I've been a lurker for many years on these boards as well, and feel that much of the reason why a lot of these very narrow questions have been surfacing as opposed to more holistic analysis is due to the fact that it's very difficult to talk about a lot of these things in concrete ways. There are a number of reasons why we have seen this shift:
There has been a wonderful increase in the amount of video tutorials done by a large amount of people in the community, and I think that's great. I'd say we see a lot more useful information being published in the forms of articles not on the boards, Facebook groups, as well as streams and videos being published.
Comparatively, it's a lot more difficult to explain the minutia of Melee mechanics in the form of text; videos are more readily accessible, as it often does not require explaining every little thing to paint the picture, you can simply just show the situation and provide commentary for the less obvious mechanics.
Also, it seems like the number of high level players frequenting the boards has dropped drastically over the years. Many times on stream I hear top players state that they no longer frequent the boards, and that's a loss we kinda have to take.
We've recently seen a MASSIVE insurgence of "noobs" inspired to pick up Melee by the documentary and Melee's recent insurgence into E-Sports. For this group, there is a mountain to climb in the form of Tech Skill (which most early players are most interested), Match Ups, and Mindset, to name a few. Simply, a more informed community will ask more informed questions, and as the majority of board frequenters seem to be coming from this demographic, the analysis has grown a little weak.
Looking forward however, I would like to see integrating these other media into the boards themselves. A little over a year ago, Victra and I set out to create a barebones "Match ups" guide for people trying to get a bead on the ol' Captain. I still have a lot of my (amateurish) work saved, and would love to continue the discussion of match ups. I actually started a thread a month or so ago soliciting discussion of Match ups, and critiques of my current guides. It promptly was buried under the countless "how do I x?" threads.
With the tools we have now, creating guides like this should not be such a difficult task (compared to earlier years). Whether it's place lies on smashboards, or perhaps in a smaller setting. I was mainly working with Victra via PMing here, and invite anyone who wants to talk Falcon theory in a scientific manner (it is 20GX after all) to open the conversation. Who knows, maybe some day soon we will start a new Mecca for Falcon theory.
But we have to take ownership of it.
We have to do it.
In the spirit of Smash, it is up to us.
No Johns guys.
Amazing.
I never thought about the fact that the documentary had anything to do with it, but now it all makes sense.
I think that 2 things should be done for making this change, but we would need incredibly high cooperation of the mods of the board, and I don't think they would make such a big change just for a handful of people who aren't focused on "how do I L-cancel knee on shield???".
The two things are:
1. Make a thread that acts like a sub-board that is ONLY for questions like "how do i x" or "how to deal with y".
I got this idea off of reddit, and it works really, really well.
It not only clears up all of the really low quality posts that can be answered in a single sentence, but it also creates a place where people who haven't been playing the game for like 7+ years can go and talk freely with each other.
There could be a new thread every week and we would all collectively try to help out the newer players.
Why would the people follow our thread? Well, that's where the mods come in; we would not only need to sticky the thread every week, but we would have to remove that type of content from outside the thread to enforce it.
And,
2. Make a push for a retake of Smashboards.
Smashboards is something that literally made our community the way it is. It shaped our game, and more than that, it shaped our players.
The top players value one thing above all else: The people.
With a collective push as a community, we could get the top players back into it.
Something so small as just even a tweet or a facebook post telling whoever to please look at a thread, or to please post something.
Things like sub goals/donation incentives are made to
please the people so if the streamers see that we
obviously want to see their content more often, then they'll listen to what the people want.
Do you know how much influence we have over things? I'll give you an example:
Everyone wanted CLG to sponsor PewFat, the doubles team composed of PewPewU And SFAT. After thousands and thousands of tweets, guess what? It happened.
If instead of pushing for sponsors, which, don't get me wrong, is extremely important, we could push our content creators and our players and technicians to pick up the forum and post some incredibly insightful posts about things like "how has the meta evolved and how it affects you" or "Is coaching fair?" then I know for a fact we would bounce back to using this as our main form of communication.
Think about the posts that PPMD has made over the years, imagine him or armada writing something like that in this year, when their views have changed so drastically.
~
To recap, we need a BIG change of the style of the board, we need some incredibly
dedicated and
open minded mods,, and above all, we need the help and support
of the people!
Good luck!
