Idea for Adjusting How Timed FFAs Function#953

Just an idea I’ve had rattling around and mentioned here and there. Figured I’d make a formal post about it.

So, when it comes to 4-Player Free For All, matches, Time mode is clearly superior to Stock mode, for a number of reasons. When Stock matches occur, it tends to lend itself to passive, noninteractive gameplay. Some examples of this would include: a player falling behind in the match, and committing to running away until the stocks have evened out… or, a player getting too far ahead in the match, everyone trying to dogpile them, and that player running away, as well. There’s also the fact that once you’re out of stocks, you’re just… out of the match, and have to wait to continue playing; I understand this caused a problem in Online Casual in the past, when FFA used Stock mode, as eliminated players would somewhat frequently turn their game off.

Time mode largely addresses all of the above issues; encouraging players to play more actively, so they don’t miss out on crucial kills and items and the like, and everyone gets to play to the end of each match. With all that, I certainly approve of the fact that Online Casual FFA currently uses the Time mode format.

That in mind, however, Time mode does have one problem that Stock mode doesn’t, and it’s that matches in the format just… end, when time runs out. It feels very anticlimactic, compared to Stock, where you’ll generally always have that exciting climactic finale. (This is a HUGE reason why a lot of people tend to prefer Stock over Time in FFA formats.)

So, with all that preamble, here’s my idea to help bring the solid foundation that Time mode provides, together with the exciting finales that Stock mode provides:

When time runs out, all but the Top 2 players from the game will be removed, and those two remaining players will fight it out in a 1 Stock finale. I’d say that you should reset both players’ damages to 0, but you could provide some kind of benefit to whoever was leading the match when time ran out. For example, you could give that player a stat buff, or a free item, or give their opponent some damage right off the bat. The bonus effect could even be randomized between many different outcomes, and even scale with how much the leading player was winning by when time ran out. There would be plenty of ways to fine-tune this idea to taste.

I think this would be a great way to add even more excitement to the Time FFA format. What do you think?

I’m not a big FFA player but a change like this would make me a lot more interested, especially now that items and fun stages are coming soon

I think the biggest thing that this fails to address is the “eliminated players turning their games off” problem. If the bottom two players aren’t in the game anymore after time runs out, they might do the exact same thing, putting us right back where we were before.

@Miscellaneous Shaun Right, I hadn’t considered that. I suppose one could make the argument that players D/Cing might happen less often, since each ‘finale’ would be the tail-end of a match, so you wouldn’t have to wait as long, but… yeah, that would definitely still be an issue to some degree, for sure.

It could be worth experimenting with an implementation of it, to see how much of an impact it has on D/C rates compared to full Stock matches.