I don’t consider an educated criticism of a game “belittling” it, but then it’s a small distinction. So let me rephrase, I never belittled the OP himself for playing a game he enjoys, but the game is terrible IMO.
If you don’t know anything about fighting games you may see characters on the screen fighting and assume it is a fighting game, but that is a very shallow appraisal. The biggest reason Smash is not a fighting game is because there is no lifebar and the point of the game isn’t to kill your opponent, it is to knock him off the edge of the screen. Smash is closer to one of those battle pong games than a traditional fighting game.
EVERY fighting game either has a lifebar or the purpose is to outright kill your opponent. There are a couple exceptions of 3D games where you can win by ring out as well as killing the opponent, and one game with no lifebar at all (Bushido Blade…which also isn’t considered a fighting game by fighting game players). There are other reasons but that is the biggest one.
It’s not really fanboy trash talk, I have plenty of objective reasons I believe Smash is awful for competitive play that I didn’t feel relevent to this thread (the characters are programmed to randomly trip. This can lose you the game). People who like the game don’t bother me, people who wrongly call it a fighting game do.
I like how the OP didn’t mention what character he plays, and the first guess was correct. Marvel vs Capcom 2 scrubs played Cable, and Smash bros scrubs play MK.
Let me repeat this, although it’s becoming a broken record:
No metaknight has won a major European tournament in the last year and a half. When Ally (one of the best Metaknights in the world) came to Europe for ñGamers, he opted not to use Metaknight against our best player, because he was scared of how good he was against MK. Almost every tournament in Germany and Holland is won by either Leon or Mr R (both play almost exclusively Marth), almost every tournament in France is won by either Leon or Glutonny (who plays Falco and Wario). Metaknight has not demonstrated himself to be broken, even at high level play, in Europe.
Whether or not MK is broken is not really something I care about, mostly because I don’t play andn never have. However, I do know enough to knwo that Marth is more or less the preferred anti-Meta Knight. Saying that your tournaments are won by people playing anti-Meta Kight is more or less a very good way of admitting that Meta Knight should be removed.
Banning is not always about removing the specific broken element. It’s also about making sure that the game is more fun and open to all. Sometimes that involves cutting something which might not in and of itself be dominating, but which allows greater levels of play.
…Marth supposedly loses to MK just as badly as Diddy, Snake, Olimar, and Fox do. Other top spots beyond Marth include Zero Suit Samus, Diddy Kong, Snake, Metaknight, and Wolf. Oddly enough. It’s not like the metagame is down to MK + MK’s counters. It’s down to most of top tier.
There’s like, two MKs in germany that aren’t garbage, lol. “Fun”? You can throw a controller and you’d have shitty odds of hitting someone who plays MK.
And we’re straight into the *second *age-old argument, “if the devs thought it was an exploit/unbalanced/bug, they would have removed it/wouldn’t have put it in the game in the first place. Since they leave it means it’s intended and they’re tacitly okay with it !”. Only to either slink back into darkness when the bug is fixed (to come back later with a new “legit” tactic) or to complain that whiners have ruined the game FOREVER.
We have a Doper involved in actual MMO developpment here who was quite vocal about how silly this argument is, though I can’t seem to find the post. Bottomline was: game makers can’t possibly fix every last little exploit and underhanded trick “creative” types hammer out to rig the game in their favour, especially not within a couple weeks of said exploit coming into light. When it comes to Magic the Gathering, despite heavy pre-release play-testing it’s just impossible to foresee every combo every weird new card could have with 15+ years of weird cards. Even within a single edition it’s quite hard to identify game breakers before they break a tournament or two in half. That’s the appeal of the game, in fact.
Now, like you I have absolutely zero familiarity with the problem at hand. But you do make the exact same arguments I’ve seen countless “good players” make regarding their own playing with two queens. In this particular case however, it seems the tournament officials have, in fact, decided to ban a character. That should settle the issue of whether or not it’s overpowered in the first place. To turn your logic on its head, “if the devs banned it it must have been a 'sploit” (yes, I’m aware it’s just as bad an argument :D)
Brawl is unique in that the director has zero interest in how the game is played competitively, at least Capcom, Namco and a few other fighting game developers do beta testing to tweak balance beforehand…that is not done with Smash and the director specifically wants even a beginner to be able to beat a good player so that “everyone can have fun” insert eyeroll here
That isn’t to say that I think a high level smash player actually would lose very often to a scrub, just that the devs don’t change a single granule of Smash games because of what they think will be too powerful in tournaments. The game is designed so people my little sister’s age (12) can have fun. That’s all.
The “they would’ve removed it if they were bothered by it” also fails because even companies that do beta tests cannot always trust the feedback they receive. For example in Capcom vs SNK 2, there is an abuseable glitch called “roll cancelling” where any special or super move can be given the invincibility of a roll by canceling the roll into the special within a few frames (I think 4 frames). It is impossible to play CvS2 at a high level without roll cancelling, but it was discovered in the arcade at the location tests by top players, who knew it was a secret weapon they could use at the national tournaments (the other theory is that they thought CvS2 sucked without that glitch).
I know zilch about pro-gaming, but I get it and respect it as a thing that people enjoy competing at (it’s not nearly as silly as Air Guitar Championships, at least). The OP’s complaints sound like someone using an aluminum bat in the major leagues, but still only hitting 20 HRs a year.
Not always. An example from a different fighting game, Soul Calibur 4.
Yoda is often banned, not because he’s over-powered, but because he’s gimmicky and simplistic. He is immune to high attacks and throws, so opposing characters have half of their move and combo library taken away. This reduces fights to tedious repetitive move-spamming and removes all of the tactical and thinking-game elements from the fight. Boring for players and boring for spectators.
Imagine if there were one team in the NFL that always just punted, hoping to score on a fumble. Every play in every game. They’re easy to beat, but other teams don’t want to waste their time playing them, and fans don’t want to buy tickets to see such a brain-dead matchup. That’s Yoda.
A few thoughts from someone who plays very little in the way of video games (and isn’t sure why he’s in this thread at all).
First: Although “Brawl” is both a game and involves fighting, it is inaccurate to call it a “fighting game”. This is because falling under the genus “fighting game” requires inclusion of a lifebar and the the goal of causing death to one’s opponent. Except when it doesn’t. You’ll forgive readers for finding this reasoning a little … ad hoc. At the very least you can understand how the phrase “fighting game” is very naturally applied to a game about fighting.
Second: Reading this thread has given me the sudden urge to accompany Jack Batty on his quail hunt, and perhaps afterwards attend that bitchin’ kegger.
Yeah, obviously you don’t play videogames, since there are tons of videogames where you fight, but the term “fighting games” is very specific. Boxing games are not fighting games, they are boxing games. Even UFC /Mixed Martial Arts games, which are purely about fighting, are not fighting games. Those games where ALL YOU DO is scroll from the left side of the screen to the right, fighting bad guys along the way? Those are called “beat 'em ups”. “Fighting game” means something very specific you apparently aren’t familiar with.
Brawl fails “fighting game” litmus test simply because the goal of the game is not to kill your opponent.
(I’ve never played SSB at all, but am quite familiar with metagame aspects of M:TG, and played SSF2T a lot back in the day).
So… if MK never wins the big tournaments, and very few people actually play him, what’s the reason that was given for the banning? It’s hard to imagine it was just done of out spite or something. My guess is that it’s due to a (perceived) metagame issue of the sort many people have discussed here. If MK is good vs the majority of other characters, and only a few characters are good against MK, then it will come down to MK or anti-MK, which greatly reduces the variety of matches that can be played. I’m guessing that, if asked, whatever cabal of people made the decision would make an argument somewhat along those lines. Now, I certainly don’t know nearly enough about the SSB tournament scene to comment on whether that decision is justified by the actual facts, but it’s certainly not prima facie ridiculous, and reducing it to calling people scrubs doesn’t do your case any credit.
That said, if the banning is in fact done by some secret group that doesn’t have to justify their decisions, I can see how that would be super-frustrating.
As I understand it, the problem is that MK isn’t considered terribly overpowered in the Euro and Japanese metagame, but the American metagame thinks he’s unbalancedly horrible.
So the “secret cabal” that rules on these things for the western hemisphere banned him from tournaments following their ruleset.
European tournaments don’t typically follow that ruleset, which is why our OP is REALLY annoyed that MK is banned anyway at his tournament in Germany.
