every set i played today, the person to strike first got rid of distant plant, and then the other player got rid of green hill zone, and THEN they basically just did 3 starter stage striking backwards. aka the 1 2 2 1 just became 2 1. i'm not very convinced on the 5 starter thing. no one ever strikes smashville or PS2 or BF. it's like both people knock off DP and GHZ and then say "i dont care whatever". opinions?
I actually forced a strike to Dreamland or Distant Planet during one of my sets yesterday. I feel that the current striking is where people don't truly care where they go since they just have personal preference. The small advantages/disadvantages make enough of a factor to want to put your efforts into striking properly. The stagelist shouldn't be indicated if we have people that aren't putting some effort into where they want to go. All the neutral stages have enough differences to provide different outcomes imo.
I think there are more creative stages that have more to offer than the PM training room stage. I think we already have an issue of stages that 1. lack platforms and 2. share many similarities.
PM Training Stage is different because there is nothing similar to it outside of Smashville for a brief 1-2 seconds(?). There's only Halberd that has the same type of layout. I really don't think we're truly lacking in platforms when you consider the list of available tourney stages:
No plats: FD
One plat: SV, YI, GHZ
Two plats: PS2, Norfair
Three plats: BF, YS, DL, SW, LC
Four plats: DP
Six plats: WW
Variable plats(1-3): FoD
If anything, I think we have more issues with a saturation of 3 plat stages. 3 of them are the regular small, normal, and large stage types. Skyworld is similar to the typical platform layout, but doesn't really provide much of a difference. Lylat Cruise is the odd man out of the 3 plat stages, but brings more change than anything else. universally lower platforms with the requirement of actually sweetspotting the ledge. In my opinion, LC is one of the best large stages in terms of horizontal blastzone sizes because it gives you the feeling of a big stage without being overbearing (ala Dreamland).
The no plat to two plat list seems completely fine to me since none of them are similar in any aspect of a matchup. I think Norfair and PS2 might be the only ones that are too close in similarities, but the platform movement makes it different than PS2. GHZ's platform often becomes inaccessible during the match, ergo, it's more safe to call GHZ a no plat stage.
I personally hate Wario Ware as a stage due to it's layout and completely over centralization of ground control. Most cases, you're pretty boned when characters like Marth, Roy, DK, and whoever else takes up a lot of space go there since they can control the bottom so efficiently. To me, it's a heavily polarizing stage that I think should be taken out.
FoD is the odd man out of the whole list, but brings the variance that opens up the stage list. It just means you gotta stay on your P's and Q's when playing. Maybe memorize the movement and timing when things change. If it's on a set timer, then I'm sure that not hard to figure out and memorize. That's just stage preparation.
Overall, there's probably like 1-3 stages that provide no actual difference in the stagelist. Outside of that, most of them have changes to where things do matter in the long run, but are slow to show up now because people aren't inclined to think about what stages truly make a difference unless it's a big difference.
BTW, since we're talking a universal stage list, what about a different list for doubles? Doubles seem really scattered moreso than Singes right now.