Topic: Place your bets...(spoiler warnings)

[Smash_Brother]

We have an awesome story mode, craptons of secondary single player modes, stickers up the ass, trophies galore...and yet Ganondorf is still borrowing Falcon's moveset.

With all of this evidence before us, I can't imagine that the roster will turn out to be balanced. The clones feel like a last minute decision, yet again, so I'm inclined to believe the game couldn't possibly have gone through the proper playtesting to ensure certain characters aren't, well..."broken".

So, how many months of wifi play SSBB (in the US, I mean) until the majority of online matches are only played with 5-10 characters out of the entire roster? This, of course, will be due to trial and error and players realizing that they get beat an awful lot by players using (insert character name here) so they decide to switch to using said character.

I'm gonna say two months.

Who else has a prediction?

Note that I don't mean skilled players will be doing the same, just that the internet will figure out which characters are the easiest to get kills with and stick with those. How long until the internet figures out which characters these are?

Also, keep in mind we're locked into 2 minute time matches, which means characters which are skilled at getting quick KOs or stealing them will work best.

[Bill Aurion]

Do you really think a majority of the people that play Smash Brothers are that whiny?  I doubt it...

[Smash_Brother]

I edited it for clarity.

I mean that players, through trial and error, will discover that certain characters play better than others. For example, a lot of people called Ike the "noob killer" at the tradeshows because unskilled players will be slaughtered by Ike players.

I don't expect Ike to be a dominant character, though, as I expect players to savvy to his tricks relatively quickly, but I do expect the wifi playerbase to settle on a certain number of characters and stick with those.

The question is, how long before we can expect to go into a random wifi match and find all Metaknights or all Dededes, for example?

This doesn't mean that YOU will be playing as one, as I personally opt to take the characters labeled bottom tier and main them, but how long until the internet has settled, do you think?

[Sessha]

Without online rankings I don't know how much of a problem this will be.  I am sure after trial and error one character will stand out amoung the rest.   I would give it maybe a month before people start spamming a character.  I'm not really worried about it honestly it's kind of a moot point.  I will probably be playing with friends online most of the time.  Even after a certain amount of time won't people get tired of being the same person over and over?   Even if I won every single match I ever played and I had to be Wolf for that to happen I would quit very quickly.  

[anubis6789]

Maybe that is one of the reasons for no rankings of any kind (even any kind of point system like most Wi-Fi games); with no real incentive to win people may feel no need to have to conform to a specific play style.

From what I gather S_B you were, or still are, a competitive gamer so you would also know that most games (excepting Melee for various outside reasons, and sudden extreme epiphanies such as roll-canceling in CvS 2) have constantly changing preeminent strategies throughout their life, and the more people that are playing the more likely new strategies will evolve or change.

EDIT: Sorry Sessha, I was still writing my post when you posted.

[Smash_Brother]

I realize that strategies will evolve as time goes on. I was subject to that exact phenomenon during my days of playing SSB64 against friends.

However, I'd still wager that since all we have are 2 minute time battles with random items, we're going to have a limited number of characters who excel at getting quick and dirty KOs with the least amount of skill involved. How long until these characters are found?

[anubis6789]

It depends on what exploits and character attributes will match up.

I feel that it will be little under a month from the NA release for Brawl to reach its first Dry Bomber-level of homogeneous strategy before it being overtaken by a better strategy about three months later and then another epoch should be reached when the PAL regions start to get their copies. Granted, that is assuming that enough people try to figure out counter-strategies, because sometimes the community may also just give up causing the game to stagnate.  

[GoldenPhoenix]

Bowser will dominate all, so this discussion is pointless!

[Adrock]

I don't think it'll be long before people figure out which characters have an edge. Balance issues are inevitable because it's too hard for there to be absolutely none in a game like this. I do think, however, that they won't be as severe as they were in Melee. The unbalanced gameplay in Melee rendered certain characters utterly useless (i.e. Bowser) even after strategies evolved.

[NWR_pap64]

I think this is happening already in Japan, S_B.

I've seen a lot of Wifi matches and the characters that appear the most in them are:
-Ike
-Metaknight
-King Dedede
-Pit
-Pokemon Trainer
-Marth
-Any of the Fox trio

Of course, they could just be curious about the newcomers and are messing around with them, but you can't watch just one video without seeing at least one Ike player.

So there you go, I predict that Ike will be the cheapest and most used player in Brawl.

From what I read, Metaknight is great at creating damage but lacks a move that instantly KOs an opponent. Dedede on the other hand is slow and can't do a lot of combos, but has a lot of KO attacks (I read that one of his charged movies can instantly KO a character at just 16% damage!).

In all fairness, though, I think we should try all the characters out before we say the roster is broken. In all the impressions I've read so far they all say that Brawl is a much more polished game than Melee was and that its surprisingly balanced, that characters that were useless before had gotten buffed up and work better than before.

[Adrock]

The roster is broken in that there's only 35 characters with clones. If they were going to add clones, they might as well have added more of them so we got a larger roster. I think Smash_Bother said this in another thread, but in any case, I agree. But I digress...

It'll be a huge travesty if tiers return in Brawl, even if the game is more polished and balanced than Melee. There's a lot of new stuff in Brawl, but the gameplay is 95% Melee. I feel that there shouldn't be any blatant balance issues even though issues are bound to happen.

[NWR_pap64]

Yeah, just now I was thinking "If we still got clones in Brawl, why didn't they add Roy, Pichu, Dr. Mario and Mewtwo (not a clone, but with Lucario around he would've been)?"

At the very least, it would've made the roster even larger and ALL veterans would've returned.

[Smash_Brother]

I hope Brawl is the type of game where there's no blatantly obvious best character, like Fox was in Melee.

And yes, I did suggest that if clones are to be added that he should've at least inflated the roster to a more impressive number.

[LuigiHann]

I said it first.

Anyway, the best players I know tend to play as their worst character on a regular basis. So I'm not too worried about this situation, especially with rankless matches.

[Smash_Brother]

Quote
Originally posted by: LuigiHann
Anyway, the best players I know tend to play as their worst character on a regular basis. So I'm not too worried about this situation, especially with rankless matches.

My memory is terrible: you probably did say it first.

Also, I main Bowser for exactly this reason, but if I wanted to win a match with no questions asked, I pulled out Fox.

[that Baby guy]

I always try to pick my characters before I know how "good" they are according to people in the know.

For instance, in Brawl, I'm likely going to play as the Ice Climbers, King Dedede, Mario, and Toon Link.  I picked them out before the game got out there, and I could care less where they wind up on the tiers.  I might add Bowser to the end of that list, but four characters is still a bit.  Also, Diddy and Squirtle/Ivysaur may get on there, too.  I'll want to play as them first, to see if I like how they feel.  However, Ice Climbers are still the King and Queen of the list.

[GoldenPhoenix]

I am glad I could care less about tiers, I'll be playing as Bowser like I did with Melee (along with DK).

[Shecky]

Link, Pikachu, DK, Random

Those were my constant picks in SSBM regardless of situation.  I could even beat people with fox b/c you know these little things called ITEMS, 4 PLAYERS, and EVILNESS

Even 1 on 1 my bro and I would often do C. Falcon vs Link and we would get a 60 - 40 split in Falcon's favor.  Link should probably never win that ever given his disadvantage, but with items and the right amount of trickery I could pull through enough of the times.

The best way to get a feel with these newcomers is against HUMAN opponents.  Why is it then surprising that the newcomers are popular online in Japan?

What's broken is that there so much footage out there you probably could watch the entire SSE mode before you even play it.

And what did you want to do with Ganondorf??  Give him a sword and a bunch of parry moves in addition to one or two attacks that have a 3 second recovery time??  Did Ryu, Ken, Sagat  get this much complaining in their games?

FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO!  Like go watch videos of Portal... and then complain that it's not fun or challenging when you play it.

I predict that a vast number (oh 2-3 millions) of people will enjoy this game...

[NWR_insanolord]

I don't care what tier he's on, I knew the minute he was revealed that I would be playing most of my matches as Captain Olimar.

[ThePerm]

well, generally on both smash bros it evolved to this. People would pick a certain player Mewtwo Link, Fox, Samus, Shiek, or Falcon. They would not pick any of the other characters, I on the other hand would pick the character that they don't expect ,like Bowser, because they're so used to whipping on the cliche characters that they aren't used to fighting a master of the harder to master characters, thus their inexperience against different fighters would screw them up adjusting the balance.

[stevey]

Time: Between 12-48~hours

Characters: Fox , Falco, Wolf

Reason: Wave[insert cool name to make tourneyfag sound hardcore] Glich that breaks the game forever

[Smash_Brother]

Quote
Originally posted by: stevey
Time: Between 12-48~hours



Characters: Fox , Falco, Wolf



Reason: Wave[insert cool name to make tourneyfag sound hardcore] Glich that breaks the game forever

Oh god, I hope not...

I expect to see a lot of matches in 2 months where I come up against 3 of the same character a lot, but I sure as hell hope there isn't something like wavedashing in the game.

[vudu]

DRY BONES