The professional scene of my favorite video game is once again thinking of banning wobbling. A certain number of states in the Super Smash Bros Melee (SSBM) community are now adopting wobbling bans, with Tennessee and Kentucky being the first pioneers. Wobbling was briefly banned in for a time between 2009-2013, but was unbanned in 2013 and has been since. Trying to be extremely brief on the explanation, since this is more about banning things in general than wobbling itself, wobbling is a technique that when set up properly (and it is not difficult to set up) it is inescapable and leads to an automatic “score”. In this game, score 4 times and you win. There are a couple reasons that are commonly cited that people want this technique banned, and I think going through them has interesting parallels to real sports that have “banned” things or made rule changes to stomp out certain tactics.1. It is not fun to watch: This is one of the most common and strongest arguments for banning wobbling. If you take a look at the video linked above, you can see that wobbling is not very visually stimulating. In this video game in particular, flashy movement and exciting techniques are what make it a great spectator sport. I liken this to the 4 corners strategy employed in college basketball, where a point guard would stand in the middle, with the 4 other players occupying the 4 corners of the half. This strategy was effective because there was no shot clock in the college game at the time, and one lead could lead to a win. This would allow extremely safe passing, as the court is spread wide, and can be done over and over as long as any one player did not hold the ball for 5 seconds when closely guarded. As anyone familiar with basketball can imagine, this was often extremely boring to watch, with one team holding onto possession for minutes at a time without doing much. Basketball is generally a high flying game, with top athletes putting that on display all the time. This cut it down immensely. The best known example was the ACC championship game in 1982, where UNC, the primary users of 4 corners, held the ball for 7 straight minutes in the second half and won 47-45. This was long after similar debacles happened in the NBA, most famously in 1950 when the Fort Wayne Pistons beat the Minneapolis Lakers by a score of 19-18. This strategy was not necessarily over-powered, any team could do it, and it wasn’t employed all the frequently anyways. The last season before the shot clock was implemented in the NBA, the PPG for a team was still 79, meaning the 19-18 stuff was far from the norm. But it was still necessary to ban it for the game to thrive and grow, and a 24 second shot clock was introduced to prevent this type of stalling. This can be seen as a parallel to wobbling in Super Smash Bros Melee. While only one character can do this technique, and that character is not winning big tournaments, it is still cited as unhealthy for the game, as once again it is extremely boring to see, it overcentralizes that one characters strategy, and it takes away all interaction between players once it is started. Most of these traits are similar to the 4 corners strategy which was eventually banned. Modern parallels can be the Hack-a-shaq type strategies, or defensive shifts in baseball. They are not necessarily strong, but the boring nature of those strategies have some calling for bans of some type. Others push back, because like wobbling, the strategies are not dominating, you don’t have to do them to win, and the best teams are not necessarily doing them all the time.
2. It is too easy: As in, the risk and reward is too disparate. Wobbling is not a particularly difficult to technique to pull off. Most people who are familiar with the game cite that they can learn to do the technique itself in about an hour. While doing this in practice is obviously much different than in a real match, the fact still stands that this technique that grants an automatic kill once started and can be learned fairly quickly. A “0 to death” combo is one of the most exciting things in Melee, but with all other characters this requires an insane amount of skill and technique to accomplish, and because of the options the other character usually has while being hit, requires constant reaction and readjustment from the aggressing player. Take a look a the video above. In this video the red bird character does a veritable storm of different attacks and inputs on the controller, and eventually is doing 5.7 inputs on the controller a second, allowing him to “0 to death” the other character, who by the way is generally able to decide on the fly which way each attack sends him, meaning the red bird character does not know for sure which way he needs to go to continue the combo. Compare that to the first video of wobbling. The result is the exact same, a “0 to death” combo, where one character kills another in one string of moves without being hit. But wobbling requires just rhythmically tapping one button at 200 BPM once the grab is confirmed, and the other character cannot do anything about it. One combo was a one in a hundred chance occurrence, one of those plays that always shows up in highlight videos, only possible with years of practice, the other can be learned in less than a day and will happen often 4 times a game. In addition, going for the wobble is not particularly risky either, as all that is really needed is to grab the opponent, something that usually happens dozens of time per game, and they cannot really be punished to death for missing it. There is not great comparisons to real sports, but I will try to make a couple. The first one that comes to mind is flopping in sports, or exaggerating/making up contact to get favorable foul calls. This is prevalent in soccer and in basketball these days. In soccer especially, the risk/reward of flopping is similar to wobbling (they even sound kind of the same!), where a well timed flop can lead to a penalty, usually a sure goal, while the risk of flopping is usually nothing, or at most a yellow card. Similarly in basketball, flopping can result in free throws, and some players have made a name for themselves by selling contact and getting to the line, I.E. James Harden. Making free throws or a penalty is generally pretty easy, I might be able to score a penalty or a free throw even at the top professional level, but I would have zero chance of doing that in a normal game situation. Flopping is generally considered bad by both communities, and it is forbidden by the rules of both sports. While not exactly the same, the low risk, easy to perform maneuver to achieve a great reward is similar in my mind. It will be interesting to see in the coming days if more and more states begin to ban wobbling. Kentucky and Tennessee are not major players in the SSBM world at all, so this may just be a small time thing. And there are drawbacks for players from those regions, as they will be less equipped to deal with wobbling when they travel out of their state to play. But with more and more people and even top professionals calling for a ban, it may be sooner rather than later that this ban is enacted in full. And I think it opens an interesting dialogue on banning things in general. Do you ban things only for being too strong? Or do you also ban things the fans don’t like? Is it the strength of the tactic that is the problem? Or the risk vs. reward? Let me know your thoughts on banning in the comments below.