Why do we need an essay explaining why there "should" be item tournaments? Nothing "should" happen as much as things just need to be done.
Anime Expo holds annual FFA Smash tournaments, I think even with items on, I don't remember. Do I care about entering? No. Do I care who wins? No. But they're having fun and winning random their crappy anime DVDs =) I personally know the staff; they don't do any complex analysis regarding balance of the freeze item, they just come up with the rules and people enter. One year, I remember the tournament had to be capped at 256, pretty good numbers for any tournament.
So people are fighting over items tourneys or Brawl/Melee tourneys and without it the community won't advance? Where's it going to go? If people are divided, so be it. Whatever happens in terms of tournaments, fan base, attendance usually has nothing to do with any arguing on a message board about fighting game theory. I've seen DOA fans argue hard for their game to be taken seriously and a whole slew of technical points brought up, yet at EVO attendance was sparse despite a $5k purse.
Melee / Brawl competing for participants? That's fine, make them choose and let the scene run its course, whether separate tourneys are good, whether Melee can hang in the same tournament as Brawl, whatever will happen will happen.
The Tekken scene had something like this. There were 3 versions: 5.0, 5.1, and DR. 5.0 came out, everyone loved it, we all had fun. Then 5.1 came out, arcade-only. Where I played, people preferred the pace of 5.0 over 5.1 and we stuck with that, with varying tournaments across the US. Then DR came out, arcade-only and the tourney scene was healthy with everyone playing DR... but EVO, being console-only, had to adopt 5.0. DR was generally accepted as being better, more balanced, more awesome.
What did people do? Everyone picked up 5.0, US, Japan, Korea just for EVO. I don't know why. Fame, money, fun, whatever it was, that's what they did, no internet debating required =)
Exploring the intricacies of games and discussing it is fun to me; that's why I'm here. But I know that nothing I do here will result in change.
I think everything I just stated was everything Yuna stated. But friendlier.
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LOL at noobs complaining of elitism. I remember a lot of people whining over "not being accepted" at message boards, and then I remember a few who talked tons of trash lost MMs and everything but in the end it was all cool and they became part of the community because they just wanted to be better.
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Who cares what Sakurai intended? This one guy named Dr. James Naismith created this game called basketball because he needed to entertain his students. He ended up spawning a multi-billion dollar industry with people adjusting the rules to create a better game.