I may not know a thing about item spawns in Brawl, but tell me,
___________A___B_
Who's going to have an advantage with items on, player A or player B?
If there is no learning curve, it means the game is accessible. Any additional learning must come from being more intelligent than the other player. It would be lunacy to deliberately make a game uninviting to new players by deliberately making practical actions, such as l-canceling, more difficult than they have to be, so as to increase the learning curve. I mean, why would someone do that? All it does it cater to core fans who are already good at the game, while inevitably shrinking the audience of people who would actually want to play it.
Putting skill into something you inherently cannot control is life. It's making gambles, and seeing if they pay off. It adds to the thrill, and adds to the complexity by making things significantly less bianary, and more about whether an action will most likely be a good idea or will probably punish you, instead of having such knowledge safely in advance such that you never need to leave your comfort zone nor take a risk. It requires an insane amount of logic when things are uncertain, as all thing in life do.
To be honest, one of the things I love about free-for-all is that it is a bit about minimizing conflict and a bit about hitting multiple opponents at once. I absolutely love how important free for all makes the philosophy of "don't get hit," and the complexities that entails.
Sorry, no Sakurai here. Although I found out where he's coming from.
http://malstrom.50webs.com/disruptionchronicles.htm
@ below, I have to say war, mostly because I've never played hearts. (I do love chess though)
About putting skill into the uncontrollable - How much do you know about poker?
Since this post has several main points.
Who has fewer lives/more damage, A or B?
Whoever's losing has the advantage with item spawns, period.
I agree, with what you actually said, L-canceling was a stupid mechanic conceptually speaking, however do you know what's stupider? Melee without L-canceling. The game would be better if arbitrary entry barriers weren't there, heck it would've been better if the ATs were easier to perform.
HOWEVER, from a competitive standpoint the depth is more important then the difficulty of achieving that depth. Additional useful options makes it more a contest of skill and outwitting your opponent, therefore the greater the depth the better the game. Sure, it's preferable that it be easy to pick up, so it becomes about strategy, tactics, and outwitting your opponent even for scrubs, thus eliminating the "AT plateau" entirely, but if that elimination comes at the expense of making the game have depth, then it's not worth it.
Sure, it happens in real life, but when we're trying to make a contest to separate based on skill, should we encourage mechanics that randomly hurt and help people? Especially egregious are the things that spawn into people's f-smash and explode.
There is however, one way to do that, and this involves making the game more ratio-based, in other words, having a lot more matches to determine a set. As it stands, it's far too easy for items to cause a defeat in a match of 3 or even 5, so it doesn't really work in a direct tournament setting. 13/24 would be a start.
Free-for-alls, yes there is that issue, and if everyone is playing at the top of the metagame it could be quite interesting becayse you've got an in-game diplomacy aspect.
The problem is... it's ultimately a degenerate form because of a host of issues that cause it to be less based around in-game skill and more about pre-existing relationships, unless you're much much better. Splitting especially, that's turns it into a degenerate game by itself.
... War is entirely defined by the shuffle, it's an utterly pointless game except to observe the results of the random system. Since user input has no effect, you cannot possibly "win" war, just watch it unfold. In other words, you're not really the player, it's chance against itself.
Depends on the form of poker, 5 card stud is a degenerate game, overly dependent on luck and very shallow. Hold'em on the other hand, sure it's random but the fact that portions of everyone's hands are revealed adds a lot more depth to the metagame in terms of holding and folding and bluffing, unlike the shallow 5 card stud.
Of course, there's a major luck element, and it would be better if that could be eliminated, BUT there are enough tests to counterbalance that, making it a legitimately good game.