Expansion Characters

It has been said many times that in SSF2 the roster will be drastically changing. To counter this, the expansion characters can be downloaded and you can play as them 99.99% as much as a built in character. It has also been said, however, that you will only be allowed a certain number of expansion characters. eg. You have expansion slots, etc. Will expansion characters be tiered at all? Will only the popular ones be tiered? If they were all to be tiered it would be a very hard and trying process. Yet, completely ignoring them would not be a very good idea.






Another thing is, what is the Back Rooms veiw on expansion characters in a tournament? Most of the expansion characters are very well balanced. Would it be plausible to bring an expansion character with you?


The metagame is another thing that would be drastically increased because of expansion characters. Knowing all of a single characters techniques would be practically impossible.


Thoughts?

Niocora wrote:It has been said many times that in SSF2 the roster will be drastically changing. To counter this, the expansion characters can be downloaded and you can play as them 99.99% as much as a built in character. It has also been said, however, that you will only be allowed a certain number of expansion characters. eg. You have expansion slots, etc. Will expansion characters be tiered at all? Will only the popular ones be tiered? If they were all to be tiered it would be a very hard and trying process. Yet, completely ignoring them would not be a very good idea.






Another thing is, what is the Back Rooms veiw on expansion characters in a tournament? Most of the expansion characters are very well balanced. Would it be plausible to bring an expansion character with you?


The metagame is another thing that would be drastically increased because of expansion characters. Knowing all of a single characters techniques would be practically impossible.


Thoughts?

If there was a select of 'official' expansions then it would be possible.

But should we group them with actual character for the game, or do we create their own list?
Perhaps both?

I wouldn't know if we were allowed to bring expansions to tournaments. Most likely not if they do not get their own list.
If there was a set that allowed official expansions then it could possibly work.
Although I usually let questions like this go and I'll get my answer when the time is ready.

I'm not exactly sure about how the expansion characters work (how to download them and how they're implemented). If they can be downloaded easily enough so they don't cause a tournament to take too long, then I don't think they'll be a problem; we'll just need to figure out if a character is broken enough to be banned.

If this isn't the case, it's something that needs looking into for the ruleset of the final game. My guess is that we'll decide based on these, but don't quote me on them since I'm not sure:

1. Popularity: If a lot of tournament players main a certain expansion, then of course it's something that needs to be taken into account. Why put in the characters nobody uses?

2. How good the expansion characters are: We'll need to spend some time developing each character's game a bit and determine whether or not a character has ATs that make them broken or if they end up as another Kirby. It would override popularity in the case that a character is popular but for some reason is determined as ban-worthy. In the case that none of them are broken, My guess is that we'll make an expansion-character tier list, and the top however-many characters and/or the most widely used will be allowed.

They'd have to be regulated in some way. Like these 5 or so expansion characters were put in and they have to pass balancing tests determining whether or not they are obviously broken. Once that's done, we'd have to create an "expansion" section in our ruleset that stated "blank, blank, and blank characters are allowed". This would kinda create a little trouble at tournaments though, since certain tournament organizers might not want to allow certain expansion characters and allow others.(like low tier tournaments, etc)

I think expansions could be a great way to stimulate the metagame, introducing new threats that need to be countered by the preexisting characters. But there would have to be some kind of cap where we stop accepting new characters into the metagame. Cause having 60+ high-tier threat characters would be just way too much to handle. >_<

It's been stated that official expansions will go through a more thorough balancing process than their unofficial counterparts. Since only official expansions will be playable online, this prevents people from facing opponents using potentially broken characters. My guess is that official expansion characters will simply be integrated into the already-existing roster, while unofficial characters will be treated on a case-by-case basis.

I am curious, though, whether the popularity of an unofficial expansion could earn it eventual official status.

RM wrote:I think expansions could be a great way to stimulate the metagame, introducing new threats that need to be countered by the preexisting characters. But there would have to be some kind of cap where we stop accepting new characters into the metagame. Cause having 60+ high-tier threat characters would be just way too much to handle. >_<

I agree that there should be a cap of some sort, but if all (or many) of the characters miraculously end up being balanced, how can we determine what characters go in and out? Would we have to vary based on playstyle or select characters at random? If an unofficial expansion character isn't used much, would we just swap them out as new characters are added?

Also, how do the expansion characters work? At live tournaments (since only the official expansions are online compatible), would it be possible to swap characters in and out if someone mains an expansion character that isn't in the roster we have?

Probably. Just because the game itself has a limit doesn't mean that all of the accepted expansions couldn't be held in a specific file on the machine that's running the game. Then they could just be imported as needed.

Brikmaethor wrote:Probably. Just because the game itself has a limit doesn't mean that all of the accepted expansions couldn't be held in a specific file on the machine that's running the game. Then they could just be imported as needed.

That's what I figured. So then, we'll need to do what I said in the first part of my last post: decide on the roster size cap, which characters will go into the roster, and how we'll rotate characters in and out as new expansions are created.

I just wrote a really long and complicated yet complete way of explaining everything and IE shut down, so, i'll try to briefly explain it.(To save my mind) You will have 5-10 slots for expansion characters. If you want an expansion character, you would download a mini-installer type file. You would load the character into an expansion slot and it would be done. You can save all the exe files for later to rotate your characters. Quick and simple. (On a side note Cloud 9 is still deciding on the number of expansion slots, it is currently around 5-10)


The difference between unofficial expansions and official expansions are that unofficial expansions are characters that will receive a few downloads but the vast mojority of people wouldn't know who it was.
An official expansion character would be someone who would be popular, generally made by a high-ranking site admin, who is well balanced and will be programmed first and an online play mode available (maybe). A good example of an official expansion would be Marth.

For more info I suggest checking the ssf2 expansion forums.

I also thought that it would be a seperate tier list for expansion characters. I agree that it would be great for the metagame, but with over 60 expansions at the moment, it would be to ridiculous. Perhaps only trying to tier the very popular expansions. Some, like Sonic fan characters, are made up and their attacks, just from reading about them, sound overpowered and broken.

Exactly. Only tournament-legal expansions would have a spot on the tier list. There would be no point in categorizing the other ones.

I really don't think that there will be many problems with the official expansions, and, I also don't think that there will be that many. No offence ment to certain spriters (At least one of whom I know is a back room member) but I just don't think there will be enough official expansions to nessecitate a cap. I think it would need to be capped for the unofficial ones that may be popular, if the back room chooses to do so. Frotating wich ones are balancd, I would say just try and see how many you can do. Even if every back room member tested one expansion character, that would be how many tested? 20? 25?

Almost every backroom member would have to test each characters theirselves so we may collect all the data and opinions together for a more accurate result for each characters' match-up against other characters and abilities. By the time expansions are added, we should have more member. Even that wouldn't help. It would take maybe months of a lot of experimenting.

Brikmaethor wrote:Exactly. Only tournament-legal expansions would have a spot on the tier list. There would be no point in categorizing the other ones.

I agree with this. Besides, look at the FAQ from the MG Forum.

Q. Can expansions be played online?
A. Unofficial expansions can NOT be played as online, however, official ones will probably be able to.

Certain expansions could be decided to be tournament-legal or banned for "un-online" tournaments, I guess. But, in my mind, there wouldn't be a point in putting the other expansions into the tier list.

Zalo, I don't think it'll be that difficult. Would there really be that many expansion characters released so early? We could just test them as they become playable.

Faceless, that still doesn't solve the problem of which characters should be legal and which should be banned. If the unofficial characters end up being fairly balanced as well, how would we decide?

I'm not sure popularity alone would be enough to determine the legal characters, would it?

I was assuming they would be tested and voted on whether they were legal or not. There might be some issues with the cap on expansions, but that should be able to be worked out later.