I don't think a chance of a transformation interrupting your infinite is a reason to keep hylian skies, because you will always have access to that spot. At least on Pokemon Stadium in melee you could only infinite on 2 of the 4 transformation (2/5 if you include the normal field)

100% I feel lie a lot of stages need a good amount of testing- Hylian Valley for one seems like a decent place- like 100% that precident is a reason to test transforming stages since the problematic portion leaves occasionally/people should learn to stay away. That being said, what stages actually need Hazards on to become viable? the only ones I know of/have seen from conversations are.

Tower of Salvation
Hylian Valley
Central Highway
YI SSF2
Pokemon Coliseum
Sky Sanctuary
Saturn Valley
Warioware

Are therre others i'm missing?

afaik no character will be able to transition you from one side to the other tho. needs testing. it makes infinites not infinite and rather a cg. that absolutely should be legal

I've got a couple of BR people convinced about it. Only time will tell if it sticks.

I'll list all of the hazards in the game and how the switch affects (or is supposed to affect) them.

Hazardless:
Battlefield, Final Destination, Metal Cavern, Flat Zone+, Meteo Campaigns, Chaos Shrine, Twilight Town, Waiting Room, Final Valley, Planet Namek, Hueco Mundo, Temple, Sector Z

Hazards not affected by the switch:
Sand Ocean, Emerald Cave

Hazards missing but will presumably be fixed in a later update:
Green Hill Zone: Breakable ground and checkpoints.
Yoshi's Island (SSF2): Goonies that fly around and act as temporary platforms.
Lake of Rage: The red Gyarados.
Gangplank Galleon: The cannonballs periodically fired onto the stage.
Skull Fortress: The enemies launched from Wily's castle.
Hyrule Castle: The tornado that sweeps across the stage and launches fighters upward.
Saffron City: The wild Pokémon and propellor platforms.
Steel Diver: The underwater physics.
Mushroom Kingdom (64): The pipes, center weighted platforms, and pirhana plants.
Mushroom Kingdom II: Birdo attacking and Pidgit acting as a moving platform.
Smashville: The balloons carrying items.


Hazards currently available:
Galaxy Tours: The stage's transformations into different galaxies.
Bowser's Castle: The Thwomps that crash down onto large portions of the stage. (The lava is not affected.)
Mushroom Kingdom III: The moving platform and P-switches. (The breakable blocks are not affected.)
WarioWare, Inc.: The Microgames that periodically interrupt the battle.
Jungle Hijinx: The Barrel Cannon that hovers above the stage, catches fighters, and launches them back.
Hylian Skies: The transformation into the Dark World, flipping the stage horizontally.
Clock Town: The meteors that fall on the final day, the healing fairies that appear at night, and Tingle's balloon.
Pokémon Colosseum: The Ghost, Bug, and Steel-type transformations.
Rainbow Route: The mirrors opening and pulling fighters through to the top.
Crateria: The acid rain.
Phase 8: The lava that falls down the center.
Saturn Valley: The healing hot spring.
Devil's Machine: Giygas's dialogue. (It's not a hazard, per se, but the switch toggles it.)
Desk: The drawers launching fighters. (The drawers closing and the stapler are not affected.)
Casino Night Zone: The bumpers.
Sky Sanctuary Zone: The row of falling platforms on both sides.
Lunar Core: The stage-wide lasers.
Central Highway: The crumbling buildings on both sides.
Pac-Maze: The warp zones at the blast lines.
Tower of Salvation: Mythos Yggdrasil as a stage boss.
Bomb Factory: The bombs and bricks.
Dracula's Castle: The moving platforms. (When disabled, they'll stay in a three-straight layout.)
Nintendo 3DS: The eShop games.
Hidden Leaf Village: The paper lanterns that can be hit.
World Tournament: Touching the grass is a Ring Out.
Peach's Castle: The buttons, item blocks, and Banzai Bills.
Yoshi's Island (64): The clouds disappearing. (The clouds themselves are still there with hazards off; they just don't disappear.)
Yoshi's Story (Melee): The Shy Guys carrying items.
Dream Land: Whispy Woods blowing fighters around.
Fourside: The UFO that acts as a slippery platform.
Castle Siege: The stage's transformations to inside the castle, then the dungeon.

Galaxy Tours's transformations are currently missing, and Steel Diver's underwater physics do exist (in the form of increased jump height) and can't be turned off with the hazard switch. Those don't matter much for this discussion because neither stage seems legal in any form, but...

Not gonna lie- how is Galaxy Tours not a legal stage with Hazards Off? yes it's a taller version of warioware/layouts do change but what do you think makes it not legal?



Short version- I def should have been much clearer on what I meant, but you did answer my questions, hah. I guess to clarify, which stages do people thing are legal, but ARE only legal with hazards on. I am aware of how hazards undermined/made certain stages not viable for tourney use (Saturn Valley, Sky Sanctuary, ToS, Central Highway, etc.) Just curious because my instinct/default other than those 4 stages is to leave hazards off when it comes to the stagelist

Because the layout of the platforms is random. It's not the same every time.

maybe bc its like the 8th legal fd variant? like i said - variety


this ledge thing is news to me but even if that is the case, it's not like it isnt choreographed. test it, don't write it off. we need to stop banning plausible things from theorysmash



'too small' 'blast zones too large'
what implications do these have on the meta? again, theorysmash. "this is different so let's ban it" doesn't cut it with the current state of affairs.


floating plats. idk if im about that life, seems like it would only encourage some silly randall-like recoveries rofl


we have too many neutral stages already, we should test hazards on. it's interesting and imo very well balanced and a lot of fun


I can say from experience that Warioware is not a good idea with hazards on lmao, the hazards aren't very choreographed and if someone gets granted invincibility it just becomes a stalling game. frick that


ok but.... all of the layouts are neutral, so it doesn't matter??

another case if "it's different, let's ban it" instead of "let's see, let's run a tourney or a few to test"

The problem with making Pokémon Colosseum a hazards-on counterpick isn't necessarily the stage's hazard itself, but what's sacrificed in exchange. Pokémon Colosseum-B is a better stage for competitive play than even Smashville. I know you don't particularly care why, but you can't ask people to give that up.

Also, the implications of large blast zones is that it makes games take longer because kills come later and there's plenty of space to recover. Often, stages are banned to prevent games from dragging on for too long; seven-or-eight minute games may be legal, but are seldom enjoyable. Not saying I agree with all accusations (I agree that Central Highway-A should at least be tried), but that's what the reasoning is. You asked, I answered.

I feel bad because my question kind of derailed the discussion in a format I don't want. Question was never, should we turn all hazards on (I think the answer is no unless a legal stage is unusable otherwise.) But more of whatt stages needed them to be useful. Pokemon Colosseum is 100% a starter and should remain as such, if we wanted to test we can test it, but it's not needed.

As for the other point- large blastzones are good, some chars need them, some don't. If we want to stand true of " being different shouldn't equal auto ban" then we should make sure that the variety of stages we use is different in not only layout, but also in blastzone/stage size. part of the problem in the official games (Melee/PM/Smash 4/Brawl/64) etc. is that a lot of stages are good but were rejected because of poor community opinions. Point i'm trying to make is that if the only problem w. a stage is it's big enough to motivate camping...that's not a good enough reason to ban it.

Seperately to defend Galaxy Tours w. no hazards.

A. different layout - specifically it's one of 2 stages with a vertical set of small platforms with small horizontal blastzones. The big difference between it and Warioware is that the ceiling is a bit higher, though the platforms depending on the build are a bit closer. It doesn't have weird ledges or sides, generally flat all the way down though it has a very deep bottom blast zone (deeper than warioware's).

B. I think it's worth as a Starter stage solely because of its layout- yes we have the 4 that are more or less locks (Battlefield/Pokemon Colosseum/Smashville/Pick one of Waiting Room or FD). I'm gonna say that unless we can't decide we should stick to 5 starters (though we have the stage numbers to start w. 7 and be fine.) Now looking at those stages, we have...

Smashville - small stage area, moving platform, blastzones somewhat small

FD - larger stage, high ceiling, average horizontal blastzones

Battlefield - small stage, larger blastzones

Pokemon - larger stage medium blastzones

The reason I think Galaxy Tours is a decent starter is because it's horizontally a medium sized stage and has a layout that's uniquely different than the rest of the stages, but doesn't create a problem of where we don't have a CP stage as a starter (hi smash 4), or that we don't have the multiple triplat/flat stage/similar layout issue the other games have.

"But you can't predict the layout" - we have multiple stages that change platform layouts midmatch. Galaxy picks one pre-set but never changes afterwards. Yes it's vertically high but we also don't have problems with chars not really being able to Jump. If the Bowser issues w. his jump are true, then he might be the only one, and the stage still is decent for him otherwise, and if people are worried about camping there isn't a whole bunch you can do since there isn't a ton of space. Finally there's only 2 potential platform layouts, the one with 3 layers with the completely vertical platforms, and the one where it has a middle platform in the _/-\_ shape but it doesn't have a 3rd platform. if there are others, please show me, but point is the options for those platforms do not build a version that would be detrimental to competitive play.

Maybe I'm wrong and it should be a counterpick stage- but given our options it's a decent stage that w/o Hazards is pretty decent.

my issue with pc is that there's a huge overlap with TOS it's identical the platforms are just slightly moved over. it's infinitely more interesting with hazards on.

anyway so who's gonna be toing with a trial stagelist

Look, TSON. It's clear that we're getting nowhere with this. For example, if I told you that ToS-B was actually comparatively polarizing (which is why it's a counterpick and not a starter) despite the supposedly identical Pokémon Colosseum-B being so neutral, I doubt that you'd believe me.

If I could describe your mindset in one word, it's... "Sakurai". You look at the game exactly like Sakurai does, with exactly the same types of attitudes and misconceptions regarding competitive play.
There's an old joke about Shakespeare being enrolled in a class on his own works and flunking. Think about what I mean by that. You just have the wrong perspective for this.



Anyway, the trial stagelists are still in progress. This kind of thing takes a little while. And I'm still pushing for Hylian Skies, so at least consider that a victory on your part.

Here's I guess my view on all of this and the philosophical underpinnings of the stagelist, along with a proposed one Savvy and I hashed out.

A stage is the place where you fight your opponent. Things that make the game dependent on playing the stage (egregious examples would be 75m in the console games or Crateria in this game) fundamentally detract from the goal of competitive play: to recognize skill in the specific things that we care about testing the skill of: generally considered to be operating your character effectively, interacting with your opponent, etc. A stage that fundamentally shifts what it means to play the game has the problem that, even if SSF2 played on Crateria is fun, it isn't testing the skill set that our competitors train for, and so although it might have merit for its own metagame it's not the same meta that we want to play in.

This isn't even getting into the issue of whether that new Crateria-is-the-only-stage meta is fun, which I'd argue it usually isn't in games that are balanced for "normal" stages. (Similarly, Sonic becomes way better than Bowser in a game where powerful items are allowed.)

So that covers stages that shouldn't be on the list at all: stages that warp the metagame to make it not "how good is my opponent, with a small emphasis on stage knowledge" to "it doesn't matter that my opponent doesn't know how to combo, they can just do an infinite" or "my opponent doesn't know how to recover or edgeguard, but Bomb Factory has no offstage space".

Now what stages do I think should be on the stagelist? Having 100 stages that are FD with slightly different dimensions would obviously be terrible, so how do we choose stages from the pool of every competitively-viable stage to make a stagelist? To me, the answer to that is balance and diversity, which is to say, a lack of centralization. This is something that our previous metagame failed at: Smashville became overwhelmingly dominant, partly through being the least laggy but also for being mostly neutral, and our neutral list made it so that most matchups started on SV.

The problem with this is that SV became so centralizing that it warped the metagame: just as the metagame doesn't stay the same on Corneria, having any stage be the only stage changes play drastically. This was most apparent in characters like ZSS that really enjoyed the stage, or tactics like Samus chaingrabbing Fox that didn't actually pan out on what was an overwhelming dominant stage in friendlies and in tournaments. The more relevant question than "am I better than my opponent" was "am I better than my opponent on Smashville", which is unhealthy. This creates a balance problem.

Speaking of balance, even stagelists that don't force a particular stage can be unbalanced, in the sense that out of all the competitively-viable stages the excluded stages shift the metagame out of its "natural" state into one that is dominated by characters that are buffed by the stagelist. This was most notable in Brawl, when a fear of MK made Ice Climbers into another top threat because all of their bad stages went away. This also happened to a degree in v0.9b: swordsmen were so good and so dominant in part because the stagelist had 4 stages that were really good for them (BF, YS, DL, and WW).

How does this happen, and what criteria can we use to prevent this? Nonwithstanding the technical things that made SV so dominant, which have been fixed, I'd argue that a healthy stagelist avoids polarization, because that is what fundamentally leads to centralization. To give an example, here's a fake neutral stage list I made up that I think would be terrible, despite the fact that it's balanced and each stage is competitively viable (at least arguably):

WarioWare
Metal Cavern
Saturn Valley
Dracula's Castle
Smashville


In considering a stagelist you have to consider every matchup, but most matchups fall into a couple types of stage picking strategies, defined by which criterion becomes most important: big vs. small, plat vs. flat, and to a lesser extent high vs. low and wide vs. narrow. Let's consider a very common strategy (perhaps in a matchup like Naruto-DK, where space is very important for Naruto), that revolves around one side wanting large stages and the other side wanting small stages.

Under this stagelist, Naruto gets 2 strikes and they're clearly going to be WarioWare and Metal Cavern under this metric: they're clearly the smallest. DK, similarly, will ban Drac's and Saturn Valley, because they're much larger than the other stages on the list. They are almost guaranteed to go to Smashville, as is any matchup that picks stages this way.

This is bad because it means that the DK v. Naruto matchup depends inordinately on whether you can win on Smashville. Note that even if Smashville favors one side fairly heavily, it'll still get picked, because it would have to somehow be worse than the struck stages. So let's say on Smashville DK really enjoys the fact that the platform can block clones, and so even though out of all of the competitively-viable stages a DK player may not do very well they enjoy an advantage over Naruto regardless: we have warped the meta by picking a balanced neutral stagelist of competitively-viable stages.


So now that that wall of text is mostly over, what's my stagelist? To be honest, I don't really want to argue too much for specifics here, just get us to agree on what the fundamental goal of a stagelist is: for me, it is to represent the imagined meta that would result from the average of every competitively-viable stage without requiring that each game happen on every single stage, and to achieve that by making it so that every stage is roughly as likely to appear and that stages that are less likely to appear are that way in complementary pairs.

With that in mind, here it is:

Neutrals:

Battlefield
Final Destination
Smashville
Pokemon Coliseum
Rainbow Route

Counterpicks:
Yoshi's Story
Dreamland
Tower of Salvation
Saturn Valley
Castle Siege
Metal Cavern
Dracula's Castle
WarioWare

Under this ruleset, a player gets 4 bans when being counterpicked.

Points of interest, but things that are not as important as the wall of text above:

[*] No mergers: they add complexity without really adding depth, make the rules more complicated and make tournaments more difficult to run, and are an ugly solution to the problem. If a stage is needed for diversity, then it should be added as its own stage. If it isn't enough of a contribution to the meta, it shouldn't be picked. I've chosen Final Destination for cachet, a good size, and edges that aren't death: 3DS is very polarizing, and even though FD is too I want to avoid auto-win stages.
[*] 4 bans allow a player to ban BF/YS/DL and WarioWare, or every FD-like stage (FD, ToS, SV perhaps, Saturn Valley). It also allows you to ban all the really small stages (CS, MC, WW, YS-ish) or the really large stages (Drac's, Saturn Valley, DL, FD-ish)
[*] Rainbow Route has a name change and a new coat of paint, and it's thoroughly thrown off its prior Mirror Chamber days: it's an excellent neutral.
[*] The notable elisions are Sky Sanctuary Zone and Galaxy Tours. I actually kinda like Galaxy Tours (all of the layouts are competitively viable IMO, they add diversity, and the forms are similar enough that the randomness delta isn't huge: it isn't even as bad IMO as PS transformations in Melee), but others seem not to. You could add it without much issue. Sky Sanctuary Zone has a small problem with an infinite with multishines on the small walls, but otherwise it could be fine too: the jury's still out, but I think it'd ultimately be a catastrophe if in the GF's of some tournament a Fox player just CP's there and multishines into oblivion)


The details of the stagelist can be hashed out later: I think everyone seems to have wildly-differing definitions of what "competitively viable" means, which we'll have to tackle at some point. I'd like to get some agreement, however, on what the purpose of a stagelist is, and what criteria we should use to judge a stagelist. In my view, that's essentially splitting up the matchups in the game into a couple of classes, and for each one of those going: does every ban feel forced? Will a random neutral become overwhelmingly important? Does the stagelist seem to favor one side unduly?