Does Smash Ultimate's Meta Need To Change?

history tends to repeat itself people said melee was dying when hungry box was dominating every major for 3 years in a row people said brawl was dying due to mite's sheer dominance on The Meta people said smash we U was dying because Bayonetta became an ever increasing threat at the top level and now people are saying ultimate is dying because of characters such as Steve Sonic and Mr gaming watch being consistent characters at the Top Cut of Majors or just flat out winning them and slowing down the pace of the game this ARA of Smash ultimate now being dubbed as the four horsemen ERA with aqu Mia Sonics and Spargo practically dominating the top spots of every major they enter but does that mean the game is dying or people being hyperbolic and dor over the game and that leads into the question does smash ultimates meta need to change I took it upon myself to answer this question first we will take a look at the character stats and which characters that are dominating tournaments in 2023 compared to 2022 on top of that because why not for the last month I decided to watch and analyze every major top eight set that happened in the 2023 ranking season that's 1,640 matches and over 7,200 stocks documented with stats around how every stock was taken stock death percents match times stages picked all of it recorded and studied so that we can determine today if there is a problem with ultimates meta and how we can potentially fix it so first let's start with the numbers Mason let's talk about the meta of 2023 the image on screen showcases a character's placement percentage a placement percentage signifies a percentage out of all count Tournament results for the Lum rank 2023 season of the 82 characters in The Game's roster 41 accounted for at least 1% of results which has historically been a sign of meta relevancy and stands as the exact same amount to hit that threshold in 2022 2023 has developed quite interestingly when it comes to the tournament placements of these characters in This Global meta Steve finally overtook both Rob and palena taking over the number one spot as by quite a large margin now Steve hasn't hit the same level of dominance as Robin 2021 or wolf palena and snake pre pandemic but stands is one of the few characters to ever break past pass that 4% barrier and ultimate's offline tournament history fighter Pass 2 didn't quite have the impact as expected sure characters such as Steve pyro and Mithra and Sora saw increased usage in placements this year but kazia minman and especially seph saw downswings in their relevancy that being said kazia and minman still find themselves sitting in the top 20 so they're still impacting The Meta nonetheless smash ultimate saw a lot of shakeup between 2022 and 2023 in terms of character relevancy characters such as Bayonetta Corin Jigglypuff bth and Mr gaming watch all rose up as threats in the past year with players such as Lima tamap da fuku Neo shadik senra Reno and especially Mia all contributing a ton more to their character than last year but on the other hand Pokemon trainer inkling crom and especially Lucina and Pikachu saw major falloffs with the last two both falling 20 spots and over half a percent each even though they still have high percentages characters such as Roy wolf and Samus all had some of the biggest drop offs and raw percentages and popular characters such as Steve Cloud Mario and Diddy Kong were in the top four in increases for their share of total percentage with Steven Mario picking up in North America and cloud and Diddy Kong picking up in Japan with Diddy Kong being the number one character in that region so characters that people are relatively mixed to negative perception on such as Steve and Mr gameat are becoming more present in Smash Tim its majors across the board what about the third character people talk about Sonic while still standing in the top 20 Sonic has repeatedly been on the downswing since 2021 a very slow downswing but the fall off in general is noticeable so these three characters are still prominent threats but not the problem in terms of over in meta dominance that people think and generally people would agree as many stated top 128 top 64 and top 32 are some of the best matches to watch most of the time due to the character variance and competitive matches but what about top eight what about the most viewed portions of tournaments the biggest complaints about smash ultimate that you will hear nowadays are mainly going to be geared towards the top eights of Majors because well that's what most people watch and is for the most part centered around three characters Steve Sonic and Mr gaming watch and in a vacuum it makes sense considering that in a roster of 80 plus characters these three have much more consistent appearances in the top cut out of the 40 Majors that occurred in 2023 ranking period only three did not have Steve Sonic or Mr gaming watch present with two of those being in Europe This of course is in thanks due to these three characters being part of the three of the Four Horsemen of ultimate but it's not just them Meister also makes appearances with Mr gameing watch ken is consistent top eight threat and we've seen appearances from other players such as wrath and ta and even though Aqua is the biggest Steve contributor four other Steve mates made top eight and that doesn't even include Mia's recent usage of Steve as well these characters are seen at every Top Cut of a tournament and not just for short stints too as mentioned at the beginning of the video I went through every major top eight match that happened in 2023 while watching every match I recorded the following stats that I believe were important to study as aspects towards the game's Health one the frequency of characters selected two the frequency of stages selected three how long each match took to complete four the percent each time a stock was taken of a character that got knocked into the blast zone and finally five the move that was used to knock outside character some important aspects to note before we dig into character case studies the average game of Smash ultimate in these top eights took around 3 minutes and 30 seconds which is pretty much exactly half the amount of time the match timer is set to the average stock was lost around 137% and the most common way to take a stock across the board was with of course back air and of course the most common stage was Pokémon Stadium 2 with about a 31 percentage pick rate across 1,640 games through this data we can compare how these three characters affect multiple aspects of the game compared to the rest of the cast and try to find the pinpoint on if these characters are the main culprits or if there's a larger more Insidious problem happening that contributes more now these three characters alone make up the top three most represented characters and matches played in Major top eights in total they made up a character selection in almost a whopping quarter of all top eight matches last year so let's start examining each of these characters in their own separate case study first up let's talk about Sonic Sonic stands in an interesting spot he kills opponents pretty close to the average percentage of stocks are taken and also survives around the average as well son's most popular killing moves back airor and Forward Air also kill around the same percent but St being the fastest character in the game you can't really say the same for his matches Sonic had the second longest average of games in the top eight of majors and almost a minute more than the average of all top eight matches on top of that Sonic was a part of seven out of the eight timeouts that occurred in top eight last year and made over 34s of the games that went down to the last minute now with that being said Son can be a fast-paced aggressive fighter as there were multiple instances where matches with this character finished before even making it to 2 minutes but overall Sonic's game plan of outrunning your opponent is an effective one and undeniably will usually cause tournament matches to slow down when this character is on the field okay next up let's talk about Steve Steve is of course the most represented character in Tournament results and has the second most matches in top eight Steve's average match is about 10 seconds more than the average and that's four timeouts on the board in top eight sets Steve though has a very diverse amount of match times plenty go down to the last minute and plenty not even hitting minute 2 Steve can utilize his materials to stop interaction and force the opponent to approach leading to pacing being controlled by the terrain he creates and how the the opponent decides to approach it of course should surprise no one to see has good kill power as this Average stock taken is 10% under the cast average it's mainly finding kills with down air back air and up smash though not listed I would like to give his neutral special a shout out for having his lowest percentage of average stocks taken due to its incredible edgeguarding abilities Steve on average also has incredible survivability due the blocks either keeping the character from losing a stock later than they should or because of their incredible recovery Steve finds himself living 10% higher on average than the rest of the meta all these factors combined make for a very potent character who can change the pace of the game in very polarizing matchups if their opponent can't overcome their block wall safely they expect to either strap in for a long match when Steve takes the lead or a very quick one where he steamrolls his opponent I wanted to leave Mr gameat for last as he felt like a more peculiar case and what potential problems the character could be creating due to Mia's insane attendance and consistency plus appearances from Meister this character had the most top eight matches in 2023 now Mr game watch is a particularly like character and his average death percentage aligns with that behind Jigglypuff Fox and Pikachu Mr gameat was the fourth most susceptible character to dying earlier than normal being 11% below the average survivability the also flips around the average of match time he was a part of two timeout matches against Sonic but for the most part has a WID spread on how long his matches could last so what could this character be doing that makes it in the eyes of many to be problematic and contrary to my own belief until I did this research is because this character has a hard time securing stocks at the top level now before you scream but his smash attacks at me let me explain the flat man is mainly taking socks of three moves back air forward tilt and Forward Air with the l two not an average killing until 150 plus per. so why is this an issue you see when Mr games a new watch he can lock down opponents with very few moves in his Advantage State especially with up air and neutral air gam watch will continuously build percentage with these moves and due to its easier way of racking up this damage it can get repetitive for an audience watching add to that being unable to secure stocks until High percentages but dying early games can start to feel like they revolve around the 2D man as he'll be spending more time hitting the opponent than the opponent hitting him so the three most divisive characters in the game all have very different potential problems that could be affecting how people generally view the meta but the one most common aspect being that they are all incredibly common in competitive play out of the 173 Plus hours of match footage I've watched to gather this information 48 of these hours Incorporated either Steve Sonic and Mr game watch so with all the problems laid out with matches taking too long with inactivity being rewarded with characters taking forever to kill what could we potentially do to help these issues and to reinvigorate smash ultimates competitive scene while no expert I do have a few ideas one territory of data collection I still haven't dove into yet was about the stages and I want to go ahead and bring this info up now as I think the current stag list could have some inherent Clauses on why these problems exist so first off for those who are unfamiliar out of the 115 stages in Smash ultimate only 11 have seen usage in competitive smash this past year but really only seven stages were picked in competitive play it should come to no surprise that Pokémon Stadium 2 was the most picked stage in major top a this past year but it's not as big of a gap as you may think ps2's smaller younger cousin small Battlefield is almost as popular and surprisingly how Bastion stands as the third most popular stage especially due to it being a very popular pick by Japanese players now out the seven main stages there's some variance in size and blast zones so that means there should be quite some variance in match times and stocks taken between each well in terms of match times the difference isn't too big smaller stages like smashfield and small Battlefield do have smaller average times but only by 10 seconds and Stage with larger areas of play like Battlefield and town city are above the average by about 10 seconds but surely stock should be different huh well that's odd these stages are relatively diverse I wonder why that is oh it's actually because they're not these stages all contain incredibly similar blast phones compared to one another smash may be small but when the blastone is just as far if not farther from the stage compared to other legal stages matches still take longer than expected because characters aren't dying until High percents and take time to recover back to the stage and they will will recover because recoveries in this game are generally really strong and what's important to consider in our current role set is that these stages were not designed in mind to have hazards off smashville and town city were designed with the moving Platforms in mind Talis Pokémon leak was designed with hazards that can kill characters in mind Pokemon Stadium 2 was designed with his transformations in mind every stage in this game was also designed with eight player Smash in mind where it is accessible to every stage unlike its predecessor the current rule set is majority medium to large stages with big blast zones leading to longer stocks incentivizing and encouraging Circle camping during major top eight this year only eight complete timeouts occurred with a majority happening on PS2 but in terms of matches that went down to the last 60 seconds on the clock that list expands up to 37 matches with only one of the main seven stages staying out of that time frame smashville one proposal you could potentially do to change the stage list is to introduce smaller stages with smaller blast zones smaller stages help Force interaction and smaller blast zones mean faster stocks which leads to faster games let's take a look and compare some stages here a small Battlefield as a Baseline medium stage in terms of its size and blast zone and smashville as a small stage to overlap and compare their attributes here is a small stage not commonly used in competitive bracket Yoshi's Story the stage's general area of play may be a bit bigger vertically but stocks can be taken earlier with its smaller Blast Zone than both small Battlefield and smash will combined especially off of that top platform you can take a step smaller and look at Alternatives that have been used in competitive smash before such as yhi zland brawl the stages are relatively same size as smashville but also has smaller horizontal and smaller vertical blast zones you can go even further with some of the more otter stages Castle Siege is an asymmetrical stage with an even smaller stage size in smashville and smaller horizontal blast zones in Yosh Island it's incredibly unique in its offering as a competitive stage if you want something small that is a little more proven say hello to none other than waral Weare Inc warw serves both as the shortest stage and Baseline length and by far the shortest blast hes in the entire game the stage is a proven counterpick in the project plus competitive scene and while the blast own leads incredibly early kills it is still a valid pick to be a counter pick stage in terms of why stages are generally banned the addition of smaller stages is one way to shake up the meta or at least help what might be some of the core problems another way of handling the stage list if you're not a fan of expanding the pool is potentially moving to a hazards on list most won't particularly agree with the statement probably because it removes the most popular stage but in doing so also removes the biggest stage smash BR gains its platform's original purpose where earlier stocks can be taken improv in smaller stages such as Yoshi story and Yoshi's Island are available if you really need the stadium es stage Pokemon Stadium 1 is still a valid option even though I doubt many would want to deal with the transitions in the year of 2024 but all in all diversifying the stage list is one way to potentially help with some of the issues people seem to be having with the meta but it's not the only option at the very beginning of the video I mentioned the fact that every smash game has gone through a period of the game is dying and we could take a look at each of these games and how they handled this era well most of them let's start with an easy one right off the bat smash we is still dead though was mainly killed off because of ultimate announcement and how close and similarity these games can be outside of smashcon this game G doesn't have much of either an active offline scene or events but many agree that Bayonetta should have been banned in retrospect especially as when the character was being used by more and more of the top level even with well established players like MK Leo tweak the buzz Etc all picking her up as secondaries melee is obviously still in the healthy competitive state today with the upcoming Genesis once again breaking a thousand entrance so no it didn't die when hungry box was the dominant number one player for 3 years in a row so what changed well besides a pandemic completely changing the town pool there were two notable things that occurred that I think also contributed the Jigglypuff not seeing the dominant success that she had one was the introduction of ledge grab limit towards the middle of 2019 you see ledge Grant's invincibility for a period of time once you grab it and in simple terms a character like puff can utilize this and reg grabbing the ledge to both create a very tough approaching situation for their opponent and SL down to interaction of the game for easier timeouts the rule states that if a timeout occurs and if a player exceeded 60 ledge grabs the player that does loses the game the rule mainly did affect Puff's ability to camp but also other characters camping L as well increasing interactivity during one of the most important interactions in the game the ledge the other aspect is that people just got better at the matchup skill level up aside Zay has completely flipped over the mar jiggly puff match up on its head making it feel incredibly tough for puff I didn't mention the game earlier but 64 has an Infamous match known as Super Boom fan versus Gerson that happened in Peru it was the longest smash set ever recorded if you're curious about its story I highly recommend the gr Smash video that goes in depth into it but tldr with 64 not having a timer hyro Castle was an easy stage for Kirby to camp and particularly the top platforms so boom decided to Camp up there for incredibly long periods of time to win the set and pretty much got Hyrule Castle banned from competitive play in 64 and a timer modded in braw still actually has a small dedicated scene still competing today while everyone knows metan Knight was by far the best character in the game the character is still not banned in the current scene but the recommended rule set does revolve around him as well as the other incredible top tier character Ice Climbers Ice Climbers are banned from going to Final Destination if one player picks metan Knight and the other player picks not metan Knight then the second player can pick any stage in the competitive stag list without restriction they also have a ledge grab limit with 35 grabs instead of 60 now this rule set has been controversial I don't know much about its implementation either so I cannot comment on the effectiveness on it but the scene is starting to see a bit of a pickup in offline events and this an attempt nonetheless ultimate can attempt many things different formats of play though that is a bit tougher to do if there's no easy way to practice that format shortening the timer if the match is going to go to 7 minutes but usually averages to 3.5 minutes why have all the fluff but then you take away people's long-term strategizing to approach characters you can try to enforce rules that enable interaction but unfortunately I personally would not know where to start but even with these maybe and what ifs I think there's a key word here [Music] attempt I think at the end of the day the ultimate Community is a tough one to start any sort of reform in due to its International scale and no real Central Force circuits or Publishers helping enforce or make decisions but that shouldn't stop people from attempting change events ban Steven people still show up there's nothing stopping organizers attempting other things I've seen top players and other notable figureheads say that it's too late to change we'll get it right next game but look at most active Esports competitive seasons change rules all the time for example competitive Pokémon changes with Pokemon are legal in different divisions valorant changes which maps are in rotation in their competitive map Pool melee has gone through many rule set changes with ledge grab limit and the Banning of wobbling being some of the most notable those changes were controversial at first but they tried and it became the status quo over time because they were accepted as the better options for the health of the game hell even early ultimate decisions were being made by us about DLC characters and their stages during the time of their introduction whether we noticed it or not we can try changing stage pools during each competitive season we could try changing the timer the format anything we want because there is no one else dictating how the game is played but someone needs to attempt to start if you take anything from this video is that very little Esports hell even straight up Sports survive without change we've been playing this game for 5 years even if 1.5 were technically taken away from us because of the pandemic two now have been after the final patch of the game in terms of rule set changes there has been very little since the release of Sora and the introduction of H Bastion into the rule set ultimate could use a little shaking up and I hope this video has influenced some to try we'll never know what we like until we attempt to change thanks for watching

Channel: EazyFreezie

Views: 41,070

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Id: 8Hc4j1dNCiA

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2024