You're not doing yourself any favors saying something like this man.
People are opposed to frequent balance changes because the meta always needs more time to settle. Melees still shaking up and changing, as the low tier characters have more and more **** unveiled.
When a game gets balanced too often, and especially in regards to fan demand, the balance goes to hell and any character potential that is not apparent is shuffled around.
It makes investing and digging into a character harder, and impermanent.
People aren't just "quitting and whining", they're legitimately discouraged by the time and effort they've put into a character just so that thing they found could get removed, and the muscle memory they developed to change, and the meta they familiarized themselves to shuffle up.
I'm not sure what your PC gaming experience is, so I'm going to assume you're unfamiliar with the frequency of patching in those games, which ranges from weekly to every few months.
Even in major competitive ones, such as Dota and League, patches work by fixing visible issues. If something later seems to not be an issue (for instance, in Smash terms, if it's decided later that Little Mac really
needed his 30 damage jab combo), then depending on the developer's perspective, things can be reverted. Anything that can change one way can change back if it was overdone.
This is done, partially, to keep the spectator scene interested. Dota's international this year was considered a bust by many, because the meta played out so that the final match ended before a tower was taken, compared to last year's back and forth frantic base-racing shenanigans. No one wants to watch a boring match. And, with credit given to the degree that skilled play keeps some games interesting, a lack of change in the "top level" makes things
very boring to spectate. That's why my friends and I no longer watch Melee, and it's a part of why no one watches Brawl. It's approximately the same thing every time, because in an unchanging game, strategy can only account so much for inherent or discovered superiority (And maybe because it's because I stopped watching, but I've not noticed any shifts in Melee in my occasional spectating aside from
toward more Fox and Falco). Especially in a game that is targeted equal parts towards competitive and party settings (or perhaps moreso towards the party), it is outright discouraging to players who would otherwise love to compete, when they find that their character is the worst and has been for a decade or better.
Nothing in the last patch indicates, at least to me as an English Smash player (I don't practice Japanese by sitting around on Smash forums trying to decipher kanji), that the balance patch was done based on fan demand. We'll see if this holds in future patches, but it looks to me like Nandai/Sakurai observed matches, both tournaments and from data collected beyond our sight, and made their adjustments. A lot of it worked, and a lot of it made sense. Some didn't, but there's always the future to look toward.
And personally, I'm all for pouring one's efforts into learning a character. But if a given player is determined to maintain status quo at the expense of balance, then I, personally, can't respect that dedication. It comes at the expense of thousands of other players, who would love for even a fleeting chance at winning with their own mains.
It doesn't make sense to respect the invested time of a handful of players at the expense of the rest. I'm fully aware of the lack of total balance in virtually every game that exists, but while the game is likely to change, there really is no choice but to adapt to that change or invest your time playing a game that doesn't change. There are plenty of those around.
Then again, most of these frequently-rebalanced games are far larger and more successful esports than Smash is. What works for one may not work for the other. I think it's worth a shot.
