| thechinesenoob said: Ok i'm obviously not going to convince you that Melee is going to stay around and you're obviously not going to convince me of the opposite. The point of the EVO post was that EVO was going to host Melee regardless, Nintendo can't stop people from bringing gamecubes and playing the game, which the community would've done regardless. We paid for those gamecubes and those Melee discs so it's not like Nintendo can confiscate them if we try to go to Vegas and play them. The most Nintendo could do was stop EVO from streaming Melee which they tried to do. As someone actually in the community trust me when I say most people have an extreme distrust of Nintendo intervention, even those who play SSB4. Yes there are big differences between NTSC and PAL, but any European player traveling to EVO isn't going to change their decision simply because it's a different version. I wasn't arguing whether there were differences or not I was just saying anyone willing to spend hundreds to travel across the Atlantic Ocean is dedicated enough to the point where the regional differences won't dissuade them, and thus won't affect attendance. Mango also plays falco as a secondary and actually plays falco exclusively against fox, he is extremely capable of playing multiple characters and winning tournaments (winning Big House 4 as falco/falcon/marth mainly, played very little fox, and beat a top 10 player, Hax, with falcon), so it's no surprise he played falco in Europe. What he actually said (from what I know) was that the difference between NTSC fox and PAL fox is much bigger than the difference between NTSC falco and PAL falco so he chose falco. But that's irrelevant, the point is that only about 20 Europeans are good enough/willing to travel to America to play in tournaments and the rest are perfectly content to stay in Europe and never worry about NTSC. Thus the only possible attendance loss would be those top few Europeans, who are all good enough to place very very well in America regardless of regional differences (see Armada and Leffen). Even with the hundreds of other players traveling to other fighting game tournaments, Melee is still the third largest fighting game in the world despite the regional differences and is poised to surpass UMVC3 as the second (APEX 2015 Melee> EVO 2014 UMVC3, we will see what happens at EVO). The regional similarity might help grow SSB4 faster, but it sure hasn't hurt Melee attendance. Japan has always had a more prominent Brawl community than Melee community, so SSB4 is naturally more popular than Melee there so I'm not going to argue anything about Japan. You have basically given a bunch of opinions about why you believe SSB4 is going to spread faster and why Melee is going to stop being popular, but the facts are that people said the exact same thing when Brawl came out and Melee survived Brawl and let's compare Melee post Brawl to Melee post SSB4. # 100 person Melee Tournaments 2007: 15 (largest 270) # 100 person Melee Tournaments 2008: 6 (largest 231) (Brawl released at the beginning of 2008) Attendance at APEX 2009: Melee 52, Brawl 210 # 100 person Melee Tournaments in January 2015 alone: minimum of 10 including APEX(APEX, BEAST V, Norcal Arcadian, Paragon 2015, Sweet Prologue, Sweet 17, MVG Endgame, Mayhem, Super Nebulous, Smash for Smiles 2). These are the ones I know of, there may or may not be more # 100 person Melee Tournaments in every other January combined: 13 Attendance at APEX 2015: Melee 1037, SSB4 837 As you can see, Melee got absolutely obliterated in the aftermath of Brawl, whereas in the aftermath of SSB4 it is doing better than ever. I think if it can survive getting out attended 4:1 in the first APEX following Brawl's release, then it can survive SSB4's release. Yeah sure SSB4 has better online than Brawl ever had, but you can play Melee online for free, the only price is the controller adaptor whereas playing SSB4 online is about 400$. Melee online actually has much less input lag than For Glory mode has (I think Anther's ladder is 3-4 frames on average), whereas my personal experience with for glory mode is about 7-8 frame input lag and slight frame skipping, which is why I only play SSB4 local. Again I can't speak personally for Europe but if those are your impressions for the European scene I'm not going to argue with them, I'm just stating the numbers, and the numbers support Melee. Anyways I think this argument has reached it's conclusion, if those numbers don't convince you of Melee's survival idk what will, and your opinions of why SSB4 is going to grow faster won't convince me that Melee will die, so we can just agree to disagree. |
I've already highlighted the flaw in comparing Brawl to S4, not only is the push a lot better with S4 as well as the game being deeper and all that which we've already touched upon but also the community situation. Many at the time believed Brawl was going to be Melee 2.0 when the game was being stripped down to be much more casual and party like, with S4 the community are still in the mind set of anything non Melee being casual as a result of what happened with Brawl, if the latter game was designed like S4 it's possible Melee may have not even been able to recover and survive being followed by a game that could be just as competitive and deep in mechanics as people were more willing to explore Brawl to master the meta game and try and make the transition.
Stopping Melee from being streamed at Evo would have been a massive blow for Smash's exposure on all levels, the FGC only began to open up to the series after it was streamed with well respected commentator James Chen doing commentary, you could bring your GCs yes but the exposure wouldn't anywhere nears as much and Melee would continue to be more underground and elite. I don't know how exactly you're calculating costs as Melee being free to get online Wii U online is free and the cost of the console is a bit of a wonky point to bring up as people buy a platform for multiple games in a library on top of the one they want, if it's some homebrew method I don't think it can be classed as a viable point tbh, getting a GC game online in EU on GC well good luck I guess, I'm not familiar with how it's done in the US.
Few Europeans would make the trip because of the changes and wayward scene over here, on equal grounds EU players have shown to be just as good as any NA player in any game we have an EU Evo champion in SFIV while no NA player has had that honour for reference. I'm willing to bet Amsa, Armada, leffen and the few others who make the trip play the NTSC version the majority of the time as the scene here is very elite and small with activity on just picking up over the last year, this is why Smash Europe was launched to bring the groups together and have a go to site for all Smash players. This is why the majority of tournaments go as far as to stick to a certain console version if the are even differences like speed so everyone knows which footing it's going to be played on.
Numbers are good yes but they don't prove that Melee won't be replaced in the long run and that's the flaw in what you're arguing here as the numbers were good for the likes of MVC, MVC2, SF2, CVS, SF3 etc... I've seen it all before and don't believe the Melee fan's determination can avert this as I mentioned earlier even if Melee can run a long side S4 I can see another Smash game doing what SFIV did to S2 and taking the mechanics as a template to build on them in a new style which will result in Melee being retired by most much like SF2. Smash is doing what SF did in having multiple approaches to its concept, Sakurai won't go back to Melee's approach but another director will at which point it'll be S4 trying to survive the new game.
Finally on Zero's victory, I've been watching him stream since the game came out he's actually one of the first players to explore S4's mechanics extensively along with Izaw. I see him practice a lot with M2k with many characters so he knew match ups well when going into Apex, much better then his opponents although the Olimar player really made that character fly.
