Game journalists think Little Mac is OP in Smash, publish actual articles about it

The problem is baiting him to either edge. Smart Mac players know what's up, so it won't be easy. They'll just stay on the ground, counter and abuse that super armor to death. And of course he has that goddamn KO move. I gotten killed at like 40-45% :/

Yeah, he's pretty lame if you ask me. No Johns...yeah yeah...Fuck that noise. Mac is a stupid ass character. Period.
 
Timeaisis said:
He's not OP at all though. For every huge advantage he has a huge exploitable weakness. He's actually a very well balanced character, people just don't understand how to beat him. This is just reactionary bullshit.

I wonder how the internet would've reacted to Fox if Melee had online. Or if Brawls online was good how people would react to Meta Knight. Mac is not even close to them.
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2001 day 1 Melee would have Sheik as the supposedly #1 character, not Fox

(also Little Mac is more like Brawl Ike lol)
 
-PXG- said:
The problem is baiting him to either edge. Smart Mac players know what's up, so it won't be easy. They'll just stay on the ground, counter and abuse that super armor to death. And of course he has that goddamn KO move. I gotten killed at like 40-45% :/

Yeah, he's pretty lame if you ask me. No Johns...yeah yeah...Fuck that noise. Mac is a stupid ass character. Period.
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This is what I'm wondering.


I don't have a lot of trouble with Mac players, but most have no idea how to use him. However, I've come across a few good ones and any smart mac will avoid the edge like Ebola.

What do you do, then?
 
Epicine said:
This is what I'm wondering.


I don't have a lot of trouble with Mac players, but most have no idea how to use him. However, I've come across a few good ones and any smart mac will avoid the edge like Ebola.

What do you do, then?
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My only guess without actually testing it yet is projectile spam. Perhaps Toon Link or Samus could give him hell. Then again, smart players could easily dodge all that shit, counter it or just YOLO it and roll through it anyway.
Toon is one of my alts. I main Falco. His blaster is too slow and the Mac recovers from the being hit by the shield too quickly for it to be of any use.

Sure, every character has their nuances and you have to change your game up a bit. Something that works on one character might now work on another. This is fine. But with Mac, you have to fundamentally change how you play completely. It's not fun or satisfying at all. That along with the constant fear of being KO'd at low health all of your attacks being countered or gobbled up by super armor is just shitty.
 
-PXG- said:
My only guess without actually testing it yet is projectile spam. Perhaps Toon Link or Samus could give him hell.

Toon is one of my alts. I main Falco. His blaster is too slow and the Mac recovers from the being hit by the shield too quickly for it to be of any use.
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Yeah, I can see that working for some characters, but anyone without one is going to have a relatively tough time.
 
After knowing a decent Mac player who won't take the bait I've actually learned how to take the fight to him as dumb as it seems. Just guess a sidestep or shield if you're unsure to launch him into a combo is pretty much how it starts...

Of course if I lose momentum I try to go back to the edge to try again.
 
"Little Mac is op according to people who have never really tried to get good at the game".

Reminds me when IGN implied DDD was terrible in Brawl. Or when people told me Ike is too strong. The guy with like 2 safe on shield moves is too stronk, guys.
 
Hahahahahahahaha

If anything I would buff Little Mac's recovery, gimping him is so utterly trivial it's ridiculous. He's definitely not OP - not even close. He's just fun, so a lot of people play him.
 
This attitude INFURIATES me.

People are already coming to conclusions on who's overpowered, who's underpowered and where they all fall on the tier charts.

The game hasn't even been out for a week.

The game hasn't even been out for a WEEK!

I don't know, man. Sorry to pop off. I guess I feel that anyone that claims to know who needs a buff and who needs a nerf after a few days knows nothing about fighting games and probably shouldn't have their opinions on the matter taken very seriously.
 
Comfort Jones said:
"Little Mac is op according to people who have never really tried to get good at the game".

Reminds me when IGN implied DDD was terrible in Brawl. Or when people told me Ike is too strong. The guy with like 2 safe on shield moves is too stronk, guys.
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"Shield? Isn't that that move that's for nerds?"
 
ShaperofStories said:
This attitude INFURIATES me.

People are already coming to conclusions on who's overpowered, who's underpowered and where they all fall on the tier charts.

The game hasn't even been out for a week.

The game hasn't even been out for a WEEK!

I don't know, man. Sorry to pop off. I guess I feel that anyone that claims to know who needs a buff and who needs a nerf after a few days knows nothing about fighting games and probably shouldn't have their opinions on the matter taken very seriously.
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last time i popped off over people freaking out over a smash character being hard to handle i ended up in the drunk tank bro, be careful and be safe and be american
 
OricWindstar said:
If you are asking for a balance patch 4 days into a game, you don't have any kind of grasp on the meta game. By this logic, if patching were available for Brawl, we'd have nerved Ike in the first few weeks.
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Yeah, that's how Sentinel turned from Big Poppa Pump to Buff Bagwell in Marvel 3. This is way too early to be crying about balance.
 
FreedomFighter said:
How is Mac useless near the edges?

I don't own the game yet and am just curious about this.
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His recovery/aeriel moves are terrible. The best bait for a bad mac player is to stand at the edge, if they come near you grab and throw them backwards off the stage, and it's an easy edge guard.

Even if you don't actually get a throw, they're not in a very comfortable zone as attacks that knock them off or even their side B will no longer be spaced right, and the side B suicides them if it goes over the edge.
 
I have so far beaten a couple of Little Macs by just jumping around, waiting for the player to get impatient and then off the side they go. Except for those guys who stay in the centre, they dominate rather hard.
 
Comfort Jones said:
"Little Mac is op according to people who have never really tried to get good at the game".

Reminds me when IGN implied DDD was terrible in Brawl. Or when people told me Ike is too strong. The guy with like 2 safe on shield moves is too stronk, guys.
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Somebody I met in passing when we got onto the topic of videogames once told me Brawl put them off Nintendo permanently. At first I assumed they were going to talk about Meta Knight being wildly unbalanced or the overall gameplay changes from Melee, but instead went into a mini-rant about how Ike was literally impossible to win against and it was super dumb Smash never introduced a dodge/evade mechanic to negate that sort of thing.

It was weird and Mac feels like the exact same situation here, just replace dodging with people seemingly oblivious that you can't jump around Mac.
 
How about instead of nerfing mac (which is completely unecessary by the way) we instead rally around for nintendo to fix samus?

Here is a list of things that make samus one of the worst characters in the game right now:

  • Grapple recovery time is longer than any character who has a ranged grab, for seemingly no reason as it's not a particularly strong grab
  • Non super-missiles take just a bit too long to come out, which makes them one of the slowest to release weak projectiles.
  • Low range on side smash
  • Low speed and range on down aerial makes it almost entirely worthless
  • Bombs don't explode on contact anymore, which makes morph ball bombs only good for repositioning in the air.
  • Too lightweight considering her over all speed
  • Attacks too slow considering their output
Oh who am I kidding, smash isn't gonna get anything that resembles a balance patch. That's just not nintendo's style.
 
BeesEight said:
Why are you using a binomial test on a data set that has more than two categorizations? Wouldn't you want to use a multinomial goodness of fit test if your expected frequency for each character is the same?

Course, the obvious issue arises that you're now doing calculations on a sample size that is below the number of categories you have for a multinomial test. While small sample sizes can be analysed with various tools, your conclusions can be flawed especially in a case like this. If you wanted to examine whether a character was seeing more play than any other, I simply can not see how you can get a robust confidence interval on such a low sample.

Granted, it has been years since I've done my statistical course work. However, I think it's fair to say that twenty matches is not the best experience to try and base any conclusions on.
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It depends on what question you want to answer. If it is "Is Little Mac picked more than other characters?", 20 samples and a test for the distribution "It is LM (2%)" and "It isn't LM (98%)" is enough to get a result (with a p-value of 0.00065 even). Saying "However, I think it's fair to say that twenty matches is not the best experience to try and base any conclusions on" just does not have any value unless you show mathematically where the problem is. A bigger sample would not change the result of the simple binomial test.

Now, if I wanted to figure out either how often exactlly LM appears or a complete distribution of all the fighters I would need more samples and a multinomial model. With the data here a 95% interval for the probability of LM is (5.7%, 43.6%), which is useless. But the lower bound is much higher than 2%, and that's all the article wanted to know. For a complete estimate of the distribution I guess you'd need about 500 samples at least, but it is just not true that a sample of 20 in general is too small to draw any solid conclusions.
 
Gaming journalists trying to discuss fighting games is equivalent to that guy who goes to locals and pretends to know shit about the genre while simultaneously asking what things like "zoning" means. Leave that shit up to the websites dedicated to it, thanks.

But lol kotaku.
 
TheSpoiler said:
Gaming journalists trying to discuss fighting games is equivalent to that guy who goes to locals and pretends to know shit about the genre while simultaneously asking what things like "zoning" means. Leave that shit up to the websites dedicated to it, thanks.

But lol kotaku.
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Took the words out of my mouth.
Also
"I don't know but this zoning thing sounds like spam." :)
 
Leafhopper said:
Took the words out of my mouth.
Also
"I don't know but this zoning thing sounds like spam." :)
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I don't think it was Kotaku, but some website had an article about fireballs and if they should be banned. Reason? They were too hard to get past and easily spammable.

Like, what is fucking jumping? Focusing through?

All these articles do is lick the heels of gamers who are casuals but don't want to take the time to learn. Essentially, journalists are empowering DSP-type people and reinforcing their bad habits instead of teaching them.
 
theprodigy said:
2001 day 1 Melee would have Sheik as the supposedly #1 character, not Fox

(also Little Mac is more like Brawl Ike lol)
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Yeah, I suppose your right. Too fast and "impossible" to defend against. Mac is just like Ike, though, in many ways. Just more extreme, I think.
 
I've been through vanilla Sagat, Arcade Edition Yun, and Cammy being a nuisance in general. I don't give a FUCK about some little boxer punk.

Also For Glory mode is dumb because it's been established for a while now that Final Destination isn't objectively the most balanced stage.
 
TheSpoiler said:
Gaming journalists trying to discuss fighting games is equivalent to that guy who goes to locals and pretends to know shit about the genre while simultaneously asking what things like "zoning" means. Leave that shit up to the websites dedicated to it, thanks.

But lol kotaku.
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Kotaku's character "ranking" is the most sorry shit I've seen from them in ages. Like, what da fuck does that even mean? Ranked by what? How? It's just a random ass list.

I was tearing it up in 1v1 For Glory. My Falco destroyed one guy's whole crew. I'm talking like seven different characters. All of a sudden he chooses Mac. I got bodied. He wasn't stupid. Nothing, not even God Himself could get this guy to budge from the middle of the stage. No matter what I did, he always managed to make it back to the middle. Of course it goes without saying I got hit with his instakill move at low damage :/ Ugh
 
ShaperofStories said:
This attitude INFURIATES me.

People are already coming to conclusions on who's overpowered, who's underpowered and where they all fall on the tier charts.

The game hasn't even been out for a week.

The game hasn't even been out for a WEEK!

I don't know, man. Sorry to pop off. I guess I feel that anyone that claims to know who needs a buff and who needs a nerf after a few days knows nothing about fighting games and probably shouldn't have their opinions on the matter taken very seriously.
Click to expand...

Sometimes there are characters that are blatantly overpowered and time isn't needed to verify that (remember Sentinel in MVC3?).
 
TheSpoiler said:
I don't think it was Kotaku, but some website had an article about fireballs and if they should be banned. Reason? They were too hard to get past and easily spammable.

Like, what is fucking jumping? Focusing through?

All these articles do is lick the heels of gamers who are casuals but don't want to take the time to learn. Essentially, journalists are empowering DSP-type people and reinforcing their bad habits instead of teaching them.
Click to expand...
Yup it's pretty ridiculous. It's the reason why some games get low scores if it doesn't hold your hand the entire time.
 
Seems weird to nerf a character who has such obvious weaknesses. Doing so seems like asking that the character just be completely worthless.
 
The first and only Mac I played so far I lost to. He can catch you off guard if you don't know how to play him.

With that being said he has a big enough weakness that he's not OP by any definition of the word.
 
Mister Wilhelm said:
Sometimes there are characters that are blatantly overpowered and time isn't needed to verify that (remember Sentinel in MVC3?).
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Yeah a lot of people already mentioned remembering how Sentinel received a knee jerk nerf because people were crying instead of learning how to beat him.
 
Not Spaceghost said:
How about instead of nerfing mac (which is completely unecessary by the way) we instead rally around for nintendo to fix samus?

Here is a list of things that make samus one of the worst characters in the game right now:

  • Grapple recovery time is longer than any character who has a ranged grab, for seemingly no reason as it's not a particularly strong grab
  • Non super-missiles take just a bit too long to come out, which makes them one of the slowest to release weak projectiles.
  • Low range on side smash
  • Low speed and range on down aerial makes it almost entirely worthless
  • Bombs don't explode on contact anymore, which makes morph ball bombs only good for repositioning in the air.
  • Too lightweight considering her over all speed
  • Attacks too slow considering their output
Oh who am I kidding, smash isn't gonna get anything that resembles a balance patch. That's just not nintendo's style.
Click to expand...

Really? These are valid complaints, but I've been pretty competitive with Samus online. I think she seems a lot more capable then past releases. Bombs not exploding on contact is a chafe though.
 
Honestly the problem with Samus is that she came out too "early" in Smash.

Had she been in Smash around, say, Brawl or 4's time, she'd have a nice gimmicky set based on her games.
 
naumov91 said:
Well he did beat Mike Tyson

punchout1.png
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Most /thread img ever.
 
I do agree that game journalists are generally incompetent idiots who suck at videogames, but this brings up an interesting question. Should Nintendo be balancing these games for hardcore players, or just for more general audiences?
 
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