Nintendo's trying to keep it very accessible, now anyone can go online find a mtch and enjoy, no worries about being harrassed, or how good they are, just a fun game that lasts a few minutes

Stats are motivation to play.  With no voice chat you can't be made fun of anyway.   

 Not always, if you feel your stats are suffering, you may log off out of frustration or the desire not to let them fall too far, but if its casual, you may keep playing just for the fun, stats add pressure

This is your asinine way of saying "your opinion doesn't count."  Just because someone doesn't care about stats doesn't mean they can't point out problems with different ways of handling stat tracking.  And just because Starcraft did something 10 years ago doesn't mean that's the best thing to do.  Maybe in the last 10 years, we should have come up with a better way to handle disconnects.

Anyway, the way to please both camps is to give people a choice.  GH3 lets you play ranked matches or unranked matches.  Perhaps Brawl should do this, but the fact that it doesn't does not bother me in the least.  Nintendo does not want its online community to be known for immature 13-year-olds waving their e-penises around in every match, and Brawl's online functionality is consistent with that.  I respect that.

 Stats are motivation to play for a select, miniscule group of players who dedicate their lives to the game.

For the rest of us with jobs, stats are meaningless because I acknowledge that I'll never live a life that allows me to play SSBB for 18 hours of the day.

For every stat-obsessed Halo nut, there are likely 20 Halo players who have work/school/women and will never get their stats up to the point of e-penis rights.

And I keep telling people this: TOURNAMENTS TOURNAMENTS TOURNAMENTS TOURNAMENTS!

The best SSBB players will always be found in tournaments, just like for SSBM and SSB before it. 

The argument against stats is completely inane. If you dont care about them, then they dont affect you in any way so having stats would only be a plus for those who want them.

If you dont care about any kind of stats, why be against it? Your insanity is growing from the lack of a logical counter point to that statement.

We dont need leaderboards, but I like stats, and I like the ability to do a "quick match" and have someone connected to someone with similar level of experience.

I wont be anywhere near the first 500,000 ranked people ever, but I always like to know how im doing compared to others, competition is good, the only people who dont keep score are the people who never learned to accept a loss. (The same kind of freaks who think its a good idea to not keep score during a little league game)

 Might want to reread the thread there, bucko.

Stat tracking leads to more people hacking and dropping. When I go online, I just want to have an enjoyable game of Mario Kart. It dampens the mood when someone has invulnerability for the entire duration of the match because they're using a packet shaper because losing to me means his perfect but wrongfully acquired recored will be forever tarnished.

Know why Nintendo is doing this? To make the aforementioned behavior obsolete because players won't be obsessed with keeping their rankings up.

Would I mind them having ranked and non-ranked game modes? No, but I'm not going to gripe about not having it.

Actually, it would be great to have both because then the e-penis mongering hackers will stay in ranked and leave unranked alone.

And FYI, not sure who mentioned Calling All Cars, but the online didn't die from a lack of leaderboards. It died because it's a tiny game being sold on a console which has the smallest install base of all next gen consoles.

Mario Stikers online is basically dead now and it HAS stat tracking. TF2 has zero stat tracking and yet it's still alive and well.

Anyone who thinks SSBB's online will die out due to a lack of stat tracking needs to seriously consider starting a career as one of those analysts who still has the PS3 slated as this generation's winner.

Nintendo does have a good argument for this saying that it is not safe to put names out into the world but, yeah it kind of does suck. I mean everyone wants to see how good they are compared to the world. But NIntendo just thought that it was too unsafe and maybe they could get sued(IDK) Okay maybe that was an exageration but Nintendo tried to compromise with voice chat. It doesn't affect the (pre) teens but it will affect the younger ones.

I agree with everything you've said.

I'm not sure why people are arguing against it.  Some Nintendo fans are very strange.  It's like they don't want extra features.  

If you don't want stats don't play a ranked game or turn stats off, or just don't care!  Exactly!  A lot of people want stats.  It's not going to change whether I play the game but it might change how long I play.  If you want online games and people to play against, stats are a great way to keep people playing.

Uh, yeah, I am saying the opinion doesn't matter because logic says it doesn't.   People that want stats will not care if you get a loss from disconnecting because 1) it will prevent a lot of people from dropping and 2) is a lot better than not having stats at all.  People that don't want stats can point out problems with a method of stat keeping all they want but it doesn't matter if other people want the stats and are more than willing to deal with the perceived problem.  If you don't want stats, why are you arguing against stats that others want?  Why do you care? 

Most people are not going to quit, and if it becomes a problem play matches that aren't tracked (which apparently should be an option because of the whiners that don't want stats) or find a new game.  A lot of people are going to quit if they aren't having fun anyway, but people drop from online games all the time and a match-finder should find you new opponents.

I think a lot of you underestimate how much people like stats. If there is no long-term incentive to play, people will move on to new games.

But fine, I'll agree there should be a choice.  As far as we know there isn't one right now, so that is a problem.