Link to original post: [drupal=771]Crushing the Competitive Spirit[/drupal]
Before I even start this, I should let you know that I'm not intending to respond to any posts in this thread. I'm set in my opinion, and I'm not looking to convince anyone that they're opinion is right or wrong, and I'm also not looking to have my opinion challenged. I just feel like writing. I will at least read every post in this thread, so at least one person does.
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I hate Brawl. Anyone that knows me or has seen me post anywhere on the boards probably knows this by now. I bought a Wii specifically for this game, and I've felt that I wasted $300, because the Wii is an even bigger disappointment than Brawl is, but back to the point. My wife and I play Melee together almost every night, and when we owned Brawl, we played it together for a month. That's about how long we could feign interest in a poorly developed and shallow game, and we came to the conclusion that it was better to just trade it in. So we did, and I bought Disgaea DS. It was definitely the right decision.
Even though I don't own the game anymore, I still can't escape the shadow of mediocrity it casts over the Smash community. Whenever I head back to my old college to hang out with my friends, I bring my Wii and Melee so that I can kick their *****, and they bring Guilty Gear and Naruto so that they can kick mine, all in good fun of course. And as soon as I plug in the Wii, someone inevitably asks, "Did you bring Brawl?". and I'm forced to explain for the umpteenth time that I don't play Brawl, and I don't even own it. "Why?" they ask. "Because it sucks," I say. "But it's easier!" Never mind that when I did play Brawl, I beat them in it.
It would be one thing if this line of thinking, "Let's take the easy way out" was reserved for the casual players that frequent community colleges across the country. But this ugly, anti-competitive spirit has spread like a plague throughout the community, and has reared its ugly head in more ways than one. The fact is that Brawl is a mechanically broken game. No amount of glossing over can change the fact that Nintendo published a game where things that make absolutely no sense occur on a regular basis. My favorite example of this is D3's chain throw. How did Sakurai and his development team miss the fact that D3 can perform a 0-death combo against walls, and then make a stage like Shadow Moses? Or Pokemon Stadium 1? How did they miss the fact that he can chainthrow a significant portion of the cast to death on stages like Eldin, Flatzone and Mario Kart? How did they miss grab release infinites? Standing infinites?
We think about these problems in terms of competitive play, because that is the focus of this website. But in reality, this is a problem for everyone who enjoys Smash, both competitive and casual players. It doesn't require any level of skill to take a stock from someone with D3 if you play on banned stages, like most casuals do. Where is the enjoyment for little Timmy because his best friend is a cheap ******* who dthrows him to death on every walk-off stage? It's ironic to think that our tourney*** nature may actually preserve some of the enjoyment of the game, because we don't allow that kind of gayness.
The list goes on and on regarding things that are literally broken in Brawl, from a programming standpoint. Yet somehow a poorly designed, poorly planned and poorly produced game has become the tournament standard for one of the largest competitive communities in the world. How can that be? Because it's new? I wish that was the answer.
Because it's easy.
A friend of mine was talking to a certain well-known Smasher, and he asked him why he liked Brawl more. "I like it because it requires less technical skill", this respected Smasher replied. I wish I could have been there to hear him say it, because I almost didn't believe it. I'm sorry, but when I got into competitive gaming, I didn't sign up for the easy way out.
I don't know about you, but it feels good to waveshine. It feels good to ledgehop a double laser. It feels good to Wobble. It feels good to Ken Combo or float cancel. I saw a mach the other day where DSF moonwalked with C. Falcon into a grab. I replayed that moment like 20 times, because it was the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. What does Brawl offer that can even come close to comparing with that? I forced myself to watch a Marth ditto in Brawl after I watched a Marth ditto in Melee. I almost cried from boredom.
That is truly the problem with Brawl. I've gone through my hatred of Brawl in phases. At first I hated it because it wasn't Melee 2.0. Then I hated it because it was too easy. Next I hated it because it was poorly programmed. But now, I'm back to hating it because it's too easy, and the game itself has created an atmosphere that is toxic to the competitive spirit necessary for any tournament community.
I have a friend who is a political conservative, and at work we often discuss the problems with liberals. I consider myself to be a liberal, but over the last few years I've experienced a significant shift in my political beliefs, where I think I am now more moderate as opposed to the hyper-liberal I used to be. His belief is that liberals want to give everything away: health care, housing, better wages, overtime, etc. By doing this, we de-humanize people and make them wards of the state. Instead of encouraging them to go out, find work and make a better life for themselves, liberals say "You can't do it, so we'll do it for you", by providing people with health care, low-rent housing, food stamps, etc. Basically, the argument is this: If you subsidize an individual's life, you lower that person's expectations for themselves. Why should they work if the government will provide everything for them anyway? and without work and self-reliance, there's no self-worth, and in the end all of the government handouts have done more harm than good.
For the most part, I agree with him. I live a poor part of the city, where everyone receives some form of government help, including myself and my family. And for the most part, the people around me are content to rely on the government to take care of them, and they don't mind not being able to support themselves. Where my wife and I differ from these people is that we have strong friends and role models who know that we are in a tight spot now, but they encourage us to work and go to school, and by toughing it out now, someday soon we'll be able to say "**** you" to government help, and enjoy the pride and self-worth associated with taking care of ourselves.
Why have I gone off on this seemingly unrelated tangent? Because I believe that it is the perfect analogy for what Brawl has done to the Smash community. Sakurai has extended government aid to the Smash community, and we've eaten it up. And just like how government aid can crush the human spirit, I think that Brawl has crushed the competitive spirit. You no longer have to measure your recovery; the game auto-sweetspots for you. You don't have to worry about l-canceling, that's gone all together. You don't have to be fast, the game is slow. DI is all you need to make it back to the stage, thanks to the floaty engine. Perfect-shielding is so easy my son can do it. There's no way to quantify these effects on the community, but I think that there is more than enough anecdotal evidence to support my theory that an easier game has led to a more complacent and less competitive community.
The biggest example of this is the "Ban Metaknight" debate. Is Metaknight gay? Yes. Is he gayer than Melee's Sheik or Fox? That's debatable. Is he unbeatable? No. But everything else has been handed to Brawl players, so why not just hand them a ban? "It's too hard to fight MK", they whine. He has no counters. He has no bad stages. He's the best character. Well, last time I checked, the same things were true for Fox and Sheik in Melee, and there was no mass movement to ban them. It used to be that our community was invigorated by challenges, and that was what pushed the metagame to heights that no one would have dreamed of in 2004. But here...oh no, Metaknight's too hard to fight, so instead of actually being forced to get better, let's just ban him!
It really baffles me to see people abiding, even supporting, this kind of attitude in a competitive community. Aren't we supposed to rise up to challenges like this? I expect as much, but I keep forgetting that I'm applying Melee ethics to a community that knows nothing about practicing tech skills for hours to do impossibly difficult things. God forbid that a Brawl player be forced to actually do something hard. Glide-tossing? Get that kiddie **** out of here. I feel like the community that I once loved has now lowered itself to the lowest common denominator. We're encouraging mediocrity on the grandest scale imaginable. When I can force myself to watch a Brawl match, I have no idea what separates a good player from a bad one, because there really is nothing that does. We expect less from Brawl players, and they give us less. That is a simple fact that seems to get overlooked. A lower caliber game yields a lower caliber player, and a lower caliber community in general. It's as simple as that.
Brawl is easier, and that's what people want. As a direct result of that, we've been rewarded with a whiny, *****y, non-competitive community, and it saddens me that people work actively to grow this group that has shown that it has no desire in competing. Melee was gay, but it challenged me as a gamer to push myself to my limits in order to compete. Brawl doesn't demand anything of me, or anyone else that plays it. I can't believe that we've allowed this to become the face of our community. It might as well be our death mask.
Before I even start this, I should let you know that I'm not intending to respond to any posts in this thread. I'm set in my opinion, and I'm not looking to convince anyone that they're opinion is right or wrong, and I'm also not looking to have my opinion challenged. I just feel like writing. I will at least read every post in this thread, so at least one person does.
-------------------------------------------
I hate Brawl. Anyone that knows me or has seen me post anywhere on the boards probably knows this by now. I bought a Wii specifically for this game, and I've felt that I wasted $300, because the Wii is an even bigger disappointment than Brawl is, but back to the point. My wife and I play Melee together almost every night, and when we owned Brawl, we played it together for a month. That's about how long we could feign interest in a poorly developed and shallow game, and we came to the conclusion that it was better to just trade it in. So we did, and I bought Disgaea DS. It was definitely the right decision.
Even though I don't own the game anymore, I still can't escape the shadow of mediocrity it casts over the Smash community. Whenever I head back to my old college to hang out with my friends, I bring my Wii and Melee so that I can kick their *****, and they bring Guilty Gear and Naruto so that they can kick mine, all in good fun of course. And as soon as I plug in the Wii, someone inevitably asks, "Did you bring Brawl?". and I'm forced to explain for the umpteenth time that I don't play Brawl, and I don't even own it. "Why?" they ask. "Because it sucks," I say. "But it's easier!" Never mind that when I did play Brawl, I beat them in it.
It would be one thing if this line of thinking, "Let's take the easy way out" was reserved for the casual players that frequent community colleges across the country. But this ugly, anti-competitive spirit has spread like a plague throughout the community, and has reared its ugly head in more ways than one. The fact is that Brawl is a mechanically broken game. No amount of glossing over can change the fact that Nintendo published a game where things that make absolutely no sense occur on a regular basis. My favorite example of this is D3's chain throw. How did Sakurai and his development team miss the fact that D3 can perform a 0-death combo against walls, and then make a stage like Shadow Moses? Or Pokemon Stadium 1? How did they miss the fact that he can chainthrow a significant portion of the cast to death on stages like Eldin, Flatzone and Mario Kart? How did they miss grab release infinites? Standing infinites?
We think about these problems in terms of competitive play, because that is the focus of this website. But in reality, this is a problem for everyone who enjoys Smash, both competitive and casual players. It doesn't require any level of skill to take a stock from someone with D3 if you play on banned stages, like most casuals do. Where is the enjoyment for little Timmy because his best friend is a cheap ******* who dthrows him to death on every walk-off stage? It's ironic to think that our tourney*** nature may actually preserve some of the enjoyment of the game, because we don't allow that kind of gayness.
The list goes on and on regarding things that are literally broken in Brawl, from a programming standpoint. Yet somehow a poorly designed, poorly planned and poorly produced game has become the tournament standard for one of the largest competitive communities in the world. How can that be? Because it's new? I wish that was the answer.
Because it's easy.
A friend of mine was talking to a certain well-known Smasher, and he asked him why he liked Brawl more. "I like it because it requires less technical skill", this respected Smasher replied. I wish I could have been there to hear him say it, because I almost didn't believe it. I'm sorry, but when I got into competitive gaming, I didn't sign up for the easy way out.
I don't know about you, but it feels good to waveshine. It feels good to ledgehop a double laser. It feels good to Wobble. It feels good to Ken Combo or float cancel. I saw a mach the other day where DSF moonwalked with C. Falcon into a grab. I replayed that moment like 20 times, because it was the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. What does Brawl offer that can even come close to comparing with that? I forced myself to watch a Marth ditto in Brawl after I watched a Marth ditto in Melee. I almost cried from boredom.
That is truly the problem with Brawl. I've gone through my hatred of Brawl in phases. At first I hated it because it wasn't Melee 2.0. Then I hated it because it was too easy. Next I hated it because it was poorly programmed. But now, I'm back to hating it because it's too easy, and the game itself has created an atmosphere that is toxic to the competitive spirit necessary for any tournament community.
I have a friend who is a political conservative, and at work we often discuss the problems with liberals. I consider myself to be a liberal, but over the last few years I've experienced a significant shift in my political beliefs, where I think I am now more moderate as opposed to the hyper-liberal I used to be. His belief is that liberals want to give everything away: health care, housing, better wages, overtime, etc. By doing this, we de-humanize people and make them wards of the state. Instead of encouraging them to go out, find work and make a better life for themselves, liberals say "You can't do it, so we'll do it for you", by providing people with health care, low-rent housing, food stamps, etc. Basically, the argument is this: If you subsidize an individual's life, you lower that person's expectations for themselves. Why should they work if the government will provide everything for them anyway? and without work and self-reliance, there's no self-worth, and in the end all of the government handouts have done more harm than good.
For the most part, I agree with him. I live a poor part of the city, where everyone receives some form of government help, including myself and my family. And for the most part, the people around me are content to rely on the government to take care of them, and they don't mind not being able to support themselves. Where my wife and I differ from these people is that we have strong friends and role models who know that we are in a tight spot now, but they encourage us to work and go to school, and by toughing it out now, someday soon we'll be able to say "**** you" to government help, and enjoy the pride and self-worth associated with taking care of ourselves.
Why have I gone off on this seemingly unrelated tangent? Because I believe that it is the perfect analogy for what Brawl has done to the Smash community. Sakurai has extended government aid to the Smash community, and we've eaten it up. And just like how government aid can crush the human spirit, I think that Brawl has crushed the competitive spirit. You no longer have to measure your recovery; the game auto-sweetspots for you. You don't have to worry about l-canceling, that's gone all together. You don't have to be fast, the game is slow. DI is all you need to make it back to the stage, thanks to the floaty engine. Perfect-shielding is so easy my son can do it. There's no way to quantify these effects on the community, but I think that there is more than enough anecdotal evidence to support my theory that an easier game has led to a more complacent and less competitive community.
The biggest example of this is the "Ban Metaknight" debate. Is Metaknight gay? Yes. Is he gayer than Melee's Sheik or Fox? That's debatable. Is he unbeatable? No. But everything else has been handed to Brawl players, so why not just hand them a ban? "It's too hard to fight MK", they whine. He has no counters. He has no bad stages. He's the best character. Well, last time I checked, the same things were true for Fox and Sheik in Melee, and there was no mass movement to ban them. It used to be that our community was invigorated by challenges, and that was what pushed the metagame to heights that no one would have dreamed of in 2004. But here...oh no, Metaknight's too hard to fight, so instead of actually being forced to get better, let's just ban him!
It really baffles me to see people abiding, even supporting, this kind of attitude in a competitive community. Aren't we supposed to rise up to challenges like this? I expect as much, but I keep forgetting that I'm applying Melee ethics to a community that knows nothing about practicing tech skills for hours to do impossibly difficult things. God forbid that a Brawl player be forced to actually do something hard. Glide-tossing? Get that kiddie **** out of here. I feel like the community that I once loved has now lowered itself to the lowest common denominator. We're encouraging mediocrity on the grandest scale imaginable. When I can force myself to watch a Brawl match, I have no idea what separates a good player from a bad one, because there really is nothing that does. We expect less from Brawl players, and they give us less. That is a simple fact that seems to get overlooked. A lower caliber game yields a lower caliber player, and a lower caliber community in general. It's as simple as that.
Brawl is easier, and that's what people want. As a direct result of that, we've been rewarded with a whiny, *****y, non-competitive community, and it saddens me that people work actively to grow this group that has shown that it has no desire in competing. Melee was gay, but it challenged me as a gamer to push myself to my limits in order to compete. Brawl doesn't demand anything of me, or anyone else that plays it. I can't believe that we've allowed this to become the face of our community. It might as well be our death mask.
