Week 7/8: Communities, Part 2

I find it interesting that a community receiving so much praise due to their presence and attitude at EVO 2k7 would be so berated only a year later for their presence and attitude at EVO 2k8. (Actually, this is probably not really surprising--a year can be quite a long time with notable effects on any community, and people are, well, people after all.)

I wouldn't go so far as to say that too much control over a game is a bad thing; I actually think that it adds value to the game. If you allow the players to customize options to their liking, it becomes easier to adopt the game in different settings, tailoring it to different target audiences each time. When I play Smash in a casual setting, I prefer to have items enabled to add a bit more variety and randomness to the game. At the same time, if I'm playing in a highly competitive environment, I tend to prefer items being disabled. In the former case, I like the fact that items might affect the game enough to let different people win who might not normally win; but in the latter case, I certainly don't want that kind of interference in a match of skill.

Now, that said, I'm quite frankly disappointed that the items decision at EVO 2k8 led to so much drama between the organizers and the Smash community. Sure, the items tend to add randomness to the outcome of the game, but if those are the rules, then the players might as well just deal with it. Maybe the player who has the best technical skill won't win, but the player who has the best ability to adapt to the situation will win. It might become a different sort of contest, but at the end of the day, it's still a fair contest.

Ironically, it's this same kind of random variable that SFIII:TS could use to reinvigorate itself. James Chen mentioned in his EVO 2k8 wrap-up that, despite an active, strong community, SFIII:TS feels like it has reached the highest level of play the game will ever see, with the same two characters dominating pretty much every top-level tournament. Alas, it's not possible to introduce items into a game post-hoc (this is another win for Smash: since it's so highly customizable, there are plenty of directions in which the game could grow even if it reaches this sort of plateau). However, it might be worthwhile for the community to try something new as a way to force players to try different strategies and techniques. A soft ban might be just the thing--but I'm personally not a fan of soft bans for reasons discussed in a previous post. As another alternative, the community might try to organize some lower-scale tournaments that outright ban the use of the top 3 characters (Chun Li, Yun, and Ken). This should get players to explore new dimensions of the game--as long as they don't shun the ban like the Smash community shunned the presence of items.