TIME VS POINTS: the final showdown

we need a separate topic for this after all, since this is proving to be a pretty contested topic in SFA right now.

the issue is whether SFA should play according to 5-minute TIME matches or POINT matches (if it came down to it, we would probably do 3-point matches, since most time games end with about that many points anyway).

trying to keep it as simple as possible, the characteristics of these gametypes are:

TIME MATCHES:

• put more pressure on players who are down in points, leading to more polarized scenarios where one player is attacking and the other is defending
  
• prevent games from stalemating and lasting 15+ minutes: you can't play passively in a losing position
  
• create hype by creating "down-to-the-wire" situations in the last minute or 30 seconds of games
  
• introduce the possibility of games drawing, presenting players with choices: if the game is tied 3-3 with a minute to go, should they risk pushing and winning or just wait out a draw?
  

POINT MATCHES:

• force both players to continually keep attacking, even the player who is up in points
  
• give players who are down in points more time to mount a comeback by leisurely stacking up on weapons
  
• (allegedly!) prevent fast characters from dominating games since playing passively and running away isn't as effective
  

please, post your thoughts, and RELEVANT GAME ANALYSES if you have them. these discussions don't work nearly as well without hard evidence.

i'll go first and officially throw all my weight behind TIME matches. here are my arguments regarding why points don't fix the problems people have with time games:

1. if it's a good decision for a fast character to run away and play passively in time games, it's a good decision in points games too. stalling games might actually be worse in points games, because it has the possibility to go on forever if the player who's not doing the stalling doesn't make the right decisions; this is decidedly a worse outcome than a player simply not making the right decisions and losing because of it.
   
2. i think the attitude of "what can a slow character do if Falco is up in points with not much time on the clock?" is a wrong one. rather, we should be considering that if you're a slow character and you've let your opponent get up in points with ~2min on the clock, you've already made some bad decisions and lost because of it. we shouldn't be trying to create opportunities for players who are down in points to leisurely run around, pick up weapons, and come back. the solution to the problem is simple: don't get killed in the first place. /isai
   
3. the counter to camping/running away/playing passively in points games is exactly the same as it is in time games: get the missiles and other powerful weapons, and cut your opponent off somehow. this is straightforward on some stages (Sarg, Simp2) and all but impossible to do on others (Fichina). thus, instead of looking at the gametype, we should be looking at which stages make it way too difficult for a passive player to be shut down, and either ban them or restrict them to yellow status. we have been way too liberal with our stages in the past considering many other competitive games only have tiny handfuls of playable stages, and that should change.
   

the other major point i'd like to make: if a player can't crack a defensive playstyle, it's due to their decisions. if someone has spent the last 30 seconds juking you, you probably aren't going to get anywhere by hanging around there and waiting it out. if you can't put enough pressure on them, you need to go and get stacked enough that you can put more on them. this shifts the focus to your decisions rather than just "trying to hit them", which is barely ever a good idea. is it possible for Falco to win games by running away from Peppy with <some amount of time> left on Katina? yes. is it a good idea for Peppy to run after Falco with nothing but CB and try to catch up? no. is that the only option available to Peppy? almost never.

here's: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] a game won by defensive play. Cac barely ever de-engages, choosing to try and fight it out rather than going for missiles or nades or anything after his initial HL pickup. his loss had nothing to do with time. the initial engagement began at 4:05 on the ingame clock and ended at 2:51 or so - over a minute. the second one begins at 2:22 and ends at 1:04. that's over a half of the game spent engaging - WAY more than enough time to go elsewhere and get stacked up, during which Akp can't contest Cac's item runs as he's in the red.

here's [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] another. after Cac wins first point he starts running away to the top. CBlue (ex Ganon) follows him via stairs rather than elevator, which doesn't give him position on missiles or HL, and Cac is free to waste his time even after CBlue picks up another bar. at 3 bars to none, CBlue is in a great position to hop the elevator up to the top, and very aggressively push in, but he takes his time about it and burns through two of those bars doing so. the next point, CBlue picks up invis and attempts to attack Cac, but all he has to do so is his blaster - while HL and nades are up in the top center. again, this loss had nothing to do with CBlue being unable to get enough points in time; it had to do with him not making the best use of his time.

i'll upload the recent games played by myself, Akp, and STG tonight, and break them down in depth, but i think that covers pretty much all of the points i'd like to make

This sounds like we're moving into a new era of time matches. Also hello, I'm here. I heard about online SFA and will make steps toward downloading the emulator and stuff soon (this week).

I've thought about time vs points, and time is probably the way to go. It just seems like a "cleaner" format. Points would promote a super safe form of play where 70% of the game is trying to rack up items, plus there's the no time limit thing, which would suck.

Time forces at least one player to do something proactive. And I see your point about beating defensive play on time, but what about Slippy or Peppy vs. Defensive Falco? If you could show me a video of that being in Slippy/Peppy's favor, then I might be convinced. I'm still kinda on the fence about it.

However, we can only manipulate the game so much to help out Slippy/Peppy. And if it can't be done, then it can't be done (not saying it can't, just making a point). I'd rather have Falco, Fox, and Krystal be the major picks than make so many rules just so Slippy and Peppy can be viable. (Also, I'm not saying that Slippy and Peppy can't win, but they definitely have a disadvantage.)

Anyway, my vote is for time, as I think we can agree the more flawed of the 2 game modes.

Sleeves wrote:

And I see your point about beating defensive play on time, but what about Slippy or Peppy vs. Defensive Falco? If you could show me a video of that being in Slippy/Peppy's favor, then I might be convinced. I'm still kinda on the fence about it.

ever since the whole question of time vs points has come up i've been trying to find just such a video. unfortunately, i don't think there is one, for the simple fact that nobody was keen to try playing slower characters in high-level tourney matches. basically, i think playing positionally is a lot harder than playing a high-mobility game where you just grab everything, and people were already really good at playing the latter style. since almost the only time we ever played SFA was at high-risk gatherings like tournaments, we didn't have any opportunity to practice things like that, so we went with what was straightforward.

probably the closest thing i can show you is this game: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] . i also have an analysis of this game at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] . to sum it up if you don't feel like reading and watching it all, the decisions that lost Yosh this game were small mistakes like at 1:57 where he checks for health and leaves his back unguarded (better map awareness would have told him there was no health out there anyway) and not using HL rather than RCB at 3:02 which could have allowed him to get position on the health at blue (again, assuming he knew it was there, which he should have if he had been paying attention to the items).

a counter-argument might be that it kind of sucks for slow characters to have to avoid making such seemingly tiny bad decisions, but i think a) this stage needs looking at and could probably benefit from banning item runs much as we do with simp2, and b) in the grand scheme of things, these mistakes aren't that small (weapon choice, letting the pressure up on your opponent). Yosh could totally have had this game.

Quote :

However, we can only manipulate the game so much to help out Slippy/Peppy. And if it can't be done, then it can't be done (not saying it can't, just making a point). I'd rather have Falco, Fox, and Krystal be the major picks than make so many rules just so Slippy and Peppy can be viable. (Also, I'm not saying that Slippy and Peppy can't win, but they definitely have a disadvantage.)

i agree with this completely. the fact remains that even with a lot of Falc dittos and the like, we've had lots more great time matches than great points matches, and i don't think that'll change in the future. as long as the game is still fun to watch and fun to play, it's all good.

witholding my vote till we play some point matches, but i'll probably go with the general consensus

I played the above game pretty badly, if I had ran away at all points where I fought him, I probably would have shut him out, or won 3 or 4-1.  I just don't think Peppy can compete here, although it's not as bad as some stages.  If he snipes an early first point (which is doable if Falco doesn't get an HL) he can probably do alright.

and like it was said above, it's okay if Slippy and Peppy aren't as good of characters, nothing's ever balanced, and Falco isn't >>>>> Krystal like Wolf is >>>>> the rest of the cast.

Not really the place for it, but who do you think are the best characters? I'm inclined to think Falco >>> Krystal > Fox >>> Peppy >> Slippy

STG wrote:

I played the above game pretty badly, if I had ran away at all points where I fought him, I probably would have shut him out, or won 3 or 4-1.

honestly, i'd say the only mistakes you made were not throwing on your barrier and crossing to yellow after Yosh uses his barrier at 1:35, and chasing Yosh after you barriered at 2:37, both of which directly led to points for Yosh. the latter wasn't even a particularly bad decision considering Yosh still had bar and you wanted him to use it. everything else you did in that game was pretty much spot on

i more or less agree with your ordering of the characters, though sometimes i don't feel like it's a question of straight up power levels. in particular i think Falco (and potentially Krystal) has to be more scared of Peppy than Fox does seeing as how Peppy continuously outputs half of Falco's health in damage

still on the subject of that game above, how would you feel about banning item runs on simp1, say by preventing people from picking up the bar? i'm starting to think it'd make sense, it'd definitely give slow characters an edge on that map since there's hardly any point in them going outside of the center anyway, and it'd make the game more aim and position heavy rather than item-heavy.

on the subject of "things we can do to make time games sensible", i think item-heavy games should be avoided since items are so powerful and can easily undo 30 seconds or more of in-game time after a single pickup. this is also why simp3 sucks

At the same time, the HL just gets a massive power creep if you can't pick up items on simp 1, if someone gets the first point with the HL, they're probably popping the barrier on the second stock too, in addition to likely having item control, the health at the very least is a good way to waste HL uses.  I think if we ban too much stuff though things start getting needlessly complicated, we don't have to ban stuff to cater to weaker characters, and I'm saying this as someone who likes playing the slower characters more.

And yeah I don't know if I got cocky or just didn't remember where item spawns were in the above game, but I should have just item ran instead of fighting most of the time.

Alright going to go ahead and finally put my thoughts out on this. So when me and the crew first started playing about a year ago we started off with stock/points first and honestly we had no problem with it until we decided to switch to time about a couple months ago when we came back. So we played a long time on stocks/points but thats when we weren't really that good. Upon switching to time after seeing your rule set so far i found myself playing more aggressively than ever before and that wasn't a bad thing. As soon as me and centi switched back and did points a couple days ago i wasn't really pleased with it and here are my points.

1. The first thing i noticed was the fact that matches would last longer and be drawn out because the person down would be able to have more time to come back if the other person is forcing you to approach they don't feel pressured and if someone is camping and they are the slower character the faster character can just run and pick something up and come right back with no penalty since there isn't any time.

2.You would be able to abuse spawns more and force things to come up when you wanted them to since you never had to look at the clock this is something i do a lot when i'm in a desperate position as a falco player if iv taken one hit and gotten a kill when it comes to healing items and barriers.

3.You could say that in time its more reward for camping since there is a clock but honestly if you think about it in points/stock this wouldn't make a difference anyway since if that person is camping and they are up by a point they still be able to camp anyway there just wouldn't be a clock and soon as you stop pressuring them while they are camping you might end up putting yourself in a bad position as soon as you let up. This point is more stage dependent wanted to put that out there.

4.I know this wouldn't really count as a point so much just mostly my opinion but i prefer to play in time since you have to plat more aggressively and honestly playing aggressively in this game just seems more rewarding so far from what i'v played.

If anything looks off anyone can point it out since i don't have as much experience as you guys i just wanted to put my thoughts out there and see how you guys feel about it.

STG wrote:

At the same time, the HL just gets a massive power creep if you can't pick up items on simp 1, if someone gets the first point with the HL, they're probably popping the barrier on the second stock too, in addition to likely having item control, the health at the very least is a good way to waste HL uses. I think if we ban too much stuff though things start getting needlessly complicated, we don't have to ban stuff to cater to weaker characters, and I'm saying this as someone who likes playing the slower characters more.

yeah, that's a good point about the HL. i'm going to open up the stage discussion thread soon as well because this one is quickly turning into a simp1 discussion thread when it should just be about the gametype... i have more stuff to talk about wrt. simp1 for sure

ShaZyV wrote:

If anything looks off anyone can point it out since i don't have as much experience as you guys i just wanted to put my thoughts out there and see how you guys feel about it.

nothing's really off, your whole post looks good, and i think we pretty much agree on all the reasons why point matches don't fix the alleged problems with time matches, especially regarding camping. i also enjoy the pressure of the clock a lot more, it leads to really hype moments and decisions that wouldn't happen otherwise, and turns games that might have been boring into exciting ones.

we'll still play some point matches but for now it's looking like our goals for the immediate future are a) figuring out how to do crew battles with time matches and b) balancing stages and figuring out stage statuses.