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I'm not a competitive player, but I think grounds for supporting camping being legal are the fact that it is so difficult to define and separate from fair legitimate play. I think there's a case to be made against certain types of camping that go too far and are easily identifiable, but not camping as a whole.

When I was a kid, we used to play freeze tag in elementary school. We had a phrase. No "puppy guarding". Meaning we couldn't wait by someone who was frozen to freeze them again immediately. At the time I didn't see a problem with the practice. I learned today that I was one hell of a spawn camper.

Never have I ever heard Vars insult gamers that hard before but boy was it good 😂

Camping is very easy to define, but it is difficult to accuse someone of. Any attempt to ban or limit camping would inadvertently affect every form of defensive play and ultimately do more harm than good

Video Idea: The Most Spammable Move In Smash Ultimate

My opinion on things like that is; Never blame the players to play "dirty", blame the developers. It is up to the developers to balance the game and make it better. Players will use their tools they have to win. Sure, it sucks to be in situation like that, but that's the resposibility of the developers to put mechanics so annoying tactics like that won't be relyable.

Tbh some characters have polarizing tools that force a campy playstyle. Like Lil Mac, Wario, Kazuya, and Luigi. And then some characters lack the tools to effectively play a different playstyle, like sephiroth, villager, or duck hunt. Camping will always be a thing but developers could help fight it

The problem with camping isn't whether or not it's sportsmanlike or problematic. It's a matter of who gets bored and approaches first because of how simply play to win camping is.

I think Rivals of Aether has an interesting solution to camping. Every character (but 1) has a projectile, can reflect projectiles, and have around the same ground speed. You can tell how effective this is because the only character who can effectively camp happens to be one who cannot rely on reflecting or using their projectile.

At the end, the idea that camping can be but is not always ok was put out there. If Sonic running away to time someone out is ok (as was stated), when is camping ever NOT ok? I legitimately can’t come up with any scenario where avoiding engagement to time someone out is ok but X, Y or Z is not.

If I was a Samus main, I'd take marshmallows, crackers and logs to a comp because camping is incomplete without them

Tbh, I feel like the onus on fixing camping is on the developers, through things like buffs and nerfs that can discourage camping/encourage more aggressive play. Which sucks when a game is abandoned, but still, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to ban such a broad concept as camping.

Remember kids, camping is the esports strategy.

9:07 is such a great moment

I think any attempt to prevent camping as a whole is going to hurt the game more than camping itself does

Camping itself may not be the root problem in Ultimate, but rather it's the polarizing nature of some of the characters that throws the balance of offensive and defensive gameplay out of wack. Camping wouldn't be nearly as prevalent if it wasn't incentivized and rewarded so heavily by so many characters' designs. Think about it. What's the best way for Sonic to deal with someone with middling mobility and no projectiles? Circle camp. What's the best way for Steve to get all his resources? Block the enemy with a literal wall to buy himself more time. How do you deal with Luigi, Little Mac or nearly every heavy? You use your superior mobility and your large hitboxes to play keep away because God help you if they manage to land one hit on you. While defensive play and using the clock to force approaches is a necessary and even positive feature in plat fighters, the sheer difficulty and fruitlessness of approaching an opponent dead set on evasion makes way too many games a hopeless, frustrating, boring slog. My plat fighter of choice, Rivals of Aether is a lot more offensively inclined for the most part and it's jarring how different the it feels to Smash. Rivals characters have more versatile projectiles, more complex combo games and way better mobility compared to Ultimates roster, and it improves the quality of life a lot. You'd think every character having good mobility, range and combos would make the game even *more* defensive, but that really isn't the case. Since everyone can weave around platforms so easily, even the most sluggish characters can catch up on defensive players quite consistently. It's hard to camp for an extended period of time if the enemy has the tools to actually catch up to you, especially if getting caught will cost you 50%, or even your stock. The game isn't flawless by any means. Its parry system is dumb, there's a lot of bugs and your opponent might pick Pomme or Forsburn, but I'd say the game totally nailed the ratio of offense to defense! As for Smash, I can't say the same. I think that if some form of action isn't taken against this hyper defensive play, it will eventually become the meta and drain away what little hope I had left for Ultimate. For my Ult bros' sake, I hope I'm wrong

I think my main problem with camping isn't necessarily that some characters are incentivized to do it, but that said characters are not sufficiently punished when they fail to camp. For example, a Samus player could theoretically spam her projectiles and run away for the entire match, but if an opponent manages to get past all of it, the fact she has halfway decent close quarters tools means that instead of crumpling under pressure and the match progressing, she just uses screw attack out of shield and instantly undoes minutes of her opponent's efforts. She failed to properly employ her optimal strategy, but she did not suffer for it. That's bad game design.

It really bugs me when a K. Rool stays in one spot, spamming side and neutral special; and literally doesn't know what else to do when I can get out of the way

At least for me, the reason we all play video games is to have fun. Winning is nice and everything, but at the end of the day the point is to have fun. If an although legal tactic takes away the fun then it ruins the experience for both me and the other person.

I mean, if we look at melee, there had been rules put in place to prevent excessive stalling. Comparing Melee Jigglypuff to Ultimate Sonic, I honestly see the same qualities in both. -Both of their primary goals is to get a percent lead and start draining the clock to either make the opponent make a sloppy approach, and thus lose a stock, or to simply win via time out. -Both have unrivaled mobility, Puff in the air and Sonic on the ground. -Both have near uncontestable moves, Sonic with Side/Down B and Puff with back air. -Both are infuriating to play against, and neither are fun to watch. I think the biggest difference is the ability to find any sort of "cause" for Sonic's ability to stall, or any way too prevent it from becoming excessive. Melee Puff camps the ledge because grabbing ledge always give some i-frames, so to tone down her stalling, there's a ledge grab limit, as well as pound stalling is banned outright. She eventually has to return to the fight. With Sonic he can stall because he's the fastest in the game (excluding speed Shulk) and has a MASSIVE unreactable burst range, what would we do to fix that. Not let him run? Ban his side b? We can't do anything that isn't either: A) Going to flip the meta on it's head. B) Just outright petty. This has been my sleep deprived rant on Ultimate's camping, and as always give no hate to players.

Never understood why people think camping isn't a built in part of the game that revolves around skill just as any other. It isn't easy to "not get hit" and it takes skill to not mess up for an entire match if necessary, and that can be seen clearly with the amount of players that manage to do it. Why is Sonix the only one doing that good with his character? Watch any other sonic play and you'll see how much worst they are at it. People got so mad about Jigglypuff in meele when it was basically just Hbox actually knowing how to play the character well... "Some characters can't deal with it" "Some characters dont have the speed/resources and its free win against them" Some characters also cant do anything about long/0 to death combos since even SDI isn't enough if their hurtboxes it to big, yet, combo game is seem as completely fine, just cause it looks cool (it does look cool tho, i agree). Camping isn't less part of the game as any other strategy, learning how to camp and how to deal with others camping, is as valuable a skill as learning you're confirms, recoveries, and how to apply and addapt every one of these to the current match

Unfortunately it's just a game design/gama balance issue. It's ultimately up to the developers to craft a game that avoids camping being a dominant strategy. If the game doesn't work to prevent it, then it's not the players being lame for camping it's the game being lame for allowing it.

I see no problem with camping, as long as there are s’mores.

Could always make a rule that you can't start "camping for a timeout" before a certain time in the game, maybe a minute and a half left. Sadly, this would give TOs more stuff to do, but if you make what camping of this kind looks like for each character, I think it can be done. Or you can call your opponent a bitch and hope that does the trick.

It is a bit ruffling to hear Zoning being directly equated to Camping. Zoning is literally just controlling space, and even just having big disjointed hitboxes like Sephiroth and Cloud do can lend themselves to zoning. Camping is specifically obligate non-interaction. While zoning tools are often used by some characters for the purpose of camping, the strongest camping strategies don't even use them.

As a Belmont secondary I try to push an advantage off of any stray hits I get while maximizing my chance of getting those hits in the first place as much as reasonaby possible, unless I'm fighting Incineroar, I will play keep away until the cows come home against that character.

the problem is less so the behavior and more so the game itself. it indirectly encourages camping. even if competitive smash was played with casual rules (2 mins, all items, smash meter) the character with the most movement options can get anywhere on the field faster than their opponent. So they'll likely get the items first too. mechanically smash rewards camping, and if players have a problem with it, we really just need a wholly different game. T_T

Camping is fine, it’s the degree to which Smash made it so good that’s not okay. Many other fighting games have anti-projectile and camping mechanics, Smash doesn’t have that many.

I remember watching John numbers play Dabuz in smash 4. Wii fit vs Rosa and numbers camping was brutal to watch. Dabuz was visibly upset.

I think everyone needs some type of charging mechanic even if it’s just a slight speed boost from standing in center stage to at least counter campy players

Steve and Sonic being meta relevant characters exacerbates this even worse in Ultimate.

The problem should be framed as the risk:reward of interacting vs playing passively. Ideally, a game punishes passivity and less skilled defence. Smash unfortunately has bubble shields, air dodges, and strong retreating aerials. What it desperately needs is an analogous system to high/low from trad. fighters so that passive players can't easily swat away and evade aggressors.

9:07 I mean... that wiifit play was low key galaxy brain xD

I used to compete at my locals back in 2019 and I always felt like the game was a bit campy. Thats just how the game is. A lot of people would camp without being aware of it. So im not surprised this is how the game ended up.

As someone who played a fair share of Fighting games, all metas evolve to defensive play( in which, can be seen as camping), cause as the combos and rewards get better, you feel the need commit less in neutral. So I wouldn't call camping as something bad, its only bad if the developers make it awful to play against. As an example, rivals of aether is a platfighter that has camping in it, a lot of it ( Mainly platcamping) , but almost all characters have ways to deal with it because of mobility/ tools not being exclusive to high/top tiers. In smash, you can clearly see which characters will be camped, and which will camp, and thats not the players fault or any unsportsmanlike behaviour, its just how the game is, a badly design game for competitive play.

I don’t like sonic either, but there’s no practical way to reign in his antics. You’ll always be drawing new lines for illegal camping. Either you ban sonic and deal with that rabbit hole or you accept him as-is. We can only hope that Nintendo gets better at making sonic for smash.

Totally right at 13:23. However, this just assumes that everyone was born with their main, and can never change it. When you select samus, your intention is to camp. That is the reason you play that character… because that’s how you prefer to win.

I think the biggest issue with camping is the 11 frames of input lag in the game. Navigating and timing moves to break camping and zoning tools is so much more difficult than just defending and waiting. Especially as an incineroar main

Imagine if there was some sort of ruling that if a match ends on time out, next match would have its clock or stock count altered in any way? 🤔

11:30 I disagree. He could have beaten Sonix if he was using minecart in less predictable ways and if he used forward air or backair to intercept Sonix. He just refused to engage with Sonic.

I think i just don't like campers in smash is mainly because your ability to overcome a camping opponent Isn't skill based or ablut outsmarting them, it's a Speed issue, there are many characters that flat out aren't fast enough to punish their opponent for doing this, and many games will have some kind of feature to allow the player to turn the tides on the camper but smash doesn't, the only way for a camper is to loose is by screwing up

Like facing Young Link on FD as Sheik. Shits hell.

Well yeah, the rule is "win by any means possible". If they can win in Tekken using Eddy/howarang and mashing their controler, they will! If they can win in Street Fighter using guile/Sagat and spaming projectiles/turtling, they will! If they can win in Smash, spamming with Samus or camping with Sonic, they will! People will always find a way to secure their victory, keep the advantage as much as possible and avoid interaction as much as possible in fighting games (0 to death, spamming, timing out, using top tier, infinites, set ups, loops etc...), because when and where as sportmanship ever been a viable strategy to win safely?

Maybe... make matches 5 minutes long? That would make it possible to have Grand Finals as a Bo7, not that thats necessary. The lower time limit would grant camping a bit more power, but it limits viewer irritation?

(Honestly they should make a time-out a tie, then sudden death that force interaction with smaller stage)

Honestly any full ban of camping (outside of absolute degenerate strategy like planking) will do way more harm then good to a game. Not everyone wants to play two gorillas going at it. Some players like the more methodical game play that camping supplies. There is a fair bit of thought that goes into most camping.

Maybe the problem is the timer, or moreso how it currently affects the game. You obviously need a timer so games don't last too long, but if a character knows they can just exist long enough until their opponent loses, they're gonna try winning that way. Perhaps a system where players start rapidly building percent, or the complete removal of the timer would at least help to manage the abuse of timeout strategies. Neither of these are perfect solutions and they might not even be good ones either, but they can at least be iterated on.

I remember going to some local best-of-three tournament back in the very end of Smash 4's years. Their solution to camping was simple: have an overseer of the match who has a stopwatch. If a player camped for 15 seconds or more, they were forced to throw the match for 'unsportsmanlike behavior'. The victim would immediately earn one win against their opponent, and the match would prematurely end. While I believe that occasion of the rule was extremely heavy-handed, it could lead to similar rules implemented that would dissuade camping playstyles. Is that a good, or bad thing? I'll let you decide on that.

i think you should play to your crowd. if youre playing your casual friends, chill out If youre playing your competitve friends, then be merciless but maybe stylish as well if youre playing tournaments, then definitely use degenerate tactics... youre there to win.

So many video from Vars! This is too good to be true!

i think you shouldn't be able to time someone out by percentage. only by stocks. if you have the same amount of stocks and the timer runs out, no matter the percentage you should go into sudden death

This is what Elite Smash Mii Gunner play like with the 3332 set. (Grenade Launch, Gunner Missile, Arm Rocket, and Bomb Drop) They literally only use projectiles from across stage. Don't get me started at being at ledge against Grenade Launch

Pretty funny when Samus does a charge shot to camp, but doesn't remember your character has a reflector. They can straight up die from that mistake sometimes.

Haven't binged a channel this hard since I discovered LockPickingLawyer xD great stuff.

I love ehen someone times out a Steve, that set was epic.

I think most of the hate for camping comes from Death Match type game modes. Honestly, I never feel like an enemy is camping in an objective based game. Of course, they are near the objective. I'm trying to take it and they are trying to protect it. People just got annoyed with someone holding a position that is almost impossible to approach without dying. I've used camping tactics in some games. Back when Battlefront 1 came out, I played Hero Hunt a few times. And my favorite tactic was a form of camping. On a base with doors that open when someone approaches, I stood just outside of the door and waited for people to approach, as soon as they did, I hit them with Force Choke or whatever I had. On a battlefield with no cover, but long hallways, I would run and engage enemies as needed. As Leia I would drop a Shield generator in a halfway when I knew people were chasing me and keep running so they couldn't hit me. As Luke I would line them up and use his charge to kill multiple enemies at once. All tactics I see some form of in this video. Here's the thing. They won me games. Sometime with a single turn as the Hero, I would win handedly. I'm sure people hated me for it, but optimal strategy was optimal strategy.

I play link and believe me camping is cancer id rather play a fast pace opponant than someone whos gonna spam at range projectile should be used to create an opening not making a wall between you and your opponant

13:47 agreed some people play characters that are asking to get camped.

I know from country singers that grass is blue, so there!

Personally I don't see camping as a major problem in the game. However, if it were to be considered detrimental to the game an easy way to counter it would be a stalemate clause similar to what exists in chess. You could have it to where if neither player inflicts damage to the opponent in X amount of time the game ends in a draw. This would still allow some level of camping and zoning while also ensuring that both players still need to strive to have occasional engagements and trades while doing so allowing opportunities for slower characters to turn the match around. Granted that would have to be implemented in the game somehow which would either require dev support or much more likely a mod being made for competitive, but it's not outside the range of possibility and would be the most fair way to address camping.

That said the real issue with smash bros camping is the lack of defensive and offensive tool balance. Crossups removed, balloon knockback, framedata spreads, lack of universal movement options, lack of safe ways to penetrate defense, lack of ways to avoid being put into a horrible disadvantage. Its the whole game thats an issue as a whole and no balloon knockback is part of teh problem. Bubble shields is another. Another issue is risk rewards and how its spread among the cast. You could easily argue consistent 0-death characters as cheesy and underhanded as much as camping which also encourages camping more as well. There is no complete fix and camping doesn't need to be removed otherwise you have an inverse problem where there isn't much thinking involved with your decisions even more than there already is because ultimate is the most simplistic and caveman platform fighter out there already. People need to learn to appreciate defensive play more. Even in the better smash games like ROA and project m and HDR, camping is still a strat that gets used from some characters and an infamous ROA camper is ABSA and its some of the most hype camping you could ever see. Penguin's Absa is hype. Camping can be hype. People love footsies in fighting games which is pretty much movement camping if you think about it fundamentally.

Me when playing Byleth: So do none of you in this four player online match realize you need to stop me from taking my sweet time to fully charge an arrow to hit anyone horizontally infront of me and probably get a bunch of kills? No? ...Ok then?

11:20 perfectly exemplifies why sonic is more of a problem than Steve and Kazuya

that opening joke made me die as an eagle scout 😂😂😂

Pretty sure there's rules against punch someone in the face to get what you want. We call them laws lol

As a Luigi player, I get camped all of the time. When players make the argument “if I approach, I die” I understand. Certain characters “deserve” to be camped out.

There’s a little game called YOMI Hustle, it’s like a turn based platform fighter. It has a mechanic called sadness, where if you spend too long without actually fighting and just running away, you become sad

As much as camping is a legal strategy, it's boring to watch and play against. If the game has no reasonable solution other than "join/submit to the camper", then frankly I have better and more fun things to spend my time and money on.

oh wow that roast was fire lol

My least favorite campy characters are Pac Man, Samus/Dark Samus, Belmonts, Links (Depending on the player) Wii Fit Trainer, Mii Gunner, and Zelda.

Can you make a "Why everyone plays: Diddy Kong"?

My Samus has frustrated people, and My Cloud Seph and Byleth give the impression that I can only play by cheesing out unfair reach. But I hate how Bayonetta can just up and take stocks off the top with a single out of shield punish. Like, Imagine in Samus's screw attack didn't put her in freefall and instead true combos into charge shot to kill out of shield under 80. I feel compelled to wall out Bayo and avoid a loosing close up fight.

This may sound riduculous, but why do we need a timer with matches at all? To me, camping's main crutch is the fact that the timer will run out. As soon as someone gets a lead in anyway, all they have to do is keep it until the timer runs out. I don't see camping being nearly as effective if the timer got removed. You could argue that camping would be perpetual due to no time limit, but the match won't end until someone loses all of their stocks.

0:05 you’re lying, i know the color of grass! Its yellow

Why don't the smash community implement a "shot clock" rule like basketball. Before the shot clock, it was a viable win condition to get a lead and literally sit on the basketball ball for the rest of the game. In smash this could be something like: the player has 30 seconds to make a concerted effort approach their opponent under threat of a one stock penalty.

I think some projectile heavy characters need serious weight nerfs. Young link is 88 which makes him heavier than little mac. Even worse is samus who's like 108. Samus has one of the best disadvantage states in that weight class and her recovery is fantastic. All projectile's should get blanket sheild stun nerfs. Mewtwo shadowball into dash shouldnt do 80% sheild and be as consistent as it is

As much as i hate camping most of the time its just a skill check. How good am i against projectiles? Can i adapt faster and better? What tools are at my disposal that i need to use to my advantage?

In a tournament setting, camping is fine. The point is to win; entertainment value doesn't matter. No one is going to let a Sonic player through to the winner's bracket because he chose to lose in style. In a casual setting, camping is not fine since at that point, no one is really having fun and nothing's on the line so there's no reason to do it except to be annoying.

6:19 ok, but Mewtwo is actually a Zoner

Your section on platform camping with WhyDo's gameplsy got me thinking, WhyDo already plays Steve, Aegis, and ROB, now he just needs to pick up Kazuya, Sonic, and G&W

Vars should interview sonix that'd be cool

The problem is simple,Everything 😃

2:31 4:26 This Is Clever.

Lower the timer to 5 minutes to make the time spent camping shorter. Timeouts can be hype. It’s only boring when people do nothing at all

Why would Jigglypuff go head first into Sephiroth? Because Sephiroth has bad up close options. If Jiggs can weave away and into Sephiroth's face, that's basically death since Sephiroth is rather light. But you'd probably spend half the match trying to do that since Sephiroth is just going to poke Jiggs until it dies

Me: Oh cool another Vars Smash video 8 seconds in: Holy ****

I mean if a strategy works it a works if people don’t find it fun it doesn’t matter because it’s an aspect of the game and if your charecter gets destroyed by camping, there are 70+ other characters

"There is no ammo in this game unless your name is hero" (Sad Robbin noises)

when you play for fun camping is super lame, but if want to go pro is an essential part of the game. You should know how to campo and how to not get camped if you want to get good, you are not allowed to complain

It may be fun to play AS your character in a vacuum, but the vast majority of matches are just miserable experiences because playing AGAINST most other characters is not enjoyable. I’m glad I stopped playing this game years ago before it got REALLY bad, Meta and community both.

I play smash (and other games) casually, for fun, which is why I absolutely DESPISE campers. They suck all the fun out of the game for what feels like a VERY cheep, very unearned victory and some meaningless numbers (GSP). In addition, I would argue FPS campers are easier to deal with, as you most often have access to longer range weapons and/or explosives (and ways to counter them, in case the campers are using them), in addition to campers picking similar places, which means you know where to look out. Side note, another thing that makes specifically projectile camping (and to a lesser extent faster characters like Sonic) MUCH more infuriating to fight against is the fact that unlike FPS games, being hit by ANY stray attack means you CANNOT act for a set amount of time. It may "only" be 0.05 seconds, but chances are that once you get hit, you won't stop being hit until you lose the stock, and then it's up to you to use the brief window of intangibility you get after respawning (THANK YOU SO MUCH, NINTENDO) to get as much done until your opponent inevitably goes back to camping you out.

Can you do a video on Mr. Game and Watch? He strikes me as probably the strangest high/top tier

Lol at 9:14 the Wii Fit wins with that down B heal.

The same day this was uploaded, I wrote an essay on defensive metas for North American sports. Riddle me that! Here are the criteria I used: A) Continuousness: Whether a game is played with or without discrete offence/defence, and how easy it is for defence to interject in an offensive push. B) Asymmetry of effort: The skill gap between successful interactive and passive play. C) Reversibility: How easily an interactive effort can be turned into an unfavorable outcome. D) Commutativity: How similar players' objectives are at any given point during a match. E) Unpredictability: How variable the typical game-state can be. In this way, Smash is most like Hockey and Soccer, and less like Football or Baseball. Basketball is an interesting case, because without the shot clock and a bunch of other ad hoc rule innovations, it would end up being the most defensive. However, with its immaculate rule set, it ends up being arguably the most interactive. For this reason, I pin the sorry state of Smash on Sakurai, who is far too worried about casuals getting discouraged by a few movement options/moveset restrictions.

One of the things about camping in Smash is that we know the game can be fast-paced and fun. We've seen it time and again, even from conventionally campy characters. In a game like SF5 (I haven't played 6 so I don't know if it's faster-paced) where games are more slow-paced and defensive, camping is closer to the norm. Every character in Smash has the capability of playing offensively, even conventionally campy ones like Sonic and Belmonts. This means it's harder to justify camping except for some matchups where "that's just how you play the matchup."

Imo if camping is either excessive or part of the main game plan it's not fun

Acr: If it's that bad let's just use Sudden Death for even stock counts. That way the camper is required to at least get a kill.

Imo I think the best way to prevent camping, that is at least accessible to the community, is to lay down some rules for specific problem characters. Of course, this should be agreed on by the community at large. The most egregious examples being Sonic and multi-jumpers like Jiggs. In general you can simply tell when someone is intentionally stalling for a Timeout. It will end up being a decision for judges, but I think it would be healthier to cut down on it happening. The examples in the videos should be very easy to rule against. It's not even a match at that point, it's simply boring and spoils the whole set.

14:11 It's really that simple. I always see people who see so flabbergasted on how people can spam or camp. They're just in it to win bruh. For all you know they could be the most chill fun players ever. Outside tournaments. However the minute payment comes into the equation, it's full on try hard mode. It's really not that hard to understand