Excuse me, but no. WE are the ones forcing the game to be something it's not (a serious competitive 1v1 fighter). If someone logs onto the online component, and they happen to get matched up with us, they have done nothing wrong. In fact, as I've said before, we're encroaching, not the other way around.
Gonna have to take objection to this one. Sakurai lets people turn items off for a reason. Smash is not exclusively designed to be a 1v1 competitive fighter, but neither is it designed to be solely a goofy, unbalanced party game. Players can take any approach they like, and that's part of the charm. If 1v1 competition wasn't part of Sakurai's vision for the game, he would have removed the capability to do it long ago.
Let's assume there's a hidden AT in SSB4, non official, that we've figured out. We log onto the online component to play; we may want serious matches, maybe we don't. Perhaps all we want to do that day is troll casuals, steamrolling them and then taunt partying. Who knows. The point is that, simply by existing in the online queue, we have the ability to **** up someone's day. Because, millions of people will log onto the service with NO knowledge of this AT. None at all. In fact, they don't WANT to know.
If beating a casual will ruin their day, and we can't have that happen, why let competitive players play the game at all? They're just going to end up "ruining" somebody's day by stomping them into the ground, advanced techniques or no.
The reality of any game is that there will always be people who are better, and there will always be worse players that they beat. This cannot be avoided, only mitigated through an effective matchmaking system. People need to learn not to get their feelings hurt over a game.
Hell, take a look at a game like LoL, which many DotA players accuse of removing DotA's "advanced techniques" to create a simpler, more casual-friendly experience. Thousands of people get their feelings hurt in LoL on a daily basis despite these modifications. There's simply no avoiding it.
These people know full well that they'll probably be matched up with someone of a different skill level. Losing is a real possibility. For these people, that's not a concern. Losing isn't that big of a deal, they're prepared for it. They don't actually have a problem if they lose. But, here we come, matched up with them, and now we're using these ATs that they don't know about. They don't WANT to know about. We steamroll them, and now we've FORCED our **** onto them. They didn't force anything onto us; we played the game we wanted to play, whether that's "let's practice against the human equivalent of a lvl 5 CPU" or "let's practice in a non-lag-free setting" or "let's troll some newbs today". They didn't. They played "let's get annihilated by someone who is doing what, as far as I know, could be a cheat". They played "let's not lose because I'm less skilled, but because someone else is doing something I didn't even know existed". In that situation, losing sucks because they are forced to play a game they didn't want to play.
I would think that a casual would
prefer to lose to somebody who was using techniques that they did not know. People love to rationalize losing in any way they can in any type of game, and losing to somebody using ATs allows a player to say "well, it's not my fault I lost, that dude had BS moves I can't do." If you lose to somebody and they just straight-up outplayed you, well, you just suck. How is that more comforting?
It seems a bit arbitrary for you to deem that casuals don't care if they lose because they suck, but they
do care if they lose because they suck when it's against somebody who knows ATs.
And for YOU to sit there in your chair and tell them that not only do they have to want a serious match if they're playing you, even considering that they have no idea who you are and probably didn't ask to play with you, specifically, but also that they cannot have a serious match without being on SWF and learning every ridiculous thing we do... the balls you must have. That is easily the most entitled, self-centered, self-important view of a gaming community I've ever heard in my 25 years of life.
Why is it any more entitled for a competitive player to want a serious match than for a casual player not to want a serious match? What makes the casual player inherently right in this situation, while the competitive player is wrong? If I'm a competitive player, I want to play people as good as I am so I can have fun, enjoyable matches. I didn't ask to be put with somebody who sucks any more than somebody who sucks asked to be put with me.
Casuals don't have to want a serious match, and nobody should force them to. Equally, however, other players
will want serious matches, and nobody should force them not to. There is plenty of space for both groups to coexist.
EDIT: Seriously, watch this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO3VTXqMCoo&feature=player_detailpage#t=159s Listen to Arin's frustration, and how Jon refuses to tell him the controls that he knows. They are, functionally, playing different games. We balk at this because Jon is winning not because he's actually better, but because Arin is artificially handicapped. We feel for Arin because it would SUCK to play that game like that, to play ANY game like that.
That's how casuals feel when we play against them.
If you're bringing in anecdotal examples, allow me to share one of my own. Brawl was the first Smash game I owned, and the first one I played to any great extent. I was a casual in every sense of the word. I played against only my friends, I had no inkling of what powershielding was, let alone any ATs, and I was unaware a competitive scene even existed.
A couple years back, I started playing Melee with some friends who were quite good and performed Melee's ATs regularly. I got my ass beat, hard. But it wasn't because I was "artificially handicapped"-it was because
they were better players. And I knew that! So will any casual who gets destroyed by a competitive player. ATs aren't the difference; pure skill at the game is still the determining factor. Indeed I would challenge your basic assumption that a casual player would prefer to lose to somebody who isn't using ATs. How many times have you heard somebody blame a game for screwing them over and rendering them unable to do anything when the failure was really their fault? People use it as a coping mechanism to deal with failure all of the time.
By your logic, no gameplay secrets should exist at all, because they're unfair to people who don't know them. Samus being able to transform into ZSS via taunts? Let's take that out, it's unfair to casual Samus players who can't be bothered to look up how to do it and are therefore always stuck with one character.
I know you don't want Sakurai catering exclusively to the competitive community, and neither do I, but you are not arguing from a position of wanting Sakurai to cater to both audiences. You are arguing for full-on catering to casuals, from a perspective that it matters more how the casual player is impacted than the competitive. Both parties should receive equal consideration.
