Camping is the act of moving to a far corner of a stage, or to a lonely, safe place to evade the opponents.
Origins
The term "Camping" is mostly known on First Person Shooter video game, yet it has a different purpose. When camped, the player stands on his place, preferably ducked and in some sort of hiding spot, and waits until an opponent comes by. The victim has no idea that the camper is hiding, and when he realizes, it's probably too late. Campers are usually insulted for their acts.
In Smash Bros
It can have several purposes, including:
- Using a spammable projectile, which can also be done to force the opponent to approach
- Charging a move that needs charging
- Wasting time
- Leading the opponents into a mine or Pitfall.
- Waiting to the opponent to approach with for example Wario's air camping, usually done with percent or stock lead.
- (in battle with multiple fighters) wait until the enemies have taken more damage.
Planking
In Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Planking, is a form of camping that abuses the invincibility of stage ledges. Planking refers to excessive camping (typically with Meta Knight either jumping up and down) due to the fact that ledge camping is very difficult to edgeguard in brawl. This is even more powerful with Meta Knight because his priority is so high and his attacks are incredibly quick and easy gimp kill moves. This was named after a California Meta Knight user who was known for "planking" the edge. Similarly, stalling just to make the time go lower is also banned. Such examples include infinite wall chain grabbing to overly high percentages. Minor stalling such as moving around the stage to get to a better position is not banned.
Ledge grab rule
Due to planking being very easy to perform in Brawl, thanks to the fact that characters facing either side can sweetspot the ledge (usually with Meta Knight, though sometimes with other characters), a majority of tournaments now have a ledge grab rule. This is enforced using the end-of-match statistics, were it says on the results screen how many times a player has grabbed the ledge. If the player has grabbed over the amount of times allowed (usually in between 50 and 70 grabs, changing per state and sometimes per tournament, the person's round becomes disqualified and the opponent automatically wins the round. However, if both players exceed the ledge grabbing limit, they will often restart the match, either with the same rules, or with special rules for over-ledge grabbing applied.