I am not trying to stand on a pedestal and I apologize if it at any point seemed like I was stating that item players are unskilled. However, if you have read a majority of this thread (which I suggest not doing, it's too long and redundant), he has been telling us that we are limited cowards who lack the skill to adapt to items and the chaotic nature of FFA matches. I am simply stating the argument from our perspective as to why matches are played one-on-one with items removed. I have no problem with people wanting to play with items or FFA matches. Hell, I do it from time to time. It's just that these matches do not give the results we want in our tournaments.
I have actually played a lot of Mario Party, and I have to say that from my personal experience the results of matches are A LOT like a 4 person FFA Item Match in any Smash Bros. game. I played the Mario Party games quite a bit more than some of the other people I played with so I won a majority of the games. However, no matter how much better you are, there are just times when the game plays too much to your disadvantage to win. Also, if you put 4 players in the match who are relatively close in skill level (like the players likely to attend tournaments will be) you are not going to have the slightly better player taking a majority of the matches; it will be rather randomly determined with everyone having about the same win count. This goes for both games (party games are made for that sort of result, and Smash Bros. and Mario Party were created to be party games).
In Mario Party you may win the majority of the mini-games and get the most coins throughout the game, but the Stars may always appear for your opponents still giving them the victory. In Smash Bros. you may completely otherwise dominate the match but the items continuously spawn in favor of your opponents, or just in ways that straight up annihilate you with zero effort from the opponent. You may have defeated your opponent in every aspect of gameplay, but the handicap was just too much. The person with more experience may win the majority of 100 games, but you are a lot less likely to win the majority of 3-5 games (average amounts for tournaments), due to the probability of those random games that defeat you with chance appearing in the early number of matches.
Poker players may like these results, and people who like Smash Bros. for its party game characteristics may want that; however, based on the majority voice of the competitive smash scene, that's not what we want. He, however, has been responding to us in a manner as if to state that this random nature of FFA Item Matches will not in any way skew the skill of the player or the results of tournaments (even though items were given a chance and they proved to do so).
Alright, I can buy that as solid reasoning. I'm not critisizing no item play, but critisizing.. critisizing item play. I know I get rocked hard in items off matches, admittedly, when you play a lot of item matches, you limit some of your character meta-game development time. Plus, not a lot of tournament experience. I mean nobody has had that in Brawl, but in Melee, same dealie for me.
And I know Poker is random, but there is a Poker champ, and he's not just lucky, he's skilled at what he does and how he plays, and he doesn't even have ANY control over what cards are coming his way. Yet it works. That's the point I'm trying to make. In Smash, you have ALOT of control, so if that game can be controlled, than this one can. That doesn't mean every game can be controlled...
The 4 player Free for All you mention... I'd actually say that no matter what the settings, it can be overwhelming. Say for instance all your opponents take a liking to beating on you. That can happen, sometimes people pick on the strongest player first and then try to take each other out. Characters don't really have the fighting capacity to take on more than one other character, let alone hoards of equally powered and skilled players targeting them. So I can't really even come up with an explanation for how a match like that can translate to skill... maybe the skill of convincing others to side with you? Regardless, y'know.. there's only so much you can control in a match...
This lack of control over your destiny IS a lot like a new Mario Party game actually, although, the computer does the slaughtering for you. Literally anything can happen, you roll a dice for a random number, you land on a space that has a random result, and the results are so often so game crushing that the tides could turn at any time. Trading your stars and coins with your opponents, landing on a space and getting 5 stars, etc. Even the end-of-game results can hurt the ending, like, if you landed on enough green spaces, you get stars. It's like "why am I even playing the minigames". However, an older rendition of Mario Party, say the first one, was more of a skill based, and you had a lot more control over it if you were good. Controlling the mini-games meant controlling the amount of coins the players got, and as an end result, if your opponent was lucky and had stars keep spawning in front of them, they would not be able to pay for the star and you could mosey along later and pick it up. There were some lucky spaces mind you, and the green space star still existed, but those things made little difference in a standard 20 turn match. I personally wouldn't make a league out of it, Mario Party's simplicity kinda gets boring for me, but some control is available in old Mario Party games.
I'd argue that with the amount of control available to you, adding in the extra layer of the unexpected is welcome and the strategies that unfold make it worth it. I believe I am developing another skill which will help me consistently dominate items on matches. There's still a lot to see and do, and I'm not ready for everything yet, but in time, I think it will be easy as pie. Like I say, it's not for everyone, and it's not for some guy to come along and try to change the way you do things in tournaments, but putting the other persons playstyle down is pointless. Item players don't hurt anyone by playing the game, so if we think we are skilled while doing it, then so be it. It's just insulting to be put down like that. It's not like we're a nazi regime that needs to be stopped, we're just playing the game, so even if you do think that items on matches take no skill, is there really any point in saying it? It's as insulting as it is to have a bunch of people coming along putting down item off matches, which happens ALL the time. Even the topic creator took shots at items off play, maybe unknowingly, but y'know, they did. Not nice.
So yeah, that's all I've got to say, personally, I respect all styles of play. I've got no harsh words for any one really.