After watching a whole lotta videos this is my (most likely completely ignorant and wrong take) on how skill level plays into the new smash. It looks like the casual play has been left untouched, you can jump in pick a character and insantly just start having fun, which is the basis of smash, and looks unharmed.

The competitive, to highly competitive bars is what seems to have been moved. Watching all these characters like Snake, Sonic, Olimar, Lucas, Ike and many more, they aren't easy to master. They display far more weaknesses than characters in the past. There is a much larger range of diversity in how characters play, and while you can go in with snake and chuck a bunch of grenades and watch them bounce, and fire off rockets and have fun in a casual match, it looks like you'll get kicked in the face in a remotely competitive match where you'll be punished for leaving yourself open, or attacking inneffectively. You have to know when to use rockets and how to use grenades or be punished severely. And it looks like alot of characters are like that. Getting to that middle bar of "competitive player" seems like it will require more work than it did in melee, because you'll really have to learn the ins and outs of the characters more, rather than just learning the tricks of fighting in general and then picking a character you like.

It would seem that the bar for highly competitive play has been lowered though. With the removal of a number of exploits in the physics engine, and some other Advanced techniques, it would seem that there will be less to master to get to that high level. There is still alot to learn (just look at the technical thread on smashboards posted above, still alot there to learn), it won't require hours and hours of practicing wave dashing, dash dancing, short hopping with l cancelling ect ect in order to get to that high level. There looks to be new things that weren't in melee (backwards jumping towards opponents to utilize a character's back air attack instead of front air or neutral), that are still being discovered and learned. But thus far, they don't require hours of repeating the same thing over and over until you're comfortable exploiting it in a real match.

It looks like there will definately still be competitive play, but it will rely less on becoming skilled at exploits, and more skilled at character based tactics. And rather than it looking like it did in melee where it was

Casual--->competitive-------------------------->l33t skillz0rs

it will be more like

Casual---------------->Competitive------------->l33t skillz0rs

Which I think is a much better balance overall. But hey, in another week we may know about a much deeper metagame with a small top tier list that shoots all of that in the foot. We'll see.

^wait - so u can't wavedash in SSBB?

get with the times man! Wavedashing has been confirmed gone for months!

Sorry, I know not everybody follows it as obsessively as some of us do. Yeah, Wavedashing=history

its not about wave dashing its about wave landing these days.

!!! According to the source's prelims Smash sold upwards of 1 million in week 1...!!!

This game might out sell the GC version if we add up the first month in each territory alone... It might even pass Melee before it hits Europe...

Yeah, that is indeed an amazing number for it's first week. About time Japan bought a good game.

^ yeah my 350k predictions were way off
I blame Galaxy

My prediction was 800k but I put it in a day too late for the prediction league. I wasn't too far off I was going to guess 1Mil before I heard that the game would be supply constrained.

Samus is under fire! She has sent and emergency directive....JOIN THE FIGHT!

This song rocks so hard.