Chaddd: Your point would be very much worth taking into consideration if we had evidence that this sort of thing actually happened. Please show me a situation where some newb played the game for a couple weeks, learned the infinite, then went and destroyed legitimately skilled players with it.
I haven't met or heard of anybody who just magically came out of nowhere and trashed people using it. Some people would argue that *I* did that, except I'd been playing the IC's seriously for about 8 months prior to NCT2, had played Smash competitively for a year and a half before THAT, and spent an inordinate amount of time practicing and learning with other skilled players.
What I don't understand is how people can confuse "broken" with "powerful." Arguments like "you wouldn't have won the match without it" are meritless, as far as I'm concerned. If a Fox landed 3 KO's using up-throw up-air, you could say that he wouldn't have won the match without that combo. That doesn't equate to brokenness.
So now we have to tackle whether or not the "grab equals a lost stock" argument is valid. Yes, it's POWERFUL. That's not even the topic of debate. But is it broken?
Broken means game-breaking. It means that somebody with a lot of skill, knowledge, and effort under their belt could lose to somebody who had only mastered the strategy in question. It might also mean that playing the game becomes exclusively about using that strategy, and skill with that strategy determines how good you are. With those criteria established is the infinite broken?
I contend that it is NOT broken for the following reasons:
1) It is situational. Nana has to be close by for the infinite to take place. The opponent can't wiggle out before you begin. Lastly, the IC's are NOT Fox, Marth, or Sheik. They don't have the same capacity for landing grabs. They can be out maneuvered, camped, grabbed first, split up, out-ranged, and when they FINALLY get in... Nana could easily be dead. In order to land it, you must establish the appropriate situation using spacing, precision, and prediction--essential skills of the good player. It won't just magically fall into your lap... unless your opponent is bad. Opponents who just run into things also lose to Peaches who do nothing but down-smash and Marths who forward-smash. We don't say the moves are broken, we say the players need practice.
(actually, we do say the moves are broken, but people who say those things are rarely taken seriously)
2) It is hard to land. People say they do it their first time in training mode. That's fine. That's fantastic. But I have only played two people who were good enough to consistently find openings for the technique and then perform it on command, Chu Dat being one of them. I played people who were, strictly speaking, worse than me and who tried to infinite me. They couldn't land it. I wiggled out, I avoided grabs, I gimped Nana, and played the matchup correctly. Any "lucky" grabs they landed did not satisfy the conditions and I escaped. In fact, they were so intent on landing those infinites that they ignored other useful combos, and I won by even larger margines that I normally would have.
This is the question I pose: If a crappy player can grab you enough times to infinite you four times and win without doing anything else... then doesn't that make you a crappy player too? And if they didn't JUST infinite, but had to put you in positions where infinites could seal their victory and, knowing this, you allowed it to happen... did you deserve to win?
