Fun Club Sakurai does not care about Smash Balance, and should stop acting like it's our fault.

[Undeniablybiased]

If I made a game with a million characters that sold better than any other game in its genre I also wouldn’t care about balance.

 

[Koti]

Let's be mindful to use more inclusive language, not everyone here is a guy

Language is overrated, passion is the future

 

[Rocketjay]

Ultimate's game balance was excellent until:

1) Steve showed up with a ridiculously overtuned kit, it's like they were afraid of making him bad because he's so unorthodox, so like every single move he has is fucking ridiculous to the point of absurdity (Kazuya is also a bit like this, but to a lesser extent)

2) it became apparent that playing Sonic as campy and degenerate as possible is obnoxiously hard to counter, making any high level match with Sonic an awful exercise in tedium

The next Smash just needs a longer window of receiving updates once the final DLC character drops and the meta begins to really settle. They do respond to player feedback, Ultimate's last update nerfed Min Min because Japanese players had been complaining about her. It's difficult, though because there were some Steve players that deliberately hid Steve tech they had discovered until after the last patch so that they wouldn't have to worry about their busted character being properly balanced

One of the main reasons why Steve and Sonic are so dominant right now is cause of stage choice. The stage list for ultimate competition is full of large stages that allow campy defensive characters to thrive. I don't get why everyone is allergic to picking smaller stages against Steve and Sonic, they always go to Ps2, and bitch about how lame they are to fight against.

 

[xghost777]

'Guys' is gender-neutral.

I can at the very least attest that it's been used in a popular cartoon by a girl to refer to two of her female friends.

Not everyone feels that way especially in an online space and it’s easy enough to use other words to refer to the group here that don’t have that connotation attached such as everyone, y’all, Fami, etc. Depending on where you are from, words like “guys” and “dude” can read very differently and not be a problem locally (like California where I’m from for example), but they can read very differently online and can feel excluding depending on how they are used. The context matters.

 

[NBOctoling]

I feel like 90% of the time anyone starts a sentence off with "fun fact", it is followed up by a decidedly unfun fact

Fun Fact: I got LASIK earlier this month and now can see without glasses in over 25 years!

Fun Fact #2: I only cried in joy for like an hour!

 

[Raccoon]

I think he might have a famiboards account

 

[Darknut85]

I think he might have a famiboards account

The world is a village…

 

[PixelKnight]

Third, and this is the huge one, Player Created Estimations are better than the data you collect, Sakurai.

This seems unlikely in a game with almost 90 characters.

Any time this absolute fraud opens up his liars maw to discuss how the game isn't actually a haha wacky party game and the numbers he will only vaguely allude to back him up, I'm gonna go honk a clowns nose so I can at least have some fun, too

Calling a dev who puts a shitload of time into developing a fighting game and uses reasonable tools to keep an eye on win ratio a fraud, a liar and a clown seems a bit much to me.

 

[Ab]

So uh.. from casual players (most players) viewpoint and play style wise... The game is balanced? I'm not really sure Sakurai is talking about high level play but I guess if he was then.. ??

 

[Hailinel]

no it sounds like the premise for a fun thread

As others have noted calling Sakurai a fraud and a liar seems like a poor premise for fun.

 

[Tentacle-tropes]

I mean MaximillionDood has talked about the issues with balancing fighting games before

It’s a time consuming process that often your audience does not know how to solve; and often you still get complaining up and down the aisle with no real way of knowing how it will go for a time.

 

[Razgriz]

So uh.. from casual players (most players) viewpoint and play style wise... The game is balanced? I'm not really sure Sakurai is talking about high level play but I guess if he was then.. ??

The problem is that the needs of a casual vs a competitive player are just very different. Casual players like more choice and see balance through that; oh I don't play well with Ganondorf so I pick a faster character like Lucario. Overall having some gaps in the roster isn't that bad as long as you can find a small set of characters you like to play. This works because with casual smash the only thing on the line is pride between friends and family. If your younger sibling can just spam Kirby down B and have fun and will switch to say, Samus' more ranged keepaway game once your other younger sibling catches on, the game is functionally speaking "balanced".

Smash Ultimate has 89 characters with... decent learnable depth which means it's well past the count where casual play balance has issues. Even in online play where you eventually get "Elite Smash" (which is the statistics Nintendo used to balance Smash), this rule holds up. Winrates settle around 50% as people get sorted into their skill brackets and move around mains mostly depending on their mood with a win/loss streak.

The problem is when you get into hardcore competitive Smash. In other words: real life tournaments for real cash prizes. Here, that previous flexibility to just switch a fighter once you get tired/on a losing streak just doesn't work. You're doing loads of tech that the game can handle but wasn't ever really meant to do. You have to pick one fighter and then stick with him or her for pretty much the foreseeable future.

This means that a character like Steve, who in the hands of a casual player is an overly gimmicky character with lots of tools that suddenly move him around and make him act weird isn't that broken. It's however those same weird tricks that make him borderline broken if you're going to start dealing with framedata or learning tech that's closer to glitches. For a casual player, this doesn't matter - the overwhelming majority of online players don't really know how to use Steve (and lest we forget that Nintendo's own online play is so bad that most tech is also just unusable by default), so he's more or less balanced by that.

I'd say Smash only ever made 2 characters that are truly unbalanced to the point it upset casual play; Smash 4 Bayonetta with her weird hitboxes (being extremely disorienting if you don't know how to play as her) and Brawl Meta Knight with his ludicrously good rushdown, recovery ability and having basically no bad or dud moves in his kit that are all broken in ways even a causal player can understand.

Other than that, yeah Smash Bros is balanced enough to be fun for casual play and I'll be honest; it's not like Nintendo has ever been too deeply interested in growing the Smash Competitive circuits, so it's a bit hard to consider that type of high level play an audience they care about. The closest they ever got to that was Sakurai talking about Sephiroths frame data during the reveal, but other than that, Nintendo seems to want to avoid Smash' competitive scene like the plague.