STAGE REVISION THREAD V4: THE CULLING (COMPLETE!!!)

HAXage wrote:

Cac wrote:

Invisibility didn't give either of us the edge - STG hurt me more while I was cloaked (0.66dpss while invisible) than not (0.24 while visible)!

this is what really kills it for me... this stage is small, it's boxed in, it's got no cover at all, and it's not unreasonable to get kills or put damage on people while they're invis here. as it is, the invis itself is just a gateway to the other items.

Jay McCloud wrote:

I'm not saying stealth on Simple map 3 is an automatic kill, just a very likely one.

sure, i agree absolutely with this - so is grabbing missiles right out the gate on Katina against a 1* healther, or item running vs a slow char as Falc on Simp1, or locking your opponent out with missiles/HL on Ap after they spawn, but we don't ban all those things.

really, i think the crucial point here is that something has to be pretty game-breaking to actually be overpowered enough to ban. we have a restriction on Sauria not because the cave is a catch-all power position, but because it leads to dumb games; we banned Simp5 and plane-only stages not so much because any one character can win games 100% of the time on them, but because they lead to games that aren't interesting competitively.

that said, the more i discuss this the less sense i think it makes to ban invis on simp2, because from what we've seen (although there hasn't been much to see, we've been kind of short on the vid recording front) invis/item runs are really not as stupid as i used to think they were... but that's a discussion for when we bring back simp2.

i do have more to say on why i think this should be yellow, but i'm tired so i'll save it for later

I realized that if invis has to be banned to play on a stage it shouldn't be green. So I'm voting yellow

I vote Yellow. I'm also biased, simp3 is my favorite stage

I vote yellow.

From my experience on the stage the invis has only really mattered in 3p games. The person who chose the faster character usually gets it and tends to wait until the other two players are damaged and jumps in and takes them down. If anyone challenges him he usually is able to outspeed the others around corners.

My 1v1 experience on simp3 is usually me with the faster character and the matches have been balanced but slightly in my favor. The one time I played pep vs falc I was able to overcome the speed difference with some HL no locks against the walls of the top floor to kill the invisible falc.

I'm not sure if the speed factor is a big enough issue in order to ban the invis or not but I deffinently feel this stage should be more of a counterpick than a fully open stage.

Ok, I going to buck the trend here. I vote green (the horror! ) with invis legal. Why? because if one person gets the invis, the other player can grab it to! And this stage is so small there is very little character bias. The fact that there is a quick way down through the hole makes there be less bias towards speedy characters. plus in my experience, me and my sister are on fairly even grounds on this stage. (I still beat her the majority of the time on this stage due to me having higher skill than her, but she pulls some of wins out from this one)

sfafreak wrote:

Ok, I going to buck the trend here. I vote green (the horror! ) with invis legal. Why? because if one person gets the invis, the other player can grab it to! And this stage is so small there is very little character bias. The fact that there is a quick way down through the hole makes there be less bias towards speedy characters. plus in my experience, me and my sister are on fairly even grounds on this stage. (I still beat her the majority of the time on this stage due to me having higher skill than her, but she pulls some of wins out from this one)

The only problem is that after one invis is collected the other invis can be camped by the currently invis character.

Zerolink100 wrote:

From my experience on the stage the invis has only really mattered in 3p games. The person who chose the faster character usually gets it and tends to wait until the other two players are damaged and jumps in and takes them down. If anyone challenges him he usually is able to outspeed the others around corners.

yeah, damn, i've forgotten to be voting for stage statuses with more than 2 players... this stage is totally yellow in 3p or higher, it's just bloody chaos and it usually ends up with someone going on a huge tear with spawnkills, item runs and whatever. tons of cherry picks, tons of jack.

Quote :

I'm not sure if the speed factor is a big enough issue in order to ban the invis or not but I deffinently feel this stage should be more of a counterpick than a fully open stage.

i agree - i can just imagine someone randoming this on the first game of a set or whatever and having to run into either a Falc ditto or character pick mindgames. picking Pep here blind and running into your opponent's Fox or whatever on the first game would just suck.

Jay McCloud wrote:

The only problem is that after one invis is collected the other invis can be camped by the currently invis character.

camping on simp3 doesn't really get you anything though... especially if it's the top level, you have ample opportunity to pack HLs, nades, mg/sensor if you like... items too, if the second invis doesn't spawn immediately after the first one is taken. camping shouldn't be a problem here in most circumstances and certainly not when it's only to control the top room. sniper/invis might be scary on stages that aren't so top-down oriented but if you're not in that immediate zone and/or making a push you don't really have anything to worry about

sfafreak wrote:

And this stage is so small there is very little character bias. The fact that there is a quick way down through the hole makes there be less bias towards speedy characters.

i do have to disagree here: yes, top to bottom it's easy to chase, but there's only ONE way to get to green and the ways up are all chokepoints on either side of the stage...

you can look at it like this - the other stages with more than, say, 2 levels are Titania, Zoness and Sarg; all the others are either more or less flat (Simp1/2, etc), two-leveled where the higher levels are more or less connected (Kat/Saur), or Corneria which is sort of an anomaly having so many different unconnected higher grounds. of those three multi-leveled stages, two have large amounts of interconnectivity among the higher levels and augment mobility by adding elevators (Sarg/Zone), and these two are green.

Titania, the only yellow one, has some truly massive amounts of separation between its levels; you might put this down to it just being really big, but honestly the structure itself is about the size of Sarg. the issue is more how the main spire is so difficult to climb without some speed. any choke leading upwards is basically a footrace. the trick to playing slow characters isn't to doggedly push wherever you need to go, it's about being able to anticipate and cut off your opponent's pushes at the right time and concealing your intent to move somewhere, and you just plain can't do that if the only way upwards is a huge choke, and if upwards is where the whole match's mobility is focused...

i guess my point is that it's hard to be where you want when you want on Simp3 because cutting your slower opponent off as Falc is merely a case of waiting until they've committed to walking up the choke and then beating them to the spawn they want. hiding what you want to do so that you can't be denied is about 90% of playing a slow character, and walking through chokes requires you to commit to displaying your intent at some point

HAXage wrote:

sfafreak wrote:

And this stage is so small there is very little character bias. The fact that there is a quick way down through the hole makes there be less bias towards speedy characters.

i do have to disagree here: yes, top to bottom it's easy to chase, but there's only ONE way to get to green and the ways up are all chokepoints on either side of the stage...

Actually, some of the green level's floor sticks out into the area of top level's hole, making it possible to jump from pink level (top) to green level (middle).

sorry, i should have said "one way up to green". even that isn't much i guess, considering there are only two ways to go up at all...

There is always the long way of going up from blue to pink then jumping down through the hole to green, but you better be using Falco because you'll need the speed. (Your opponent will be long gone from the green level if you use someone slower.)

i mean, you can look at it like this... there are basically only six places for any player to be at any time on simp3: on blue, green, or red; or the chokes between blue/green, green/red, or blue/red.

if you, as Pep, want to make it to green from blue, you can 1. go through the choke directly or 2. go up to red and drop down to green which is very indirect but maybe masks your intent further.

if you pick option 1, your opponent can also be in one of those six locations... if they're playing Falc, they can beat you there from the blue/red choke (dropdown from red), they can beat you there from green/red (dropdown or just backing into green and locking you out) and they can beat you there from blue or blue/green (since it's just a footrace at that point). if they're already on green the point is moot no matter what character they're playing. same goes if they're on red (any character can drop down).

if you pick option 2... it's a little hazier, since you're not being so obvious about where you want to go, and i suppose there's really only one way for your opponent to cut you off without directly engaging you along the way (going through the other chokes). they'll beat you to red as well, then, no matter what stage they're on, and you don't have the opportunity to do much about it since you're in the choke the whole time.

we can look at the same scenario with red if you want to get there from blue, too: either you're in a footrace, which they win (if they're on blue, blue/red, blue/green, green) or they're there already (green/red, red). barring some serious jack it's pretty heavily stacked against slowbies to get where they want here.

of course, i'm not claiming a Pep will never come out on top here; all this is just theorizing, and it doesn't take into account the actual combat aspect, but then again, no one would claim a Pep would never come out on top on Ap, for example. the point is that if a character has this severe an uphill battle on a stage, it's not one that can be randomed first game in the set and played with blind picks.

HAXage wrote:

barring some serious jack it's pretty heavily stacked against slowbies to get where they want here.

Yeah, but isn't it that way for all stages? Of course that fast characters have an advantage in traversing a stage. If the criteria for an unbalanced satge is that slow characters can't get around as quickly as fasties than you might as well make all stages yellow. That may be a slight exaggeration, but my point is you have to look at ALL the advantages and disadvantages. This is actually one of the easiest stages for a slowbie to traverse.(The others being Sargasso and Zoness)

sfafreak wrote:

This is actually one of the easiest stages for a slowbie to traverse.

While this is deffinenttly true they also have to deal with combat. If a faster character were making a push on a slower character it would be tough to get around while being attacked. The faster character can also cut off the slower character in those choke points.

I think another reason why slower characters tend to do worse here is that they can't use their jump to jump on anything. Even on simp maps they have something they can easily jump out of cover, shoot, then fall right back into it. I find that whenever I go plippy here my opponent can easily jump chase me. Here there are just corners and faster characters are better to get around those.

the question isn't just based on footracing in most maps, though... mobility is your ability to put pressure on your opponent, fake them out, keep them from doing what they want to do. if i had to sum up the whole slow character manifesto, i would say "it doesn't matter how slow you get to your destination if your opponent can't get there at all". this is certainly true for Pep, who is more or less all DPS; Slip's ability to tank stuff means he can be a bit more carefree in getting places.

in other stages, mobility is not just a matter of footraces: it's complicated by the fact that both characters often have direct lines of sight to each other, have alternate routes to things, and cover. simp3 has very little of the first, none of the second (two routes upwards, three routes downwards - you can count them on one hand!) and none of the third...

so, yes, slow characters will always have a harder time being mobile on stages than fast characters - that in itself doesn't imbalance a map. what does imbalance a map is how that map makes it difficult for slow characters to make up for that loss of mobility, and, like Ap, Simp3 has that difficulty in spades, i think.

i really regret not having more vids of this map up, because that's what we really should be looking at... one of the problems with these debates is that they can get pretty deadlocked if we just have theory to go on. oh well, soon enough.

Zerolink100 wrote:

sfafreak wrote:

This is actually one of the easiest stages for a slowbie to traverse.

While this is deffinenttly true they also have to deal with combat. If a faster character were making a push on a slower character it would be tough to get around while being attacked. The faster character can also cut off the slower character in those choke points.

If a fast character is pushing on you, than do what HAXage says to do in his guide. "Play the enemy on their own terms." In other words, if the enemy is making a push on you, push back! Stay around and fight instead of running! Use Plippy's incredible jump to keep jumping over your opponent to buy time for your PCB/SCP.

Zerolink100 wrote:

I think another reason why slower characters tend to do worse here is that they can't use their jump to jump on anything.

As I said before, use their high jump to buy time for a PCB/SCB.

I reiterate, Green with invis legal.

haxage wrote:

mobility is your ability to put pressure on your opponent, fake them out, keep them from doing what they want to do.

Deffinently easy to do on a slow guy on simp 3.

sfafreak wrote:

Use Plippy's incredible jump to keep jumping over your opponent to buy time for your PCB/SCP.

If you're good enough not to get jump chased then I suppose it could work.

haxage wrote:

one of the problems with these debates is that they can get pretty deadlocked if we just have theory to go on.

That and the number of people throwing in their opinion is so few.

I still would hate to pick peppy and random Ap or this stage because of the fast characters having a bit of an edge. Peppy is certinally fun to play but if you pick him and then have a disadvantage all because of randoming the first stage in a set and end up losing, that would suck and give your opponent an easier win.

My opinion still stands at yellow for all (1v1, 2v2, 3p, and FFA).

I feel that people seem to be quite set in their opinions, and the majority is for Yellow. There is argument for Green, however. I think with so few people, we should set it tentatively at Yellow, and if more people join discussion, we could rediscuss the issue.

If everyone is done making their point, I think we should move onto the next stage

Zerolink100 wrote:

I still would hate to pick peppy and random Ap or this stage because of the fast characters having a bit of an edge. Peppy is certinally fun to play but if you pick him and then have a disadvantage all because of randoming the first stage in a set and end up losing, that would suck and give your opponent an easier win.

Except you that choose the stage before your character.

Jay McCloud wrote:

If everyone is done making their point, I think we should move onto the next stage.

I agree, until we get some comprehensive vids we should move on.

normally when we don't have much of a consensus the best thing to do is leave the stage at what it was previously... however, there's been a lot of contention for this one and a lot of people have weighed in with some pretty good points, so i think we'll have to come back to it later. no harm in that!

which means we're moving on to KATINA - i will post my regular analysis of this one later

Katina is probably my favorite stage. The hard hitting weapons are further out so you have to put some time in if you want them. Common weapons more around the center but spread on different levels.

My vote is green for all variations of this stage, unless someone can convince me otherwise.

And next on the list was simp 5, not katina btw.

Yeah but simp 5 is a lock for red. It's that bad. Also, kantina should be yellow. I forget why, it just is a stage that feels yellow when I play it.

I vote Green with no missiles. (or even no missiles on the first life) I think that the ability for fast characters to get missiles before slow characters have a barrier (or even a machine gun for god's sake) is enough to make the stage Yellow. Especially now with time matches as standard, as in most games only 2-3 points are scored by each. A probable free-kill for fast characters is ridiculous in my eyes. I say no missiles.

Thank you, Falco XII, for reminding me why this stage should yellow. The missiles. They make this map unbalanced more than they make others due to the lack of bunkers.(Missile hiding spots.) This map is perfect for toad style, though.(Lol now we'll have a topic explaning toad style and that slippy actually sucks at it. Sorry HAXage.)

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is the most even slow/fast game we have, i think; it's not a blowout by any means although Yosh did lose. this tourney is also notable in that Cac never allowed more than one point against him in his 1v1s, which indicates he was playing a pretty solid game throughout (up to sudden death, lol )

first missile pickup is right off the bat, Yosh has ample opportunity to deny Cac the pickup due to his spawn and does a pretty good job, landing two solid hits on him and avoiding one missile, although Cac does get the kill in the end. typically the first point is like this, i agree: players scramble for the missile spawns, sometimes they aren't there, sometimes they are. to rush for them immediately is a bit of a gamble because they are really way out there, even for a fast character, and risking finding nothing while your opponent drops down and grabs the HL is a big waste of time.

since this match only had three points in it, is it reasonable to say that that first missile pickup won Cac the game? absolutely not! Yosh puts him in the red right away and only dies due to some really weird splash around the corner, and his followup revenge push just kinda goes sour when he slips off the ledge at 1:12 or so. then he makes the wrong decision (i.e. to jump down instead of just push down the ramp) at 1:39 and Cac gets out of there just in time. was he locked out entirely because of his character? again, absolutely not; he had a whole bunch of options up to that point, including the (probably easiest) brute force option of just pushing with a bar on.

then what occurs is basically a really long timelapse of Cac running away. he spends about 30 seconds looking for a health pickup, which he eventually finds at 2:21 or so; i would argue that his intent was clear enough at that point that Yosh shouldn't have wasted time looking for the missiles and should have immediately moved to cut him off, and that since he had control of the center it would have been at least moderately easy to do so. i think the main mistake he makes is chasing directly instead of going around the left side of the center to cut Cac off at 2:10.

but what does this get Cac in the end? after his health pickup, he doesn't manage to put any damage on Yosh or take any advantageous position, and the item grabs end up landing Yosh, who still has control of the high ground, with invis at 3:10! hell, if missiles had been there he could have had the point too - it just so happened that they weren't there, and that stroke of luck had nothing to do with who was the faster character. all in all, Yosh's play here - from Cac's health pickup to Yosh's invis pickup - could be a textbook example of how to get the stuff you want to get on Katina as Peppy: he has a great, straight line of sight to Cac while making the long walk to the missiles, he keeps the high ground all the time, and he puts plenty of pressure on Cac while he's doing it, just cheap spammy RCBs that don't cost anything to fire off.

afterwards... Cac grabs HL, which doesn't do much for him now that Yosh is invis. he ends up dying with it due to suicide, although i would be pretty confident in stating that that one would have been a lost point anyway as Yosh still had a bar. Yosh has no problems pushing him here; he recognizes that this is a position he's going to benefit from, barring some serious nonsense, and comes out on top.

next point, Cac heads to missile spawn, and they still aren't there. there's a brief standoff and then Cac decides to push up first, being the one with more health; they still have bars. this prompts Yosh to move up and Cac jukes him out and heads right for what he knows must be there: the barrier. there's no pack, no silver health (he can see both of these things), all the other items have been taken already, so the bar must be there - and he executes this juke perfectly in a scenario where he probably should have taken a hit at the very least. maybe it's just that Yosh isn't expecting it, but the end result is that Cac ends up with 2 bars, which is enough to win the match for him. again, speed has nothing to do with this one: Cac saw first that the bar must be there, and took it at the first opportunity when he was confident enough that he wouldn't get hit.

so where were the turning points here that were decided by the fact that Cac had 2 more speed stars than Yosh? there was only one missile pickup the whole game, and it decided a moderately close first point; the second point dragged on a little longer than it could have but this wasn't thanks to character stats, it was thanks to the fact that Yosh went right when he should have thought ahead a little further and gone left. happens to everyone. the third point could have gone either way - hell, for the bulk of it, Yosh was actually closer to the deciding item - the barrier - than Cac was! if he had made the connection and checked for the bar instead of being so aggressive there... who knows?

i don't think this stage is won on speed at all. i think it's won on decision-making, and you can make good or bad decisions no matter what character you are. if you want to play this map like Ap and give your opponent the runaround, sure, Akp, pick Falc if you want the whole thing to hinge on how far you think ahead, pick Pep. this one's always been green and green it should stay, i say.

and yeah, oops, Simp5 was supposed to be next we don't normally discuss red stages, but this one was brought up for discussion by Jay a little while ago and i said we'd include it. we'll do it after Kat

HAXage wrote:

normally when we don't have much of a consensus the best thing to do is leave the stage at what it was previously... however, there's been a lot of contention for this one and a lot of people have weighed in with some pretty good points, so i think we'll have to come back to it later. no harm in that!

which means we're moving on to KATINA - i will post my regular analysis of this one later

Missile banned green