Pete's Rant #1: Competivity

For the new blog post, go to this link:
http://www.ausmash.com/2010/07/petes-rant-1-competivity/
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Hello everyone, and welcome to Pete278’s rant/essay/article/whatever else you want to call it. You’ve probably seen me on the boards, and probably reported at least one of my posts for trolling. Truth be told, while I am trolling some of the time (and am a member of Perth’s infamous Troll Patrol, the much superior, subtler trolling brigade which exists to counterbalance Alzi’s blatant trolling achieved through his existence alone), I am a heavily opinionated person by nature, and possess what I’ve nicknamed Devil’s Advocate Syndrome; I tend to get into debates with people on the subtlest of points, or on pure semantics because, in my mind, it matters. So, who better to write a rant than someone who has such strong opinions?

Anyway, so, you’ve read this far, and are probably wondering ‘Pete, what’s the subject? Surely you won’t talk about yourself the whole time?’ Well, I probably could if I wanted to, but I doubt S.D would publish it, so I’ve decided to write about an ambiguous term which generates much debate and discussion on Smashboards: the word ‘competitive’, and how it affects the smash community.

A lot of people have their own opinions on what makes a game competitive, what we should do to make the game more competitive, and so on. I’ll try to remain neutral about the topic, for the sake of an objective write up, but, if you’ve read anything of mine, you’ll know it won’t end up that way.

Since we, as a community, play this game in tournaments, there are two main goals of the smash community, and every other competitive community: to have fun and to make the game as competitive as possible. Obviously, having fun is completely and utterly subjective, and is nigh impossible to achieve for every person in the same context. It is something that must immediatly come into consideration in the mind of someone who wants to play a game/do a sport/whatever competitively, they must ask themselves the fundamental question: do I have fun doing it? If not, and money is your only concern, I’d probably get a job or play a different game, since you’re not going to make nearly enough money to make up for the fact you don’t enjoy what you’re doing. If you do have fun doing it, then congratulations, you’ve made it past the first step to deciding whether or not the game is worth playing. As you progress through the ranks of skill, though, the fun quality of the game can change, as people become more cutthroat and less forgiving. I’d recommend if, at any point, you stop finding the game fun, to take a step back, look at what you’re doing and decide whether it’s worth it. Nonetheless, it’s pretty difficult for us to maximize the fun aspect without severely injuring the second aspect: competivity. No, that’s not a word, but I’m going to use it as one, since there isn’t a noun form of competitively in the way I need it.

The definition of ‘competivity’ I’m going for is kind of like ‘The aspect of a competition that defines how frequently the better player/team of competitors will win the set.’ For instance, four player free-for-alls would have a rather low competivity, since you can never even get close to a high percentage chance of the best player in the four winning. If everyone just focuses on that player, he’ll get raped and thus, the skill margin necessary for the best player to win a large percentage of matches is a lot higher than it should be. That one player has to be a lot better than the remaining three to guarantee that, even if he gets focus fired, he will still win. Games on WarioWare lower it as well, since the ‘prize’ given for the mini games is random, and if the inferior player gets a star, and the better a mushroom, then that’s definitely going to hinder the chances of the better player winning. As much of a dick I think Sirlin is (hurr I invented Yomi it’s kind of a big deal), playing to win is fairly spot on about this aspect of competition, even if it doesn’t refer to it the same way as I do. However, after the more obvious aspects, it gets a little more blurred and opinionated. For instance, if you wanted the game to have maximum competivity, you’d have to ban all characters except one and make all games be played on the most fair stage for that mirror, otherwise San, for instance, could lose to an arguably worse Metaknight player because of the matchup, meaning the better player lost. People tend to ignore situations like this though, since it is San’s own fault he’s restricting himself with Ike. You don’t ban weightlifters from tying a couple of tons to their hands before lifting the dumbbell, after all.

Normally, this is where the argument would end. Most fighting games, like Street Fighter, would just say ‘okay, ban any character that makes the rest irrelevant (i.e. Super Turbo Akuma, Gill, whatever), ban any stages that are annoying to look at/hinder colour blind people/lag the game, and we’re done’ and be done with it. The timer is another arguable thing with those games, but 99 seconds seems to work universally well, and hasn’t really been argued by anyone, since games tend to end before the timer anyway. However, Melee and Brawl both have more aspects (maybe too many aspects) that players can pick from that impact the game, those being stages (most obvious), items (generally hated by everyone, though that doesn’t necessarily make them bad), game mode (read items), and so on. Within each of those realms is a multitude of individual choices, making Melee and Brawl extremely difficult games to write rule sets from scratch for. This is the main reason why scrub tournaments end up scrub tournaments: the Tournament Organisers don’t play the game, don’t know where to go for the rules, assume everyone plays the game like them, and then you have a four way free for all items on Temple only tournament.

Starting off, it’s easy to scratch the stages that blatantly change the game for the worse, or don’t work at all for 1v1, the dominant competitive paradigm. Mario Bros. is my favourite example of this, as it’s completely random who wins once you know what you’re doing, and the game you’re playing isn’t really Brawl anymore. 75m, Spear Pillar, and a few others are easily slotted in here, along with Rumble Falls, which, in my opinion, is irrationally hated because it resembles a stage that was horrible. Nonetheless, that’s neither here nor there now, and Rumble Falls is gone for the moment.

The easiest way to remove the remaining stages is, of course, by removing ones that polarize matchups too much. Stages like Corneria, which give one character a huge advantage against the majority of the cast, will inevitably make a Game and Watch (using Corneria as an example here) player win a majority of games on that stage regardless of whether they’re the better player. Infamously, at a tournament eternities ago when Corneria was legal, I, as a scrub at my first tournament, defeated Vlade’s Metaknight with Game and Watch on Corneria. Obviously, personal evidence doesn’t mean anything in an argument like this, but you can see the point I’m trying to make there. Bridge of Eldin is another good example, as it will give the Dedede player wins a lot of the time regardless of whether or not he’s the better player. This entire point and paragraph, however, can be argued with the same point as the weightlifters weights: why not play characters that can abuse the most stages? If Dedede can walk off on a lot of stages, is that a problem with the stage, or a problem with you for not playing him? In the end, though, even if everyone plays Dedede, the game becomes too ‘random’, where top players will end up with randomly assorted top eights even if you could argue one is better than the others, based solely on who could get the first grab off. A regular game would be forced to ban Dedede, but, because of Brawl’s modular nature, we can simply ban the stages that enable that effect instead.

Now that you’ve narrowed the stages down to the remaining few, it becomes a lot less obvious to know what to do. Do you keep it like that, or keep trying to modify it until its perfect? You could argue Rainbow Ride for the second ban ‘criteria’, so why not ban it? How do you define a starter? As I’m not considered a top player, my arguments here will be read and considered by none, so I’ll try to just stay on the philosophical side. If you move on from stages at that point, you still have items and ‘bannable techniques’ to consider.

Items, inherently by their random distribution, lower the competivity of a game, and thus they, except for perhaps the most useless of items, really shouldn’t be considered at all for a competition, even though they make Ganondorf kind of viable. Character viability tends to be overrated by most, as once you have a viable top tier consisting of more than, say, three characters, the game has enough variation and balance to be playable and thus, after that point, it shouldn’t be factored in at all to stages and other variables unless you would make one character the only viable character. Nothing you can do is going to make Lucas a viable character without hindering the competivity of the game, so there’s no point whinging that something hurts him. It’s best if you can maximize the viable characters, yeah, but you don’t hinder the game itself by doing so. A good example is banning Dedede’s infinite on DK. What happens if someone accidentally does a loop of it? Do you take the game off them? What if someone times it perfectly so that you have one frame to dodge out of it? They’re not using the infinite on you, just grabbing you repeatedly as you fail to dodge it. Unfortunately, there’s no way to really enforce it, and check whether it was escapable, and thus, you can’t ban the infinite.

Since this is looking kind of long right about now, and this is a good place to end for the moment, I’ll wrap it up here. If it gets read by someone, and S.D will let me, I’ll continue writing this on other topics it logically flows into, but for the moment, you’ll have to settle for this. Hope you enjoyed reading this and, assuming it doesn’t get any follow-ups, you can read more of my writing at www.bulletpunch.com (shameless plug inserted).





Actually, on an unrelated note, I might as well explain the ads here, since I kinda didn't. Basically, the Amazon ads are context sensitive, and thus pick up main topics of this blog, and then procure items of interest based on them. If you see anything you want and want to buy on it, buy it, since I get a comission from it. Otherwise, I get nothing from it

On another unrelated note, the two maids in the background are Hisui and Kohaku, if you don't know them. Hisui is the much superior one on the left, with the blueish eyes. Remember their names well.The banner is made up of a few games, though, including Pokemon (CAN YOU SEE THE SNORLAX? ITS FAIRLY WELL HIDDEN), Melty Blood, Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, Street Fighter and Arcana Hearts. It'll be redone later once I get my laptop back so it'll look less shit and pixally, but you can blame the gods of Nvidia for it not being here now. Also, new poll, check it out, especially if your name is Vlade (sorry Vlade).