Why only love for Project M and vanilla Brawl?

[dusty22]

It seems like there's always all this talk of vBrawl and Project M... why does nothing else get any love?

VBrawl is decent, but of course has some character balance issues. Balanced Brawl is basically better because it buffs or expands most of the weaker character's abilities without nerfing the strong ones, and it removes bugs, glitches, exploits (like chain grabs) and tripping, but other than that it's almost exactly the same as it aims not to change Brawl.

Project M is cool, but I didn't really like it because it so heavily mods the game and it's balanced for highly competitive very high-tech play.

How come no one ever talks about B-Brawl, Brawl+, or custom sets? I've been making my own custom code sets lately like B-Brawl with slight modifications from Brawl+ codes like slightly increased gravity, shield stun, and hit stun

 

[shapular]

Balanced Brawl was never very popular. Amazing Ampharos says he didn't market it well enough. I think it's a combination of that and that people who were fine with the way Brawl is weren't interested in or looking for mods. Brawl+ died around the time the first Project M demo came out. There was some internal struggle and other issues with B+ a little bit before that, but PM dealt a big blow to it.

 

[[TSON]]

Brawl+ fell apart because Brawl+ devs wanted to make PM but didn't have the tools/skills to do so when they were starting out. Once PM was a (albeit secret at the time) thing, there was no reason to work on B+ anymore.

Brawl- went through a big dev team fiasco and is still being developed but there's not one person on the team that worked on it pre-2.0, so it's kind of a completely skewed version of the original idea now.

Balanced Brawl wasn't really a thing to begin with - people who wanted to play with Brawl mods either wanted radical changes a-la Brawl+ to make it more fun, or preferred just playing regular Brawl since you were able to play WiFi with anyone.

 

[dusty22]

Balanced Brawl is gud.

At first I avoided it because I thought it would take elements of fun and quirkiness out of the game by nerfing all the characters, but that's basically the opposite of what is was.

It removes bugs like grab damages not always working right, and exploits (like chain grabs), as well as tripping. And it balances the game mostly by improving or expanding characters (as opposed to nerfing them to oblivion which is no fun). A few nerfs are interspersed but most characters are buffed or expanded, just with weaker characters getting more buffs.

 

[Jaxas]

It's because Brawl (vanilla) is the Official Game, so that's what everyone has or at least starts out with.

Balanced Brawl, Brawl+, and Brawl- were all kind of fighting each other for a spot before there was as large of a spot to fill, since there wasn't quite the same level of dislike that many have for Brawl now.
Project: M appealed to the Melee enthusiasts, as well as being advertised as The Big Deal, and it honestly didn't just finish killing off Balanced, +, and - Brawls, but also basically dealt the final blow to vanilla Brawl itself; while there's still somewhat of a scene for it, even Brawl is waaaaay smaller than P:M at the moment, and P:M seems to only be growing while Brawl finishes dying.

Though I don't really blame P:M for finishing off Brawl, as Smash 4 would have done the same thing soon too, after all.