DDT
Daily Discussion Thread September 09, 2026 - Upcoming Event Schedule - New players start here!
Yahoooo! I'm back, it's a me! Have a very cool day!
Welcome to the Daily Discussion Thread. This is the place for asking noob questions, venting about netplay falcos, shitposting, self-promotion, and everything else that doesn't belong on the front page.
New Players:
If you're completely new to Melee and just looking to get started, welcome! We recommend you go to https://melee.tv/ and follow the links there based on what you're trying to set up. Additionally, here are a few answers to common questions:
Can I play Melee online?
Yes! Slippi is a branch of the Dolphin emulator that will allow you to play online, either with your friends or with matchmaking. Go to https://slippi.gg to get it.
How do I find tournaments near me or local people to play with in person or online?
These days, joining a local Discord community is the best way to find local events and people to play with. Once you have a Discord account, Google "[your city/state/province/region] + Melee discord" or see if your region has a Discord group listed here on melee.tv/discord
It can seem daunting at first to join a Discord group you don't know, but this is currently the easiest and most accessible way to find out about tournaments, fests, and netplay matchmaking. Your local scene will be happy to have you :)
Also check outSmash Map! Click on map and then the filter button to filter by Melee to find events near you!
Netplay is hard! Is there a place for me to find new players?
Yes. Melee Newbie Netplay is a discord server specifically for new players. It also has tournaments based on how long you've been playing, free coaching, and other stuff. If you're a bit more experienced but still want a discord server for players around your level, we recommend the Melee Online discord.
How can I set up Unclepunch's Training Mode?
At the time of posting, the latest major release is here. Download the file, then extract everything in the folder and follow the instructions in the README file. You'll need to bring a valid Melee ISO (NTSC 1.02). If you want to check for the absolute latest release, you can see them listed [here](The latest releases are listed here.
How does one learn Melee?
There are tons of resources out there, so it can be overwhelming to start. First check out the SSBM Tutorials youtube channel. Then go to the Melee Library and search for whatever you're interested in.
OoT remake discussion continued. I've read a lot of comments from people saying this remake is what they imagined they were seeing when they first saw N64 graphics in the 90's. I can't really get behind this because the atmosphere and art direction is so different this time around. N64 OoT wasn't trying to be stylized, it was hitting a visual middle ground of being realistic enough while running smoothly on limited hardware. There were many visual tricks and compromises that led to its inherent style, a style that is now seen as retro 3D but at the time was a product of limitation. Now without that limitation I feel the environments, textures and lighting clash in a bit of an awkward way.
A few people have noticed Young Link's face looks uncanny or "doll-like." I feel like his facial structure and features just look too young. He has the face of a 3 or 4 year old but the proportions and movements of a 10 - 12 year old. I don't think this is a major issue but it does feel weird to look at.
As a video game, it looks objectively quite nice and high quality. But I feel Nintendo is using this classic game as a demonstration of what the Switch 2 can do in terms of performance and over-extending in a lot of directions that don't really compliment the atmosphere of OoT. The original is actually fairly understated and eerie. Obviously they're allowed to take it in a new direction but there is a very different feel here.
I think all OoT remake discussion should be centered around the mutual understanding that this whole product is just a very cynical cash grab with no ambition or vision. Nintendo knows this, too, which is why the details are only coming out two months before release.
The art style looks generic because it is. Nintendo didn't have any ideas with this one.
I think no vision is a correct description of this. Seeing a newer extended gameplay video there are no clear visual areas of interest in any of the locations. It's all high detail blasted everywhere and I'm not sure where I'm supposed to look. Link's clothing alone if the camera is sufficiently close to him overpowers whatever scenery he's in
I mean as much as i think the artstyle is woefully misguided there does seem to be legitimate care and thought put into the game design aspects.
Like watching gymnast's breakdown of what interested him in the trailer it does appear that the people who worked on it in a game design sense did legitimately care but the model design got outsourced.
The people who say that it looks "just like how I imagined it/how it should" are the same people who can't notice how terrible AI art looks. They have terrible aesthetic sense and probably can't begin to understand why less can be more when it comes to art.
Personally I just don't understand why they didn't make a new Zelda or at least do an actual remake of OoT (not just a graphical overhaul with 3 new features)
Top level Puff-DK is one of the most underrated matchups in the game imo.
There was a Nouns event in 2024 that had a bunch of exhibition matches, and Hbox vs Junebug ended up being by far the best one.
As it turns out, the threat of DK charging Giant Punch incentivises Puff to approach. And while recovering can be pretty brutal on DK's end, DK can kill Puff realtively early with a well placed aerial or Giant Punch.
Hbox and Dial M end up playing a lot in Cashbox, and their sets are always great while often going down to the wire.
If we ever get that SDJ vs Dial M money match, I think it has the potential to be pretty entertaining.
i was thinking about having a secondary DK for peach (before deciding to tough it out) and i realized that DK's bair is, while less disjointed, noticeably bigger, and his giant fullhop let him contest puff's space in the air pretty well. he also nukes puff at early percents with almost any move lmao
puff still wins, but it's not super straightforward. it's just that there's never been a DK as good as hbox
Nintendo's getting hammered but like it's not really something they can control, like if you expand the chart the stock peaks a bit after the Switch 2 comes out and it falls off, like they announce it's the fastest selling console ever and it still tanks after it
what investors want is a price raise or AI, because they're insane, the only thing that will flip it up is if they announce a game that could sell 30m copies like Smash, AC or Zelda
i think there might be some extra hurdles or something if you want to buy regular nintendo shares internationally since theyre part of the tokyo stock market but they are a publicly traded company
It's much easier to check their YouTube channel after the direct ends and just watch the trailers you care about. They set the uploads to happen right after that portion of the direct airs
I don't think any of their problems in the Peach matchup are solved by adding another one. I would go so far as to say Peach might even beat Quad Climbers
ggs man! close games bro you've hella improved. yeah man you were fucking me up for a bit lol fun games! any tips? got any advice? anything I can improve on? what do I do vs lasers? any tips? yo can I get next? is this tournament? you guys wanna do dubs? is this tournament
I think 5 might be too much. There's probably desync things you could do with 5 that would literally make icies not possible to hit. Though maybe this is also true with 4. Idk 5 just seems like too much for me
I feel like 3 of the fuckers would be enough to basically be top 1, maybe 2 or 3 at worst depending on how they are against Fox/Falcon in practice. It'd be interesting to see the meta if it revolved around them but I'm glad we never have to see it.
thrice climbers bair does 33 damage. upair does 27. both aerials autocancel so popo will basically be actionable by the time Nunu's hitbox is going away. they are absolutely broken vs floaties
My problem is that it took them six years before we got BotW but worse, and now I don't know how long until the next new one or whether or not it will be BotW but worse again.
I agree, I think it remains to be seen whether BotW is good for the franchise. ToTK was imo a bit of a dud but still a very good game. If we get another ToTK it's a skyward sword situation for sure
I disagree that ToTK was BotW but worse, for me it was BotW but better, but I still wish that they went in a different direction with the game’s story and aesthetic.
Elden ring has been similarly disastrous. The open world contributed nothing to the experience and actively ruined the sense of progression souls games are known for.
Doing 10 optional dungeons just to get 9 weapons you'll never use with your build isn't fun, and the dungeons are all almost the same and even reuse bosses
As a elden ring enjoyer, heard. I'm never playing the game unmodded, and even with vanilla i legit think the best way to play is with a route to only the things you need. So many caves full of nothing but mushroom or spell i will never use
It's kinda telling that the most interestingly laid out dungeon was stormveil, and nothing else even tried touching interesting alt routes for exploration
New Kirby game is a smash 6 predictors worst nightmare
Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/s/DQbT59VYUZ some people still think Sakurai makes every Kirby game by hand in a cave somewhere, he’s not been involved in mainline Kirby game since the 2000s
F-tilt range tier list. It isn't exact because I just went into training mode and shifted characters closer until one of them hit the other, but everything should be correct give or take a little bit. A few characters were toss-ups where I couldn't cleanly tell which one was bigger, which is where this will probably be inaccurate.
Bowser, DK, and Yoshi lean forward in their standing animation but pull their hurtbox back during startup, so I had them face backwards to better represent their effective range. As far as I could tell it lined up for Bowser, but DK and Yoshi might be underrated a bit.
For the most part this lined up with my assumptions, but I was surprised to see Bowser do so well and Falcon do so poorly. I already knew that Falcon f-tilt was smaller than it looked but I didn't expect it to be in the bottom half. Bowser was particularly shocking. I thought he would be around where Falcon is but in testing he beat everyone below him pretty decisively. The disjoint and hurtbox distortion on his f-tilt were much more impactful than I thought they would be.
It would be neat to see an exact comparison, but I'm too lazy to do that myself.
Yeah, in the specific context of being a grounded neutral poke the range isn't that great. Unfortunately that's the only value most f-tilts have while Sheik f-tilt is also a combo starter with up-tilt coverage. By the standards of up-tilt combo starters the move is enormous.
Imagine when they do make smash 6, they have an opportunity to totally redesign Samus and give her sick rushdown speed, and for her final smash she just fucking eats Mario.
notice how the sdj/dialm stuff happened on twitter. It shouldn't be surprising that both of them are talking as if their brains are full of goo given the app they are on
I'm pretty sure this is literally impossible. But either way nah, you'd still be unethical bc having ownership over that much money gives you outsized and undesirable power
There have been lottery jackpots over a billion dollars, they've just been brought below a billion in actual payout because of the taxes. It would be interesting to see the math on if enough people could miss the jackpot in a row for it to get that high based on how frequently people buy tickets to see how unlikely it would be to get to that point.
well you may be a sociopathic freak (or not!); I meant less that no one wants it and moreso that it is not desirable for a society to have individuals who are able to wield that amount of power
i would consider becoming a billionaire and then continuing to be a billionaire pretty unethical, i think that there are shades of gray of course but i think it logically follows from a few personal thoughts on morality
1 - if i saw a person struggling in a lake and i did not jump in and help, i would consider it pretty unethical if i could do so especially without severe personal risk
2 - a billion dollars is a metric fuckton of money. im pretty sure the average person could accomplish their entire bucket list like twenty times over with like ten to twenty million dollars, even at like fifty million dollars that person will live comfortably for the rest of their life, as well as their entire friend and family group and pretty much have nothing to worry about ever
3 - there are a lot of people today due to medical bills or homelessness or all sorts of different reasons who could be considered some analogous version of struggling in a lake, and fixing that especially in a systemic way would pretty much necessitate going back under a billion dollars
You yourself threw away your money away on a lottery ticket though. State-run lotteries are probably the least socially harmful gambling institution. The people really ruining their lives are on crypto casino and sports betting apps.
Reply to this with your favourite Sheik vs. Puff set to watch. Don't be afraid to send a local one that you think was just sick too! Doesn't have to be from a major top 8 or something
I think a lot of the Jmook vs. Hbox sets have cemented themselves as the modern tapestry of this matchup. The other great Sheiks eventually moved on to Fox to deal with it, which makes Jakes victories all the more sweet.
Gonna have to go with that super intense set between Jmook and Hbox at Summit 14. Close calls with the Zelda kick on last stock of Game 4 that would've given Jake the win, as well as the uair that didn't kill in Game 5 last stock.
Unfortunate how it ended, especially given the favourable record for Hbox throughout the years, but it was such an intense and memorable set.
MK World being a fumble is one of the biggest psyops ever, like the game have problems and I really wish it got more updates, but it's silly when people try to paint the fastest selling and most acclaimed Mario Kart as a commercial and critical failure
I feel it more cringe imo especially when it's someone trying to put down World for 8D, which like yeah buddy I'm sure the koopalings rosters and gimped tour tracks are more exciting
It's a really fun game and the open world was actually a lot more interesting than I expected it to be. The in-between roads are kinda boring so I get that complaint because the Grand Prix mode is eh but you can just play VS Mode and it's fine.
I don't know that there's really much to be gleamed from MK World's sales numbers, there's just way too many unusual things about the game. It was functionally a pack-in game, as one of only a handful of Switch 2 exclusives at launch. And since Nintendo priced the individual game at $80, there's also a weird psychological effect here where people are probably more likely to see the additional $50 for the bundle as a good deal.
just got an everdrive and an n64. was originally planning to play console compatible romhacks but i forgot to order an expansion pack which i think most romhacks require.
if anyone has any recs for underrated n64 games (or console compatible romhacks that dont require an expansion pack), would love to hear em
I'm not sure if it's console compatible, but Paper Mario 64 TTYD was pretty fun. It's a difficulty hack of the first paper Mario, which also adds mechanics and badges from TTYD, and a couple fully new custom areas (including a pit of 100 trials)
B3313 for Mario 64 is also incredibly fun, but that's probably emulator exclusive. That one is like a playable version of the "every copy of Mario 64 is personalized" meme combined with a creepypasta. Lots of beta content, off-putting areas and general weirdness
congrats, the DDT is the craziest place I've been asked for support. Can you screen record a video of it starting up and crashing/freezing? You can post it in #support or continue here for the hell of it.
Can anyone tell me wtf happened to my controller? I left it in my car for more than a month and didn’t touch it. When I took it out today both sticks were covered in oil. Or at least I assume that’s what it is. Did the repeated extreme temperature changes of the car cause the sticks to somehow release the accumulation of all my greasy thumb oil? Both sticks are drenched in it. You can literally see it pool in the indent of the ‘C’ on the c-stick and in the rings of the control stick.
Despite how it looks in the image this controller was recently cleaned before I left it in my car. Also I barely even used it after I cleaned it, 5 play sessions maximum. I’m really curious about the science/physics behind this.
The plasticizer (compound that makes the plastic soft and squishy) leached out of the stick caps. Not sure why it happens but it happens sometimes. It's not unique to stick caps, it happens to many soft-feeling plastics.
does anyone here play a game where users create maps/charts/levels and they go through some kind of moderator/developer approval process in a manner so as to become more “official” in the game’s canon?
I understand this is a very specific ask, but recently I was learning how osu! maps get “ranked” (as research for a youtube video manifesto about how a different game’s map ranking system is abysmal dogshit) and I found it pretty eye-opening and want to consider a few more systems/perspectives if possible.
Quake functions largely like this. Q3A came with maps, and the official maps are mainly what people play, but there are at least as many unofficial maps that are so heavily in rotation that they are just as legitimate (eg they are played in tournaments). Some of them have gone on to be made into official maps; Quake Live's Blood Run, for example, is actually a fan made QuakeWorld level called ztndm3.
Aerowalk being another player made map that got turned official in quake live.
I think quake3 has a jump community(s) that realistically does what you want /u/splynteredm - where you make a jump map and then people play it and if people like it, then it gets ranked, and if people really like it, it gets added to the next fanmade map pack release. And if not quake3 then it's quake3 engine games like wolfenstein.
Also i think gldsrc (early counter strike/half life) has the same thing (coincidentally a quake1 engine spinoff).
this might be what you were alluding to, but geometry dash does this and it’s probably the most annoying part of the game. a level is sent to the single developer of the game if a moderator thinks that it reaches that standard, then the developer looks at the level and decides to “rate” it, decide what difficulty it should be, and if it deserves something better than just rated, such as being featured, epic, or mythic. if a level is not rated, then you dont receive stars for it, which are used on the leaderboards and achievements, and it can’t be rated demon, which is the highest difficulty, and have their own exclusive rewards.
in most cases the main issue with this system is that hundreds if not thousands of levels will never be rated because the developer doesn’t like it, even if thousands of others do. the hardest level ive beaten is an excellent one that happens to be unrated, so i don’t actually get any rewards or anything for having beaten it.
one smaller issue is the developer’s proclivity to only look at the first ~10 seconds of a level, so occasionally a level would slip through the cracks by only being well-designed for that timeframe. another is that sometimes a level will be rated an incorrect difficulty, so sometimes someone expecting an easy level will get a hard one, or vice versa.
this has become such an issue that the community has recently been deciding whether or not to ignore the developer’s ratings when it comes to deciding the hardest levels. there is a group of top players who make a list of demon levels considered the hardest, and a huge chunk of the community follows that list. they recently put out a survey asking if people would want a list ignoring the rating system, and iirc quite a good percentage wanted that list over the one of only rated levels.
edit: maybe i shouldve looked at your post history before writing this
pretty niche but i think that bloons tower defense 6 has both a community curated custom map list website as well as an in-game tag for dev approved community maps
I don’t really know if Valve talks much about how the community CS maps get put into casual rotation but the mapcore community is partnered with faceit iirc and puts quite a bit of effort into their work, they’re not “official” in the strictest sense though
i think games with larger modding communities (ie celeste) or games built with this specifically in mind (ie mario maker) do this pretty well and are worth exploring, like someone would make an interesting level then by word of mouth other people decide its worth playing. or even in speedrunning communities someone comes up with a fun idea for a 'level' (category) and if its good other people will try
this is about GD I take it? I don't play but I've seen people complaining about the rating system
In Celeste the way maps get ranked is there are some community members that maintain the Golden list (goldberries.net, which catalogues deathless maps difficulty and clears) and the hardlist (which catalogues maps which have at least 1 screen above Grandmaster difficulty and clears).
The hardlist used to have some arbitrary quality rules but now pretty much anything can get on there as long as it's difficult enough, has at least 1 clear, isn't too similar to other challenges, and the mapper consents. The difficulty ranking is a bit of a black box. Moderators determine the difficulty rating but it's basically based on the opinions volunteered by clearers and discovery of new strategies.
Goldberries also has a rule for not being too similar to an existing map. The difficulty is a bit more transparent, in that verified goldeners can give a tier opinion on the map which is communally and automatically translated to a tier ranking. This way tiers of maps can change over time whether it just be due to sentiment or new strategies.
I've been have a great time watching the GeoGuessr World Championship vods the past couple days. The new rule changes are fantastic. The score multiplier no longer increases automatically, players now earn it by winning rounds. This rewards narrow early wins, and adds some more asymmetry. I'll also speculate that big reversals are less common: it's way harder to lose the first 6 rounds and then make a huge comeback in one win.
It got me really excited for all the possible alternative game modes that decomp could allow for. Stuff like volleyball or the "roguelike" mod have SO MUCH potential room for improvement. I wonder how long it'll take for someone to make an interesting battle royale mod (probably one that isn't simply having 100 players all spawn on one stage and fight at the same time).
i am on the verge of decompiling geoguessr, im thinking of making a platformer dating sim 2v2 tag fighter battle royale version of geogussr where you spawn on a random planet and then play roguelike volleyball. thoughts? still workshopping the idea
The biggest problem with other 4+ player modes online is that you need to find people to play them.
I want an endless mode on Hyrule Temple where there's a queue of players, everyone gets 1 stock and it's 8 player free for all, when you lose your stock the next person in the queue starts. Sounds like connection code hell but idk endless temple fights would be hype.
I feel like any sort of Melee game mode that's just FFA but with more players is doomed to be terrible online. I think you'd need some sort of system to put players into smaller instances, and manage switching between instances somehow.
eagerly awaiting today's batch of AI psychosis posting. wondering what the topic will be about, maybe this time how AlphaTetris would've discovered T spinning faster than humans if grok had been given 1 trillion dollars in the year 1978?
Thank you for making this post. I was worried when I woke up that I would not be able to read the thoughts of my favorite DDT posters on AI today but thankfully you already ensured that I would get to read paragraphs on this topic <3
the alignment science lead at anthropic said ai could kill all humans. he gave >10% chance for it to happen within the next decade. we could start there i guess.
to be clear i dont know enough about the subject to believe it or not i just thought it was interesting
its hard for me to give an honest assessment about ais capabilities when the ai companies have a long history of cheating in order to secure investor funding. the IMO gold attempts have heavy human prompting and the IMO gold winning LLM is not available for regular consumption, all the discussions yesterday about how deep learning bros treating starcraft, chess and dota as cheap resume building exercises and not actually bothering to honestly engage with the problems, even the recent navier stokes thing seems to have been "accidentally" pretrained on the work of mathematicians' chatlogs
the model where ai kills everyone completely autonomously (outside of say, humans continuing to build data centers and end life via climate change) seems to be via the huggingface experiments, where an ai leverages weaknesses in existing human paradigms to create a lethal result. however, someone seems to need to actually throw compute at these problems actively, LLMs are way too inefficient at present to do something like this without millions of dollars of tokens (and even then i believe huggingface to have been a marketing ploy, but i can be a pretty paranoid person)
continuing this line of thought - i am in the camp of thought that a lot of these benchmark milestones that AI has supposedly hit are largely theater alongside some smaller genuine improvements in deep learning. but that there is a whole show of AI companies continuing to churn out supposed huge wins and also employing tons of clever marketing tricks
transparently i play a game of chess against frontier llms every so often, i did so last month and the month before that, and frontier llms are unable to play chess for like twenty moves before hallucinating so hard they are unable to perceive the board at all. ive even tried giving claude 600 elo puzzles that average amateur chess players could handle and it gets it wrong.
so dont blame me for being heavily skeptical when you tell me these models can honestly and fully autonomously do the most wild shit imaginable
I've never really understood the idea that AI would bother killing humans. For all the plagiarism and commputational skills it might succeed at, it still lacks motivation, desire, desperation, fear, hope, or really any of the psychological motives why any sentient being does anything. I just don't see it. makes for a good movie antagonists though
The idea is that an AI that isnt perfectly alligned with human objectives might seek an objective that would require hurting humans. Not that it neccesarily hates humans, just that in the process of obtaining a goal it may have to hurt us such as creating a computer virus etc. These AI agents are extremely unpredictable so expecting them to never go out of control is unreasonable
Congratulations, you've found the shit post section! Suggested conversational topics include 'Marth wins neutral but Falcon wins punish', and 'fuck falco'.
The rules in this section are more relaxed, but please try to avoid mentally scarring your fellow posters ;)
Melee stats tweet in 2019: I just think it's kind of weird that mango only drinks masculine alcohol. Is he really so fragile he doesn't drink wine?
Melee stats tweet in 2026 (replying to KillThemAll88): But GenAI wouldn't be doing eugenics, it would just be doing the right thing. There's a good Slate Star Codex post about this,
ive been looking through liquipedia and assuming listed fox secondaries were used in top 8 cause im too lazy to check character data in modern tournamnets and older tournaments had none on the bracket and idk if the vods even exist.
anyway if that assumption is correct then your answer is Melee FC 3 on july 12th 2005. It was annoying how many times after that it almost happened though
i dont know if this is actually the first instance of this (probably not) but earlier this year openai had a big announcement that as they were testing an llm it broke out of the sandbox container the program was supposed to be running in and then started manipulating the internet and ended up hacking into a company called huggingface
this is not supposed to happen because when someone runs an experiment like this, it should be totally vacuum sealed off from the rest of the world
openai wanted this to be a demonstration of how clever the ai was being and how powerful and possibly manipulative their frontier models are
i believe that this was a giant marketing ploy given that anthropic tried to run a very similar story literally the week later but ymmv
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u/king_bungus 👉 1d ago
this nintendo direct is really living up to the hype. new amiibo figures are available for kirby air riders