I'm not saying you made this up. I'm just saying the reasoning sounds so forced with no real back-up.
I could reverse that statement
"2 stocks provide nothing but less consistency. On the other hand, 3 stocks make results consistent while having an enjoyable average set length. As a bonus beginners get more stocks to play and are not kicked out of a tournament after 10 Minutes."
You can always make-up some random reasoning. Fact is we always played with 3 Stocks in Brawl and Smash 4 is a much faster paced game and lowering the stock number doesn't make sense. If for glory didn't exist no one would've even thought about playing 2 Stocks. The reaction when 2 Stocks for for glory were revealed were like "ugh 2 stocks" but everyone heavily grinded for glory in the first 3DS month because real tournaments were not possible and people got used to it.
The "time bonus" is an excuse for bad tournament organizing. We have several big tournaments in europe held with 3 Stocks and we never had schedule issues so far, except in the case of bad TOing. We even do round robin pools and finish 16 6-7 Man pools in less than 2 hours.
Additionally it's statistically proven that people want 3 Stocks. I still don't get why american tournaments don't switch for good.
I was summarizing, without wanting to dig up the original FB comment thread. There were caveats, like a couple stated in your reversed statement, but at least in Las Vegas players that come to play, we're pro-2-stocks. We do have a mild elitism in that "if you don't show, you don't get a vote" mentality, because we have a few vocal people who expressed that they will not show, even if they have confirmation that no PR20 or other notables will be there. They won't even go to EVO for novelty like most of us, which is down the street. We feel that everyone should be influenced by their own influence, so you go to the tournaments you make rules for.
While we did play Brawl with 3, it was because we (IIRC) "stepped down" from Melee who at the time also do so from 64. It seemed like natural progression with game speed, and no one wanted to experiment with 2 stock Brawl. After Smash 4, our Brawl guys tried out 2 stocks on Brawl, and we liked that better. We didn't play Sonic, but theorized that we wouldn't have had that time-out issue if Brawl was 2 stock. But that was a year ago, and Brawl is pretty dead here.
After having the force-fed 2 stock campaign of For Glory, I'm even fine with trying the speed of "Smash 5" (if made) anywhere from 1-10 stock, but I'm certain it will be 2-4. Smash 4, to me, is right in the middle of 2 and 3 stocks, which feels hard to make standing arguments. The only thing I really want to argue to meta rules, is player consistency, in # of stocks. Other things are just extra. 2 stocks demands consistency out of players, and 3 allows accessibility of consistency. It is a difficult scale to balance.
Making time work for a tournament and pacing are two different things, and I see I didn't clarify. What I meant beforehand was that, for one reason or another, we have a lot of new people that get very anxious to play another game right away, even if they just lost. 2 stocks helps us with that. I've noticed in California, Utah, and Arizona (neighboring states), they don't see this as often. I'm pretty confident in saying that Las Vegas local has a pacing problem to new players, and sometimes 2 stocks isn't fast enough. We're not going to do 1 stock or Bo1, so we aren't solving that.
I did find that article on stocks by SmashEurope (you should link me sometime
), and I'm wondering if the poll being in English is the only true bias. It is also difficult because I consider 4000 people, mixed with other Smash games, too small a sample size. I've wanted a good statistics challenge, and maybe I'll work on this.
Why I lean 2 stock now is that I see it as a higher challenge by a small margin. This is the competitive side of me taking over. I personally want 3 still out of nostalgia from Brawl, mostly because I actually did like taking 7 minute control games.
As it is, we will be seeing more 2 stock games in America due to EVO's / CEO's rules, which most want to practice for. For EVO, I can say without a doubt that we had a guy who didn't care, and 2 pro-2-stock guys deliberate on the rules. This is also true for the "murdering" or Miis, sidenote.
I have an experiment for the community in fighting games in general (focusing Smash) that I'm still refining before release, and while I'm rolling it out, I'll poll stocks too. I expect a fair representation, albeit with an American bias, as traveling out of country is difficult. I'll be doing the polling in person, so that will take time, and I'm not getting an answer right away.
