I've said before that we strongly need a universal ruleset, and I've had several conversations about this topic. Here are the basic principles that you absolutely have to have:
1. It has to be universal. This is the most important thing of all. It's kinda a joke that going region to region or sometimes even event to event within a region that you're literally playing a different game (if the rules aren't the same, it's a different game). I can't stress enough how much it would help smash and this community to have one single ruleset used at every single event at least in the US/Canada/Australia/Europe (I don't think we can realistically expect Japan to be involved). Honestly no matter which rules we did use, any universal ruleset would be better than divided rules.
2. It must represent the will of the people. This is tricky; we tend to be collectively dominated by vocal minorities, and those minorities over time sway the more indifferent masses to some extent but also create a fairly alienating effect (this is a big part of the culture shock "casuals" feel when they're introduced to us). The reason the will of the people matters though is that in the long run the conclusion the majority would reach if they were properly informed will be the ruleset that will have the greatest potential for growth in the community, and we have a big interest in growth.
3. It must be enduring. We can't have moving goalposts. Once we decide if we're going to ban something or not, it needs to stay that way. That means, for practical purposes, we only make a stagelist once, and then we use that stagelist forever unless something truly earth shattering is discovered that forces us to re-evaluate the game as a whole. Not only is a consistent game important to players seeking to master it, but if we can all agree that the rules aren't changing, we can collectively just not worry about fighting over them and instead focus on everything else. The effort we save over the years fighting over rules could allow us to accomplish great things.
4. It must be inclusive. This is true of both the contents of the rules and your method of making them. The more people are involved and the more open the process, the more legitimacy your ruleset will have. Saying "leave it to top players and TOs" is a very bad idea; making the rule process removed from the masses results in people feeling no real connection with the end product, and even more, there's no guarantee at all of better results (unless you consider what we ended up with for Brawl an ideal result). It's also a simple fact that the rules affect us all as a community. That fact alone means that everyone deserves a voice. Also, to be very honest here, someone being a top player doesn't necessarily give them special insight. A lot of times what makes a top player top is very strong on their feet intuition and subconscious knowledge of how to deal with situations. Those kinds of things serve them very well behind a controller, but behind a keyboard making policy it doesn't really translate. They should still be listened to, but the gold standard in policy is logic, not status. No matter who is making any argument, the contents of the argument and not the name behind it should be what win the day, and being more inclusive of everyone will, if guided properly, allow for the marketplace of ideas that will favor that kind of work. This will be a very hard needle for us to thread as a community (uninformed mob rule is even worse than being non-inclusive), but it's worth giving our best possible effort.
I would suggest that a few specific ideas may serve us well as principles any of you as individuals may find useful to pursue in the inevitable debates:
1. No character is getting banned unconditionally. Let's just save the debate and make it unconditional. If any character is so good to break the game, the game will be broken. MK was handled as poorly as possible; we need to avoid doing that again. I feel reasonably confident that no character in smash 4 will be as good as MK was relative to the rest of the cast. Surely Sakurai knows the problems MK causes so many players, not just us either. If we can just accept with confidence the legitimacy of the whole cast, it will save us a headache.
2. No starter-counterpick dichotomy. This is just a bad idea. In terms of "fairness" from the start, it doesn't make sense. We ban stages that have some features that, for whatever reason, make them either degenerate or fundamentally unfair in a competitive sense. If a stage lacks those issues and is okay to be legal, why should it only be part-way legal? The way most people interpret it is that the counterpick stages are only "kinda" fair and that it doesn't make sense to play on "kinda" fair stages when you have "really" fair stages as well.
As a practical matter from a player's perspective, practicing counterpick stages is a waste of time. Game one will not be on one, and you can counterpick a starter yourself. That means that, if you can win on starters, you can win the set. That means it's smartest to play friendlies only on starters for most players. The single biggest predictor of when a player will favor banning a stage is when he's unfamiliar with it, and it makes sense. Most players are pursuing the "starter" strategy, but those guys who pick the oddball counterpicks and win big not only get annoying but when one player knows the stage very well and the other doesn't, the games sure don't seem to look fair.
What you need is a culture in which it's smartest for players to practice on every legal stage equally. The only way that is going to happen is if every stage that is legal is equally legal. There are ways to make rulesets that could allow for very large stage lists (20+) with all stages being fully legal for game one; there's no true practical roadblock. This also saves us from the "community as designer" problem in that we aren't deciding which stages get special treatment out of our legal set and therefore which types of gameplay we're going to reward. The only decision we have to make for any stage is whether it's objectively both fair and non-degenerate.
3. Items are not a battle worth fighting unless something huge changes. Let's just be straight about it. Items really suck in all current smash games. They aren't strictly unfair or strictly non-competitive. They pretty clearly make the games worse, and at the very least some items have to be banned. This puts us in an awkward situation if we try to allow them. Stages are hard enough of a battle; item lists are an even more complicated issue with a far bigger case of making the community into game designers that in no way prevent the stage issue so you're more than doubling your burden. Getting a community consensus on a fair particular item list would be nearly impossible (and all the casuals you hope to draw with your item ruleset will still be unhappy because of whichever particular items you banned), and it doesn't seem worth it at all because what do you get for it? You get a game that uses some items and is probably a somewhat worse but still playable game than the itemless one. Items make the game more swingy than it would be without them, items make all the characters a bit more generic, and this is purely personal but items just make it less fun to play. When you further consider that for so many here the idea of turning them on is sacrilege, I'm not really seeing it as a good idea to pursue them unless there's some sort of huge change in the game that makes items way, way more attractive than they are in the current games. It seems to me like it's a good way for people with good ideas and intentions to waste their efforts that could have made a real difference in other areas. If that sounds harsh, I'm sorry, but I think that's just being real about the situation as it stands. I don't think you guys are truly wrong in what you say about items, but I just don't believe you can win and am somewhat unsure if it would be a huge good if you did.
4. Day one we should ban two types of stages. We ban stages that can be easily demonstrated to enable infinite run-away (the "loop" stages, both hard loops like Temple and soft loops like Hanenbow). We also ban the stages that are overwhelmingly random to the point that we know they're going to degenerate the game (WarioWare is the classic case). Within a few weeks, we'll see probably several more stages that are not really "fair" in the sense that they are swingy, enable gimmicky and somewhat degenerate gameplay, and introduce huge character biases (your Flat Zone style stages) though we might find a few others that can be proven broken using stuff that's not obvious on day one. This second group of stages should be the only stages we're really looking to remove going forward, and I don't think it will be very deep into the game's lifespan before we can make reasonable decisions on them (about a month in, two tops really). There will undoubtedly be gray area here no matter what very rigid criteria we try to define, and of course this is where will of the people comes in, but I at the very least would lean toward being charitable toward stages and having faith that players will be able to adapt and overcome a stage good enough to have substantial defenders.
I could say a lot more about the topic, but this is already way too long. It's a very difficult issue and one of the most important ones we'll face in the early days of smash 4. The particulars of what we're going to do are obviously only going to be known once we have the game in our hands, but the kind of approach we should take is definitely something we can discuss now.
