some guy said:
"Standard play" is playing with default rules. This means time battle, free for all, items, and all stages. That's really the only standard. Everything else is artificially created. We've come up with a ruleset to foster a competitive environment. People disagree on what stages foster the best competitive environment, but it's selfish to think that the rulset you consider most competitive is somehow standard.
I don't think we have "created a rule-set to foster competition", we've selected the rules which the game offers us a choice from. There's a huge difference in those two options.
If we created a rule-set when the game offered no options, we would be something terrible, like competitive Pokemon, with hundreds of artificial rules and scrubby limits.
Smash, however, is
designed to be played many ways, and it's obvious that certain ways (such as Stock battles) are more competitive than others (coin battle, etc.).
Now, you can argue which ways are the best, but we aren't creating those ways, we are using the ones that are available to us. Generally, the less random something is, the better it is for competition, hence choosing stocks over coin battles.
Sorry, I just think we take to much credit for "all that we've done", because it was all there for us to begin with. Obviously we've done things like choose which stages are most competitive and decided that items aren't, but again, those options were there for us to begin with.
Item select and random stage select have been there since the beginning and are in no way "artificially implemented" by us to "create a more competitive game". We chose the competitive options out of the options presented to us, as many options were presented and each of them for obviously different purposes.
Even the stage-striking system, which is so unique to us compared to other fighting games, has been in place for ages in one form or another in First Person Shooters or other genres where the map you play on is just as important as your character.
It's all fundamentally no different than deciding to play timed or infinite-time matches in Street Fighter, or deciding to play first to 3 instead of first to 2 per game in a set. That game has less options to choose from, ours has more.
Now a ledge grab limit or a ban on infinites or a 300% cap on infinites for "stalling", THOSE are artificial rules created by us to foster a different kind of gameplay.
