It's probably just a difference of opinions, like we're seeing in this thread.
Not seeing how "a stage is banworthy or not" is an opinion. It's hardly subjective.
But how much? What has changed? Has it changed to the point where months/a year of playing on X stages and regions deciding to ban those stages is invalid?
IIRC, Luigi's was banned because of the light circle, cave of live, and it being a really strong CP for some characters—"too" strong in the eyes of some people. I know MW:E and Texas had this stage on their list for a while up until some point in 09, and when it was banned there was general dislike for it. Maybe it wasn't 100% warranted, but I'm more inclined to believe the opinions of people who'd been playing on the stage for months to say if it's banworthy or not, because they must have banned it for a reason.
Got me there. Then again, I'm not a fan of LM either.
Yes, but does the pattern remove from the strength of the hazards that some people see? I'm also pretty sure people have known there was some pattern beforehand, but in any case I doubt it was, "PTAD is random let's ban it," and more of, "PTAD has a bunch of odd features including the cars that punish too hard." It may not necessarily be true, but eh see above.
The hazards are not an issue! Those cars could OHKO for all I care-as long as there's a reasonably large safe zone, reasonably large periods of time where they are not active, and a fair warning beforehand,
why aren't players getting out and staying out of the way?
When was it disproven? Or rather, why do educated people hold the walkoff and hole for issues? There's no real reason that's been presented to believe so, beyond Pika and DDD's CGs, both of which are extremely conditional. And the hole makes no sense with a LGL.
The only real problem I've seen with PS2 is Marth's Dancing blade glitch where he dies on one of the transformations, otherwise this stage should really be legal everywhere lol.
Glad we agree on this. "But it ****s with my physics" is a terrible, TERRIBLE excuse to ban a stage. And whenever someone says "but X is too strong there" I want to punch them because it's not only unproven, it's also very unlikely true (it's a decent MK counterpick, but he has like 5 better ones in the MLG list lol).
The issue here is that Brawl wasn't designed to be a competitive fighting game. It was designed to be a party game, and the community made it into a (you could say makeshift) fighting game, so obviously some rules had to be tweaked.
So since our game and thus our community isn't the same as a traditional fighting game, most people don't hold the same standard viewpoints as people from other fighting games. You can quote Sirlin all you want and call people scrubs on the forums for not viewing things a certain way, but the thing is people in this community don't care.
Now here's the beef part of your post.
Name me one non-stage thing we have actually
banned in brawl. ONE. We almost banned metaknight. But except that, there's literally only stages on the list of "things we have banned". And even then, the list is comprised almost exclusively of crazy, over-the-top stages-the kind of stages that you would include if, say, you were forced to meet a quota for the casual players who love the series. Again, there aren't many (okay, almost no) stages that are both blatantly unfair
and boring as hell. Most of the stages we ban (75m, Mario bros, Big Blue, spear pillar) all fit into the casual niche (there are some exceptions, like Skyworld, which everyone hates; distant planet, which is arguable; the walkoff stages). And these are the ONLY things we ban!
Now imagine this scenario if you will. The dev team really
wants to make a solid competitive platformer/fighter game. However, nintendo is forcing them to make a casual game. They can't make their intention obvious, and they need to fill a quota as far as "things for casual players" go. This seem at all realistic?
Who's to say that Brawl wasn't designed as a competitive fighter (albeit in secret, and with elements you had to remove)? Mess with a few settings and you have a solid competitive fighter right there. In fact, a
ridiculously good competitive fighter! And not just that, but one that you could potentially make competitive in multiple ways (time mode is just as good; coin mode was completely ignored but could work; ISP could work; hell, team battles on all kinds of ridiculous stages could work!).
On the other hand, who's to say, for example, that Blazblue or Guilty Gear were intended to be solid competitive fighters? Lord knows that Blazblue didn't stick around too long (at least, the first one). They're over-the-top, crazy, and at times very random. They hold a similar position to brawl, IMO-they could have been designed as legitimate competitive fighters, or they could've been designed as an insane party game, or as both. 'Cept that they lack the different modes, and items, and stages, obviously.
Regions are against certain stages obviously because they've played on them, experienced them competitively for a while, and mostly think that the stage is bad competitively and they dislike it. Many people in regions that have played on Mansion for a while deem that Mansion is banworthy. You don't. You believe that dynamic stages are a part of smash and Mansion's problems can be easily worked around. They don't. It all really comes down to a difference of ideals and opinions on how this game should be played, and because this was designed as a party game these opinions are going to vary a lot more. I'm just more inclined to believe that Mansion is banworthy if regions have played on it for 6+ months and deemed it so. And TOs are obviously going to follow their opinion, because they want more people to come happy, and they want more people to come in general.
Dynamic stages
are a part of smash though! It's right there! There are only a miniscule number of static stages, and if you want to go and get rid of ALL of the dynamic stages, or at least mitigate the effect they have on the game, why are you playing brawl? Why aren't you playing a game with
no stage? It's like ensuring that every match in your Soul Calibur tournament is played in a caged-in stage–outright stupid; some characters NEED to be able to ring out to be good characters, plus caged-in stages are not the norm-there is no norm.
As ADHD said, we've already "neutered" this game to play it to our own standards anyway (our own standards being the majority's opinion). Some people thresholds of stage interference are different, and that's fine, because some people view this game different ways. I just think there's something to be said—at something least you can't ignore—about entire regions playing on stages for months and then banning them.
We haven't. We have
not neutered this game beyond stages. Stages are the only area where we are truly scrubs (well, that and trying new modes of play, I suppose). Where we obviously and very clearly have a mindset extremely against the game itself. Where we decide, "**** what the designers think, we're doing this". It's not changing a setting, it's not choosing a mode, it's flat-out banning a massive part of the game. I could understand this if the game said "here's the default, have fun" and pointed us to FD, Battlefield, and Smashville. But it doesn't. It never has, not throughout the whole series. You have to beat 51 events to unlock FD in melee. In 64, there are only two stages which is even remotely static that you can select without a gameshark, one of which has to be banned due to cloud camping.
But when you decide that stages being dynamic is a
bad thing, you're not only going against the game itself, you're also limiting a competitive aspect of the game. When you say "PvP is the only part of the game that matters", you should really go play a totally different game. If you look at the game and say that the designers intended to make a party game, how are you gonna back this up? You don't know. You sure as hell can't trust the developers' words on this, not nintendo's. There's no real justification to completely throw designer intent out the window. You immediately throw stated/guessed intent out the window, but actual designer intent as implied
within the game itself should never be ignored-if you have to in order to play the game competitively, then you should play a different game competitively. But hey, newsflash-we don't! Sirlin's principles still apply.
)? The issue is not only that the metagame has changed (it has), but also that many stages were banned before truly given a chance. Luigi's Mansion was first banned because it made MK's Tornado the best move in brawl. This was shown to be untrue; this was a premature ban. So now people are pointing to other factors. PTAD was banned because of excessive hazards and randomness. It's been shown to have a pattern. YI(M) was banned because of fear of the walk-off and the hole. Both of these have proven to be not really serious issues. PS2 was banned because it messes with your physics; this is really not a big deal in the long run. Norfair was banned beca–
