While imbalance is abundant throughout and easily noticeable in the Smash series, this is a hack meant to severely tone down that imbalance, giving previously bad characters greater viability in the competitive environment, while still emulating a form greatly resembling that of Melee.
The problem is that in trying to correct this imbalance, you have to constantly check your player-base to make sure that your changes appeal to your audience. The ultimate goal really is to make a game that people want to play, which is apparently overlooked quite often.
For example, Ness sucks. Ness is pretty much doomed to always suck if you leave him to play as he always has: the character has a slow ground speed, a slow air speed, poor range, and a poor recovery. These are fatal flaws that will yield a low tier character if left unchanged. If you try to compensate for them in other areas, you basically force Ness's opponents to exploit those areas even harder. This is a bad way to fix the problem. In any instance where you form extremes, you're actually limiting the interaction with that character. The shallower your gameplay is and the less you can interact with your opponent for better or worse, the more you will drive away your player base. I'll use my previous example of what Squirtle was, where he's too fast/small to reasonably aim attacks at, and he was unable to be "caught" per se. This is extremely limiting to Squirtle's opponent, and the game degenerates into some shallow lack of interaction where basically you throw a move out and hope Squirtle runs into it.
You quickly see a pattern where the more you can interact with the opponent, the more depth you can derive from play and those more appeal the game has. This is immediately evident in the better developed characters. The proper way to fix Ness is to remove his weaknesses to a point, such as increasing his running speed, increasing his air speed, giving him better range or a better recovery. You run the risk of making him too "vanilla" but it requires some finesse and refinement to avoid it.
So cmart expressed the idea that Ness's PK Fire was too good over the weekend. I said that might be true, but as long as that move comes at the cost of playing Ness, it is not a problem until the character is focused solely around that move. So long as you avoid instances of a character with extreme situations and increase the amount of interaction available, your game will probably be better for it.
The changes I've proposed so far were all corrections on these extremes as I've seen them:
-Wario's side B. Since this move was reduced from a 17% panacea, I have not even seen this character played, which only further reinforces (to me anyway) how stupid that 1 move really was.
-ROB's relative combo immunity. I don't think the change to this character was a major one, but punishing his mistakes is a much more reasonable process now.
-Squirtle's relative immunity to the cast. Squirtle is still a potent, fast threat as far as I can tell, but is much more reasonable to interact with in that you can...at all.
The most extreme character I saw over this past weekend is ZSS, but I don't think she's as bad as the above 3 were. ZSS right now is incredibly fast, well ranged, and her combos are just too easy/lethal. Her recovery is somewhat hard to interact with but I think that can stay. On the opposite side, she has very low weight, no shield game, and her throws are downright weird.
Finally, don't justify "balance" in terms of other attributes. A false association is just asking to be exploited in some stupid manner. Don't make a ZSS light because she is fast. Don't give a character a move that KOs at 60% because that's their only kill move. Don't leave in mechanic abuses on a projectile because the projectile isn't that good. These things lead to those extreme cases and are generally unreasonable to deal with. Understand why things like Falco's melee shine and lasers are a bad thing for a smash game. Yes we've come to understand them but a frame 1 invincible combo starter and indefinitely perfect stage control are also extremes that you should not strive to replicate, as the character eventually becomes focused around those extremes...like melee Falco so obviously is.
If you need one last example of a character that you can't interact with, look at Brawl Metaknight. The inability to deal with Tornado, stage abuse, camping, etc. got that character banned. You simply can't interact with him favorably in most situations.
edit: Actually Ike is more extreme than ZSS in that he's absolute trash. To be fair, the opponent can interact with Ike, Ike just can't do anything about it.
