We're less than a week away from the release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate now and I thought I'd try and organize a league like I did before with Smash 4 on 3DS and Wii U.

Here's how it all works: 

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate League

• Every player starts out with 100pts, you can join at any time.
• You can challenge only people who are within 3 ranks of you (Ex. if you're in 5th place, you can issue a challenge to users ranks 2 to 4).
• Once a challenge is issued, it must be retained for at least 24 hours (once that period has passed without an answer the player may choose to remove the challenge and challenge someone else)
• You can have a maximum of 2 active challenges
  Challenges have to be accepted within 3 days (or else you'll suffer a 2 pts penalty).
• Once the challenged user accepts, both players must battle within that 3 day period (plus a 24 hour extention). Any player who does not show up (whether it be the challenger or the challenged player) will suffer a 10 point deduction
• Challenges must be made public in the League thread as well as accepted challenges and results of the match.
• Matches will be a best of 3 rounds, 3 stocks, 8 minutes, no items.
• The loser of the previous round may change character and will get to chose the next stage they will battle on (counterpick). The winner must keep the character he won with.

Points

Philosophy

• Everyone starts on equal footing
• The points distribution favors activity/challenges since you can gain points quicker by challenging someone then by waiting for a challenge.
• The lead the top player can amass isn't too big since he can only gain a maximum of 6 pts per challenge and can lose it pretty quickly but a dominant player is still rewarded for his exploits.
• On the other end, lower ranked players don't lose pts too fast and can regain a few positions quickly with some wins.

Upcoming matches

Challenged

Recent matches

Tag.

Definitely interested, but won't really have time to invest into competitive training until about a week or so after launch.

Tag, but also a couple of questions/suggestions.

What stage list are we using? Presumably (at least, I genuinely hope) not every single stage is considered legal for the purposes of this league.

Assuming players cannot come to an agreement on the stage for the first game of a set, how is the first stage to be determined? Are we using a striking process, and if so, how do we determine who bans first? (And what is the ban order?)

For counterpicking stages, does the previous game's winner not get to ban any stages at all? That seems particularly disadvantageous if one character has a particularly bad matchup against another character on a specific stage (like, say, Lucina/Marth vs. Mewtwo on Battlefield in Smash 4). I'd (personally) recommend giving the winner at least one or two bans, depending on the size of the stage list.

I'd also really recommend giving the player who won the last game the option to switch characters after the stage for the next game has been chosen. That's the ruleset adopted by most tournaments, and while I don't want to be the guy that comes in here and say "Waahhh it's different so fix it please," stages make a huge difference in how characters play, sometimes even to the point where people will change their character entirely based on what stage they're playing on. For example (using Smash 4 again), some people will deliberately pick a character with a safer recovery to make Lylat's questionable edges easier to deal with. Or, alternatively, some people will opt away from Little Mac on Battlefield because the top platform makes life really tough for him.

Other than that it looks good. Definitely interested in joining with or without these recommendations.

All good points that I'll take into consideration. It's hard to say for stages at this point but we could start with a list a returning stages that we know will be somewhat "neutral". Would you have such a list on hand? I think we'll have a lot of stages that will become usable since we now have the option to turn stage hazards off (no Yellow Devil on Mega Man's stage yessss!).

I'll join but not right away. Ive been on-and-off on Smash 4 for like a year and a half now so im a bit rusty. probably in mid-January i can be ready to start

I'm also down for it. I enjoyed the 3DS League. Might not be able to actively participate in the first few weeks but I'll join after that.

I've seen a few stage lists thrown around so far, but here's my (personal) favorite from what's been tossed around.

Starters: Battlefield, FD, Pokemon Stadium 2*, Smashville, Yoshi's Island (Brawl)

Counterpicks: Town & City, Arena Ferox, WarioWare*, Castle Siege*

* denotes hazards off

Admittedly this may have to be changed as we find out more about the game and discover some good/bad things about stages. I'm certainly not opposed to modifying this either if people want some other stage swapped in for another (like say if you want Wily's Castle in)

Alternatively, since we have so many legal stages, I think it'd be really cool if we had a seasonal stage rotation, where different stages get swapped in to the list depending on the time of year. That way, we get an opportunity to play on all (or most) of the plethora of legal stages at some point.

As a personal aside, I'd recommend staying away from adding more Battlefield clones (Yoshi's Story/Dreamland), as well as FoD due to framerate issues that some people have reported.

I'm interested. I'll have to see if I can unlock everything before December 10th. I also have to *sigh* pay the online fee...