I'm still wondering what the SRK opinion on random elements is. If someone (ponder, Jchensor, etc.) could elaborate it would be much appreciated.
I cannot speak for SRK, only for myself. Since you asked, I'll give you my opinion. Let me say up front that this is how
I see the world, not necessarily how you should see it. Your viewpoints are of course valid for you.
I think a game can have large elements of randomness and still be extremely competitive. Look at something like poker. It is basically built around randomness, yet on a whole the hardcore pro's make final tables and win a larger percentage of the time than they should. So just because your game has some randomness in it doesn't mean it can't be competitive.
Taking this a little closer to home, we have what we call "50/50's" in a lot of hard core fighting games. This describes a situation where one player has to guess what another is going to do: there is no time to react. For example, Makoto in SF3 is basically 1 big 50/50. After a connected rush punch, she can either attack (blockable or parryable) or go for her command throw (not). If you guess wrong, you eat damage. Some people say this is an example of "Yomi" or "reading your opponent's mind". If you're good at knowing your opponent's mind you will guess correctly much more often than 50% of the time. This is definitely a skill that some players are good at (e.g. John Choi, Alex Valle, Daigo, etc.) and some definitely are not (e.g. me).
Take that even farther and you get to Marvel, which at times can be
completely random. The game moves so fast that sometimes even the player executing a rushdown doesn't know whether his attacks will hit high or low (* See note). If the attacker doesn't know what he's doing, you can be sure the person trying to defend doesn't either! While this isn't strictly "randomness", it's sorta close in that how you come out of these situations is dictated more by your luck than your skill at reading your opponent, knowing your character, or executing your moves. That being said, there's still a tremendous amount of skill in the game, a lot of which involves around figuring out how to
avoid those situations in the first place. The MvC2 player rankings are perhaps the most consistent of any fighting game, ever. Justin Wong reigns supreme, beatable only by Yipes and Sanford, if they're lucky.
Translating this to Smash, the "randomness" of items could lead to an interesting meta-game where how well you'd prepared your game-plan around random spawn events overwhelmed the actual random factor. The closest analogy I can draw to this is something like Magic: the Gathering, another game built at least in part around the randomness of your initial deck.
As inkblot mentioned, the FGC grew out of the arcade where we did not have the luxury of tweaking the game to meet our preferences. When you got a game you exploited the hell out of it until you determined whether it was competitive or not. If it was, we started running tournaments and a scene grew around it. If it wasn't, it was discarded.
Very early on there were "house rules" to try to convert a game which was seen as not-so
competitive to be a better game. The most well known of these was the "no throw" house rule, where you could only damage your opponent by finding a way to get him to block incorrectly. Throws were forbidden. People took their house rules extremely seriously. Inkblot and I almost got knifed in the parking lot in an ST tournament in New Jersey because ink violated the no-throw rule in a Balrog vs. Akuma match (yes, their house rules banned throwing but not Akuma. Insane, right?). This is back in the day before the web. All we had was Usenet, and only then if you happened to be lucky enough to be in college or in a gifted-program at an expensive high-school. It was obviously impossible to standardize anything. This just reinforced the decision that everything was to be allowed in a game, and if it couldn't stand up on its own merits that it should be discarded as not tournament worthy.
Of course, your roots are different. You've got a wealth of settings to tweak and a rich medium for communicating those settings all over the world. However, (and this is really getting to the reason we held an items tournament to begin with), I still believe you could apply FGC standards to Smash and come out with something playable. It's possible that there's a game lurking inside Smash with items on that's just as competitive as items off. This game would play much
much differently from the current Smash games. The meta-game of item play and stage control would be just as important as combos, edge guarding, etc... maybe even more important. The tiers would be different, strategies would be different, and the game would play at a much more frentic, chaotic pace. You would probably only try to find that game if you had no choice or if the principle of playing the game at default settings, unmodified was important to you. Neither of those is true for the Smash community, which is why you don't really care about whether or not this game exists and can stand up on it's own, but as a Street Fighter I think it's a facinating question (including the randomness).
I expect you to disagree with that last paragraph, but you did ask. If you don't, I'm pleasantly suprised. If you do, don't worry: I'm not trying to convert you. You've found a system that works well for you and you should be happy that you got everyone to agree on something and that the scene is still growing.
(*) Note: at the highest levels of play (Yipes, Justin Wong, etc), this actually isn't true.
