Melee is to Brawl as Short TTK is to Long TTK

Calling Smash competitive is rather generous. It's great casual fun, but it's never been remotely good for competitive purposes.

If the TTK gets any shorter I'm leaving and not looking back. If they make it shorter, personal shields, heavy shields, nanoweave etc may as well not be a part of the game. In fact I say they are pretty much useless already and TTK needs to be longer not shorter, add to this the netcode issues and lag in general making a low TTK unfun in a huge way.

i have average connection speed....when i get hit it feels like all 7 or 8 bullets hit me at one time => instagib.

Low TTK is gonna make is even worse.

It's pretty sad to see people asking for lower ttk.

The game takes quite a bit of skill to play actually. On the surface it looks pretty casual, but once you learn a lot of the different mechanics/techniques the game allows its pretty complex (wave dashing, DI, L cancelling). I know its nintendo and its a console game (both things I have sworn I won't play again) but you can't hold that against it. It was at MLG for a couple years and despite it being an over decade old game, there is still a small tight knit and very dedicated competitive player base that is still participating in tournaments.

A documentary was created for the game which can be viewed on youtube in multiple episodes. I thought it was pretty interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=smash documentary

Eh, it's not really about the skill cap. Even PS2 has a relatively high skill cap but it's details about the core design and aesthetic that make it unsuitable as e-sport style competitive game. Same deal (but different specifics) with Smash Bros.

Which is sort of odd to say, given that I just today got pulled into a 4-way splitscreen of the new Mario Kart and a couple of us were losing, and one spoke up and demanded we turn on the option where players who are further behind get better items, and I spoke up as being against that, and he (somewhat correctly) pointed out that catch-up items are truer to the aesthetic of the game (though he didn't quite word it like that, even though we all work in the games industry.) But even though I lost, I actually had more fun knowing the game wasn't cheating to try to get me closer to first place (although we for some reason played in Grand Prix mode with all the NPC drivers, and they were a pretty brutal force of chain-stunning ********* that definitely prevented it from being a truly skill-focused racing game haha.)

Personally, I think in order for a game to become an esport it has to have 2-3 things. First, it has to have a high skill cap because it makes for more interesting entertainment from a viewers perspective. With higher skill caps come more interesting/complex game mechanics and you can see the different decisions players make and why they are so good at the game. Watching people play low skill cap games is pretty uninteresting for me personally (don't like luck or random crap that determines a winner). Dota 2, Starcraft 2, Counter Strike, these games have high skill ceilings.

Secondly, it needs to be a popular game. Popularity draws more people to the game and therefore you can draw really talented players to the game that can make the game very entertaining to watch. Also, the more popular the game the more money that can be made my tournament organizers and the players themselves (which helps fund esports to becoming bigger and better). The International 4 (dota 2 championships) this year already has a prize pool of $7 million (its still growing) thanks to the intelligence of Valve and the dedicated fan base of Dota 2.

Lastly and I think this has slightly a smaller role than the 2 above, but still crucial. Is it needs good tools for commentating competitive matches. Good camera views/angles, tools that help commentators explain what is going on during the match ect. Something that PS2 very much lacks in atm.

Smash had all 3 of these. Granted due to smash being a fighting game it didn't really need to implement special tools for commentators because there are only 2-4 people on the screen so it was easy to tell what was going on. PS2 is quite different and a hell of a lot more complex due to the scale of the fights.

Called a handicap. I don't like it.

Right, that's one of many reasons that PS2's focus on large battles (which implies large teams) makes it terribly unsuitable for e-sport matches. Even early on I suggested they should ditch any ambitions along that line entirely and focus on going deep on massive war, which is PS2's unique selling point and the reason I'm playing.

But that's sort of apart from the fast vs. slow TTK discussion, which is relevant even if the focus is massive war. For that, the line of logic goes something like:

1. Massive war implies longer reinforce times between the bases players are pushing from. (I don't think this is automatic, but it does help support the aesthetic.)
2. Combat should be a relatively big part of a war game.
3. So because of 1 and 2, combat should take longer to resolve when it finally happens.
   • In addition to the side-benefit of making Evasion Skill a bigger deal, and generally games which reward more types of skill are more interesting because there are more ways to improve at the game. (Not always true, but it tends to be easier to increase the skill cap by adding a new type of skill than by going deeper on the existing types of skill.)

A longer TTK just doesn't work in big scale fights. The so called Evasive skill is useless when you have to fight against three people at once. You will die no matter how good you are probably without killing anybody. But with the short TTK we have in the game you have the chance to surprise them due to good tactics and kill them all at once or pick them up from a distance one by one.
BTW. Is there any serious military shooter with a TTK over half a second or so?

Only people who like long time to kill still play this game. Fast time to kill people quit a long time ago.

IMO. Close range TTK is ok. Long range TTK is totally broken. Some times it takes 10-13 shots to kill some one. You have so much time to get to cover while getting shot it's a joke

Saying it "just doesn't work" is just a hand-wavy "I don't want to think about the ways it actually could work" explanation.

TTKs were slow in PS1, and I took out 3+ players per life all the time. Evasion skill was part of it.

(You know, the same PS1 which was a massive game that worked with slower TTKs?)

The situation is a little nuanced:

• The evasion mechanics are "the game", which can either be deep or shallow based on the depth of those evasion mechanics (and the other mechanics involved in a single fight.)
• TTK duration is how long you get to play "the game". Obviously if you took the best, deepest videogame ever made but only let players play for 2 seconds every 60 seconds, the depth isn't actually going to shine through much and significant chunks of the depth won't even surface because you don't get enough time to actually experience it.

BTW, is there any serious military shooter that's fun to play? No, because they don't optimize for fun. They optimize for realism/seriousness.

Counter strike. Has quick time to kill.

It's not consider shallow.

I don't think so, ShackTac makes me thing that 'serious/realism' is "Serious Fun."

Eh, it rides the line and I don't think too many veterans from pre-CS days really consider it that deep. Hitscan weapons and fast TTKs undermine its skill depth, even though I wouldn't really call it outright "shallow".

Can you accurately click icons in Windows? Well then you're qualified to make CS headshots, which is basically the primary skill of the game. There's obviously a good deal of nuance beyond that, but that's the main skill.

Whereas in PS2/BF you have to be just as accurate except you're aiming at a predictive location in front of where your target is moving. Usually I call it "trajectory skill".

And when it comes to trajectory skill those aren't even strong examples. Tribes and Quake blow PS2/BF away when it comes to the actual skill used to win fights. PS2 mostly survives because it has so many other tiers of skill to it (but mostly planning/strategy related; the shooter gameplay is solid, but still a step below the better shooters.)

Yeah.... right, CS was one of the most successful competitive FPS of all time. A level this game dare not dream of even to this day.

This isn't mw2, and it isn't cod, and no it didn't feel glorious... Again, this is not a cod clone, and it shouldn't be one, short ttk's are fine when you're only facing like 5 more dudes, but throw in 200 and it's another story

Being successful has little relevance to the quality/depth of a game's competition.

Long TTK is needed by someone that won't develop their situational awareness or tactical sensibility. This is a team game.

Quake and Tribes are both games that work cause fighting is based on a caouple of "one vs one" fights on a map, that has nearly no cover and places to hide.
BTW I am pretty good at Tribes until a Juggernaut comes and blows my poor Infiltrator away.

Right, the design choices of those games were set up to synergize well with the trajectory-heavy combat.

But even shooter makes its design choices to synergize with trajectory-lite combat, it's an uphill battle.

For example Mechwarrior Online does several things to increase the skill depth of its non-trajectory weapons but it still doesn't quite achieve quite the same depth. (Your reticle's speed is limited by the tracking of your arms/torso, hit location matters more, lasers need to be held on specific locations for a length of time while moving, and you end up turning your torso during weapon cooldowns to spread enemy damage out.) So even when a game does quite a lot to try to make hitscan deeper, it's an uphill battle.