On Melee and Brawl(A Proposition to the Community)

[Smooth Criminal]

I don't see the logic in leaving Brawl's metagame to evolve on its own outside of mainstream tournaments. I mean, I've been working on Brawl's item metagame for a month and a half now, but all I keep hearing from fellow Melee vets is 'Why don't you host a tournament?' Most people admit that change will not come from anything outside a mainstream tournament... so wouldn't us relegating Brawl to the corner instead of Melee be sealing its fate?

I think you are underestimating Brawl's popularity, Jack. A whole slew of no-names (I do not mean this as an insult) have sprung up in the community and have started hosting Brawl tournaments. I've also noticed a trend of LAN centers holding small Brawl tourneys weekly alongside your normal Halo/CoD/whatever-FPS-comes-to-mind tournaments. MLG/EVO have picked up Brawl as part of their game-set. Everything is centering around Brawl now and not Melee.

It is impossible to put a game like Brawl into a corner.

Smooth Criminal

 

[Dai.]

People are willing to travel to brawl tourney's and pay for gas as much as melee ones. Melee is just something people don't want to go back to, people want to learn and become great at brawl because it's newer and there's fresh challenge in that. Just because you don't have set in stone character mechanics and Melee Fox players running around as much doesn't mean you can't learn the meta and be just as good from now and until 5 years from now.

The game will be just as golden as melee was competition wise. and friend codes aren't going to ruin anything for tourneys and their goers. Just practice up and have fun at the tourneys, because if you just keep playing melee, and everyone has moved on to brawl. You're going to be pretty sad when you get destroyed.

 

[RomeDogg]

Dai. didn't you join SWF yesterday?

 

[Pink Reaper]

I wonder if Isai still goes to tournaments and just sets up Smash 64 >_>

 

[Jack Kieser]

I think you are underestimating Brawl's popularity, Jack. A whole slew of no-names (I do not mean this as an insult) have sprung up in the community and have started hosting Brawl tournaments. I've also noticed a trend of LAN centers holding small Brawl tourneys weekly alongside your normal Halo/CoD/whatever-FPS-comes-to-mind tournaments. MLG/EVO have picked up Brawl as part of their game-set. Everything is centering around Brawl now and not Melee.

It is impossible to put a game like Brawl into a corner.

Smooth Criminal

We, as a community, should keep melee the focus for our tournaments for the time being. Yes its that simple. Brawl should take a back seat to Melee for now, Im not saying we SHOULDN'T have tournaments for Brawl, but for now the larger tourneys and the biweeklies that garner larger turnouts should be Melee focused. As for Brawl, it should be a secondary tournament for the time being(sort of like doubles or crews) at the larger tourneys.

That was Pink Reaper's proposition: relegate Brawl to the inferior placement in the hierarchy. We all know what that means. If Brawl isn't the center of attention, then there is no incentive for new players to play it, much less anyone else. That means that we would be effectively cutting off innovation in Brawl's metagame, as is evidenced by everyone's cries of 'Well, then host you own tournament.' No one wants to do that, especially if they know that their tournament will be considered less important or inferior; not many people can find motivation with that knowledge (a problem which, luckily, doesn't apply to our more experienced tournament organizers).

So, no, the answer isn't to force Melee to continue to be the focal point of the tournament scene; the answer is for all these vets to take their own advice and just host their own Melee tournaments. If your turnout is down, I'm sorry (I really mean that; I'm not being facetious), but there isn't anything else you can do.

 

[Pink Reaper]

That was Pink Reaper's proposition: relegate Brawl to the inferior placement in the hierarchy. We all know what that means. If Brawl isn't the center of attention, then there is no incentive for new players to play it, much less anyone else. That means that we would be effectively cutting off innovation in Brawl's metagame, as is evidenced by everyone's cries of 'Well, then host you own tournament.' No one wants to do that, especially if they know that their tournament will be considered less important or inferior; not many people can find motivation with that knowledge (a problem which, luckily, doesn't apply to our more experienced tournament organizers).

So, no, the answer isn't to force Melee to continue to be the focal point of the tournament scene; the answer is for all these vets to take their own advice and just host their own Melee tournaments. If your turnout is down, I'm sorry (I really mean that; I'm not being facetious), but there isn't anything else you can do.

No, I was stating that we, the players should continue holding large melee tournaments as other tournaments, like Evo and MLG will already be getting huge turnouts anyways. Also, your statement that Brawl has to be the center of attention in order for newer players to want to play it is ridiculous. Huge amounts of people will play it just because its new, they don't care about anything else. And once again, I wasn't stating that Melee be THE ONLY FOCUS as there are already crazy amounts of Brawl tourneys as well as huge Brawl tourneys being held, Im saying we, as the community, should keep melee alive at least long enough to see how well Brawl pans out. Don't put words in my mouth.

 

[Scamp]

We could just do things the way we've always done things.

Tournament Organizers put on the tournament they want.

People either go to it or they don't.

It's really that simple.

 

[DoH]

Brawl should be a Melee training device. It's a slower pace to get people ready for a fast paced game and you can get accustomed to spacing and punishing; it's like practicing things in training mode on slomo to get the hang of timings.

Most of the people coming into Brawl had never thought of Melee as a tournament game. Brawl can be like training wheels and to get people into Melee as a competitive game.

 

[Jack Kieser]

No, I was stating that we, the players should continue holding large melee tournaments as other tournaments, like Evo and MLG will already be getting huge turnouts anyways. Also, your statement that Brawl has to be the center of attention in order for newer players to want to play it is ridiculous. Huge amounts of people will play it just because its new, they don't care about anything else. And once again, I wasn't stating that Melee be THE ONLY FOCUS as there are already crazy amounts of Brawl tourneys as well as huge Brawl tourneys being held, Im saying we, as the community, should keep melee alive at least long enough to see how well Brawl pans out. Don't put words in my mouth.

Well then, if my assertion that Brawl has to be the focal point of our efforts is ridiculous, so is your assertion that we have to work extra hard on Melee, since people will ultimately play what they want anyway. Scamp (see above) said it simpler than I did, but that is the truth.

If we can't complain without having a back catalog of hosted Brawl tournaments under our belts, then no one else who isn't actively hosting consistent Melee tournaments should be able to complain about Melee's so-called 'dying out', either. And I'm not convinced that Melee is dying out, to be clear. If it isn't obvious, the majority of the vets here would rather play Melee, so if there aren't a plethora (indeed, an overabundance) of Melee tournaments, they only have themselves to blame.

 

[RomeDogg]

I have never went to a tournament before nor do I ever want to...........unless Melee was the main game of the event. In that case I would spend money on gas to drive to a tournament and I would spend money to get into the tournament. With brawl even if the Meta game develops at all combos still will be nearly impossible to do.

 

[TheManaLord]

The problem of this series is that the games aren't similar in the least besides the base concept of Nintendo characters knocking eachother around. That's it. Gameplay wise these games are not similar, and if they were presented in a different manner (say Sony made a smash-esque game that felt like brawl) we'd call it a cheap rip off. The problem is THIS SITE. It was created for smash brothers, it became a hub for everything about competitive SSBM. Now it is influenced heavily by a game that is not similar in the slightest to melee. This is just a problem of two community's residing in the same exact place. This does not work.

There is an allisbrawl, if there was an allismelee I honestly think everything would be alright.

 

[orintemple]

One cannot switch between the two games with any kind of ease, they are too different. I would love to see them treated equally but Brawl is going to win out in the end for no other reason than the fact that it is has a bigger fanbase. Most of the Melee players PLUS the incredible amount of newcomers to the series make Brawl fanbase a hell of a lot larger than Melee's.

You may say, well then why don't the newcomers just play Melee too, but the reason is that gamers as a whole are generally too lazy to learn a game right after they just learned one, esopecially newcomers who mgiht get frustrated trying to learn 2 games at once. Plus, Brawl is prettier and has more content and that is all that matters to most players.

Sure most of those players will never go to a tournament in their lives, but they still make their input on the competitive scene regardless of their intentions, which leaves us playing Brawl competitively or not playing Smash competitively at all. There just isn't enough Melee fans left to support it as the choice game.

 

[TheManaLord]

Bigger fanbase does not mean a bigger competitive scene, nor a better competitive scene.

 

[orintemple]

Bigger fanbase does not mean a bigger competitive scene, nor a better competitive scene.

It definately doesn't mean BETTER, but it seems more likely it would be bigger. There is more people as a whole making it more LIKELY. I am not saying it is a 100% sure thing, nothing in life is certain, but it is a higher probability.

 

[Vyse]

This is the first time that this community has EVER had to consider a transition from one game to another. The majority of people here come from Melee to Brawl. This arguement never spawned from smash 64 to Melee, because of how much more Melee bought to the table.

Look at the other fighting game communities, how they've dealt with change. It is possible for Brawl and Melee to coexist. What we're all worried about are things like time constraints during tournaments, and conflicting events. We don't seem to realize that to cater for both games as tournament worthy games, we need to expand our current definition of a tournament. We need to hold tournaments that are bigger and better than before. As long as we don't completely forget about Melee, it'll still be there for us.

Look at the range of games at EVO. I seem to remember people that even today still play Street Fighter 2 competitively, and as enthusiastically as they probably did 10-12 years ago.

EDIT:

Take this for example -
http://www.tougeki.com/

The Tougeki super battle opera 6th Annual Arcadia Cup features games like Tekken 6, Arcana Heart 2 and Virtua Fighter 5, and still includes Street Fighter 2 in its line up.

I can see the same happening with Melee, it was (And hopefully remain) such a highly contested game. The metagame has evolved in ways that not even seem possible for other fighting games, and as such shall remain in the limelight for years to come, regardless of what people think.

 

[Ja]

I agree completely with the OP, his proposal also minimizes community split which is extremely important. It's also dumb throwing away a good game in place of a bad-okay game with maybe goodish potential.

There are four cases here which matter, y/n melee stays main event, and y/n brawl becomes a better competitive game than melee
You can think of this in a cost-benefit analysis:
1. If melee stays main event and brawl stays bad, we've lost time to do other things, BUT we've given a possibly good game a fair chance.
2. If melee stays main event and brawl gets good, we've wasted time playing melee when brawl's meta could have been advanced instead, BUT we covered our ***** in case brawl was terribad, AND we spent less total time playing brawl with an underdeveloped metagame.
3. Brawl becomes main event, and brawl becomes a better game than melee. We have a strong meta, fast and possibly online tournaments for money. BUT we took a huge risk on an initially terribad game, AND we spent a lot of time playing a teribad game until it became a amazgood game.
4. Brawl becomes main event, and brawl continues to be teribad, doesn't matter if it becomes teraworse or terabetter, it's still terabad. SO we spent all this time playing a really bad game, didn't enjoy most of it, and it was just a massive time waste. In that amount of time, we could have advanced smash to the point where double's tiers matter.

Here's how community fragmentation goes in each of those scenarios:
1. Very little fragmentation. Almost all meleers will switch over, the ones that don't are just odd.
2. Some fragmentation, the nintenboy fans will still be playing brawl, and trying to play it competitively but all the pros go back to melee.
3. Initially significant fragmention because brawl so far seems like a pretty bad game. Once it is shown that brawl is more competitive most meleers will switch over. Although in the long run the fragmentation wouldn't be too bad, fragmentation in short term would be terrible, AND that's really when fragmentation matters, in the RIGHT NOW as new people are joining, communities and connections are being formed.
4. Extreme fragmentation. The melee and brawl camps become more polarized because brawl is not improving and melee is. Most brawl pros switch over to melee, all the fanboys stick with brawl indefinetely until ssb4 is released.

There's already extreme controversy over brawl vs. melee and it's rumored that m2k has already given up on brawl, anything that better unites the communities is a good idea.