I fundamentally disagree with that style of thinking. The thing is that "jank" or a use term of "hazard" or whatever are really quite meaningless. I mean, you listed a bunch of stuff that might happen to cover everything that is in the game, but I could easily make hypothetical examples of stages people would not like that demonstrate the weakness. You never cover the possibility of a stage's left and right sides looping to each other (forcing all deaths to be off the top or the bottom). If such a stage did exist, how would your method approach it? It's not covered on that nine point list, but that's obviously a major gameplay element that probably makes the stage pretty unfair to a lot of characters (assume there are no circling issues). Another example stage would be Final Destination scaled up in size to be as big as Temple. Again, there would be nothing on your list, and it doesn't even contain any unusual elements. It would be an extremely character biased stage, but it's not "janky" at all.
woah woah I think you misunderstand, I'm not at all suggesting this method is the right one, it just appears to be the method in use, the status quo if you will. Competitive players seem to labor under the illusion that Jank = uncompetitive. And to prove this I've used logic to afford myself a consistent outlook, which would not include hypothetical stages with game play that doesn't even exist, only the stages that Brawl came with. It's my way of understanding how these stages got so popular, in other words. I didn't get involved in Melee until after Brawl, so I cannot speak to the mindset of players that made the transition, but it's been mentioned that the rule sets involved were adopted directly from Melee, which means so too were the stage list mentalities.
Imagine a player putting in Brawl for the first time, and going to brawl his friend (we'll assume SSE is unlocked). He picks... pictochat, and lolz ensue b/c instead of brawling they're busy avoiding spikes, trying to keep up on the conveyor belt, just all this nonsense. Immediately an impression is made *(first impressions are the most lasting) "this stage is not competition worthy."
now, as the months pass, and the stages get practiced on, more and more stages become viable for tournament, and theoretically the banned list should be reduced bit by bit, until you're left w/LinkShot's list (which I wholly endorse). So basically pictochat DOES eventually become viable for competitive play, but not right away, and certainly not universally.
The point is that the "janky" method is looking to make a subjective ruling on stages (it's essentially identical to the "gayness" criteria). There is absolutely nothing objective about it, and I feel as though it's a very bad method that should be discarded with prejudice. A better method for starters is to ask which set of starter stages produces the consistently least character biased outcomes. The "top" stages are obviously not Battlefield and Final Destination, especially not Final Destination which is the best (not banned everywhere) stage for a bunch of characters. I still maintain the least character biased stage in Brawl is PictoChat, and I've grown convinced that second place is between Lylat Cruise, Pokemon Stadium 1, and Delfino Plaza.
Not necessarily subjective, just all encompassing. It is a way to categorize and order the stages w/o even considering character bias. If you were to meld the list with a second list that does take into account character bias, but completely ignores "jank" ... then somehow cross connect them, then maybe THAT stage list presented would be better than either one alone. But you first have to address the smashers who are innumerable and look at stages like pictochat and say "meh, this stage is gay, lets strike it from the roster." Such rulings do go without much thought involved, simply an avarice towards the jank. Think of each stage as being on trial and guilty until proven innocent. Guilty of, having a walk-off, guilty of, having too many distracting transformations, too many hurtboxed animations, too high a % dmg'ing hurtboxed animations, etc etc. Each of the criterion in my list are so listed because they each introduce a dynamic to the stage that affects the brawl character during the match. Either you have to move out of its way, or shield, or avoid it, etc. At least on the stages with low to none of those elements, the brawl can focus on itself at the maximum, because there's already enough going on with each character's own dynamics, to have to think about the stage characteristics.
This REALLY dissolves down into people who want the SF experience in Brawl. And to break that mindset, you have to really first take everyone a step back and re-learn them. This. Isn't. SF. "Well I know it's not, I don't have a life bar." no, it's more than that. SSB is different to the point that even trying to make it anything like SF is immediately going to unravel the game.
When I first showed up on these boards I jumped right into the ban MK thread and got flamed right back out, lol. "We're not playing Mario Party here." ? Shoot, OBVIOUSLY, but by banning characters, stages, (yes, even items IMHO) you're not playing brawl anymore! You're ... doing like you said, playing a mini-game within the Brawl engine, and calling it Competitive Brawl. Maybe the exact nature of competitive brawl has to be re-examined. I don't doubt for a second that this game was partially designed w/the Melee competitive scene being watched like a hawk. Why else would they throw in tripping? It's what us old-schoolers call typical Nintendo bull****. Any sequel to a game that you play, the moment you try to do some broken tactic that took you 5 months to master in its predecessor is immediately punished, and useless, so that you have to re-learn everything. They didn't have the Smash community at their disposal to test brokenness, so things did slip through, like D3's standing infinite, MK's IDC, or did they? Who knows what was really a glitch slipping through, or an oversight, and what wasn't.
I have long been willing to work toward a non-optimal but pretty decent compromise starter list of:
Battlefield
Final Destination
Yoshi's Island (Brawl)
Halberd
Lylat Cruise
Smashville
Pokemon Stadium 1
That would contain elements most people would appreciate while not deviating too much from the norm and also greatly increasing fairness out of the starter portion of gameplay. The optimal set of stages would probably be nine stages, honestly probably removing FD and adding PictoChat, Delfino Plaza, and Castle Siege.
Well gosh, this is both promising and kinda... delusional, lol no offense, but srly, pictochat a starter? If and only if the very definition of Starter changes. It was originally meant to replace the term "neutral" but now Starter's ... starting to dissolve back into a simpler form of logic, the stage the first fight takes place on. That's not gonna cut it, I'm afraid. Again I am ALL for a liberal stage list, but I'm speaking on the points of those masses you (and ultimately, the handful of us in this thread) wish to educate, for the sake of the metagame and for the sake of the future of Brawl. Guilty until proven innocent. I reiterate because that IS the status quo. And pictochat in particular is guilty of several of those List elements, which betray neutrality (in the mind of a jankless player).
Gotta think a bit on it, what you're proposing is quite complex actually, and I don't want to dismiss it out of ignorance or laziness.
