This has come up all over, and it's a very important point I want to make (I've owed you guys this thread for days, sorry!). I see many people post "reasonable" stage lists that have an all around decent set of legal stages... but then they ruin the stage list and make it incredibly unreasonable with this concept of counterpick only stages, semi-banning most of the stages.
Traditional smash stage rules (back in the good old days before Brawl even came out) were that stages were divided into three groups. The six starter stages in Melee were the stages from which game one was randomly played, the counterpick stages were the stages a player could pick for games 2 and 3 after losing the previous game (though a player could also pick a starter stage at his or her leisure), and the banned stages were not allowed to be picked at all. The theory was that the starter stages were overall a pretty similar set of stages to each other (the flat + plat stages) so the random stage wouldn't swing the match too much, the counterpick stages were more unique but fair, and the banned stages really were not very fair at all. The system was functional but had some flaws. The randomly selected stage might still offer some real advantages versus other possibilities, and since starter stages could be counterpicked, only starter stages offered a consistent path to victory (you can win a whole set playing only on starter stages but not playing only on counterpick stages) which meant that at high levels few strong players actually picked the counterpick only stages.
In Brawl we had a great idea known as stage striking. This is a system in which players take turns removing stages from the stage pool until only one remains. This completely eliminates the problem of randomness in game one swinging sets, and it removes the need to keep the starter list down in order to make sure the random factor is reduced. Striking between two educated players will always pick the middle stage on the stage list in terms of fairness. Unfortunately, we had a lot of problems in the Brawl days; we didn't really work together at all, and people had this bizarre idea that banning a lot of stages would somehow make Meta Knight less overpowered (spoilers: he dominated anyway). We kept the counteprick stage idea despite it being antiquated by even that point, and while eventually a lot of people realized it was a bad concept, so many of them instead just banned almost every stage in response. Whatever; it was Brawl, and the game had issues that people were trying to fix whether their solutions were good or not.
That brings us to today. We have a game that has no character like Meta Knight who is just overpowering like that to distract us, and this game also has a very large number of very tame stages moreso than any other smash game. What would be a huge mistake would be following the same old paradigm and having a small number of starters and any set at all of counterpick only stages. Here's what in particular counterpick only stages with a small starter list means:
-Characters who are good on only some of the legal stages are artificially helped or hurt. Every legal stage is competitively legitimate; any stage that is not competitively legitimate would be a banned stage. There's no real reason that being good on any one of the legal stages should matter more than being good on others; only by having every one of them as a starter are we being truly fair and not just arbitrarily deciding that players who main some characters deserve to place higher than players who main other characters for any reason other than the game's natural balance.
-Learning the counterpick stages is a strategic mistake and will be rarely done. As I said before, the most straightforward way to win a tournament set is to win game one on a starter and then to win on your own counterpick. By making your counterpick a starter stage and just playing a character who excels on the starter stages, you minimize the amount you need to learn and put yourself consistently in a winning position. Almost all strong players will do this. Counterpick only stages will only be picked rarely by naive players. Since most other players will not have practiced on the counterpick only stages (because being able to perform on these stages is not important to winning tournaments), gameplay on these stages will inevitably be super sloppy as one side will have essentially no familiarity with the stage. Who wants legal game elements that are almost always wrong to utilize and that when chosen create bad looking gameplay?
-Variety is quashed. Larger starter lists have more variables and thus more ways to turn out in different match-ups and between different players. A 5 stage starter list usually includes Final Destination which is almost always struck and otherwise often involves the same styles of decisions across match-ups that will tend to lead to the same stage or two all of the time (hence the idea that Smashville is the stage picked 90% of the time). Playing on the same stage in game one 90% of the time is boring for players, very boring for stream viewers, and doesn't really work in the interest of fairness at all (there is no neutral stage so you're just maximizing the importance of one stage's biases this way).
-Stages are chosen arbitrarily. Generally there's some decent standards in place for what stages are legal or not legal; we can point to clean, distinct reasons why Skyloft is a good legal stage while Gamer is a dubious one. The starter vs counterpick distinction tends to be completely arbitrary. What makes Battlefield a "better" starter stage than Skyloft? We can very easily establish both stages are rock solid competitive stages; breaking up these solid stages into two groups usually ends up being a list of stages one guy likes more and one guy likes somewhat less which is not a good way to make rules.
What I propose is that we have 13 legal starters and no additional legal stages. We can argue about the 13 a little but only have a few real ways to end up at it; this is pretty close to the number of non-controversial stages in this game. 13 is a very easy number to strike from and has balanced striking. We've run it locally here; it works in practice very well. I've seen a few counter-arguments but honestly I see no merit in any of them; let me run through them:
-Striking will take too long. 13 is a small number really; we used this locally, and going through the list tended to take under a minute. This is what actually happened in a real tournament when it was used; it was super fast. If anyone has actually done it and not just hypothetically thought about it and had time issues that would be interesting, but so far, 100% of the time it has been used it worked and was quick and 0% of the time it was used it caused time issues. It seems reasonable to conclude it's fast until definitive proof to the contrary is presented.
-Some stages will always be struck anyway/you'll end up on Smashville anyway. This is so incredibly not true. When I saw it in action, I saw almost every stage come up; out of 13 legal stages, I believe I saw 10 be used in game one at least once at a single event. When given choices in practice, players really do use them. Particular players have particular striking habits and may often end up on the same few stages, but you just have to peer over to other set-ups that don't involve you to see they tend to strike a lot differently and favor different stages. Even if a stage is always struck, the act of striking it is the act of that player having one fewer strike to use otherwise and having to strike it changes the final stage the game will be played on. Smashville does not come up unusually often when actual striking from a large list is done; players seem to agree to it a lot out of laziness or bad habit, but as players become more educated about what a huge strategic mistake agreeing to Smashville is for at least one side (I still owe a thread teaching how to strike effectively, will probably do that one in video form), you'll see it less and less.
-It's hard to keep track of that many stages. This is definitely objectively false. The random stage switch can be used as an in-game solution to keep track of the stages directly. Even better, the omega forms have their own independent tracking of what's allowed for random. Here's what you do. Before the tournament, set all of the legal stages to both the normal stages and the omega stages. Strike from the normal stages, removing stages from the list as struck. Before the next set, the new players will look at the omega random stage select and copy whichever stages are on over to the normal stages before striking from the normal stages. Even if every player has the memory of a gnat and can't keep track of what's legal or what has already been struck, the game keeps track of all of it easily.
I bring this up as such a big point because out of all stage questions starter list is what really matters to player experience. 5 starter lists worsen the player experience (and bore stream viewers to tears) while offering literally no advantage over 13 starter lists. Why would we choose to play a worse game instead of a better game when there are literally zero downsides to playing the better game? It doesn't make sense to me. We need to use a starter only stage system, and it needs to have a decent number of stages so actual variety exists. 13 is a very good number, a sweetspot really in which conservative players never have to play on "janky" stages and liberal players have great variety to enjoy. Why not go with it and make 99% of players happy? I know we have a lot of stages threads, but stages are one of the things we have to figure out to actually run tournaments and it seems obvious that we can just do this, make everyone happy, and accept zero downsides. Does anyone have any good reason why not?
Traditional smash stage rules (back in the good old days before Brawl even came out) were that stages were divided into three groups. The six starter stages in Melee were the stages from which game one was randomly played, the counterpick stages were the stages a player could pick for games 2 and 3 after losing the previous game (though a player could also pick a starter stage at his or her leisure), and the banned stages were not allowed to be picked at all. The theory was that the starter stages were overall a pretty similar set of stages to each other (the flat + plat stages) so the random stage wouldn't swing the match too much, the counterpick stages were more unique but fair, and the banned stages really were not very fair at all. The system was functional but had some flaws. The randomly selected stage might still offer some real advantages versus other possibilities, and since starter stages could be counterpicked, only starter stages offered a consistent path to victory (you can win a whole set playing only on starter stages but not playing only on counterpick stages) which meant that at high levels few strong players actually picked the counterpick only stages.
In Brawl we had a great idea known as stage striking. This is a system in which players take turns removing stages from the stage pool until only one remains. This completely eliminates the problem of randomness in game one swinging sets, and it removes the need to keep the starter list down in order to make sure the random factor is reduced. Striking between two educated players will always pick the middle stage on the stage list in terms of fairness. Unfortunately, we had a lot of problems in the Brawl days; we didn't really work together at all, and people had this bizarre idea that banning a lot of stages would somehow make Meta Knight less overpowered (spoilers: he dominated anyway). We kept the counteprick stage idea despite it being antiquated by even that point, and while eventually a lot of people realized it was a bad concept, so many of them instead just banned almost every stage in response. Whatever; it was Brawl, and the game had issues that people were trying to fix whether their solutions were good or not.
That brings us to today. We have a game that has no character like Meta Knight who is just overpowering like that to distract us, and this game also has a very large number of very tame stages moreso than any other smash game. What would be a huge mistake would be following the same old paradigm and having a small number of starters and any set at all of counterpick only stages. Here's what in particular counterpick only stages with a small starter list means:
-Characters who are good on only some of the legal stages are artificially helped or hurt. Every legal stage is competitively legitimate; any stage that is not competitively legitimate would be a banned stage. There's no real reason that being good on any one of the legal stages should matter more than being good on others; only by having every one of them as a starter are we being truly fair and not just arbitrarily deciding that players who main some characters deserve to place higher than players who main other characters for any reason other than the game's natural balance.
-Learning the counterpick stages is a strategic mistake and will be rarely done. As I said before, the most straightforward way to win a tournament set is to win game one on a starter and then to win on your own counterpick. By making your counterpick a starter stage and just playing a character who excels on the starter stages, you minimize the amount you need to learn and put yourself consistently in a winning position. Almost all strong players will do this. Counterpick only stages will only be picked rarely by naive players. Since most other players will not have practiced on the counterpick only stages (because being able to perform on these stages is not important to winning tournaments), gameplay on these stages will inevitably be super sloppy as one side will have essentially no familiarity with the stage. Who wants legal game elements that are almost always wrong to utilize and that when chosen create bad looking gameplay?
-Variety is quashed. Larger starter lists have more variables and thus more ways to turn out in different match-ups and between different players. A 5 stage starter list usually includes Final Destination which is almost always struck and otherwise often involves the same styles of decisions across match-ups that will tend to lead to the same stage or two all of the time (hence the idea that Smashville is the stage picked 90% of the time). Playing on the same stage in game one 90% of the time is boring for players, very boring for stream viewers, and doesn't really work in the interest of fairness at all (there is no neutral stage so you're just maximizing the importance of one stage's biases this way).
-Stages are chosen arbitrarily. Generally there's some decent standards in place for what stages are legal or not legal; we can point to clean, distinct reasons why Skyloft is a good legal stage while Gamer is a dubious one. The starter vs counterpick distinction tends to be completely arbitrary. What makes Battlefield a "better" starter stage than Skyloft? We can very easily establish both stages are rock solid competitive stages; breaking up these solid stages into two groups usually ends up being a list of stages one guy likes more and one guy likes somewhat less which is not a good way to make rules.
What I propose is that we have 13 legal starters and no additional legal stages. We can argue about the 13 a little but only have a few real ways to end up at it; this is pretty close to the number of non-controversial stages in this game. 13 is a very easy number to strike from and has balanced striking. We've run it locally here; it works in practice very well. I've seen a few counter-arguments but honestly I see no merit in any of them; let me run through them:
-Striking will take too long. 13 is a small number really; we used this locally, and going through the list tended to take under a minute. This is what actually happened in a real tournament when it was used; it was super fast. If anyone has actually done it and not just hypothetically thought about it and had time issues that would be interesting, but so far, 100% of the time it has been used it worked and was quick and 0% of the time it was used it caused time issues. It seems reasonable to conclude it's fast until definitive proof to the contrary is presented.
-Some stages will always be struck anyway/you'll end up on Smashville anyway. This is so incredibly not true. When I saw it in action, I saw almost every stage come up; out of 13 legal stages, I believe I saw 10 be used in game one at least once at a single event. When given choices in practice, players really do use them. Particular players have particular striking habits and may often end up on the same few stages, but you just have to peer over to other set-ups that don't involve you to see they tend to strike a lot differently and favor different stages. Even if a stage is always struck, the act of striking it is the act of that player having one fewer strike to use otherwise and having to strike it changes the final stage the game will be played on. Smashville does not come up unusually often when actual striking from a large list is done; players seem to agree to it a lot out of laziness or bad habit, but as players become more educated about what a huge strategic mistake agreeing to Smashville is for at least one side (I still owe a thread teaching how to strike effectively, will probably do that one in video form), you'll see it less and less.
-It's hard to keep track of that many stages. This is definitely objectively false. The random stage switch can be used as an in-game solution to keep track of the stages directly. Even better, the omega forms have their own independent tracking of what's allowed for random. Here's what you do. Before the tournament, set all of the legal stages to both the normal stages and the omega stages. Strike from the normal stages, removing stages from the list as struck. Before the next set, the new players will look at the omega random stage select and copy whichever stages are on over to the normal stages before striking from the normal stages. Even if every player has the memory of a gnat and can't keep track of what's legal or what has already been struck, the game keeps track of all of it easily.
I bring this up as such a big point because out of all stage questions starter list is what really matters to player experience. 5 starter lists worsen the player experience (and bore stream viewers to tears) while offering literally no advantage over 13 starter lists. Why would we choose to play a worse game instead of a better game when there are literally zero downsides to playing the better game? It doesn't make sense to me. We need to use a starter only stage system, and it needs to have a decent number of stages so actual variety exists. 13 is a very good number, a sweetspot really in which conservative players never have to play on "janky" stages and liberal players have great variety to enjoy. Why not go with it and make 99% of players happy? I know we have a lot of stages threads, but stages are one of the things we have to figure out to actually run tournaments and it seems obvious that we can just do this, make everyone happy, and accept zero downsides. Does anyone have any good reason why not?
