| thechinesenoob said: I think basically what he is trying to say is that he believes that Melee is a much better spectator sport than SSB4 will be. The hype and speed of Melee is what has kept it alive and growing for the past 15 years. Melee had it's biggest year ever in 2014 and is slated for an even bigger year in 2015 (there was already a day where Melee had 6 100 player tournaments in one day, whereas about 5 years ago there were maybe 6 100 player tournaments per year). This is because Melee is, in the eyes of most people (not necessarily my opinion), way more fun to watch. I followed the tournament pretty closely as I love competitive smash and about 60000 people were watching melee and 20000 people were watching SSB4 throughout the day. For the grand finals, SSB4 had about 70000-80000 viewers and Melee had 110000-120000 viewers. The defensive mechanics in SSB4 (strong shield, ledge play, fewer movement options, lower hitstun, etc) lead it to being much slower paced. The top 8 of SSB4 took approximately as long as the top 8 for Melee despite Melee having double the amount of stocks per game and 11 more games being played in Melee top 8. If you enjoy the mechanics in SSB4, great that's your choice, but theres no denying that the mechanics lead to much slower games and in most people's opinions (again not necessarily mine or yours, but just in general) this makes the game more boring to watch. Of course, this could always change as the metagame for SSB4 develops, and as players get better the game will inevitably change. One of the reasons Brawl was only successful for about 5 years was because as players got better the game actually got slower because they dropped the Melee mentality of fast, aggressive gameplay. This lead to matches becoming slower and less appealing to spectators as time went on, whereas Melee has gotten faster and faster. Although the comments earlier that Brawl was a complete failure competitively are horribly misled. Brawl absolutely dominated the competitive scene in 2007 and 2008 and it appeared at the time that Melee was going to die off. Melee recently became popular due in part to the release of the smash bros documentary (definitely would recommend watching it, although it doesn't do Brawl justice). As to earlier comments about wavedashing and Melee mechanics, from personal experiences and what top players have said, dash-dancing is actually a much more important movement option that has been taken out in SSB4. Someone earlier incorrectly said that dash-dancing is in SSB4 when it isn't, SSB4 has foxtrotting which is also in Melee, but not nearly as useful as dash-dancing so no one uses it. Also in response to OP, I can see where the Melee crowd was coming from as Melee was the main event and was delayed 3 or 4 hours, but it was still terribly disrespectful and I hate that this negative trash is what people will see first when looking at the smash community |
Makes a lot more sense and is more open then what he was saying, I'll counter by saying Third Strike had hype and speed over SFIV in it's early days but the latter has still become a strong spectator sport due to it's diverse match ups while the former has become a relic of the past, still good and many still prefer it but it's not as prevelant as before and the notion in general is the clash between Melee fans and other Smash fans is that the rowdy group with in Melee fear this may become the case so they're against any approach that is different from Melee's approach and are loud about it. One thing about Smash 4 is it's diversity in its meta, some matches are fast while some are slow, many characters seem more viable which in the long run can is much better then a fast paced clash of the same match ups, some characters like Lucina for example are not fully figured out, when Brolylegs' Lucina fought with that same Olimar player weeks ago it was like a Melee match. Melee when it was still being figured out would have looked just as boring, Smash 4 it seems will have a meta that will develop based on each individual player's style.
The mechanic people are playing around with in Smash 4 is perfect pivot as it has a wave dash effect, remember this is a different set of mechanics and approach to Melee so the effect on the meta game could be significantly greater then what dash dancing had on Melee. I've seen the documentary and tbh it's good but it highlights an elitist attitude with in the Melee scene that people have touched upon in this thread.
