one of the most grounded, but still inquisitive voices in all of melee. The fact that he still plays but still has a really neutral take on matchups and lower tier characters. Hes my fave caster for a reason. He really knows his shit
I know Toph is totally plugged into the scene when he name dropped Slug as a potential top ten player when everyone was shocked by his stellar performance at the Ludwig tourney
SluG hasn’t really been underground. He had a great showing at Genesis, and beat Zain at Double Down. I think this event just put a lot more spotlight on him bc of the Mang0 and Jmook wins
@@daytopel4292 yeah I of course knew of Slug before hand and had seen some impressive results, but there are so many players who seem at the precipice of breaking through to that top level that to single out slug seemed like a call that requires a surprising degree of foresight.
I was saying a week before Ludwig Invitational that Slug was lowkey top 14 in the world lol (I think we should use top 14 instead of top 10 because the top 8 is defined and then the difference in skill between Wizzy, Axe, lloD, S2J, Kodorin, and Slug is very very small)
About training tool, it could be really great to have with your slippi replays something like Tekken 7's replay pointers where you can look back a replay and the engine tells you "hey, you got hit here but you were actionnable so it wasn't a true combo and you could have shielded" and stuff like that
I've been saying for a while that itd be really cool to have a function where you can plug a specific frame from a replay (have it carry over action states, frame states, inputs and all) to lab out different scenarios and see what you could've done differently.
Toph is definitely the best voice of melee. A lot of players and content creators have very strong opinions but everytime toph gives his takes they feel very thought out and not emotionally driven and I find myself agreeing with him pretty much all the time. Love the content
I feel we also are missing regular doubles that build an identity. We had pew-fat, we had Leffen-Ice, we had the brudders, PPMD and LoZR, plup2king, korean fried chicken... most of these had a God level player, like Toph said, but also, all of them were regular teams that had character. This is something that we are currently missing imo
@@tysonfontanez Yeah, it's hard to develop good storylines if we don't have a recurring cast of characters (which is kinda sad, I loved PPMD/LoZR's Bad Moon Rising run, and Leffen/Ice used to be my favorite team)
My favorite rectangle nerf is to let them have any angles they want. Give them a dozen modifier buttons so there's no need to choose which angles you want, you can just have them all. Then, just make it so that when you're holding down, the B button won't work. Boom, suddenly the most broken and consistent controller ever, but also completely worthless because 90% of it's users can't use their main character's best move anymore.
I don't play Melee, but the Tekken comparison was dead-on 😂 I spent an hour in training mode when I got the game, and I definitely thought I was hot shit when I could do three ten-strings in a row and a couple electrics here and there. I hadn't even played against a human, or even a bot but I was like 💪😈
I think Samus is more valid than ever. The less people playing her at a high level just makes it easier for people to excel (lack of high level players benefits other high level players of samus). I play samus and I feel like bomb drops have never been fully used to their potential.
Really hopeful about new box and also new gcc rulesets. It'll just be a big sigh of relief from the community. It's not just about some players abusing the rules, it's about the resolving worries about whether you are protected from BS in the rules.
"I think more players should be satisfied not being the best player in the world" If top players thought like that we wouldn't have some of the best moments in competitive gaming period. Would be interested to hear you expand on this thought process with some former top players who no longer compete as much.
according to mark rosewater (lead designer of mtg) there are three reasons people play games 1) for the emotional highs and lows 2) for the intellectual stimulation 3) proving yourself as a competitor
Ultimate players will only want to get into melee if they really like the combo game. Otherwise the movement feels bad old and the game has a high floor because of it. Just dashing and doing a F-Tilt is hard in melee. It’s controversial to rebind your controller in melee haha. The games got some tough obstacles for newbies.
We may not have 10+ FE characters but we have 2 FE characters and one of them has a balloon-sword while the other one has the depth equivalent of 10+ Ult FE characters, so... 👉👈
Character viability is an interesting topic, as a DK player I fully believe that he is a lot better than people give him credit for. I don't think he is better than yoshi but I think he is close to that tier and will get there as he develops more. You mentioned Ringler and he is a great example, you also have Dada, Akir, Moe and Optimism who are putting in a lot of work with the character. I think a lot of characters have more potential than people give them credit for and we just need players like axe, amsa and now slug to show it. I fully believe a dk will top 8 a major in the next few years.
The entire point of rectangle controllers is to avoid using analog sticks. All 4 fingers on every directional button has the capacity to be much faster than moving the stick across opposite directions (ex. left to right), and also being much more precise due to being able to consistently hit certain directions. The same thing is happening in trad-fighters with the Hitbox and the like, with a % of people complaining that button directionals was cheating.
is the hundred page rectangle ruleset publicly available? i wanna make sure my controller follows the most restrictive rules now so that if they ever do get changed officially, i don't have to change the way i play
As someone who has put a lot of play time in to samus I will say she is viable BUT !!!!!! Samus mains will run in to a certain caliber of players where the character's disadvantages start becoming marginally exploitable to the point where the cumulative advantages your opponents will gain throughout the match will out weigh samus privileges. Can samus win your local? Yes. Can samus win a regional? I would say yes. But when it comes to majors where you'll encounter that skill bracket of top40-30 players samus is at severe disadvantage where your % chance to win will obviously still be nonzero but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be a high % given equal player skill. The stars really REALLY have to align (bracket luck) for samus to start breaking in to that 17th (and up) placements at majors.
The double whammy is that not only does Samus lose a lot of matchups, people hate you for playing Samus. Lmao. For the record, I think if Samus had someone like Armada, there would be a lot more Samus mains and they would be better across the board. Duck was carrying Samus innovation all by himself
@@happens4656 I get a lot of instant quits online. Plup dropping Samus is when I was like, shit nobody is going to believe in her now. There are still tons of good players, ever Samus I've run into online is vastly beyond my level, just not many pushing her to the top.
You often trail off when reading questions aloud. For example 13:35. It's like you'll be rushing through the question with the assumption that we're reading through it with you and therefore more quickly than speaking. I love the content and often just have it on as audio only, so I'd love if you'd fully verbalize them
I play melee roy against most top tiers and go to my locals with solo roy or duel main both of them. (Never won or been to majors) but i have closed out some games and tournaments when i find the time to go to my locals.
To answer the ultimate question. Show them how easy it is to install slippi, and then rub the fact that Minecraft Steve exsists in ultimate in their face. That's how I got into melee
I feel like the bit about 'people who enjoy melee but don't attend tournaments' is more that some people who are just fans might feel like they're catching strays when top players or personalities are shitting on people who aren't actually fans and only interact with the community to be toxic. Like there's a number of drama youtubers who try and farm the community for content, and their fans go into online smash spaces to harass people. I feel like those are 'specifically' the people who top players mean when they're talking about people who don't attend tournaments, but people who are just casual fans probably don't realize that's what's going on.
2:32 if you want more character diversity, you're gonna have to be willing to take years of getting shit on in-bracket as that character and as that character alone. Most people eventually give up and just switch to a better character because why the fuck would you wanna work 5x as hard in neutral for shit that top-tiers get for free.99. aMSa has been playing melee Yoshi for 10 fucking years up to this point before finally winning *something* and that's also due to Yoshi having shit like a parry, an unpokeable shield and super armor. Melee is hard for every character but the entry-level skill requirement only goes up the further down the tier-list you go. Just remember to thank Axe for working as hard as he fucking does to make Pika work at top-level because that shit is NOT easy and anybody else would've dropped that rat for a space animal long ago.
I think the commentator blocks for Melee ended up being kind of weird since Toph and Vish were doing stuff before top 4 when in reality they should have been doing top 4 but their voices would have probably died and they maybe didn't want to keep going into Top 4
could not disagree more. Imagine if in a sport people with prostetics preformed better. The solution wouldn't be too give the athletes without prostics steriods. The solution is put limits on the prostetics (boxx) so they are not over powered and so the playing field is leveled.
@@SSBM-Sandwich Except this isnt comparable because its way easier to just mod GC controllers than to start pumping steroids into people lmao, not to mention no legal issues.
The boxx already exists and has plenty of well thought limitations I don't see why we just don't let the boxx exist and switch over to 1.03 so that controllers and boxx controllers could be equal and players wouldn't be forced to shell out big money for controller mods just to be able to compete
Yoshi bad... Amsa good... I assure you Amsa would've won MUCH more putting in the effort he has with Yoshi with Fox instead. That is how character tier lists should be based on the character strengths not the player. Player tier lists are different.
Mewtwo on a boxx style controller could be decently viable. Mewtwo has tech akin to Samus as well as being almost “space animal” levels of normal tech due to DJC. Yeah, clearly M2 isn’t as good as a spacie, but I’d love to see one solid player repping them with incredible tech skill. It would be fun to watch.
@@spazrocketgaming424 Yoshi has djc stuff plus some unique tech, they are definitely comparable. That said, Mewtwo has a larger bag of tricks with teleport that require precise angles at specific positions that would be much easier implemented and more consistent on a boxx style controller. You don’t have to have a boxx style controller to play an extremely technical M2, but it is a plus.
(4:45) The one about the stigma against people who play but don't compete kind of tilted me and I didn't understand why until I sat and thought about it. Tournaments (and to a lesser extent ranked ladders) are like how we formally test ourselves in gaming. They are how you know you are good at the video game, yeah? Wins and losses outside of tournament aren't particularly thought about by most people. So even if you only play to be as good as you can be, how can you even say you are good unless you have victories over other good players in tournament environments? I don't know if you can actually say you have as much passion as another player when you aren't interacting with like... the reason we compete in the first place. I'm cooked rn.
you can be passionate in the way of being a fan of something. Not everyone wants to compete but that doesn't mean people who don't compete don't love the game just as much. That would be like saying "if you aren't playing live shows, you can't be passionate about music"
As someone that has personally felt that question, I'll try to shed some light. There are other forms of passion than competing. I'm not a good competitor, nor do I really want to be; I used to grind weeklies, but I quickly found that while hanging out with folks was super fun, I started to not actually enjoy playing the game despite having OK initial results (4-2, 3-2). I would grow frustrated whenever I didn't hit stuff I practiced, etc. etc. Call me a baddie or weak, whatever, it's true. I'm just not that kind of guy. However, I love melee. I still practice movement and tech because it's fun to me. I still get that dopamine hit when I hit that schnasty combo or mixup, and play 1v1's with some guys for hours on end. I allot time to watch every single major, even though I'm an old working man with little free time. I always notify my buds what the next big bracket is, and host watch parties; I'll try to catch them up to speed on all the storylines and players, especially the up and coming ones. Whenever I see something intricate happening, I geek out and get excited to share about it (i.e. tech lockout mixup stuff to prevent amsah tech). This game was part of my childhood and accompanied me through college all the way to my workplace. Melee still occupies a huge amount of headspace for me, and is the way I've connected with many of my best friends today. I'm... a spectator fan. But. I suck at competing, I don't have that thick skin or drive. Sorry. But, all that has to count for something right? What about other folks in the space, like TO's/Content Creators/Commentators/Artists? If they don't compete, are they necessarily less passionate about the game, even when they dedicate other skills, time, and forms of craft to the game besides explicitly competing?
For the doubles narrative question, I feel like another problem is that nobody talks about doubles. There’s no RU-vid videos following doubles bracket tournaments talking about insane tournaments or anything - nothing to ESTABLISH those storylines.
Also there's no doubles tier lists or doubles rankings or anything like that, and there's no way to play Doubles Unranked on Slippi. It isn't taken as seriously as singles so it doesn't feel as important
You can do that IC desync angle on a gamecube controller. They were just trying to find more ways to make it look like they were making more compromises without focusing on the fact that these controllers are really just designed for fox and falco.
Why are ppl still so damn worried about box controller capabilities rather than their own capabilities? Like, the time you spend pondering on that stuff you can just idk, git gud n' not care??
I am a Melee Enjoyer, not a Person Enjoyer. I paid my dues with the tourney circuit stuff back in the MLG days, and as much as I love the idea of the community aspect of Melee, I'm too old and don't have enough time to devote to tourneys and locals. Do I miss it? Sure, to some extent. But then I play Slippi and get all the lols and insta-quits, and I feel like my decision to not interact with humans is justified.
I'm one of those people that play but do not compete. I would like to but even locals are over an hour away at a minimum. Plus the scene has been getting too political over the last couple years.
Controllers need to be regulated. Ban boxes and any mods you cant do at home. Aka no 3rd party boards. Notches and snapback modules are fine. Those can easily be done at home. With the current rules set, from my understanding, I could build my own box, I could dedicate a button to perfect ledge dashes, or wave shines, or whatever tech and I wouldn't be stopped. There is a rule, technically, that should stop this but boxes broke that rule with the modifier button so its not being enforced. Yes I understand OEM controllers are worse for your hands than boxes and that 3rd party boards are way better than playing controller roulette but lets be real. Most of us are not going to notice the difference from a peak performing controller and a decent controller. But we will 100% notice the difference between a decent controller and a phob or goomwave or whatever. The reason we allowed UCF was to make the game more accessible to more controllers to make the barrier to entry cheaper but now its way more expensive. A tuned $60 controller just doesn't work when you are playing someone with a $200+ phob controller. Maybe I am completely wrong but from my experience this is the case. As for boxes. They need to have a joystick/analog stick and no modifier button also we need TO's to check controllers and enforce the no macro rule. The current path we are heading down is not a good one. Hax keeps trying to change the ruleset. Button remapping, frozen stadium, removing whispy and shy guys, changing how the analog stick functions as a whole. All the 1.03 changes are not what the game was meant to be. We fell in love with the game and all its jank stop trying to change that. The irony of hax doing this is in his leffen propaganda thing he said "leffen is changing the game and community we fell in love with" then he turns around and does the exact same thing for a monetary gain. If we are going to go down this path then we need to go all in. Allow the SD remix stages. Fix game and watch shield and L cancel. Hell just play SD remix. I mean screw it if we are going to keep gutting the game. lol sorry for the rant its late and im drunk.
I don't understand why the melee community has such a crazy problem with this when Hitbox controllers for regular fighters have had way less controversy and have been accepted for use within the community and tournaments. Just change the ruleset and leave them usable and comparable to a regular controller.
@@THE_BASED_GOD It's a weird thing. I won't even try to pretend my opinions are the best in the subject. But I think part of the problem is we let the modders and controller makers decide the rules. They have a financial interest in this. I think maybe we could have a vote. Or maybe a "committee" of top 100 players and TOs? All I know is it's the wild west for controllers right now.
@@x9x9x9x9x9 Most of the big tournaments use a ruleset which implements some form of MIOM's controller addendum. This allows modifiers as they exist on the rectangle controllers. You can't use modifiers with analog inputs for rectangle controllers that support a joystick input like the boxx. Macros are banned whether or not they're on a rectangle controller or a GCC style controller. I don't think a $60 'tuned' controller vs a phob/goomwave is a good comparison. Pre phob/goomwave many high level players would not settle for the 'tuned' controller and would instead spend a lot more than the current phob/goomwave to get a performing controller. Phobs/goomwaves perform like the best stock controllers that won the controller lottery but they're set up so you don't have to re-buy a phob/gcc as soon as a good OEM controller because they are designed to not wear out as fast or be recalibrated due to the regular wear over time. UCF still closes the gap quite a lot, the winner of ludwig's tournament on sunday notably did not use a phob/goomwave but just a OEM controller.
Fax u know what happened when the box came out for the fgc? Daigo wanna the best players picks it up cause and it gave him a huge advantage why dont the top players stop complaining and just learn the box?
