Super Smash Bros. General v24: Joker Waiting Room, Please Take A Number - Games

I'm not saying that literally every single Melee player is like that, but most of my interactions with melee fanatics have been unpleasant as all hell.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in both UK scenes, hosting lots of tournaments for both and building content/streaming both scenes, I can categorically say you're wrong and both scenes are great with amazing people. You're brushing an entire community away because of some tweets and comments online, it's crazy. I don't think people who play the game for right reasons deserve that stigma from you.

I've been told it in person though??? And online??? I think I have every right to make a claim based on something that has happened to me several times- and something that has happened to a ton of other people as well. It's nice that you have a good group of friends or small tourneys or whatever but stop trying to de legitimize what people have had to put up with. Melee isn't some poor kid that's picked on for no reason- it's picked on because it's aggressive and openly hateful to everyone not praising it as the best [i]in most cases[/i]

And that fucking sucks that your community leaders are letting things like that happens. You're pushing away the legitimate work that people do with both scenes. I help run one of the biggest weeklies in the UK, which included both games. The UKs main Smash 4/Ultimate TO enjoyed our events/community so much he has started entering and practicing Melee each week. We've spent so long harbouring a good scene, across two cities at opposite ends of the country, just for you to say "nah fuck half of the community you're a part of because of this thing". It fucking sucks you dealt with shit, it wouldn't ride at our events and it never has. I'm not even talking about the entire Melee scene, but the fact you could potentially look at the scene we've made here and say "Melee players are toxic" despite all the things we do together as a Smash community is frustrating. It's not a small tourney or group of friends, we're a genuine community here.

Melee had higher stream numbers at genesis because it took place during primetime. It's grand finals weren't at 2AM EST No shit it had higher stream numbers

I know and it sucks, again, that it happened like that. I'm a mere European, so I couldn't even stay awake for Melee, which stung me particularly because I'm part of the the that did the stats work for Melee and Ultimate at Genesis Top 8. I stayed up for one match to see a small part of my work with a great team on screen, then had to go to bed to get up in a few hours for work.

From my experience, there is still an unhealthy amount of Dunning-Kruger level elitism at the entry level of Melee, especially in the netplay communities, and it's turning a lot of people off. I've left two Melee netplay Discord channels so far (who I won't name, they don't need a signal boost) that were hazing or outright hostile to anyone they perceived to be green, just to stroke their own egos. This went as high as the admins, in the second one.

speaking of melee, y'all remember Salem? The guy who went on a tantrum about how Melee isn't part of the Smash community and contiued to shit on Melee players that did nothing wrong? https://twitter.com/TeamLiquid/status/1100853476622548992

Guy pretty much failed to let old grudges go and failed to build his brand.

And let's not forget the game they treat worst of all: Brawl. For a good five years the game and its fans have been subjects of humiliation thanks to the Melee camp's voices getting louder than ever after EVO 2013. And considering the Brawl camp's fundraiser contributions were a major reason why Melee even beat out Skullgirls in the first place (like I said, I remember #OneUnit) for that EVO slot, what a backstab that was. Ungrateful, arrogant divas.

I don't even get what's so good about Melee. Why do people faun over it when it's just a Smash game that's dated just like all the others? Is there a quality about it that makes it much better than Ultimate?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJJmpVvEQ94

Jank and familiarity. Smash as a series was a good nine years old before Melee finally passed the baton to the next installment, and seven of those years were focused on Melee itself almost exclusively. The only other Smash game during that time - SSB64 - had only two years to itself and once Melee hit the shelves, it seemed like a mere tech demo (which it basically was, if you know anything about its development history). Melee was Smash for over 75% of the series' entire lifespan by the time the following game came out, so people accepted how it played as standard - one subset in particular getting super-invested in that status quo. It's basically the same hardcore "G1" obsession you see in some other franchises like Pokémon or Transformers, only with the caveat that the actual first Smash game was so short-lived that people didn't have time to spend basically their entire adolescence on it like some did with Melee - and was such a small production and oddball compared to the themes and mechanics Melee would codify for the rest of the series - that Melee became the de-facto "G1" instead.

I think the best analogy in non-Smash terms would be if Melee was a Team Fortress 2 where the 9 classes were all ones found in Overwatch, and Ultimate is Overwatch. The latter has more characters and everyone present in this hypothetical TF2, so it should be inherently better, right? One might look at it from a casual perspective like this and they wouldn't be wrong, as preferences are based on opinion. However, this odd version of TF2 lets you do more things than this OW. Overwatch tries specifically to tell you how you should play, and goes out of it's way to make sure you play that way. This makes it easier to get into and understand, but overall gives it less depth. If you don't like that OW has air brakes to prevent you from abusing momentum, the flexibility in movesets to take on multiple different playstyles or the fact that you can't combo your options because the game forcefully limits how well you can use your toolsets, then it may grow stale or feel less engrossing. This oddball TF2 though doesn't do any of those, and lets you play your characters the way you feel like you should. Basically, there's a misunderstanding that Melee players want things to be fast. No, that just happens to go hand-in-hand with freedom. They just want characters and combos to be flexible, which is also a big allure in basically any genre where you commit to one character type. As has been mentioned before, Ultimate's movespeed is technically faster, but the gameplay is still slower because following up on choices is only as possible as the game allows, and Ultimate is very hesitant to give you this power of choice (it's just that SSB4 and Brawl are even worse about this). Because of this lack of freedom, players are less able to evoke personality within their gameplay, as the game tells them what their character is meant to do, they are effectively forced to play that way. I don't find Melee enjoyable compared to Project M because there isn't as much variety, but it's definitely the freedom and not the speed that makes me enjoy PM. Every character feels like they can be played in over 5 different ways and not have any of them feel strong. Want to play Bowser as a grappler? PM lets you do that. Want to rely mostly on tanking hits with armor? PM lets you do that. Want to rely mostly on pokes? You can do that with PM Bowser, too. Want to be a quick character who walls people offs stage and then focuses on his powerful edgeguarding tools? Yep, can do that, too. Basically, there's a personality aspect to gameplay where the more you are able to evoke how you desire to play, the more attached to a character you can become. This is why Project M didn't just attract the Melee crowd, but also almost the entire competitive Brawl crowd and resulted in what was the most unified competitive community that Smash has had after Brawl's release. It wasn't because it was harder, it's because even Brawl characters could be played with much more nuance, such as Ike or Wolf. This actually is almost completely wrong. Genwunners stick with the first generation despite knowing it's a flawed, glitchy mess that later versions thoroughly fixed (even immediately with Gen 2). Melee fans stick around because the gameplay has more depth. The genwunners are well-aware that their version lacks depth and has almost certainly the worst metagame. The only thing both crowds share in common is that the developers intended to render those titles effectively obsolete with their sequels. If what you said was true, they'd be circlejerking around SSB64, instead.

The good old delusion argument. I can't help but find this incredibly disingenuous. While it's certainly true for a certain subset of fans, like any game series, trying to apply the grumpy old man geewunner argument that they're simply deliberately blindly rejecting the merits of newer games doesn't fly for such a large amount of people over so many years. A subset of assholes are and they exist for every fanbase. Now more than ever, most people just play both, because one doesn't invalidate the other, meanwhile you'd be hard pressed to find somebody willing to go back to 4. The actual answer is that people like the gameplay more. That's it. It fills a different niche. It's not like the clear progression from Brawl to 4 to Ultimate where each is a refined and improved version of the last. Even looking at the jump from 4 to Ultimate where 4 gameplay now looks glacial isn't comparable, imagine or Ultimate just threw out 4's system and did something completely different. It's faster, it has very different physics and movement, and a bunch of different mechanics whether they're side-effects of jank and bugs or not. It's less forgiving and less fluid to the average player due to the lack of input buffer being overall weightier and faster and having less mechanics designed to be more forgiving like easier recoveries and no ledge hogging, and it's dated in the sense of less convenience and a smaller roster but that doesn't make it a worse game to play. You can moan about exploits and stale top player meta and increased mechanical skill demanded but at the end of the day you go compare ten minutes of Melee and Ultimate and you get very obviously different experiences. The newest and shiniest game does not invalidate the old one. Smash Bros is just in a weird place where instead of getting a successor that people deemed fitting they got Brawl, a game specifically designed to be anti-competitive. If a game as good as Ultimate had come out of the gate swinging instead at the time Melee would have a smaller and more quiet scene. Maybe not. Who knows? Ask ten people what their favourite Street Fighter game is and nobody will give the guy who days he likes Third Strike more than V shit for "refusing to move on". The only difference is that for Melee people are still playing the old game in large numbers and have a shitty fandom that speaks louder than people who just play it because they enjoy it and have a scene that allows them to do so instead of drying up because the new game came out. While the top player meta remains stable there are still people picking up and playing Melee competitively for the first time, it's not just comprised exclusively of bitter old men. I don't see the slightest thing wrong with people continuing to enjoy a game based purely on preference over its successor. If people are still having fun with it, then why be the guy to kick over their sandcastle and tell them to stop having fun? The issue is with people being assholes about their preferences and trying to kick over everybody else's sandcastles not the game itself. 64 still has a small and quiet scene and nobody gets up in arms about it because they aren't dicks about it.

And I already said why SSB64 would be the exception to that, because it didn't have the impact Melee did. SSB64 effectively came out of nowhere, even if it ended up selling well. Melee was the one that rode the wave of Smash being a phenomenon, much how Pokémon (at least in the West) had the head-start of the anime proceeding the games and so that's what people knew the Pokémon phenomenon to be. I even remember the commercials being about, "Take all 151 Pokémon on the go with your Game Boy!" Most of the parodies at the time were of the anime. The G1 games and Melee both hit the scene at that popularity crest, after the anime and SSB64 got the ball rolling. Plus, like I said: Melee had the vast majority of Smash's lifespan at that point for people to get comfortable with the status quo for several years. No one wanted to start fresh, no one wanted to throw out all those hours learning Melee's intricacies or risk letting a cushy reputation as an elite player slip by starting again at ground zero with everyone else on a new game. We'd see the same exact phenomenon in the transition from Windows XP to Windows Vista (at pretty much the same time period, too, the 2001 installment being superseded with the 2007/8 one); an unprecedented lifespan of six years for everyone to get nice and familiar and complacent with it, when no previous Windows release had exceeded three years before the next one came out. People weren't even willing to give Win7 a shot for the longest time and some stubbornly stuck with XP right up until support finally ended in 2014. Because they were used to it being the latest and greatest for the better part of a decade.

Your entire argument is built on the idea that all Melee players are egotistical animals who can't handle the idea of playing another game because they would get less fame from it.

I actually rescind what I said in that post for now.

I don't see any possible way you could try to rephrase that to make any sort of reasonable sense given how rooted in emotion and working backwards from "melee players are assholes, therefore". Is it really so hard to accept the idea that people just like one game more than another, and that people tend to be dicks when they think one thing is way better than another?

Well if you put it that way, then I'd say it's a combination of the two. Because yes, I say that image and personal status absolutely plays into it. Not for every player, mind you.

As a Melee player, and the vast majority of Melee players, we just want a culture of love. In the past it has been bad in the UK, but the last couple of years has been great for cross game events, whole community support and melee players playing ultimate. We all love our games. Melee is my passion, and smash as a whole is a great hobby and even earns me some extra money now making things for the community. The Ultimate scene is already bigger than Melee in the UK for the last few months, and we all prosper because of it.

Let's be clear, I don't think anyone here has a beef with someone just minding their own business. At least, I would hope not.

people still play melee because it's a fun competitive game and a fundamentally different competitive game from any other smash game. that's the long and short of it imo

Why do people still play Street Fighter 2 Turbo? Why do people still play Street Fighter 3 Third Strike? Why do people still play UMVC 3? Why do people still play *insert old fighting game here*? ...Because they're fun?

I'm fine with Melee itself, I just thing it's unfortunate that its scene had so much time to become so unprofessional and crass, instead of building an image to last a generation The FGC in general desperately need to get up to the standards of the MOBA pro leagues, if they want to be taken more seriously by people who aren't already invested

Melee has had some really great commentators. Sometimes that would be the best part of a tournament.

Reposting from LAMO pics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=257x-8j24Pc

Some of them are amazing, but not all of them are good. That's where providing commentary guidelines - energy level, context, knowledge, speed, vocabulary, things like that - would improve the viewer experience the most, in bringing that bottom tier of commentary up to par.

I absolutely think the "jank and familiarity" argument holds up, though. Melee had a bunch of crazy bullshit you could pull off that was altogether unintentional, stuff like wavedashing, that were basically bugs (to the point that Sakurai implemented tripping in Brawl). If you wanna play competitive Melee, you need to know the tricks, and all of those kinds of features are absent from future iterations. There's a world of difference between the way Melee and a game like Sm4sh play, moreso than most modern fighting games vary from iteration to iteration. Smash games that aren't Melee aren't janky in the precise ways Melee is, and that's why so many Melee players aren't interested in other Smash games. And that's fine, because everyone has their preferences. The only time it becomes a problem is when the game gets so old that it becomes all but impossible for any newcomers to enter into the scene because they'll always have so much LESS experience than the people who were there from the beginning. Melee's biggest flaw is that it was on the Gamecube, so the meta is going to evolve less and less as time goes on, to the point that it stagnates forever. Compare that to Ultimate, which can tweak balance and eliminate bugs and introduce new characters for as long as its financially viable to do so. If a mechanic like wavedashing was in Ultimate at launch (that being, a mechanic that presents the potential for technical depth if exploited, but one that was included wholly by accident which actually causes the game to function counter to the interests of the developer), it would have been patched out on day 1.

Mechanics like that do exist in Ultimate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1kjQtMaPkE