ParanoidDrone said:



For those keeping track at home, it's this one:



Spoiler: Isle of the Goddess Amazing Ampharos can you explain how the Isle of the Goddess transformation promotes rushdown? I have to admit I'm not seeing it.For those keeping track at home, it's this one: Click to expand...

I had never seen that particular first clip; that was interesting and strange and was new to me (every time I've seen a clip on this stage it has been on the bridge). I would have liked to talk to that Pikachu player and asked what he input for that Quick Attack; it's strange that he didn't recover. There may be a random piece of solid geography inside of that one object which is very unusual, but assuming you're not trying to clip inside of it, it certainly seems very rare and very obscure to end up inside of that object. Before just now, I'd never seen it, and I have played on this stage an awful lot.I honestly don't understand the argument you're making about the transformations having similar numbers of problematic forms but Delfino's somehow being better anyway. I don't really agree with the way of thinking of "a stage's legality is based on the number of problems we can list" since you have to consider both good and bad (it's not like a very simple stage like FD is perfect and every other stage is measured as a deviation from that), but even if I did, Delfino's problem count is pretty identical to Skyloft's. Like yeah you can use the bell on the Knight Academy defensively, but it's not really different from how you can use the shape of the Shine Gate which is a more fair comparison than the Fire Form of Pokemon Stadium from Brawl. The bell on the Knight Academy is a bit steeper than the divisions on the Shine Gate, but then again, you have platforms in approach friendly positions on the Knight Academy and it's harder for the defending player to quickly switch sides so overall it encourages about the same level of aggression which tends to be modest (sometimes the Knight Academy stalls out, but more often, it's mostly modestly paced fighting which is about what happens on the Shine Gate as well). The Windmill form of Skyloft is nearly identical to the Pillars on Delfino which is a case of complex and dynamic approaches by some characters and stalling/waiting for this form to go away by others. I do admit that Skyloft has the single worst transformation (the Small Island is a blatant hard loop), but it also has a smaller percentage of its transformations as potentially defensively oriented so it about balances out (5/11 is significantly less than 5/9).I can also say, decisively, that the idea that the high platform on moving platform 3 of Skyloft allows for run-away is very, very far from true. Like... you really did post there that Sonic might use that to run away. Let me go straight to experience. I main Rosalina, one of the lowest mobility characters who is good anyway. My most frequent opponent mains Sonic. He avoids platforms like that like the plague since going up there destroys his mobility and puts him in a good position to get killed by my uair which I can set up awfully easily and dynamically since there's another platform right below. In general going up there is a good way to get yourself trapped; the secret to running away in a smash game is always leaving yourself somewhere to go while making your opponent take a long time to get to you which that top platform just doesn't do for you as it has no natural escape avenue and gives your opponent really easy and accessible options to get to you. My Sonic friend actually told me on several occasions that he considers Skyloft an okay Sonic stage overall but probably his worst transforming stage; he really likes Wuhu Island the best followed by either Castle Siege or Delfino Plaza depending on his opponent and his mood. If Skyloft helps anyone run away, it's definitely not Sonic who is the best general character at running away. I don't think the stage, other than the Small Island stop, actually promotes run-away at all, and I'm entirely convinced platform 3 has a 100% healthy lay-out.I watched some of that second video, but it's over 10 minutes long and after about a minute and a half I hadn't seen anything really unusual. I was able to spot the difference between 1:19 and 9:43; at 9:43 Jigglypuff is further to the right and contacts the stage while at 1:19 Jigglypuff is a bit more to the left and doesn't actually touch anything (close but not quite, maybe that arch was touched and doesn't have collision or maybe Jigglypuff passed under the arch which wasn't really possible to tell in the video one way or another but at 9:43 Jigglypuff touched the stuff to the right of the arch so it was different entirely). Jigglypuff is also able to recover from doing a lot of stupid stuff that you would never do in a real match, and since in this game Jigglypuff's recovery is not notably good, that would seem to suggest that Skyloft is pretty forgiving even to players who intentionally try to put themselves in bad positions. In general I find the way contact with the stage works on Skyloft pretty intuitive and just saw my intuitions play out correctly in what I watched of that video; could you be more specific about what particular interactions don't seem to make sense? I also don't really see the issue at 0:37. If you get hit really low, too low to make it back, you might lose a stock... but isn't that true on every stage especially for a character with poor vertical recovery like Jigglypuff? What makes this case unusual?I just don't see the problems overall. The transformations aren't so bad, I don't find it hard to keep track of what is allowed to happen (the stage has hitboxes when moving, doesn't when stopping, and turns on the grounded collision at some point while landing which may if you're very precise create a gap), and while I can't and won't provide a detailed explanation of everything that can happen at every point, it's mostly because it's the kind of thing that is more remembered as a moving picture than as a list of rules and I don't think I could accurately describe a moving picture in under 50,000 words even though it's simple and easy to understand. The bugs are super obscure and almost never actually result in kills; we've had this stage legal for the game's entire lifespan so far, I've seen people clip through the stage three times (all on the bridge), and all three times they just jumped to save themselves (and two of the times it was Link who clipped through, and Link is not exactly a high recovery character!). I think it only seems worse than Delfino because Delfino is familiar and to many this stage is not, but I think when actually played a lot, this stage mostly just shows is quality and shows that concerns are overstated while the upside is large and real.This is one of the things you would not realize until you've played on this stage competitively for a long time, and I kinda knew it wasn't obvious but didn't explain it just because the op was already really long. I don't know quite how you took that picture to make it look so big, but in practice, this is not large at all. If you're not on the "platform", you're very close to the blast zone while having the low ground and a lousy position to fight people attacking you from the platform. Being down there is super, super dangerous. Even being near the edge of the platform is pretty scary; you're closer to the blast zone than being near the edge of a typical platform but have all of the same mobility restrictions (you can't easily just "go right" without trapping yourself in an awful place). What this means in practice is that whoever controls the center stage on this transformation has an above average positional advantage, and the best thing to do by far with an above average positional advantage in 15 seconds is to push it really hard as you try to force your opponent all the way to the blast zone (which is of course always the goal, just a goal a bit closer at hand here than elsewhere). It's virtually always correct for the advantaged player to move in and move in hard since you just won't get that kind of opportunity so easily in the future and squandering advantages is how you lose matches. Even if the advantaged player has a big lead and doesn't want to move toward a walk-off at all, what this means is that the disadvantaged player will almost always rush right in (to get out of the bad stage position and seize a good one!), and either you have a rushdown battle happen at center stage or the advantaged player will retreat... and thus create the precise rushdown scenario I described in the first place with the two characters reversed. All around, this form promotes such aggressive play; I always get a bit nervous whenever we stop here just because I know that I'm about to have to fight really hard and that a lot of big exchanges are going to happen in the next 15 seconds. It's almost literally the exact opposite effect of going to the Small Island, and I think overall it's a pretty great dynamic that exists on this stage.