I'm going to make an extremely conceited, yet also honest post, which will probably garner me a lot of hate, but here goes anyway:
Me and other top players use spacies a lot because we have played the character for years, and years, and years. I'm talking 100s, usually 1,000s of hours. When you make a character almost identical (Except you don't need to have as good of a controller to move them fast because you only need to push the control stick like half-as-far to register a dash as you do in melee, which is really neat/nice), people are going to move onto those characters.
There's a reason I choose to play fox, falco, marth, sheik/zelda, Mario, Mewtwo, etc.
I've messed around with them since SSBM was released. I've been playing all of these characters a lot since ~2002. Pretty much 12 years. And I probably messed around with them more than anyone. I've logged MANY 100s of hours into a -LOT- of characters. Some of the above are just naming a few. I'll probably mess with more in the future, but what I've done is already done.
Doc was my first main before tourneys in 2004 so I use him quite a bit in the past. I've even played all top docs in dittos (besides shroomed) and 4 stock mid % pretty much all of them. That's just a ditto and one example but the point is I'm very good with the character due to all previous time with him. I started with Fox/Marth (mostly Fox) in tournaments starting Feb 14, 2005 at KOTC, where Zanguzen beat me by 1 stock twice. Next tourney I beat him back with doc by 3 stocks. This stood out cuz it was my extremely early days.
Fox/Mewtwo/Marth (and recently Sheik) are some of the characters, in all my ~10k hours playing Melee, that i put the MOST time into. The transition from melee to pm is VERY easy since the characters are basically identical, and mewtwo is no longer low tier garbage. I use those characters due to all the skill automatically transferring, then I focus on the new PM differences/MUs so I can improve myself for that game, starting from an EXTREMELY good starting point, thanks to all my time messing around with melee.
I got lucky; I had/have a HUGE advantage that I messed around for fun with so many melee characters. I won't lie. I had no life. I played alone all the time, just to entertain myself. I tested so many countless things about smash. It's just absurd what I tried to do.
http://smashboards.com/threads/ssbm-statistics-list.30064/ for an example to prove I am not lying lol.
From dedicating 9 years into smash, I have grown to understand smash, theory-craft, practicality, and a LOT of things to a VERY advanced level. I think I may have played smash in total more than anybody, even if just by a bit. But that's just a guess. With theorycraft (esp during the brawl days when I cared about the game a lot like early 2010, or 2007 days when I was completely obsessed with being the perfect melee player with marth/fox) it becomes WAY more.
People just see results, and think "this is how things are". Or they see "top melee pro using their best characters from melee, where the skill all transfers, so these must be the best characters once again"
i say NO lol
There are so many underrated characters with VAST potential. Link is freaking incredible, but until Lord HDL comes and gets into his prime and plays this game, you guys won't see what his true potential is really capable of. You're just seeing the "true" potential of characters top melee pros play. I'll name the top 5 melee pros as examples, PP/me with marth, mango with spacies, me i guess me with sheik when i use her and maybe doc, my mewtwo (Even though taj/kdj's mewtwos fail from what I've seen; they both lost to ally's ike and then I beat him last month 3 stock low % same MU, or 3-0d dehf's spacies after taj lost both games, or 2 stocked the link that 3 stocked kdj) who I've logged just as many hours into as Fox (my most two used PM characters by far), PP's falco/marth (even tho he basically never plays PM), Hbox's puff (even though he never plays PM), and any top melee pro who just goes and uses the same character, is going to have the advantage of their character basically near-mastered already, outside of some MU experience and small differences.
I got lucky I spent so much of my time with mewtwo before he was announced in PM. Easily over 1k hours logged into that character and I get to play a near identical just improved one for PM so that transition was easy. Prob played him bout 100 hours now I'd say. Fox/Mewtwo are all I really play most of the time in PM.
I've basically almost already fully mastered those characters; due to how long I played them already in Melee (not to mention in PM also). And I require Fox for hbox so I've logged tremendous time into fox recently from melee but I no longer need a good controller to use him well thanks to PM using the Brawl factor that you don't need to push the control stick as far to initiate a dash (esp dash-backwards the way you aren't facing) frame perfectly which is important at top level play.
As far as I've seen, even the worst of characters (like toon link and kirby? idk) can become good enough to win (although they may or may not need to be improved a bit; yes a BIT plz stop with MASSIVE tweaks just do very tiny ones plz aka what was done from sonic 2.5 to 2.6 was just dumb).
I didn't even want to vote on the CT tier list because not only do i not trust any of their uneducated opinions, but as much experience as I have from fighting so many people and traveling everywhere, I don't fully trust my own either. And when people aren't sure what to do they are just merely going to look at tourney results, and/or say the top melee chars are automatically the best again even though the worse characters (Link comes to mind for me immediately) are made -WAY- better.
I don't trust anybody's tier lists really, except my own for melee. Falco > Fox > Puff > Sheik > Marth > Peach > ICs > Falcon > Doc > Pikachu > Luigi > rest barely matter. Something either exactly that or very close to that, for me. I was against tier list stuff in general due to how uneducated most people are about most of the list. I don't even feel fully comfortable with ordering the worse characters in an exact order, despite how much I know about the ENTIRE melee cast.
tl;dr there are a lot of really good, unexplored characters. Mainly the melee top tiers are mostly already explored/mastered to the extreme, but the new ones not nearly as much (or not by as skilled of players). I don't care if that's "shot's fired", because it's my honest opinion. There is no Link that has mastered Link as much as any melee top pro has mastered their character. The way I see it, most of these new characters are capable of so much. inb4proveityourself which I've done many times with old claims (I said sheik was the best in 2009, people said prove it, so then I did for a while, people said to use puff if she's so broken, and i required her in order to win both Rom6 and Rom7 teams). I'm trying to explain why I choose melee characters myself (12 years of experience basically) for now, and why I believe there is so much potential with so many other characters. You can say "I could become the best if i was using a better character" from melee all you want,
but unless you're Axe or Amsa, it is hard to take such statements seriously. I'm pretty much top 3 with every char in the cast from melee due to my basic fundamentals/understanding of smash/time spent playing many characters, so I can actually make this claim for myself, but I'm not going to take the randoms who main Roy and stuff seriously when I'm basically the best or 2nd best roy/GW/pichu/etc from melee while barely playing those characters outside for fun.
The ACTUAL reality is that those characters (the lower tiers) are MUCH LESS EXPLORED BY TOP PLAYERS THAN THE TOP TIERS FROM MELEE ARE.
Same is true for the brand new characters (Pit Lucas Ivysaur Wolf etc).
The reason is because why would somebody like DrPeePee spend all his time using Roy when he can be using Falco/Marth instead? He would be WASTING HIS TALENT to do that. So he invests his time and therefore specifc skillset into mastering the viable melee characters. This does NOT mean you need to make his melee mains crappier in PM with each update. (not saying anyone will; just saying in general).
The game is so new and unexplored still, because not many top pros use the new characters or have mastered them yet. Armaada for example has told me he did not play Pit very long, but is still immediately very good with him. Now it is true that I think pit is an amazing top tier, but imagine if his full skill would transfer from his melee peach for instance. We probably wouldn't be beating his pit at all because he would have invested so many 100s/1000s of hours into the character already with most of the skill immediately transferring almost completely. This does not necessarily make X character to be a certain level, you have to consider how mastered a character is already. I think spacies get comboed to hell and back for instance, and I just played Kels Fox with my mewtwo on oro's stream and beat him taking only 45% (the other games were all 2-4 stock still though, but I also 3 stock 30% in the mewtwo ditto). Mewtwo i think is good right now, but also not great. He's a good design i think. He's about mid-high tier imo, atm. He's pretty low/mid tier vs floaties, cuz his combo game lacks, but he's high/top tier vs the fast fallers it seems, cuz that is where his combos shine the most.
Link was bad design, you guys just made everything OP as hell. What the hell at a 12% lagless grapple that leads to kills, a lagless grab you can spam from a distance and usually not punish, dash attack comboing everything, jab being automatic combo to grab which leads to chain grabs or KOs, up B OOS or grab OOS both being a good 50 50 mixup on owning someone that touches your shield, insane recovery but also super heavy on top of boomerang comboing to everything, that's just super buffing everything from a melee mid tier and that's not good design.
All that was was trying to make worse characters better so that average smash players can pick up the character and upset really really good players who choose to use their best characters from melee. (Sorry but the truth is if you're a pro player in melee and/or brawl esp melee, then you are most likely just a really good player in general, and it's pretty unfair/dumb to want to punish them for that reason).
If you're "-only- good at PM", and you use a new gimmicky character, then your character is most likely either
a) secretly amazing/underrated
or b) no one knows the MU
or c) some combination of a + b.
You shouldn't be PUNISHED for wanting to use the same character you use from melee just cuz they were a good melee character, just like you shouldn't be so heavily rewarded for picking up the newest ridiculous character before he's fixed (2.5 sonic, 2.6 Ivy/Link iirc, etc). Big tweaks are also a little ridiculous, they should be minor adjustments a little at a time for the most part. In general, I would say pretty much leave the good melee chars alone, make the worse chars a little better (mewtwo/mario were a good example of what you guys did right, even though some moves like Confusion are still pretty useless compared to powershielding for example), leave top tiers alone (fox was made a LOT Worse than you guys think even already for example; laser camping is basically pointless because the damage you get from it is usually not worth the stage-control you lose from it, unless it's a super long stage vs a slow character on like pokemon stadium; I'm the run-away fox from Melee so I can really feel how much worse it's become. I'd highly prefer you restored fox to his regular melee self, but I know it's just insane to be asking here to do that since there is so much spacie bias since melee pros [mostly spacie players] can transfer their skill level over that way, and god forbid that happens), otherwise the melee pros are just going to be unhappy + might quit the game + that's unfair to do; they're just using a VASTLY more mastered character and they aren't stupid if they're a top player, they CHOSE a high/top tier (anyone from falcon to spacies on the tier list) because they want to win, so they INVESTED most of their melee time into a VIABLE character, so then that gets to immediately transfer into PM. This does NOT mean "X character is X good because Melee pro [aka very good player in general] did well with their main", which most people fail to understand.
Basically there are a lot of extremely good characters, but the most unexplored ones (by the most skilled players anyway) are the newer ones to me. I understand lack of MU knowledge against them to a degree, but that isn't more important than their actual untapped potential, imo. Which most characters aren't nearly there yet because godlike players from melee (or brawl but honestly mostly melee since pm is generally a lot more based on melee than brawl by far) use those characters because they would rather use characters they already mastered from melee, and they shouldn't have to be punished for that.
edit - btw, tiers seem a LOT Closer (even bottom to top diferences), than they were in Melee or Brawl. So I can see bottom tiers being quite close to as good as some top tiers in this game, where I absolutely could never see that in Melee or Brawl, so it's good success so far imo.
