Very soon, we're going to know a lot more about smash 4 than we already do, and it's quite possible that the game itself is getting pretty near. I haven't really been active in the smash community in a few years, but I've spent a whole lot of time thinking about how things went with Brawl. To be brutally honest, we as a community have really failed to realize the potential the series has. As far as I can tell, attendance on everything is down from where it was when I was active, and compared to truly successful competitive games like League of Legends, we never were anything in the first place. I firmly believe that none of this is smash itself's fault; the smash games are brilliant games, and they have an incredible potential for both widespread appeal and deep competition. I think we fail to realize this potential because of what is at core one single issue, a truly crippling one that is entirely self inflicted:
We don't work together.
For serious, just look at all the major issues that came up during the years of Brawl's lifespan as our main game:
-Melee vs Brawl. This stupid argument carried on for years, and it was an absolute toxin on the entire community. I could go on for hours about how terrible this argument was, but it can be summed up simply. Brawl was the new game and was absolutely inevitably going to be the main game of the community. A relatively small but extraordinarily vocal set of people decided to raise as much hell as possible to try to fight this. All the rest of us played into their game and one way or another took sides, and years later, here we are, divided.
-Meta Knight. Honestly after about a year we should have realized that we were really never going to ban him, but for basically the game's entire lifespan we fought it, constantly re-arguing about how we were going to ban him but then never doing it. Eventually we did... and then we settled on undoing that. Winner? No one. Loser? All of us.
-Stages. There were basically two competing and polar opposite visions of what the stage list for the game should be. We started with a very "liberal" stage list, but there was always a war over it and a dynamic that guaranteed the eventual victory of the "conservatives". Stages that were banned were almost never unbanned, and all they had to do was get something banned in one region and rely on time until that ban would spread. Players in a region with any given stage banned would have no experience on it and would inflate the ranks for banning it, and momentum would inevitably build. After one set of "controversial" stages was finally mostly banned, new stages could be thrown into our never ending battle. Eventually we were down to single digit remaining stages, and nowhere on this road did the regions agree on a stage list.
These large problems and several other small ones had the common theme that we as a community dedicated an overwhelming amount of effort to fighting each other, and for it we had to show a lot of hurt feelings and a game that was literally not the same game between two different events. The backroom in theory was supposed to resolve this by limiting discussion to a handful of experts, but as someone who was involved, I can say in practice it didn't work to that effect. What we the broader community spent a lot less effort on was promoting the game and growing the community. We'd even go so far as to carry our petty arguments with each other outside of our community. When you go on SRK, someone from outside of the community posts that smash sucks, and the response from us they get is "well, Brawl sucks, but Melee is different!", what does that tell them and anyone else reading that exchange other than that we're just a joke? It certainly does nothing to encourage anyone to play any smash game, Melee or Brawl.
So far it seems like I've just been ranting about how bad everyone is, but don't mistake me. I am very much a part of this community, and I in no way am trying to place myself above any of this. I was in the trenches every step of the way fighting for "my side" in these battles while doing fairly little else for the community, and for that I certainly share guilt, probably more than most of you reading this. I'm saying everything here not to try to act superior to anyone; I'm saying that WE messed up, and WE need to do better this time.
Now is the time to talk about this too; smash 4 is close, but it's still enough of an unknown that we can talk about it in the abstract with no bias at all based on the particulars of what is going on with it. This is best as, to be honest, none of those particulars matter. When smash 4 comes out, it will be our main game. We will have a massive influx of new players, and it will be for a time very easy to draw many more if we devote our efforts to that purpose. This is an overwhelmingly massive opportunity for our community, and given that it takes an average of half a decade for us to get new smash games, we cannot afford to squander it. Before anything else, we need to agree that we're all going to do one simple, basic thing:
We must all work together. We will all support smash 4 or at the very least refrain from attacking it. The inevitable handful of trolls who cannot do that will be treated as such and rejected by the rest of us. From day one, we need a true unity ruleset used at every tournament coast to coast in North America as well as in Europe and Australia, and we need it to be truly representative of our collective will with no gaming of the process by anyone to accomplish an agenda. Once decisions are made, we need to stick to them. If we decide we're going to ban something or for that matter not ban something, we are not going to re-litigate it over years while pressuring any TO we can find. We're not going to repeat the ever shrinking stage list until we're playing on a single digit number of stages, but we're also not going to try to force people to play on everything under the sun out of our own personal principles. I would be lying if I said I didn't have tons of ideas about the best ways to go about things. I've thought nearly endlessly about the particulars of how we could do better, but in the end, I see the same fundamental roadblock that we must overcome first. We need to work together, every one of us, as a united smash community. If we can just agree on that one thing, we will have accomplished the first, biggest, and most important step to making smash 4 a wildly larger success as a competitive community game than Brawl ever was. So please, are you guys with me on this? Smash 4 can be the biggest competitive game of this generation, but we all need to be on board for it to happen.
)
