My Final Plea Regarding Floorhugging#936

Hey everyone, John Numbers here.

Near two-decades-long platfighter enthusiast and Nintendo World Chump extraordinaire.

I’ve made a few posts and comments about this topic in the past, but I wanted to make a full formal writeup about my thoughts on the state of the game, and especially how Floorhug as a mechanic factors in to all of it. I’m not really sure how much of this will come off as pointless shouting into the void, but I’m hoping that my extensive amount of experience in this genre might have at least give some weight to my words. To give a scope on how much skin I’ve had in the game, I’ve competed quite extensively in every Smash title between Melee and Ultimate, as well as P:M/P+, and Rivals 1 and 2, of course. Since P:M/P+ is a very relevant title to Rivals’ history in general, I’ll also mention that I was considered to be the No. 1 user of my main - Charizard - during my tenure playing the game, so I absolutely understand how to pilot platfighters that aren’t ‘Modern Smash.’ Also, I don’t think it matters, but I’m sure some people are going to ask; my usual rank in Rivals 2 typically tends to plateau around 1525; certainly no master of the game, but definitely well-experienced. Additionally, between Brawl, Sm4sh, and Ultimate, and Rivals 2 of course, I’ve engaged in more than my fair share of ruleset and game-design discussions with the respective communities at large, so I want to say that I’ve been doing this for some time now, to put it lightly.

Between playing the games and engaging in debate, I’ve been at this for almost two decades now. Again, I’m not sure how much all of that actually matters in the scope of my thoughts on Rivals 2, but I hope that it will at least put some amount of weight behind my opinion.

So those are my credentials; I’m going to go ahead and talk about Floorhugging now.

So, Floorhug (FH) is… a divisive mechanic in Rivals 2, to say the least. It’s a mechanic that allows players to use ASDI Downwards to reduce the hitstun and knockback of many of the moves in this game, which can allow a defender, after they’ve already been hit, to potentially counter-attack the attacker. Spikes and Strongs will break FH and potentially put the defender into knockdown. Upwards-hitting moves will break FH more easily. Grabs will completely ignore the influence of FH, of course. And you can always use good spacing, or really deep-to-the-floor aerials to help avoid potential counter-attacks from a FH user.

As far as I understand it, FH was introduced to the game as a way to help combat a wide variety of moves that had proven to be too overwhelming in Rivals 2’s engine, and too difficult to engage with, using the other mechanics of this game (generally, either shielding, movement, or trying to fight back with your own attacks). These moves generally also fall under a certain umbrella description I like to call: ‘If these moves are allowed to even touch your Shield, then you lost neutral.’ Most of the community refers to moves that fit the entire above description as ‘toxic moves,’ and some of the most commonly cited examples of these would include Zetterburn’s Fire Pulse, Loxodont’s Jab, Clairen’s Dtilt, and Forsburn’s FStrong. And to be fair, yes, FH does allow players to fight back against these kinds of moves that generally resolve in a lot of checkmate situations for the attacker.

Now, I don’t disagree with the notion of introducing a game mechanic to help curtail the strength of ‘overwhelming’ moves. In fact, I would say that the very-similar Crouch Cancelling (CC) exists in a similar design space, allowing players to mitigate the effectiveness of overwhelming moves by holding Down. And I would even argue that CC is perfectly fine as a game mechanic (even if I find it a bit obnoxious to interact with at times). The primary difference between the two mechanics, is the amount of risk a player incurs when using either mechanic.

For CC, your character needs to very deliberately be in the crouching state (for 3 frames) in order to activate it. This means that you are deliberately giving up your action - be it movement, attacking, or defending - in order to risk taking a hit to the face, all for the mere chance at being able to counter-attack the opponent. It’s something you have to use predictively, with the very real risk that your CC fails against whatever the opponent decided to try using against you. There is a proper push-and-pull here between the attacker and the defender, and I’d say it’s a proper example of a well-designed game mechanic.

With FH, however, the amount of risk being taken is completely flipped on its head. Since it’s activated with ASDI, rather than being in a specific animation state, it means that it can be used even while your character is inactionable. This means that it can be activated in situations where you’ve completely whiffed your moves, by simply holding Down during the recovery of said moves, meaning there’s no timing aspect to it.

Additionally, you’re risking very little for trying to activate it; since you use it during the cooldown of a move, you’re not giving up an action to try using it. And yes, I get that one could argue that the extra 25% damage taken, or the fact that getting hit by the wrong move while trying to FH could put you into an even worse situation than if you hadn’t done so is a risk taken with the mechanic. However… in practice, we see so often the situation where a player whiffs a move, the opponent hits them with something, and that’s the end of the punish from the opponent, because the whiffing player held Down and mashed out Shield/really fast move to cover themselves. Players are very frequently able to diffuse a situation AFTER THEY’VE ALREADY MADE A MISTAKE, just by accepting a very small amount of extra damage, instead of taking a full combo and being put into a bad position. This realistically means that FH as a mechanic has an unnecessarily low risk factor to using it.

And finally, there isn’t really a predictive aspect to FH. You use it when you’re inactionable. If the opponent doesn’t successfully hit you, then nothing happens. If the opponent hits you with something that can be FH’d, then you get a very good chance at diffusing the bad situation you were about to be put into. And if the opponent hits you with something that beats FH, then it didn’t matter if you FH’d or not; that hit was going to get you either way. And even in the situation where you get hit by moves that allegedly beat FH, there’s still the chance that the Spike/Strong/Upwards-Hitting-Move puts you into knockdown, giving you an opportunity to Amsah Tech and diffuse the situation anyway.

All of this, in my eyes, paints FH as a mechanic that has no timing aspect to it, and very, very little in the way of risk or predictive aspects. It’s a mechanic that allows players to belligerently whiff moves, and then escape a very large chunk of the consequences that come with that, all by holding Down. The defender has to put in extremely little effort on the mechanical and decision-making sides of it, but the attacker has to perform really specific actions with a high level of precision to work around it. To me, this marks the mechanic as extremely poor game design, even if there are technically ways to play around it. And it’s one that very unnecessarily complicates the aspect of whiff-punishing in this game, which I would argue is one of the most important elements of any fighting game, let alone Rivals 2 specifically.

We’ve seen from top-level play that it’s absolutely possible to play around FH. To say that it can’t be worked around would be completely disingenuous. The point I want to make is this: a game mechanic can have nuance. It can have ways it can be worked around, and worked into your own playstyle. It can have all of that, but it can STILL be a badly designed mechanic. To give some examples…

In Sm4sh, there was a whole entire culture around figuring out how to deal with the absurd frame data and general safety of airdodges. It was nuanced, and there were ways to play around it, but it was not good game design. Ultimate, there are pages and pages of documentation on how to deal with Steve as a character. You could write a whole novel about the number of interesting game interactions this one character brings to the table, but he’s not good game design. Even in Melee, with the renewed debates surrounding Jigglypuff camping the ledge, there are a number of ways one could attempt to approach that situation, including careful spacing from the ledge, or trying a risky ledge steal, but considering that we have rules specifically designed limit that sort of gameplay, it’s pretty obvious that it’s not good game design, either.

And that’s the main point I want to get at with Floorhug in Rivals 2. There are a number of ways an attacker could approach dealing with a defender whiffing moves and holding Down afterwards. They can use grabs, which always work. They can use Strongs, Spikes, and Upwards-Hitting-Moves, which might not always work, but are generally reliable in breaking FH. They can use good spacing, so they’re out of range of a counter-attack from the defender. They can use their moves as late as possible so they have a chance to get their Shield up in time. There are plenty of character specific options to consider, too. There’s all of this; the mechanic clearly has nuance to it, and I still put forth that FH is bad game design, with its current implementation. It’s a mechanic that complicates whiff-punishing far too heavily, and encourages players to more thoughtlessly use their moves, backed by a promise of being able to avoid the worst of the consequences for doing so. It’s a mechanic that is extremely powerful, very easy on the executional scale, and asks for barely any level of risk-assessment from the player using it. All of this, while the person fighting against it has to commit to very specific, sometimes challenging or even impossible options just to deal with it. The push-and-pull is so heavily skewed in the defender’s favor and I really do feel that the system needs to be re-examined at a fundamental level.

Now, with all that said, I don’t want to harp on solutions too heavily, but one that I would like to put forward, is the idea of removing Floorhug as a universal concept, but making it so specifically-designated moves are Floorhuggable. Those ‘toxic moves’ that many players say would become a problem if FH was completely removed from the game (again, things like Zetterburn Fire Pulse, Clairen Dtilt, Loxodont Jab, etc.). With a simple change like that, the dedicated mechanic that sought to give players viable counterplay to these kinds of moves, could continue to validate its own existence, while forcing players to exercise some level of decision-making behind using it (“Are they about to use a move that’s FHable?”). Meanwhile, players will now have access to a large majority of their kit when it comes time to punishing players for making mistakes. It would make whiff-punishing actually feel like a properly fleshed-out aspect of the game, and would force players to put a higher level of thought into their general offense. And if a player really wanted to use a one-size-fits-all, ‘I want to take a hit and counter-attack them regardless of the attack,’ then that player still has the predictively-inclined Crouch Cancel at their disposal. I think this overall is a very strong solution that’s worth considering.

Meanwhile, I would also recommend considering putting out a player survey if you haven’t done so recently, and asking about Floorhug somewhere in there, because I’m truthfully unsure how in the majority my opinions on all of this is, especially from the perspective of the top level. Player surveys are always good to do, in general, for a number of reasons, but I feel it would be very important for gauging public opinion on Floorhugging specifically at this point in time.

…I want Rivals to do well. I REALLY want it to do well. This is a title that stands as an important landmark in the platfighter genre, between asking Smash to do better as a competitive medium, and showing that other indie platfighters do NOT need to be bogged down with ten-thousand obtuse mechanics in order to be enjoyable. But… as far as I see it, as long as Floorhug continues to exist in its current state, this game is constantly going to struggle in terms of player retention. Every new update and added feature does a great job of drumming up interest for the title, but it really feels like Floorhug (among a few other issues) causes the game to hemorrhage players nearly as quickly. And at the very least, I can speak for a good chunk of what could have been the potential Rivals scene in New York. A number of players did give the game a real try (usually by my request), but just couldn’t get into it due to the presence of Floorhug causing their interactions in neutral and in whiff-punishing to just fail (among other problems such as game performance problems and certain character designs, though you guys have been doing a good job at addressing these I’d say). It just. Does not feel good to engage with, unless you’ve put a frankly obscene amount of time into the game.

I’m not sure what else to say. I gave this game a little over a year of my time, and through it all, I really did try my best to accept Floorhug for what it was. I really, really tried my hardest; I worked it into my own gameplay, and discovered all of the requisite counterplay needed to fight back against opponents using it. But through it all, I NEVER felt like I was ‘better-player’ing the opponent each time I whiffed a move due to my own carelessness, but then got off the hook scotch-free because I remembered to hold Down afterwards. And I definitely wanted to commit various crimes when I lost to opponents doing the same to me. The frustration I felt surrounding this mechanic eventually hit a breaking point for me around 4 months ago, and I had to stop playing the game. And unfortunately, I haven’t looked back since.

Throughout my tenure playing Rivals, I was giving this game near-daily attention, and gassing it up to my friends and Smash acquaintances in New York about how cool this game was and that they should totally play it. As a plea to the devs of this game, I really do hope that you’re considering potential adjustments for Floorhug, or at the least, a community survey regarding the playerbase’s feelings towards the mechanic. And… if, by some chance, you guys do actually decide to do something significant in regards to Floorhug down the line, I will be more than happy, at that time, to immediately go back to bat for this game like I had used to.

That’s all. And, despite my misgivings, I do want to thank all of the devs of Rivals 2 for everything, regardless.

Until then,

• John Numbers

Completely and totally agree on this write up and your pain points of floorhugging. I absolutely despise how powerful it is, because it forces me to act in a very specific way to counter something that requires next to no strategy, prediction or risk to perform, which runs counter to the reasons I love Melee-style platfighters, that being: freedom of player expression and creative playstyles. It’s just a slog to have almost all of your options in neutral cut down because the opponent held down

I can say with complete certainty that the design decisions keeping FH so centralized have driven many players away and drastically impacted player retention, at least among my online friend group and local scene. Many players just find it frustrating, and frankly unfun to be punished for what visually was a clean whiff punish. It’s not intuitive at all for these heavy moves to be sending the opponent nowhere for reasons not apparent until after it’s already happened.

As far as proposed solutions go, I have 2:

1. Reduce the threshold and power of floorhugging to be more in-line with it’s strength in Rivals 1. Contrary to what people would have you believe, Rivals 1’s floorhugging was very useful in certain niche cases, namely vs projectiles and weak pokes, while being, at the same time, orders of magnitude less infuriating to fight, with far more counterplay. This would also make characters feel less like they are glued to the floor until 100%
2. Remove the ability to floorhug while in most inactionable states, such as landing lag or dodge recovery. This would make the mechanic make far more sense, give it actual visual representation, and make it less of the get-out-of-jail-free card that it is currently

I would come back to Rivals 2 in a heartbeat if floorhug changes were proposed. Rivals 1 is my favorite platform fighter by far.

I have written similar posts and conclusions many times before, so i 100% agree. But still some things to add:

FH is particularry bad in Rivals 2 because moves have so little end lag. More often than not you cannot even apply an option that beats FH because by the time that would hit they are already actionable again, and as you correctly said they can just hold shield or mash a fast option. and even more ironic: most options that beat FH are very unsafe on shield. so in many cases you know exactly that your opponent is going to FH and cannot counter it without a huge risk to get shield grabbed if you are just a few frames off. So you amlost always go for grab yourself which is redundant and boring.
Thats one of the main reasons characters like Clairen feel so bad to fight and were much less problematic in rivals 1. If you have moves with super long reach and pretty short end lag, they become completely safe with FH since almost no char can cover the gap of the hitbox you just threw out AND apply a move that breaks FH in time before you are actionable again. So FH enables these chars (lox, slade etc are also guilty here) to simply spam options without little to no thought involved.

I also mentioned it several times: melee does FH (ASDI down) way better with Sakurai Angles and actually giving different moves different application in different percent. Not like Rivals 2 with its super linear “unlocking” of moves the higher the percent goes.

Finally i can also confirm that FH has made many people i know leave the game. both online and local. And both unofficial FH surveys paint the same picture.
But i must meantion that FH is not the only design problem the game has. It definitly is one of the biggest but there are many more (like safety of shield+strong OOS options, no cornering people because ledge invul etc) and the closer you look and the longer you play, the more obvious they all become. In the end the game is good looking, has great movement and char design, very good bones with the engine and netcode, but very mediocre combat system design. It can be fixed but it will require a big commitment from the devs to do all the necessary changes.

Nicely written. Speaking as a wrastor, the better I’ve gotten, the more limited this game seems. It really just becomes a game of grabs at low percent, which sucks when there’s so many more interesting approach attacks. Getting hit/combo’d/KO’d for whiff punishing just sucks. The feeling of using FH to get a hit is quite negligible, compared to how it feels when used against you. I really hope for some significant changes after EVO.

@melephs_cap

My point is that it does ultimately promote aggression because the camping response is incorrect – as you say yourself, it’s filtered out as players improve.

It doesn’t promote aggression. It promotes DOMINATION. The player that can floorhug simply dominates the player that can’t, so it’s up to THEM whether or not they approach more or camp. Floorhugging doesn’t encourage either explicitly. It allows for impunity in the choice.

When you improve enough and both players are floorhugging, the domination is gone, and so you have to play the game differently.

Moreover… If I don’t have fun until my 201st hour in the game, what gets me to play the 150th hour? Saying that a problem fixes itself once you’ve mastered a mechanic neglects the experience of the majority of players who have not yet mastered the mechanic, which is most new players. The road to mastery must itself be fun.

@melephs_cap
“But also, if you hold down as someone approaches, expecting a floorhuggable attack, and then they grab you into a quick throw, you’ve likely just not DI’d and given them a free followup.”

This can be the case in practice, but you’ll rarely need to hold down that long vs anything with a single hit. I think the danger with being forced to hold down is that, if you want to account for attacks with a fair bit of hitpause, you will have to continue to hold down even after you become actionable. Like, if Zetterburn dash attacks you the frame before you can act, your stick must be pointed downwards the fourth frame after you become actionable. And if you wanted to account for Ftilt, you’d need to be holding for even longer. And if the opponent was using a character with a multihit approaching tool (which jabs can count as in practice), you don’t really have a way to cover that option without continuing to hold down.

In addition to the risk of hard knockdowns/poor DI, this is the other “tax” that floorhugging has. This input makes it quite difficult to access your movement options in practice. So if your opponent knows you will try to floorhug, they can grab you even if they didn’t technically have enough frames to work with, for example. They also can take a bit of extra time to space or cross up with an aerial (very good in this game btw), as long as they’re okay with the punish being dropped if you chose to floorhug -> shield.

I’ve also had a lot of success with purposefully dropping punishes that I may have been able to connect with. When my execution isn’t good that day, I have trouble consistently spacing my tools to be safe vs flug. On those days, I take advantage of the fact that I get to set up any positioning I want vs an opponent who is rooted in place and is probably going to pick a panic button. You’re allowed to space aerials ofc, but it also lets you dash dance, waveland, cross up with a waveland, dash through, shield/crouch in front of your opponent, delay hits, or just get a harder punish off of their panic option. So even though you dropped your direct punish, you have not dropped your punish opportunity.

Especially because you will not be able to directly punish everything from floorhug on reaction. Many floorhug punishes are either reads or mashes meant to guarantee a frame-perfect reversal. As long as you don’t fall for the trap, this extends the whiff-punish window. I will sometimes just whiff punish with Fleet Fstrong vs people who are too happy to downhold + A, and it knocks them down surprisingly often. I can’t say how much people mash their reversal at top level, but most people would benefit from treating flug-reversals like wakeup DP’s.

To argue against myself here, you can buffer movement options and go back to holding down, in theory, to leave a small hole. Unsure of how strong this is in practice though. I buffer wavedash or dash + wavedash sometimes, and it’s decent vs reactive punishes, though I usually lose access to reversal options due to sliding way too far away. The dynamics at play are also different depending on how how your opponent is using it. Any time you can’t “just do the thing” that guarantees reward, you will be forced to deal with some really unhinged habits that accidentally beat what you’re doing.

That point aside, I think a lot John’s (and Bio’s) points against the mechanic are solid. Floorhug is a huge confounding factor for most interactions that involve the ground, and any amount of edges that it has are going to be grating when it constantly interferes with your primary ways of pushing the game state: attacking. Melee avoids this by providing a lot of top tiers with reliable whiff-punish options that don’t lose to floorhugging, that way you have a linear base gameplan to branch off of (so long as your execution is good enough). In RoA2, even a fairly skilled player can be forced to switch up their entire playstyle to be anti-Rock if they run into someone who chooses Rock 90% of the time and has a good punish.

I don’t necessarily agree with the solutions presented. Many of the solutions I see (not all!) essentially amount to removing fundamental aspects of the game and, thus, would likely require it to be rebuilt from the ground up. Even from a cold business standpoint, it’s a pretty massive risk to remove major things that the captured players like to chase an audience that has not been proven to be capturable yet.

But, I think players like John are effectively the target audience of this game. RoA2 can be very fatuiging to play when you’re trying to win, and if the combined package is not worth it for him, it’s a good indicator that further change is probably necessary. For floorhugging, if the edges can’t be sanded off to a sufficient degree without fundamental changes, then fundamental changes need to be in the cards.

At the very least, I think the devs will need to tackle the horrendously difficult task of completely overhaul the feedback of the mechanic. It heavily relies on negative-feedback (the expected outcome of “knockback being taken” not happening), and I don’t think it’s something that actually works well on a human level when the mechanic changes the gamestate every time it comes out. My novel idea is that the game should probably indicate if the opponent is doing a floorhug-eligible input at all. Atm, the opponent’s habits are a bit of a black box until the actual interaction occurs, which makes it very easy to have bad habits without the opponent being able to figure them out over the course of a Bo3.

(Forsburn, of course, should not have this indicator appear if he is in his smoke.)

The foundation of the current fighting game reneissance is improved netcode and a major step up in feedback to the player. It would be a major boon for this game if it can manage to fit itself into more peoples’ tolerance point.

Yeah, Melee and PM, FH doesn’t influence the impact of knockback/hitstun quite as heavily as in Rivals, and also, since it’s not Auto, you have to time the Down SDI, which presents a very real risk of DI’ing something horribly if you want to FH and mistime the attempt.

@AthleticInsurance868 , this is incorrect. The frame advantage you have on floorhug is greater in PM and Melee (the floorhugger is put into the empty landing state, which is typically 4 frames, after a successful, non-knockdown floorhug). This is true regardless of if you CCd or did a non-CC floorhug. In Rivals 2, there is a distinction between CC (4-5 frames) and non-CC floorhug (4-8 frames). In the majority of cases in Rivals 2, you will be getting the 8 frames from the non-CC floorhug, which is double the frames you need to go through in Melee/PM before actionability

In PM and Melee, you only need to ASDI down far enough such that you don’t leave the ground on the first frame of launch. This is also how rivals 2 works. There is no timing requirement in Melee/PM

I will also simply say that I agree. John put it all very clearly. I will re-emphasize that having this option in states like endlag is unappealing. If I have my opponent in endlag, I outplayed them, and I should be able to use whatever move I want to punish their greed. I learn to not do that, because I can’t, but I still don’t like the experience of having to remain vigilant and restrictive in my moveset when someone is in my face and in endlag.

@DimNetball090
thats another very good point. the visuals are horribly bad. it already starts with CC (please note that i am fine with CC as a mechanic/if it was the only form of FH) which shows giant arrows going down on the char which in every other game simply means debuff, which is something bad.
And pure FH is nearly as bad. It needs a propper visual representation that gives the feedback of “my opponent just did something to absorb/counter my attack”. not the visuals of them getting hit but just with shorter hit stun.
We must not forget melee was developed in less than a year. Sakurai had to cut some corners. But there is no reason why aether studios had to copy this without any more thought. Rivals 2 has been out longer than melees full development took. So there must be some room for improvements here if they are so hell bent on keeping FH.

if they’re at all considering any drastic changes but they’re not sure how it’ll affect the meta, using Steam’s branch feature to put up an alt build so that people can get direct competitive experience would be really cool. That way it’s not just a what-if, we can all see if it really does mess the game up or not.

I have little to add other than that I read all of the critiques in this thread and largely agree with them. I understand the intended function of FH in RoA2’s design, but I dislike its implementation. Evidently, I’m far from the only one.
I would be happy with any of the following changes:

• Removing the ability to FH in endlag after whiffing an attack. A similar change was applied to grabs months ago, but not attacks. (Shields are already so strong that I am concerned about the effect of removing the ability to FH when in endlag more generally.

• Reducing the effectiveness of non-CC FHing, making it a more committal, preemptive defensive option that is visually communicated to the opponent by the crouch state.

(These changes might reward passive or reactive behavior too heavily, however.)

• Reverting to the previous system of having specific moves be (auto-)FHable, as suggested above. I understand the rationale provided in the auto-FH patch - that of avoiding a growing laundry list of arbitrarily auto-FHable moves - but it feels like auto-FH is itself arbitrary and damaging to the game’s casual and competitive appeal.

I also really want to echo John Number’s experience of trying to introduce people to RoA2 only for them to be turned off by FHing specifically. As much as FH is intended to protect players from frustrating interactions, it fails in this respect; that is, the common sense frustration of “being punished for approaching” and “being punished for whiff punishing” very evidently outweighs the value of making specific moves less frustrating to fight against.

Anyways, love the game, here’s to a good Evo, and here’s hoping post-Evo is an opportunity to at least acknowledge these criticisms.