I understand this isn't the first game to have infinites.
I'm also not saying that, because of infinites, we should stop playing Brawl.
However, I think that, in any sort of competition, you need to limit the scale and scope of what you're presented with to provide an even playing field for your competitors. A prerequisite to competition is a fair starting ground. I'll admit, it's impossible to completely even the playing ground, especially when working within certain boundaries (like the mechanics of a video game). That's just a preface, onto your argument:
You are fixated on the issue of balance. But as wild as this may sound, balance is not a determining factor in whether a game is competitive or not except in the most extreme cases. We do not ban things to make the game fair for every body. Fighting games are not really about fairness.
If we were trying to fight on a level playing field, we would play Fox only, no items, FD.
If we allow the whole cast of characters to be used, then we aren't fikghting oin a level playing field due to the inherent strengths of certain characters over others (and in some cases the utter superiority of certain characters such as Snake and MK).
We ban things to make sure the game is playable. That's it.
If walk-off stages were not banned in Melee, every tournament level Melee player would eventually come to the conclusion that Fox's waveshine death combo was the only viable strategy and that would be the whole metagame. Therefore, those stages were the waveshine is possible are banned to maintain the game's playability. The game is still terribly unbalanced, but playable.
I honestly don't know much about those games so it's hard for me to engage you on the actual mechanics of them. But I would say that first, telling people to use infinites first, in this case, would be extremely limiting. The list of characters that can infinite regardless of situation consists of two people (or, if you consider the characters it can be used on a situation, one character: ICs). The majority of the cast can't simply infinite first, unless everyone rolls with the Climbers. This clearly isn't going to happen.
I said use infintes yourself if you really think it's a problem. This is Brawl, not Marvel vs Capcom 2. Infintes are not such a factor in the game that you even have to use them. You just need to learn to avoid it just like anything else.. And it's really not that hard.
But second, in this game at least, we choose to limit certain things despite the fact that the game would still be fairly competitive with them. If we left certain stages on, the game would be a bit less competitive, but it wouldn't ruin the competitive aspect of the game; you've still got two people fighting against each other, with their inputs determining the outcome of the game. If we allowed items, the game would be a lot less competitive, but competitive aspects would still exist. My point is this: those games might have been competitive with infinites, but could we make them more competitive by taking them out? My argument is that Smash could.
There is no evidence yet that infinites make Brawl less competitive. I brought up those other examples to show fighting games where infinites play a far more drastic role in the metagame, yet the game manages to be very competitive and still fun and widely played. The infinites in Brawl are trivial in comparison and only require you to play differently against certain characters. It doesn't mean that DDD will beat DK 100% of the time or even 50% of the time. If DK learns to space well, he can avoid grabs for the most part and still win. Surely he is at a disadvantage, but is he totally incapacitated? No. Therefore a ban is not really necessary.
You have brought up an interesting conundrum though, at least to me, and I'm not sure how to answer it yet:
At what point is a ban too limiting? It's hard to find the perfect balance of limitations and competitive stuff in a fighting game. If we put items back in, the game clearly isn't competitive enough. If we ban everything except FD and ditto matches only, the game is way too limited, although that's where we might see the most even ground in terms of skill.
The only thing I could think of for now is that banning infinites wouldn't really harm Brawl's metagame too much. We wouldn't be banning moves from movesets, just very specific applications of moves. It's not very limiting, although I could be wrong. As I said, it's a good point.
You should read Sirlin's "Playing to Win", specifically the section on Banning things. Banning things in competitive games is actually kind of taboo, an executive power only reserved for that extreme circumstance where the game becomes non-competitive or unplayable due to something extremely over-powered.
Sirlin presents the example of Akuma in Street Fighter 2. In SF2, Akuma's air fireball is so good that if you just jump and spam air fireball, you will almost always win. Tournaments eventually degraded into 2 Akuma's jumping and pressing quarter-circle forward punch over and over. In other words, the game became far less competitive. Thus Akuma was banned. But why ban the whole charcter you say? Why not just the move? Because banning a move is unpractical. What if Akuma throws a fireball once per round? Should the player in question be disqualified? What if he does it by accident? What if you set a limit of fireballs to three and both players choose to throw an extra one? Do you disqualify them both? To avoid this ridiculous scenario, Akuma was banned outright.
This is a very extreme case, and actually one of the few cases in fighting game history where a ban was needed.
The Smash community is actually one of the most ban happy fighting game communities of all. If something doesn't work as Saint Sakurai intended, it is unfair and needs to be banned.
Again, the "don't get grabbed" thing was discussed a lot previously, so read that and respond.
Your second point is good though, but I think that you missed the point.
Infinites are good because they can be an instant kill, but that's not the reason I claim that they're broken or anticompetitive or whatever. I never meant to claim that someone was overpowered if it killed you. Obviously, kills are inevitable in a fighting game, I couldn't make that claim.
But there is a distinct difference between infinites and killing blows. Killing blows are the result of competitive play, you have to actually engage your opponent to even get to that point.
Infinites aren't. On one level, as I said in the OP, you're playing a one-player game. Your opponent can't do anything while you sit and press certain button combinations to get a win. I argued that, ultimately, that doesn't make it a fighting game because it is strictly anti-competitive (that is, competition doesn't even factor into the equation).
On another level, the move is, in comparison to the rest of the cast, so much better in terms of damage and killing ability that it doesn't provide for a fair playing ground. I think that fits in with your other fighters example; there have been characters to possess move(s) so effective compared to other people that the character is just outright banned. We don't even have to do that in Smash, we just have to ban the technique from occuring.
First of all, none of the infinites in Brawl are so easy to land as you suggest. All of theme are situational and can be avoided or countered as I said in my prior post (kill Nana, learn spacing). And you do have to engage your opponent to land an infinite. If I'm using ICs or DDD, you know I'm trying to land an infinite. You just have to adjust your game to beat me. Yea you have a bad match up and you have to play very differently, but I'm no where near guaranteed to beat you if you play smart. If anything you could always pick a character that counters DDD or ICs. In a game like Brawl where match ups make such a big difference, you should be using multiple characters anyway.
Infinites are just particularly powerful moves that make the game interesting. Unless they guarantee that the player using them will win the match the vast majority of the time, like Akuma's air fireball, they are not ban worthy.
Second of all, again you are fixated on this level playing field thing. Fighting games are not about balance and have never been. All the best fighting games have been sorely unbalanced. The unbalance, I think, drives players to try to overcome their characters' flaws and their opponents' strengths. This fosters competition. Infinites are like that too. At first, people that Wobbling was so unfair that it needed to be banned, but the best players just learned to beat it or avoid it and it just became another factor in the metagame.
And banning a technique is essentially running from it. If you can learn learn to beat the technique and overcome it, there is no need to ban it.
Those are clever examples, however, I don't think they apply.
I'm just going off of our previous history with banning things to justify this, because I think those standards are still important.
When other fighting games ban characters outright, their moves are avoidable. They don't come into the game with a win, the just enter the match with such a large advantage that people banned the character for more competitivity. It would be as if boxing set a limit on how strong someone could be before entering the ring (which is why I'm saying fighting games don't function like boxing/tennis).
When stalling was banned in Melee, you could avoid getting above a higher % than JigglyPuff before he could stall. It was still banned though because JP still had a huge advantage upon entering the match.
Basically: in fighting games, we have a history of not only banning things because they are unavoidable, but we also ban avoidable things because they are incredibly unfair.
I used my sports examples to show that because a maneuver is extremely overpowered or can end a game in a single hit doesn't mean that it should be banned.
In fighting games, banning characters is extremely, extremely rare. Banning a whole character actually decreases the level of competition in the game for the most part.
Akuma is one of the few examples in all of fighting game history. Besides that, generally only boss characters or other characters who play completely different from everyone else are banned. Even the most unbalanced characters like Yun in Third Strike or Eddie in Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core, who can kill people literally in 2 combos easily are not banned because they do not guarantee victory, despite having a great advantage over basically the whole cast.
We do not ban things because they are unfair. We ban them if they totally prevent the game from being competitive at all. As I said earlier, banning is only reserved for those most extreme circumstances where the game's integrity as a competitive game is jeopardized. If it can be countered or avoided, no matter how effective, it goes unbanned unless it breaks the whole game.
Learn to adapt and overcome.
<(^_^< ) hugs all around. =D
