Okay guys, a little heads up. Diem is running a Brawl- side-event at Concentrate IV. That is ****ing awesome. However, it's worth noting that, as far as I have heard, he is not using the most recent balance patch, although I do believe he's up to PL2, which includes at the very least the Olimar and Kirby bugfixes/balancing. It simply wasn't far enough in advance for the tournament, and I understand completely.
He has also informed us that most of the alleged balance issues that he complained about a while back, which we thought we had dealt with, are still present, primarily with regards to what east coast considers the top tier of characters. This is unfortunate going into the leadup of one of the more serious Brawl- events recently, but at least it'll show us what we're dealing with.
I'd appreciate it if you all kept this in mind while playing. We in the backroom are really low on high-quality playtesting, and we get very little actual tournament data, let alone videos. We strongly recommend taking part in the event; we really need that information (please please please save and send us the replays!) and I have my doubts that 2.X is truly that broken. Hopefully not too long after Concentrate IV, there will be a 4th balance patch. Even if there's nothing extreme from the tournament to address, there are a few odd nasty strategies with Pikachu that are just coming to light, and there are a few more odd fixes where we overdid it / made the game seem just outright silly.
TL;DR: Diem isn't using the most immediately up-to-date patch version, the backroom doesn't have much info to work with when balancing currently, and we intend to, if necessary, push another balance patch out fixing the issues that crop up in this tournament.
