Air Time Rulings

So remember how I talked about Metaknight's planking yesterday? Well, Ledge grab limits are a fairly sensible solution to his planking, which is, in fact, broken. But there were also other solutions proposed. I took apart one of the more common ones, "Ban Metaknight", in my last article. But it's not exactly an open-and-shut issue; there are very good arguments for banning Metaknight. But this time, I'm going to take a rule apart that is not hard to figure out. As in, "this rule is HORRENDOUSLY bad". Air time limits.
The rule's name is slightly misleading, but almost as bad. The contents of the rule is, essentially:

"If a match goes to time-out, the player with the lower air time is declared the winner."

Now, can you see the issue with this rule? Immediately, the term "Completely arbitrary bullshit" comes to mind. Air time? Yeah, sure, I guess MK spends most of the time in the air when he planks, and you can stay on the ground while sitting there and waiting for the time to run out. But this isn't attacking the problem at the root at all. What's broken is not "A character spending too much time in the air". It's not even "Metaknight spending too much time in the air". It's "Metaknight spending too much time on the ledge". So the first issue is that it doesn't address the problem. And to be honest, we could stop there. That's all a rule like this really needs to be struck down–the inclination that, "yes, it's bullshit," combined with the realization that there are other rules that fit the bill way better. But no, apparently this is not enough for some people. Japan has had this rule in its rulesets for as long as I can remember, and Mexico just adopted it as a part of their national ruleset, which has inspired me to write this article–this CAN NOT STAND. It's incredibly bad, and I honestly think I should stand up and say it. So I'll go into the other problems this rule has.

As far as problems go, it's worth mentioning that this is a rule that has grave effects over every game that goes to time. Not games that go to time because someone was abusing a broken tactic, but EVERY game that goes to time. Especially in matchups where both characters are very mobile and have weak kill moves, or trouble landing them, this is a big deal. The Peach-Diddy matchup is a primary example of this.
Peach has relatively lousy kill moves, and a lot of trouble landing them. Diddy struggles to score a kill on peach at all, especially because she spends most of the match floating above the bananas he uses to set up his kill moves. Both characters have to play the matchup extremely carefully. Or Sonic-Wario, which, as far as I know, works similarly–Sonic spends most of the game dancing around Wario's kill moves, and wario spends most of the time floating around trying to land a hit. These are matchups where the only smart thing to do is to play amazingly safe and campy. Hell, you want an extreme example? Metaknight-Ice Climbers. MK has to camp the ICs until they make a mistake, then separate them and kill Nana. The chances for this to happen are few and far between against a good Ice Climbers player. And even after Nana is dead, the smart thing to do is get the lead, and continue to camp Popo, because he's not a serious threat (as in, it's smarter for the ICs main to just take a stock loss)!
Think for a moment. In any of these examples, is anything broken happening? No, of course not. It's just how the matchups are played intelligently. And there are many more examples. Hell, there are whole characters who need to camp around in the air, and have trouble killing. Jigglypuff. Samus. Toon Link. None of them are doing anything broken. And yet, they are all affected by this rule. And this rule will be overriding the game's internal win criteria–being a stock or more ahead. Think about it–if it doesn't override it, it's not an effective stop for planking. And can you imagine the situation? You're Peach, you're a stock ahead of Diddy Kong, have a solid lead, and suddenly he gets the idea to camp harder because, well, you only took one stock off of him in 5 minutes, and if he can run the clock down without losing all of his stocks, he wins because your character puts you in the air more! He never has to leave the ground. ICs and Snake are even better at this game-they have amazing field control and great projectiles, forcing you into the air, and can control gameplay because if you get too close, you get raped. ICs get a MASSIVE boost by this. You can't camp them out, and there is maybe one character in the entire game who can take the Ice Climbers head on on the ground. So you have to play amazingly carefully. It's not impossible to win, but the best option of Wario, G&W, Metaknight, and assorted others is gone. It's a staggering injustice.

But wait, it gets worse. You know who else has an amazing "shutout" grounded moveset, half of which launches or juggles, plus short jumps and a good fastfall speed? Metaknight. Just for reference, if you get hit by MK's upB, you are airborne longer than him. If he pops you up with a short-hop, fastfall uair, you're going to be airborne longer. It's not a winning situation if you're easily juggled, or have poor kill moves...

The Mexican and Japanese TOs try to excuse this by pointing to the fact that their timer has been increased from 8 minutes to 10 minutes, and that this makes time-outs less likely. First of all, good for them, but running tournaments with 10-minute matches is simply unfeasible for most TOs. That's extra time on the clock, and it doesn't matter if it's disincentivised-what about the players who camp on purpose? DMG, Bloody (german wario main), Overswarm... These are players that are play amazingly campy, and that rely on that to win games. And they will keep camping. Any smart TO plans in advance to the extent that any number of matches in the tournament, or, let's say, at least half of them, could go to time without running out of time at the venue. What does this mean? 10-minute games means less play time, a lower maximum number of competitors, and a worse tournament environment. It is an issue, as much as you want to wave it away. And even then, even if you get your tournaments running well with 10-minute timers, the issues of the rule are still there. You didn't remove them, you just made them more rare in happening. 

Actually, you know what? I think it's worth talking about the reasoning behind this rule. It CAN'T be planking. If it was planking, they'd take a ledge-grab-limit. So it's got to be something else. What else is there, huh? Oh right, Metaknight's dair camping. Wario's aerial runaway. Falco's SHDL spam. This rule is aimed not at planking, a broken strategy, but rather at an assortment of non-broken, legitimate play strategies. I've tried to wean myself off of this word, because I've gotten a reputation for using it too much, but this is a scrub move. And in fact, I've gotten confirmation from a major Mexican TO (Kyoko_Pamuyo) that this is not some lapse in logic on their part-Mexico is proud, and they don't see time-outs as legitimate, or "fun", so they're trying to cut it down. Nobody likes Metaknights who Dair camp all game long, or Warios who hop around battlefield for 10 minutes.

Mexico, let me spell this out for you. Something being more "fun" is not an excuse for CHANGING THE WIN CRITERIA OF THE FUCKING GAME. Even ignoring all of the other issues that this rule has, this alone should kill it. It's a rule crafted by scrubby TOs to satisfy players who are refusing to "get better" to the extent where they can beat tactics like Wario's aerial runaway or MK's dair camping, or at least put up with it because, well, it's a part of the game (and I'm suspecting that incredibly manipulative, egotistical pros who have trouble with such tactics have their hands in this–here's looking at you, TKD). And even if the only effect was getting rid of these tactics, then it still would not be excusable, but this rule has wide-reaching consequences for the whole cast. A rule like this is one of the worst things you can do to a game. It would be like saying in street fighter that, when the timer runs out, the character who had the most hitboxes active (like, a light Shoryuken which hits once counts as one, Seth's super shoryuken counts as 5) wins. And you know what the worst part is? You can't even measure it until the end of the game. Wanna know how ridiculous this is? Play the game with a hack that turns off your damage meter. You can't count how long you've been in the air, and especially if it comes down to the wire and it's close, it can end up being flat-out ridiculous.

In short, the rule awards wins to people who, according to the game, lost, without even giving them a chance to keep track of the deciding factor for the rule, drastically changes the entire makeup of many matchups, drastically weakens several characters, severely helps others, has no reason to exist beyond pure scrubbiness or selfishness, and in general SHOULD throw Mexican players and TOs in an incredibly negative light. And I haven't even gotten into how gimped their stagelist is (in fact, TKD came right out and said that the reason that their stagelist is so small is to weaken metaknight!). But this... This rule must not stand. It's one of the worst rules I have ever heard of, period. Just... no. I'm ashamed to be a part of the same community as these people, and I can say with confidence that the day that this becomes accepted in my region is the day that I quit brawl for good.

Also, a little postscript: I don't mean anything bad towards mexican TOs–at least, not good ones. Kyoko_Pamuyo is a really cool person who actually knows what he's talking about most of the time, and his rules are generally good. No, the anger in this post is for all of the dolts who went ahead with this rule. Honestly, you guys should feel ashamed, both for your playerbase for wanting the rule, and yourselves for bowing down to completely scrubby behavior.

BPC out.

EDIT: Btw, in the original draft of this, I forgot something... I only gave the mexicans flac. Japanese players, what's your excuse, huh? This is not something new for you guys; you've been running with these rules for years, despite it being ridiculously scrubby. And you guys are the MASTERS of tech skill, camping, gimmicky runaway, and arguably brawl itself! What gives? Ah, **** it.
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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.
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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?
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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!).
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My break with the smash community as a whole, or: why more settings SUCKS.

The smash community is massively competitive. Super Smash Bros Brawl, while perhaps not at the level of Street Fighter, World of Warcraft, Counterstrike, or Halo, has one of the largest competitive communities out there (in fact, those are the only four that came to mind when I was considering larger competitive communities!). But here's the problem... they are scrubs when it comes to how they consider elements of gameplay. Sure, they take their advanced techniques and moves nicely, and very rarely ban tactics (or characters). No, they're incredibly competitive in that regards. If all there was to brawl was 1v1 on a small selection of stages, and the only setting available was with a 1.0 damage ratio, 3 stocks, and 8 minutes, then they would be a perfect competitive community. But... it isn't. And they aren't. The problem with brawl is one of its greatest strengths as a game, but one of its greatest weaknesses as a competitive game-it gives the player too many options.
Imagine in street fighter if you could decide not just the length of the set, but also if there was chip damage or not, and if you could jump block like in TvC. What's the most competitive option? Even though it's not clear at the first glimpse, there is one, and if the community decides that they think that it's better without chip damage, then when it comes out that the game is miles better with chip damage, do you think the community will want to change? What if they didn't even logically think about it from a competitive perspective in the first place, but just decided because either they thought it was more fun that way, or worse (here's looking at you, inui), a few influential tournament organizers thought it was better that way?

This is the problem with the brawl community. Brawl has a lot of settings. First, you set if you want to play normal brawl or special brawl. As most special brawls are fairly gimmicky, and not really that fun or competitive over lengthy amounts of time, we go to normal brawl. Then you select the mode: time, stock, or coin. Coin mode was never even looked at, but rather considered something like special brawl-you ignore it and hope everyone else does too. It may be competitive but nobody gave a fuck. I'm tempted to agree with them; it's very stupid and seemingly random. Time and Stock were both looked into and it was decided that stock + time (also a setting) would be the best. It's a fair competitive decision to make, honestly, and supported by lots of testing. And then you have a bunch of cosmetic settings (how to select stages; I'll get to that later but it doesn't really matter for the competitive community, score on/off, etc.). And then you come to the big fish in the barrel. The damage ratio, the item switch, and the stages. Let's start with damage ratio.

The damage ratio of the game determines how much attacks knock you back. The higher it is, the more knockback things have. I think it's worth mentioning that it took two years for people to even LOOK at this. Never mind that brawl is plagued by fixed/low-knockback throws that allow for ridiculously strong and easy chain throws, or that with higher damage ratio, there's more hitstun and therefore a few more combo strings. Nobody even bothered to look at it. And when someone finally brought it up, I can say, to the credit of the community, certain fractions took it seriously. But there was a very large number of people who basically said, "We don't care about this, even if it is more fun/better". They weren't interested in any kind of results that would show that, say, raising the damage ratio would lead to a more competitively deep and balanced form of gameplay. But I suppose you will have a hell of a hard time quantifying that... It gets worse.

Items were played for a while in Super Smash Bros Melee, but then turned off because of explosive capsules which you simply could not turn off without removing items altogether (IIRC they saw Ken, the best melee player of the time, lose to a random in a tournament match because of a bomb spawning on him, and this was the last straw for most of them). They could (and did) often fall completely randomly in front of an attack of yours and cost you a stock, if not the whole match, leading to massive inconsistencies. In brawl, however, you could remove only those explosive items, and be left with items and did NOT lead to excessive inconsistency, but rather raised the depth of the game intensely. There is a heavily playtested version of brawl known as "Item Standard Play" with a well-balanced list of items, which is actually really fucking competitive. Sure, the items are somewhat random, but not to the extent that it would cause major inconsistencies in gameplay.
Now what do you think the brawl community's reaction to this discovery was? "LOL ITEMS GTFO". Yeah, they basically said "fuck you" to something which added an immense amount of depth, gave each character the tools to deal with most of the "broken" strategies in the game. What's worse, the person who started the project, Jack Kieser, got the nickname on the forums, "That Items Guy" (despite the fact that he didn't like the format himself, and that he had only really started it as part of a bet to prove someone wrong). I suppose it is arguable... After all, the items do lead to minor inconsistencies. But not enough to make a large difference. And this time, what's really bothersome isn't necessarily that it was decided against, but rather how it was decided against-with snap judgement and personal preference. Not the will of the competitive community or anything of the sort, simply "We like it this way". And this STILL isn't the worst of it.

Then we get to stages. Brawl has various built-in settings for stage selections, but none of them are really that competitively balanced (random is, well, random; turns doesn't account for a fair round one or fair terrain at all, same with loser). So it's up to the community to create its own version of stage selection. And it's really very different from region to region. The only things that remain the same are that there is a list of starter stage from which each player strikes to find the most fair stage for the matchup, and then the loser gets to choose a stage from either that list or an additional list of "counterpick" stages; normally stages that offer a large advantage to various characters. However, there are SERIOUS differences in the stagelists between regions. And what's worse, most of the community has, again, reached a snap decision that unmoving stages are better than moving stages. No, not "non-random is worse than random" (technically true). Moving is worse than non-moving. This is INCREDIBLY wrong if you're looking for competition. It leads to people advocating stagelists where almost every stage in the game is banned! Remember, this is a game where the stage, regardless of its shape and form, has a massive working on how the match runs. Even the stage Final Destination, which is a perfectly flat stage with no platforms, movement, or hazards has a massive influence on how the match runs, simply because no other stage has no platforms, and very, very few stages have no movement or hazards. However, this snap decision has made its way through the community, and people just don't think about it. It doesn't matter if you point to how the game is more competitively deep if you legalize Jungle Japes or Rainbow Cruise, those stages are "different" from your typical flat stages, so they aren't wanted. Hell, even to get them to accept one of the most balanced and fair stages in the game (Pokemon Stadium 2; added bonus: it's flat with platforms!) was really hard. Why? Because the stage is "Gay" and "Changes your physics" (it has one segment where your traction is seriously reduced due to ice, and one section where your gravity and fall speed are severely reduced due to windmills from the ground; neither of them are degenerate or would allow you to ignore any basic part of gameplay)-neither of those are actual reasons to ban anything, but they did it anyways.

If you are designing for competition, and decide to add a lot of settings, you will be putting a lot of work into sand. But if you want people to pay attention to things like stages and optional settings, do this:

• Put in a built-in, legitimate stage selection method which WORKS. No game does this. Soul Calibur, Brawl, later Tekken titles... they all make the same mistake. There is no good, built-in method, and this means it's up to the player to sort it out. This leads to lousy assumptions.

• Do not include stages/other elements which are obviously not intended for competition, or which are obviously "different", even if they are potentially competitive. The brawl community looked at stages like Temple Hyrule, WarioWare, and New Pork City, which trivialized competition, and decided that they might as well extend that to any stage which is even remotely questionable. For the latter thing mentioned, look at the "Mario Bros" stage, which although potentially competitively valid, is so ridiculously distant from any other element of brawl that it feels like a completely different game. Make it clear right from the start that every stage in the game is competitively viable and valid, and make it clear that they all belong. Similar to what they did with items; they saw bombs creating massive inconsistencies and decided that just about every item would end up doing the same.

• Make sure that the "default" settings are the very best you can think of for competition.

• Do not make things random. The brawl community would have a lot less trouble with stages like Frigate Orpheon, Halberd, Norfair, Pictochat, and Green Greens (the former two are tournament staples that get questioned occasionally; the latter three are stages that are almost always banned, mostly due to randomness, although norfair has become questionable for other reasons entirely) if they weren't so goddamn random. Items would be completely legitimate if they had at least set spawn points. But no, it's random.

And here's the big one: do not claim that your game was not intended to be competitive. By claiming this, you give the community complete liberty to reshape the game however they feel is correct. The competitive brawl community has never played with Damage Ratio 1.1. They have never played seriously on Skyworld or Onett (two questionable stages). They have never honestly given items a chance. And I see this as a major weakness in the community. I mean, the brawl community is, beyond shit like this, amazing. It may seem like I'm hating on it pretty hard... I'm not, I love the brawl community. You'll almost never see a video game scene which is more cutthroat and competitive and at the same time so casual and relaxed. I've gotten into bitter feuds with people on the forum and then gone to tournaments, met them, and they were really, really cool people. In fact, I think out of all of the smash tournaments I've been to, I've only ever met one person who I didn't find cool, or at least legit (he knows who he is; if you're wondering, it's probably not you). They're really eager to help new players, and the tournaments are often really laid-back. But if they have one major failing, it's their failure to accept logic. Most of them do not accept that there is a logical way to deduce how to make the game the most competitive game possible, and even if they do, they refuse to accept it, instead just ignoring it because they, as the majority, are able and willing to. It's incredibly irksome, and just feels very, very wrong.

It's not the end of the world, I guess-brawl is still a very fun, and extremely competitive game without moving/harmful stages, without determining the best settings, without items. It's just that belonging to this minority, and being right, and seeing the community laugh you off kinda sucks. You see, I really enjoy "gay" stages. REALLY. My favorite stage is Port Town Aero Dive, a stage which most smashers would laugh at because of the hazards that can kill you ridiculously early (tip: they're REALLY EASY TO DODGE) and the lack of ledges on the main platform (again, not an issue because there's a big fat hitbox below you that will bounce you back up if you fall off). I also really enjoy playing on Norfair (where jets of lava fly from all sides at the players), Rainbow Cruise (where the stage moves around a set path and disappears behind you), and Green Greens (where bomb blocks rain from the sky). And being right, and it not mattering, especially on an issue like this... it bites.

But enough about me johning. The point of this article is really about settings. They're an interesting game design tool, but they are ridiculously hard to implement in a way which the players will make the most of them. You're really best off not letting the players touch anything which is actually important.
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Competitive Gaming with fighting games: extra points 5

Step 8: Don't immediately dismiss Player vs. External Element.
This has been my message to the smash community for several months now, and it's just finally getting through my head that they don't care about logical reasoning regarding the stages that can be used in competition, but rather would just come to a general consensus over what "feels" right (and you can't really judge them for it... after all, it is just a game). And what feels right for them is that what should dominate in combat is the Player vs. Player aspect.
Time for a little background knowledge here. In Smash, each fight has the following setup: Player vs. Player (vs. Player) (vs. Player) vs. Stage (vs. Items). The items in brackets can be turned off by changing the game mode, or in-game settings. The ones outside of the brackets cannot be turned off-they can be minimalized, to an extent, but cannot be turned off. A more recent model slated the parts that you cannot turn off more accurately as Player+Stage vs. Player+Stage. What the smash community has tried to do is limit the effects that the stage has on competition. This means, in a game with 41 stages, banning all but between 3 and 15 of them (usually between 9 and 12), based on many of them emphasizing player interaction with the stage in a way they don't like, and forcing the first round of the match to start on one of the least interactive stages in the game.
However, when you think of it in competitive terms, how does removing the stage-based elements that move, or can hurt the player, in a game where each stage is massively different, improve the competitive depth of the game? As said, it's always going to be Player+Stage vs. Player+Stage, even on the most simple of stages. By allowing stages which are "different", there is no lowering of competitive depth (Perhaps due to overcentralizing strategies and/or randomness, but I covered that in my first post). Instead, when you remove stages, you drastically reduce the number of effectively different situations, leading to the competitive depth of the game being lowered.
This does not apply only to smash! Sure, building stage hazards into most competitive fighters is hard. But look at Tekken 4 (which unfortunately bombed). Its stages are so much cooler than any Tekken game before it. If you would, say, remove all but the flat, open stages, you would remove an amazing amount of competitive depth. Look at Soul Calibur's various incarnations-there's almost no reason to ever ban a stage! I mean, the "earthquake" stage from Soul Calibur 3 is exactly what I'm talking about-it's different and hazardous, and leads to some very, very cool mindgames-do I block the earthquake, or try to hit my opponent with a grab or a medium/overhead attack before it hits? Such "third-party interferences" can be incredibly refreshing, and an incredibly easy way to drastically increase competitive depth-as long as they aren't excessively random and are done intelligently (i.e. no lasers coming from the side of the screen in a game like Street Fighter). Warning: if you are not very clear about the fact that the stage variance is a competitive element, the playerbase very well may bitch and moan like nobody's business, and you won't even really be able to tell them that they're wrong.
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Competitive Gaming with fighting games: extra points 4

Go easy on the tech skill. Sure, hardcore tech skill can be great. Just ask any Super Smash Bros Melee player (the famous claim: Mew2king, one of the best melee players, cannot play Fox for the entire tournament because he's too damn hard on the fingers)-they love the fact that it's ridiculously hard to play the game at a competitive level at all, and they love the massive amount of skill involved. However, ask a Brawl player who doesn't play Melee (like me!) what they think of Melee, and you'll get a lot of people who simply can't deal with the ridiculous tech skill barrier. Just to make this clear, let me pull an example. One of the staple techniques of every character is the Short Hop Fast Fall L-Canceled Aerial. SHFLLing is something most pro players do multiple times a second. Here's how it works: You hit the jump button and release it within approximately 2 frames to keep your jump short (2 frames is the minimum, but it's never above 6, at least not among the viable characters). Immediately after your jump startup ends (same 2-6 frames), you press A plus a direction to do an aerial attack, and then after about another 10-20 frames, you press down to fall faster. Then, as you land, press L. The timing on all of this is very tight, and made even tighter by the almost complete lack of a buffer. And that's an AT that every character needs; some character-specific (but also essential!) ATs such as Waveshining with Fox or Samus's "Super Wavedash" are even harder.

Increasing the tech skill barrier does not negatively affect the depth of the game. However, until you raise it to a degree which is ridiculous, even at the highest level of human ability, you are hardly putting a dent in gameplay depth-SSBM pros nail nearly every tech skill requirement, and it reduces the game, at the highest level, back to what it would be if the tech skill was not there-it merely makes it harder at the beginning level. And what that does can indeed be negative-games with a higher tech skill barrier are far harder for an initiate to pick up and play. It leads to less players getting into the game in the first place. Imagine if the command for a hadoken in street fighter was 236463214 instead of just 236, and shoryuken was 412363214. Would it be a more fun game? Probably not. And at the highest level of play, it wouldn't be much deeper either. This can be an incredibly negative aspect. If you want a game with nothing more than a stupidly high tech skill barrier, I'd recommend Bop-It! Extreme or something similar-it's not deep, it's just difficult, technically.

Now hang on a minute, I hear the melee community screaming out, "but melee would be WAY LESS DEEP without, say, wavedashing!" Yep. It would be. And THIS is why you need to differentiate between two things: necessary tech skill and gratuitous tech skill.
Necessary tech skill is the kind of input you need to do a certain action which is not without a disadvantage. For example, in melee, do you always want to waveland? What about always short hop? You need certain commands to perform certain actions. Hell, games like Brawl, Melee, or Guilty Gear would be unthinkable without 5-6 buttons. I mean, pressing 236HP to do a hadoken is not an excessive tech skill requirement. It is, however, necessary to differentiate a hadoken from, say, a mid strong. Similarly, waveshining in melee. Doing it effectively requires very, VERY good timing. It's brutally hard, and the game has no buffer. But you don't always want to do it. And furthermore, you need those commands to differentiate the different actions in the game, and to pull off the tech, you need to input them with a very strict buffer.
Gratuitous tech skill... THE big example which comes to mind is L-canceling in melee. L-canceling is an advanced technique in which you press the shield button right as you land with an aerial attack. By doing so, you halve the lag on the landing. This AT alone turned melee from a solid game into an AMAZING game. But it's terrible design. Why? Because you would never not want to L-cancel if you could. In situations like this, it's usually better to cut out the tech skill. Melee would be exactly the same game at a higher level, but more approachable at a lower level (warning: making L-cancelling automatic still leaves you with a ridiculously hard game! Don't get too excited, Stubbyfingers). The tech skill isn't giving the game anything new at a high level-it's simply forcing you to do another (almost) frame perfect input in an already blisteringly fast game. This, similar to the example above of replacing Hadoken's 236HP input with 236463214HP, is not making the game a better game at all until you reach the point where the tech skill cannot realistically be achieved effectively, at which point... Eh, you're better off just dropping it altogether (see also: this RETARDEDLY HARD advanced technique with king DDD in brawl that nobody will EVER be able to do consistently. EVER!).

My advice: make certain "Advanced techniques" (special attacks, such as the street fighter supers/ultras or the TvC Hypers lend themselves especially well to this) very hard to execute, but make the normal stuff relatively simple to execute (note: DO NOT TRIVIALIZE IT. SNKvsC2 made this mistake by making every attack executable with a direction on one analog stick... this is a very, very bad idea! It makes the player feel very stupid, and simplifies gameplay too much. Some tech skill is good. No tech skill, or too much tech skill, or worse, Gratuitous tech skill, is bad).
(This is, honestly, more opinion than most things, but it's based on a fair bit of observation.)
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