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WFS's platforms are in a random arrangement every time they come and go, but they're all completely normal instead of solid. (Coliseum's platforms are also random-ish since they rise to different heights. The individual segments themselves are fixed though.)
Ok so. Yes, the transformation is that bad. The high platforms and walkoffs make camping a really big issue, and there's the walkoffs which are bad for obvious reasons (cheesy horizontal kills and walkoff camping). The statues also mess up projectiles. That transformation is really, really terrible for competition. It's there for 43 seconds at a time (iirc) and is a third of the stage, which is pretty unacceptable. The transitions are pretty iffy too...like that missing a tech can result in instant death, and that the transitions can save people who have otherwise been gimped.
Permanent walkoffs
What are your 10 other stages? There are stages worse than CS that should be brought into question before it. I personally don't think reducing the number of stages is entirely necessary, (in my opinion) an odd number like 11 is actually marginally better for balance as everyone can get their 6th best stage (especially with FLSS) rather than the stagelist favouring one player.
Castle Siege is a fine stage. Even though the 2nd transformation has walkoffs for 43 seconds, that's not really enough for it to be abusable... The statues messing with projectiles is just a part of the stage which makes it more unique. I've even seen projectile users like Ness and Robin to use the statues in their favour to set up their own stage hazards. The stage is interesting and I don't think that it warrants a ban.
That is more than long enough for it to be abusable. 15 second campable transformations are abusable. 43 seconds is almost triple that.
So far the stage list is:
This is somewhat my thoughts as well, but once the seed of doubt is planted, its hard to uproot it.
Have you tested Peach's Castle extensively in real matches? Just curious. I'm not going to argue against timeouts because I haven't tested it enough myself to determine if that will actually happen, but you shouldn't brush a stage off if you're just theorycrafting. I really liked playing on the stage with a friend of mine so it would be a shame if we banned it, but then again, I haven't tried to abuse the bumpers or anything.
You should ask yourself about Castle Siege :
dav3yb
IMO Peach's Castle is the most suspect stage on that list followed by Castle Siege and should be addressed long before CS.This is silly to me. The only thing these 3 stages have in common is the fact that they aren't static and have rather large blast zones - some of the time. You don't actually need to be able to ban all 3, they're rather different and I think very few players and even fewer characters will choose all 3 of these stages as their first, second and third preferences. Why can't I apply the same logic to other stages? If your tournament has 2 bans, by including Battlefield, Dream Land, Lylat, Smashville, Town and City, Duck Hunt on your list you imply that players can not ban all non-transforming platformed stages. If you want players to be able to ban all platformed stages, you either need to raise the number of bans to 6+ or remove several stages from the list.
@
This is silly to me. The only thing these 3 stages have in common is the fact that they aren't static and have rather large blast zones - some of the time. You don't actually need to be able to ban all 3, they're rather different and I think very few players and even fewer characters will choose all 3 of these stages as their first, second and third preferences. Why can't I apply the same logic to other stages? If your tournament has 2 bans, by including Battlefield, Dream Land, Lylat, Smashville, Town and City, Duck Hunt on your list you imply that players can not ban all non-transforming platformed stages. If you want players to be able to ban all platformed stages, you either need to raise the number of bans to 6+ or remove several stages from the list.
RIP|Merrick
asked me very nicely to do so. These points are made under the assumption that camping, infinites, glitches, walkoffs, stage hazards, and unexpected or unpredictable effects on game mechanics are all undesirable in competition. 
We can lessen that by trimming the fat. With seven stages this would be a viable thing on any of the bigger base stages like Final Destination, Town & City and Duck Hunt come to mind for those characters as well, Sonic in particular who would love to play keepaway and stall until he times you out. Camping is viable on any stage really dependent on matchups. That's not necessarily the problem. The problem comes when you're forced, however momentarily, to play even more cautiously than before in an undesired environment. Anyone at any percentage should be deathly afraid of being on the edge of the second transformation of Castle Siege. And it's such a problem based on the fact that it's a walkoff, however brief or long.
First of all, I don't care how much I make you "cringe", and that's not really relevant to stage legality. Secondly, I already addressed the point about "just ten seconds". If it's degenerate, it's degenerate, be it for ten seconds or ten minutes. Thirdly, defensive playstyles on balanced stages are cool. Being forced to play defensively regardless of character choice by a stage that makes approaching the objectively wrong choice in every situation is not.
As @
The_Jiggernaut
said, this is my point exactly. I'm not saying he should give people options to ban all stages with temporary walkoffs, blastzone size changes and slants (things that all 3 stages share), but if he wants to then he should alter his stagelist and/or ruleset accordingly.
Listen, I do not care for this thread anymore because we're talking circles around preferences, and it's a battle that the people wanting "less" have already won, and no matter how hard the other party tries, it will get nothing. It's easier to remove what's complex to understand and cater to a lazy playerbase that continues to just say "jank" as a spell to get something banned and, newsflash, they get it, no matter how much misinformed or exaggerated certain points become.
No, at least not with walkoffs.
Jpot
your argument would be strengthened if you explained how and why walkoffs and (circle) camping are bad things if they can only last for a few seconds at a time. Neither pose any risk at all to the passive (non-camping) party unless the timer is getting close to 0. In all other situations, the player who takes the position that is harder to approach is left in a worse position as the stage moves again. I don't think a strategy that actively works against the user can be considered truly degenerate.
Jaxas
while I agree with you (ie. the best thing to do against any sort of stage-related camping is to wait it out and take center stage) it is worth noting that walkoffs can come into play without either character trying to camp them, merely being hit and/or chased towards them is enough to impact the match.
I don't think people can be considered "lazy" for wanting a slightly trimmed ruleset that caters to not only what most of the players seem to want, but for reducing what they feel are unnecessary or polarizing current legal stages. Most are quite informed on how a stage works and each little nuance within a stage. I can't help but feel in your comments since those stages were challenged that you've essentially picked one little thing he said in his lengthy post regarding camping and have said nothing else in regards to his various other problems he pointed out, which makes me assume that those points raised are indeed problems, but you just deal with them, which is fine. I'd have thought that it would generate more discussion because insight on these things are very crucial when forming a ruleset for our local weeklies and monthly tournament. Nobody here in Michigan likes Castle Siege or Halberd especially, we've talked and discussed them extensively in our Michigan Smash 4 facebook group and found out why they don't like them as competitive, tourney played stages and they're pretty legit reasons that, when taken as a whole, are clear of personal bias and should make you question things, however small or big they may be in a stage's design.
I honestly have because it truly brings a lot of colorful insight into things I sometimes may not have thought of, and it's good to look at these things with a very open mind.
Sorry you feel that way. It strikes me as a bit disingenuous to accuse me and my camp of being lazy or unwilling to learn when I clearly just put a significant amount of effort into laying out my exact concerns with a number of stages, while the best you've come up with in response is five lines of hot pink "woe is me." I get the sense that I'm supposed to feel bad that you're frustrated based on your reputation, but I'm honestly just disappointed in the lack of actual discussion to be had. I just don't get why you're accusing me of dismissing things as "jank" and not evaluating them further, when I clearly just laid out all my thoughts in great detail, which you responded to by cherrypicking your least favorite part and dismissing the whole thing as "cringe". I'm happy that you run your own tournaments, and I encourage you to continue to do so with the ruleset that you and your players find most agreeable. I, too, TO events in my area, and will be doing the same.
Once again, this is the argument I attempted to anticipate in my second to last paragraph. Fifteen seconds (the length of time between transitions on Skyloft and Wuhu) is more than enough time to exploit walkoffs, and as Pazx pointed out, there are many other ways to abuse walkoffs other than waiting next to them. Furthermore, being forced to put the game on hold to wait for the stage to stop inhibiting fair competition isn't something that should be viewed as a positive.
Thanks for the feedback! Again, walkoffs and circle camping are still bad, even if only for short periods of time, because the best case scenario is that both players stop playing the game for a while and wait for the stage to transition to a better layout. The stage should not force players to stop playing in order to circumvent a poor competitive environment. As you pointed out in your reply to Jaxas, there are many ways for walkoffs to negatively affect a match that don't involve one player camping them. The most realistic example would be getting faired to death by Sheik, literally across the entire stage into the blast zone, because she's not limited by her number of jumps.@
@
I don't believe the best case scenario is to wait for 10-15 seconds though. If player A ends up retreating to the walkoff or to a better camping position at transformations then the optimal decision for player B is to take stage control. I can only think of a few transformations where taking the lower ground doesn't result in putting yourself dangerously close(r) to the blast zone, namely the "∩" shaped ones like the Shine Gate, Fountain, and the Knight Academy. These are the only transformations that actually get waited out in normal play for a pretty significant reason: If player B isn't biting and doesn't approach these hard-to-approach positions like the walkoffs then the optimal decision for player A is no longer to camp, ie. to approach. Obviously the exception is playing for a timeout, but that reflects more on the out of game % win ruling than the stage itself.
Jpot
I'm currently deep into discussions just like that with the German community and it took me a while to understand/accept that people with opinion a aren't wrong since it's a question of perspective. Both are reasonable, but it still saddens me since I'm a huge member of opinion b.@
I suspect there's simply two ways of going about stage legality. On the one hand you have people such as yourself for whom the stage is basically window dressing; at best, you may have to worry about a moving platform or something. While it's fairly obvious that every stage influences every matchup to some degree or other, these people consider that to be a secondary concern to simply not having to devote much if any mental energy to the stage itself.
Meanwhile you have people like me (and presumably kyokoro, and I know there are others) to whom the stage is almost a third player in the matchup, deserving of all the respect that implies. While I make no secret of the fact that I lack much practical experience (although now that I have a local scene I'm working on that), I can at least in theory talk about how Wuhu Island is very horizontal, how Castle Siege is no bueno for projectile characters, and so forth. As long as the stage is not inherently broken (i.e. Pyrosphere or Temple), these people think it should at least be given a shot.
Unfortunately, a) the first group seems to be much larger, or at least much louder, than the second, b) the first group is the status quo and thus has the advantage since the Smash community at large seems to be very conservative, and c) I'm not sure there's really a way to bridge the two in a way that's acceptable to both parties.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the communication gap between the two camps, and I thank you for doing so. It will help me better understand how to articulate my points in discussions like this in the future. It's becoming clear to me that my post was less useful than I thought, because I and other smashers seem to disagree on at least a few of the assumptions I listed at the start of the post.@
I suspect there's simply two ways of going about stage legality. On the one hand you have people such as yourself for whom the stage is basically window dressing; at best, you may have to worry about a moving platform or something. While it's fairly obvious that every stage influences every matchup to some degree or other, these people consider that to be a secondary concern to simply not having to devote much if any mental energy to the stage itself.
Meanwhile you have people like me (and presumably kyokoro, and I know there are others) to whom the stage is almost a third player in the matchup, deserving of all the respect that implies. While I make no secret of the fact that I lack much practical experience (although now that I have a local scene I'm working on that), I can at least in theory talk about how Wuhu Island is very horizontal, how Castle Siege is no bueno for projectile characters, and so forth. As long as the stage is not inherently broken (i.e. Pyrosphere or Temple), these people think it should at least be given a shot.
Unfortunately, a) the first group seems to be much larger, or at least much louder, than the second, b) the first group is the status quo and thus has the advantage since the Smash community at large seems to be very conservative, and c) I'm not sure there's really a way to bridge the two in a way that's acceptable to both parties.
I am at this point convinced that Peach's Castle is a good stage.
I'm indifferent about Peach's. But horizontal KOs will be heavily favored, since the ramps and the bumper are there. It's better than it was in Smash 64, though, since the bottom platform FINALLY has ledge grabs.
