| thechinesenoob said: 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. |
Perfect pivots were used but the players who did weren't aware of the new properties and used them in how they would in Melee, I don't know if Melee will survive S4 as it's a much more competitive and technical beast then Brawl was and has a meta game that can go on to be equal of even better then Melee. Most Melee players may not make the jump but a large number of Brawl players will with little issue. I'll also add that the won't be same rift with the FGC like the Melee crowd had for years opening another avenue fornew players, someone earlier hit the nail on the head that these players are so reliant on Melee's approach that they're destined to fade with the game until a new game using its approach arrives, it won't disapear but it'll become a relic like Third Strike and being a relic doesn't mean washed up, trust me it will be replaced one way or another. People like Mang0 saying they don't like the new game is no different to someone like Sanford Kelly a top MVC2 player and Multiple EVO champion moaning about MVC3's differences as in the end it made no difference as he was replaced on his pedastal by the likes of Chris G, F Champ, Rayray etc... these are the guys I'm talking about who will be replaced by newcomers in newer games.
On tournaments I'll point out the is a large factor in Smash tournaments being more successful and that is Nintendo themselves, in recent years they've acknowledged the fighting scene and worked to push and help it unlike before and this is one thing that also falls into S4's favour as well as Brawl never got this support and this is a key factor in Melee not surviving newer games like it did Brawl. Everything before were left to the Smash community who were dominated by the Melee crowd, S4 will grow just as big or maybe even bigger given current conditions as new things are found out each week and it has a better platform to launch from with an immediate presence in big tournaments and a far better and stable online then its predecessor which is also a strong tool in roping in new people to the scene, all of this is on top of being a more balance and competitive game then Brawl which the latter was never intended for any proper competitive scene unlike S4 , this is why Brawl's meta game ended up like it did and Melee has grown to what it is today. We're seeing an equal level of diversity from S4 this early on in it's life, difference being in Melee I tend to see the usual Fox, Falco, Peach, Sheik combo making the top 8, in S4 I've seen different supposed low tiers make top 8 with one even winning.
