This isn't as much based on parts and regulation, but it kind of ties in with the topic here and some recent events.
Wall of text inbound, prepare thy eyeballs
I see Beyblade as having 3 major factors of skill:
- Designing
- Picking
- Launching
Design is the process of coming up with customizations and adapting them to suit your needs, whether it's as an individual Beyblade, part of a set you carry to a tournament, or a specific deck configuration for Deck Format rules. Although the "Build Me A Combo" and top-tier list threads can partially remove the need for this skill, experienced Bladers who know how to improvise on the fly or build counters to probable opponents will have an edge over anyone using standard "cookie-cutter" combos. But knowing how to build combos does you no good if you don't know when to use them or how to launch them!
Picking encompasses the whole tournament-day mess of scouting and predicting your opponents, and knowing how to apply that knowledge to ensure the best possible chance of victory. Picking skills are incredibly important, because they influence how you will design your combos in preparation and how you will launch them in battle. However, all the scouting, prediction, and sheer luck in the world won't help you if you don't have a combo to fit the situation or you don't know how to use it properly.
Launching is probably the most obvious skill involved in competitive Beyblade;
being able to launch in a strong but controlled manner is absolutely critical for any Beyblade with a mobile Bottom, and at higher levels of play becomes important for almost any match, as techniques like weak-launching can turn weak or bad odds into a win. Although there are quite a few records of Attack masters getting KOs in matchups they really shouldn't have, or extremely strong launches leading to unexpected OSes, a good launch needs to be paired with a good combo in the right matchup for it to be effective.
These three things - an opportunity for creativity, a battle of wits, and an element of physical ability - are the reason that I've been so into Beyblade all these years. To me, they are what makes Beyblade a fun, competitive game, and all of them are essential to the experience.
This is where, lately, there have been problems.
I was initially extremely excited for Burst's release last year; the Bursting gimmick seemed like just the cool, fresh kind of game mechanic that would keep the new generation of Beyblade interesting and exciting. The lack of multiple Track heights and the resulting sub-meta worried me, but after years of hiatus, I was willing to give something new a shot. As new releases came and went, though, the new-ness wore off and it became clear that Burst has some serious issues. The most obvious two are Layer wear and Odin, but there is still a lack of meaningful Disk choices (as there are usually just a handful of extremely similar "good" options or the decision is more or less meaningless as long as you don't pick a terrible one) and there's still a constant worry over every new release: "Will Takara bless this Layer with good enough teeth or does it go straight to the garbage bin?"
The latter two problems cause a persistent lack of customization options and freedom to experiment; with Disks, it's almost always a matter of "better or worse" and never "different" when choosing which one to use; differences between competitive Disks are subtle and are more for optimizing based on manufacturing variance than for making significant strategic decisions. You could draw parallels to MFB's Clear Wheel system, but swapping an Aquario out for a Escolpio on a Defense type is a significant and potentially viable decision (giving the combo some Upper Attack to deal with tall opponents), whereas swapping Gravity out for Force does not provide a significant alteration to how the combo plays, and is more than likely just a bad decision.
Regarding the situation with bad teeth on many of Takara's releases,* my problem with it is that it brings the "useless" Layers in Burst to an all-new level of worthlessness. To illustrate with another MFB analogy, consider Poison. Poison is an awful Metal Wheel; it is useless in all formats and always has been. It's recoily, has bad Stamina, and not enough Attack to work in comparison to all the other options available, even in Limited. But even if little Timmy shows up to a Limited tournament with only his one prized Beyblade, Poison Serpent, he could actually have a shot at winning if his opponent chooses the wrong combo. Stock Poison Serpent could conceivably OS a Defense type or KO a Stamina type if Timmy gets lucky and launches right, and he could actually manage to blunder his way to a few wins. If he walked into a Burst event with a stock combo with terrible teeth, there is pretty much no hope for poor Timmy. Storm Spriggan is probably the worst offender; an aggressive shape coupled with some of the flattest teeth in the game makes it practically suicidal. Timmy won't be able to eke out a lucky OS or KO, because his combo will just blow up before he gets close to that chance. Now, obviously we aren't going to cater specifically to newbies using terrible stock combos, but those awful teeth means that those Layers are completely unusable in any kind of well-thought attempt at a competitive combo, either. Wheels like Poison are at least usable as an experimental or "lethal joke" combo, and underused, "bad" wheels like Cyclone and Divine have been seen on the Winning Combos list on rare occasions. On the other hand, in Burst, Takara may as well have shoved a wadded-up ball of damp newspaper into the Layer slot of the package instead of a Layer with bad teeth, because it's practically impossible to use them in any sort of competitive scenario. You will Burst against stronger-toothed opponents, and you will lose. I understand that they want to throw in "filler" to spread out the good parts more, but Burst's bad layers manage to be useless on an unprecedented level. They aren't even worth experimenting with; even if there was some kind of weird undiscovered synergy with another part, it won't fix the Layer's explosive tendencies, and it will remain useless.
As I said a couple paragraphs earlier in this increasingly jumbled mess of a rant,
Burst's issues with uninteresting Disk choices and unusable Layers making up the majority of the release schedule hurts its customizability even beyond its already simple 3-part system. I've become increasingly frustrated with Beyblade Burst, and am desperately hoping that Hasbro's revisions to the system can help solve what I see as glaring issues with the product line as a whole.
*Please note that my complaints about bad teeth are not based on the Chaos layer (which I do like a lot) being weak; giving Chaos terribad teeth makes sense from a game balance point of view and I'm not upset about that. The issue is that the
majority of released Layers aren't suitable for use because of bad teeth, and those bad teeth make them impossible to use, regardless of any other positive qualities that they might have. Again, S2 is an excellent example of the "bad teeth, cool shape" group.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE
caek pls
Takara's poor product design / game balance choices have seriously hurt Burst's "Design" element; but there's something else I'm concerned about that I think could cripple the Burst metagame's "Picking" element: Deck Format. Or, more specifically, this clause:
Deck Rotation Format Wrote:- When a Blader loses a round, they have the option to switch their Beyblade for another Beyblade in their deck.
My problem with this is that the winner is
not allowed to swap out their combos following the round; the winner is a sitting duck strategically; the loser needs only basic knowledge of counter-picking in order to counter the last round's winning combination and win the next round. This means that unless one player or the other intentionally picks a bad matchup, (which would not have to happen if both bladers are knowledgeable enough and have properly constructed decks) whoever wins the first round wins the whole thing. But Bursts and KOs are valued double, which opens the door to exploitation. I covered this in an earlier post in the Deck Format thread, but I'll restate it here. By playing dirty (but legally),and abusing "safe" combos, the doubled-value Attack wins, and the fact that the winner of each round must re-use the same combo, you can game the system to win almost any matchup (assuming your Attack skills are good; given the fact that Attack is so unreliable in the Takara game right now, it's probably not practical... yet).
Here's how:
Rules are first to 5 points, double valued Bursts and KOs.
Our deck will consist of -
* 1 Defense/Stamina hybrid of your choice (must be capable of resisting Attack effectively, more weight to Defense than Stamina)
* 1 Attack type, must be as consistent as possible against Stamina
* 1 Stamina type, just needs to be able to OS Defense types and Def/Sta hybrids
1) Always lead with the hybrid.
2) The goal is to lose to Stamina. If you win against an Attacker, keep using the Defense/Stamina until they switch.
3) Once you've forced your opponent into a Stamina combo, switch to Attack to KO/Burst them. They can't switch off, so 2 easy points for you. Score is at least 2-1 in your favor right now.
4) They will likely switch to counter your Attack type. If you don't think you can win the round, deliberately weak launch or launch out of the stadium to take a 1-point loss instead of risking a Burst. Score is minimum 2-2, you may be leading if you got some early OSes with the hybrid.
5) If they used another Attacker to try and counter, swap to the hybrid, forcing them back into Stamina where you can exploit the double Attack bonus. If they used Defense, counter with Stamina then suicide launch when they pull Attack to counter you, allowing you to revert to the Hybrid for a counter. Either scenario results in a win for you, either 5-3 or 6-4.
To make matters worse, if this kind of "tactical loss" strategy catches on, if both players use the strategy, there is no 2x Attack bonus at all because players will always forfeit the round instead, meaning that we'ere back to "whoever wins first wins it all".
Now, to avoid all this dubiously ethical nastiness, simply removing the "winner must keep the same combo" rule makes the whole system less exploitable (though suicide launching is still an issue that needs to be dealt with). If both players get a chance to swap combos each round, gameplay becomes less of a matter of "What Counters What: the Quiz Show" and more of a typical blind pick, but with less unpredictability. Bladers must consider what they need to pick to counter the opponent's deck, but it retains some of the typical qualifier blind pick decision-making and uncertainty; instead of tailoring their combos to beat specific known combos, Bladers would need to prepare themselves to deal with three different possibilities in each round - not the overwhelming array of choices available in the qualifiers, but not just a simple back-and-forth of counterpicks.
Whew, I spent over two and a half hours writing this... I don't know that I've said everything I want to, or that it's said as well as I want to, but here it is XD
EDIT: Trying to bold some significant points but the haphazard structure of this beast is making it difficult.
EDIT2: I have some thoughts on part bans/how we maintain competitive balance, but I needed to get this out first and I'm still thinking things through after the whole Hasbro reveal. Before the announcement I was interested in a Burst Limited-type format, but now I'm thinking that integrating Hasbro and Takara releases into one big format would be best for the health of the community and the integrity and fun factor of the game. We'll need more tests before I'm sure, though.
You did a good job of summarizing the problems Takara-Tomy has been running into with Burst, and why I am cautiously optimistic about Hasbro's effort.
We can only work in theory and hypotheticals so much — we wanna try something out! We definitely plan to iterate on the format as fast as possible, so your feedback is appreciated. We'll post a thread soliciting broader feedback once we've at least one run tournament.
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