Closing Thoughts

The most meaningful writing assignment overall, at least for me, was most definitely the researched essay. I think one of the biggest reasons why is that it helped me get better at not only  writing those specific essays, but also better at citing and finding evidence in general. Initially, especially last semester, I dreaded doing them as they were quite lengthy and additionally required me to find multiple good sources of evidence to use. Finding evidence isn’t normally very hard for me, but it was a different case this time. The evidence also had to be varied, which forced me out of my comfort zone of primarily using online news articles as a source. Additionally, I once again had to get better at MLA citing, which is a useful skill I’ll need for the rest of my academic career. I believe it was also the most meaningful for me because I was able to speak about a topic I was very passionate about. As an avid Smash Bros. fan and player since I was very young, I first watched videos on YouTube about Super Smash Bros, Brawl, wishing I could play it myself. It came from the heart, which definitely made the essay more memorable and important to me. In fact, a lot of the sources were things I had remembered from previously looking into Nintendo’s history and bizarre relationship towards Smash, especially its community. I was quite surprised to find how unhelpful Nintendo has been throughout the years, so I wanted to talk about it in some way, ultimately culminating in my researched essay. 

One important thing I took away from Tiny Gray-Garcia’s offerings is that it truly helped me understand the extent of how serious the problems of poverty are, especially in relation to minorities and indigenous people. As a Jamaican-American myself, I’ve always known that a large majority of those in poverty were often people of color, but I truthfully wasn’t aware of the deep extent of it. The most meaningful part of the video and podcast I watched were definitely when one of the speakers spoke about how they had to help the community, as he and many others there had learned “what it’s like to be on the streets,” in his own words. A personal belief I had is that being motivated to change things so no one has to suffer as you have is one of the most noble and respectable things a person could ever do, and it really resonated with me. 

My writing goals for the future are something I’m still thinking about. I’d very much like to produce my own written story one day, which would be the ultimate culmination of my writing and artistic skill. Non-creatively, as you could tell I’m quite interested in Smash. Maybe someday I could write articles or post news in my own style of writing. Perhaps, with inspiration from our guest speaker’s materials, I could utilize some of their ideals to help change the community for the better. While I personally don’t believe the Smash community can truly be killed, at least, not for long, I still think it needs the support of its community to thrive. 

Becoming a Stronger Writer

This semester has been interesting to go through compared to my first one, as they’ve both been wildly different yet also have notable similarities. I definitely enjoyed this class a lot, once again my writing/english class was generally the most enjoyable class of the semester. I believe I’ve become a much better student compared to my first semester. Admittedly, personal issues in my life definitely impacted my abilities as a student for the worse, which was a notable difference. However, I came in with far more experience and understanding on what I could do. And even in spite of those issues, I still firmly believe that I’ve improved throughout the year throughout this time as well, My topics tend to be less orthodox compared to other students’, but as we go through my literary journey this semester I’ll be mainly focused on how I achieved several of the Course Learning Objectives (CLOs).

Our first paper was the op-ed, in which I wrote about Super Smash Bros. and Nintendo’s lack of support towards it, especially in comparison to other fighting games. The first and second CLOs are related, so I will discuss them together. They both entail that I “[e]xamine how attitudes towards linguistic standards and differences empower and oppress language users,” with the second one requiring that I also “acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility.” I believe that in the case of my op-ed, Nintendo often uses their commercial jargon or “corporate speak” to oppress their players especially in the cases of their tournament cancellations. The way they used that style of speech when they canceled the Smash World tour was clearly done in an attempt to minimize predicted negative reception and was an important part of displaying Nintendo’s maliciousness towards Smash. As I talked about in my essay, “Doing this on such a short notice is needlessly unfair and proves Nintendo’s total lack of care for the community, wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars for VGBootCamp and the community as a whole.”

Momentarily skipping over a few CLOs for now, the next one I want to focus on is my ability to “develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” Throughout the year in general, there was definitely a focus on working together as writers in the classroom. More recently, we were able to talk about one of our papers via our Oral Reports, where people could ask questions about what you wrote or similarly make comments about it. Additionally in general for pretty much every paper I wrote for this class, I had a considerable amount of help from my friends when writing it. I asked multiple people to review them, for example. Even in my op-ed, I included one of my friends’ statements as evidence for the paper. Collaboration was an important part of my writing process this semester, helping me avoid mistakes I overlooked a lot of times. For example, I almost included misinformation in my research paper, but I was able to correct it thanks to a friend noticing it whilst reading it. 

Speaking of my research paper, there were some CLOs that I was able to complete as well. As I had to “formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing,” During the initial creation of my introductory paragraph, I had to make my stance very clear as to drive in the point of Nintendo’s maliciousness. Specifically I had stated, “I plan to break down and explain why a majority of these new guidelines are anti-competitive and arguably malicious to the community, along with displaying how Nintendo in general acts maliciously to the Smash community often trying to weaken the competitive scene however they can.” Here it’s clear that I take a stance, being that Nintendo has always been notoriously malicious to the Smash community, specifically but not just including the case of the new tournament guidelines. The two CLOs directly after that one, “practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects” and having to “strengthen your source use practices ” were both also clearly done in my research paper. I used properly cited evidence continuously throughout the essay. As an example, when I spoke about how Smash players make very little money relative to other top players of even just other fighting games, I brought up the prize pools of the tournaments and an article elaborating that the players, tournament organizers, commentators, and pretty much everyone in the scene would like more money, at least money comparable to other popular competitive games. 

All-in-all, even in spite of the difficult circumstances I had to deal with during this semester outside of school, I believe I’ve grown as a writer once more. I think I’ve done a much better job especially in comparison to my first semester overall in terms of writing quality. Additionally, I’ve met the various Course Learning Objectives throughout the semester through the essays we had to work on. While of course I would’ve liked things to go better, I’d argue my struggles’ impact on my writing was definitely balanced out or arguably nullified by my sheer improvement over the course of the year.

The Death of Competitive Smash and How Nintendo is the Murderer

Competitive video games are becoming more popular than ever  nowadays. In fact, I’d even say this is the golden age of competitive gaming, especially at the highest level of play. There’s more people than ever playing, making these kinds of games less a niche hobby and more like something people can actually have livelihoods with. Not only are tournaments being supported by their respective communities, which has never changed, but they’re much larger in scope now. Super Smash Bros. is a good example of this phenomenon. Initially, the game was popular casually of course as it’s a Nintendo game, however slowly over time most of the entries in the series have had competitive success, with the most notable examples being Super Smash Bros. Melee, the second game in the series, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate which is currently the latest game. Even with little to no support from Nintendo the competitive scene has thrived. However, recently Nintendo has released official tournament guidelines for all their games. This largely pertains to Smash, but also affects their other intellectual properties (IPs) such as the Splatoon series. After a controversial history with the community often feeling burned by Nintendo’s questionable decision making, Nintendo has decided to take direct control over tournaments with their new “Community Tournament Guidelines.” These guidelines make it harder to run tournaments in general, give tournament organizers (TOs) even more trouble hosting tournaments as they already hardly made enough money to break even and often didn’t, and even don’t allow sponsors. I plan to break down and explain why a majority of these new guidelines are anti-competitive and arguably malicious to the community, along with displaying how Nintendo in general acts maliciously to the Smash community often trying to weaken the competitive scene however they can.

First of all, Nintendo is introducing hard limits on tournaments not sponsored by them. The maximum participation cap is 200 entrants for in-person tournaments, and 300 for online tournaments. Admission fees are also capped to $15, with prizes being limited to $5000 in total. This is simply unreasonable for so many different reasons. Smash tournaments already hardly make money in general, and a change like this hurts TOs the most which are the backbone of the community as they are responsible for hosting tournaments. For example, a recent tournament Super Smash Con 2023 had a cash prize for 1st place in the Ultimate bracket of almost $12,000 and also featured well over 1132 players (Liquipedia). And this was just for one game, not even including Melee’s results. It’s obvious that these new guidelines are far too restrictive. For reference at EVO 2023. Street Fighter 6 had a 1st place prize of $20,000. Even in comparison to other fighting games, Smash has always lacked funding. These changes will make these differences even wider, and will absolutely cripple top players who rely on high placements for paying to fly out constantly to these premier tournaments, paying for controllers, streaming software as most popular players often need to stream for extra money. As stated by Digiday in their article, “I think that every top player, every commentator, every person who has done anything administrative for the scene, would like more money. A lot of the great tournaments that we have experienced over the years have all operated on a loss. Most players after rank 11 make less than minimum wage off of Smash.” (Digiday) While Smash wasn’t dying before obviously, things still weren’t amazing unless you were the best of the best. And what Nintendo is trying to do with these guidelines is nothing less than needlessly obtuse and unfair to the Smash community, which has been grassroots ever since its inception with little actual Nintendo involvement.

Another issue with these guidelines is that third-party software and hardware are completely disbarred from all tournaments now. This is utterly crippling in several ways. Melee players can no longer play online in any capacity. Considering Melee’s age and it’s status as a GameCube game, it of course has no way of playing online without third-party tools. During the quarantine, while Nintendo did nothing at all to support Melee by possibly re-releasing the game on a modern console with online support, the community had to step up and effectively make their own online via the use of Slippi. This provided the community with the ability to host online tournaments as there were nearly no in-person events throughout 2020 and 2021. So not only would this mean Slippi would be completely removed from tournaments, meaning online Melee tournaments literally cannot exist, but even offline Slippi’s valuable features such as saving replays of matches and being able to play Melee on things that aren’t CRTs from 2003. Slippi was a game changer for Melee, as when it initially came out several high level players commented on its quality. Kotaku stated  “Community reactions to Slippi have been overwhelmingly positive. Evo 2018 champion William ‘Leffen’ Hjelte, who tested the application, released a 20-minute video explaining how Slippi works with footage from a match being played between his home country of Sweden and the east coast of the United States. Jeffrey ‘Axe’ Williamson, who is considered one of the top five Super Smash Bros. Melee players in the world, said that using Slippi felt like playing offline. Melee god Jason ‘Mew2King’ Zimmerman said he was impressed with the netcode after testing it for over nine hours.” (Walker) And if the top players, who have notoriously been sticklers for people changing things in Melee, were happy about the new online, then it just goes to display how beloved Slippi was not just by high level players but also the entire community as a whole. These new guidelines are ignorant to how Slippi kept Melee afloat especially with the lack of support from Nintendo. Even in the present day, Slippi is used by many players both low and high level who simply want to just play for fun. And once again, online tournaments still use Slippi to run them even after the quarantine has ended. One of the most popular bi-weekly Melee tournaments, the Coinbox hosted by top player Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma, is an online tournament that requires the use of Slippi to play. 

But arguably the most anti-player change that stems from this guideline is the fact that third-party controllers of any kind are completely banned. This includes modified controllers like Phobs, and completely custom controllers such as the B0XX. People often used modified controllers as while OEM GameCube controllers aren’t unplayable, they suffer from notable issues with doing precise defensive inputs such as shield dropping or ledgedashing. At the highest levels of play, you simply can’t function without them. As Miikkta Ketonen states in their paper, “In fighting games, controls have to be perfect. Players have to react to their opponent’s  movements and make decisions in quick succession. Certain combos can contain strict time frames (frame is a single picture of a move) where the player has to be able to perform the next move. Most fighting games run at 60 frames per second, some combos can contain even one frame links which mean the player has 1/60 second to make a move in the correct section. A linking is an act of using a fast attack right after the previous one has ended. For these to be possible controls has to be responsive.” (Ketonen, 8) While it’s unrealistic to expect a controller to be perfect, Phobs and even the more controversial B0XX are far more reliable and closer to perfect than any official Nintendo controller. This continues to show the idea that Nintendo’s new guideline changes are ignorant of the community’s work to make the game the most enjoyable it can be. And once again, Nintendo does nothing to help the community out here at all, basically giving us only the worst controller choice to play with. It’s even worse if you’ve suffered a hand injury and thus require a special controller to play with, such as notable Melee player Aziz “Hax$” Al-Yami, who after suffering a major hand injury in 2014 has been effectively unable to use regular controllers at all as they hurt his hands too much. Thus, he among others developed a different kind of controller called the B0XX, resembling a more traditional fight stick though it was exclusively buttons only with no sticks. This kind of controller has become quite popular lately and even in spite of its legality issues, it’s far better than the alternative of nothing.

An ongoing theme in this paper is the fact that these new guidelines are primarily anti-grassroots in design. TOs can’t make money from tournaments, you can’t use modded software, and they don’t even let you use Nintendo brands in tournament names. Meaning popular yearly tournaments such as the aforementioned Super Smash Con would have to change their names entirely, which just feels so pointless. This isn’t even the first time Nintendo has tried to target Smash in a negative manner. In fact, there is no greater enemy to competitive Smash than Nintendo themselves. Even as far back as 2013, Nintendo was in a lot of controversy due to their actions related to Melee at EVO 2013. As stated by Dr Ying-Ying Law and Dr Joshua Jarrett in their collaborative paper, it’s said that “in July 2013 after SSBM made a return to the premier annual fighting game event in North America named ‘EVO’ due to a community crowdfunding effort, Nintendo subsequently forbid any SSBM games from being streamed at the tournament. In this instance, the reaction to Nintendo’s decision was so severely rejected and controversial to SSBM’s culture that Nintendo reversed their decision.” (Law & Jarrett, 3) Nintendo quite literally has no sensible reason to do this. With Smash’s presence at the largest fighting game tournament of the year being gone, it reduces popularity and thus brings less people to the series, which was ongoing at the time. Smash players were lucky that for once the controversy and backlash was enough for Nintendo to uncharacteristically back off and let Melee be a mainstay at EVO up until its removal in 2019. Things like this aren’t even rare for Smash either, as after 2013 Nintendo has appeared to seem to test their limits on what they can do without the community being able to stop them. Throughout 2014 and 2015, Nintendo effectively killed the popular Brawl mod known as Project M by shutting down tournaments hosting it even if it was alongside official Smash games, until it eventually was banned from even being streamed on Twitch. Not to mention, once Nintendo sent the Project M developer team a cease and desist letter in late 2015, it was the final nail in the coffin for the mod. More recently, in 2022, Nintendo completely shut down the tournament circuit Smash World Tour 2022 which was the first significant circuit for the game ever done. Originally beginning in 2021 at a slightly reduced scale due to the pandemic, it was in full force in 2022, but as the SWT team themselves state, “Without any warning, we received notice the night before Thanksgiving from Nintendo that we could no longer operate. This was especially shocking given our discourse with Nintendo the past twelve months. Since then, we have been working around the clock to take the proper steps logistically, as well as to prepare this statement with proper legal guidance.” To add even more insult to injury, the Smash World Tour championships were set to begin on December 9th 2022, so they only had two weeks notice to shut everything down, which is utterly despicable as Nintendo knew that the Smash World Tour was headed by VGBootCamp, a team that entirely focused on Smash comprised of people from the community.

To sum it all up, Nintendo is the real reason why competitive Smash is being killed. Almost every issue in the community right now is related due to Nintendo’s lack of willingness to truly support the community without some sort of unreasonable caveat attached. It’s clear now that the only reason why these guidelines were introduced was to gain control of competitive Smash by forcing TOs to sign licenses with Nintendo. Even if the community is cooperative with them, we still end up losing. No third-party mods and modded controllers would be banned, and there would be much more meddling in community affairs as well. If Smash truly is finished now, we all know who to blame for it.

Works Cited

Liquipedia. “Super Smash Con 2023: Ultimate.” Liquipedia Smash Wiki, 28 July 2023, liquipedia.net/smash/Super_Smash_Con/2023/Ultimate

Lee, Alexander. “Confessions of a Super Smash Bros. Tournament Organizer on Nintendo’s Lack of Support for Competitive Gaming.” Digiday, 25 Jan. 2023, digiday.com/marketing/confessions-of-a-super-smash-bros-tournament-organizer-on-nintendos-lack-of-support-for-competitive-gaming/

Walker, Ian. “Fans Just Gave Super Smash Bros.. Melee Cutting-Edge Online Multiplayer.” Kotaku, Kotaku, 23 June 2020, kotaku.com/fans-just-gave-super-smash-bros-melee-cutting-edge-onl-1844137203. 

Ketonen, Miikka. “Designing a 2D Fighting Game”
Theseus, 2016,
https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/118514/Thesis_Miikka_Ketonen_KAT13PT.pdf

Law, Ying-Ying, & Jarret, Joshua. “More Than a Tournament Grassroots Play and Participation at Esports Events” ResearchGate, 2018 www.researchgate.net/profile/Ying-Ying-Law-2/publication/350387098_More_Than_a_Tournament_Grassroots_Play_and_Participation_at_Esports_Events/links/605d0e5c299bf173676ba96a/More-Than-a-Tournament-Grassroots-Play-and-Participation-at-Esports-Events.pdf. 

Smash World Tour. “Smash World Tour Official Statement – Smash World Tour – Medium.” Medium, 13 Jan. 2023, medium.com/@smashworldtour/smash-world-tour-official-statement-f568a3d135c8#680f.

My intended audience for my essay is definitely Smash players and Nintendo fans in general. Of course, my sentiment towards Nintendo can apply to other franchises as they aren’t a special case of hindering their communities, but it’s primarily focused on them. Smash players, stereotypes aside, are very dedicated to the game. Basically, every tournament hosted is grassroots which means it’s hosted by the community. Grassroots tournaments are notably very hard to run, especially the annual ones, and they often bleed money. It takes a lot to host a tournament, but even in spite of that there are easily ten or more major tournaments for Melee even 22 years after its release. This independence is not something players want, but it’s almost necessary as the community is pretty traumatized from Nintendo meddling with their affairs almost always for the worse. Nintendo sponsored tournaments are rare for this reason.

In general I want people to understand that Nintendo is highly in control of Smash  as much as the community tries to be independent of them. They can cancel tournaments, sabotage circuits, and ruin Smash’s relationship with other major esports brands, like MLG back in the 2000s. Basically, I want more people to be aware of the struggles the Smash community often faces. They’re often mischaracterized due to the several controversies, but truly I believe a large majority of the community is well-meaning and just wants to play the game. Which is something Nintendo either doesn’t understand fundamentally, or simply doesn’t care. Hence, the feelings I wanted to evoke were those of a foreboding presence, as Nintendo can basically do whatever they want with Smash and face effectively no meaningful backlash. 

Initially, I had wanted to do a short comic, but I decided on one poster. Posters can be more eye-catching and appealing due to the fact that you can look at one and pretty easily understand what’s trying to be conveyed. However, a comic has the advantage of sticking in your mind more because you’re looking at it longer. Both are pretty good ideas to go with. I’ve considered other genres like making a video, but I think drawing something plays to my strengths more as an artist.

Nintendo and the Smash Community

Fighting games are some of the most popular kinds of games in the world at the moment, especially in the modern world of esports. Naturally, a good fighting game is supported by its fans, but an amazing one is supported by its developers extensively too. Yet Nintendo always seems to be one-step behind other companies and publishers in how they treat their star fighting game franchise, Super Smash Brothers. Often shortened to just Smash or Smash Bros. when talking about the series as a whole, Smash games are unique due to their unorthodox style of platform-based gameplay. This uniqueness is what brings millions of fans to the game, with the most recent title in the series Smash Ultimate selling well over 31 million copies worldwide, and has 19 billion total battles played. But in spite of the massive support Smash has as a whole, Nintendo always seems to be working in the worst interests of the series and its fans. Nintendo constantly threatens or just straight up terminates tournaments that are almost always grassroot events, refuses to open a tournament circuit for the game holding it back competitively, and has been historically uncaring about the competitive scene.

I did claim before that Nintendo has refused to open a circuit for Smash, and while that is true there actually has been two circuits before. They were under a series called the “Smash World Tour.” It was a series of familiar and new tournaments hosted during 2021. It was the first time there’s ever been a Smash circuit, and it happening during the worldwide pandemic also wasn’t particularly great timing, but it still went off in spite of all the issues the creators of the circuit, VGBootCamp, had to deal with. But for 2022, things didn’t go as smoothly. Towards the end of 2021 Panda Global, which was a popular sponsorship team in other fighting games but known primarily for Smash, had finally been the ones to strike a partnership with Nintendo. Everyone was surprised, and slightly worried due to Nintendo’s often malicious meddling in the scene. But most people were actually hopeful. Smash World Tour 2022 was also going well, and it looked like there would be two championships for both circuits at the end of the year. However, Nintendo apparently didn’t like that, as the SWT team revealed they killed the entire circuit a few weeks before their championships, “Without any warning, we received notice the night before Thanksgiving from Nintendo that we could no longer operate.” (Kotaku) There was literally no positive reason Nintendo could’ve done this, and the fact that Panda Global had ditched the community for the company who hates the community this much did not go well for them. Doing this on such a short notice is needlessly unfair and proves Nintendo’s total lack of care for the community, wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars for VGBootCamp and the community as a whole.

Things like this constantly happen to the Smash scene, leading to immense distrust from most of the community whenever Nintendo ends up getting more involved than usual. Nintendo’s stance on modified game content has been harsher than any other company. In December 2020 during the heat of the pandemic, a popular tournament in “The Big House” series was set to be hosted that year. It was notably a tournament that included the entire Smash series of games, making it a great event for both Melee and Ultimate players, which are the most popular Smash games at the moment. However due to COVID and the resulting lockdown the tournament, like every other in-person tournament after the first few months of 2020, ended up being canceled. But things weren’t that bad, as The Big House would come back as an online-only tournament. Sadly, things really were that bad because as Nintendo directly states, “Unfortunately, the upcoming Big House tournament announced plans to host an online tournament for Super Smash Bros. Melee that requires use of illegally copied versions of the game in conjunction with a mod called “Slippi” during their online event.” (Polygon) While Nintendo legally has all the right to do this, there’s far too many layers on how unfair this was for the Melee community. For one, there’s no official way to even play Melee online. It would be monumentally easy to make a version of Melee on modern hardware for Nintendo yet they chose, and continue to choose, to not re-release or remake any Smash games on later platforms. It’s not like Nintendo is averse to this as a whole. Super Mario 3D All-Stars was exactly this: a port of three of the 3D Mario games which were released on multiple platforms years ago including the GameCube and Wii, the consoles that Melee is played on the most. Two, Melee, while being popular in its own right, was hit very hard by The Big House’s absence as it’s often one of the largest and most prestigious tournaments hosted. Not having it at all means there’s one less major tournament in the year, which impacts competitors heavily. And three, Melee doesn’t even have any form of online at all. Meaning Nintendo would rather there be no tournaments at all than host one using Slippi, as if the competitive scene isn’t a large part of what makes Smash games popular.

As important as having online can be in a competitive game, having bad or low quality online is not much better. Hence why Slippi is so valuable for the Melee community. But to move away from Melee for a second, Ultimate also suffers from Nintendo’s lack of support even in spite of it easily receiving the most support of any Smash games so far. Which honestly isn’t really saying much. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate quite possibly has some of the worst online in any game I’ve played. It’s quite disappointing when compared to other games especially. Even the previous Smash game, Smash 4 had considerably more usable online. Firstly, there’s the quality. Now, I wanted to get a second opinion for how bad the online is, so I interviewed my friend David. He mentioned online being “slow and unreliable” and that “simpler characters are basically the meta [most effective] because they don’t get ruined as much from lag, but the harder characters are very hard to have fun with.” I’m not surprised at all to see David say this. There are 6 frames per second of input lag in general for Ultimate. That probably sounds like it’s not so bad if you aren’t familiar with these kinds of games, but even 1 frame can make a large difference when it comes to reacting and performing frame perfect inputs. Online, this 6 frame delay becomes 11 frames, which is FAR more problematic. And this is if your connection is good and doesn’t even account for things like being connected with people countries away because even after setting your region it still can match you against people horrifically far away. Nintendo Switch’s online is considerably cheap, but even for 20$ a year this is still hardly excusable, especially when their previous, weaker console had more consistency online. Even outside of lag, Ultimate’s online leaves a lot to be desired. For some reason, instead of a casual and competitive mode like in Sm4sh, there’s Quickplay and Elite Smash. Quickplay becomes Elite Smash when you have a certain level of Global Smash Points (GSP) in a character which is earned by winning matches. However, this only applies to that character with a high GSP, not the entire roster. So if you play multiple characters you need to do a lot of work getting your GSP up to avoid getting matches with items that destroy the balance of the game or stage hazards so obnoxious no one would ever even consider picking the stage unless you like watching people suffer. And if your GSP drops below the Elite Smash threshold, you are removed from being able to play Elite Smash. This is fine in theory, because it means you are rewarded with being able to fight better players the better you are. In practice, this is mostly annoying and due to losing MUCH more GSP than you earn normally, it encourages you to constantly only worry about winning over having any fun. Thus, degenerate strategies are created that often take advantage of the high input delay so you can get as much GSP as possible. And now you can see the problem of just not making Elite Smash selectable. You shouldn’t have to work to unlock the basic privileges of a competitive ruleset. Nintendo’s lack of effort put into Ultimate’s online leads to competitive players being stunted when it comes to practice, as playing online can almost feel like a different game due to the lag and delay.

It really is a shame to see Nintendo take the Smash community and even the game itself for granted. As they’ll always have their defenders in the forms of children and adults with too much free time, they can easily do anything they want. Whether it’s canceling tournaments or stopping popular mods there’s basically nothing that can be done because they’re the owners of the franchise. And it’s honestly sad seeing how the community is so devoted to the game while Nintendo just… doesn’t really care. It’d be nice if they change their ways at some point, but with them being notorious for being unwilling to change when it comes to anything, it took them four-and-a-half years to add bluetooth headphone support to their new-gen console, it feels like that’s just never gonna happen. The only thing we can hope for fans of their games to stop blindly defending them, and maybe then something could actually change.