Sakurai is saying if you take out strong moves and stats and buff the weak ones, you're going to end up with a bunch of characters and movesets that feel too similar
I think that was his point; I think he way trying to say how you shouldn't make characters that are too similar, so you should give every character a balance of strengths and weaknesses
Example: If you balance Ganondorf by making him faster but weaker... you're just turning him into Captain Falcon. Not an interesting way to balance him. Instead, keep him slow/strong but buff his tools in other ways. Maybe give him the ability to float and a projectile like Ocarina of Time. Maybe super armor on a couple of moves. Or maybe something else, but definitely not "fix his slowness and reduce his power", that's boring.
Sakurai is so tired of tryna explain how he made a party game for the past quarter of a century that the next game is just gonna be 100 fire emblem characters out of spite
I think the problem is that Marss is thinking Sakurai’s talking to the competitive players. He’s not. The game is built for a casual audience and if you want to make a competitive scene out of it you can (and I’m certainly glad there is one) but the game’s not gonna be balanced around the top level. 95% of their revenue is from people playing 8 player FFA at the their house with items, if you want to make a competitive career out of it you can, but you have to understand that your ideas of balancing for competitive integrity are barely even secondary
Sakurai's video is a response to people talking about balance, the only people who understand and care about balance are the competitive players so I think it's at least partially incorrect to say that the video is addressed to casual players.
I think Sakurai is a lot smarter than people give him credit for. He implemented teching all the way back in Smash 64 to give players a way to escape disadvantage and prevent get up infinites. He added air dodge in Melee to compete with how strong aerial attacks were. And even though Ultimate has its problems it’s by far the most balanced Smash game he’s ever created.
Honestly yeah he probably knows all the competitive stuffs. The dude even intentionally added wave dash to melee. I think he was just pressured by Nintendo and casuals to play dumb in these videos. Heck, more melee example, look at how after just a few months of competitive melee between ntsc and pal he could literally know which character’s so broken (like 4/5 top tiers got nerfed).
Ultimate honesty feels artificially balanced by the matchup inexperience of the player base. It's impossible to know the matchup of 80+ characters, and even if you know the matchup low tier is cheeseland.
@@artimist0315nah it's more than manageable compared to regular fighting games Tekken characters have over 100 moves on average that require game knowledge to block, duck, or sidestep left or right. Not to mention frame data. It can still be your turn in regular fighting games even if you're minus depending on positioning or if a move forces an opponent into crouch. Heck if you're aware your opponent doesn't punish your -10 move with a jab you can stuff them with your own jab instead.
A later video by Sakurai called Play Testing Keeps Going had some additional thoughts regarding character balancing: "Furthermore, online matches and tournaments had grown rather popular [by the time of Ultimate], making it easy for us to use their results as reference." "My personal approach to character tuning is to make each fighter highly unique. Having players with divided opinions is ideal, as that's part of the fun. Looking at any one part in isolation may make the game seem unfair, but I'm willing to write that off for the sake of individuality." "I'm glad that top tournament players use a wide range of fighters, but that's not the only thing we look at. Some fighters are naturally better tuned for multiplayer matches, as well."
That is also a part of the problem of Ultimate's balance patches. Online win rates from a game with such an awful online already are such a terrible baseline to balance the game (And even from that perspective they made many very questionable decisions, as many annoying online characters have been buffed)
Showing that there isn't a big difference in win rate in a skill based match making system as an argument for balanced characters is insane... Skill based match making systems always average around a 50% win rate. That's the whole point of skill based match making.......
I think he was trying to say that it's extremley hard if not impossible to make a game as balanced as smash and still have every character feel unique.
Sakurai nailed it by saying people will say some characters are broken and others will say they stink, because little mac isnt technically a good character in terms of tiers. BUT some people just CANT fight him and lose every time to him, making them think he’s broken, when its just a skewed view based solely on YOUR experience. Top players will say mac stinks, casual players probably think mac is broken. Who is right tho? Who do you listen to in this scenario?
Mac is a unique case due to how incredibly polarizing (and bad) his design is. He's awful if you know how to exploit his weaknesses and play around him being bad in the air i.e. platform camping. If you don't and try to fight him head-on though, you're going to be at a huge disadvantage. By design he absolutely destroys casual play but is bad in competitive.
Yeah good point, actually the stage is the strongest boss because my 3 year old brother keeps walking off of it. And don't even get me started about how my mom and grandma lose track of their characters. Who should I listen to, the data and a large sample size of players or my GRANDMA?
This is such a bad metric for balance. Quick play is designed to match you up with people of a similar skill. That fact alone means characters will always trend toward a 50% win/loss ratio. It’s how the game is designed. Or represented mathematically, it’s designed to move you up in gsp until you win and lose about the same amount, and that’s the range you’ll stay at. You could look at this in terms of stages, players, characters, modes, whatever. As long as there’s enough data, you’ll always trend toward 50% win/loss. These numbers have nothing to do with character viability specifically. They’re essentially just saying the data has a normal distribution, therefore it has a normal distribution. It’s meaningless.
This is exactly what I was thinking and was surprised no one else said it yet. This only proves that the rankings are accurate, this does not prove that a character is better or worse at all.
Was just about to make this comment. You’re exactly right. However, if the choice of character DOES affect win rate in some way, you’d expect to see mostly top tiers at the highest GSP online and bottom tiers at lower GSPs. If a highly skilled player were truly limited by their character, 10 million GSP would be full of duck hunts and ganondorfs, while top GSP would only have Steves.
The point isn't to say that all characters are perfectly balanced. It's to say that there are no characters that are so immensely unbalanced to the point where any outliers appear on this curve. Yes, some characters are better/worse than others but people are overly dramatic about it. They'll say "X character is broken!" and "Y character is unplayable." If those characters literally broke the game or were unplayable, these data would reflect that.
But like, if 90% of Ganondorf players are in the low GSP range, doesn't that indicate a losing record to get to that point? And then within Elite Smash, you can absolutely have a losing record and stay in as long as you occasionally beat someone with a higher GSP. My personal win rate in Elite is like 40% and after a rough losing streak with Terry I think he's at like 30% wins. I'm awful against bad matchups in the 13.5M range but I can three stock a good matchup in the 14.3M range.
What I think the point is supposed to be is that balanced game design doesn’t necessarily create good or fun game design, especially for the video-game-playing community at large. As an example, look at Mario Strikers: Battle League. The game is incredibly balanced competitively, especially compared to the previous titles, but the game isn’t as fun to play for most people. As he said, what’s most important is how a character FEELS, not necessarily how strong they are. This is why Ganondorf and King K. Rool are such popular characters for casual players, despite their viability: the characters are fun to play. Meanwhile characters that do tend to be more well balanced, like Pit, have more lower player counts (at least from what I see online). Games obviously can do both, though. Rivals of Aether in particular is a really balanced game, where each character’s viability is almost entirely dependent on the player’s skill and not traits of the character itself, and is still incredibly fun and unique. It also tends to lean into the “extremes” design philosophy Sakurai seems to favor with its cast in general, such as Wrastor being so air-focused that he can only perform strong attacks in the air.
Thank you, Rivals is the perfect counterexample to Sakurai's reasoning for the game not being more balanced. It's not that you can't make the characters well balanced while also being unique and fun, it just requires a good understanding of how to make them distinct while still having strengths and weaknesses.
I would reject Rivals as "balanced" on the premise it is easy to derive "balance" from a game with far less hours put into it than another game. What's balanced at year 1 might not be balanced at year 3 even without patches. One can see this with Melee, despite no patches melee has undergone massive changes over the years with the gap between many characters shrinking, some have even suggested Fox isn't the #1 character (some suggest Puff or Marth).
There's a smaller player base for duck hunt, so the people that are dedicated to duck hunt increase it (while losing sometimes) and the pyra/mythra player is much larger, and that leads to that player base being very mixed from new players trying to learn them, decreasing it and experienced players increasing it
There's some truth to what he's saying. An overly-balanced game does run the risk of being a boring game. Characters need to be interesting. They need to have useful tools, and strong options for people to actually want to use them. Of course, when you are too generous with what you give your cast, you run the risk of creating some insanely powerful characters.
Smash ult is still probably the most balanced fighting game while also have the largest and most unique cast. I think top players also overvalue their opinion. They say little mac and ganon are the two worst characters, but at a casual level they are two of the best characters. Obviously competitively they both suck but comp players arnt the ones buying millions of copies of the game. The DLCs are still an anomaly broken across all skill levels
When Smash players say this I legitimately wonder if they have ever played another fighting game outside of Smash. This game isn't awful balance wise, but calling it the best is ridiculous. Smash 64 literally exists within the same franchise.
The reason characters are unbalanced is because the game's play testing is primarily done in casual settings. And we can't really fault them for it, most players play smash casually or are not good enough to care weither steve has a frame 4 forward air or not.
I think about how Steve is generally way worse in free for alls than in 1 v 1s due to not enough time to mine, and from the whole wider game perspective, both casuals and competitive, I’d believe that Sakurai’s right. But it does kinda feel like Sakurai’s saying “it doesn’t matter if Steve is better in 1V1s if he’s worse in free for alls”, and that seems like an awful metric for balancing lol
steve is still annoying in free for alls, but also in free for alls you can pick a different opponent, have all of them gang up on him, of have him run accidentally into a strong attack or item.
Imagine you think little Mac sucks and try to balance him. The “correct” way to achieve perfect balance would be to give him more aerial options and a better recovery, but then tone down the grounded moves to ensure he doesn’t become overpowered. This would make sure he doesn’t have any big advantages or disadvantages over any particular character or situation, and thus be balanced, but if everyone was balanced like this the game would be boring.
Not if you give him enough unique mechanics and moves to stay interesting. Mac's current design is just impossible to make balanced in competitive without being overpowered in casual, it's inherently flawed. No other fighter is as polarizing as him.
@@100organicfreshmemes5smash is an extremely well balanced game for what it is. The only things they really need to do is nerf Steve, Pythra, and Sonic. That is all
Smash Ultimate has sold 34 million copies and the competitive scene is literally nothing compared to that. They realistically don't have to consider that scene at all when making patches because this is a casual game 1st and even tried to make it anti-competitive with earlier titles. When people say this is a party game, you really need to realize that they're right.
imagine there is a character that flips a coin at the beginning and if he wins the call he gets straight to the victory screen or if he loses straight to a losing screen. his winrate would be 50% so perfectly balanced but not fun to the player or the opponent ^^
also some people will say he is broken and when ever they meet that character they become selfullfiling prohecies where they say oh no he is just gonna win because he allways does and even if its 50% it will FEEL like he wins more on average. and people who dont take him serious will say yay free win and it will FEEL like on average he loses more but in fact the coin flip is 50/50
People forget that smash isnt balanced around 1v1s. The win percentages are ALL game types across ALL skill levels. You can argue that it shouldnt be that way, but that was the aim and they succeeded in it.
@@yuomovaeh3028Still doesnt make the argument valid. If we are talking about balance, than 1v1s, no items, final destination, etc is the MOST effected by character balance. So the numbers for wr are inflated with garbage that dont actually show the balance of characters
@@hunterkinsella5303 see this is what I mean, the game isn't meant to be balanced around competitive play, so it's not that there's a bunch of garbage skewing balance for 1v1s, it's that 1v1s are just a part of what is balanced around. Like yeah ganon is awful in 1v1 but he's a volatile wrecking ball in FFAs, and both are equal in Nintendo/bandai's eyes. Your view of what it SHOULD be balanced around has no weight in the argument.
@@tundralbut like, why even bother with 2 years of balance patches that are specifically targeted at the competitive scene then I doubt little Timmy cares about Sheik's needles being 2 frames safer on shield
I think Sakurai is looking at the balance of the game as a whole. Yes the people who are competitive will know the weaknesses and strengths of the characters way better, the other 95% of the playerbase is pretty balanced.
Imagine the volume of games from online play as a force pulling the win rate towards 50%. If the only constant factor, i.e. the strength of the character manages to pull against that to a significant extent, it suggests that the character tends to do much worse than most other characters. However, this kind of analysis typically works better when taking data from only higher skill brackets, because in low elo characters can have cheese moves bumping up their win rate that are easily countered by a competent player. Additionally, I think Sakurai is presenting some very unsound arguments by showing the absolute difference in win rates rather than their standard deviation. If 90% of characters are clustered around 49.5% to 50.5% win rate and a couple are scattered way beyond that, they should be identified as imbalanced characters.
Not even 70 seconds in and bro makes up the part where Sakurai said he wants it to be fun AND fair 💀💀 my brother in Christ he literally never said fair Didn't even get to the big words yet and already failed the understanding test 💀
I would in fact argue that the overall online win rates being fairly close for all characters says less about the balance of the roster than it does about the sheer amount of crazy item/stage/ruleset bs in this game and its ability to invalidate all other factors in determining who is likely to win.
Strawmanning Definition: A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction. Wikipedia
If I had to guess, I'd say the main reason Sakurai's logic doesn't make sense to you is because you're dead set on the idea that competitive knowledge of how the game works and tournament setting standards are more important than everything else. Meanwhile Sakurai is talking about balancing the results coming in from EVERYONE he sold his game to, not just the elite while trying to maintain character gameplay identity so they feel different despite yielding similar global results. In other words, you've prioritized a small group of "the most important people" while Sakurai is prioritizing "the whole world even if you suck at the game" which includes millions of people who bought his product but you would probably NEVER take the time to care about. He's not really balancing "the game" itself, he's balancing the whole planet's online win rate across 80 characters and an astronomical amount of gameplay variables. The two of you are just not talking about the same thing. 😅 Disclaimer: I'm NOT saying one side is right and the other is wrong or which is which. I'm ONLY identifying the disconnect that exists between the different contexts under which the word "balance" is applied to Smash Ultimate... Oh who am I kidding, the internet is gonna do what the internet gonna do 💀
I agree when Sakurai says that smash opinions are a echo chamber. Here Marss insist that Zss sucks, so players give him more merit to his skill and results, and same goes to Nairo, who calls sephiroth mid on a daily basis, for the same purpose. They just repeat those takes to themselves until the convince themselves and others.
Seph is definitely mid and ZSS has a lot of problems that casual play just doesn't show you though. Playing defensive against ZSS and shielding a lot rips out her entire gameplan and some of her hitboxes are inconsistent. When you get comfortable bullying Seph you realize that his frame data is god awful and he seriously can't fight back. Same goes when you're playing as him.
Except those characters ARE mid, those two just make them look really good. Just like how Skyjay and Leon make their respective characters look better than they really are
@@bcon1308yeah, I agree the characters have problems but some fans views are pretty extreme. There are people under every other Nairo video commenting about how bad Sephiroth is and saying he’s bottom 5 in the game because Nairo convinced them he’s trash.
@@tfthief4931Sephiroth becomes straight up overpowered when one-wing is active, and has one of the best n-airs in the game. I dunno how anyone can confidently say he's mid.
and again Marss is asking tournament results, but that there is where the issues with Esport games happen when they only listen to pros. Usually when only listening to pros it makes the game dull or just kinda shitty play for the majority.
I did some unofficial matchmaking analytics on a handful of games including LoL and I have to say, Sakurai claiming that 51% to 47% is about even is wild. It does highlight that no characters are being widely abused for being giga-broken, but 47% means that there is at least one fighter dropping 100,000s of games on character diff. That first 2% off of 50% is a maaaassive gulf
The win rate statistic doesn't really mean anything without context. Use rate, skill level, skill difference, connection quality/delay etc. need to also be tracked and taken into account.
Yes, exactly this. In fact, most statistics don't mean much or are very misleading without context and even less without solid data collection. People are like, "Steve has a 60% win rate." But do you even realize what you're talking about? How much nuance is lost in such a blanket statement that's only true under specific biased lenses?
balanced around casual play, not pro play. pro play makes a smaller percentage of world wide play. casual play is 10 kirbys spamming up b. its not that cool to a pro player but its fun to casuals.
If characters are considered abysmal in competitive but there's such a small difference in win rates in the data used to make decisions then, wouldn't tweaking a character to be more fair in competitive not have that much of an impact on win rates in general?
I find it kind of funny Sakurai mentions trying to keep each character unique as a reason for not making the game more balanced, but Ganondorf is still a Captain Falcon semi-clone for the 4th game in a row. And you just know he's not factoring in how Ultimate's shitty netcode benefits heavies and zoners disproportionately.
Sakurai is spitting hard the problem with a game where strengths and weaknesses are both not too big on a majority of the cast is that it ends up makinf everything feel kinda similar an kinda boring The variety and replayability of the game THRIVES on the fact that everyone has big strengths and weaknesses maybe not to the extent of some ultimate characters but in general he's very right
People need to give Sakurai and his team way more credit, they've done an amazing job making this game. It's too easy to see flaws and faults with a finished product afterwards, rather than before when making it. Steve was out for ages before people realised he was the best in the game. The game has so many characters and is well-balanced, especially when compared to other smash games and given how many characters are in it. People will always find something to complain about in a game with this many varying characters. It's not like if x problems didn't exist then everyone would have been happy and not found something else to complain about. Also, keep in mind how old the game is. If you don't like it anymore or lost interest after seeing the meta develop this far and settle, then stop and play something else until the next one comes out. Just accept it for what it is, and either like it or move on.
It’s key to remember that winrates are really only indicative of the bottom 90% of players. The “competitive scene” only makes up probably less than 5% of players, meaning that they have very little impact on winrates. So winrates are a good way to see what average people do but have almost nothing to do with high level gameplay. If a design team is balancing around winrates, then they are not balancing with competitive players in mind.
For better or worse, 90% of players are noobs who play poorly and have no idea what makes characters good or bad, but heavily influence the online win percentage which Sakurais team took into consideration. If everyone was approximately the same skill level the game balance would be very different
no way that's accurate, Sakurai has to be pulling from non elite data. I will go on 30 fight win streaks in elite and then go 5-5 for 10 and call it a night. maybe at like 7 million GSP (the average) you get a consistent 50/50 but that's not reflective of the characters potentials at all (which is the metric you should patch on) its not "oh but low level play is a toss up"...its a toss up cuz they are bad not because characters are even. meanwhile 10,000 dudes are all using the same character at a 80-90% win rate (or higher) in elite and IRL
Honestly. If you take into account all matches and match types... Free for all, time, items, teams, competitive rulesets. And all of the win ratios across the entire gsp spectrum, then what he said was right. The point of the game is meant to be fun. Not competitive. My best friend can barely recover, and I play Ganondorf online almost daily at 14.5 million gsp. I have the most fun in this game playing without taking it seriously, which is part of Sakurai's thoughts on balance. If everyone was as balanced and equal as Lucina, then the game simply wouldn't be fun. If everyone had the out of shield options of G&W, or the safety on shield of Mii Brawler, or the speed of Mario, then the game would be balanced, but it would get far staler at all levels.
What Sakurai doesn't see is that only good players gravitate to the difficult to play characters. Out of a hundred players: 50 top tier bad players, 25% low tier good players, 25% top tier good players. Top tier good players: 75% winrate. Top tier bad players: 25% winrate. Low tier good players: 50% winrate. But the good and the bad are mixed together so we get online stats that don't really represent the best each character has to offer.
Sakurai's point is that balancing isn't as much about removing things that are overpowered or underpowered, but offsetting them. You were on the money when you mentioned how glass cannon characters are fun. If you remove the volatile "unbalanced" things then none of the characters are interesting. His video is not about making a balanced game, but how to balance while keeping the game fun. Also saying "wifi's not where you look to balance the game" makes no sense. Those are the people playing the game. Why would you balance the game for any other group of people?
It's just not true that characters need overpowered strengths and crippling flaws to be interesting. The movesets, animations, variety of special moves, and other variability makes them interesting. Nothing is more unfun than dying to something that doesn't feel deserved, and the game is more engaging when you can learn from mistakes. People mashing buttons aren't going to create wide disparities in win rates in a well balanced game either. The real end of the story is just that Nintendo wants to raise the skill floor so people mashing buttons can keep up without knowing what they're doing, and they want big hits to make characters explode because that's fun for casual players. They don't want or care about the competitive scene, which is why I quit a long time ago (after being top ~10 in my state before COVID)
Guys, reminder that smash is literally just a children’s party game that we take way too seriously. Sakurai needs to give each character (except echoes apparently) a unique “personality” to make the game more interesting for children. Getting rid of advantages and disadvantages of characters just removes the personality and intrigue of each character, making it more bland.
I watch a lot of competitive play, whenever I play with my scrub ass friends, we're even, they play a lot more but having some competitive knowledge gives me an edge that allows me to keep up with them, so games are very back and forth. That being said, as soon as I pick Steve and have a very rough idea of what he does (because of esports) even tho I'm not good at all when it comes to execution, I wop their ass, its not even close most of the time, they cannot keep up with a random ass Steve, and I cant even place blocks properly. I think that says a lot.
Overall 'win rate' of each character is a terrible metric to use for balance. Each individual character gets it's own separate GSP. You can be 12m+GSP with half the cast while still being 4m with some of the high skill execution fighters. Which makes the 4% disparity in win rate actually quite large considering the algorithm for matchmaking is literally intended to produce a 50% win rate through GSP matchmaking. Average GSP of each individual fighter would be a much stronger representation of overall balance.
most pros forget that the casual playerbase is a million times bigger. I suck at the game and struggle against ganon. If they buffed ganon to be tournament viable, I’d probably smash the cartridge and shoot my switch. While I do think the top 5 need to be nerfed, it truly doesn’t make a huge difference to anybody outside the top 5%
Yeah, matchups rarely matter until the skill level gets close between the players, and then it’s painfully obvious. Ganon is the worst in the game because every other character can just run away forever and not get hit Vs him. If you don’t want to play campy you’re gonna struggle, and that’s what sakurai means by polarizing strengths and weaknesses. At lower levels takent always wins out but at top level you see tweek (clearly top 3 most talented) losing to random Steves and Samuses all the time. Because the game is way easier for the other player, they’re willing to sacrifice fun for results. Like any job.
Mythra seems overtuned but she's not that great when she's using her tipper. She hits her three pieces and can't really pressure you off stage to truly seem oppressive. She's easier, but less flexible sheik.
What he's saying is he'd rather have strong advantages alongside strong disadvantages instead of every character being just okay in every situation. In the former, you have to try to push your opponents into disadvantageous positions while keeping yourself from your own bad situations while in a perfectly uniform game the whole game would just be poke and run away.
i think people are MASSIVELY downplaying how large of a gap that win% is in actuality in league of legends a character with a 53% or higher is considered GAME BREAKING. with anything under 49% being basically unplayable. the numbers sakurai has here are BAD but says they are fine???? like in any other competitive game these win %s will not fly in overwatch 1 brig on release had a like 52% winrate and single handedly killed the competitive scene cause she was so broken that she built a meta around her at just 52%
Dude Marss you’re a top twenty player in the entire world probs and he is making this game for casual dads who work 7am-3:30pm. I get your critiques, but this game is not only being sold to top professionals who do not contribute anything to society except for their video gaming skills. It’s for families that play once a month, which equals a majority of the profits. Imagine if ocarina of time was made only for speed run sweats, and not rpg loving lore nerds (me). You’re very smart for a smash content creator, but come on brother. Btw I love your content and you inspire me in smash when I play once every 6 months, please acknowledge me, a lowly blue collar worker
(Statistics Nerd comment alert) Marss: My propaganda! Me: Well now that you've "proven" his point, why not perform a real test with it? In stats you need a minimum of 30 trials for each data point so the data can actually be considered valid because of the law of averages. Its possible the results of your experiment just a coincidence as you did not have enough data points to prove this statistically accurate or significant. I propose a second test, 30 games with trash/low tiers, and 30 games with broken/high tiers. See if those turn out closer to the actual percents that Sakurai was talking about. Theoretically, the trash/low tiers will have only 14 wins while the broken/high tiers should have 15 wins (I rounded down for each). The control in this test is simply you and your skill level. Since there is minimal to no fluctuation in skill, this really does come down to the balance of the actual character. Only other influences are the skill levels of your opponents which you can either keep the test the same and play online (where Sakurai pulled his data from), or make it a content idea with Luminosity! Ensuring high skill fights against high skill.
5:06 the thing is, that's an extremely good spread for win rate. How ever League actively nerfs people who have a 45% win rate, just because they get banned or picked too much in pro, even when the win rate isn't extremely high in pro. Nerfing just because some one is popular, not because they have degenerate game play or makes the game super favored to one side to another. The times when they nerf people who are already low winrate due to too much use in pro play. Is the other choices are trash when people know how to abuse their weaknesses. Every pro ADC has a dash. Every time a ban or pick happens, it's picking an ADC who has a dash. This means pro players don't see the value of ADCs who lack a dash. Do you give those other champs a dash to make them played in pro more often? Nah, you nerf the dasher every time a pro tourny finishes. Leading to extremely low winrates, even for the pro level players. Balancing is extremely compilated. Seeing a 7% difference from best to worse is good. How ever breaking down low vs skilled also lets you see that Steve is getting smashed in low level smash, keeping his win rate lower, when it can easily be well over 60% in most match ups (Not against Trainer or Cloud.) in the pro level. Anyone over 54% win rate in a chunk of players is not good. I don't have to look up Steve to know he is over 54%
He wants a more swingy game. He wants characters like little mac and ganondorf to exist and also wants Kazuya to exist. Characters that are SUPER swingy. Kaz can 0 to death, but loses to camping. Ganon is a very fun character cuz he hits HARD, but has bad frame data Little Mac has KO punch but no aireals. He likes the variety in that every character can do something special. If every character had the same weaknesses, or advantages (same frame data same up b etc), rhen it would be a "boring" game.
I don't think bro got the point. Sakurai isn't saying a balanced game isn't fun. He's saying there's more to balance than just making the strong weak and the weak strong. He wants to maintain character identity and uniqueness, avoiding making movesets that feel too samey like Nick All Stars 1 for example. In my opinion, the characters are already unique enough to where they most likely won't feel homogenized with damage and angle tweaking, but I see where he's coming from.
(Please read this like you’re pinching your nose) Well, erm, ackshually Marss, you should have played 10 gamshe with eash character becaushe half of 5 is 2.5 and you cannot have five and a half wins online 🤓👆
What Sakurai means is if somes offense is 7 but survivability is 3 that is more fun then everyone having 5s across the board. I don't think ZSS would be fun if they made her combo better but flip jump has 20 frame start up and is no longer invincible.
To be frank, f💥ck the tornaments usability! Most tournament players will always play with the best charcter, even if his win rate is 1% higher than the lowes.
i really hope for the love of god no game dev looks at smash 4 and utimate as an example of good game balance people dont mention it enough, but both games are literally just pay 2 win on purpose like, base roster is still good, but they just massively over tune the DLC in both games and then abandon the game before they can fix it
Marss I like your content but your attitude makes react content hard to watch. You don't listen, you don't seem like you care, you just assume something about what people mean and then disagree with it (that's what strawman means). Maybe put some thought and effort into it or just stick to playing the game.
tldr marss doesn’t know what “amplifying shortecomings” means then plays the bottom 5 characters to prove the ambiguous sakurai strawman wrong lmao. glad ur getting ur paycheck here bud
Theres no way sakurai and the team would be focused on the competitive scene. What matters in terms of balance is if all characters could win a casual match. If you buff ganondorf, for instance, what is the average casual player to do when they already think hes broken.
If they weren't catering to the competitive scene, then there's no reason why they released balance patches that nerfed top tiers and buffed low tiers. And the problem with casuals getting crushed by the likes of Ganondorf is generally because they're not practicing/adapting their gameplay because they're playing the game casually, and most likely fighting someone who typically practices more. If you have a friend who practices way more than you, they're going to crush you, regardless of what character they use.
@@mrmediocre848Wouldn’t the buffing and nerfing of characters mean that they were straying away from that 50/50 win-rate, which would make perfect sense as to why they got either buffed or nerfed.
@@ynam.2622 because the aggregate win rates will tend towards 50/50 because of how Quickplay/Elite Smash works with millions of players, it's unlikely that they would've strayed so far from even win rates that those would be the deciding factor for receiving buffs or nerfs. Sakurai said they rely on player feedback as well, and competitive play would show the cracks in some characters' power level that would warrant some balancing. Hence, Bayonetta was nerfed into the ground once in Sm4sh and once going into Ultimate, why the likes of pre-patch Olimar and Pichu were severely toned down, and ZSS, Joker, Wario, Min Min, and more were nerfed over time as they demonstrated their strengths in tournament play. We don't know the reasoning entirely for why some balance patches happen to which characters for what, but some level of competitive consideration was there, as unusual as that appears. Of course, they haven't really embraced the competitive side of Smash, with only customary glances whenever they're not issuing C&Ds.
I believe that the win rate online is nearly the same as the loss rate for every character because you have no choice but to fight players with equal GSP. If he wanted more accurate data, Sakurai should've created a quickplay and a ranked mode. Quickplay allowing you to play with preferred rules, and paired with random skill level players. Ranked allowing you to only fight others higher ranked or same level. There you go, but you know, Sakurai doesn't want optimal fun for casuals and try-hards.
I think the game that sakurai is going for is one where characters suck but have a few aspects that are broken about them and that makes every character technically viable because they can BS their way to a win. Little Mac and Ganon and examples of this
why are a bunch of people that dont make videogames having an opinion on game design lmaao try making a game see if you get it right. I think Smash is perfectly balanced for what its purpose is
Sakurai is just giving excuses for his poor balance decisions. He's a great game designer but he's a bit out of touch with the competitive side of the game.
shoutout to sakurai for still giving a fuck to release a video like this like 6 years into the games life
Sakurai is saying if you take out strong moves and stats and buff the weak ones, you're going to end up with a bunch of characters and movesets that feel too similar
That makes more sense
a game where every character is just lucina would be pretty balanced and also INCREDIBLY boring
I think that was his point; I think he way trying to say how you shouldn't make characters that are too similar, so you should give every character a balance of strengths and weaknesses
Example: If you balance Ganondorf by making him faster but weaker... you're just turning him into Captain Falcon. Not an interesting way to balance him. Instead, keep him slow/strong but buff his tools in other ways. Maybe give him the ability to float and a projectile like Ocarina of Time. Maybe super armor on a couple of moves. Or maybe something else, but definitely not "fix his slowness and reduce his power", that's boring.
That's why I can't get into brawlhalla no matter how much I try. It's more balanced, but the characters have SO MUCH less personality
"Kirby sucks"
Well yeah, that's like Kirby's main mechanic lol
😑
I love Marss but genuinely his (and most people's) intelligence and reading comprehension gets a 50% debuff when live on Twitch
Let's not act like their ignorance makes Sakurai's statements any better, lmao
@@LeonardoRodrigues-uj1sm Apparently some people have that debuff without being live.
Sakurai is so tired of tryna explain how he made a party game for the past quarter of a century that the next game is just gonna be 100 fire emblem characters out of spite
Fire Emblem Battle Royale. Hell yeah.
I would play that, I love the Fire Emblem characters
Bro most be tired
I think the problem is that Marss is thinking Sakurai’s talking to the competitive players. He’s not. The game is built for a casual audience and if you want to make a competitive scene out of it you can (and I’m certainly glad there is one) but the game’s not gonna be balanced around the top level. 95% of their revenue is from people playing 8 player FFA at the their house with items, if you want to make a competitive career out of it you can, but you have to understand that your ideas of balancing for competitive integrity are barely even secondary
This is probably true, but at one point, maybe as a joke, he teased talking about competitive viability in one of his character presents
Because that isnt how the game was made. Exactly.
@@Trattt It was the Sephiroth reveal talking about frame data.
There is only like 1% people play the game competitively. Of course sakurai has to focus on the casual side.
Sakurai's video is a response to people talking about balance, the only people who understand and care about balance are the competitive players so I think it's at least partially incorrect to say that the video is addressed to casual players.
I think Sakurai is a lot smarter than people give him credit for. He implemented teching all the way back in Smash 64 to give players a way to escape disadvantage and prevent get up infinites. He added air dodge in Melee to compete with how strong aerial attacks were. And even though Ultimate has its problems it’s by far the most balanced Smash game he’s ever created.
And he created one of if not the best fighting franchise + kirby lore
He is the goat
Honestly yeah he probably knows all the competitive stuffs. The dude even intentionally added wave dash to melee. I think he was just pressured by Nintendo and casuals to play dumb in these videos.
Heck, more melee example, look at how after just a few months of competitive melee between ntsc and pal he could literally know which character’s so broken (like 4/5 top tiers got nerfed).
Ultimate honesty feels artificially balanced by the matchup inexperience of the player base. It's impossible to know the matchup of 80+ characters, and even if you know the matchup low tier is cheeseland.
unfortunately some characters were given a lot less time to develop than others, you got some like joker and sora, but then you have ones like ike
@@artimist0315nah it's more than manageable compared to regular fighting games
Tekken characters have over 100 moves on average that require game knowledge to block, duck, or sidestep left or right. Not to mention frame data. It can still be your turn in regular fighting games even if you're minus depending on positioning or if a move forces an opponent into crouch. Heck if you're aware your opponent doesn't punish your -10 move with a jab you can stuff them with your own jab instead.
A later video by Sakurai called Play Testing Keeps Going had some additional thoughts regarding character balancing:
"Furthermore, online matches and tournaments had grown rather popular [by the time of Ultimate], making it easy for us to use their results as reference."
"My personal approach to character tuning is to make each fighter highly unique. Having players with divided opinions is ideal, as that's part of the fun. Looking at any one part in isolation may make the game seem unfair, but I'm willing to write that off for the sake of individuality."
"I'm glad that top tournament players use a wide range of fighters, but that's not the only thing we look at. Some fighters are naturally better tuned for multiplayer matches, as well."
This is based, nice
That is also a part of the problem of Ultimate's balance patches.
Online win rates from a game with such an awful online already are such a terrible baseline to balance the game (And even from that perspective they made many very questionable decisions, as many annoying online characters have been buffed)
Thanks for this addition. It makes a lot more sense in context to remember they are and have always tuned for casual/multiplayer games as well.
Using online play as statistics is wild. Tho, it makes sense, since 3rd party tournaments don't exist according to Nintendo.
Using one of the most common ways of playing the game is wild?
Coming from the league community, a 4% difference in win rate is still considered to be quite substantial.
Showing that there isn't a big difference in win rate in a skill based match making system as an argument for balanced characters is insane...
Skill based match making systems always average around a 50% win rate. That's the whole point of skill based match making.......
I think he was trying to say that it's extremley hard if not impossible to make a game as balanced as smash and still have every character feel unique.
Sakurai nailed it by saying people will say some characters are broken and others will say they stink, because little mac isnt technically a good character in terms of tiers. BUT some people just CANT fight him and lose every time to him, making them think he’s broken, when its just a skewed view based solely on YOUR experience. Top players will say mac stinks, casual players probably think mac is broken. Who is right tho? Who do you listen to in this scenario?
Mac is a unique case due to how incredibly polarizing (and bad) his design is. He's awful if you know how to exploit his weaknesses and play around him being bad in the air i.e. platform camping. If you don't and try to fight him head-on though, you're going to be at a huge disadvantage. By design he absolutely destroys casual play but is bad in competitive.
Yeah good point, actually the stage is the strongest boss because my 3 year old brother keeps walking off of it. And don't even get me started about how my mom and grandma lose track of their characters. Who should I listen to, the data and a large sample size of players or my GRANDMA?
My main takeaway from all this is that smash ultimate has a higher percentage of bad players than any other fighting game in history
This is such a bad metric for balance. Quick play is designed to match you up with people of a similar skill. That fact alone means characters will always trend toward a 50% win/loss ratio. It’s how the game is designed.
Or represented mathematically, it’s designed to move you up in gsp until you win and lose about the same amount, and that’s the range you’ll stay at. You could look at this in terms of stages, players, characters, modes, whatever. As long as there’s enough data, you’ll always trend toward 50% win/loss.
These numbers have nothing to do with character viability specifically. They’re essentially just saying the data has a normal distribution, therefore it has a normal distribution. It’s meaningless.
Honestly the best comment in this entire thread
This is exactly what I was thinking and was surprised no one else said it yet. This only proves that the rankings are accurate, this does not prove that a character is better or worse at all.
Was just about to make this comment. You’re exactly right. However, if the choice of character DOES affect win rate in some way, you’d expect to see mostly top tiers at the highest GSP online and bottom tiers at lower GSPs. If a highly skilled player were truly limited by their character, 10 million GSP would be full of duck hunts and ganondorfs, while top GSP would only have Steves.
The point isn't to say that all characters are perfectly balanced. It's to say that there are no characters that are so immensely unbalanced to the point where any outliers appear on this curve. Yes, some characters are better/worse than others but people are overly dramatic about it. They'll say "X character is broken!" and "Y character is unplayable." If those characters literally broke the game or were unplayable, these data would reflect that.
But like, if 90% of Ganondorf players are in the low GSP range, doesn't that indicate a losing record to get to that point? And then within Elite Smash, you can absolutely have a losing record and stay in as long as you occasionally beat someone with a higher GSP. My personal win rate in Elite is like 40% and after a rough losing streak with Terry I think he's at like 30% wins. I'm awful against bad matchups in the 13.5M range but I can three stock a good matchup in the 14.3M range.
What I think the point is supposed to be is that balanced game design doesn’t necessarily create good or fun game design, especially for the video-game-playing community at large.
As an example, look at Mario Strikers: Battle League. The game is incredibly balanced competitively, especially compared to the previous titles, but the game isn’t as fun to play for most people.
As he said, what’s most important is how a character FEELS, not necessarily how strong they are. This is why Ganondorf and King K. Rool are such popular characters for casual players, despite their viability: the characters are fun to play. Meanwhile characters that do tend to be more well balanced, like Pit, have more lower player counts (at least from what I see online).
Games obviously can do both, though. Rivals of Aether in particular is a really balanced game, where each character’s viability is almost entirely dependent on the player’s skill and not traits of the character itself, and is still incredibly fun and unique. It also tends to lean into the “extremes” design philosophy Sakurai seems to favor with its cast in general, such as Wrastor being so air-focused that he can only perform strong attacks in the air.
Thank you, Rivals is the perfect counterexample to Sakurai's reasoning for the game not being more balanced. It's not that you can't make the characters well balanced while also being unique and fun, it just requires a good understanding of how to make them distinct while still having strengths and weaknesses.
I would reject Rivals as "balanced" on the premise it is easy to derive "balance" from a game with far less hours put into it than another game. What's balanced at year 1 might not be balanced at year 3 even without patches. One can see this with Melee, despite no patches melee has undergone massive changes over the years with the gap between many characters shrinking, some have even suggested Fox isn't the #1 character (some suggest Puff or Marth).
There's no way Mythra and duck hunt have near the same win% 💀
I think sakurai was talking about casual matches online or something
mythra player base is one of the worst in smash history
I've definitely lowered mythra WR, i went 0-20 in many arenas 💀
There's a smaller player base for duck hunt, so the people that are dedicated to duck hunt increase it (while losing sometimes) and the pyra/mythra player is much larger, and that leads to that player base being very mixed from new players trying to learn them, decreasing it and experienced players increasing it
@@Moose7701 if u simply choose to win, you’ll get better
There's some truth to what he's saying. An overly-balanced game does run the risk of being a boring game.
Characters need to be interesting. They need to have useful tools, and strong options for people to actually want to use them.
Of course, when you are too generous with what you give your cast, you run the risk of creating some insanely powerful characters.
It's almost like this game was designed for casual play, you know, like they've been saying since day one....
Smash ult is still probably the most balanced fighting game while also have the largest and most unique cast. I think top players also overvalue their opinion. They say little mac and ganon are the two worst characters, but at a casual level they are two of the best characters. Obviously competitively they both suck but comp players arnt the ones buying millions of copies of the game. The DLCs are still an anomaly broken across all skill levels
When Smash players say this I legitimately wonder if they have ever played another fighting game outside of Smash. This game isn't awful balance wise, but calling it the best is ridiculous. Smash 64 literally exists within the same franchise.
@@RobbertRobbert12345 bruh obviously I only mean smash ult
The reason characters are unbalanced is because the game's play testing is primarily done in casual settings. And we can't really fault them for it, most players play smash casually or are not good enough to care weither steve has a frame 4 forward air or not.
I think about how Steve is generally way worse in free for alls than in 1 v 1s due to not enough time to mine, and from the whole wider game perspective, both casuals and competitive, I’d believe that Sakurai’s right. But it does kinda feel like Sakurai’s saying “it doesn’t matter if Steve is better in 1V1s if he’s worse in free for alls”, and that seems like an awful metric for balancing lol
steve is still annoying in free for alls, but also in free for alls you can pick a different opponent, have all of them gang up on him, of have him run accidentally into a strong attack or item.
It's the polite Japanese way of saying "shut up about balance".
PS: Mama mia, the stylish finish on that Snake at the end.
Imagine you think little Mac sucks and try to balance him. The “correct” way to achieve perfect balance would be to give him more aerial options and a better recovery, but then tone down the grounded moves to ensure he doesn’t become overpowered. This would make sure he doesn’t have any big advantages or disadvantages over any particular character or situation, and thus be balanced, but if everyone was balanced like this the game would be boring.
Not if you give him enough unique mechanics and moves to stay interesting. Mac's current design is just impossible to make balanced in competitive without being overpowered in casual, it's inherently flawed. No other fighter is as polarizing as him.
@@100organicfreshmemes5good luck giving 80 fucking characters extremely unique mechanics while keeping the game perfectly balanced lol
@@100organicfreshmemes5smash is an extremely well balanced game for what it is. The only things they really need to do is nerf Steve, Pythra, and Sonic. That is all
Didn't realize the youtube comment bots aren't just replies
Smash Ultimate has sold 34 million copies and the competitive scene is literally nothing compared to that. They realistically don't have to consider that scene at all when making patches because this is a casual game 1st and even tried to make it anti-competitive with earlier titles. When people say this is a party game, you really need to realize that they're right.
imagine there is a character that flips a coin at the beginning and if he wins the call he gets straight to the victory screen or if he loses straight to a losing screen. his winrate would be 50% so perfectly balanced but not fun to the player or the opponent ^^
also some people will say he is broken and when ever they meet that character they become selfullfiling prohecies where they say oh no he is just gonna win because he allways does and even if its 50% it will FEEL like he wins more on average. and people who dont take him serious will say yay free win and it will FEEL like on average he loses more but in fact the coin flip is 50/50
People forget that smash isnt balanced around 1v1s. The win percentages are ALL game types across ALL skill levels. You can argue that it shouldnt be that way, but that was the aim and they succeeded in it.
Exactly this. Sakurai is taking into account every player not just competitive scene.
@@yuomovaeh3028Still doesnt make the argument valid. If we are talking about balance, than 1v1s, no items, final destination, etc is the MOST effected by character balance. So the numbers for wr are inflated with garbage that dont actually show the balance of characters
@@hunterkinsella5303 see this is what I mean, the game isn't meant to be balanced around competitive play, so it's not that there's a bunch of garbage skewing balance for 1v1s, it's that 1v1s are just a part of what is balanced around. Like yeah ganon is awful in 1v1 but he's a volatile wrecking ball in FFAs, and both are equal in Nintendo/bandai's eyes. Your view of what it SHOULD be balanced around has no weight in the argument.
@@tundralbut like, why even bother with 2 years of balance patches that are specifically targeted at the competitive scene then
I doubt little Timmy cares about Sheik's needles being 2 frames safer on shield
@@tundralAmen!!
I love Marss' gremlin laugh
I think Sakurai is looking at the balance of the game as a whole. Yes the people who are competitive will know the weaknesses and strengths of the characters way better, the other 95% of the playerbase is pretty balanced.
I agree with sakurai, need characters to have different feels to them, there’s a reason his game is by far the biggest fighting game
Imagine the volume of games from online play as a force pulling the win rate towards 50%.
If the only constant factor, i.e. the strength of the character manages to pull against that to a significant extent, it suggests that the character tends to do much worse than most other characters.
However, this kind of analysis typically works better when taking data from only higher skill brackets, because in low elo characters can have cheese moves bumping up their win rate that are easily countered by a competent player.
Additionally, I think Sakurai is presenting some very unsound arguments by showing the absolute difference in win rates rather than their standard deviation. If 90% of characters are clustered around 49.5% to 50.5% win rate and a couple are scattered way beyond that, they should be identified as imbalanced characters.
Sakurai should go to his local with Ganon and see how he fairs with his local Steve main. THEN we shall see
He'll pull a nairo and smoke your top 5, Light's career in shambles.
You talk about as if he wouldn't obliterate the Steve.
This man can grab two controllers and win a doubles set by himself.
You should go see a couple of casual friends play some free-for-alls and see how Steve fairs with Ganon
Remember he designed like 80 characters. Not every one will be good enough
Honestly, you catch like two minecart recoveries and Steve is dead. I don't think the Ganon/Steve matchup is all that terrible for Ganon.
Not even 70 seconds in and bro makes up the part where Sakurai said he wants it to be fun AND fair 💀💀 my brother in Christ he literally never said fair
Didn't even get to the big words yet and already failed the understanding test 💀
You comment too much bro take a breather
He also literally said Sakurai was right. What's your point lol?
Shits obnoxious. Dudes so pompous for what reason. Being #30?
@@jaredkline2351 maybe it's a bit much yeah lmaoooo my b
He may not have explicitly said the word fair, but if you listen to what he is saying, it boils down to he wants fun and fair.
I would in fact argue that the overall online win rates being fairly close for all characters says less about the balance of the roster than it does about the sheer amount of crazy item/stage/ruleset bs in this game and its ability to invalidate all other factors in determining who is likely to win.
That snakes day was probably so lit after that lmao
Strawmanning Definition:
A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.
Wikipedia
Okay marss im going to need a 10 page essay on what on earth happen on that last stock.
Marss you gotta deal with these bots
If I had to guess, I'd say the main reason Sakurai's logic doesn't make sense to you is because you're dead set on the idea that competitive knowledge of how the game works and tournament setting standards are more important than everything else. Meanwhile Sakurai is talking about balancing the results coming in from EVERYONE he sold his game to, not just the elite while trying to maintain character gameplay identity so they feel different despite yielding similar global results.
In other words, you've prioritized a small group of "the most important people" while Sakurai is prioritizing "the whole world even if you suck at the game" which includes millions of people who bought his product but you would probably NEVER take the time to care about. He's not really balancing "the game" itself, he's balancing the whole planet's online win rate across 80 characters and an astronomical amount of gameplay variables. The two of you are just not talking about the same thing. 😅
Disclaimer: I'm NOT saying one side is right and the other is wrong or which is which. I'm ONLY identifying the disconnect that exists between the different contexts under which the word "balance" is applied to Smash Ultimate... Oh who am I kidding, the internet is gonna do what the internet gonna do 💀
Poor netcode is the great equalizer in those win percentages
I agree when Sakurai says that smash opinions are a echo chamber.
Here Marss insist that Zss sucks, so players give him more merit to his skill and results, and same goes to Nairo, who calls sephiroth mid on a daily basis, for the same purpose. They just repeat those takes to themselves until the convince themselves and others.
Seph is definitely mid and ZSS has a lot of problems that casual play just doesn't show you though. Playing defensive against ZSS and shielding a lot rips out her entire gameplan and some of her hitboxes are inconsistent. When you get comfortable bullying Seph you realize that his frame data is god awful and he seriously can't fight back. Same goes when you're playing as him.
Except those characters ARE mid, those two just make them look really good. Just like how Skyjay and Leon make their respective characters look better than they really are
@@bcon1308yeah, I agree the characters have problems but some fans views are pretty extreme. There are people under every other Nairo video commenting about how bad Sephiroth is and saying he’s bottom 5 in the game because Nairo convinced them he’s trash.
@@tfthief4931Sephiroth becomes straight up overpowered when one-wing is active, and has one of the best n-airs in the game. I dunno how anyone can confidently say he's mid.
and again Marss is asking tournament results, but that there is where the issues with Esport games happen when they only listen to pros. Usually when only listening to pros it makes the game dull or just kinda shitty play for the majority.
Well, we are watching his video and he is a professional player.
The game is mostly played by casual. Sakurai did the right thing.
I did some unofficial matchmaking analytics on a handful of games including LoL and I have to say, Sakurai claiming that 51% to 47% is about even is wild.
It does highlight that no characters are being widely abused for being giga-broken, but 47% means that there is at least one fighter dropping 100,000s of games on character diff.
That first 2% off of 50% is a maaaassive gulf
The win rate statistic doesn't really mean anything without context. Use rate, skill level, skill difference, connection quality/delay etc. need to also be tracked and taken into account.
Yes, exactly this. In fact, most statistics don't mean much or are very misleading without context and even less without solid data collection.
People are like, "Steve has a 60% win rate." But do you even realize what you're talking about? How much nuance is lost in such a blanket statement that's only true under specific biased lenses?
balanced around casual play, not pro play.
pro play makes a smaller percentage of world wide play.
casual play is 10 kirbys spamming up b.
its not that cool to a pro player but its fun to casuals.
If characters are considered abysmal in competitive but there's such a small difference in win rates in the data used to make decisions then, wouldn't tweaking a character to be more fair in competitive not have that much of an impact on win rates in general?
I find it kind of funny Sakurai mentions trying to keep each character unique as a reason for not making the game more balanced, but Ganondorf is still a Captain Falcon semi-clone for the 4th game in a row.
And you just know he's not factoring in how Ultimate's shitty netcode benefits heavies and zoners disproportionately.
Today I learned Marss has a slow reading comprehension.
Sakurai is spitting hard
the problem with a game where strengths and weaknesses are both not too big on a majority of the cast is that it ends up makinf everything feel kinda similar an kinda boring
The variety and replayability of the game THRIVES on the fact that everyone has big strengths and weaknesses
maybe not to the extent of some ultimate characters but in general he's very right
People need to give Sakurai and his team way more credit, they've done an amazing job making this game. It's too easy to see flaws and faults with a finished product afterwards, rather than before when making it. Steve was out for ages before people realised he was the best in the game. The game has so many characters and is well-balanced, especially when compared to other smash games and given how many characters are in it. People will always find something to complain about in a game with this many varying characters. It's not like if x problems didn't exist then everyone would have been happy and not found something else to complain about. Also, keep in mind how old the game is. If you don't like it anymore or lost interest after seeing the meta develop this far and settle, then stop and play something else until the next one comes out. Just accept it for what it is, and either like it or move on.
It’s key to remember that winrates are really only indicative of the bottom 90% of players. The “competitive scene” only makes up probably less than 5% of players, meaning that they have very little impact on winrates. So winrates are a good way to see what average people do but have almost nothing to do with high level gameplay. If a design team is balancing around winrates, then they are not balancing with competitive players in mind.
For better or worse, 90% of players are noobs who play poorly and have no idea what makes characters good or bad, but heavily influence the online win percentage which Sakurais team took into consideration. If everyone was approximately the same skill level the game balance would be very different
no way that's accurate, Sakurai has to be pulling from non elite data. I will go on 30 fight win streaks in elite and then go 5-5 for 10 and call it a night. maybe at like 7 million GSP (the average) you get a consistent 50/50 but that's not reflective of the characters potentials at all (which is the metric you should patch on) its not "oh but low level play is a toss up"...its a toss up cuz they are bad not because characters are even. meanwhile 10,000 dudes are all using the same character at a 80-90% win rate (or higher) in elite and IRL
Nope. Elite smash is filled with Ganon
Honestly. If you take into account all matches and match types...
Free for all, time, items, teams, competitive rulesets. And all of the win ratios across the entire gsp spectrum, then what he said was right. The point of the game is meant to be fun. Not competitive. My best friend can barely recover, and I play Ganondorf online almost daily at 14.5 million gsp. I have the most fun in this game playing without taking it seriously, which is part of Sakurai's thoughts on balance. If everyone was as balanced and equal as Lucina, then the game simply wouldn't be fun. If everyone had the out of shield options of G&W, or the safety on shield of Mii Brawler, or the speed of Mario, then the game would be balanced, but it would get far staler at all levels.
What Sakurai doesn't see is that only good players gravitate to the difficult to play characters. Out of a hundred players: 50 top tier bad players, 25% low tier good players, 25% top tier good players.
Top tier good players: 75% winrate.
Top tier bad players: 25% winrate.
Low tier good players: 50% winrate.
But the good and the bad are mixed together so we get online stats that don't really represent the best each character has to offer.
Sakurai's point is that balancing isn't as much about removing things that are overpowered or underpowered, but offsetting them. You were on the money when you mentioned how glass cannon characters are fun. If you remove the volatile "unbalanced" things then none of the characters are interesting. His video is not about making a balanced game, but how to balance while keeping the game fun. Also saying "wifi's not where you look to balance the game" makes no sense. Those are the people playing the game. Why would you balance the game for any other group of people?
It's just not true that characters need overpowered strengths and crippling flaws to be interesting. The movesets, animations, variety of special moves, and other variability makes them interesting. Nothing is more unfun than dying to something that doesn't feel deserved, and the game is more engaging when you can learn from mistakes. People mashing buttons aren't going to create wide disparities in win rates in a well balanced game either. The real end of the story is just that Nintendo wants to raise the skill floor so people mashing buttons can keep up without knowing what they're doing, and they want big hits to make characters explode because that's fun for casual players. They don't want or care about the competitive scene, which is why I quit a long time ago (after being top ~10 in my state before COVID)
Guys, reminder that smash is literally just a children’s party game that we take way too seriously. Sakurai needs to give each character (except echoes apparently) a unique “personality” to make the game more interesting for children. Getting rid of advantages and disadvantages of characters just removes the personality and intrigue of each character, making it more bland.
"your Joker is better than your Ganon" said the chatter, as if Marss's Ganon isn't still better than 98.9% of elite Smash
wow I did NOT expect the dead by daylight comment and it's so spot on too
I watch a lot of competitive play, whenever I play with my scrub ass friends, we're even, they play a lot more but having some competitive knowledge gives me an edge that allows me to keep up with them, so games are very back and forth.
That being said, as soon as I pick Steve and have a very rough idea of what he does (because of esports) even tho I'm not good at all when it comes to execution, I wop their ass, its not even close most of the time, they cannot keep up with a random ass Steve, and I cant even place blocks properly.
I think that says a lot.
Everyone keep in mind that "Top Secret Data" or only 'implying' that data exists is the same thing as not having data.
Breaking news: skill/mmr based matchmaking leads to players leveling out around a 50% winrate.
that ending hahahaha
i gasped as if I was the kazuya myself
What if Sakuri said "any one can poo their pants" and then pooed his pants
I think lil mac should have a chargeable KO punch like Cloud’s chargeable attack. He’d be so scary with that
Overall 'win rate' of each character is a terrible metric to use for balance. Each individual character gets it's own separate GSP. You can be 12m+GSP with half the cast while still being 4m with some of the high skill execution fighters. Which makes the 4% disparity in win rate actually quite large considering the algorithm for matchmaking is literally intended to produce a 50% win rate through GSP matchmaking.
Average GSP of each individual fighter would be a much stronger representation of overall balance.
most pros forget that the casual playerbase is a million times bigger. I suck at the game and struggle against ganon. If they buffed ganon to be tournament viable, I’d probably smash the cartridge and shoot my switch. While I do think the top 5 need to be nerfed, it truly doesn’t make a huge difference to anybody outside the top 5%
Yeah, matchups rarely matter until the skill level gets close between the players, and then it’s painfully obvious.
Ganon is the worst in the game because every other character can just run away forever and not get hit Vs him. If you don’t want to play campy you’re gonna struggle, and that’s what sakurai means by polarizing strengths and weaknesses. At lower levels takent always wins out but at top level you see tweek (clearly top 3 most talented) losing to random Steves and Samuses all the time. Because the game is way easier for the other player, they’re willing to sacrifice fun for results. Like any job.
A better test would be you with, lest say Light, one player plays the worst 5 characters of the game, and the other the best 5, and then you switch.
Fishbowl habitat IQ takes bud.
all these people who know better than the guy who made the game? THIS IS WHY JP REGION FARMS YOU lol
Mythra seems overtuned but she's not that great when she's using her tipper. She hits her three pieces and can't really pressure you off stage to truly seem oppressive. She's easier, but less flexible sheik.
What he's saying is he'd rather have strong advantages alongside strong disadvantages instead of every character being just okay in every situation.
In the former, you have to try to push your opponents into disadvantageous positions while keeping yourself from your own bad situations while in a perfectly uniform game the whole game would just be poke and run away.
when marss said this dudes a dead by daylight player i can say from my experiences with the game nobody is ever happy with it 😂
Lmao, i just watched a video by rndThursday that talks about dbd's balance, that game looks like a mess
@@PZynder truly is lol and shoutout rndthursday as a big ror2 guy
i think people are MASSIVELY downplaying how large of a gap that win% is in actuality in league of legends a character with a 53% or higher is considered GAME BREAKING. with anything under 49% being basically unplayable. the numbers sakurai has here are BAD but says they are fine???? like in any other competitive game these win %s will not fly
in overwatch 1 brig on release had a like 52% winrate and single handedly killed the competitive scene cause she was so broken that she built a meta around her at just 52%
Dude Marss you’re a top twenty player in the entire world probs and he is making this game for casual dads who work 7am-3:30pm. I get your critiques, but this game is not only being sold to top professionals who do not contribute anything to society except for their video gaming skills. It’s for families that play once a month, which equals a majority of the profits. Imagine if ocarina of time was made only for speed run sweats, and not rpg loving lore nerds (me). You’re very smart for a smash content creator, but come on brother. Btw I love your content and you inspire me in smash when I play once every 6 months, please acknowledge me, a lowly blue collar worker
(Statistics Nerd comment alert)
Marss: My propaganda!
Me: Well now that you've "proven" his point, why not perform a real test with it? In stats you need a minimum of 30 trials for each data point so the data can actually be considered valid because of the law of averages. Its possible the results of your experiment just a coincidence as you did not have enough data points to prove this statistically accurate or significant. I propose a second test, 30 games with trash/low tiers, and 30 games with broken/high tiers. See if those turn out closer to the actual percents that Sakurai was talking about. Theoretically, the trash/low tiers will have only 14 wins while the broken/high tiers should have 15 wins (I rounded down for each). The control in this test is simply you and your skill level. Since there is minimal to no fluctuation in skill, this really does come down to the balance of the actual character. Only other influences are the skill levels of your opponents which you can either keep the test the same and play online (where Sakurai pulled his data from), or make it a content idea with Luminosity! Ensuring high skill fights against high skill.
5:06 the thing is, that's an extremely good spread for win rate. How ever League actively nerfs people who have a 45% win rate, just because they get banned or picked too much in pro, even when the win rate isn't extremely high in pro.
Nerfing just because some one is popular, not because they have degenerate game play or makes the game super favored to one side to another. The times when they nerf people who are already low winrate due to too much use in pro play. Is the other choices are trash when people know how to abuse their weaknesses. Every pro ADC has a dash. Every time a ban or pick happens, it's picking an ADC who has a dash. This means pro players don't see the value of ADCs who lack a dash. Do you give those other champs a dash to make them played in pro more often? Nah, you nerf the dasher every time a pro tourny finishes. Leading to extremely low winrates, even for the pro level players.
Balancing is extremely compilated. Seeing a 7% difference from best to worse is good. How ever breaking down low vs skilled also lets you see that Steve is getting smashed in low level smash, keeping his win rate lower, when it can easily be well over 60% in most match ups (Not against Trainer or Cloud.) in the pro level. Anyone over 54% win rate in a chunk of players is not good. I don't have to look up Steve to know he is over 54%
He wants a more swingy game. He wants characters like little mac and ganondorf to exist and also wants Kazuya to exist. Characters that are SUPER swingy.
Kaz can 0 to death, but loses to camping.
Ganon is a very fun character cuz he hits HARD, but has bad frame data
Little Mac has KO punch but no aireals.
He likes the variety in that every character can do something special. If every character had the same weaknesses, or advantages (same frame data same up b etc), rhen it would be a "boring" game.
I don't think bro got the point. Sakurai isn't saying a balanced game isn't fun. He's saying there's more to balance than just making the strong weak and the weak strong. He wants to maintain character identity and uniqueness, avoiding making movesets that feel too samey like Nick All Stars 1 for example. In my opinion, the characters are already unique enough to where they most likely won't feel homogenized with damage and angle tweaking, but I see where he's coming from.
(Please read this like you’re pinching your nose)
Well, erm, ackshually Marss, you should have played 10 gamshe with eash character becaushe half of 5 is 2.5 and you cannot have five and a half wins online 🤓👆
What Sakurai means is if somes offense is 7 but survivability is 3 that is more fun then everyone having 5s across the board. I don't think ZSS would be fun if they made her combo better but flip jump has 20 frame start up and is no longer invincible.
the shot at dbd was unnecessary (deserved) i think
To be frank, f💥ck the tornaments usability! Most tournament players will always play with the best charcter, even if his win rate is 1% higher than the lowes.
i really hope for the love of god no game dev looks at smash 4 and utimate as an example of good game balance
people dont mention it enough, but both games are literally just pay 2 win on purpose
like, base roster is still good, but they just massively over tune the DLC in both games and then abandon the game before they can fix it
Marss I like your content but your attitude makes react content hard to watch. You don't listen, you don't seem like you care, you just assume something about what people mean and then disagree with it (that's what strawman means). Maybe put some thought and effort into it or just stick to playing the game.
tldr marss doesn’t know what “amplifying shortecomings” means then plays the bottom 5 characters to prove the ambiguous sakurai strawman wrong lmao. glad ur getting ur paycheck here bud
Theres no way sakurai and the team would be focused on the competitive scene. What matters in terms of balance is if all characters could win a casual match. If you buff ganondorf, for instance, what is the average casual player to do when they already think hes broken.
If they weren't catering to the competitive scene, then there's no reason why they released balance patches that nerfed top tiers and buffed low tiers.
And the problem with casuals getting crushed by the likes of Ganondorf is generally because they're not practicing/adapting their gameplay because they're playing the game casually, and most likely fighting someone who typically practices more.
If you have a friend who practices way more than you, they're going to crush you, regardless of what character they use.
@@mrmediocre848Wouldn’t the buffing and nerfing of characters mean that they were straying away from that 50/50 win-rate, which would make perfect sense as to why they got either buffed or nerfed.
@@ynam.2622 because the aggregate win rates will tend towards 50/50 because of how Quickplay/Elite Smash works with millions of players, it's unlikely that they would've strayed so far from even win rates that those would be the deciding factor for receiving buffs or nerfs.
Sakurai said they rely on player feedback as well, and competitive play would show the cracks in some characters' power level that would warrant some balancing. Hence, Bayonetta was nerfed into the ground once in Sm4sh and once going into Ultimate, why the likes of pre-patch Olimar and Pichu were severely toned down, and ZSS, Joker, Wario, Min Min, and more were nerfed over time as they demonstrated their strengths in tournament play.
We don't know the reasoning entirely for why some balance patches happen to which characters for what, but some level of competitive consideration was there, as unusual as that appears. Of course, they haven't really embraced the competitive side of Smash, with only customary glances whenever they're not issuing C&Ds.
I believe that the win rate online is nearly the same as the loss rate for every character because you have no choice but to fight players with equal GSP. If he wanted more accurate data, Sakurai should've created a quickplay and a ranked mode. Quickplay allowing you to play with preferred rules, and paired with random skill level players. Ranked allowing you to only fight others higher ranked or same level. There you go, but you know, Sakurai doesn't want optimal fun for casuals and try-hards.
0:58 Because a game where no one has any weaknesses and also no strengths makes for a very boring and limited game.
I think the game that sakurai is going for is one where characters suck but have a few aspects that are broken about them and that makes every character technically viable because they can BS their way to a win. Little Mac and Ganon and examples of this
why are a bunch of people that dont make videogames having an opinion on game design lmaao try making a game see if you get it right. I think Smash is perfectly balanced for what its purpose is
Sakurai is just giving excuses for his poor balance decisions. He's a great game designer but he's a bit out of touch with the competitive side of the game.
This was just Sakurai's longwinded way of saying "We don't care about competitive smash"
All I gotta say is dr Mario. Idgaf how strong or fast he is that’s recovery need work. And mewto why tf is he as big as Ridley and light as shiek
i wish this man would just realize that making steve not broken only helps the game and doesnt hurt casual play.
omg a game that matches you up with players of similar winrates gives each character similar winrates
Mr Sakurai, fix hurt and hit boxes, that would be fun. No invisible boxes, just make it be what it looks like.
A perfectly balanced game is boring. A perfectly balanced game would be everyone playing the same character.
Sakurai live patched snake to have a bigger fsmash hitbox during that last match. It doesnt count, im afraid.