I meant AT's based on glitches. That's your opinion. What does a game harm and good is 100% based on opinion. Many feel glitches are good and others feel they are not. All I am saying is the people complaining glitches are making the game less fun because they are losing are going to lose regardless of whether they exist, and they will find something else to complain about once they are patched out.
You can't please everyone, but I firmly believe leaving in the unintentional side affects that are moderate (patch out freeze glitches and game breakers, but leave in glitches that left a certain character move a little faster) will please the most amount of people.
Glitches are only good by random chance. GTA glitches are always fun, as are those in Just Cause. But a glitch in Starcraft is a big no-no. Same goes for Smash.
Melee was a happy mistake, and a big one. If airdodging into the ground was buggy and made you take 50% damage, rather than wavedash, that would have been a bad glitch and this community would definitely not be so positively hopeful about discovering and protecting new glitches.
Glitches are never a thing you should want, because it means you don't like what the developer is capable of - you want deus ex machina to come in and design your game based on random code mishaps.
This was the case with the smash community and Sakurai in 2008. We hoped for new glitches to be discovered in Brawl that would make the game accidentally play like Melee. At the time, we did not trust or respect Sakurai's vision, which is understandable as he made it clear Brawl was not a game for the competitive scene.
But this has all changed and turned on its head - we now have a design team that is making the game competitively balanced and interesting, and we shouldn't still be wanting glitches to come in and disrupt the game's mechanical balance. Because the delicate balance in place is actually good this time around.
Glitches can have positive effects, but it is always better to have positive effects be intentionally granted by the developer. Emergent gameplay should be due to mechanics designed by the developer, not by glitches. Glitches that DO end up being useful should ALWAYS be removed and replaced with a non-glitchy implementation of said mechanic by the developer.
It's always better for a gameplay mechanic that is fun to be provided by the developer intentionally, so the developer's talents and abilities can shine through in their implementation and design of said gameplay mechanic. We can see that in Smash 4, with Sakurai going through great lengths to hire a team and devote themselves to balancing the cast more than any Smash game thus far, and tweak game mechanics to work in a very elegant way that we haven't seen intentionally done in a Smash game before.
We don't need bugs to 'shake things up' this time around, and people need to get this through their heads. The same way Starcraft players don't welcome bugs into their meta, the Smash community has to be against them as well. Glitches take away from the intended design of the game, which we are supposed to respect if it deserves respect; and I believe Smash 4 does deserve respect in this case. It has done so much for competitive players this time around.
We have to learn to be comfortable with the fact that we are now, for the first time, playing Smash as it was intended and designed. Both casual AND competitive play is now intended in-game by developer design and intent. It's a first, and we shouldn't be taking it for granted or falling back to old habits.
