The Unity Ruleset: Discussion

[DMG]

However, you cannot (usually) punish for doing ledge drop Nair/Uair after grabbing the edge. Because while he loses invincibility before the aerial ends, you ALSO lag for stealing the edge from him. So now he's dropped down, and you might have a slight frame advantage on him but no reasonable way to exploit that.


Trust me, the mechanics on beating planking are harder than "grab the edge". lol

 

[Grim Tuesday]

My eyes are almost bleeding from the retardedness of the last 20 pages or whatever the number is.

You know what? **** you guys. Continue to live in your land of bias and ignorance where a ledge-grab limit is justified and non-MK planking is actually legit. Keep banning RC and Brinstar and believing that Final Destination is the most neutral stage in the game. Disregard any attempts to legalize new stages based on your arbitrary view of how the game "should" be played.

I'm done trying to talk sense into people who argue just to hear the sound of their own voice. Some of you are as bad as holocaust deniers, which is sad considering how many of you are good, respected players too.

 

[Flayl]

See ya, drama queen.

Can anyone post a video of someone trying to grab the ledge immediately after G&W and failing to punish anything the G&W does? I assume Omni should have at least one since he mentions having more experience about it than anyone else in the thread.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

Hey, life's a stage and I just happen to be on it!

 

[Laem]

My eyes are almost bleeding from the retardedness of the last 20 pages or whatever the number is.

You know what? **** you guys. Continue to live in your land of bias and ignorance where a ledge-grab limit is justified and non-MK planking is actually legit. Keep banning RC and Brinstar and believing that Final Destination is the most neutral stage in the game. Disregard any attempts to legalize new stages based on your arbitrary view of how the game "should" be played.

I'm done trying to talk sense into people who argue just to hear the sound of their own voice. Some of you are as bad as holocaust deniers, which is sad considering how many of you are good, respected players too.

I do believe character-wide LGL is justified. Why? Cuz nobody wants to play this game if the ledge is that (Will vs RB) dominant. I do think RC and brinstar should be banned in a ruleset in which MK abuses them to the max. I believe FD is one of the least neutral stages in the game (seriously, where did that idea of yours come from).
How should the game be played? Not in a way that makes every1 quit it.
I'm not ignorant. To me, the bolded sounds like pure and absolute rationality.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

I will give you a Super Grim Personal Amazing Guarantee that without a ledge-grab limit, ledge-play would not become dominant and make the game unenjoyable.

 

[Omni]

I will give you a Super Grim Personal Amazing Guarantee that without a ledge-grab limit, ledge-play would not become dominant and make the game unenjoyable.

Let's say it doesn't become "dominant".

But several people decide to pull off more Will vs. Rich Brown stunts from time to time.

Do you think that's perfectly okay?

 

[MK26]

then people start to realize how to combat it, and then those people who decide to use it figure out that thats not the best option any more

so they stop

and then it never becomes dominant

 

[Grim Tuesday]

Well, I would prefer that it didn't happen, but I don't really see a competitive issue with it considering we've allowed similar tactics in other match-ups.

Though if some people decide to pull it off they deserve to win as planking in that fashion isn't as good as everyone thinks it is.

If we didn't have a ledge-grab limit, a few people would try to pull off another "Will vs. Rich Brown" and the plankee would learn that there is nothing to stop them sitting still while waiting for the opponent to leave a gap in their timing (it WILL happen eventually) and then hitting them.

Planking is high-risk/arguably high-reward. If we weren't so scrubby in our banning of it, then everyone would've seen that already.

 

[Marc]

To be fair, I've never seen someone win a tournament all the way through with MK's planking either. Theorycraft aside, the biggest issue with planking to me is that the risk/reward for dealing with it is very skewed towards the person doing it and this also applies to characters like G&W and DK. Perhaps not in every matchup, but most characters should not want to mess with it. I don't know if it's exactly broken as we banned it across the board too early, but at the same time people simply seem to not want a metagame revolving around ledge play. Even if it's more beatable than it seems, I can guarantee you that without a LGL people will still go for it in many scenarios, as it's much easier to do than punish and especially players with less skill will get wrecked by it. You can't really blame all this on MK, even if he is the biggest offender. Especially when you consider that there was no MK involved when Unity reinstated the LGL, as a direct response to an incident that happened pretty much immediately when the LGL wasn't there for a change.

 

[~ Gheb ~]

The sad part about all these ruleset discussions - ledge grabs, timeouts and other MK related stuff in particular - is that a lot of American players entertain the deluded idea that the current status quo of their ruleset is the most logical or at least close to it. There are so many fundamental flaws in the rules that are not character related at all and should have much more priority than them that the claim that it's too early to ban any character is still perfectly viable [I don't support this claim though, I don't think MK should be banned under any circumstance].

The ruleset dictates to use 3 stocks / 8 minutes - COMPLETELY arbitrary. Why 8 minutes for three stocks? Where is the logic behind that? Why not just say "each stock should be awarded with 3 minutes"? That's consistent and allows the TO to run 1 stock or 2 stock matches and still go along with the unity idea - or are you guys really that dumb to not sticky a major tourney just because the host feels that the game is more exciting when played with 1 stock / 3 minutes or 2 stocks / 6 minutes?

The ruleset also tells us that percent decides the winner of a game in case of a timeout if both players have the same stocks. That's also arbitrary as Brawl is not based solely on % and percent is not a consistent value within the composure of a stock. Percent is just as randomly chosen a value to determine the winner as "damage given" or "knockback distance" are. A one-stock rematch is much more accurate a way to determine a winner than percent is because a rematch reflects what we have chosen to be the "actual" win condition very well. Funniest thing about it is that with a rematch you wouldn't even need to add rules like LGL.

Obviously I don't expect this to change the minds of pro-ban people. It's more than obvious by now that pro-ban people will find a way to twist this argument somehow or get it off the track with completely unviable arguments such as tourneys "taking too long with these rules". It has also occurred to me that a lot of people who are pro-ban advocate in favor of the status quo of the american ruleset because it's the only scenario where MK actually can be argued to be broken. Horribly broken stages like Brinstar are argued as "perfectly legitimate" just to make it seem as if MK was the problem.

MK isn't broken - your ruleset is.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

The ruleset also tells us that percent decides the winner of a game in case of a timeout if both players have the same stocks. That's also arbitrary as Brawl is not based solely on % and percent is not a consistent value within the composure of a stock. Percent is just as randomly chosen a value to determine the winner as damage given or flight distance are. A one-stock rematch is much more accurate a way to determine a winner than percent is because a rematch reflects what we have chosen to be the "actual" win condition very well. Funniest thing about it is that with a rematch you wouldn't even need to add rules like LGL.

I actually like this idea.

Horribly broken stages like Brinstar are argued as "perfectly legitimate" just to make it seem as if MK was the problem.

People are gonna pounce on you for this, you know, innocent until proven guilty and all.

On another note:

I don't see why DK's planking is brought up so often.

He doesn't have any options from the ledge other than Up B really, so it's inferior to Marth/G&W's in that respect (they can fair and nair/uair respectively). He has an awful vertical recovery so if he DOES mess up, he pays a very hefty price and he has a massive gaping vulnerability spot above him that can be hit without endangering yourself (you don't have to go completely off-stage to hit him out of his planking, basically).

 

[Flayl]

Doing the 1 stock rematch would encourage users that are losing heavily to run away the rest of the match so they can bring it back on the rematch (which I assume doesn't have a timer?). Not saying that makes it inherently worse but it still has a problem.

 

[~ Gheb ~]

Doing the 1 stock rematch would encourage users that are losing heavily to run away the rest of the match so they can bring it back on the rematch (which I assume doesn't have a timer?). Not saying that makes it inherently worse but it still has a problem.

If they are losing "heavily" they'd have to be at least one stock behind in which case a rematch is not needed.

 

[Flayl]

Using a different definition of "heavily" doesn't actually address the argument.

 

[Ussi]

Can't be a stock behind in 1 stock match.


But shouldn't it just be by % anyways? (not like there is a better choice)

 

[~ Gheb ~]

Using a different definition of "heavily" doesn't actually address the argument.

Then give me yours first.

 

[Life]

Any reasonably big percent lead works. The exact number does not matter.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

If you are on 100% and your opponent is on 0% and you time out to go for the rematch, chances are you'll either:
a) Get KO'd before you can run away for long enough.
b) Lose in the rematch.
c) Get a lucky gimp and win the rematch.

I wouldn't really consider it a major issue.

 

[AlphaZealot]

The ruleset also tells us that percent decides the winner of a game in case of a timeout if both players have the same stocks. That's also arbitrary as Brawl is not based solely on % and percent is not a consistent value within the composure of a stock. Percent is just as randomly chosen a value to determine the winner as damage given or flight distance are. A one-stock rematch is much more accurate a way to determine a winner than percent is because a rematch reflects what we have chosen to be the "actual" win condition very well. Funniest thing about it is that with a rematch you wouldn't even need to add rules like LGL.

In every single game imaginable you need to have a winning/losing player at any given point in order to force action. Having the majority of a match be a TIE means that action is rarely forced. Doing this only shifts the stalling from the "winning" player by percent to the "losing" player by percent, assuming there is a significant % difference. In the event BOTH players are relatively close in %, then they will simply not approach each other at all as there is no incentive to do so. People complain about stalling all the time, in this system stalling would be compounded exponentially.

 

[Ghostbone]

It's just pointless.
Why have a rematch when you can just extend the timer?
(replying to Grim's post)

 

[Life]

If you are on 100% and your opponent is on 0% and you time out to go for the rematch, chances are you'll either:
a) Get KO'd before you can run away for long enough.
b) Force a rematch, stall again if you start losing in the rematch, forcing another rematch in which you'll stall even more if you start losing, etc.
c) Get a lead on the other guy, who will begin timing you out to force another rematch, etc.
d) Somebody SD's.

Fix'd. The problem with rematches is their ability to go on indefinitely because, when percents reset every three minutes, there's no reason for the losing player not to stall out. And if you invoke percent rule on the rematch, then you undercut the main reason to have a rematch, that is, the arbitrary percent rule.

The only non-arbitrary timeout rule is Sudden Death, which is bad for three reasons: the bob-ombs, the percent reset, and the ability to sit on the ledge forever and not die. Solution? If you're going to do rematches, set a big ol' handicap so that they don't take very long and are much harder to time out (basically Sudden Death with a timer and no explosions). But then you still end up with one problem: the 150%-0% match becomes a 150%-150% rematch, or whatever numbers you want to pluck from the air. You just awarded 150% damage for losing for an entire game.

Is a percent rule arbitrary? Absolutely. Do we have anything better? Nope.

 

[DMG]

A rematch wouldn't have a % handicap. You're better off starting at 0% if you're going that route.

The 2 main problems with the rematch rule is that:

1. It encourages players on either side to go for a timeout if getting the rematch would be favorable to them. And finding scenarios where that would/could reasonably occur isn't very hard. Take Pikachu vs someone CGable for example. Say that Pikachu is either ahead or behind, doesn't matter. The other guy has enough damage that the Pika CG's won't work/as well. It's now in Pika's favor to try and get a rematch so things go back to 0 and he can do his CG easier. Regardless of whether he's behind or ahead in that earlier game, he has an incentive to run out the clock that wasn't there before. If Pika is ahead, the other guy ALSO has an incentive to let the game go to time because there's a solid chance that under "regular" % rules, he'd end up losing to Pika. Even if that means dealing with the CG all over again.


2. You eventually need to have a rule that definitively finds a winner. You can't do rematches over and over til someone wins unless you want to introduce handicaps or strong incentives like going to time in the rematch means you both lose. If you need something to decide the winner after the rematch, what are you left with? Another rematch? Sudden Death? % rule now finally kicks in? You'd have to have that settled beforehand, and frankly it would look incredibly ironic if you decided the rematch with the "broken" % win rule.


As far as stages go, I'd agree I'd get rid of Brinstar and RC before making a decision on MK. I would also explore 2 and 1 stock matches and see if that's more appealing (regardless of MK's status).

 

[ADHD]

Ban mk.

10

 

[Player-1]

Shoutouts to jebus:

 

[popsofctown]

The ruleset dictates to use 3 stocks / 8 minutes - COMPLETELY arbitrary. Why 8 minutes for three stocks? Where is the logic behind that? Why not just say "each stock should be awarded with 3 minutes"? That's consistent and allows the TO to run 1 stock or 2 stock matches and still go along with the unity idea - or are you guys really that dumb to not sticky a major tourney just because the host feels that the game is more exciting when played with 1 stock / 3 minutes or 2 stocks / 6 minutes?

Wow, have you played Brawl before? Zero Suit Samus, Lucario, and Pokemon Trainer all have huge power swings if you mess with stock numbers from tournament to tournament. There has to be a standard. You might as well say that a ruleset dictating a 30% handicap for MK and a 10% handicap for Falco should be totally ok and given a unity sticky.

Oh, I forgot Wario's fart changes some too.

And to a lesser extent, every character that kills with a move they also stale.

 

[SaveMeJebus]

Planking is just as bad as walk off camping which is banned by banning stages with permanent walk offs. It is low risk high reward and it benefits the player who has the lead

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJaLEjFCuZE&t=2m30s

look what happens when ADHD tries to stop him from planking

This is proof that it may work in theory, but it is a lot harder to stop in reality

 

[MechaWave]

Shoutouts to jebus:

This was ruined by the fail punctuation in the first panel.

 

[Cassio]

Disclaimer: The BBR has nothing to do with this, it’s the Unity collective AKA the BBR-RC. Completely separate rooms. The BBR has not voted on any rules since Unity was installed.

As an individual I’ve been following and participated in Meta Knight debates since the start and it’s gotten to a point where I’m pretty sick of the whole discussion. It has harmed the American community more than any character itself ever could and I don’t think it will ever end. People drag in all sorts of arguments and personal attacks (both ways!), but to me it seems rather simple: Meta Knight is perceived as winning too much in the United States. In Europe and Japan he functions pretty much like every other top tier would, even if he is acknowledged as the best character. There are some key differences in stages and perhaps mentality, but I generally find peope very unwilling to explore the continental discrepancies in the first place.

Meta Knight makes about half the total money earned in American tournaments and has several top players consistently performing with him, most notably Mew2King, which has been documented rather thoroughly. Note that this in itself doesn’t mean anything, the data doesn’t make statements on its own. Other than Tuen I don’t think anyone has ever even bothered to do a proper statistical analysis, nor is there material to compare it to. Melee was dominated by a single character too for several long periods, but we didn’t keep monetary records and I don’t think other fighting games scenes do. What it comes down to is that there really isn’t any objective justification for a ban other than that the scene can collectively determine a cutoff point where they think it’s enough, provided TOs are willing to run with it. That’s about as legitimate as it can get and I’m not really against a (super) majority rule as long as people leave their salt at the door. I’ve always acknowledged that MK is very dominant in the US, but I simply don’t agree with most other arguments that get thrown into the mix. There’s nothing “factual” about character diversity and dominance as far as cutoff points are concerned, it all comes down to the values of players.

What I do know is that players like M2K, Ally and Anti deserve their wins and rely on more than their character to be as consistently good as they are. I hope that people can at least have that much respect, even if their character does get banned.

inb4europeknowsnothing

I hate that posts like these go unnoticed around here.

Also once again drawing too many conclusion from a voluntary polls is silly. Trying to use a 3:1 ratio is dishonest, the most that can be said is pro-ban is more passionate since thats generally what a voluntary poll will judge.

And why are people criticizing m2k for his emotional arguments when thats what pro-ban's argument revolves around. There are no objective reasons to ban MK :|.

 

[Nidtendofreak]

No objective reason?

Where have you been for...3 years?

Also: a jump from 55-45 in favor of ban to 75-25 is not ignorable. Not in the least. There is no logical way to say it's "dishonest". What, did a massive chunk of anti-ban just randomly decide to sit this one out, but not the last three polls where it was close to even? That's rather illogical.

 

[TheSlothStyle]

I was


Then I farted on him

:D LOL! That was funny.

 

[Cassio]

There was also a jump from more than 3000 votes to less than 1000 votes. Did over 2/3rds of the community just disappear? Like I said voluntary polls themselves are horrible. They measure passion and thats about it. Im not just saying it just to say it, anyone thats taken even a first level statistics course knows this.

And yes, no objective reason. Read Marcs post. People want him banned bc hes overcentralizing and tired of seeing him place as well as he does. These are not objective reasons.

 

[Nidtendofreak]

Over something this passionate, that causes this many arguments? No, it's not a perfect indicator, but it's dang close. You'd have to be frankly, completely closed minded, to throw this out. It's not a bias poll, and it was spread around in the more popular topics. If people didn't bother to vote on something they KNOW could effect them: that's either their own dang fault and too bad for them, or they were neutral and honestly don't care either way.

There was also 3000 votes last time because there was a rather...convenient jump in newbie accounts right around those times. I don't know, but I suspect they found a way to weed out more multivotes as well.

 

[M@v]

There were several measures in place to prevent alternate/multiple accounts from voting.

 

[Nidtendofreak]

There were several measures in place to prevent alternate and multiple accounts from voting.

Thank you.

That in itself should be an indicator of how much attention this board puts in these votes: 2/3s of the votes last time were most likely false, just with people trying to make their side win.

No, I'm sorry, but this current poll is the best indicator you're going to get.

 

[Cassio]

What if asking my neighbor who plays the game once a month was the best indicator I could get? Is that still a worthwhile indicator?

Over something this passionate, that causes this many arguments? No, it's not a perfect indicator, but it's dang close. You'd have to be frankly, completely closed minded, to throw this out. It's not a bias poll, and it was spread around in the more popular topics. If people didn't bother to vote on something they KNOW could effect them: that's either their own dang fault and too bad for them, or they were neutral and honestly don't care either way.

LOL. Hold on lemme hold a radio poll for President advertise it super well and see who wins . Im sorry not trying to be mean here but you cant actually say what you did without either some ignorance on the subject or a severe lack of intellectual integrity.

There was also 3000 votes last time because there was a rather...convenient jump in newbie accounts right around those times. I don't know, but I suspect they found a way to weed out more multivotes as well.

That in itself should be an indicator of how much attention this board puts in these votes: 2/3s of the votes last time were most likely false, just with people trying to make their side win.

These are superfluous judgements youre not allowed to make when polling. Thats a part of the reason voluntary polls are so bad, there so many stupid factors that can play that theres absolutely no way you can make an accurate analysis of the numbers youre given.

Not to mention that 2 false votes for every 1 real just sounds redic. But hey, my judgement is as accurate as yours on that account. Or so is saying that they were all real.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

Wow, have you played Brawl before? Zero Suit Samus, Lucario, and Pokemon Trainer all have huge power swings if you mess with stock numbers from tournament to tournament. There has to be a standard. You might as well say that a ruleset dictating a 30% handicap for MK and a 10% handicap for Falco should be totally ok and given a unity sticky.

Oh, I forgot Wario's fart changes some too.

And to a lesser extent, every character that kills with a move they also stale.

Change isn't necessarily bad.

Thank you.

That in itself should be an indicator of how much attention this board puts in these votes: 2/3s of the votes last time were most likely false, just with people trying to make their side win.

No, I'm sorry, but this current poll is the best indicator you're going to get.

I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but from what I saw, around 1 in 20 votes from the last ban either came from alts or newbie accounts.

 

[Nidtendofreak]

What if asking my neighbor who plays the game once a month was the best indicator I could get? Is that still a worthwhile indicator?

LOL. Hold on lemme hold a radio poll for President advertise it super well and see who wins . Im sorry not trying to be mean here but you cant actually say what you did without either some ignorance on the subject or a severe lack of intellectual integrity.

No, it's just you not being around long enough to realize how things work on these boards. These polls aren't grabbing random people off of the street who might not know anything about the subject, or don't care: its targeting the people who are effected by it, and happen to spend a lot of their time talking about the subject. A lot more than the vast majority of the citizens of the USA talk about say, their President choice or politics in general.

These are superfluous judgements youre not allowed to make when polling. Thats a part of the reason voluntary polls are so bad, there so many stupid factors that can play that theres absolutely no way you can make an accurate analysis of the numbers youre given.

Not to mention that 2 false votes for every 1 real just sounds redic. But hey, my judgement is as accurate as yours on that account. Or so is saying that they were all real.

No, you could actually go through who voted on each side in the last four polls. Wouldn't be hard to figure out how many were newbie accounts. Could some of them be legit? Sure. Did we just so happen to have a giant spike of actual new people around that time? I think the odds of that are really low. If those accounts by now still have no posts, chances are they were just made to fluff up the vote count. Perfectly accurate? No. Very good ballpark guess? Yes.

 

[Isatis]

In the fourth poll, a lot of the results were actually just new people, yes. Look at the list, it's freely available to look at here. Compared to this poll here, and like I said on AiB, you could pick out any name on that list and (in 49 out of 50 cases) it will have been a top player or a frequent, known tourney-goer.



And I will say this. In two years, yes, we did lose that many people.

 

[Cassio]

Speaking from opinion 1 in 20 doesnt sound off. 2 in 3 sounds out there. My main point though was we cant accurately make that judgement and are better off not doing so.

No, it's just you not being around long enough to realize how things work on these boards. These polls aren't grabbing random people off of the street who might not know anything about the subject, or don't care: its targeting the people who are effected by it, and happen to spend a lot of their time talking about the subject. A lot more than the vast majority of the citizens of the USA talk about say, their President choice or politics in general.

You're stating precisely what I did two posts ago: Voluntary polls measure passion. Who spends a lot of time talking about the subject? Is it everyone in the community? Anyone who's spent even a small amount of time around this forum knows theres a group of people who spends more time arguing these things than that whole of the community in general. Theres so many factors present that simple questions become difficult to answer unless you hold down variables.

And I will say this. In two years, yes, we did lose that many people.

I wasnt making a statement about how much of the community was lost. Rather criticizing making such judgements off the polls. Making our own subjective judgements is one thing but not everyone is going to agree and thats not something the poll can quantify or clarify.