GroundZero996
Smash Apprentice
There's no point in adding another barrier of entry into Smash and another reason for TO's to dispute. Even though it will be easy for larger tournaments, smaller tournaments and scenes not completely involved in the standard competitive Smash scene will have trouble ensuring all the stages are present. You're right in saying that they are easy to share and over time, most everyone will have them. We're the community that runs one of it's major games off of SD cards. But, it's still a hassle to check if every WiiU has the stages.
It's not hard to modify these stages also. A player could raise the stage up by one level or remove a block from the main stage. Small problems like these will arise and if unnoticed, muddies the validity of the competition. Again, we could check every WiiU or have the TO personally upload the stages. However, it's still a hassle.
Also, what stages will we make and how many should we make? There are effective an infinite number of appropriate custom stages we can make. Even if the community does happen to agree on what stages to use, some TO is going to want another one and run it in their tournaments, separating local communities even more. The Smash community already has problems agreeing on rulesets. There is no need to make it worse. The second problem is what stages will we make. We'd have to make stage with a purpose or otherwise we'd just have stages for the sake of having them. However, we could make stages that shift the game to favor one group of characters over another
The biggest problem is for the individuals, and not necessarily the players already into the competitive scene. If custom stages are implemented, the current competitive community will just get them and move on. But, for new players this is a huge issue. At least with our ruleset, we still use all the components that are already in the game. If we use custom stages, we seperate ourselves further from the rest of the player base. Smash games not only have so many different rules compared to other competitive games, but between the different Smash games themselves. It will only make it harder to attract new competitive players and keep them in the scene if they have to add the custom stages to the rules they have to learn and then actually learn the fundamentals of the game.
I'm sorry but these feel like incredible superficial problems. As long as the TOs are the only ones that place the new stages on the event consoles modification should not be an issue. Adding one rather simple thing for "TO's to dispute" seems like a small price to pay for what could be a very useful tool IF and only IF the WiiU doesn't have enough viable stages.
As for what stages to make clearly that's something that a community of highly skilled players and designers like those who worked on PM should work together on. You could even have custom stage Tournaments, where only these custom stages are allowed in order to test them.
As for new players I don't see how this is a problem. Do new player really just wander into a venue without taking any time whatsoever to read up on the rules and stages that are allowed? If we worry so much about new players not understanding the oh-so-complex working of our competitive scene then why aren't we playing on any map, FFA, with items and Smash Balls turned on high? I come from the SC2 competitive scene were then landscape changes all the time. Somehow new players manage to break in.
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