The reality of the times is as such: individuals which are commonly seen as figure-heads or are sought after in the community are more focused on e-sports presentation (promoting themselves).
There isn't anything wrong with that, this is about livelihoods and whatnot.
In the past, a single representative body being a voice or union of-sorts was a lot more efficient and the forced process of discussion, consensus building and decision making - was in most ambitious player's interests to be apart of that process. Now the dynamic contracts a lot more apathy on average, and in any case of disagreement we essentially get "walk outs" followed by (usually) *****ing on reddit or twitter - demoralizing, destabilizing and undoing the legitimacy of what organisations or groups are trying to achieve.
The individuals who know they can have this impact and are willing to flaunt it are few, but it results in ambivalence from the rest who would otherwise be necessary to counteract it.
This isn't unique to the 4BR (in fact we've kept ourselves low key enough for it to not be something we can be overly hurt by), but instances have been seen for just about everything else attempted in Smash4 and all the fiascos of the Unity Ruleset and the BBR late in Brawl's life time are still in the forefront of our minds.
Furthermore, Smashboards and forums in general are seeing less usage and convincing people otherwise is near pointless - which goes back to self promotion and how there isn't really a platform to do so through us.
This isn't entirely correct though as we do have a large twitter following and our news articles do draw attention - we can use these things, but to decide what is appropriate to beyond the obvious is quite difficult.
So what are we able to do?
We are able to bring together objected 'data' from as many relevant individuals as possible and present it as a whole - in other words metagame relevant shindigs such as tier lists which are otherwise highly subjective at a micro-level.
However, the amount of having to personally coerce and remind people to participate is quite steep - too much is being shouldered by individuals (this is really daunting, at least for me) rather than the group itself.
And this has to change.
For anyone who wishes to use us as a platform to get information and ideas out there (twitter/news/etc), we're quite open to this and I believe this has been roughly stated one way or another. Essentially anything that is aimed at informing or helping, we'd love to be the base of such things - a place where one can present these ideas to other intelligent and/or like-minded people for discussion before moving forward with it.
Literally the original idea of the Backroom - just being a backroom. How we see the BRs today was an unintended consequence of bringing together the best, brightest
and enthusiastic into an environment they could discuss among themselves. "Oh we happen to have all the TOs in here, let's agree to a rule set".
At this stage we're trying to do things in the opposite direction and it hasn't been working out. So just like how the original BR had no grand intentions, it eventually built itself up through the
volition of its members into what people
envisage of back rooms today [wait, wasn't that something we asked people?
] and I currently don't see many other means of advancing.
With all the aforementioned issues in mind, we've been going with a 'from scratch' notion. We want people in here who would like to be in here and this would overlap with those who are still active on Smashboards (we're hesitant on making a discord for a reason, although it's approaching 'necessity' at this point) in some shape or form. We've been struggling to find a fair middle ground between 'tier list' type people, and the super lovable-tryhard-nerds without as much tournament notoriety that have a higher chance of pushing us forward.
.
Many of the new people we've just let in have varying degrees of interests which may push towards official ventures - although we initially wanted to keep a 10ft pole between us and rulesets, building up towards this is one of the few ways to keep a vested interest. This falls into what an alternative 'voice' could possibly do amidst the drama/ego fueled landscape we're currently being strung along primarily through outspoken and popular individuals.
Personally, I would think an appropriate area for us to focus on is 'anti-meta', bringing awareness of Miis, alternative formats beyond singles, stages, stocks, etc - not 'recommending' or stating one is better than the other, but
promoting global ruleset diversity (hence the 'personal' part, because I know a lot of people have hard-ons for global rulesets despite how successful our game has been without such things for over a decade).
I, and I'm sure many others, have 'big ideas' that could come about really really quickly given the right circumstances, but the foundations still need to be solid and we have to build it up beforehand .... somehow.
