I don't think the stagelist I suggested isn't diverse. It has tri-plats, a flat stage, a stage with 2 platforms and a dip in the middle, a stage with a single moving platform, a stage with 2 platforms without a dip, a stage with the inverted tri-plat layout, a stage with a slant and platforms, etc. To say these are just copies completely ignores how big a difference each of these has in competitive play. If these were really just "3 stage layouts with different death boundaries", why wouldn't people just agree to play on any stage, or just ban stages at random? Fox is better on Pokemon Coliseum than Castle Siege: they aren't the same, and they make big differences.

they just play on one stage bc it's perceived as the "least laggy" and they don't stage strike. they do it bc it doesn't make a practical difference in the neutral or the cp stage. that's how this conversation started and why I think it's worth testing something else so our meta isn't just people playing on one stage

I agree that SV was dominating, but I think it was because the stagelist made it that way. I discussed that, and the neutral list I proposed (BF, FD, RR, SV, and PC) fixes that. The problem is that in a stagelist with 3-4 polarizing neutrals, people just go to SV because they strike there anyway. By having 5 different plat layouts and varying sizes, we make it so that SV isn't "the last neutral" but it just one of many viable neutral stages.

even tourneys that ran alternative stagelists had the sv problem, such as anthers tho.

Once SV becomes the default, and when it's the least laggy, changing it later doesn't help.

take this out of ssf2 context, how tf is this list of neutrals used in all our 9b tours polarizing? since you guys don't seem to pick up on the brawl analogy, do you think official game BR's would call any of these polarizing?! LMFAO. truly, if any of these stages mattered enough they would be played on...but they don't.



Modern BF is a starter in Brawl/Smash 4.
FD is a starter always.
Smashville is a starter in Brawl/Smash 4.
YS is a starter in the game it appears in (Melee).
Dream Land 64 is a starter in 64, starter in Melee... and a CP in Smash 4 because they run one of the most conservative stagelists (and did near-no testing) in any Smash game to date and literally ran out of CP stages because they were so afraid of having a contested stagelist like Brawl, many tournaments still make it a starter anyway.

if you're going to twist the truth at least be half-right

stages like castle siege, delfino plaza, etc were tested for about a year and then we realized they don't work, that's why we run a conservative stagelist

we ran our tournaments like brawl. and they were dumb.

you literally keep referencing a dead game over and over again and it's pretty hilarious. the three living smash games (64, Melee, Smash 4) all have conservative stagelists. Project M doesn't have a conservative stagelist but they're not having any problems. but weird, they don't have hazards on, and they still pick stages other than Pokemon Stadium 2!

is it because they have good players that actually understand how to pick a stage, or...?

That 9b list looks a bit polarizing since there's 3 tri-platforms (even though they function a bit differently). Surprising how Smashville ended up the pick all the time, though.

I see both sides here... Having hazards on for some stages and not others could be a bit confusing, and promotes a lot of debate if certain stages should be allowed with hazards for counterpicks (Pokemon Colosseum, etc). Of course, that could be resolved with testing. Hazards on for all counterpicks sounds nice, but then we give up some otherwise potential counterpicks (Clock Town, Sky Sanctuary Zone) and makes a bunch of 'neutral' stages debatable for even counterpick (Jungle Hijinx, Castle Siege, Saturn Valley, etc). Hazards off for all counterpicks could also work, but then we lose out on a potential counterpick (Central Highway) and Dracula's Castle becomes dull.

Yes tests, that being said Smash 4 ruleset has slowly gotten worse as people became more conservative. Like Siege, Delfino had issues, but were valued as CP's and made picks/bans, DSR, etc. viable. Problem now is that there are certain matchups in BO5's you are forced to CP yourself in the later parts, AND certain things such as bans, or DSR actually can't exist if we want the game to be healthy. this also over-centralized the current game even if balanced. Melee has the same problem stagewise as it's heavily favored towards spacies/not floaties.

64 is a bad example because w/o gameshark there are only 2 viable stages. Like the only 2 games that are even close to the SSF2 scenario we are in are PM and Brawl for as much as you want to s*** on it. The other games have very few or s*** stage options. The other 2 games had decent stagelists, where brawl had the issue of MK, problem there was in the attempt to stop MK being so good, people indirectly gave IC's life because all of the stages that made them suck got axed from the ruleset. Indirectly removing the stages that got axed ended up hurting more characters than helping and never really bothered MK in the first bit. As for PM, yes it's competitively focused, that being said the stagelists were always much larger than the other games because of their options, it was only since 3.6 came out that people actively tried to shrink the list, and even then most lists have 9 or 10 legal stages and could have more. SSF2 has the same problem in that we should start large and go smaller because we only know if we give it a fair shot first. The big problem with PM is that there is literally 0 way to make the stagelist even with small/medium/large stages. That is bad because some matchups are determined by the size of the stage along with the capabilities of the characters.

Most "conservative SSF2 stagelists will have the same problem, as for instance, the generally accepted 5 starters (SV, BF, Pokemon, FD variant, Dreamland OR Yoshi's) is heavily skewed towards chars who want small stages because there is only one big and one medium stage, whereas there are multiple small stages. More stages are good because yes bans and DSR can work but it also ensures that we don't artificially nerf characters who need big stages or who suck on small stages.

Point is, most people saying more stages are not saying all hazards on, or dumb s*** like Final Tournament legal, but that being said, if the only rationale for dumping stages is because of random layouts, or camping, or temporary issues, or "because we have better options" then it's both lazy and it's worth testing to see if the same issues that force certain factors to auto ban stages in other games still apply to beta.

Also Hazards aren't that big of a problem since only 2-3 stages need them on to be legal. Like it isn't complicated that the only stages legal w. hazards on are central highway, siege, dracula's castle and Clock Town if that gets tested. Its not hard.

Honestly, there are some good stagelists in this thread, but at face value we should start big whether or not we have hazards on for the stages that need them or not.

Comparing Smash 4 stagelists to this game makes no sense because this game has more viable stages than we need. There's no idea of "accidentally" making people counterpick themselves because we have stages that are unanimously agreed to be competitive that cover every base.

I'd also check the stage measurements Harr posted. A list of SV-BF-PC-FD-DL is not small: on the contrary, it's actually rather big. FD and SV are definitely not small.

In general, I think you're bringing this idea from console Smash that we should include every competitively-viable stage, when there's no reason to. Just make a stagelist that balances out the diverse factors that infuence stage choice (size, blast zones, platform layouts, offstage area, hazards, etc.), even if it doesn't include every viable stage. The most obvious example of this is clones: WR doesn't need to be in the stagelist if FD is too. There are more debatable stages that I would argue don't add anything that can't be filled by other stages. We don't need Saturn Valley with hazards on if it turns out it's indistinguishable from a stage counterpicking perspective. We don't need both Jungle Hijinx and Castle Siege if from a counterpicking perspective they're mostly the same.

For some stages, it's a question of viability: I think clearly GT has no counterpart on the stagelist currently, ditto for SSZ. If they're viable, they should be legal, because they add things that other stages don't replicate. But I think there's no reason to assume that we need every stage that won't totally break competitive play.

Simply put: what's the harm in being conservative if we have a stagelist that meets our needs already? Shouldn't changing something that works already require some additional reason beyond "we can"?

My only concern is if we start too small if we ever change/remove stages it overcentralizes the game + we should use those resources. But I do share some sentiments with you just think the cutoff is a bit rough to decide.


Also, just as a thought/based on these conversations, here's an idea?

Starters
Final Destination/Waiting Room/3DS
Battlefield
Smashville
Pokemon Coliseum
Dreamland

Counterpicks
Sky Sanctuary Zone
Dracula's Castle
Galaxy Tours
Warioware
Rainbow Route
Yoshi's Story OR Castle Siege

Goal with this is obviously to have fewer stages, that being said CP wise I tried to even it out between 2 large, 2 medium and 2 small stages, with SSZ, Dracula's = Large, Galaxy Tours/Rainbow as medium, and Warioware and either YS or Siege as the 2 small options. Thoughts?

I think the list is a move in the right direction: Dreamland is the "least tri-plat-like" of the tri-plats because the platforms are bigger and there's more space between them, so characters like DK don't have quite as easy of a time sharking and tech-chasing. You could substitute one of DL or BF for RR and I think that'd be good, but I'd be happy to play under that stagelist too. You don't have to play on a tri-plat or a flat stage (making SV an honorary flat stage) if you don't want to.

The counterpick list is obviously contingent on whether GT and SSZ are competitively-viable (testing is required for these, no other way around it), buut I like the other choices. (I think replacing SSZ with Saturn Valley and Galaxy Tours with Castle Siege, making the last one YS, would preserve the idea behind the stagelist if either of these went.)

Overall, this is what I really like: it feels like we have the same goal. There has been so much argument over what a good stagelist even is, and this feels like an attempt at achieving what I think of as an ideal stagelist: one that represents the competitively-viable stages evenly.

The actual hashing out of the stagelist is a lot easier if we have a common goal, and this feels like a list with the same mindset as mine earlier or others that I support.

why lunar core is banned?

Give a very big guess.

Joking aside, it's likely got to do with the size of the stage, as well as the uppermost platform being rather close to the blast zone. It's kind of like Smash 4's Duck Hunt stage, in a sense.

Additionally, the fact that there's two platforms that characters can go between, but that are still pretty high, means that it becomes really easy to sit at the bottom, shoot lasers or whatever, and then you have a platform to help you get away and repeat the cycle.