David_Hernandeez said:
Are you a competitive smash player? if yes, what is your ranking in your region? most of your complains are the same that the for glory players. "Mario's Down Throw to Up Tilt combo has become infamous for its ease and damage output, but he's far from the only example; several other characters, such as Bowser, Fox, and Toon Link can deal roughly an assured extra 20% or so off of up tilts (or one up tilt, in Bowser's case), assuming you're at low %s. Other characters, like Luigi, Diddy, Sheik, ZSS, DK, Lucas, and more can all get fairly easy follow ups off a down throw. Combos are fine, but I think the game would benefit as a whole if they made a concerted effort to move away from throw setups." |
...where exactly is this mass governing body of "the for glory players" that voices complaints as a whole? I'd imagine that different players complain about different things, if nothing else.
Anyway, let me clarify one point before I elaborate. I'm not trying to "complain" here, or nitpick about a character being overpowered, or anything along those likes. Given the size of the roster, Smash 4 is incredibly well balanced. Nor is this a complaint about grab combos being broken. More than anything, it's a desire for variety; I'd like to see characters have good combo starting moves outside of grabs. The standard pattern for playing a Mario, Luigi, DK, and quite a few other characters is "above all else, don't get grabbed before 50% of so," and I'd like to see that get mixed up in future installments. Give characters combo potential outside of throw setups.
Regardless, I had a feeling that writing this post was going to wind up with my Smash credentials being questioned, and since I do try to be about as open as possible, I'll talk about that a bit as well. As I mentioned in the OP, I'm by no means a spectacular Smash player; I consider myself decent, but nothing special. Most of my local play is within my college's Smash community, where I almost always take Top 3 at tournaments. I go to regional tournaments as well (Scenic City was the latest one I attended in April of this year), and I can usually take a couple sets or so off other players before getting eliminated. FG winning pct. is a largely meaningless statistic, but since it's been thrown around a bit in this thread, my win pct. there hovers around 75%. I finished as a Gold III on Anther's this spring.
Anyway, make of that what you will. I'd like to think that very little, if any, of these suggestions require being a particularly good player at all.
DivinePaladin said:
Two points I want to follow up on: For stage balance, you can just keep Omega stages and make Alpha variants that are tourney legal Battlefield variants for each stage. Give some moving platforms a la the AC stages, but in general it adds variety with little input, but lets us keep the insane stages we currently have. Just get rid of 75m and Great Cave Offensive entirely and I'm happy then.
The second point is a point of disagreement with your stance on roster size. Smash 4 released as the most balanced Smash game yet. Yeah, there were naturally issues, but there was a sense that essentially every character could be viable competitively. With 50 characters of course that's not going to ever be fully true, but compared to Brawl and 64 which are absolute messes, and Melee which is a boy's club of the top five to ten characters mostly (with room for some lower characters in the top players' hands), Smash 4 excelled in this regard, despite having the shortest development cycle next to Melee. I feel that even if they continue to upscale the roster they'll be fine so long as they continue reasonable balances instead of the admittedly knee-jerk nerfs they made at times. There's no reason to cut back the roster unless it's to redesign the clones as skins or trim the fat on the forty FE characters or something. Well, they could remove Palutena and almost nobody would care since she's literally hot garbage, but even then I guess she's unique, may as well just keep her since it won't be hard to upkeep with her lol |
"Alpha" stages would be fine, honestly. I'd be completely ok with that, though I would like to see Nintendo try to do something new with "normal" stages. Maybe something like Pyrosphere except without silly edges and Ridley.
I do think that a smaller roster size would be beneficial to balance, however. Smash 4 is a more balanced game largely because it was the first to get an actual team working on balance as opposed to just having Sakurai handle it. The team did a truly impressive job given the roster size they had to handle, and I'd argue that they could make a game as balanced as Killer Instinct (which literally had all of its then 17 characters show up in Top 8 at the most recent Combo Breaker tournament) or SFV with a smaller roster size.
IkePoR said:
Fantastic post MTZehvor. Very good points. I fully agree with trimming the roster; SFV will thrive for it's purity by having a trimmed roster, even if more characters are being added.
Something that might help balance is in Smash 5 the devs could broaden the concept of custom moves. Perhaps the normal move sets of the trimmed cast could have the level of balance that SFV has. Taking some of the more useful customs(Wizards Dropkick comes to mind) and having them replace a less useful normal. In turn creating more over the top and crazy customs, a la Brawl -(minus). Thus, creating an atmosphere where the normal movesets can be enjoyed by all players but competitive have their balance and for fun players still have more options.
Not to discredit the devs of Smash 4. That game has AMAZING balance to have a cast full of brawlers, swordsman, projectiles and turtles.
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That's a good idea. It'd also help cut down on some of the clone complaints; giving Ganondorf Wizard's Dropkick is at least a slight difference from Falcon's Down B. Slight variations probably wouldn't require too much additional work in the way of balancing, either.
