? I'm throwing several ideas together in my head and in a game that is so unmobile, I can't imagine it working, almost no matter what the stage does. Thirdly, street fighter is a completely different game from brawl, and there's a big difference between introducing crass new design elements and picking the best ones that are present.

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.

Please 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.

Actually, look closely. I don't advocate pointless "performing difficult moves" (tech skill) as it merely raises the entry barrier, as the real skill in the game is in strategy. Me and Sirlin are definitely on the same page here. However, what I'm missing is how this (enhanced tech skill) has to do with an enhanced number of effectively different situations/strategies. In short, how it has to do with ACTUAL strategy. Because if an enhanced number of situations and options doesn't provide more strategy, then what does?

''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.''

There can be various reasons for this. Perhaps they were going on a similar line of thought as I was when I wrote the article, "My Break with the Brawl Community". After all, Team Fortress is not like brawl; each match takes a long time and you're not likely to end up on more than one stage each match. The stage would be less of a fluid, and more of a static setting. Maybe (and I'm going to call this to most likely option) they wanted to ensure that all the maps were well-balanced for each class (something most FPSs don't really have to worry about), and doing so took a lot of time, energy and effort-so much that they couldn't really pull off more than 6, or felt that (with the above reason combined) it was enough. I honestly don't know what you're trying to say with this. What I'm getting from it is quality above quantity... Except that we have to work with what we have in brawl, and there's no reason to call certain stages of worse quality for no reason or without a really solid look.

Even 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.

"Soft ban" does not mean you cannot play the character. It means that all the top players have agreed not to. There is no reason to believe that brawl would be a more varied game with metaknight banned, especially when almost every character he invalidates is invalidated by others even harder (there are very few chars that actually get raped by MK as hard as people have thought). What does this even have to do with the subject at hand?

''“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.

I've demonstrated very extensively why making the game more complex and strategically difficult makes it more competitive. I have gone out of my way to isolate that as THE variable. It may also be worth mentioning that the most competitive game in the world, a game which has reached the level of a professional sport, a game that has $300k tournaments, is one of the most complicated and difficult games in the world. Coincidence? I don't, and the Zergs agree with me.



And one by Isaac:

Pretty much sums up the next few paragraphs. At least Hippieslayer had interesting arguments.

In 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?

This hardly dignifies a response, but I said I'd go through it, so I will.
1. I do not personally advocate items due to their heavily randomized nature.
2. Items such as Bob-Ombs and exploding capsules that can spawn on a player and just kill them with no warning were removed from Item Standard Play (a brawl ruleset variant involving items; proven competitive, by the way) right off the bat. Nice strawmanning.
3. Tripping is a random effect caused by a player-initiated action (dashing). Don't want to trip on Rainbow Cruise? Don't dash on it. Don't want to die to tripping on rainbow cruise? Don't spend time dashing around the blastzones.

Developers 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.

O.o
You're honestly arguing against Rainbow Cruise by citing tripping. Tripping is a constant in brawl. It's an irritating random effect, but claiming that it breaks a stage is ridiculous when you can avoid tripping altogether. Maybe if the stage caused you a guaranteed death every time you tripped, or even every 10th time. Not having Rainbow Cruise removes a completely legitimate, completely non-random, extremely varied stage. It doesn't make the game less competitive. Why, because it can punish tripping in a stupid spot hard? Ban Wario; he can kill you at 50 if you trip in a bad spot.

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.

sigh.... Another person who simply does not get it. The problem is not figuring out which ruleset is the most competitive. We could do that pretty easily (with only a few gray areas, such as Onett, Norfair, and Skyworld). The problem is getting players to accept that, as opposed to their own opinions or the status quo. So what's your excuse? Tell me, Isaac, why are you putting the competitive depth of the game behind your own personal opinion of what is more fun?

"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".

Isaac, which tournaments have you gone to recently? How were your placings? What's the ratio of tournaments that you could've feasibly gone to in the last few months to the number you actually attended? How many tournaments does your region normally have? And how long have you been part of the tournament scene?
Lemme give you a few of my figures... Oktoberfest, hosted by Ravenlord (4/20 among some of the best bavarian players; lost to Ravenlord, possibly the best lucas in the world who placed 5 at a major european international very recently, and Crifer, a high-level Fox player; first tournament ever in late october). Smash@Slay, hosted by Slay (7/20, lost to Bloody, the best german wario, and Gale, a solid metaknight who placed 2. in the tournament). Make Some Neuss, hosted by Semifer (33/80; made it out of what most of my colleagues considered a very difficult pool, took game one off of one of the top warios in germany and, AFAIK, the best french metaknight; won MMs against Gale, Quiksilver, who is 9th place in german PR), and a few less notable others). There was no tournament in that time that was larger than 15 people that I was able to go to AT ALL (there was one I was very hyped for, but we were moving that weekend so going to it was impossible); rest assured, I move my schedule around QUITE A BIT for smash. I hit 3 out of 3 that I could've at all. Germany usually has one or two remotely notable tournaments each month, if that much. In the last few months I have taken games off of top german players, beaten a good 80% of everyone I have met at tournaments, and improved considerably. What about you?

So even if "RandomNoob doesn't play competitive smash, therefore his logic regarding it is worthless" *was* a logical statement (pro tip: saying this makes you look retarded; Ad Hominem is NEVER an argument. EVER.), I'm *not that random noob*. I play this game extremely competitively. And even if I was a random noob, then the most you could do is question my motives-my arguments would not be disempowered by this AT ALL.

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.

First of all, I just did prove Sirlin's reasoning (to the extent that it's possible to prove a philosophy) as valid. Second of all, they would be unnecessary by-products to most fighting games, but they are inherent and crucial parts of Brawl. They're a part of Smash's formula, and have been since the first game-in fact, I'd be hard pressed to find stages in that game that didn't move and couldn't kill you.

Let me make a few things clear here.
If you honestly think brawl would've been better without all the moving stages, or is a more competitively deep game if we reduce the stagelist to the one that Japan has, you are completely wrong. Many moving stages (Rainbow Cruise, Port Town Aero Dive, Brinstar) lead to a very different style of gameplay than almost any other stage in the game. Many (Pirate Ship comes to mind as a nice example) require you to think up entirely different and new strategies and ATs to use the stage well.

If you think these articles rely on Sirlin's principles, you are completely wrong. It is its own reasoning, and the fact that it backs up Sirlin's theories in the process does not mean it leans on them at all. This does not presuppose ANYTHING Sirlin has said.

So, that said, I have a few more updates coming (hopefully) soon... Keep watching the feed, guys (ha, as if anyone actually follows this thing!).