Again, you’re not using examples. You’re throwing out statements like “choice” for whatever reason. It’s not making something harder needlessly, it’s like I said in the Falco example, so you can just bust someone’s shield for free. Imagine if there was no L-Cancel for input in Smash N64, characters would just contact your shield once and free shield break without error. There are many characters who have “meaningless tech” to help them maintain pressure. Makoto from Street Fighter III Third Strike has Hayate Canceling. C.Viper from Street Fighter 4 has thunder knuckle cancel. What about Jin from Tekken, and the many characters in the series that cancel into stances to maintain pressure? Granted, it’s ingrained into the game, but why does how it’s inplemented matter more than its ability to function properly? L-Canceling can be seen pointless from players who don’t play the game, but for Melee’s sake it was done right. Sort of. Hence why having it wouldn’t hurt. Just because something is a choice doesn’t mean it’s optimum. There’s tons of combo videos of characters in games doing stuff that isn’t practical, but people like that. It doesn’t have to have some profound meaning to it. And you’re claiming that L-Canceling is playing against yourself, so to speak? Nah, no combos in Smash can make you feel that way. That happens in Marvel vs Capcom, but those series of hits are not easy to execute. Just because I’m making extra inputs doesn’t mean
Again, you keep saying that what I’m saying isn’t correct, but you give me no concrete information that supports your statements, or something to draw comparison. I typed it, I know what I said, you don’t have to repeat it to me. Can you at the very least tell me how you think the mechanic should work in a game like smash?
Also, wouldn’t balancing around the best players in the smash would be to have all these options available? It’s the same as curving a letter grade, but curving towards the highest grade, which changes nothing and you fail anyway.
Again, the whole “meaningful” choice thing is baffling me because I don’t know what that even means; you aren’t elaborating. This isn’t match.com lol it’s a fighting game. But I would really like you to explain what you’re saying clearly WITH examples.
A "meaningful choice" is usually illustrated as an ability, on the player's part, to use a specific tool or mechanic either suboptimally or optimally. This flows into every mechanic for the game. Let's take an easy Smash example using your Marth vs Ganon with Marth on the ledge, except leaving L-Cancel out of the equation, and just halving landing lag. Should Ganon go for Fair, something that could potentially kill, but whiff and have a bit of lag for Marth to get up safely, or pressure with Nair, something fast and safe, but most likely won't combo or kill? And let's turn to Marth's perspective here. What if Ganon banks on the Fair? If Ganon wishes to time the Fair to Marth's getup, he would simply stand still, leaving Marth the ability to just ledge attack or get up normal, whereas that most likely wouldn't work if he was spamming Nair. Marth could also roll, dodging the Nair entirely.
This is a bit scatterbrained, but the point is that each choice presented to the player can work in one situation, but not in another, and involves prediction on the part of what the other player is doing, will do, or following a pattern maybe. Imagine if Ganon stands still after doing Fair a lot, and Marth decides to counter it with normal getup or a ledge attack. Ganon then can react accordingly and grab Marth, or shield the hit. This is how competitive games work on a baseline level, and if the game is designed well enough, there will be no need for execution based things in this dynamic. Execution difficulty should be incidental to the design of the game, and for fighting games, it is an intrinsic result, just like it is for MOBAs, FPS, RTS, and really any video game involving real-time. You don't need to make something harder to execute intentionally in a fighting game; they do this well enough by themselves, and like I keep saying, there's no casual, strategic, or developer benefit to it.
As for all of those "meaningless techs", it all depends on how they are designed. If they have a reason not to be used, or are predictable and punishable by the other player, then they already have more of a purpose for competitive and developers than L-Canceling. But considering you said they were "designed around", I would assume the developers avoided these problems, as they should. Secondly, those are character specific techs, which, again, if designed around, is fine since the overall skill floor of the game is unharmed, and thus casual or low-level competitive play is not harmed by it. I think you misunderstand my problem with L-Cancelling as having an aversion to execution based things in any case when that's not true. This is why I always say I don't like execution
for execution's sake. If you have a well designed option that is suboptimal sometimes, yet requires a bit more execution to do, and it doesn't mess with the overall skill floor of your game (unless you explicitly state your game as being "hard to learn" as well as hard to master), then it's okay by me.
L-Cancelling, almost cleverly, avoids all of these rules and causes a cascade of problems that I've mentioned throughout these posts. And I already explained to Quillion why L-Cancelling, as a concept, is fundamentally flawed, because the entire purpose of it is to mess with the self-balancing, skill-independent aspect of a fighting game that allows for easier balancing and depth. In this case, endlag. It's like having a way to remove bullet spread or damage falloff in a shooter, and suddenly a shotgun is now a mid range weapon instead of its intended close range design. It is the one advanced tech in Smash that I can safely say has no place in the series, or really any other game in the genre.
Last little thing, involving your question on balancing around high-level players means L-Cancelling should be supported. Two things:
One, L-Cancelling is not an option, it's an obligation. Because of this, the only barrier is execution, and balancing a game at a competitive level means expecting the player to be able to execute the tools you have at the very least, and the balancing aspect comes into how effective those tools are and thus dictates where, when, and why your players will use those tools, not that they simply can or can't.
Two, design and balance are two separate entities for development. Design involves tools that can be used, balance involves how good or bad those tools are. This distinction means for an "easy to learn" game, you design around low-level players, at least as a basis. Again, specific characters can have much higher skill floors should you want them to. You then balance these easily executable and understandable tools around high-level play, so in a competitive sense, they become eventually fair. L-Cancelling is a problem with design, not balance. It's why Quillion's idea of doubling landing lag if you mess up the L-Cancel does nothing to fix the plethora of problems.
I can't really give examples of how something like L-Cancelling could work, because it just can't, at least without compromising the design of a game on all levels for little gain.
Teeb147 already points out the flaw in L-Cancelling that is still not addressed, and it's the main flaw with it, among all the others I mentioned. And all of the examples you give in the other games either are not the same thing, like the Street Fighter 4 deal, where options and choices are actually lost, or can be dealt with in a more streamlined manner with pretty much no depth to the game lost, or it's a simple balance issue, while the mechanic itself is still fine design-wise, in this case, the Yun vs Cammy dive kick example.
