Now that we have a lot more stages in Beta than any other game before this, we may have a big discussion ahead of us regarding the list of tournament legal stages, both online and offline. This thread is just for that and we will discuss which stages could be legal and which ones should be banned for the reasons you believe they could be.

Have fun and happy debating.

im thinking

Starter
Battlefield, Smashville, Final Destination/Waiting Room, Pokemon Colosseum, and Tower of Salvation

Counterpick
Dracula's Castle, Galaxy Tours (despite the random layout), Dreamland, and Sky Sanctuary Zone

Well, I'd actually like to give my own opinion on the list, too, and it's that I believe the following should happen if there was the possibility of an extended stage list:

Starter:
Battlefield, Final Destination, Metal Cavern, WarioWare, Inc., Clock Town, Pokemon Colosseum, Saturn Valley, Tower of Salvation, Yoshi's Story, Smashville

Counterpick:
Galaxy Tours, Hylian Skies, Rainbow Route, Sky Sanctuary Zone, Hyrule Castle, Castle Seige, Dreamland

All of these stages seem perfectly fine for me, honestly.

Edit: Also, the reason I added Hylian Skies and Clock Town is because they seemed to have their little issues fixed on them, thus making them more appealing for tournaments. Also, I put Clock Town in starter since it can be seen as a starter stage.

Clock Town's middle gap is hella bad for competitive. Janky af. Screws over ground-based characters.
Walls on Hylian Skies enable a possible Fox multishine infinite. No thank you.
Everything else seems perfectly a-ok.

First of all I think thats way to many starter stages.

Clock town is bad because the hole in the middle force you to jump and be in the air
Wario Ware was banned in previous versions cause it has super jank blastzones
Rainbow Route/Mirror Chamber has bad platforms. Middle one is too low. and the others are too high making it easy to camp.
Saturn Valley im still iffy on but i think it would most likely be counterpick rather tna a starter. Same for Metal Cavern
Hyrule Castle is just to big and easy to camp on
Hylian Skies is broken cause fox can infinite

I can't believe the hole wasn't just filled with a platform on Clock Town. Majora's Mask missing out on appearing competitive

Rainbow Route/Mirror Chamber's platforms are wider and the middle platform has been raised to an acceptable height. Been playing on it a lot and it certainly could be a great neutral with its inverted BattleField layout.

I'm pretty sure WarioWare is bigger with wider platforms. Definitely feels better for slower characters to have time to breathe from pressure.

And, now that we have so many good neutral stages to choose from, I wonder if we should just combined the tri-platform stages together as one with striking (Battlefield/Yoshi's/Dreamland). Swordsmen like Ichigo and Marth just would have too many of the same favorable layout for choices when counter-picking.

Well... here's where I would start at:

Starters (Hazards off):
BattleField
Final Destination/Waiting Room (Kcuf 3DS, it sucks).
Pokemon Colossuem
Rainbow Route
Smashville (Platform can be wonky as of the current version though).

Counters (Hazards off):
WarioWare
Jungle Hijinx (Combined with Castle Siege, or just picked over it. Seems to have a lower ceiling and wider base.)
Sky Sanuctury Zone Hype stage, plz make legal.
Tower of Salvation
Saturn Valley (Hopefully, if not...) Dreamland
Yoshi's Story (if decided seperate)

Jank, jank, jank, jank, jank! Can't I even see one competitive SSF2 discussion without being inundated with that meaningless john?

I don't think we're going to have a satisfactory stage list this time. Not if we keep our mindset from v0.9b. And to be frank, I worry about the Beta tournament scene because of it.

We need to start gathering actual data before we start making definitive lists. If you're going to build things based just on memories from our three-year mistake, without paying any mind to differences and how things will actually play out in a match, our scene is dead before it even begins.

Tl;dr - jank is inev, there's less of it in this game than in Melee or Smash 4. That being said we still have a LIMITED number of stages- but overall they are not bad. Anyway, my ideas

3 Stock/8 Minutes (OR) 4 Stock/8 Minutes
No Hazards

Starters:
Smashville
Battlefield
Waiting Room
Pokemon Coliseum
Galaxy Tours

Counterpicks
Rainbow Route
Dreamland
Metal Cavern
Warioware
YI Brawl
Dracula's Castle
Final Destination/3DS
Mushroom Kingdom 2
Tower of Salvation

First off- 100% lots of stages, these are the only ones that aren't totally awful- would argue a few others, (Saturn Valley, Jungle Hijinxs, Clock Town, Castle Siege) could and should be tested, but 100% stage-list gets too large at that point Also unlike the others named, there are sizable disadvantages to those stages.
(This is pushing it and it's from someone who thinks the original Smash 4 stage-list shouldn't have changed from the beginning) Either way, ignoring factors like stage size/dimensions, platforms, etc, seems the most equal in my opinion.

Addressing the weird things (Waiting Room, Galaxy Tours)
Waiting Room seems less strange/awkward in terms of recoveries compared to FD, as a result that's why I have it there as the default over FD.

Other note- we should do something similar to the Tri-Plat double ban in Smash 4 ( If you ban Waiting Room/FD/3DS) they all are banned or you can gentleman to them, etc.

Galaxy Tours- Really like the stage layout, creates something new- I do worry that this starter set AND the list as a whole favors chars who like small stages more. If i change a stage to have a "larger" starter stage, it would be Dracula's solely because I don't want double triplat. If I switched to a personal preference, it would be Metal Cavern- again, issue is that chars who like small stages could benefit too much.

With this stage-list/idea there would be 3 bans per player.

Okay, but other than the nonproblem of the gap in Clock Town, what really warrants it being banned? Nothing.
In fact, Clock Town is nothing like it was due to the universal changes to characters' air speeds and jumping heights. You can simply jump onto the top platform like any other stage and fight without going to the bottom gap at all, or you could just use a character's great air speed to just go from one part of the stage to the next.
Now you could say that someone could be above you while you try crossing the gap and will end up spiking you, but I don't think that's the stage's fault, that's the player's fault for choosing poorly.
And don't get any idea that the stage promotes circle camping either, because it doesn't due to the speed of all the characters and the fact the top platform is a soft platform.

So honestly, there isn't a single problem in Clock Town that warrants a ban. The arguments that the gap is the problem is ignoring everything else in Beta without proper testing, and can be easily dismissed as things that are easily mitigated.

2 reasons why I didn't include it

1. There's a huge number of viable stages in this game- like as of now there's more viable stages than we could imagine. While I am all for a large, liberal stagelist, at least until people find ways to exploit them, at a certain point the list gets so big that even bans can't check back.

2. Stage development- circle camping isn't the problem, because obviously there isn't really that much of stage to have it occur. the problem is in certain matchups (think Shiek, Pac-Man, Falco/Fox, etc.) that stage has the potential to become too polarizing as the layout may be decent for a lot of characters, the capability to actually approach once one of those chars, or others gains a lead becomes incredibly difficult. Do I think camping is a reason to ban a stage? No, but I do think while it's a good CP stage, it actually could become too strong of one in certain matchups. That being said, would like to test it before writing it off.

How did the youngest Melee tournaments do it, back in the distant past of 2004, when far, far more stages were legal than there are today and before the stage striking process was invented? I'm thinking that could be a potential way to pare down things as we figure out EXACTLY what's bad about the things that are, in fact, bad.

It'll be messy and ugly, but that's the point. The point is, we have to have a definitive account of WHY x is bad, not just say "X is bad" without a second thought.

With proper testing, you'll realize that Clock Town is very much so able to be a tournament legal stage with little to no problems to it.
But also, let me ask, why do you think Mushroom Kingdom II should be counterpick? A stage that has walk-offs and pits of death is grounds for banning automatically.



Okay, so do you have any opinions on specific stages that have the potential to be CP or Legal?

My own opinions? I've put all the stages into five rough categories:

But this is very rough.


NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION:
---
Battlefield
Final Destination/Nintendo 3DS/Waiting Room (though we need to address how it affects stage striking somehow)
Tower of Salvation
Smashville
Pokémon Colosseum
Dream Land
Yoshi's Story
Dream Land 64

MAYBE:
---
Metal Cavern: Banned in Project M, but popular for exhibition matches anyway.
Galaxy Tours: Randomized layout, but each randomized layout is viable on its own.
Yoshi's Island (SSF2)
WarioWare, Inc.
Jungle Hijinx
Rainbow Route (Mirror Chamber)
Saturn Valley
Sky Sanctuary Zone
Dracula's Castle
Final Valley
Castle Siege

I JUST DON'T KNOW:
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Gangplank Galleon
Phase 8
Casino Night Zone
Lunar Core
Central Highway
Pac-Maze
Hyrule Castle: I still see people defending it sometimes.
Yoshi's Story (64): If only they tied the clouds to the hazard switch…

PROBABLY NOT BUT WE'LL SEE:
---
Mushroom Kingdom III: Walk-off. Breakable blocks even with hazards off. Platform doesn't move, leaving it skewed.
Hylian Skies
Clock Town: Cannot currently be tested. A patch broke it.
Meteo Campaigns
Desk: Hazard Switch doesn't affect stapler.
Chaos Shrine: Walls higher than they used to be.
Steel Diver: There's a huge wall in the middle.
Hueco Mundo
Peach's Castle (Melee)
Mushroom Kingdom II: Still used for side events. Not entirely sure about the reasoning, but it's there.
Saffron City (64)
Sector Z (64)
Lake of Rage

ABSOLUTELY NOT:
---
Bowser's Castle: No lower blast zone. The floor is lava.
Emerald Cave: A Cave Of Life by design. Hazard Switch does nothing.
Sand Ocean: The track's still there, eliminating the lower blast zone. (I keep saying "tie it to the hazard switch", but nooooo...)
Flat Zone Plus: Walk-off, large, weird layout.
Crateria
Devil's Machine: Largest stage in the game if not the series, completely flat, walk-off.
Twilight Town
Skull Fortress
Bomb Factory
Hidden Leaf Village
Planet Namek
World Martial Arts Tournament: Hazards off, large, mostly flat, walk-off. Hazards on, the lower blast zone is RIDICULOUSLY close to the stage.
Mushroom Kingdom 64
Temple
Fourside
Green Hill Zone

What if the community has 2 sets of tournaments? The first set uses the 0.9b stage list, with slight modification to add Waiting Room and whatnot, and the other set is an experimental set that tries out different stage lists and stage striking systems, and possibly different rulesets. As time passes, rules from the second set are slowly incorporated into the first set. Of course, the second set wouldn't count for FCR, if that's still a thing in Beta.

This way, we can have a competitive scene sans 'janky' messiness as soon as tournaments start happening, but new quasi-legal stages can phase into the competitive scene.

I really want to encourage some thought around not using slopes or size of blast zone to determine what's a counterpick. Our meta would be way more fun if we just had hazards off neutrals and hazard on counterpicks especially with stages like world tournament