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While I’m sure this is going to start a lot of fighting and bickering, it still needs to be dealt with. From what I hear, several people are not happy with the SSMB tournaments. The main topic of discussion with those that are displeased seems to be exploiting. Use this thread to discuss what you believe needs to be changed about how this tournament runs. I think that Matt does an excellent job, and I do believe that he will listen to GOOD CONSTRUCTIVE ARGUMENTS. Do not use this thread to flame or bash or I will destroy you.
I think most of the glitches have been fixed in Brawl so this won’t be much of a problem at the next LAN. If some new glitches pop up, then there might need to be some serious discussion about what is out of line. Personal belief: Genuine skills are totally fine; glitch exploitation of any kind is unethical.
You call them glitches. I call them techniques. The smashbros community generally defines what is broken or not through massive trial and error in major tournaments with lots of cash on the line. Usually if a technique upsets the balance of “The better player will always win”, it is removed. Right now, there is a big discussion about a technique called ‘wobbling’. It is an infinite combo that is relatively easy to do with the ice climbers. A player called Wobbles was able to use this technique and defeat players better than him and went on to win the most recent Evo tournament. He received much criticism and hate for it from many of his peers, but wobbling was not banned by the tournament rules. Therefore, he was technically not doing anything illegal. So you see, even still to this day the rules and glitches are under constant review to maintain the integrity of the game.
How this applies to our situation: This same community decided long ago that basic advanced techniques, such as the ones I use in our LAN, are not gamebreaking. They just provide opportunities that otherwise would have been unavailable. They are not hard to learn, and with a bit of practice can be incorporated into your game.
Although wavedashing specifically is out of Brawl, it already has similar techniques in it, and I fully intend to use them as best as I can once I get a copy to practice on.
I totally agree with this. Brawl is supposed to have a much different engine than Melee, which was full of glitches (most unintentional). Matt didn’t even want to run the last Melee tournament, but because I was sickly he kind of had to (I would still like to have Melee at the next LAN, but then again we will end up with even more tournaments…). I plan on getting Brawl the day it comes out, as long as Sylva doesn’t completely run out of copies… which it probably will.
Hopefully I’ll have enough time before April to see what is and is not totally unethical in the game, however the game has already been out for 2 weeks in Japan and they’ve already unearthed a bunch of new technicalities in gameplay.
That being said, I really do hope we don’t see a repeat of the last LAN when it comes to arguments about exploiting the game. I’m addressing this because it will be the first time that a Brawl tourney will be held at the LAN and although you will be aiming all your comments and questions at me, please be patient since it is a first for this game.
Ephraim said:
I think most of the glitches have been fixed in Brawl so this won’t be much of a problem at the next LAN. If some new glitches pop up, then there might need to be some serious discussion about what is out of line. Personal belief: Genuine skills are totally fine; glitch exploitation of any kind is unethical.my main thought is that in these tournaments I would rather only face techniques that can be logically deduced and/or were designed into the game. hell, i didn’t know the button for it and thus wasn’t even able to jump on SSBM, i didn’t complain about people that could. extrapolate that thought to the rest of the legitimate techniques. like one I saw, the people running over to the edge and intentionally falling off so they could hang on to it and prevent others from grabbing on if they were trying to recover from a fall. that made sense. that stuff I’m okay with. exploits are abusing sloppy programming and shouldn’t be used in a tournament with the intent of having a good time, which I think ours are
btw, at least in my match of the first round, i don’t think i saw any glitches, i just got my butt handed to me on a silver platter coz i was a noob
If something was not intended or spelled out in writing by the developers of a game, it is a glitch. Exploiting glitches is a technique which is garaunteed to earn you the hatred of all those around you. Just because you can do something in a game does not mean you should. Also, just because someone has an opinion which differs from yours, it does not mean they are unfamiliar with the subject. There is nothing personal about this debate, its just worth while to bang this stuff out in order to keep the peace.
I understand, Ephraim. We do need to discuss this if it is causing this much disruption in the community.
Falcon: Your games vs Dan were pretty epic, haha. Neither of you really knew what you were doing. It just worked out that you suicided more than he did
I’m arguing, though, that the basic techniques used are not that big of a deal. They just give a slight edge to whomever uses them. Like OhMalley pointed out for halo, there are acceptable things like this for all games that are easy to learn. I would try to list them for CS so you non-smashers could identify with it, but I dont know them, hence the reason I always go like 2-15 in our pub server
In all fighting games, cancelling (In ssbm’s case, tapping the L or R button after landing an aerial attack to cut lag time in half) , teching (Tapping L or R after getting hit to immediately right yourself on the ground and cut down time spent vulnerably just laying down), and spacing (Wavedashing plays a big part here. Basically, different attacks have different hit boxes which creates optimal distances to be at) are the biggest things you need to learn in order to be quick/efficient enough to keep up. The rest is just mindgames/prediction games.
It’s like rushing in Starcraft. If you are not capable enough to defend against it, you will probably lose. However, once you get better and faster with the controls/build orders, it no longer is an assured loss. Thats what separates good games from the bad ones. There is a mechanical aspect (wavedashing/cancelling) that needs to be learned along with the mental aspects (mindgames/prediction) in order to compete.
I found this over at gamefaqs. While the information and discussion there is usually pretty terrible, I agree with every word this guy said :
Items: Tournament players choose not to use items mainly because of their random nature, also in melee items meant exploding boxes. Items can spawn at any time at any place, it isn’t that rare that an item interferes with an attack, it has happened to me at least a dozen times (yeah I’m kind of unlucky), the result is me being catapulted into the air because of some stupid crate or bobomb. Now think about this if you feel that items should still be used: By chance both players are far apart from each other just then a heart spawn next to the player with 150% the player picks it up and basically gets a free stock. Now the other player loses MONEY because of that situation. It is not possible to adapt to random, it doesn’t work that way, when money is on the line you don’t want something that is pure luck to affect it, when the option to take away the randomness is there (so don’t give me the poker garbage). Remember that most tournament players are of very equal skill and items can easily be game breaking.
Stages: Another controversial topic, I can’t understand why. Some levels force certain players to play a certain way, because another player has an advantage. Basically some stages give certain characters an advantage, that must be removed. Stages will always be banned before a character, why play a game where you can’t even use the person you want to use.
L cancel: the less controversial of the two well known advanced techniques. This has been in SSB and SSBM, this was very intentional, there was an update on the original SSB that showed exactly how to perform it and what it does, in the first game it remover pretty much all lag of an aerial attack, which lead to some insane combos. In SSBM it was kept in, most likely for the veterans of SSB who knew about L-Canceling already (Z-Canceling in SSB), however this time around it took out half of the lag caused by aerial attacks. This technique is in no way cheap and was intentional, it was most likely taken out of Brawl because the aerial attacks in Brawl do not have as much lag, and therefore was deemed unnecessary.
Wavedashing: The more controversial of the two well known advanced techniques ( I know there are many more, but these are the most talked about). This is not a glitch it is an EXPLOIT. Why? you may be asking yourself. I will explain. Every part of the wavedash was intentionally put in, heres the main parts: the jump and the air dodge was obviously intentional, the airdodge in any direction was intentional, the sliding animation of a character who dodges into the ground (notice the smoke around the character is different when compared to normal landing after a jump smoke). So every part of the technique can be used by any casual player and already is just not to the degree people took it. People have exploited this mechanism by constantly doing it over and over in order to achieve faster movement speed and use mind games. Was taken out of Brawl for a different form of airdodging, which i find interesting, being able to attack airdodge then attack is pretty cool.
Another thing to look at: How do the pros do it? The people that run professional tournaments are the ones who know how to run competitive gaming. Use them as a model on these controversial things.
ZaplinG said:
I would try to list them for CS so you non-smashers could identify with it, but I dont know them, hence the reason I always go like 2-15 in our pub server
There aren’t any glitches like the ones in SSBM in any of the CS/CSS/DoD games for the plain and simple reason that complaints to Valve got them fixed. It’s not hard for a “noob” to sit down and do well in PC games so long as they’ve played similar games before. At 2007.3 I won the DoDS tournament having never even played the game and have won 2007.4 and 2008.1 with very little practice since day 1. The difference is that real, actual talent is all the matters in most PC games.
Since you obviously don’t have a problem using these “advanced techniques” perhaps, in the interest of fairness, you could list and describe how to use all the “advanced techniques” that are used by “pros” so that the “noobs” can learn them. It would go a long way in easing the situation if people could at least prepare to be raped and have a clue as to what’s going on.
I think this does need to be discussed by those in charge of the console tournaments. Keep in mind that if 50% of the CS/CSS players felt someone was taking advantage of a glitch to win that person would be asked to stop. This same burden of fairness should already be applying to consoles. The Halo glitching can be avoided by *surprise* using Halo 3 instead of Halo 2. I know there are enough XBOX360s on campus to where this shouldn’t be a problem.
I’d be more than happy to show people how to do things in smash ^^ They really are not hard to learn at all, its more just remembering to do it in-game when things start moving very quick. Maybe I’ll start a thread in this section of the forums listing all the stuff and how to do them
"MasterP" said:
The Halo glitching can be avoided by *surprise* using Halo 3 instead of Halo 2. I know there are enough XBOX360s on campus to where this shouldn’t be a problem.My point in bringing that up was to say that using glitches/exploits in a competitive settings was not limited to SSBM, but one of the most competitive console shooters in recent years.
Oh Malley said:
My point in bringing that up was to say that using glitches/exploits in a competitive settings was not limited to SSBM, but one of the most competitive console shooters in recent years.I knew what you meant but my point was that the glitching in that game has been there for years and MS has refused to patch it.
It’s hard to patch animation issues. It’s not that they didn’t want to. Same thing with the super bounces in Halo 2, do you think they really had the time and manpower to fix the gaps in geometry that caused that? And then make everyone redownload all the content that’s already on the disc?
Oh Malley said:
It’s hard to patch animation issues. It’s not that they didn’t want to. Same thing with the super bounces in Halo 2, do you think they really had the time and manpower to fix the gaps in geometry that caused that? And then make everyone redownload all the content that’s already on the disc?If they could fix the “modem pause” bug they should have been able to fix about anything there. To my knowledge that was pretty deep in the netcode.
They never fixed standbying or bridging. They pretty much just banned all the modders or at least prevented most of them from accessing the matchmaking playlists. I’m assuming the standby issue and bridging is what you meant by modem pause.
Oh Malley said:
They never fixed standbying or bridging. They pretty much just banned all the modders or at least prevented most of them from accessing the matchmaking playlists. I’m assuming the standby issue and bridging is what you meant by modem pause.Modem pause is the PC term for standby. I was told it was fixed by MS in a patch but didn’t play XBOX back then so wasn’t sure. I wasn’t under the impression you had to have a modded XBOX to use the standby feature.
No, you just had to have your cable modem and hit the standy button on it. That’s all. And bridging? You just had to network your Xbox through your PC rather than directly to the modem. PC then ran software to manage IPs and firewalls to leave people in blue / loading screen like a standby would. Bridgers just had the advantage of making one team or selective individuals go into blue loading screen or lag them out entirely.
All of that is easily fixable by patching the server-side netcode to disregard stats from games that magically “drop” for a few seconds. If there was no benefit from it they wouldn’t do it. They could also write a server-side module that monitors packets to and from the hosting XBOX and log whenever it pauses or drops players with a penalty of not being able to host anymore games after a certain number of them. This would have the added bonus of preventing players with poor or unstable connections from hosting as well.
So blame MS for that ball dropped. Even still, standbying and bridging did not affect LAN based tournaments. Or on-line tournaments, because with video captures, evidence could easily be provided for teams cheating. Bungie did not have the time/capabilities/resources to devote to tweaking the code of Halo 2 to prevent the glitches of BXR/BXB/RRX because they were working on new map content as well as Halo 3. The same could also be true of any production studio that makes any sort of video game. Once they develop one new product and release it, they leave a small team to address issues with the game if there is a great demand to do so, while they start or continue work on another project.
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