Analysis of Stage Usage in Smash 4

"Hey, you wanna start on Smashville?"

Smashville is frequently the stage chosen to begin Smash sets. It's so common that many people joke about the frequent usage.

But is it really used that often? Let's take a look.

Looking at VOD data for 41,735 sets, here is some stage usage data. As you might notice, it's the dataset export that we used to compare Player one vs Player two win rates.

Starter stages

Looking at the chart below, it's really clear that "Let's start on Smashville" is really a thing. Smashville is the starter stage on more than 50% of competitive Smash sets.

Stage usage by percentages

This chart is a bit hard to read with the smaller slices, but it's clear that Smashville is the starter of choice on well over 50% of Smash 4 sets. It's the starter 56.5% of sets to be exact. The one unlabeled sliver below is the catchall category of "Other" listed above (ex. Duck Hunt).

What happens after Smashville game one?

This might not come as a surprise, but most of the time after Game one is played on Smashville, we end right back up on Smashville.

Even though Smashville is the most frequented pick after starting on Smashville, it's easy to see that we have pretty good stage diversity for game two. The combination of Battlefield, Town and City and Final Destination make up nearly 50% of the picked stages after starting on Smashville.

Game 2 stage frequency

Let's forget about Smashville for a second. Independent of what the starter stage was, here were the stage choices for game 2 of Smash sets.

We know from the "after Smashville starter" data above that about 8k of the Game 2 choices are Smashville. That means that when Smashville is not chosen game one, it only ends up as the chosen stage 20.44% of the time in game two. It seems that users who don't settle for Smashville on game one also don't want to play it in game two.

People who start on Smashville are frequently happy to keep playing on it. People who do not start on Smashville don't frequently head to the state in the proceeding game.

Lylat Cruise

Lylat gets a lot of hate and for a lot of good reasons. If you are curious to how many competitive sets have been played entirely on Lylat (every game of the set), here is the breakdown. A lot of players will always ban Lylat, but not the players in the sets below, playing on Lylat until the end.

This blog post was written by a SSB World community member. Share your Smash 4 knowledge by creating your own blog post now.

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