Super Nebulous 4 is set to be an important tournament in 2016. The New York City regional is stacked with talent in-state, out-of-region and even from another country. This is a chance for Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma to solidify his position as the best player in America, Aaron “Professor Pro” Thomas will be fighting to show the potential of European smash and, of course, the long-awaited return of Aziz Al-Yami aka Hax F. Money.
However, this is bigger than any individual storyline. This tournament has the possibility of becoming one of the most influential tournaments in melee history.
This will be the first big tournament to feature ‘frozen’ Pokemon Stadium.
No windmill.
No tree combos.
No transformations.
Tradition
It is no secret that melee players hate change. It’s the main reason why we play the same game even though it’s been out for fourteen years.
The standard melee ruleset has been set in stone since it was published by the melee backroom nearly two years ago. Tournament organizers can create whatever ruleset they want, but they usually stick to the standardized version. Only minor changes such as the exclusion of Kongo Jungle 64 in doubles, no neutral starts and no switching controllers with your partner during doubles are added, but no game-changing rules.
The last big rule change was when Robin “Juggleguy” Harn banned wobbling from The Big House tournaments series. Even that rule changed with the most recent installment, The Big House 5, when he joined the rest of the community in making it legal again.
With new technology, created by players like Dan Salvato and achilles1515 we have new ways to practice and play the game. It allows more innovation with how tournaments are run, including the removal transformations from Pokemon Stadium.
TO’s and other leading community members drive changes to the rules so the game can thrive in a competitive environment for players and spectators alike.
Why?
This wasn’t a split-second decision. The TO’s for Super Nebs have used frozen pokemon stadium in local tournaments before with positive feedback from players. Director of eSports for Nebulous Gaming NYC Jesse “KillaHertz” Hertz said, “From a TO perspective, time spent during transformations is wasted time, as the optimal strategy is just to wait the transformation out.”
The decision was also impacted by a recent melee set, Hertz continued, “I think for a lot of people, watching Plup lose to Mango and Leffen on PS because of transformations really cemented that they were stupid and something the game would be better without.”
Impact of Pokemon Stadium
There is no denying the affect of the transformations with games played on Pokemon Stadium. Transformations have determined games, sets and tournaments.
Tech
There are certain techs that can ONLY be performed on the transformations of Pokemon Stadium.
Jigglypuff’s rollout increases in speed on the grass transformation. This was popularized during the “Angrybox” set at MVG Sandstorm where Hungrybox took not one, but two stocks off of William “Leffen” Hjelte.
As recently as this week, Masaya “aMSa” Chikamoto discovered new yoshi tech that only works on the rock transformation of Pokemon Stadium.
There is new tech yet to be discovered, or properly implemented, that can only be done on this stage.
Jank
Of the legal stages, Pokemon Stadium is easily the jankiest. Glitches have changed the momentum in games and even changed the outcome of major tournaments.
Most notably when Joseph “Mango” Marquez and Justin “Plup” McGrath played during top 8 of CEO 2015. The outcome of the tournament was changed because Mango was able to recover to the windmill during the water transformation, on what normally would have been an easy edge-guard for Plup.
Certain parts of Pokemon Stadium result in players clipping through the middle of the stage. Search the words “Fall through pokemon stadium” and you’ll find a number videos of players ‘discovering’ the mind-blowing glitch. Some even use it to their advantage
Is it the right move?
There is no right or wrong answer. If this tournament runs well, and top players promote the idea of Frozen Pokemon Stadium, more TO’s could adopt the ruleset and change the current meta.
Whether or not it is adopted into the universal ruleset, keep an eye out this weekend for some potential melee history.
Check out the stream this Saturday, March 26th, 2016, at http://www.hitbox.tv/nebulousgaming/.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“With new technology, created by players like Dan Salvato and achilles1515 we have new ways to practice and play the game. It allows more innovation with how tournaments are run, including the removal transformations from Pokemon Stadium.”
This makes it seem like disabling PS transformation is a recent development, but that’s not true. Zauron developed the code back in 2010, and it was easily possible to integrate that code into Melee .isos with widely available tools (GC-Tools, GC-Rebuilder).
The problem with disabling Pokémon Stadium’s transformation is that the viability of the individual transformations vary a lot and are also pretty subjective.
Grass mode is a great stage layout, about equally good for competitive play as normal mode. Water (windmill) is somewhat questionable, since the high platforms benefit characters with high jumps like Fox and Falco more than others.
Fire and Rock, however, would certainly be banned if they were individual stages.
So if we have the freedom to choose which of these remain, what do we do? No transformations at all? Only neutral and Grass? Or windmill too? It will be difficult to reach a consensus here. I believe having a poll with only MIOM top 100 players could be a good idea.
I was originally excited for the removal of random elements such as wind, shy guys, and Pokemon Stadium transformations, but I think it will be bad for the game in the long run as a standard.
When you make it okay to mod the game for tournament, it becomes increasingly difficult where to draw the line. If people want to change stages, maybe a TO will decide to raise Yoshi Story’s ceiling or lower Dream Land’s.
We might even find ourselves playing modified characters for the sake of “balance”. I don’t trust anyone, especially top players, to remain neutral when it comes to this decision. Just imagine the type of support a mod that removes wobbling might get despite ICs not being overpowered in the meta.
The few random elements we have are mildly annoying sometimes, but they are part of the game, so I’d rather not compromise the game’s integrity for a slightly smoother batch on Pokemon every once in a while. At most, TOs should provide setups with the capability to implement these mods when both players agree to it, but no one should be forced to play on a non-standard setup.
Decisions like this are made on a case by case basis. The TO’s over in NYC modified the game based on several factors not mentioned in the article.
Head TO actually responded to the slippery slope idea and said
“I think this is probably a bit of a fallacious use of the slippery slope principle. The melee community has made minor changes before (such as changing the stagelist, turning off items, changing the stock count), so there are clearly discrete modifications to the games ‘ruleset’ that can be made (in other words, the slippery slope argument doesnt hold because it makes the contintuum falacy of assuming there aren’t sane middle grounds on what we do/don’t accept in our ruleset.”
We are constantly making changes to the game and in the moment it is unclear whether it’s for better or for worse. But I admire the bravery to try new changes. The game, even in its age, needs to evolve.
With all due respect to you and (I’m assuming) Hertz, I cannot disagree more with that sentiment. This is *exactly* the definition of a slippery slope, because the logic used to justify this change (freezing Stadium because of a whole bunch of things we think benefit the metagame overall) could easily be used to justify a whole bunch of other changes like Bones listed. Just because you agree with one change and don’t agree with another doesn’t change that those distinctions now become arbitrary, which is a problem for presenting a clean, consistent rationale for taking a certain action with regards to accepting modded game versions. Think how much easier it is to just say “we aren’t going to entertain notions of modding Melee, because despite a number of areas that we potentially see room for improvement, it is not worth the hassle of establishing a new universal competitive standard.”
Not to mention, think about how this affects outside views of our community. I honestly don’t know what an eSports investor would think of our initiative to try and improve the game on our own, but I don’t think it would be looked at favorably by Nintendo, at least. And despite the lack of concerted involvement on their part, we do know that there do exist *some* people in the organization that like us, and do you really think it’s worth jeopardizing that goodwill? Over a tree and a cliff? Really? Super shortsighted IMO.
>It is no secret that melee players hate change. It’s the main reason why we play the same game even though it’s been out for fourteen years.
How can MIOM write stuff like this? That’s not the reason play melee, and you would expect people that write for MIOM know this. That sounds like what smash 4 people would say about melee players.
That’s exactly what I thought! I think it’s really weird that this stuff is sipometimes said on MIOM.
But it’s true isn’t it? The main reason we play melee is because there is a much wider variety of game mechanics we can use as opposed to brawl and smash4. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the statement, and it is after all Melee it on me, which is dedicated to melee…
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