Name (aka Handle):

My tag is PeppyWil, but most people shorten it to "Peppy."

How old are you?:

I am 21.

Which characters do you play in SSF2? Why do you play these characters? (Note: do not list characters that are not currently in the game):

My best two characters are Meta Knight and Fox; deciding between the two is largely dependent on my opponent's character choice. I would consider myself somewhat proficient with every member of the current cast except Yoshi, Sora, Goku, Tails, Sonic, Ness, Megaman, and Peach. I enjoy fast characters with strong options both on the approach and out of shield (henceforth abbreviated to OoS). MK's Up Air and Neutral Air (henceforth referred to as Uair and Nair, respectively) and Fox's Shine OoS are very quick options that lead to combo situations and option select scenarios that are very beneficial for characters that have fast enough aerials and grounded options to take advantage of them.

Both MK and Fox also dash dance really well in the neutral game, which is appealing to me personally. My biggest stylistic distinction as a competitive player has always been that I grab a lot. A. Lot. Sometimes it feels like all I want to do. MK and Fox both have lots of guaranteed setups into grab, like Fair or Bair into grab with MK and Dair into grab or ShineGrab with Fox. They also get lots of damage (and possible kill options) out of specific throws. Those are the best reasons I can give for my character choices.

How much experience do you have with official Smash titles? (SSB64, Melee, Brawl. Include in this answer which characters you play/played.):

I have an incredible amount of experience with all three games. I began playing Smash 64 when it came out, when I was very young, and began playing Melee when it came to the U.S. in 2001. I became aware of competitive Smash in 2006, when I found Youtube videos of Melee at MLG. This marked the beginning of my competitive career, which I'll discuss in the next question. I picked up Brawl on release day in 2008 and dedicated what can only be described as an unhealthy amount of time to the game. I have something like 3500 hours total playtime with the three games in the series, and more than half of that is as a competitive player. I've played Project M quite a bit in the last few months as well, but that isn't an official title so I'll hold off on discussing that for now.

Have you ever attended any Smash tournaments? If so, give some details about the tournament (number of participants, which games, etc). How well did you place?

This is sort of a big question for me, but the short answer is yes, I have. I attended my first Smash tournament in March 2010, at the ripe age of 16. It was exclusively Brawl, had about 40 entrants, and I did poorly. I made it out of pools into a 32 man bracket, and went 1-2 in bracket, coming in 17th place. I used exclusively Ike, and I was not very good. I have been consistently entering tournaments since then, though I've never thought of myself as particularly great as a competitive player. I played Brawl as my primary competitive game until the release of Project M 3.0 earlier this year, when I began the transition to Melee and PM. In total I would estimate that I have been in some way involved in at least 40 Smash tournaments in my career.

I've also gone through the transition from focused competitive player to tournament organizer and commentator, which is where I feel like I excel. For the last two months, I have hosted weekly tournaments for Melee and PM in Dayton, Ohio. Each week we get about a dozen local players. I consistently place either 1st, 2nd, or 3rd at these events; there are two local players that are distinctly better than I am, so I get 1st if they don't show up, 2nd if one of them does, etc etc. I am also the host of the DIRTY DYT monthly tournament series in Dayton, which is a large monthly tournament that attracts attention from out of state players and top level Ohio players alike. The results of the most recent iteration of this event can be found here: http://smashboards.com/threads/dirty-dy ... io.368321/

If you're familiar with competitive smash, you should recognize some names. Representation at the event has included players from Maryland, Michigan, Kentucky, and Ohio; from Ohio itself we've had players from Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, and other, smaller municipalities. Also, I'm hosting one of the first Smash 3DS events at Epic Loot Video Games in Centreville, Ohio this coming Saturday. Additional tournament organization feats for my resume: I worked as a volunteer staff member at Apex 2014, which is where I first met several of the SSF2 dev team members; I consistently help operate and perform commentary for tournaments in the South/Central Ohio area, including events in Columbus and Cincinnati; and finally, I volunteered as a Pool Captain for Melee Singles at The Big House 4, which ended yesterday.

My most recent notable tournament placings include 13th in Project M singles at AlphaCollusion 4 in Columbus, a tournament with 30+ entrants, and 9th in Project M singles at the most recent Cincinnati Smash Revival Biweekly, a tournament with 20+ entrants.

tl;dr Smash tournaments: they are what I do.

When did you start playing SSF2?

I played the original on Newgrounds like everyone else. Some time in 2011 one of my competitive Brawl buddies, Maram, mentioned playing SSF2 and being good at it, or something like that. Anyway, I downloaded the latest version, and have been playing since then.

What is your favorite stage in SSF2? Explain.

I enjoy plenty of the stages when hazards are turned off. Pokemon Stadium, Jungle Hijinx, Tower of Salvation, and Casino Night Zone stand out to me as really fun neutral stages, each with cool little things to make them unique. Mainstay neutrals like Battlefield are great as well, of course. I enjoy these stages because they provide a good neutral environment for competitive play, without being polarizing in specific match-ups the way that Final Destination, Clock Town, or Yoshi's Island are. My favorite janky stage is Bowser's Castle, because spiking people into lava is too fun, and comboing into the really low ceiling is wonderfully mean.

Who, in your opinion, should be placed first on the SSF2 tier list? Under competitive settings why would this character perform on a higher level than all others?

Ya Dad seems to think Naruto is the best in the game, but I'm going to ignore him because he's a big ol' buster. It may also be Peach, but she's a character I can't really play well, so I'm not sure about her. The characters that really stand out to me are Zelda, Meta Knight, Naruto, Wario, Link, and Chibi-Robo. For the sake of this question, I'll narrow it down to Meta Knight, if only because I can talk about him the most. However, I'm prepared to accept that I'm wrong about this if I'm shown evidence to suggest otherwise; if I'm accepted as a back room member, I'd love to be shown some things that prove me wrong.

Meta Knight is the best character in this game because his normals have high priority, good range, long lasting hitboxes, and wonderful combo potential; because he can string Fair, Bair, and Dtilt into grab, and he can combo grab -> down throw into any aerial except Dair, and can string that subsequent aerial into still more varying combos, including regrabs off of Fair and Bair; because he can gimp characters with bad recoveries for early kills with Dair and Nair, and can kill with a sweetspotted Nair very early, especially off-stage; because his dash-dancing is fast and unpredictable, and getting a grab out of DD is both relatively simple and very rewarding; and because, most importantly, the current SSF2 competitive ruleset, to my knowledge, does not include a ledge-grab-limit, and Meta Knight can take the lead in a game and finish the rest of the match by camping on the ledge, defending himself with Uairs, Fairs, and Tornadoes until time runs out, which only a handful of the cast members are fit to deal with.

Who, in your opinion, should be placed last on the SSF2 tier list? Under competitive settings why would this character perform on a lower level than all others?

Ness and Jigglypuff are both bad, but Ness is the worse of the two. Double Jump Cancelling is cute, but it isn't very good in the current iteration because Ness has very low horizontal air speed, meaning the opponent doesn't have to work very had at all to out-space Ness completely on the ground. Ness has a small grab range, grounded normals that are either slow or very low in range, poor air speed and low priority aerials (aside from Fair, which is probably his best move), a mediocre dash speed that limits his mobility on the ground, a weight-class/fall-speed combination that allows other characters to juggle him well, and a recovery that is interruptable and limited.

If you could make only one change to SSF2 as it currently is, what would it be and why?

Aside from making Ness and Jigglypuff better, I would decrease Meta Knight's grab range, make grabbing edges slightly more difficult, decrease hitstun on Zelda's Nair, increase the necessary timer for Wario's fart to charge, and give Link a throwing animation for bombs that actually has lag. If I had to choose only one, I would make grabbing ledges more difficult, or implement some sort of change to make planking less effective, or enforce a ledge-grab limit in competitive play. Something that would make ledges less safe would be ideal.

What is your view on items in competitive play?

They should not be allowed. Items spawn in randomly assigned places at randomly assigned times, and thus represent an unnecessary inconsistency in competitive play. If a Smash game cannot stand on its own as a good competitive game without items, then it cannot stand on its own as a good competitive game at all.

Do you have or can you download Skype? You don't need a mic or webcam.

I have Skype on my laptop and desktop, and have a webcam and headset for each.

Why do you want to join the Smash Flash Back Room? What will you contribute? Why are you an exceptional applicant? Be as detailed as possible.

I want to join the Smash Flash Back Room because I enjoy this game a lot, I want to be more involved in its development, I like the members of the development team that I have met so far, and I think I'm fairly good at it.

My contributions to the back room will include... well, a lot of things. I have a good implicit understanding of how characters can be balanced around their specific design directions; I'm friends with some of the developers of Project M and am often involved in their in-person discussions at tournaments regarding the viability of certain characters and the over-powered nature of others. My knowledge of the fundamentals of smash are very sound, as a result of my activity in the competitive scene in the last half-decade. I am willing to travel to events in Ohio and other places in the Eastern Midwest to attend events and talk about Smash Flash 2. My writing, including spelling/grammar and extending to style as a whole, is fairly sound (I am college educated). The only thing I wish I could contribute that I can't is programming knowledge, but I suppose that's why the difference between developer and back-roomer is made distinct.

Why am I an exceptional applicant? Well, based on the literal definition of exceptional, I suppose it's because I'm not fourteen and I actually know something about competitive Smash. I'm going to talk about myself a bit more generally to properly answer that question, though. Firstly, I'm a college student studying Physics Education, with the hopes of becoming a high school science teacher sometime soon. I'm fairly good at both mathematical calculations and explaining things to people, either in-person or through writing. Secondly, I play a couple instruments, perform stand-up comedy for drunks at a local bar, volunteer as a counselor at a leadership camp/seminar for high-school kids every summer, tutor 1st graders once a week to help them learn to read, prefer whiskey over gin, write weird things on Twitter @CDPeppy, and am generally not terrible. This illustration of myself as well-rounded, in tandem with my involvement in the competitive Smash community and the fact that I two-stocked Ya Dad's Link in friendlies should give you a fairly good idea of my credentials. Just don't ask Ya Dad about how our money match went. I've never backed out of something harder in my life.


Additional information (Include in this section anything relevant to your application. This could include links to videos of yourself playing.)

You know, it's strange... there aren't any videos online of me playing. My personal tournaments don't get recorded due to lack of equipment, and I'm not quite good enough to warrant being put on stream in either Melee or PM yet. Hopefully I can get this changed soon. Regarding my skill level, I guess you can just ask Ya Dad or TSON, who played against me this weekend. They're both probably better than me at SSF2, but not by much, I'd say.

There isn't really anything else I can think to say here, so I'll open this thing up for questions and the rest of the process now!

1. Discuss the Fox vs Link matchup. Discuss the neutral game for both characters, and discuss the best stage for both characters using this stage list (both counterpick and neutral stages can be selected in your answer):


2. Who is Fox's worst matchup on Smashville? Be detailed in your response.

Please note that the Smash Flash Back Room has no direct involvement with the game's development. We discuss the game in its current state, nothing more.
If you'd like to be involved in the balance and development of SSF2, consider applying for a balancer position.

That's actually probably what I should do. Thank you! I'll lock the thread now.