Do you think Melee has a terrible fan-base?

[themistermanguy]

Super Smash Bros. Melee is regarded as the best entry in the series, and the best entry for competitive play. However, I have a problem with its fan-base. They seem very.... unpleasable. They operate on the philosophy of "If its not Melee, it's casual". So if if the game doesn't have every single thing Melee has, they flip out like crazy. So do you think Melee has a terrible fan-base?

 

[Maximum Bert]

Yes and no ultimately they are people some people are dicks some are not. Some have very strong feelings about certain things which others may not care less about.

I dont play Smash much anymore but if its anything like other fanbases I am sure you are going to get toxic players and nice ones.

Im sure some are like what you have described most I expect arent as extreme in their views and just keep quiet and get on with their lives enjoying what they enjoy and not shouting about it. Your views will be coloured by the experiences you have had obviously so if you met 12 bad players and thats all you will assume all are the same which is highly unlikely.

 

[Rin Tezuka]

I wouldn't say that, it's natural in every fighting game community that you're going to have a pool of fans (Thankfully they're almost always in the minority) who either complain about everything or act toxic towards anything that isn't related to the game they support (Very common with SF and MvC3).

Melee of course is no exception. Granted, I don't think I've ever seen any hardcore Melee fans complaining about the game, it's pretty much always being hateful to other fighters, notably Brawl. Personally, I feel the hate for Brawl is unjust and pretty much the only reason the hardcore fans hate Brawl is because it wasn't Melee 2. Brawl's a ton of fun, competitive or not.

To avoid derailing myself, Melee is just your average fighting game community. It has it's whiners as does any community, but thankfully they're a minority. There's a ton of fans who are devoted to the game and who have great attitudes, it'd be unfair to lump all the complainers with the good side of the fanbase and write it off as bad overall.

 

[Atmos Duality]

I wouldn't say that, it's natural in every fighting game community that you're going to have a pool of fans (Thankfully they're almost always in the minority) who either complain about everything or act toxic towards anything that isn't related to the game they support (Very common with SF and MvC3).

^It's more or less this.
I will add that Melee had the distinction of being one of the first games whose online community had a noticeably aggressive elitist attitude due to its added emphasis on strict competition.

And that became ever more true when I encountered their sort in real life.
(including two old friends; one was a pro-wannabe who breathed pure competition, and that pretty much ruined the game for anyone playing for fun since he would not shut the fuck up about this or that)

As a more personal aside: The only time I've ever watched a literal brawl break out over a video game was over a championship of Smash Bros Melee at college.

I don't mean just a couple of dudes punching each other. I mean a ballroom blitz. Like 10+ dudes in fisticuffs. It was all I could do to flee the scene before campus security arrived, which is one of the most absurd things I ever had to do in relation to video games.

So yeah. While it's not purely representative of Melee fans (no perspective is; we're human) my opinion of the "fighting game elites", especially Smash Bros', is pretty low.

 

[Kitsune Hunter]

I would say no, yes there are fans like that, but what fanbase doesn't have it's fair share of arseholes. I've loved every SB game so far, but I admit I do regard Melee as my favourite in the series and these fans probably prefer Melee more due to nostalgia to a greater extent than I do. Although I can't believe some people would hate the new SB just because it's not Melee, it's silly, the new game looks amazing

 

[Taylor Becktold]

I only play the original on the Nintendo 64, the only thing I care about in the new ones are what characters they throw in. I do prefer melee over brawl, but original all the way.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

You need to objectively examine what their complaints are about. If they reason them well then it warrants validity.


I'm a very competitive fighter player and I never played mellee but from playing brawl I cam definitely see why one wouod define it as casual. It's a party game. Not intended to be competitive. Fans had to "fix" it by hacking it into "project M" to make it worthwhile to play competitively. SSB4 seems to not be like that and is designed with competition in mind so I expect it to be good though.



Just look at EVO, mellee made it last year while brawl wasn't even nominated. As I said I've never played mellee but if it made it to EVO I am convinced these folks know what they're saying.

 

[themistermanguy]

You need to objectively examine what their complaints are about. If they reason them well then it warrants validity.


I'm a very competitive fighter player and I never played mellee but from playing brawl I cam definitely see why one wouod define it as casual. It's a party game. Not intended to be competitive. Fans had to "fix" it by hacking it into "project M" to make it worthwhile to play competitively. SSB4 seems to not be like that and is designed with competition in mind so I expect it to be good though.



Just look at EVO, mellee made it last year while brawl wasn't even nominated. As I said I've never played mellee but if it made it to EVO I am convinced these folks know what they're saying.

To be honest, I don't think Sakurai intended Brawl to be strictly a party game, but at the same time, I don't think he intended it to be nearly as serious or hardcore as Melee was.

Now it does look like Smash 4 will try to appease both sides reading hands on impressions from competitive people, but of course, Melee fanboys who haven't played the game already think its nerfed from those tourney stats, when I doubt those people really spent enough time to know everything about the game.

 

[Flammablezeus]

People play SSB competitively? To me the series has always been as serious and competitive as Mario Kart.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

People play SSB competitively? To me the series has always been as serious and competitive as Mario Kart.

Mario Kart, like just about any multiplayer Nintendo game since Tetris (or GoldenEye depending on your viewpoint), ruins friendships. Hell, Mario Party is supposed to be a casual game but try keeping it casual... go ahead, I'll wait. Seriously though there's rampant competition in the "casual" games, and you'll always find people that are willing to go above and beyond.

 

[Artaneius]

Well, to understand why Melee hates Brawl it's essentially how Halo fans feel about Reacn and 4. It's how Quake fans felt about Quake 4, it's how UT fans felt about UT3. If you treated games like a competitive sport, you would be pissed off that the work and effort you put in just suddenly meant nothing. Hell, it's how Quake and UT fans feel about every other shooter in general because they became easier and were no longer skill based arena shooters.

Let's be quite frank. In online competitive games, the vast majority of people get good in games specifically to be better than others. Essentially to pubstomp. That's common sense. If I spent countless hours into improving at a game, I expect that lesser skilled players should be absolutely destroyed at my whim. It's the same principle. You pay your dues and expect to be rewarded for paying your dues. Melee players were betrayed by Nintendo for profit. That's the bottomline. Just like every other online gaming series has done. Quake, UT, Halo etc.

When you work a job, you expect to be rewarded for spending the time and effort to do it. Melee players expect to be rewarded by being able to do long combos and pwn noobs.

Heck, just look at my gif. If I'm not able to pull off long combos like that and pwn, the game isn't worth playing or investing time into.

 

[NeutralDrow]

As long as we keep in our separate boxes, I have no problem with them. Sure, they seem like a bunch of entitled jerks who sneer down their noses at basically anyone who prefers Brawl, attributing to us all some kind of "tire don exits" casual myopia and forcing any local multiplayer game to run only the three most boring maps (if you're lucky and find some who are okay with Smashville)...but I suppose to each their own. I personally find any limitations on the Smash games' wonderful capacity for utter chaos to be heresy, but I don't dictate what's fun for everyone.

...granted, most of the Melee players I've spoken with do attempt that dictation, so I guess my answer is probably yes. I still play and appreciate the game itself (mostly because Fourside, Brinstar Depths, and Pokefloats didn't make it into Brawl), but it's a terrible fanbase.

 

[TheIceQueen]

All fandoms are terrible. Every single one. Some are more terrible than others, but they're all terrible.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

You need to objectively examine what their complaints are about. If they reason them well then it warrants validity.


I'm a very competitive fighter player and I never played mellee but from playing brawl I cam definitely see why one wouod define it as casual. It's a party game. Not intended to be competitive. Fans had to "fix" it by hacking it into "project M" to make it worthwhile to play competitively. SSB4 seems to not be like that and is designed with competition in mind so I expect it to be good though.



Just look at EVO, mellee made it last year while brawl wasn't even nominated. As I said I've never played mellee but if it made it to EVO I am convinced these folks know what they're saying.

To be honest, I don't think Sakurai intended Brawl to be strictly a party game, but at the same time, I don't think he intended it to be nearly as serious or hardcore as Melee was.

Now it does look like Smash 4 will try to appease both sides reading hands on impressions from competitive people, but of course, Melee fanboys who haven't played the game already think its nerfed from those tourney stats, when I doubt those people really spent enough time to know everything about the game.

Right. He didn't intend mellee to be hardcore either. The issue is he used his intentions to strip Brawl out of what made mellee competitive, adding tripping and slowing down fall speeds and whatnot. As someone with zero investment in ssb past that of someone who likes to hit people with Charizard, I find the inclusion of the competitive stuff in 4 as a hopeful sign, though at the same time I can understand how one may think it not enough to undo the damage Brawl did to the game's formula. I imagine if I actually cared about the series as I care about games I'm competitive about (such as Blazblue) I'd be a lot more sympathetic towards those melee fans.