I guess i've missed the other reasons besides that in your posts especially since the pictures don't show the issues besides said hazard. So why isn't ToS a good stage assuming no Hazards? I understand it's large, but given the majority of considered stages are far smaller (like Dracula's might be the one stage larger that is universally accepted or considered, seems like it would be a decent mixup/benefit for characters who'd want a larger stage. Not to mention with hazards off, there are 0 interfering factors, no bad ledges, no glitches, which based on your explanation would justify a stage's ban.

I'm not against non-hazard ToS at all?

considering no one who posted in here actually is entering or hosting tournaments tho... can we really make that call for the community that's involved?

Alright I guess? just by the tones of your posts it sounded different.


Separate question- given that we have 3 different Final Destination variants worth testing, would it be better to keep them separate or keep them together?

To be fair I did help out/was entering tournies before a mix of online never working and school taking away from my ability to play. But 100% I do plan to enter events, be serious etc. If real life permits.

wanted to jump back and address this post because relevant


i dont really think jumping higher turns beta into super smash land but i mean if it does we wouldn't know because we didn't test it. in theory (since everything we're saying itt is theory lets be honest) your combos that worked before still work you just have to ff a little later. big whoops. we dont even know if the wall infinites are escapable because of the lowered gravity because we never tried it. lol


friend
pal

healing 8% after a ko doesn't break the game, the regen rate is so slow. plus your opponent can legit just do it right back
we don't know how this will affect the meta though or how people will play on it or really what's most abusable (trying to heal or trying to keep the pressure on) since it wasn't tested though

this is probably a fantastic stage to test though as without hazards it really doesn't have much to offer that isn't found on tos's platform layout or the wideness of another fd clone


assumptive

which wasn't banned for a long time. read this excerpt:



Note that they do not say: "The cars hit. Ban."
They also do not say: "There's some parts without ledges. Ban."

They counterplay these issues with experiences. They say it is choreographed and a reasonable expectation to avoid the cars and track, with usually minor punishment, and even when the punishment being larger, it still is a counterpick quality not a reason to ban considering the telegraphing.


which is banned because you can clip through the collisions and because the movement is not choreographed, backed up by tournament footage and experience


Maybe we should consider doing what they did in the above Smashboards thread and sort into more liberal categories with hazards on/off separated, have tournaments exclusively to test through the liberal list of "possible counterpicks" and go from there.

EDIT: notable also that they ruled that low gravity is not a reason to ban a stage in that thread lol

i feel it isn't worth arguing against hazards being tested because regardless of how many points are brought up you'll bring up posts from 7 years ago (i was barely a teenager my guy) and bring up old rulesets/old legal stages that are no longer in use tbqh

is this what no prize money does? damn

cant really say the brawl meta was figuring out their stagelist from scratch in 2017 considering the game wasn't new. good post though

except have you ever thought the reason you couldn't find a post from another game that's more recent is because that attempt didn't work?

we didn't try every stage in Smash 4. we tried a good handful, because we knew better. we knew what worked for the most part guess which ones we tossed

the wack ones from brawl

ur sooo invested in us not testing things, it's really not instilling confidence that these stages aren't actually viable. the correct answer tbh is "ok you'll see"

the same process happened in melee and 64 btw I won't waste my time linking them though because if brawls was too old I can only imagine

tbh smash 4 even had it to a very basic extent (duck hunt, town & city for example - stages we would have banned for dumb reasons I'm sure)

the difference is in official smash titles you try things that sound remotely plausible, then ban those proven otherwise, here we come into threads and act authoritative and make stagelists 5 days after release, before there even is a meta, try to shut down any conversation with theoreticals, and then we never revise it. not conducive. I'm not trolling or stupid or bad for wanting to test s*** before banning it, I'm doing precisely what our communitys leaders should be doing. shame that I have to stand alone lol

We can only test so many stages to the level that testing requires: people don't seem to be satisfied with testing in serious exhibition matches, so in order to really test stages you need to have large tournaments (for character diversity) and then collect data from that, and you also have to make sure that people don't soft-ban all the broken stuff. That probably means you need a stagelist that doesn't have neutral stages on it, so that people don't just gentleman to SV every game. That's a lot of work for a stage that, with a good degree of certainty, can be said to not be competitively viable. Is it worth it to wait 6 months or more for a viable stagelist, before a tournament can have official sanction and viewership without increasing the number of rulesets out there?

We need to test specific questions of fact and answer specific questions with tests. But having an entire tournament to test the viability of a healing mechanic is a waste when there is already a dearth of big tournaments. As the meta develops, we can refine and revisit, but we need a starting point where we can actually start playing.

"Do SSZ multishine infinites (which don't work on every charactter) overly polarize the stage" is a question that can be settled by having several competitive matches with Fox v. some character that gets infinited, where the Foxes can perform the infinite to death and commit to a fully play-to-win strategy. But there's no point in just testing random stages that almost the entire community agrees on being unviable for competitive play, wasting valuable tournaments and time, just to confirm once again that Temple is illegal or that death beams spawning isn't quite the same Smash that the other stages have.

I think your comparisons to other Smash games aren't very relevant, because in this game there's an abundance of competitively-viable stages, perhaps more than we actually want in a stagelist. Many Melee players and pros think that PS shouldn't be legal, if it weren't for the fact that Melee desperately needs another stage. Hyrule Castle was legal in Smash 64 not because it was a legit stage in the way SV is, but because the alternative was one legal stage. It took a 50-minute set to overcome that.

I think a better comparison is PM, which essentially went with the idea of "as long as we have a diverse stagelist, missing a stage is not the end of the world." That's the key: once you have an abundance of viable stages, the burden of proof shifts: instead of "we'll take anything that doesn't obliterate the idea of fairness", it becomes "does this stage add anything to the stagelist?" In Melee, I'd probably test Saturn Valley with hazards on and consider it really seriously. But in this game, why go to the lengths it requires to test everything when we can have a diverse stagelist in a month that the community can get behind?

100% agree with Tson to be honest, like given the circumstances and that the game version is so new, we should err towards more stages, rather than fewer. The reason there are some that are 100% not even tested is that yes, there's a 100% chance that they'd do nothing to help comp play. However, the benefit compared to Smash 4, Melee, or even Brawl is that we have so many to start with. The official games started small but there were only at best 11 or 12 stages at best, and in some cases there were fewer that were acceptable. In fact the closest game to what we have is Project M, since they specifically had stages geared towarrds competitive play, and through time/testing changed/moved the stages until they found the right ones. Sure the stagelist will be smaller eventually when thigns are found but we should start big and then shrink only when needed.

veering with Samurai here quite a bit

this isn't like the other games where they are drowning in competitively unviable stages so they stretch for more. in SSF2 we have, without hazards:

Battlefield, Final Destination, Metal Cavern, WarioWare, Inc., Clock Town, Pokemon Colosseum, Saturn Valley, Tower of Salvation, Yoshi's Story, Smashville, Galaxy Tours, Rainbow Route, Sky Sanctuary Zone, Castle Seige, Dreamland, Training Room, 3DS

that's am absolutely massive stagelist. honestly you don't even need all of the stages that are obviously competitively viable; why do we need to bring in stages like "ToS except sometimes you can't jump" or "Saturn Valley except you heal in the middle" or "WarioWare except you play a minigame" when we have actually outright superior stages?

like, yeah, you could add Hylian Skies to be maybe a counterpick if you squint really hard but why do that when even without that stage you have a TON of options (and a good handful of those options you don't even need, like Training Room, 3DS, Sky Sanctuary, or Clock Town!)


you're wasting your time to pretty much result to "yep, these stages actually aren't that good, just like initially thought"

Just wanted to highlight the argument that should take Galaxy Tours out of the equation for now, no testing required. CodeSamurai mentioned it briefly some posts ago, but since it was a short point in a long list I thought it might benefit from proper emphasis.

The way I see it, Galaxy Tours should be an automatic no-go in order to avoid every opportunity for scumminess and grime.

Picture this:
An absolute nightmare. Code mentioned intentional disconnection, which is one more in a long list of unsportsmanlike yet nonpunishable tactics that a stage like Galaxy Tours encourages by its very nature.

If a future version of SSF2 allows players to force select a specific layout by holding a button while the stage loads, then Galaxy Tours should absolutely enter discussion again. At this point, however, I firmly believe that the healthiest thing to do is to disallow it entirely.

So the long and short of it is, yes we do. I'll grant you that in this game, most stages get worse w. Hazards on. There are some that are worth testing because they get better, like Dracula's Castle, Central Highway, etc. There are some that hazards on/off are never gonna be viable. Sometimes we get stages that get nixed because they have problems for the game that we don't expect until later. Sometimes we have stages that get nixed because of paranoia and fear, and as a result there are problems with the game that we don't account for.

The examples you name, I think are a issue of hazards rather than those stages. All 3 of those named are decent, solid CP stages. CP stages are good because there is no possible way to have a list of starters that are perfectly balanced. There is 0 stage that doens't benefit one person over the other. Yes hazards are mostly bad, we shouldn't throw the baby out w. the bathwater. Furthermore there are stages that are interesting but need hazards to be remotely viable. Should we test them? yes, simply because we don't know until we try them what problems will occur. It's the same as 3 or 4 stock, 6 or 8 minutes- we don't find the problems unless we well deal with them and try them out. Smash 4 might have chose poorly in the stages they removed, but it still took a year of tests before stagelists changed, same with how they tried to eliminate lylat, realized the test was a failure and replaced it.



* As for the "No Galaxy Tours arg"... That would never happen, and if someone's that grimy you legit get a TO involved- yes the stage has 5 possible layouts, but it's the same as any transforming stages we've used in the past. You can't just restart because you don't get the transformation right, and that's part of the stage. That's one of the stages that if someone picks, they're choosing because they prefer the stage regardless of layout- and if you'd use that stage then you take the risk you don't get your favorite layout.

People being s*** isn't a reason to ban a stage.

idk people fake desyncs, get other people to play on their accounts, join tournaments on alts, and even stall the whole tournament just to have a chance to win or simply piss off other players. I wouldn't be surprised if people come up with some lame excuse to try to restart the game to get the layout they want