by Doc – Owner, Founder, Will Probably Get Sucked Back In For a While If Smash 6 Has Amiibo Training
Amiibo Doctor as a website is what, almost 8 years old now? I think we turn 8 in May. For this little thing’s entire existence plus one or two years, Amiibo training in Smash Ultimate or Smash for 3DS and Wii U has been an ongoing thing. I’ve had the privilege of seeing the rise and fall and eventual “entropy” of two amiibo training metagames over the last 10 years. Fortunately, I think the Smash Ultimate amiibo metagame is in a much better place than the Smash 4 one, as there are still plenty of trainers to go around and tournaments are held periodically, even if meta revelations don’t happen much anymore. It’s at a nice, steady state.
But I digress. I’ve been reflecting a lot on this time period, and on the unique nature of amiibo as an esport relative to other esports. My present fixation is on Pokémon (as you probably noticed by the dearth of Pokémon Tera raid content these last few months) but I will always have a special place in my heart for amiibo training, and as I compare amiibo training to other esports, it occurs to me that there are very many unique and cool aspects of the amiibo training hobby that simply don’t exist in other esports. So let’s put the “Amiibo” back into “Amiibo Doctor” and talk about the uniqueness of amiibo training.
I’ll put a disclaimer in here and say I haven’t been heavy into amiibo training in a few years, though I’ve lurked in competitive servers (mostly USAC) often, just to read posts by old friends as they talk about their lives. It’s nice to see that people you used to know are still alive.
Rules? What Rules?
Amiibo tournaments started, and still are, entirely subject to the whim of one person: the host. Occasionally a few individuals will co-host amiibo tournaments, but by and large for the 99.9% of amiibo tournaments that have ever occurred, they were all hosted by one individual. As such, that individual could set up their own rules, which often created a metagame that was just a flake different than something you’d find in a more traditional tournament. Maybe Bowser is legal in this tournament but not legal in that one. Perhaps it’s an “A+ or below” tournament where only amiibo at or below the A+ tier in the current amiibo tier list are legal. Maybe it’s an A+ or below tournament except Bowser is also legal, and Bayonetta is banned because the tournament host is still mad about Smash 4. They can all be their own thing!
Compare this with Super Smash Brothers human tournaments, which tend to aim for a few-sizes-fit-all ruleset, where the same characters are legal or banned across all tournaments generally speaking. (Yes, I know local tournaments can have their own rulesets, but many local scenes try to follow what the national scene is doing.) Generally speaking, if large tournaments ban a specific character, the smaller tournaments often follow suit, and only differ majorly on the occasional character ban or slightly different stagelist. It’s not uncommon in Smash tournaments to have 100% of the roster available or close to it, whereas amiibo tournaments are most comfortable banning the best 2-4 amiibo no matter what, and then having discretionary bans from there. Hell, entire tiers get banned regularly in amiibo tournaments and it’s no big deal.
Compare this also with competitive Pokémon. While Pokémon Showdown does allow for a lot of custom rule sets, which is cool, practically all competitive Pokémon play occurs in predefined generations, with predefined rosters of Pokémon available and not available, and a level of precision in their rule set that is simply not matched anywhere else. If the Generation 3 OU rule set committee decides they want to add another condition to how Baton Pass can be used in a tournament, they can be exactingly specific in how they formulate that rule and implement it easily. In other words, unique rules don’t exist in the other esports I’m familiar with, at least not to any major degree. Amiibo has no such precision.
Determinism
To my knowledge, every other esport on the planet requires players to play, creating a scenario where the likely outcomes of games is fluid and can change at any point. Players can learn, adapt strategies and identify patterns of behavior in their opponent and react accordingly. If you learn of an esport that isn’t like that, let me know.
Amiibo doesn’t play like that. Amiibo tournaments are, basically, two sets of behavior weights placed into a fighting simulator that behave according to an algorithm, and an RNG seed serves as the base determinant of how it’ll operate. There’s no adaptation and no strategies beyond trainers crafting their training ahead of time to accommodate the limits of what their own amiibo and to beat the likely patterns their amiibo opponents will play. In fair rulesets, the stages don’t usually change and there’s no items interference to bring more RNG into the fight than there otherwise would be. Because of the complete lack of adaptation, and the relatively stringent limits on amiibo AI, you can reasonably well guess how an amiibo tournament set is going to turn out before it ever begins just based on tier list placement alone.
Fracturing Is Part of the Package
To any new amiibo trainer, I always point them to USAC. USAC is and has been since its inception the center of competitive amiibo tournaments, and if a tournament is happening somewhere it’s going to be talked about in USAC. That’s where the amiibo tools are hosted, where the guides are written and where most of the research is conducted.
Still, there’s a bunch of other places that actively (or at least, were active the last time I checked) host competitive amiibo tournaments, such as SUAL, which has its own weekly tournaments. I remember when SUAL first showed up; I helped integrate them into the broader amiibo community by promoting them heavily. There’s any number of other, smaller Discord servers out there that may not have consistent tournaments or operate on the “standard” competitive amiibo ruleset, but have tournaments nonetheless. EAX comes to mind as well.
Other competitive communities do have their own niches and subgenres, but I don’t think there’s that many of them that are completely separate communities operating on their own iterations of each other. It’s kinda funny – there’s a lot of people in SUAL that aren’t in USAC and vice versa, but they have significant enough overlap that when it comes time to make the USAC tier list the results of other non-USAC tournaments are part of the discussions. This is all baked into the cake. If you want to do amiibo tournaments under your own ruleset, or variation of an existing ruleset, you can host your tournament in USAC… or hell, why not just start your own little tribe? That’s part of the fun.
It’s Chill
SpliceStream, for several years, ran very long-term leagues requiring participants to be online at certain times to participate in amiibo arenas, and they were quite popular. I was shocked at their popularity, as I figured requiring people to be online at specific times was far too much coordination compared to what trainers were used to. We typically just throw our bin files at each other and let the tournament host handle things. But Splice is a great streamer and his community was very warm, and those things all together really made these leagues feel like home to people.
Amiibo’s a pretty cool place, and very dedicated. Extremely dedicated. I think it’s fair to say that 20XX has been achieved insofar as it possibly can be achieved on this side of eternity, as the conversations around specific optimality of amiibo is coming down not to their playstyles and move choices, but now to the specific byte values and ranges of acceptable values. That’s as precise as it possibly gets, the mechanics of amiibo don’t get more than that.
Yet for as intense as the mechanics of amiibo training get, it’s not intense interpersonally. I just think that’s neat.
I don’t know that amiibo training is the future of esports. I used to feel like it was something that should be shared with everyone the world over and really worked at this website and the Youtube channel to make that happen. It never got as far as I’d hoped, but honestly? …I’m just glad it’s still around.
Amiibo Doctor 