Crow!
Smash Lord
TIER WARS
May the best player win
by scoring more points each game than anyone else
by winning more often and with lower tier characters than his opponents can
May the best player win
by scoring more points each game than anyone else
by winning more often and with lower tier characters than his opponents can
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Introduction
Does Samus have a slight advantage over Bowser, or does she crush him?
Who is better at Wolf dittos, you or your opponent?
Does Zelda really have a decent matchup vs R.O.B.?
Under the traditional double elimination with counterpicking format Smash players have grown accustomed to, the correct, competitively relevant answers to the above questions are all the same:
Who cares?
The traditional ruleset does a good job at determining which player can maximize his chances of winning each game. However, in doing so it completely removes from competitive importance somewhere between 80% and 90% of the character matchups that Brawl provides.
Tier Wars is an alternative ruleset designed to do the following:
- Give players a competitive incentive to learn every matchup in the game, not just high/top tier vs high/top tier and (for the occasional side event) low tier vs low tier.
- Allow players to strategically balance their risk / reward level each game, allowing everyone to either show off or to play it safe.
- Be fair, and be fun!
I first posted this in the BBR, where it received a mostly positive reception. While a ruleset specifically designed such that your opponent can so strongly pressure you to play as a lower tier is not everyone's cup of tea, consensus was that the rules should work and should accomplish its goals.
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Brief details
To win the tournament, the objective is to earn the most points.
You earn 10 POINTS for each game you win and you can score additional points by undercutting your opponent's tier during the character selection of each game. You can go negative in points if your opponent undercuts your tier and you lose that game.
"Undercutting" happens when one player chooses a character from a lower tier than his opponent. For each tier you undercut your opponent by, you earn 1 point. For each tier your opponent undercuts you by, you lose 1 point. These points are scored and lost regardless of who wins that particular game.
Players are paired like in Swiss; if you are familiar with this, ignore the rest of this paragraph. Each round, the player with the highest score plays the highest ranked possible opponent who has not yet played with that person. This is iterated until all players are paired. This is repeated for as many rounds as the TO decides at the start of the tournament.
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Extensive details
Each time two players are paired up, they play two games. No more, no less. Each of the two games is completely independent of the other, other than that the players take turns being the Leader and the Answerer. If there is a dispute on who leads first, the players do Rock, Scissors, Paper for it.
The Leader begins by choosing three stages from the stage list. The Answerer then picks one of these stages for the current game to be played on. Next, the Leader picks his/her character, and then the Answerer responds with his/her own character.
Now, starting with the Leader, the players may optionally choose to take turns revising their character pick by moving along the tier list toward their opponent's chosen character. (To illustrate, if your current character selection is lower than your opponent's, then when it is your turn you can change your selection to any character which is not a higher tier than your opponent and is not a lower tier than your current selection.)
This process ends immediately when either player chooses not to change their character during their turn (or cannot change because the current character selection is a ditto). At this point, any points due to undercutting are scored. As stated above, points are taken from the undercut player and awarded to the undercutter at a rate of 1 point per tier. A character's "tier" is specific to the letter in the BBR tier list; i.e. D and E tiers are different despite both also being within "mid tier."
The game itself is then played using ordinary BBR rules (3 stock, 8 minute timer, etc). The winner earns 10 points.
Game two of each pairing is conducted in exactly the same manner, except that the player who was the Answerer during game 1 becomes the Leader and vice versa. No player may earn greater than 25 points in total over the course of a player pairing. (This is to prevent a random pairing with a weak player or with a player conspiring to help his "opponent" from launching a player too far ahead).
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Example
Crow! is paired against Overswarm. They agree to set Overswarm be the Leader for game 1.
Overswarm selects Rainbow Cruise, Battlefield, and Pictochat. Crow! picks Battlefield.
Overswarm leads with Meta Knight. Crow! answers with Link.
Now Overswarm has the option to move down the tier list or to begin the match. If the match begins now, Crow! will earn 7 points immediately and Overswarm will have to win in order to score 3 points (and if he somehow lost, he would lose 7 points!). Overswarm decides he's a good enough player that he doesn't have to settle for such an easy matchup and score so few points. Overswarm picks Fox.
Now Crow! can either start the game as Link vs Fox, earning 3 points immediately and fight for a total of 13, or Crow! can change his character. Crow! cannot choose Ganon, and he cannot choose Peach or any character higher than Peach on the tier list. He can, however, choose Wolf or Yoshi. Crow! decides to try his luck with Yoshi.
Overswarm decides a 2 point undercut for Fox vs Yoshi is good enough for him. The game begins and Overswarm wins. Overswarm has now scored 8 points and Crow! has 2.
Crow! and Overswarm now trade places and repeat the above process starting from the stage selection.
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Notes to Tournament Organizers
Even though this ruleset is, in a vacuum, not much more complicated than the traditional counterpick system, it is completely different from what players are used to. If you choose to try this system out (whether as a side event or the main event), you will have to think about how to explain it and make sure the first tourney runs smoothly.
To that end, I provide a sheet that could be printed out and given to each player pair to make the selections easier. (Replace the stage list with whatever stages you prefer, of course.)
Word 2003 .doc of the sheet described above
A disadvantage of the Swiss format is that it doesn't necessarily build to a climactic Grand Finals. You may choose to have one last pairing between the #1 and #2 players to counteract this. But do not treat the winner of that grand finals alone as automatically the winner! Instead just have the GFs count toward the players' point totals as per usual, using the GFs as the #2 player's last chance to maybe get himself enough points to win the tourney.
Also, notice that the existing tier list is designed to describe character's performance in ordinary "S Tier Tourneys." It is possible that certain characters will perform much better in this format than in one dominated by high tiers and the top tier. So some characters may eventually need to have their tier list placement tweaked.
Please let me know if you choose to try this out! I want to know how it goes, if there are any rough edges, and in the event it becomes popular, I would like to make a Power Rankings for its players. Oh, and consider saving the used selection sheets if they are used so player decisions can be analyzed!
