sticky please

Hello there Its that time again - Beta has been out for a while, and naturally there was (and still is) a lot of discussion regarding what a stagelist should look like. This obviously includes us people from the BR as well, so I hereby present the very first official BR stagelist for SSF2 Beta! Feel free to debate and discuss below. Just stay away with random death threats and the likes.


Starters:

• Battlefield
• Dream Land
• Pokémon Colosseum
• Smashville
• Waiting Room/Final Destination (both stages can be striked at once)

Counterpicks:

• Castle Siege
• Dracula's Castle (hazards ON unless both parties agree otherwise)
• Rainbow Route
• Saturn Valley
• Sky Sanctuary Zone
• Tower of Salvation
• WarioWare, Inc.
• Yoshi's Story

As usual, stage striking for Game 1 follows the 1-2-1 striking system, meaning that whoever strikes first strikes 1 stage, then the other player strikes 2 stages, and lastly the first player strikes one of the two remaining stages, thus determining the stage that will be played on. Only starter stages are available for Game 1, therefore attempting to strike a counterpick is not valid.

For any match after Game 1, the player who won the previous match may strike up to 3 stages from the entire stagelist if he desires. Afterwards, the opponent declares his counterpick by choosing one of the remaining stages (both starters and counterpicks). Stage strikes reset after every game, so no full-set bans.


"FDS" Clause: In the event that a player picks Waiting Room/Final Destination, it is up to said player to decide which of the two stages will be played on.

Hazards are always OFF. The only exception to this is Dracula's Castle, which has hazards ON by default. Players can agree to turn hazards off for Dracula's Castle, but unless all participating players agree, hazards are set to ON.

I'm gonna follow this up with Stages that could have been legal, but aren't:


Metal Cavern:
Whilst this stage really did initially look like it had some promise, we felt like this was a stage that favoured two characters in particular, those being and . Their large size means they can control the stage like nobody's business and this stage can seriously push matchups in their favour. Furthermore, sword characters such as and also get a lot of advantages off it, and the stage in general is just too small. This stage suffers a similar problem in Project M with Bowser, and as such, we feel that it isn't a particularly fair stage to fight with.

Sky Sanctuary Zone:
The stage's legality was already pretty contentious in 9b, however the devs fixed the problem with it's legality by making the walls a bit bigger, making them actual walls. As such, more wall related jank, and infinites, could occur with the stage and we felt that it was now ban worthy. RIP.

Galaxy Tours:
Whilst the random layout of the stage could pose a possible problem and set up for potentially scummy play, this isn't the main issue. The main issue of this stage is the top platform being FAR too close to the already low ceiling which can make some characters kill unreasonably early. The stage causes gameplay to be fairly focused on camping the top platform and as such needs to be banned.

World Tournament:
I'd like to add this because I know a surprisingly large number of people thought it'd be legal, but no. Hazards on makes touching the ground offstage instantaneous death, and forces all characters to recover high. Sandbag would be a monster because he'd never have to recover low, and it seriously f*** up the balance of the stage. It also suffers from redundancy, because it's basically another FD.
Hazards off and it becomes a walk-off stage with a wall. Not happening.

Hylian Skies:
Who wanted this legal? Seriously? Pretty much every character can grab release infinite off a wall and Fox has access to drillshine and multishine infinites on so many of the walls. This stage will never be legal, like, ever.

Solid list. I'm curious to hear why Jungle Hijinxs and Yoshi's Island (64) didn't make the cut as counterpicks? Out of curiousity, not aggression

Jungle Hijinx didn't make the cut because of redundancy mostly, most rulesets will likely fuse it with Castle Siege though, and it's technically merged.
Yoshi's Island 64's clouds, especially the furthermost right cloud, promote camping really hard. There's no way to disable them so it makes matches slow down to a halt and be focused on camping and holding the aforementioned cloud.

Thank you; Jungle Hijinxs definitely makes sense. And for Yoshi 64, I forgot about the cloud platforms, so thank you for pointing that out.

I thought this said the official Tier List until I actually looked at the blog lol

No 3DS? You've specified FD and Waiting Room but did not specify 3DS.

As for SSZ having a problem with infinites swinging the balance out of counterpick and into banned, I disagree. Those small walls are objectively larger but they can still be walked across one way and have to be fallen off the other way. So the size increase wasn't enough to turn the sides into zero-way streets, they are still one-way.

Did you guys test any wall infinites or did you just assume that the slightly larger walls would make them happen? When people talk about wall infinites, the ones that come to mind are Fox's shine and Goku's dthrow, but neither of those work!!!! Half the time when I tried to wall infinite with Fox, I'd push the guy over the ledge by just being close enough to hit with shine, let alone the fact that the kb usually pushes them over that lip anyways.

As for the "wall jank", I hardly think that is reason to ban a stage. If anything, the ever so slightly higher walls are more useful for intentionally using them for saving yourself from a high knockback attack or a throw you really don't want to get comboed off of. Since the lip was so small in 9b, if it happened it was almost always on accident. Larger walls do mean that accidental uses of the walls will be more frequent, but intentional uses of the walls will be more viable.

Also since they are higher, that means the slower a character falls, the more airtime they will receive from the height change. ie Puff/Kirby/Zelda. This means that the fast fallers like Fox/Falco/Falcon gain very little from the lip's height increase, which is interesting because these characters are the kinds of characters most affected by the lip being there since they are dash-dance heavy characters.

- 3DS is gone. It's just not practical to merge three stages (We have to draw the line somewhere. Just imagine if we had Omega forms...), and 3DS, being both the smallest of the three and having the ever-complained-about "Lylat ledges", is the odd one out.

- SSZ... I did argue in favor of keeping it for a while - I was the last one to do so - but it was already the single most controversial stage in the v0.9b list in the first place, and having it be made objectively worse, even if slightly, does not exactly have people scrambling in favor of it.
In exchange, though, we got Rainbow Route getting fixed, so at least there's that... Also, we have the new Saturn Valley to fill its layout niche.
You'll have to talk to the others when it comes to the details here.

To further elaborate, 3DS didnt get axed because the stage is bad, its just redunant at this point. As Harr said, it is the smallest and (to my knowledge) generally the most disliked FD variant due to its... iffy ledges. The stage was tolerated because FD lagged, but now we have improved quality settings which should be able to nullify this problem. Besides, 3DS is still available via GM

Wait a freaking minute-

Where the fluke is the Backroom now anyway? I almost though it was just discontinued because the sub-forum to apply wasn't around after Beta released.


________

I don't know how much you've guys have actually play-tested competitive matches on Saturn Valley, but I don't really see how it got on the list. The stage layout and boundaries heavily promotes defensive-play and buffs many zoninger (Issac, Pac-Man, Mario,) which lead overlasted, slower-paced matches. And not be able to roll-down the left-slope leads to teching shenanigans were tech-chases can becoming 50/50s because teching right is shorten to be like a longer tech in-place animation.

I wouldn't mind it being legal in a stage-list, but picking it in-favor OVER Sky Sanctuary Zone feels so wrong. It's not the most balance, but it doesn't give as much sway to MU's the way Saturn Valley will (especially the boring ones).

P.S. : 3DS IS bad. BS ledges, way higher ceiling than FD/WR. Burn that stage!

@Zalozis The BR has a discord, I assume that's what they have been using since the subforum wasn't re-created as of Beta. (I think/hope the subforum is coming back. I don't know when that will be)


Fair enough re:3DS, I just wasn't expecting you guys to post the list, have a section about "stages that didn't make it" and then exclude 3DS


How do the ever-so-slightly higher walls make SSZ objectively worse? It didn't gain infinites and its functionally identical to 9b with respect to grounded movement. All of its features are static, which means that players can play around them since the behaviour is consistent (not to mention, as Zalo pointed out, that at least SSZ's behaviour with respect to its weird sides is consistent on both sides. Saturn Valley's side slants behave differently!) I contend that it should retain its counterpick status.

Random Question about Hazards: Can people GM Hazards on? I mean, I doubt people would do it often... but in the rare case, can they GM?

They CAN. It's not likely to happen often, but they can. For all intents and purposes, hazards-on and hazards-off versions are counted as separate stages. Especially since they now literally require no more button presses than choosing Smashville and Dream Land used to in 9b. (Remember that they used to be on a separate page?)

I mean, not only is there the case with Dracula's Castle, but Dream Land's hazard has been tolerated for almost two decades now. So while that's off by default here, I don't see any harm in or think it's too far-fetched for players to agree to turn it on.

And then there's World Tournament. We were never going to make it legal, but there's no doubt that its hazards-on version is popular despite its problems. So I'd be surprised if I DIDN'T see that getting GM'd occasionally.


Yeah, our discussions have been on the Discord.

Again, you'll have to talk to the others about SSZ's specifics. It wasn't so much "I was blown away by the evidence" that convinced me, the last man standing, to stop arguing in its favor so much as "it wasn't really worth it dragging out that three-year song-and-dance".

Fair enough Harr, I don't expect you to be the only one to chime in (and don't think that I'm specifically targeting you, it might seem like it but it's because you are the only one to respond to SSZ specifically).

Does having a small stage not also work against DK and Bowser considering they have the worst, most predictable recoveries in the game and can be more easily coaxed offstage with short combos? On any stage, if you control center stage you win, I don't think banning stages because you can control center stage makes sense. It is not that polarizing. It would be OP if we had zoning-oriented characters but in this game we really don't, even our zoners have solid combos and can control center stage up close. This is memes, man.

You still can just SDI up and land above the wall. You can't be infinited (also, grab releases can be DI'd and SDI'd in SSF2 jsyk)


Camping the top platform will get you killed, it's pass-through... The smart thing to do is to AVOID the top platform... You would have had a better argument saying that Falco is OP on certain layouts tbh.


How you gonna list the differences between this stage and FD and then complain that it's FD? LOL
Not gonna make an argument for this stages legality bc I honestly am not sure if its abusable but I gotta say likening it to FD is like saying BF and DL are the same. And as someone who plays Sandbag, no, the loss of the ability to recover low isn't a good thing for Sandbag because now he has only two recovery moves in essence and they travel in straight lines. That's not an advantage, its a disadvantage, it makes me more susceptable to edgeguarding rather than having a wide-range variable-angle recovery that's hard to predict. I can't speak to how this would affect the whole cast tho