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Wyrdness said: Most of the top Smash heads are dedicated Melee players so you can't really take their opinion with as much weight, it's like in SF how many of the old disappear as they can't adjust and are replaced, those players themselves showed disdain for newer games, if you even look at SF only a select amount of players ever make the transition to newer games and many end up just playing casually as they're replaced by newer faces, trust me the faces of Smash now will be different to the faces of Smash in 10 years with only some OGs about. It's why the meta game itself is what determines outcome, Smash 4 is more agrressive then Brawl which was heavily defence based which is why the latter slowed down as it was figured out while having that worry with Smash 4 is jumping the gun as it's meta is more diverse and matches seem to be more down to the player's style. In Apex an Olimar/Rosalina made the grand finals, while Pacman, Mac, Sonic, Sheik/Falcon, Duck Hunt made it there with only 2 Diddys, non of these characters in top 8 share movesets or fighting styles either which highlights the diversity in the match ups. Like it or not Melee is a relic of the past now which isn't a bad thing as SFII was still in EVO when TS was prominent, the newer generation of Smash won't just have Melee in their faces as the symbol Smash the will be a competitive alternative with a different approach and meta and no documentary is going to alter things this time. Most fighting games are larger then ever when their replacement comes along it's happening with SF again right now. Perfect Pivots work a bit differently in Smash 4 to Melee, they retain the same property but alow wave dash like movements (Fox's in 12:02 is scary) and they're 3 frames in S4, just check the link below, now combine this with some of the newer techniques that are unique to S4 and you have quite a way to go before the meta is even close to developed in S4 |
Yeah obviously the top Melee players are Melee minded, and similarly Melee minded players are going to listen. Their voices personally have no impact on me or what game I choose to play competitively. But they will on many Melee players who are considering jumping to SSB4. If a player like Mang0 says he dislikes SSB4, a lot of the people who follow him will be dissuaded from playing it. Also I'm not saying SSB4 is not diverse, there were definitely a lot of different characters and playstyles in top 8, but if you look at the best Melee players, there is just as much diversity.
We can go back and forth all day about whether Melee is a washed up game or not. But from a strictly statistical point of view it is healthier than ever and shows no signs of slowing down. If you add up the attendance total from the 6 largest tournaments on January 24th of this year alone, its probably about equal or larger than the 6 largest tournaments in all of 2012. For reference from Melee's release until the end of 2013 (12+ years), there were 77 100+ entrant tourneys. 2014 had 63 100+ entrant tournaments alone including 3 of the 4 largest ever up to the end of 2014. 1 month into 2015 and we've already had about 10 more including APEX 2015 (largest tournament ever), Beast 5 (largest European tournament ever and 6th largest ever overall), Norcal Arcadian (11th largest tournament ever, and no ranked players were allowed to enter), and Paragon 2015 (15th largest tournament ever). I know 100 entrants is an arbitrary cutoff, but I think from these numbers you should get the idea. Considering last year APEX had 620 entrants and EVO had 970 entrants for Melee, EVO will almost definitely break the attendance record again.
I really want SSB4 to succeed as it would definitely bring more exposure, more players, more tournaments, etc. to the smash community, but SSB4 becoming big won't cause Melee to die out. A pretty reasonable (in my mind) guess is that about 30% of the competitive Melee players switched over to SSB4 with the rest of SSB4's numbers coming from Brawl and new players. Despite this Melee still managed to break last years EVO attendance record. Melee survived Brawl despite being much much smaller back then (largest tournaments had about 200 players), it will probably survive SSB4. The difference between Melee right now and other fighting games when new editions are released is that Melee is currently growing exponentially, whereas those games experienced pretty minor growth and then drastic decline several months after the new game is released.
Also I'm aware of the differences in perfect pivots, and SSB4's perfect pivot is still roughly equal to Melee's(SSB4's allows you to perform it without using a move, but can only be done in the direction you are facing), but it is usable in a game with fewer movement options so it is relatively more useful. It still hasn't seen much competitive use, I never saw it during APEX top 8 but you can correct me if that's wrong. I'm also not trying to argue which of the games is more competitively viable or any of that, in a perfect world both succeed and no one bitches about which one is better. I'm just saying it's pretty unlikely that Melee goes under in it's current state. The community has pretty much already splintered such that Melee and SSB4 don't really affect each other (pretty unfortunate imo). The difference between now and when Brawl came out is that the community is big enough for both games to possibly survive a long time.
