#Miivolution | My Experience After a Tournament

[T0MMY]

My Paragon Experience
Having attended Paragon Los Angeles 2015 in person, I was sticking around after the tournament watching some of the more dedicated players' matches - the setups were being turned off/removed & the venue closing in a short time, so these were obviously dedicated players. Of these dedicated players' games my watchful eye caught something of a peculiarity: There was a gross proportion of Mii fighters being used.

Being a curious person I asked why they were playing the Mii fighters since I had not seen any Miis through the entire tournament; the response was saddening...

Spoiler: continue Paragon experience

These people waited patiently and came in late just so they could play their characters because they were not allowed to use them in tournament due to the effective ban placed on them (only a premade 1111 guest Mii was allowed to be used). Some wanted to come and show people that there was nothing to be scared of that was grossly overpowered, janky, or "ridiculous" about the character despite some rumors being spread. Others just wanted to play for the fun of socializing with fellow Smashers the same anyone else was there for. But what was saddening was that all of these potential attendees were essentially outcasts like some kind of leper, not allowed to play with the rest of us because their character was "not a real character" - that because they changed the character they enjoyed playing in games like Mariokart, Wii Sports, and Nintendoland were not the same exact image designed by someone like Shigeru Miyamoto or Masahiro Sakurai and therefore were inferior. Sometimes they were told their character was just too ridiculous and overpowered after struggling to keep up with Diddy's hoo-ha, Luigi tornadoes, Sheik f-air strings, and Zero Suit's boost kick deaths.

Yet, they still loved their character as much as the Ness mains, the Kirby mains, the Link mains, and maybe one could argue so much MORE if they stuck through all the ridiculous challenges of the top-tiers in game and the ostricizing and jeers of their peers out of game. The experience was heart-wrenching to this longtime vet of the Smash Community where I invested so much time and money all these years to build a tournament scene and reach out and inform people that this gaming community was so much more, that we love our game and we love our community, and we love a fair competition. All that I worked for as a TO since those early days of the Melee scene felt betrayed by one simple rule that had no grounding in competitive reasoning and the ultimate conclusion of it resulted in barring potential competitors and friends in some kind of elitist and exclusionary club for people who played "real characters" like Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, and Bowser.

I went and found the TO at Paragon. Knowing how busy TOs can be (even after a tournament has ended) I waited patiently until he was free without coming off as a nuisance and I simply asked "why?". He explained it politely and I did some further investigation afterwards, but it simply came down to a few higher profile players who I am sure believe they are doing the right thing by standing against the inclusion of Miis, though I feel like they may be ignorant of the greater implications of their actions - afterall, I was once a supporter of a Mii-ban ruling in a non-customs event. Not only do I not believe the Mii fighters are "customs", but more importantly I believe it is both competitively more valuable for competition and even more valuable for the community to just let our fellow Smashers play their characters, characters that are "real" - their design by Miyamoto and the late Iwata was to allow us to create and personalize an original character based in their world of the Mii, the world that Iwata felt was so integral to Nintendo that the headlining title to the Wii was not a Mario game but Wii Sports, that the 3DS was Mii Plaza/Mii Maker, the Wii U was Nintendoland, and the upcoming venture into the mobile market is Miitomo. The last console Iwata worked on before his unitimely death will be the NX and I would not be surprised if it is also going to be strongly supported by the Mii.

My Recent Local Success
This past weekend I put into action both a Mii petition for a local tournament in a nearby city:
Last month the TO announced a restriction on the Mii fighters reducing them to an "effective ban" (1111 guest Mii only). I immediately conducted an investigation and a survey. Not only did the investigation reveal faulty reasoning, but my survey showed that nearly every attendee supported Mii fighters in some fashion.
It turns out there was a vocal minority behind the decision - the same irrational cause behind nearly every Mii ruling I will address below.
But first, an announcement to the Mii fighter community:

I am happy to say that, after a month of work, I presented a petition for the TO to remove the Mii moveset restriction - the petition lead to a successful lift of the restriction!​

Dealing with the "vocal minority"
I believe that this same procedure can be followed on a national scale - having a "representative" of your area present the proper proof should make a change in your region. When all the regions can come together on an issue then we shall finally have a consensus. If we are confident that inclusion of the #FreeMii project is both valuable for competition and is accepted by the vast majority of competitors then we should approach a representative on the matter. And if we do not, then a vocal minority will dictate that the entire community plays how they demand, when it should be the community plays the way the community wants.

Miiyamoto and Miiwata support the #Miivolution​

 

[Chief Hotsuin]

Just curious, do you feel the same way about custom movesets in general?

 

[/|Sawtooth/|]

I did a similar thing with my college's weekly.

Wanting to keep things simple and to get players to attend, the guy in charge of the event simply adopted the ruleset of the nearest established Smash 4 weekly. This ruleset included the 1111D restriction. Once things settled down after a few weeklies, I approached him about expanding Mii legality. His response was that eh basically didn't care, but he didn't know how the rest of the scene would handle the change, so he'd be sticking to 1111D for the time being. I offered to conduct a survey to see what our attendees thought of Mii legality, and he agreed to change the rules if I got good feedback.

So, I gathered data during the next two weeklies I got as many responses as I could. I asked 3 questions:
1) Should Mii Fighters be legal?
2) How would you like to see Miis handled? (Not at all, 1111D, MLG Standard, EVO Standard, etc.)
3) Do you have any previous competitive experience with Mii Fighters? (Playing as/against them)

Here are the results of all 20 responses, which included players ranging from players with spots in the state's PR to players who were fairly new to the scene.

Spoiler: Survey Results

Submission was entirely optional, so even with the response bias presented in the data skewing the data in favor of those with strong opinions of the matter, the great majority of players were either in favor of letting Miis go beyond their 1111 moveset or did not care either way. Given attendance numbers for the bracket, about half of all attendees responded to the survey.

The third question produced a rather interesting conclusion: it seems that most people don't really have experience with Miis in a competitive environment to begin with.

After some discussion with the TO, we decided to adopt the MLG ruleset, believing it had the most potential of being nationally adopted and so we could possibly convince the larger local tourney to adopt the ruleset as well. Apparently, nobody has used Miis in bracket matches since the ruleset change, but given that I'm the only Mii player that I know of around here aside from possibly one more person who might be coming who said he'd try them out, I'm not too surprised.

I'm going to present my argument to the TO of the larger local tourney once I can actually go attend it again.

 

[verbatim]

Our area uses the EVO sets distributed via QR codes. I personally think there's nothing wrong with also legalizing bring your own mii's, but they were banned as a peacekeeping measure because some people don't understand that turning customs off disables equipment.

 

[wizrad]

Your area sounds like paradise.