The ultimate fate of Simp1

ever since I made the video explaining the weapon/item spawning mechanics in SFA, the status of Simp1 has been on my mind. I know there are people who really like this map and there's no denying we've had some pretty cool games there, but we've also had the most lopsided games in recent history on that map. basically the issues come from how item spawning works and how it relates to the layout of the map. they are as follows:

- if you pick up all the items on a map within 20 seconds, you know the order of the item spawns exactly
- Simp1 is the only playable map where it's possible to pick up all items within 20 seconds
- Falco is the only playable character who can pick up all items on Simp1 within 20 seconds (confirmed!)

basically, this means we need to look at Simp1's status. what has recently happened on this map is exclusively Falco dittos and constant item-running being the only viable playing style. similar issues to this have gotten whole maps (Simp3, Ap) removed from competitive play in the past. I don't know if we need to do the same with Simp1, and I'd like to know what people think. the bottom line is that this just isn't suitable to be a green stage no matter what, and something needs to change.

as it stands we have three options, listed in the poll up above.

the first is removing Simp1 from competitive play entirely. since this would bring the number of green stages down to 4, we'd have to retool first-round stage striking processes. this isn't a huge problem and I already have a couple of possible solutions for it, but some people might miss this map.

the second is making this map a counterpick (yellow) stage. this would bring the number of counterpick stages to 3. I will tilt the playing field a bit and say right away I don't like this option as it means we would have almost as many yellow stages as green. we'd have to provide 3 strikes for second-round stage selections, since it should be a player's prerogative to deny their opponent the ability to pick a yellow stage. however, this also means it's possible that players could end up with only 1 green and 3 yellow stages to choose from at their second round. if someone has a creative workaround to this I'd be glad to hear it, but I really discourage this option.

the third is to change within-stage rules on Simp1 to ban item pickups, similar to what we do with Simp2. in this case, we would probably ban picking up the barrier. not sure how play would change as a result. it would be possible for games to either get slower (since there's no health to fall back on after a certain point) or way faster (since everyone only has 1 barrier and no health regen). we can test some games with this ruleset.

let me know what you think. if you haven't seen the aforementioned video here it is:

I vote yellow.  It's not a super awful map; it definately has its problems though.  I'd much rather run with the best stages (Sarg, Katina, Simp2, Zoness) as green.  I think Corneria and Sauria are better stages than Simp1 still though.

Did we ever ban simp3?  I forget.

Gotta play the game again to remember what happens and what you can do to prevent it though. I still think there is counterplay to item running on Simp1.

STG wrote:

Did we ever ban simp3?  I forget.

dunno if we officially did, but it's definitely been out of rotation for a while now. I think at some point I just quietly moved it onto the "red" list lol

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Gotta play the game again to remember what happens and what you can do to prevent it though.   I still think there is counterplay to item running on Simp1.

yeah, this is admittedly all without me having played so much as a duel in some time.

it's true there's probably countermeasures, I also really suck on this map and have never been able to get the whole item-running thing down very well compared to some anyway. all the same, I think the facts (i.e. Falco being the only one able to get a consistent next item) are enough to necessitate doing something drastic here.

we will play some more here for sure. don't want anyone thinking i'm doing this because i personally can't handle the way the stage plays

I think the biggest issue is if a player gets up a kill, if the items line up perfectly the other player absolutely needs to hit two shots while they run from one item to the next, and the item running player has to be out of barriers. Perhaps make a rule that you can't pick up two items in a row? If you're forced to grab a weapon before the next item, it forces you to either camp the outside without resources or forces you to fight in the middle, but still provides an option to retreat back to an item if need be. I don't like banning items (except for stealth packs in generals, fuck those), especially in a scenerio in which you earn the first kill but took damage. You should 100% be allowed and have earned to get a health pack if it's available, getting the first kill is all about pressing that advantage.

And yeah, I don't think you're trying to get it gone because you don't have a good record on it lol. The stage definately has issues.

figured i should take a look at a game here to supplement this discussion. the first game from here should tell us some things, it's a 7-0 shutout:



I wrote a point-by-point analysis under the spoiler:

click to show analysis:

more generally I think all that needs to be said is that it's really, really easy for a player with weapon advantage to restore themselves to full health, possibly with a bar as well, on this map. you can see how quickly advantage snowballed for Akp; after he got the first HL of the game he had so much power to move around and stop Cblue from doing the same.

it's really hard to do this on other stages. generally the tradeoff after someone kills you is that they have weapon and maybe positional advantage, but they've taken some damage and/or used their bar. it's rough to have to deal with an opponent at full health every time you spawn, and that's pretty much what Cblue was dealing with all the time in this game, even if you take out his mistakes that didn't have anything to do with items. also worth noting it's pretty much impossible to restore yourself like that with any other character than Falco on this map (see above re. 20 seconds blah blah)

STG wrote:

Perhaps make a rule that you can't pick up two items in a row?  If you're forced to grab a weapon before the next item, it forces you to either camp the outside without resources or forces you to fight in the middle, but still provides an option to retreat back to an item if need be.

I like the idea of this but it'd be difficult to implement. it's pretty easy for people to remember "can't pick up the purple thing" on Simp2, but harder to try to remember "have I already picked up an item? have I picked up a weapon yet? can I get another item?"

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I don't like banning items (except for stealth packs in generals, fuck those), especially in a scenerio in which you earn the first kill but took damage.  You should 100% be allowed and have earned to get a health pack if it's available, getting the first kill is all about pressing that advantage.

well, if we were going to ban picking up anything on this stage we would probably ban the barrier. that way it'd be similar to Simp2 where we could still see some health pickups to reward players who've gained an advantage, or save players during fights. that said, I agree that we should impose as few rules about pickups as possible, it's a hassle enough about the invis on Simp2 as it is

we can try playing a game or two "no barrier pickups" and see if it changes anything. we'd probably just see high-scoring games with much less thinking and much more shooting

All in all if we have to limit pickups in general I think it's safe to say the stage has problems, I like the no barrier proposition a lot though, I think that's the best course of action.

played quite a few games with Akp today. I locked Falco every time while he tried a variety of strategies. he's decidedly better than I am on the map in general, so we figured having me stay as the "control group" might be best.

first game we played FvF. I put up a decent fight in the first couple points; play centered around items for the most part, but he eventually won by a significant margin (i think 5-2?). pretty sure 4 of those points were all in a row. control on this map really tends to snowball.

he then tried playing Peppy for two games. although he got some good shots and managed a couple kills, I won both games and never really felt out of control the entire time I was playing. the times I died, I either just got overconfident and forgot to press B or made a big mistake with my positioning. even when he was playing pretty much perfectly, occupying the center and preventing me from getting tons of pickups with his RCB, I had so much stuff I just steamrolled him with grenades or RCB or anything else. slow characters (P/S) are definitely just not viable here, with how many pickups of weapons and items there are.

the most interesting games were when he went Krystal, again for two or three games. he won all of them by a quite significant amount. most interestingly, a lot of his points were actually made entirely without the aid of Krystal's special (!). this definitely points to how bad I am on this map, but some patterns did emerge in these games. he didn't get a huge amount of items, and even though I was faster and was able to pick up a bunch of items, I felt like I was just being bounced around from item to item each time. he maintained a huge stack of HL throughout the game, something like 60. definitely the worst part though was that even if I did manage a hit, he always had so many resources that he was able to stack up again by making his way over to an item, and then I had to face a fully stacked player every time I died.

conclusions: I'm zeroing in on the main issue with this map being how easy it is to re-stack after you take damage. slow chars can't really do this since there's such a gulf in mobility between P/S and K/X/F, but if you have sufficient HL you can pretty much do anything you like on the map. as I've said in previous posts this is pretty much the same issue we had with Simp3: it's really, really hard for someone out of control to get back in it, because every inch of progress you make (e.g. by damaging your opponent a little) can so easily be undone.

still want to play more games here and see if this is indeed an issue. we can still try "no barrier pickup allowed" games, but I'm not sure any more that'll help.