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Minecraft Steve Is Once Again At The Front Of 'Smash' Players Minds As Discussions Regarding Banning The Character Heat Up

June 21st, 2022 - 11:59 AM EDT by Adam Downer

6 comments

How do you solve a problem like Minecraft Steve?

That question has been lingering in the back of the Super Smash Brothers Ultimate community's collective mind for months but was thrust to the forefront of discussion after last weekend's "Gimvitational" tournament in which a young Steve player, Japanese phenom Acola, won the event, while another, Yonni, reached fifth place. Both of them scored major upsets against established veterans in the process.

Throughout the event, it was clear that the character's tools greatly outshone those of its foes. Both Yonni and Acola were able to use Steve's ability to create terrain to effectively edge-guard opponents, and both utilized Steve's multiple strong kill moves, particularly with the diamond pickaxe, to secure early stocks. A player taking 80% damage from a single, basic Steve combo was a common sight, as were stocks lost incredibly early to Steve's plethora of powerful attacks, not to mention his mine cart attack which also acts as a command grab.

After the event, four of the attendees — competitors Marss, Light and Cosmos and caster L4st — tweeted the hashtags "#BanSteve #Please."

Some of that group later indicated that they were merely trolling the ever-hysteric Smash fanbase, but it nevertheless started the ball rolling on some of the most serious discussion regarding banning the character from competitive play seen thus far.

Those in favor of banning the character argued that the character has too many effective tools in regard to the rest of the cast, such as his ability to conjure blocks out of thin air to mess up recoveries and protect himself. This also heavily skews the "risk-reward" factor of every Steve interaction heavily in Steve's favor. This means that if a player attempts to hit Steve with an attack and Steve blocks or avoids the attack, it's likely Steve will rack up high damage and perhaps a kill, while the other player would likely have only racked up mild damage numbers.

They also argued that as players of the characters grow more knowledgable, he has the potential to dominate the game's meta by making all characters who can't effectively fight him unviable. Similar situations happened with Bayonetta in Smash 4 and Meta Knight in Brawl, and those characters' eventual dominance of their respective games is often cited as a reason why those games are not popularly played anymore.

Those against a ban felt calls for a ban were hyperbolic, arguing that there was effective counterplay against Steve and that the character had not yet put up results comparable to Smash 4's Bayo and Brawl's Meta Knight.

A simple solution to the Steve issue would be for Nintendo to patch the game with alterations that make the character less powerful (aka "Nerfing" him), as they'd done with Smash 4's Bayonetta towards the end of that game's lifespan. While Nintendo has stated there will be no more patches for Ultimate, a so-called "emergency" patch regarding Steve and potentially other characters is not out of the realm of possibility.

At any rate, the ever-polarized Smash community seems far from reaching a consensus on the so-called Steve problem for now. However, if the character begins to dominate the game as intensely as some of his critics fear, a consensus on banning the character may come too late.

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Comments 6 total

lecorbak

Jun 21, 2022 at 09:41PM EDT

I'm against fast bans, this needs more testing before a ban, not like Bayonetta or Metaknight who were completely broken from the start.
Steve is here since its release and people start to say only now that he's broken ? If he was that broken, we should have seen it way sooner.
But if Steve starts to completely dominate every single tournaments from now, this should be considered seriously.
I don't play that much the game unfortunately, but every time I fought Steves, I couldn't even guess how to fight this thing.
So banning him may not only be useful for high level, but low level as well considering how this character doesn't even fit the gameplay of smash bros.

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Soxar

Jun 21, 2022 at 02:37PM EDT

I admit to being biased against Steve, never liked it as a character both gameplay and "spot"-wise, but so far his showings are "player who previously played stuff like Luigi or something and didn't get far suddenly gets high rankings or outright wins a tourney, BUT it only happens once and at tourneys were lots of top players weren't there, then they never get the same placings ever again", rinse and repeat for all of the like 4 Steve players that did this. The only exception seems to be acola, who won two japanese majors back to back and now this one, but the japanese meta is weird (to put it lightly) and this tourney was also one of the "lots of the top players weren't there". Unless everyone is forced to go Steve to compete i don't see why we should jump on the bans, especially since people have been asking for bans for LITERALLY EVERY NEW CHARACTER since ultimate dropped, base game ones included (remember when people thought Inkling was OP? There was a time people though K. Rool of all characters was broken), not to mention how neither MK in brawl and Bayonetta in 4 were banned ever banned, or hell neither jigglypuff/ice climbers in melee (though "limitations" have been put into place there for wobbling and stuff). Let's not forget stuff like Pyra/Mythra being hyped as "the next bayo totally broken OP they will kill the game" and now nobody in the top 10 uses them anymore because people calmed down and figured out how to beat them.

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Adam

Jun 21, 2022 at 02:55PM EDT Soxar

the "MK/Bayo weren't banned" argument doesn't read as sound to me since they should have been but weren't, leading in part to dead games.

Also there have been rumblings about steve needing a ban for months and the gimvitational really showed off why, imo. The character demolished in his supposedly "bad matchups" and made it clear how he invalidated so much of the cast (think ness being unable to recover through blocks, would be the same for anyone with a teleport recovery or a recovery that lacks a hitbox.) That on top of dealing 80 merely by hitting jab or up tilt, moves that are absurdly fast.

No other character has been as seriously discussed about needing a ban because they have weaknesses that can be exploited. Pythra: exploitable recovery, linear neutral, etc. Obviously, randos crying on Twitter about anything they don't like is one thing, but seeing top players be open to the discussion puts the steve question in a different league.

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Soxar

Jun 21, 2022 at 03:18PM EDT Adam

What lead to those games being dead was basically them being replaced by their successors, Melee had and has its own ban discussions but the game is still alive and well with no character bans being put in place
Also yes i agree that Steve had a great showing this time but it was exclusively thanks to Acola clearly being the best Steve in the business and everyone else having, quite frankly, a bad time. Hell Sparg0 is outright going on hiatus because of personal issues and clearly wasn't at his best, same for others like Light or Tweek. Other players instead kept making very bad choices all around, like i still don't get why they keep trying to break the wall Steve puts up to mine instead of jumping around it, especially those with great air mobility, or anyway using other tools (ie longer hitboxes that go through the wall).
The stuff you say about Pythra is true, but nobody wanted to hear it when they were under the fire and said the same things that are being said about Steve now (and to be honest i think Steve has an even more linear neutral, either he tries to get you into the jab or he goes away to mine to get resources to spam, lots other tourneys showed how simply not letting him mine and stopping his jab means the Steve is virtually powerless).
1/2

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Soxar

Jun 21, 2022 at 03:18PM EDT Adam

And top players were ALWAYS open to the discussion about bans, remember the whole thing with Snake? or Hero? Or Min-Min? Or Pythra? Or hell even now lots of them are arguing about banning both Steve AND Kazuya, even though there are literally 2 Kazuya making strides with Riddles and Tea and that's it. Not to mention others like ROB, Sonic, Wolf, Palutena and all the other characters that routinely get their "this character shouldn't exist" moment, which are way more common than Steve or Kazuya or other apparently super broken characters.
Make no mistake though, as i said i'm not defending Steve cause if it was up to me he wouldn't be in the game in the first place, i'm arguing against banning characters just because they won some tourneys where most of the best players weren't even attending. Again, until everyone is forced to go to Steve (or anyway there's that one character dominating everything) i don't see reasons to grab the pitchforks, every other character so far has been figured out and there are some still waiting to get their day in the limelight too (Sora for example), i'm positive this is another of those and we just need to wait it out.

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Excitebot theLEGO

Jun 21, 2022 at 12:36PM EDT

Steve was legit the moment I stopped caring about character reveals. Characters like Sora were cool and all, but after Steve dropped, I just got more and more glad I never purchased DLC packs and stayed on the Vanilla path for Ultimate.

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