by Doc – Owner, Founder, Advocate for Triangular Sandwiches
As you’re hopefully aware, a new training method, SSST, has resulted in amiibo being trained with certain values that we’ve never been able to raise in traditional methods. This famously resulted in the discovery that Pichu can in fact use Thunder competently, it’s just nigh impossible to train him to do so in traditional methods. This raises the question: is SSST going to set the bar even higher for quality trained amiibo, or is it just an easier way to set behavior values that we otherwise would be unable to train?
What It Doesn’t Do
Here’s the thing: SSST amiibo aren’t typically outperforming their non-SSST counterparts on average. There are several high-placing amiibo that are SSST-trained, but there’s nothing inherently special about training an SSST amiibo compared to a non-SSST amiibo. SSST does not, on its own, make an amiibo better than anyone else’s because of the simple fact that it’s SSST, and it certainly doesn’t create new parts of the amiibo AI that are exclusive to SSST-trained amiibo.
What It Does Do
SSST does create an environment where amiibo can have bizarre and wacky behavior values beyond anything we’ve ever trained in-game, and having these previously-unseen combinations of values can result in discovering new behavior pathways (i.e. Pichu’s Thunder) in the amiibo AI that we’ve never trained before. Technically speaking, modders have always been able to tell us that the amiibo could or could not use these behavior pathways. The reason SSST is so groundbreaking is because we’ve never had a way to actually train them in-game to do it before. SSST is, at its most useful, a research mechanic.
It’s not just research, though. Certain characters on the Amiibots leaderboards are littered with SSST-trained amiibo, selected as the best results from several trainer’s SSST experiment. These amiibo’s playstyles and move choices are recognizably similar to the traditionally optimal versions of these amiibo, but they’re just… different. Observant trainers can’t put their fingers on it but agree that there’s something odd about them.
That’s because SSST tends to modify the decision-making values of amiibo, and at this stage in the meta it’s really the amiibo’s abstract decision-making that affects its viability the most. We know what moves are the best. We know how the amiibo should play, broadly speaking. But getting the amiibo to have good decision-making is the most abstract and most important part of competition when everyone’s already made the optimal choices in everything else, and that’s the sort of thing that you can’t easily teach.
How It Affects the Meta
SSST will open up a few new avenues of behavior for amiibo, but its real impact will be in how it opens doors for amiibo to have new types of decision-making. These are small adjustments, make no mistake, but at this stage in the meta a small adjustment can make a big deal. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in the meta where discussions about an amiibo’s viability circle around the decision-making values it has and not just its raw move usage, and SSST may play a big part in that.
How to Use It To Further the Meta
To research with SSST, I recommend using the SSST glitch but using what I call a Semi-SSST Layered approach. I demonstrated this in my Pyra amiibo training livestream the other day. The Semi-SSST Layered approach is where I:
- Train the amiibo normally, using moves that the amiibo normally has a hard time using (i.e. Sonic Spin Dash)
- Put it into SSST for a few matches
- Train it normally again despite its playstyle being seemingly destroyed by the SSST
- Turn learning off and level it to 50
Don’t make judgments about the amiibo until it hits 50, because (as you can see in the stream) its underlying AI hasn’t fully leveled up until then. Once it hits 50, examine the amiibo to see if there’s any unusual behaviors that you haven’t seen in the amiibo before – that’s how I found my Pichu’s Thunder, for example, and a few other behaviors were found post-SSST too.
Semi-SSST Layered is also not a useful way to train a tournament-ready amiibo. Semi-SSST Layered is just for research, not competition.
Amiibo Doctor 