Smashboards has fallen after Nintendo Power released information about pro players, advanced techniques, and a link to this site about 2 years ago. A storm of noobs started entering smashboards. With the release of Brawl, everything got even worse. Because of the numerous changes, many inexperienced players thought they finally can stand a chance, they actually know stuff, people who like Melee are cheaters, and so forth. The amount of people like this are of the masses and they flood the forum everyday. It's because of all of the new members entering, posting, spamming, etc. that the site goes down so much. The Mods have so much spam to clear up that most of them get fed up and don't even bother anymore.
About Brawl, yes, the current metagame isn't to great...but look at the video of Azen vs Anden in 2002 in one of the first Melee tournaments. The video is very lacking in anything worth watching, granted the fact the game was only a year old at the time and in a few years to come would people discover things such as wavedashing. It took Melee about 5 years to get super competitive. Smash64 took much more (however it never became as popular). I can only expect Brawl to become a better as the years go on.
Also, I need something new, heh.
About Brawl, yes, the current metagame isn't to great...but look at the video of Azen vs Anden in 2002 in one of the first Melee tournaments. The video is very lacking in anything worth watching, granted the fact the game was only a year old at the time and in a few years to come would people discover things such as wavedashing. It took Melee about 5 years to get super competitive. Smash64 took much more (however it never became as popular). I can only expect Brawl to become a better as the years go on.
Also, I need something new, heh.