Anyway, why shouldn't this be banned from tournaments? I mean, it shuts down two perfectly good characters who would otherwise be a high or mid tier! In a way, it's similar to Wobbling in Melee! Must we really sacrifice two of the most fun and still powerful characters in the game just because of this? It's really not fair!
Copied and pasted from my post in the Lucas thread:
And how do you suggest such a ban could be enforced? This is the main problem with this thing, everyone will agree that Brawl would be a better competitive game without this chain-grab of doom, but there is no way to enforce the ban in tournament play.
Banning stages is easy; if the tournament rules state that Mushroomy Kingdom is banned for singles, then no player has the right to pick that stage. If anyone insists on picking banned stages, they simply get DQed; end of the story. How, however, would tournament organizers go about banning something like this chain-grab?
First, it cannot be proven that a player actually did this unless he is actually caught in the act, and even then we would have to put complete faith in the person who does the ruling, which, in competitive play, is something you try to avoid as much as possible. So not only is it very hard to actually catch people doing this, but it also makes room for unfair ruling from dishonest "referees". This problem could be solved if the replay saving option worked properly, but most matches last for too long anyway, and a smart player would simply delay the game past the three minutes mark to avoid having his match recorded.
Even if we managed somehow to enforce a rule stipulating that it is illegal to grab Lucas/Ness again after they break out of a grab, people would still be getting several grab hits and a free smash every time they manage to grab Ness or Lucas, making these two bottom of bottom tier. There's also the fact that someone could accidentally grab a second time, and get disqualified because of a small mistake.
This is the kind of design and testing oversight that ruins games, and such a small thing has just made two characters completely unplayable. If more of this **** pops out and Nintendo refuses to patch the game, Brawl will not succeed as a competitive fighter.
The following four characters can continue this combo unless interrupted by a jump break without moving: Charizard, Marth, Lucas, Snake.
That's it..
I haven't done any such testing myself, and I don't want to sound like I don't appreciate your efforts, but there is a very simple fact that destroys your whole argument...
It doesn't matter how many characters can do this, as long as there's one. Even if, say, only Marth could do this, then any player worth his salt would counterpick Marth against Ness and Lucas players, and get a free win. You don't need to be a competent Marth player, all you have to do is press Z repeatedly.
But nothing like this has ever happened before! In Melee, there wasn't anything even similar to this that effected only two very specific characters! I'm quite sure there is a way to enforce this! There has to be. You could very well just make it a rule that you can't do it more than three times consecutively or something...
If you make a rule saying it cannot be done three times (I won't even get into how complicated such a rule would be to enforce), people will simply do it two times, and then follow up with a smash attack. Either way you lose.
It's possible to enforce a ban, but nobody will. Like Cort said, it's not gonna be banned.
I'm quite curious as to how this could be done. I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I'm a Lucas player myself and I'd really like not having to switch mains, so if you do have an intelligent suggestion to make (unlike some of the previous posters) I'd be interested in hearing it.
By the way for the people comparing this to wobbling, like it's been said wobbling was not banned in most tournaments, and I'm sure it would be too much of a ***** to enforce anyway; those people who did ban it for their tournaments were probably just relying on people's honesty, which is not a very good idea when there's money on the line. Also, if this thing ever got out of hand, we could always ban the Ice Climbers as a last resort (an easily enforceable ban); what are we going to do here, ban Ness and Lucas?
A rule which cannot be enforced is pointless.
