Appeal to results: talking about Metaknight and the Ledge Grab Limit

Ah, smashboards... You know, the mods killed the whole "Ban Metaknight" discussion for a reason. Well, MLG has come and gone, and it's back. That's surprising because in the last 3 nationals, MK has had relatively lousy placing. Like, not bad placing, but placing that would indicate that being the best character in the game doesn't necessarily make him zomgbroken. For reference:
APEX 2010:
1: DEHF
2: Brood
3: mew2king
4: Lee Martin
5: Ally
5: lain
7: Rain
7: Atomsk
9: Anti
9: Shadow
9: san
9: Shugo
13: Inui
13: Sweet Pea
13: Gnes
13: Malcolm


MLG DC:
1: The_ADHD (EC) - Diddy - $2,500
2: RichBrown (WC) - Olimar - $1,500
3: Mew2King (MW) - Meta Knight - $1,000
4: ESAM (SE) - Pikachu - $700
5: FatalMatt (EC) - Snake - $500
6: MikeHaze (WC) - Marth - $350
7: HavokZ (WC) - Meta Knight/Marth/Snake - $250
8: AllyOrNotAlly (CAN) - Snake - $200
9: Atomsk92 (EC) - King Dedede/Meta Knight
10: Tyrant-WC (WC)- Meta Knight
11: xNecrox (EC) - Meta Knight
12: xxCANDYxx (EC) - Snake
13: Felixtrix (WC) - Diddy Kong
14: LeeMartin (SE) - Meta Knight/Lucario
15: Vinnie_C (EC) - Game & Watch
16: Seibrik (SE) - Meta Knight

MLG Dallas:
1st (9) Gnes -Diddy Kong - $12,500
2nd (3) TyRaNt - Meta Knight - $7,500
3rd (2) ESAM - Pikachu - $5,000
4th (1) Ally - Snake - $3,500
5th (11) Espy - Sonic - $2,500
6th (12) _X_ - Sonic - $1,750
7th (4) LeeMartin - Meta Knight/Lucario - $1,250
8th (7) Atomsk92 - King Dedede/Ice Climbers/Meta Knight$1,000
9th (14) mikeHAZE - Marth
10th (15) -Dojo- - Meta Knight
11th (13) DEHF - Falco
12th (16) Mjg7tlink - Toon Link
13th (6) RichBrown - Olimar
14th (5) NickRiddle - Zero Suit Samus
15th (8) FatalMatt - Snake
16th (10) logic- - Olimar

These are the three most recent brawl nationals. I'm going to discount Viridian City 9 because it's not nearly of the same size and almost all of the entries are from Atlantic North, an area swam–no, swamped is an understatement. Drowning in Metaknights. (That, and the results really suck for the purpose of this article... 6 MKs in top 8, FML.)

Outside of certain regions, and especially on a national scale, Metaknight doesn't really seem to be a problem. Results like are present at those tournaments are a really healthy metagame. I mean, come on. Multiple Sonics in top 8, an Ike in top 16, diddy kong winning multiple major nationals... Dayum.

So I'm not going to use this article to address Metaknight's results, as it seems pretty clear that his results speak for themself (hell, want me to pull up a recent german national where we had a sheik, two marths, and a lucas in top 8?). No, today I'm going to talk about planking.
For those of you who aren't "in the know", Planking is a strategy where a character simply repeatedly grabs the ledge. They abuse the ledge invincibility, the risky position most opponents need to adapt to hit them, and the high risk-reward to stall out the match until time runs out. An alternative version, propagated by characters like Pit, ROB, and Samus, is to basically use the ledge as a very safe camping spot and consistently jump up above it and chuck projectiles in the other direction. In almost all cases, this is easily beatable if you know what you are doing. The problem is that Metaknight's planking is, effectively, unbeatable. I'm not going to go into detail here, but DMG made an exhaustively researched thread on the subject here. So essentially, the character has a broken tactic which is not exploiting a glitch and easily bannable when it gets seen by a judge, but is rather based in the game's physics, by abusing something everyone else can abuse, but not quite to that degree. Additionally, it's very hard to ban, because while the ledge is an amazing defensive position for metaknight, it's a shitty offensive position-Metaknight really struggles getting from the ledge back onstage against some characters. So that guy who just grabbed the ledge 5 times in a row? He may not be planking, it's just that that marth who's pressuring him isn't giving him an opening!

However, MK's planking is broken. This has led to the rise of various rules against Metaknight. The most common (and thank god least retarded) of them is a ledge-grab-limit: a rule that states: "If a player grabs the edge more than X times in a game, and the game goes to time, that player loses unless his opponent has also grabbed the edge more than X times, in which case normal time-out rules apply". Yeah, and that's the best rule we could come up with. We've tried all kinds of other things, but most of them are flat-out retarded (note to self: make article taking the air time limit rule apart in the near future-that shit is beyond stupid). And to be honest? It works. Metaknight can't plank, and except in cases where the limit was placed ridiculously low (under 25, but these are fringe cases; usually it's around 35 or 40), the cases of people losing due to the rule where they were not clearly abusing planking are almost unheard of (there's exactly one case where I have seen this happen, and the metaknight was going for the time-out anyways; I have never seen this be abused to force a loss on the other player by forcing them to grab the ledge repeatedly). From a philosophical standpoint, we are redefining the "broken tactic" (which I would consider a prerequisite to have a rule such as this) from "Metaknight camping the ledge constantly" to "A character camping the ledge for long enough to accumulate 35 ledgegrabs, and then win via time-out". Which, to be fair, is reasonable. The rule has a few flaws, sure, but one of the big ones is easily removed-specifically, that nobody has broken planking other than Metaknight. So we just make it an MK-only rule. No big deal there. Beyond that, the rule has very few actual issues. The brawl community can sit back and relax, and Metaknight can continue being the best character in the game but only slightly above the curve anyways.

Alas, there's more to it than that. There is a fairly large group of people on the smash world forums who believe that, because this is an arbitrary rule necessary to nerf Metaknight, it means Metaknight is broken. Let me start this out by saying: no shit Sherlock. "This character is broken without these rules, therefore this character is broken". Herp derp. That's why you add the rules. But no, they are claiming that because of this, it is better to ban Metaknight. This reasoning bases heavily on the outdated (and probably misinterpreted) views of Sirlin, which seem to point towards such nerfs being ridiculous. However, I can guarantee that if the issue was with a character like DK or Olimar, chars who aren't top tiers, this would not be an issue. It's because they want Metaknight banned. Don't get me wrong, the reasons for banning Metaknight are there. It's not a completely irrational stance to hold. But if you'd like to argue that the game would be less deep without him, you're not going to have much luck. First of all because this places the burden of proof on you, and proving things that aren't blatantly obvious with this theory is damn near impossible, and second of all because you're wrong.

Why am I able to say this? Because of first-hand evidence about the metagame. Metaknight is not a prevalent force in the national American metagame, nor the german metagame. He is ridiculously powerful in both low level play, and in certain areas, but overall, at top level play, the character is not broken. You have a lot of results with him, but you have a massive number of top-level players playing the character as well. I mean, I can't exactly speak for the American metagame, but I can speak for the german one. And I can safely say that germany's metagame would be far worse off without metaknight. Why? Because in germany, Metaknight is just a character like any other. Be it because german metaknights suck, or because we just don't have as many people bandwagoning metaknight, or because we have a lot of people playing other characters at amazingly high levels. I dunno about you, but judging from the fact that the european metagame isn't that far behind the American one, I'm kinda guessing it's the last two. And what a coincidence, the recent major american nationals back me up on this one-given high enough level of play, metaknight is simply not an issue.

Making a decent case that the game would be more competitively deep with him banned would therefore be ridiculous, not leastly because banning a character is, by this theory, a big fucking deal. I mean, think about it or a minute. There are a few variables
 that define what the depth of the game is. You have the physics, you have the stage elements in smash, and then you have the character's movesets. The physics don't change from match to match, and stage elements are, for the most part, fairly uniform. However, character movesets contain incredibly drastic differences. Even if you were to cut down the cast to the top tier, you still have most major character archetypes, and the game is still amazingly deep. Just think of how differently Metaknight plays when compared to any other viable character. The closest comparison, Marth, is still amazingly different. Cut out metaknight–hell, cut out ANY character–and you cut out all of the effectively different situations that character contains. And boy, is it a lot. This is why banning a character is such a huge deal-unless the character is a severe detractor to the game, limiting the "realistic" options a person has to almost nothing other than "pick this character", removing him (and therefore limiting the "actual" options) is very dangerous. And this is why we ban planking, not the character. This is what justifies banning planking. This is also why you can nerf metaknight by banning planking, but not automatically justify a rule like "Punch Time" (ganon gets 3 "free" warlock punches per match)-because LGLs already have their smoking gun which shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that, assuming that Metaknight doesn't lower the depth of the game immensely without planking legal, it is better to have LGLs than ban Metaknight. Punch time lacks this.

Yeah, that's enough for one day. BPC out.
Read more!

Always Design Competitive

Why you should (almost) always design competitive

There's this curious one-sided hate/love relationship between brawl players and Nintendo, especially since brawl was confirmed as dropped for MLG 2011 (on a side note: congrats to APEX, Pound, and Genesis, among others, for destroying MLG in entrants to the brawl event-that's how we do shit in the brawl community). On one hand, we love nintendo for giving us what is one of the most fun, popular, and deep competitive fighters around. On the other hand, we HATE Nintendo for their continuous and repeated "fuck you" messages to both the competitive brawl community, and the competitive brawl hacking community (seriously nintendo, you needed to push THREE updates to kill homebrew that did nothing except remove the hacks that we added legally to make your lousy system slightly more worthwhile?) which is tied loosely to it. This is accredited as a major reason that MLG dropped Brawl-Nintendo simply did not supply the support that MLG needed. In the end, Nintendo didn't even allow MLG to record the matches, be it on-site or by recordig saved replays later on! That's a lot of absolute top-quality video which is just GONE (although some of it was recorded on camcorders by other players)! If you're into fighting games, you know how much of a big deal this is.
Nintendo is basically trying to alienate the competitive community. "Brawl is not a competitive game," they're trying to say, "It's a party game. Stop playing it competitively." In fact, a fairly large number of Brawl's design elements point to this actually being the case (note: brawl is still one of the most competitively deep and consistent fighting games out there, with a slightly tweaked ruleset. Melee players who ride on this can go die in a fire). However, this baffles me. The fact that they would design a game to be worse for competition than it has to be, and openly oppose competition in said game is ridiculous. Why?

Because competitively designed games can easily include the casual audience, but casually designed games are only considered as such because they, by design, ignore the competitive crowd.

To make this slightly more clear: have you ever seen a hardcore competitive game that has not been played casually? Any noob can pick up and play a round or two of street fighter with his friends for shits and giggles, laughing when one player screws up the other by knocking the controller out of their hand or nudging them (whenever I play Budokai Tenkaichi 3 with a certain friend, he always starts his most powerful super, and then tries very hard to stop me from dodging it by getting my controller away from me). A friendly round of Halo, Call of Duty, Rock Band, Guilty Gear, Tekken, Pro Evolution Soccer 2010... You can't claim this doesn't happen; in fact, most of the sales of these games come from people who play them casually. And yet, they are massively competitive and played at an extremely high level for very large cash prizes (just an example: the prizes for halo at MLG 2010 were upwards of $20,000!).

However, a casual game, by definition, is not competitive. You'd never see massive cash prizes offered for the best Mario Party player. It's impossible to play these games in any way other than as casual nonsense. This has various causes; usually caused by a lack of competitive depth (name a random wiimote-waggling minigame collection) or excessive inconsistencies (name a random wiimote-waggling minigame collection). Neither really has an excuse, but somehow inconsistencies point to a more serious problem. When a game is not deep (Wii Sports, Rayman Raving Rabbids, etc.), it lacks a degree of difficulty or depth. This indicates that the studio simply didn't have the resources/talent to do it right; it sucks, but oh well. But when a game is just too inconsistent to perform well under the light of scrutiny, then it means one of two things: either the studio was trying to artificially pump it up through randomness because it doesn't have the content to stand up otherwise, kind of a weak cop-out cover-up; or they don't want it to be consistent because they don't want it to be competitive. This is what I like to call "willful destruction". Remember-competitive games which are non-random can be played casually too.  But a game which is overly random is simply worse for the competitive than the same game, made less random and more consistent. For the casual crowd, it's about the same. I'm going to take a little example from the field I know best: Super Smash Bros Brawl.

In Brawl, there is a stage known as WarioWare. This video sums it up fairly well. The stage is not really plagued with serious issues. It's fairly well-sized, doesn't have any abusive tactics on it... So why does EVERY TOURNAMENT ban it? Well... After X amount of time it switches to a random minigame. These minigames are selected randomly and often contain random elements in themselves (For example, one minigame where you have to dodge a car coming from the right side has 4 different kinds of cars; one is chosen randomly and they all move very differently, so dodging is tricky unless you're a char who can stay airborne for a long time). And at the end of this minigame, the stage is reset, and each person who "won" the minigame is given a random prize. Sometimes you receive 5% healing or something like that. Sometimes you get a giant mushroom, sometimes you get a power star. The game can swing drastically depending on what you get, and it's completely random. This is a stage that could've been legit. If the prizes were constant, or consecutive (like, win once: get healing; win twice: get mushroom; win three times: get star), or had some kind of followable pattern, it could've been salvaged easily as another stage in the game which is very different and adds loads of competitive depth. But it was crafted with randomness in mind, and you really have to wonder, "why"? The casual crowd gains a stage where it is amazingly easy for really gay shit to happen-where you end up jaded because your opponent was handed a free win. The competitive crowd gains a stage that simply cannot be used due to inconsistencies. As opposed to a stage that the casual AND competitive crowds could've loved.

And this is one of Nintendo's follies. They see competitive and casual as incompatible. Which is only half true. They are compatible, but only in one direction-what works for the competitive gamer works for the casual gamer. Now would someone please tell this to the nintendo execs so that they can give MLG the goddamn rights to the brawl videos?
Read more!

Defending the Argument to Results

So a few days ago, I was approached by some people on my article, "Arguing against subjectivity: the appeal to results". There were some fairly good points in there, and some issues I'm sure more than one person has had with the article. So I figured, what the hell, let's make a blog taking apart a few of those points. First off, from a guy referring to himself as "HippieSlayer".

I'm really sorry BPC but this is completely fail and in no way logical. Your version of the term competitive is incredibly deluded. All a game needs in order to be competitive is to allow competition. What is relevant to how the game should be competed in is what kind of competition people want. Now you may argue that the best kind of competition is that which requires the most amount of skill, a very idealistic position that is highly subjective and truth to be told makes little sense at all in the context. Why are you playing brawl at all if you think that greater difficulty allways means greater gameplay? Note that I'm using the term gameplay here, because I fucking refuse to missuse the term competitiveness like you do.

I think you will find that most people rather than wanting a game that's as difficult as possible are actually looking for other things in gameplay, one of theese things being variation, which is hurt by characters like metaknight and by the allowance of infinites. And your reasoning regarding Donkey Kong makes little sense aswell, the average skill level would go up if more characters were viable because people would have to learn more matchups in order to perform well at tournaments.

Just a moment... I'll give you the point with the infinites. It's very well possible that the game is more deep with infinites removed. But it's not exactly possible to show that conclusively. Especially when you consider that DK is widely considered to be worse against Metaknight than against King Dedede, infinite or not, at the moment. DK is not a viable character; none of the chars Dedede infinites are. The game is hardly more deep by slightly improving one of their worse matchups-if it is, you cannot prove it. Just as much that you cannot show that Metaknight doesn't invalidate a large enough portion of the cast by himself to make banning him the better option. This is a weakness in the philosophy, I suppose... But let's talk about the real meat of the post.

In the end your post contains little other than subjective opinions, preached out like some kind of missleading religious dogma. In the end it remains blatantly obvious that what is best for the competitive brawl scene is that which will help it prosper, and maximizing difficulty while sacrificing a fun and enjoyable gameplay will not do that. I suggest you drop the thought of coming up with a perfect philosophy and embrace the fact that what the majority desires is in the case of brawl probably what should be strived for.

If you can't accept this please go play melee or actual chess. You can't simply dodge this fact by saying ''well we are playing brawl duh'', you really need to ask yourself why we are playing brawl in the first place, what makes it a more appealing game than all the others? It's hardly the difficulty, so why do you praise this difficulty so? Makes no sense man....

Oh, it's the gameplay all right. But once you've gotten to the point of deciding which game you want to play, the rest of the opinion is not something necessarily shared even by the other people competing in the game. And if you do not want to play the most competitively valid version of a game, then you do not want to play the game, at least not in this form.

Now, as to the first paragraph, which is the actual meat of the post. I'm not just going on opinion here. If I am, then explain this one to me-why is Tic-Tac-Toe not a highly competitive game, but Chess is? Why does Go have more of an esteemed competitive standing than Checkers, a far simpler game? There is no other variable to isolate which is not completely subjective. And frankly, if it were completely subjective, you'd have a lot more cases of simpler games being prestiged with serious international competition. (Also, before you mention Rock-Paper-Scissors, I'm going to say in advance "you're wrong", because you are-the level of mindgames that goes into high-level RPS requires a shitton of skill; you have to work your way into your opponent's head very quickly, and this is not easy.)
Anyways, no. The fact that there's one variable that can be isolated and correlated to the competitiveness of every competitive game, and no other that isn't completely subjective, points very heavily to causation in my eyes.

Also, you know what? Let's talk about pure competition, in and of itself. The goal of competition is to figure out who the best player is in a certain discipline. This is only possible when the game is so hard/complicated that skill is non-trivial. When two players play tic-tac-toe, it's impossible to tell who the better one is. When two players play ANY solved game, and play ideally, it's impossible to tell who the better one is. So in other words, unless the game is sufficiently complex, competition is trivial. Perhaps it's fallacious to extrapolate from that to "the more complex, the better". However, it does feel like a point in favor of the above correlation being causal.

To further make things clear, what decided whether or not a game can be played cometitively is merely whether or not is possible to compete in it, competitiveness once achieved can't be increased or decreased, a game of chess is not more competitive than a game of dice, it's just different in that the outcome is not decided by randomness but by the players skill. You would of course prefer chess, but that still doesn't allow you to missuse the term competitive the way you do.

Except you can quantify competitiveness. Not easily, granted, but here's the question: which is more competitive, Chess or Tic-Tac-Toe? After all, they're both games that CAN be solved (games where physical skill do not play a role are almost always solvable). What makes chess more competitive? Simply the fact that more people play it competitively? Seems like quite a stretch.

Especially when it has absurd consequenses such as you needing to call the japanese metagame non competitive when in truth it's more developed than the american and european in many areas albeit less in others. I respect your desire to play a certain kind of brawl, but I really dislike how you try to brand it as the universally best kind.

The Japanese run many anticompetitive rules. The fact that they ban any stage which is remotely interactive lowers the competitive depth of the game severely, removing entire skill groups from the game. It's still competitive. It's just not as competitive as, well, most other rulesets (not to mention the ground time limit, which they use and I have torn apart on several occasions as a scrub rule which is ridiculously stupid).

Also about Sirlin, he plays SF and doesn't have to deal with the kind of options brawl has, consider that SF4 could also have moving stages without elements of randomness that would add increased depth and need for skill, yet I sincerely doubt Sirlin would support such a notion for future SF games. Indeed you need to consider the reason why the fundamentals of SF hasn't changed despite the fact the series encompasses several games.

Well, first of all, Sirlin knows brawl pretty damn well. He made a series of instructional videos for it, remember? Second of all, how would moving stages on Street Fighter work? I'm throwing several ideas together in my head and in a game that is so unmobile, I can't imagine it working, almost no matter what the stage does. Thirdly, street fighter is a completely different game from brawl, and there's a big difference between introducing crass new design elements and picking the best ones that are present.

Ok seriously I've read more of Sirlin now, and you have obviously been cherry picking from him. He is of a completely different opinion than you.

Please consider theese quotes: ''For example, as designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, I made the statement that performing difficult moves is not part of the core concept of the game. It’s an imperfection that should be removed, so that there can be more focus on the essence of the game: strategy. Clearly, that is a troublesome statement if you believe that performing difficult moves is part of the essence of the game. I think subtracting some emphasis on that aspect enhanced the final product though.''

Sirlin does not think complexity and difficulty automatically benefit games of competition. And while he would never ban incredibly difficult AT's he would not consciously implement them either since they deterr from the central gameplay. Now we know brawls a special case because it's central gameplay is player crafted, still it exist and it's fairly cut out in stone.

Actually, look closely. I don't advocate pointless "performing difficult moves" (tech skill) as it merely raises the entry barrier, as the real skill in the game is in strategy. Me and Sirlin are definitely on the same page here. However, what I'm missing is how this (enhanced tech skill) has to do with an enhanced number of effectively different situations/strategies. In short, how it has to do with ACTUAL strategy. Because if an enhanced number of situations and options doesn't provide more strategy, then what does?

''Valve’s Team Fortress 2 has a lot of things going for it, but it’s specifically the approach to map design that stands out as a case for subtractive design. Most games of this type would offer as many maps as possible. More is seen as better by marketing departments, after all. Valve deliberately limited the game to only six maps when it shipped, though.''

There can be various reasons for this. Perhaps they were going on a similar line of thought as I was when I wrote the article, "My Break with the Brawl Community". After all, Team Fortress is not like brawl; each match takes a long time and you're not likely to end up on more than one stage each match. The stage would be less of a fluid, and more of a static setting. Maybe (and I'm going to call this to most likely option) they wanted to ensure that all the maps were well-balanced for each class (something most FPSs don't really have to worry about), and doing so took a lot of time, energy and effort-so much that they couldn't really pull off more than 6, or felt that (with the above reason combined) it was enough. I honestly don't know what you're trying to say with this. What I'm getting from it is quality above quantity... Except that we have to work with what we have in brawl, and there's no reason to call certain stages of worse quality for no reason or without a really solid look.

Even if you want a very liberal stagelist it will never be realised for theese reasons. If you truly want to improve the game then work within the boundaries of reality.

Here's a long one sorry:

''That's all well and good, but Japan has also shown signs of a soft-ban on another character in Super Turbo. I bring up this example because it lives on the threshold. It is just on the edge of what is reasonable to ban because it is "too good." Anything less than this would not be reasonable, so perhaps others can use it as a benchmark to decide what is reasonable in their games.

The character in question is the mysteriously named "Old Sagat." Old Sagat is not a secret character like Akuma (or at least he's not as secret!). Old Sagat does not have any moves like Akuma's air fireball that the game was not designed to handle. Old Sagat is arguably the best character in the game (Akuma, of course, doesn't count), but even that is debated by top players! I think almost any expert player would rank him in the top three of all characters, but there isn't even universal agreement that he is the best! Why, then, would any reasonable person even consider banning him? Surely, it must be a group of scrubs who simply don't know how to beat him, and reflexively cry out for a ban.

But this is not the case. There seems to be a tacit agreement amongst top players in Japan--a soft ban--on playing Old Sagat. The reason is that many believe the game to have much more variety without Old Sagat. Even if he is only second best in the game by some measure, he flat out beats half the characters in the game with little effort. Half the cast can barely even fight him, let alone beat him. Other top characters in the game, good as they are, win by much more interaction and more "gameplay." Almost every character has a chance against the other best characters in the game. The result of allowing Old Sagat in tournaments is that several other characters, such as Chun Li and Ken, become basically unviable.''

Metaknight comes to mind.

"Soft ban" does not mean you cannot play the character. It means that all the top players have agreed not to. There is no reason to believe that brawl would be a more varied game with metaknight banned, especially when almost every character he invalidates is invalidated by others even harder (there are very few chars that actually get raped by MK as hard as people have thought). What does this even have to do with the subject at hand?

''“Some amount of collateral damage is expected in the mission.” Sure, ok.
“We are going to kill innocent people on this mission.” Wait, really?''

''Playing the game the way I advocate makes the game more competitive'' vs ''I prefer playing the game this way because I highly value complexity and difficulty while I care little for how enjoyable the game actually is'' Indeed you need to start actually arguing for your standpoints, (why do you value certain things?)rather than using verbal fallacies to cover up for them.

I've demonstrated very extensively why making the game more complex and strategically difficult makes it more competitive. I have gone out of my way to isolate that as THE variable. It may also be worth mentioning that the most competitive game in the world, a game which has reached the level of a professional sport, a game that has $300k tournaments, is one of the most complicated and difficult games in the world. Coincidence? I don't, and the Zergs agree with me.



And one by Isaac:

Pretty much sums up the next few paragraphs. At least Hippieslayer had interesting arguments.

In a competitive community you do NOT want randomness such as items in Brawl simply because it's random, and the very definition of randomness in this case is "Not Skill-based". Why you would even consider having that shit is beyond me. Having maps with elements like cars and Rainbow Ride-things makes other aspects such as the fairly random tripping even more potent. You could argue that one would (with skill) have the mindset to think of the edges of the map tighter, thus saving oneself from things like falling. But it's still random. If a bombomb (or wtf they are called) spawns ontop of a player, how fair is it if he looses due to this? How is it in any way skill-related by the other player?

This hardly dignifies a response, but I said I'd go through it, so I will.
1. I do not personally advocate items due to their heavily randomized nature.
2. Items such as Bob-Ombs and exploding capsules that can spawn on a player and just kill them with no warning were removed from Item Standard Play (a brawl ruleset variant involving items; proven competitive, by the way) right off the bat. Nice strawmanning.
3. Tripping is a random effect caused by a player-initiated action (dashing). Don't want to trip on Rainbow Cruise? Don't dash on it. Don't want to die to tripping on rainbow cruise? Don't spend time dashing around the blastzones.

Developers are not gods, they don't make perfect games and games tend to be in favor of the more casual players: if you want a competitive game, you tweak the rules to make it more skillbased. Brawl wasn't made to be a competetive game, but one has the ability to make it more competitive (a lot of which are part of the game option). Not having Rainbow Ride makes the edge constant and in less favour of characters less likely to trip. Competition would be meaningless to most players (especially the better ones) if more deciding factors were random.

O.o
You're honestly arguing against Rainbow Cruise by citing tripping. Tripping is a constant in brawl. It's an irritating random effect, but claiming that it breaks a stage is ridiculous when you can avoid tripping altogether. Maybe if the stage caused you a guaranteed death every time you tripped, or even every 10th time. Not having Rainbow Cruise removes a completely legitimate, completely non-random, extremely varied stage. It doesn't make the game less competitive. Why, because it can punish tripping in a stupid spot hard? Ban Wario; he can kill you at 50 if you trip in a bad spot.

You don't bring a shotgun to a sword-fight just because it exists in this universe. We are in a contest against eachother, not the game itself. The field of contest in this case happens to be Brawl. The rules are decided by the majority of the players competing in the game, just like in any other game. If you want to create your own tournements with your rules, you can do that. But you'll most likely end up with more of a mess like DoA tournaments with a different random button-masher winning every year.

sigh.... Another person who simply does not get it. The problem is not figuring out which ruleset is the most competitive. We could do that pretty easily (with only a few gray areas, such as Onett, Norfair, and Skyworld). The problem is getting players to accept that, as opposed to their own opinions or the status quo. So what's your excuse? Tell me, Isaac, why are you putting the competitive depth of the game behind your own personal opinion of what is more fun?

"Why should we listen to BPC, he's not a tournament player" is a valid arguement. Why should you, if you don't have interest in competing, decide the rules of the contest? And if you do, I doubt you'd come anywhere in them anyway because even with items removing some good players, there'd still be lots of others keeping people not getting anywhere (with rules) out. Although I'm certain your examples are not how the discussion on rules "go down".

Isaac, which tournaments have you gone to recently? How were your placings? What's the ratio of tournaments that you could've feasibly gone to in the last few months to the number you actually attended? How many tournaments does your region normally have? And how long have you been part of the tournament scene?
Lemme give you a few of my figures... Oktoberfest, hosted by Ravenlord (4/20 among some of the best bavarian players; lost to Ravenlord, possibly the best lucas in the world who placed 5 at a major european international very recently, and Crifer, a high-level Fox player; first tournament ever in late october). Smash@Slay, hosted by Slay (7/20, lost to Bloody, the best german wario, and Gale, a solid metaknight who placed 2. in the tournament). Make Some Neuss, hosted by Semifer (33/80; made it out of what most of my colleagues considered a very difficult pool, took game one off of one of the top warios in germany and, AFAIK, the best french metaknight; won MMs against Gale, Quiksilver, who is 9th place in german PR), and a few less notable others). There was no tournament in that time that was larger than 15 people that I was able to go to AT ALL (there was one I was very hyped for, but we were moving that weekend so going to it was impossible); rest assured, I move my schedule around QUITE A BIT for smash. I hit 3 out of 3 that I could've at all. Germany usually has one or two remotely notable tournaments each month, if that much. In the last few months I have taken games off of top german players, beaten a good 80% of everyone I have met at tournaments, and improved considerably. What about you?

So even if "RandomNoob doesn't play competitive smash, therefore his logic regarding it is worthless" *was* a logical statement (pro tip: saying this makes you look retarded; Ad Hominem is NEVER an argument. EVER.), I'm *not that random noob*. I play this game extremely competitively. And even if I was a random noob, then the most you could do is question my motives-my arguments would not be disempowered by this AT ALL.

Why Sirlin's reasoning would be an authority on games is a bit weird since it's very much a subjective idea, Sirlin himself never states once that it's some kind of scientifically proven fact and he never even holds that tone throughout his article. By the way, it honestly seems you've misunderstood it (like many others by the looks of what discussions google turned up). I think he'd disagree with you. He probably wouldn't have liked Brawl in the first place, his examples are games with as few options as possible. And Sirlin's games could have randomly moving stages or randomly appearing items aswell, but they don't since it would be an unnecesary byproduct.

First of all, I just did prove Sirlin's reasoning (to the extent that it's possible to prove a philosophy) as valid. Second of all, they would be unnecessary by-products to most fighting games, but they are inherent and crucial parts of Brawl. They're a part of Smash's formula, and have been since the first game-in fact, I'd be hard pressed to find stages in that game that didn't move and couldn't kill you.

Let me make a few things clear here.
If you honestly think brawl would've been better without all the moving stages, or is a more competitively deep game if we reduce the stagelist to the one that Japan has, you are completely wrong. Many moving stages (Rainbow Cruise, Port Town Aero Dive, Brinstar) lead to a very different style of gameplay than almost any other stage in the game. Many (Pirate Ship comes to mind as a nice example) require you to think up entirely different and new strategies and ATs to use the stage well.

If you think these articles rely on Sirlin's principles, you are completely wrong. It is its own reasoning, and the fact that it backs up Sirlin's theories in the process does not mean it leans on them at all. This does not presuppose ANYTHING Sirlin has said.

So, that said, I have a few more updates coming (hopefully) soon... Keep watching the feed, guys (ha, as if anyone actually follows this thing!).
Read more!