I disagree, the degenracy shifts from "risk a stupid death everytime you approach" to "camp until the unfavorable risk goes away". Even if it's in a more acceptable way this paradigm still rewards the players for avoiding combat which in my opinion is a big "never" in any fighting game.
You don't play or watch a lot of Marvel, do you? By which I mean Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or UMVC3. Either one would show quite clearly how runaway is a viable (in Marvel 2 nearly omnipresent) strategy in two of the most fast-paced and exciting-to-watch fighters. FChamp is one of the top players, and his main strategy against "big body" teams is essentially running away, completely outstripping their movement with Magneto and forcing them into a no-win scenario.
Oh yeah, by the way, you want a paradigm that rewards players for avoiding combat? One of the players picks Wario. "Run away for two minutes then kill at 20%" is not just a viable gameplan, it's a
really good game plan and has been since Brawl. Warios
should avoid combat in most situations unless their fart is charged. Should we ban Wario because he benefits from running away, and because he rewards players for avoiding combat? Of course not. That would be stupid. And yeah, you know, maybe the stage makes running away a little easier and approaching a little less advantageous. For a very limited period of time, on one clearly-demarcated transformation. If you don't want to deal with the walkoff, wait 40 seconds, and then presto, your opponent is offstage, all because you didn't approach. Camping the walkoff is
not a smart move (unlike the runaway from Wario, or MvC2 Storm, or UMvC3 Magneto/Morrigan/Phoenix teams) in the long run unless you're sure you're going to run down the clock. It's a classic case of "It's not okay for a stage but it is okay for a character". Case in point:
Kind of like I think no player should be rewarded by RNG alone, but I know I'm the only one wanting Halberd banned.
I have dropped matches and sets because of misfires and 9s. Luigi's random chance of getting a better recovery and killing very early, or Game & Watch's chances of instakilling you with a move are
far more egregious than anything on Halberd's combo cannon. You can say that this isn't "RNG alone", but all of Halberd's hazards have a long warning period, to the point where it's absolutely unreasonable to claim that any player hit by them was hit because of RNG alone.
It's this double standard present in all these discussions. Something is totally not okay when a stage does it, but it's perfectly fine when a character does it. Sure, Wuhu forces a reset to the neutral position every once in a while. Other stages, like FD, are
far less forgiving of characters who leave the neutral. That said, characters
also fall on a similar spectrum, from Yoshi, where you're pretty much never
not playing neutral and have insane anti-juggle tools, to CF, where not being in neutral is awful for whoever is getting juggled. I've had people argue that Wuhu is less competitive because it robs us of our rewards for forcing a disadvantaged state. Does this mean Yoshi is less competitive than CF? Obviously not, that would be stupid.
The fact is that stages, like characters, fall on spectra with regards to things like randomness, disruption of gameplay, and the like. We need to understand this. It's a massive double standard and I have yet to understand any justification for it beyond "Characters are more important". Yes, they are,
that doesn't mean stages are trivial or meaningless, and that doesn't make the double standard go away.
And does this kind of strategic advantage outweight the fact that in the second phase you'll spend as much time as you spenjt benefiting from the first phase ? That's the question I'm asking.
Second phase is pretty great for Pikachu too - he can run, camp, use the hitbox-extending qualities of the statues, and his bthrow is actually legitimately dangerous on walkoffs. It doesn't matter, though. It's a situation you have to adapt to, which is what makes it valuable. The fact that one phase produces a subjectively undesirable (but
not broken in the context of the stage as a whole) game state makes no difference.