1-button wavedash: accessibility or cheating?

[Bubbles_71]

In this game, "wavedashing" is an intended mechanic with its own animation, just like grabbing and parrying. All three of these can be activated by pressing a button along with the shield button, but only wavedashing, which requires a directional input as well to be useful, doesn't have an option to be activated by a single button press in the in-game controls menu.

I am aware of the history of the mechanic being an exploit from Melee, but that doesn't excuse this game's lack of this accessibility/quality-of-life feature. I only have to press one button to run (with the auto-walk enabled), so why should I need two to step?

I read the locked thread about someone complaining about a supposed cheater that was using macros to wavedash, and while people seem to agree that wavedashing is very easy to do and you don't need a macro for it, this doesn't address the question of whether the game ought to give people this option, should they for some reason want it.

Think of it this way, would it be an improvement to the game if we removed the ability to activate special moves with just one button (and directional input), and now required players to press shield and strong attack to do this? I can't imagine how.

In a game where there is even a button to force a short hop if you want, it seems a bit silly to not have a button to activate a wavedash. I understand that it was so much more difficult in Melee, but in this game it's a legitimate mechanic, not an exploit, so the lingering unnecessary difficulty of activating the mechanic should be considered a missing accessibility feature.

While I would like to see this implemented in a future update, it is already possible to achieve this with a simple macro. But that leaves things in a weird place for me. Some people say macros are cheating, and while I can certainly see how someone could use a macro to cheat, creating a simple macro just to patch in an accessibility feature that should be in the game anyway, is not cheating in my opinion.

All the evidence I see points towards the intent being to make wavedashing easier (than Melee at least), to remove lame input requirements like button mashing to get out of grabs, and to purposely provide single button options to activate intended game mechanics (grab/parry/short-hop).

Besides, having to manage another button also increases the input difficulty, just in a different manner than relying on the "manual" method. It should be up to the player which form of input difficulty they prefer. Right now I'm leaning toward having a dedicated grab button, but manually activating the parry, for example.

So, does anybody know if the devs have an opinion on this? If they are adamant that wavedashing should have the precise mechanical difficulty they built into the game, and consider any attempt to simplify this to be "cheating", I'd like to be aware of that fact before I put too much time into the game. I'm not interested in tournament rules. I don't intend to play the game for money, but rather to pay money to play the game.

[StuckInWashingMachine]

How would you even be able to wave land? The purpose of wavedashing is to add more control to your aerial mobility. A one button wavedash remove other benefits like hax dashing.
You can wave dash in to have better range or aggression on certain attacks, like grab or jab. or wave dash out to make your opponent wiff or gain spacing to enforce neutral.

if you use a macro to wavedash i'd argue you're handicaping yourself. It's no more complicated than tap strafing in a game like quake, COD 4, apex legends or titanfall.

it's a very flexible tool with lots of utility, and simplifying it would hinder that flexibility

[Bubbles_71]

If it was added as an in-game control option there could be the option to have that button act as just air dodge if performed in the air. That would be the ideal.

But even as just a macro, I would use the macro button when wavedashing across the ground, and think of it as its own mechanic, a quick sidestep, but then press shield in the air to air dodge into the ground or platforms, and think of that maneuver as "air-dodging into the ground", rather than as an application of the grounded wavedash mechanic.

Having a dedicated button doesn't remove any options, it just negates having to press two buttons to perform one action while grounded. If you want to wavedash three times in a row, you currently need six button presses, which I think is unnecessarily tedious, and doesn't seem to fit into the game's design philosophy of not having button mashing.

In Smash Ultimate I used to hold shield, then react by pressing A to grab when someone would dash attack into my shield. But when I wanted to run up and grab, I used the dedicated grab button. Am I also handicapping myself by using the dedicated grab button in this way? The dedicated button doesn't prevent the manual input method for contexts where that makes more sense; the player just needs to learn the different contexts.

The grounded application of wavedashing does not actually involve jumping; this is just a byproduct of history. This game comes so close to realizing this fact by not requiring a direction with a downwards component to activate the wavedash from the ground.

I just wish that this was taken to its logical conclusion and provided as a built-in control option for players to use, should they be convinced it helps them, or ignore if they are not so convinced.

The thing that started this line of thinking was a Youtube video I watched where they were showing how you need to wavedash to move quickly out of shield, and that because the input requires pressing the shield button, which you are already holding down, you need to release the shield button and then press it again very quickly to initiate the wavedash. Because of this, they recommended having a second, redundant shield button to compensate for the input nuisance.

Why would I want a redundant shield button to put a bandage over an awkward control scheme, when I could just go and have a dedicated wavedash button that actually fixes the issue? Also, why can't we just run immediately after dropping shield? It feels as if the game is first forcing you to use wavedash in this situation, and then also forcing you to wrestle with the awkward control scheme to even be able to do that.

A simple macro provides a sane default for a situation the game seems to overlook, and hence provides value, though at the cost of having an extra button to manage.

[Songbird]

Wavedashing is absolutely not as "easy" as people make it to be. It's actually very difficult to press a shoulder button exactly 1 to 4 frames after another button repeatedly about four times a second (since it's 4 frames of jumpsquat + 10 frames to wavedash), while also repeatedly fully moving the stick in the direction you want to move, while also actually playing the game and reacting to it.

Like I absolutely cannot do the above consistently and will eventually either cancel shield into jump or jump and airdodge if I try to keep up that speed, not to mention being pretty much completely unable to actually get full horizontal speed every time if I'm trying to alternate left-right. Doing a single wavedash is one thing, but there's a really significant physical demand to push it to the limit permitted by the game, and that no longer applies with a one-button macro.

[Pre-K]

most people come from melee or maybe even brawhala where wave dashing is needed in the game. So going to rivals is a walk in the park for those players. I came from melee so i was able to fly off rip bc of my past with melee. But by no means did i only play melee a couple of times. Just learning wave dashing in melee and use it during play tooks months of game play. To make it one move to make it easier totally takes away the skill gap of using it. Wave dashing isnt a style its a movement throw off and also sets your positioning for the next hit. Making it one button is to say i dont want to put in the hours and want the skill gap to go down.

[shadoweddie50]

I mentioned this before but i have to switch one of my shield button to a short hop so I can even have a chance to do wavedashing in this game. I try a og gamecube, 360, XB1, ps5 and a 8bitdo controllers, and I cant wavedashing using the "right" way (Y + RT + Left/Right).

If you're going to make a game where wavedashing is required to even be okay at the game then you should had mirco for it instead expecting everyone to have experience with a 25 year old game that not even currently for sell atm.

I would even go as far as say that wavedashing being this hard to do is one of the reason why the game is having trouble keeping a high player count atm

[Pride]

no we don't need that, this games tech skill is already wayyyyyy easier than melee. we don't need a macro for the easiest movement tech in the game, plus that brings down apm which is the opposite of hype.

[Bubbles_71]

The devs seem to be actively undermining the game by letting people cheat with single buttons that let you short hop, grab, or parry. This is tricking non-Melee players into thinking they are welcome to come and play this game, and that this game is designed on purpose to remove arbitrary and burdensome input barriers.

If they actually had the opposite intention, then they should go and remove all these cheater features that are currently in the game. They could also make special moves more difficult to activate. That would increase the skill gap and hype even further.

As it stands, the game leans heavily into the accessibility design philosophy, which makes me think that a 1-button wavedash should not be considered a cheat.

This game looks so good, and has the same basic mechanics as Ultimate (shields/ledges/grabs). It's also a current, legitimate game to play with intended mechanics, not exploits. I would think that most people would jump to this from Ultimate, when they start to want to play more competitively.

I never wavedashed in any Smash game, nor did i feel as if I needed to do so in order to truly play the game. So I don't think the Melee assumption is a good thing to hold onto here, unless the intention is to keep out less-hardcore players who aren't already "in the know".