The URC has been disbanded.

In my opinion I think the majority decision should go ahead even though I think the reasons for banning mk faulty.

The reason for this is it is not taking away a person's human rights. There is nothing wrong with being discriminatory to the minority. It is a video game and the reason for tournaments is to increase people's utility(satisfaction), be that through monetary rewards, the game itself, social interaction,others or a combination of them. I am not arguing for or against a competitive game, the reason people want to make a game to have more skill is because a challenge is fun.

The goal of the URC should have been to maximize the average competitive brawl player's utility. Increasing the size of the community should only be done if it increases the current average competitive brawl player's utility(the new players might bring down the average utility but if they are still having fun they will play that is why it says current) and/or to guarantee the community's satisfaction in the future.

Stop making this personal and keep it to the topic at hand.

In strong bad's defense, Spelt's post was ********. He was just the only one willing to say it.
The threads kinda devolving into bad personal opinions on governance anyways.

Spelt said:

A high level player who mains MK and places top 8 at nationals is just as vulnerable to bias (except in that scenario it's in your favor so obviously you only care what he has to say!) as someone who just went to their first tournament and got dead last.

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Based on the actions of some of the higher placing BBR members when the BBR was making the rulesets, I'd say they're even more vulnerable.

Mew2King said:

People do it because most people care about self-benefit. When given the choice to make things easier for yourself, most people are going to do it. Right or wrong doesn't matter to most people; life being easier for them is what matters. That isn't good enough and doesn't justify anything.

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Really. You, of all people, are preaching this. Alright, whatever you say.

Cassio said:

In strong bad's defense, Spelt's post was ********. He was just the only one willing to say it.

Spoiler

Stick to trolling buddy.

The threads kinda devolving into bad personal opinions on governance anyways.

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You say this, yet you provide no further productivity into the conversation.
Good job.

He was the only one willing to say it because it was wrong.

pretty much this is gonna scramble things up.

granted,it was kinda inevitable, since some folks wanted to have major tournies with the Japan ruleset and all that cal. but the issue everyone wants to know is what is the issue gonna be with MK? he's only been banned for 3 months tops, so is there even a substantial amount of data to see if the environment sufferd any major effects?

all I know is that this will probably not have a happy ending for anyone.

the irony and hypocrisy in M2k's last post is so overwhelming its not even funny.

When going to announce MK is no longer banned?

MK isn't universally banned, but we're no longer forced to use him. MK bans will never be taboo again, the URC already tore down that wall.

Recommended rulesets are awesome. To this day we still need 'em; people still think Japes is a random stage to this day and it hasn't been random even in Melee. Gotta tell 'em "Hey, this is how the stage works". If a TO just says "I don't like it", that's fine, do whatever, but there should always be a group telling you how a stage works and whether or not it has any actual issues.

I don't think you actually need to produce a recommended ruleset to inform people about the intricacies of stages to be honest.

I wonder if any of this would have happened if Brawl tournaments didn't have money as prizes.

Strong Bad said:

The Klaptrap is not consistent in Melee. It shows up every 17-25ish seconds or so, I don't remember exactly, the interval changing every time and not being consistent. I recorded about an hour of Jungle Japes and analyzed the video back in 2009. Whether or not this holds true for Brawl Jungle Japes is another story; for the most part Melee stages were literally ported from the game and then edited, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

Additionally, I don't think proving that a stage "isn't random" necessarily saves it from being banned, although knowledge is always good to have. Hyrule Temple is one of the most consistent stages in the game, but I don't think anyone in either community seriously considers it a good stage for competition. As far as ruleset ideology goes even things that are on a timer are effectively random; players do not make decisions consistently, leading to variable gameplay, which leads to things that are on timers having different amounts of impact on results in any given game. Yeah, the argument "It's random" doesn't work anymore, but the argument "It has inconsistent results on game outcome" still does.

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Knowing the klap trap shows up in a specific time in a specific range of time is enough to move it out of "randomness".

A better example would be something like Onett.

In Melee, it had some pretty awful side camping (Wattyyyyyyyy) and due to Fox's prevalence and his ability to infinite and early KO a ton of the cast on this stage it was banned not too long after Ken vs. Neo (which, funnily enough, was a close game).

In Brawl we had the same issue, this time with a character called Dedede. His grab range is ridiculous (marth in melee has nothing on him) and his d-throw infinites a large amount of the cast; it's not really far to say "don't get grabbed" and leave it at that, even with plenty of ways to stay away from grabs near walls.

So early on the stage was banned with little tournament usage. Dedede was popular so the issue was exaggerated, and even though most top tiers can get out of the CG or aren't CGable, at the time the cast was pretty evenly spread.

When researching stages, we found that given intelligent play and approaching only when the cars were coming resulted in only one grab iteration before both players were hit by cars. Waiting until after the cars resulted in Dedede being forced to dodge or take shield stun, which for some characters was enough to do damage. On the flip side, just running down and attacking and getting grabbed after a car has just passed resulted in about 50-60% of damage before a car came again. It sounds like a lot until you realize that Dedede can actually do a similar amount of damage on FD.

In short, if Onett is going to be banned it can't really be banned off of the beliefs people had in 2008. Despite this, it's been removed and many people still site that as being an issue.

Yoshi's Island (Pipes) had people that didn't play too often worried about people camping the center, and that scared people. Turns out planking existed on every stage with a ledge, and having two ledges actually resulted in planking not really being that strong.

Controllable aspects of the stage and different, but controllable, situations than you would find on a flat/plat stage has never been enough to ban a stage. If it was, Melee would have banned Fountain of Dreams a decade ago... ditto to Battlefield's edges, or PS' lip.

People debate things without putting in the same effort you put in on researching the klap trap timer on Melee Japes, and having a group showing their research and recommendations off their research is an awesome compendium that is basically required unless we want to move away from "fair and competitive" to "we thought that was lame so we don't play on the stage no more".

That's why I believe a rule recommendation is still a good idea. Have a group of impartial people whose job is to keep as much as possible into the game and have them review everything. Stages, characters, items.

If someone wants to play only on FD, they'll play only on FD and try to make everyone else to do the same thing. If someone wants to play with items, ditto. Get an outside group to do the research, make it public, then let people make their own decisions off of that. Most people jsut play follow the leader because the info isn't available to them. People still to this day say "Pictochat results in random deaths" when there's only one hazard that can actually kill you if you aren't brain dead... and that's a slanted platform that only appears in one area. Knowledge is hard to find.

Meh, knowledge isn't hard to find. People just become content with the limited knowledge they are familiar with.

Overswarm said:

Recommended rulesets are awesome. To this day we still need 'em; people still think Japes is a random stage to this day and it hasn't been random even in Melee. Gotta tell 'em "Hey, this is how the stage works". If a TO just says "I don't like it", that's fine, do whatever, but there should always be a group telling you how a stage works and whether or not it has any actual issues.

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I agree that we still need a recommended ruleset... To a point. The two problems with adopting said ruleset is that it is not internationally recognized and public accountability. Let me address each issue separately.

Item one: Adopting a recommended ruleset would not be internationally recognized. APEX 2012 has opened up new avenues in Smash gameplay, despite what some members of the URC may tell you. The same could have been said about the MLG ruleset a couple of years back. The facts is that no matter what ruleset that one puts out there, it must embrace the community as a whole, not as city states that we call countries. That is why the number of people who are willing to attend Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat tournaments will probably continue to rise, despite lower sales with each incarnation of the game, and Smash in general will sink like a rock. The community is too divided over small issues like the Kaptraps in Jungle Japes being random or not, instead of uniting and tackling the bigger issues like Ruleset unity.

The other issue is public accountability. There are plenty of reasons why the BBR and URC failed to produce a quality, for lack of a better term, ruleset that addresses all of the issues that even we US players have. The BBR's end result became too loose while the URC was "threatened" down our throats like Thor's lighting. The common denominator for why those two committee's failures was the lack of public oversight over them. Sure, there was the senate, but they never really spoke up on why the URC was being crammed down our throats in the first place. And on top of that, they were made up of SWF staff for the most part. But was there any public discourse as to why the URC should vote a certain way? Very little. We all see the results of said debates in the ruleset, but we never see the discourse that takes place that leads to that conclusion.

I'll wrap this up by saying that you think about your failures.

Meaning they won't seek out new knowledge, which results in poor decisions with outcomes people don't expect.

Like banning a ton of stages and then saying "man, ICs are really good", or getting rid of stages like Green Greens and Jungle Japes and wondering why certain characters just aren't used anymore.

Melee's stagelist was primarily created in light of Fox's complete and total dominance.

Banning a stage has the most impact on results out of anything else we can do other than straight up banning a character.

If the starter stages in Melee were Final Destination, Dream Land 64, and Pokemon Stadium, you'd have much different results than if they were Fountain of Dreams, Yoshi's Island, and Battlefield. Even more if the starter stages were Pokefloats, Jungle Japes, and Green Greens. All three sets are competitively valid; they'd give consistent results and you could practice them and improve your placement.

But are they optimal? Not really. They all focus on one type of character over another. Removing a stage does the same thing, especially with bans in play.

It's easy to say "well, that's how the cookie crumbles then" and take away certain character's cps, but seems like its working backwards to me.

Strong Bad said:

I don't think character balance should ever be a factor in a stagelist, outside of obviously overcentralizing abuses and such. This leads to possible bias in a stagelist attempting to favor characters over another, as well as arguments like "You shouldn't ban X stage, then Y character will be really powerful and Z character will be bad" that deal more with characters than actual stages. Instead, use discrete criteria, and don't discriminate, ban stages that fall within ban criteria and keep what isn't.

Stagelist should either be
1. As little impact on results as possible. Japanese ruleset, or possibly even fewer stages.
or 2. A very liberal ruleset, "Trying to keep as much of the game intact as possible," something like the MLG ruleset.

A lot of rulesets try to find a "compromise" and places some form of arbitrary limit on things that no one really understands, and often times the stagelist contradicts itself with one stage being banned and another with similar effects on the outcome legal, and frankly I don't think it works. It ends up with neither ideological group getting what they want.

EDIT: Lol this is turning into a general ruleset discussion thread...

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Overswarm said:

Melee's stagelist was primarily created in light of Fox's complete and total dominance.

Banning a stage has the most impact on results out of anything else we can do other than straight up banning a character.

If the starter stages in Melee were Final Destination, Dream Land 64, and Pokemon Stadium, you'd have much different results than if they were Fountain of Dreams, Yoshi's Island, and Battlefield. Even more if the starter stages were Pokefloats, Jungle Japes, and Green Greens. All three sets are competitively valid; they'd give consistent results and you could practice them and improve your placement.

But are they optimal? Not really. They all focus on one type of character over another. Removing a stage does the same thing, especially with bans in play.

It's easy to say "well, that's how the cookie crumbles then" and take away certain character's cps, but seems like its working backwards to me.

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That is why I generally advocate public accountability in a discussion of a recommended ruleset. Sure, it is easy for a TO to favor one character over another, for example, allowing Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise in Metaknight legal events to stack the deck in favor of Metaknight mains, but it is quite a different subject for any committee that forms these rulesets to use that tournament's results in forming a recommended ruleset without seeing how each committee member came to their own conclusions.

You might be saying, Sanji, we can see the results in the ruleset, and yes that is true, but there could be inaccuracies in the data, such as the use of "no tripping" set ups, allowing/soft banning Metaknight, only playing on starter stages via random select, etc. All of that in a large enough data sampling could influence committee members into saying that something is broken and need to fix it. Public accountability would be a check against inaccurate data and ultimately fraud.

The URC just got nailed by karma for the **** it's pulled.

Or maybe that was a Nado.

I'm not sure.

Strong Bad said:

You're ********.

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I second this.

Xyro77 said:

As we added **** people to the URC, the stink started to appear.

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Whom are you referring too?

That is why I generally advocate public accountability in a discussion of a recommended ruleset. Sure, it is easy for a TO to favor one character over another, for example, allowing Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise in Metaknight legal events to stack the deck in favor of Metaknight mains, but it is quite a different subject for any committee that forms these rulesets to use that tournament's results in forming a recommended ruleset without seeing how each committee member came to their own conclusions.

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See, this right here is why I like the idea of a group that seeks out knowledge. This guy still thinks that Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise are MK's best stages when all evidence has shown that they're just "alright" stages for MK. Similar win rates vs. other stages, and lower than stages like Delfino. What is actually the case is some characters just either have to completely rethink their play, but can still compete (like Diddy) or just straight up have a hard time on these stages (like Dedede on Brinstar against most characters)... not that Meta Knight is somehow better on them. More importantly, some characters do far better against MK on these stages than they would normally.

[YRSF] Tin Man said:

Whom are you referring too?

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Probably Me

[YRSF] Tin Man said:

Whom are you referring too?

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inb4 ****storm if Xyro answers. But on a serious note even though I wasn't in the URC, I feel like me assuming that those Xyro is referring to should be obvious. I mean to you TinMan, being part of a group with max 15 members at its peak IIRC shouldn't tensions among that size be obvious. And you can also disregard any members in it before Xyro or added with him, so the number of people left can't be above 5...

Overswarm said:

See, this right here is why I like the idea of a group that seeks out knowledge. This guy still thinks that Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise are MK's best stages when all evidence has shown that they're just "alright" stages for MK. Similar win rates vs. other stages, and lower than stages like Delfino. What is actually the case is some characters just either have to completely rethink their play, but can still compete (like Diddy) or just straight up have a hard time on these stages (like Dedede on Brinstar against most characters)... not that Meta Knight is somehow better on them. More importantly, some characters do far better against MK on these stages than they would normally.

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You completely overlooked my point, Overswarm. You focused on the fact that I said some people make Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise legal in MK legal events and pointed out some irrelevant nonsense that has no bearing on this conversation.

The truth is, if certain people is to be believed, is that it all boils down to the style of play that your tournament players have when your tournament is ran. If there is more MKs, in a MK legal event, they are going to find stages that are legal that are advantageous to them. And most of the community has come to the conclusion that it is Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise. It is generally a trade off, either ban those stages, or ban MK.

The TOs have experimented with this decision in the early days of the URC, and the URC has formally adopted the MK ban in version 2.0. Ironic, because according to Mike Haze, there are no MK mains in the URC at the time of the ban.

Since the TOs provided the data that the URC has used to make the ruleset, wouldn't stand to reason that the TOs themselves have a stake in the decision making process? That was the beauty of the BBR. It was made up of both players and TOs. Both groups made rulesets that was used in the community, but we, the public, could have little to no input in the decision making process. That is fine for trivial matters like timer length for example, but completely bad for major issues like the MK ban. I know that the BBR allowed the public to vote on the ban in years past, but the URC ram rodded the ban through without little say from the public.

You completely overlooked my point, Overswarm. You focused on the fact that I said some people make Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise legal in MK legal events and pointed out some irrelevant nonsense that has no bearing on this conversation.

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I really thought you'd follow it up with something other than this:

The truth is, if certain people is to be believed, is that it all boils down to the style of play that your tournament players have when your tournament is ran. If there is more MKs, in a MK legal event, they are going to find stages that are legal that are advantageous to them. And most of the community has come to the conclusion that it is Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise. It is generally a trade off, either ban those stages, or ban MK.

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We have pretty hard evidence that, regardless of the community conclusion you speak of, those stages aren't the best. Banning the stages actually resulted in MK being more prevalent.

Funniest thing is that the most diversity shown in major events in recent times was with MLG with a larger stage list.

The TOs have experimented with this decision in the early days of the URC, and the URC has formally adopted the MK ban in version 2.0. Ironic, because according to Mike Haze, there are no MK mains in the URC at the time of the ban.

Since the TOs provided the data that the URC has used to make the ruleset, wouldn't stand to reason that the TOs themselves have a stake in the decision making process? That was the beauty of the BBR. It was made up of both players and TOs. Both groups made rulesets that was used in the community, but we, the public, could have little to no input in the decision making process. That is fine for trivial matters like timer length for example, but completely bad for major issues like the MK ban. I know that the BBR allowed the public to vote on the ban in years past, but the URC ram rodded the ban through without little say from the public.

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The BBR also voted for the MK ban, and the majority voted for it. The public also voted for it, again with a majority.

Whoa heatED argument. im late!

Overswarm said:

I really thought you'd follow it up with something other than this:



We have pretty hard evidence that, regardless of the community conclusion you speak of, those stages aren't the best. Banning the stages actually resulted in MK being more prevalent.

Funniest thing is that the most diversity shown in major events in recent times was with MLG with a larger stage list.



The BBR also voted for the MK ban, and the majority voted for it. The public also voted for it, again with a majority.

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You stupid fool. If the BBR really did have the required majority (3/5) to ban MK, it would have showed up in the ruleset without the aid of the URC. The problem is that everyone who studied the MK metagame was only 20% of all Smash players, according to Mike Haze, 15% if you want to be conservative was put out of tournament status by the URC's 14-0 vote.

So you are telling me that essentially that 80% of players are ****** that they lost against the best character in the ruleset and want him gone. Sorry for not believing you. You of all people was one of the first who pushed for the MK ban after you noticed that M2K was winning a tournaments consistently.

Strong Bad said:

Please, enlighten us Overswarm. What stages are more advantageous for MK than Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise? Delfino is one example, but it's usually picked by MK players because Brinstar/RC are both banned. Are you saying you know MK's stage advantages better than Otori, M2K, Ally, ZeRo, etc?

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Yes, I do.

While individual matchups may switch around (MK vs. D3 might show a better performance on Brinstar for MK than he would on Halberd, for example, despite Halberd being statistically one of MK's best stages), the overall stats don't. We recorded every single match of every set during the entire MLG season.

Given the fact that using cold hard numbers has allowed me to see the future and determine which characters will become more viable over time and which will become less viable, I still don't know why people could see that MK has a higher win % on stage X rather than stage Y, but see one win between two top players on stage Y and say "stage Y is better than stage X". It's irresponsible.

The data looked something like this (info cut off on left/right):



We got data like usage on stages, both total number and average use. I sometimes limited it to just the top placing characters on those stages (most wins) like this:



OMG MK has a 5% swing from Smashville, the most balanced stage evar, to Norfair, more like nofair!....

Wait, Snake has a 3% swing towards Smashville while all the other characters shown have a fairly even rate on both stages, meaning the stage doesn't effect the outcome for them. Cept G&W, who loves him some norfair as much as Snake loves Smashville.

Is a 2% difference in win rate enough to say "Norfair obv imba", or do we need more data? It's pretty obvious this isn't conclusive. It's that easy. At this point anyone that says Norfair is imbalanced needs to collect some cold hard data, or compare Norfair-legal tournaments to Norfair-illegal tournaments to see if there is a swing in MK placements.

There were also comparisons among the whole cast:


Usage is a good indicator of what to look at, but it's difficult to account for popularity alone so you have to look closer.

So you first just look at average and total usage to determine what's important and what complaints are valid:



Looking at that totals chart you can tell that Smashville is a popular stage by comparing it with the averages. Stages that are commonly used as CPs (both by the CPer and the person being CPed by) should have a big divide between their total usage and their average usage. You can see this for stages like Brinstar, Rainbow Cruise, Halberd, Delfino, etc. Castle Siege was a curious one; if I recall correctly, other people were taking MK there, but I can't say for sure right now. But you can look at those charts and say "we obviously need to make sure MK doesn't have an unseemly win % on Smashville in comparison with his average win % on other stages" because it is the most commonly played stage, and even though Brinstar is played barely 1/6th of the time he is played on Smashville you can see in the averages that MK is played there a decent amount more than his other stages, which are pretty much all in a normal range (except for Green Greens, one of MK's few bad stages). [for those playing the home game, FD was the most banned stage by far at every event; it is far and away the most polarizing stage in the game. It's basically a counterpick placed on the starter list.]

So if people are coming in with one assumption (Smashville is a balanced stage for MK and not broken) and you can challenge that with another assumption (Rainbow Cruise isn't just a good stage, it's MKs best stage and he owns everyone on it), you do so. Since we had stock and character usage, we could do things like average stock count:





And we can say that MK isn't really owning on Rainbow Cruise much more than he is on Smashville. There's a 4% difference in the amount of two stocks, and the majority of said two stocks were against characters like Olimar which obviously would have a hard time with the stage. Another fun fact: Diddy one stocked multiple high level MKs throughout the events, enough to where it makes me wonder if Diddy might have an advantage on that stage due to MK not being able to mess with his recovery.

I did this over and over again and showed that if someone wanted to ban Brinstar or Rainbow Cruise, they needed to ban Delfino too because that stage was straight up better for MK on average. Brinstar/Rainbow were just bad stages for certain players characters, and they were salty because they played a character that did poorly on two stages and couldn't just ban both. They didn't want to have a secondary or play a better character, and wanted the stages banned to fit them.

Think of it as IC players complaining about Melee stages and saying that DL64, FD, and PS1 were the only stages that could be viable. Things like that.

I don't have all my numbers and charts on hand; some are at home, some are lost forever, some are back in back room threads or deleted MK threads, so I can't give you everything you'd like to know (not going through those numbers again).

But TL;DR, I don't **** around with banning things. When someone says they "know" something, I tell them to prove it and I mean it. When you say "You saying you know MK's stage advantages more than (top player)", I will answer with a resounding yes.


Also, this fits in line with what we were discussing earlier Strong Bad:
http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=262937&highlight=originalist+vs+constructivist

You stupid fool. If the BBR really did have the required majority (3/5) to ban MK, it would have showed up in the ruleset without the aid of the URC. The problem is that everyone who studied the MK metagame was only 20% of all Smash players, according to Mike Haze, 15% if you want to be conservative was put out of tournament status by the URC's 14-0 vote.

So you are telling me that essentially that 80% of players are ****** that they lost against the best character in the ruleset and want him gone. Sorry for not believing you. You of all people was one of the first who pushed for the MK ban after you noticed that M2K was winning a tournaments consistently.

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I was anti-ban, actually. Was for some time. Then stuff like this happened:



Most commonly used characters (top chars only)



Aaaaaaand characters used over time:



MK was winning a large majority of the cash out there. Ripple made a thread on it somewhere. This isn't something I took lightly, and I consistently gathered more information.

Not this again.

All day, every day.