i agree with nipple of destiny, the changes would have to be so significant that it wouldn’t be a game they’d ever put out – like think about melee, not from a party game perspective, but from the perspective as probably the 3rd most popular fighting game currently. it’s been featured in every single evo since 2013, even after nintendo themselves pushed against the event for featuring it, it’s true that the wavedashing is in no way the draw to playing the game, but that doesn’t mean that just any game with correct mechanics will get melee fans to swap over. If they do make it, like many are saying, like pm or 64 melee players will without question have much more interest in the game, and i believe that the divide between melee players and smxsh players from the melee side, while likely making smxsh players even more wary of melee players. if nintendo hands us something on a silver platter, and we don’t accept it ENTIRELY, the smxsh players and rest of the fanbase is just going to hate us even more than a lot of them already do

we’ve accepted as a group that if they were to make a new game, that catered directly to us, we HAVE to take it even if it takes away some stupid things that we like. if they made melee hd, but sans wavedashing, l-canceling, and some other glitches and unintentional things that directly influence the game like asdi then we have to take it and play it anyway for the sake of the life of our game, but those are part of what makes melee melee at its very core.

as far as the comparisons to dbfz, it is true that a large majority of the melee community adores that game, it’s easily my favorite traditional fighter to ever be released, and i think it’s going to be the formula for fighting games for years to come, but swapping from a platform fighter to a traditional fighter would be like swapping from overwatch to call of duty deathmatch, there are just going to be things that you miss. they’re fundamentally different even if at their very core they have the same idea. but taking from that idea, if the new smash game DOES have similar mechanics to dbfz in more diverse combo opportunities, a realistically sized character roster, none of the fighting game industry bullshit, and retained the core spirit of melee i think it could be possible.

the problem with the melee community (or really the thing that makes melee special) is every single melee player has years and years in this game, and just abandoning it for a new one, no matter how good that game may be, is just fucking wrong. a good portion of the top players have been playing since 2002-2005 and even those of us who have only been watching for the past 5 or so years have heard every story, seen every fucking set that contributed to the script of melee. In the smash doc they talk about how when brawl came out, everyone from melee rushed right over to it, like the brawl scene was entirely consisting of melee players, but we noticed super quick that it was a bad and fundamentally broken game. when that happened, and people tried to support brawl, both the brawl and melee community died completely. between the mess that was the mlg circuit and the fact that brawl just wasn’t fucking fun people basically dropped that shit entirely. after koc and the revival of melee (two big tourneys that changed everything) melee came back, way bigger than before, and brawl completely died except for a small group that still plays it. we then tried to move to pm, the brawl mod that took brawls roster but made it like a better melee, but nintendo shut that down immediately. they refused to endorse any pm tourneys, so for the sake of our community gimr refused to host any pm tourneys unless they were primarily melee or were charity events (gimr does all the streams for all of smash basically) and when pm died and nintendo tried one last brawl push before all moving on to sm4sh, melee was basically dead in the water as far as nintendo was concerned. since then we’ve completely stabilized our own scene, with only a few events not running ucf, 20xx, and the other things that nintendo essentially has blacklisted people don’t really have a REASON to move to a new game. for a lot of people, this isn’t really about the quality of game nintendo releases, about the similarity to melee, the advancements, etc. after living through all of that shit with all the years melee has being played with that whole fucking story going on and every little thing thats happened in the past 15+ yrs it’s about the culture. until they make a game that’s for US not just their new game that might have some things that appeal to us, we’re gonna stick with vanilla. least that’s the way i see it.

smash is v different from other fighting games like street fighter, tekken, marvel, etc. in that 64, melee, brawl, and sm4sh are only similar in the fact that they’re all platform fighters. 64 doesn’t have ledge, melee has ledge-hold, brawl is cursed and unmentionable, and sm4sh has ledge-trump. without explaining how ecb works basically if new melee had ledge trump, even if everything else in the game was the same, people wouldn’t move over to new melee, it’s that fundamental to the core gameplay. so for context, the move over would be so fucking difficult unless they make the game with exclusively our interests in mind, that it’s just not worth moving over. it’s too jarring, it’s not like we hate change that much, the meta is constantly changing and we’re always arguing whether to play pal or ntsc, which are each massively different from the other, but that change can’t be a completely different game. it’s like valve releasing tf3 but it’s just overwatch, people would keep playing tf2 because they’re just not even in the same vein. it would be really cool if the next smash has a fucking sensical ledge mechanic, doesn’t have rage (in sm4sh the further down you are the stronger you are), decent combos, a reasonably sized roster, and wasn’t constantly getting fucking patched, and i think if there was a game like that melee players would focus their time 50/50 on each game like m2k and wizzy do with sm4sh and melee, but the chances are much higher sma5h is going to be closer to sm4sh than melee.

end of the day we’re never going to abandon melee, I really believe that. The reason melee is going to die is age, not because people move over to a new smash game. I’ll be interested to see what sma5sh is like, but for me to completely abandon melee for the new game it would have to have

-no rage
-more sensitive environmental collision box or at least more interesting mechanics with it
-either a ledge that you can hold, or a new ledge that we haven’t seen yet that’s still fun to use
-less fucking patches.
-directional influence like melee
-the game has to be at least a little bit broken. something like jump cancels that aren’t difficult to do but weren’t supposed to be in the game have to make a comeback (l cancels and wavedashes dumb and are hard, so those can go i guess)
-they gotta fuckin chill about mods and community rules, i’m not gonna support a game with a competitive community that they’re trying to police themselves, that’ll kill it especially with how grassroots melee is
-end of the day there’s gotta be some throwbacks and respect to melee, like i said it can’t just be a good smash game it has to be a good smash game that makes us move from melee to said game
-c o m b o s, you’ve gotta be able to string something together that you haven’t fucking memorized. in sm4sh unless you’ve memorized it it’s not going to work. in melee you can rely on pure fucking clutch and win a match, that’s gotta be a thing

there are a lot of things about melee i’d also like to get rid of, if that stuff were to be gotten rid of i might be more inclined to move over. brawl kept all of the bad, and didn’t add any good competitively. if they were to essentially remake brawl, get rid of the bad parts of melee but add the good that could potentially be added, while still being a static game and leaving the community alone that would be massively successful imo. i’d comfortably say we less want melee hd as much as we want good brawl.

end of the day, i’d never abandon melee, but if a new game had all that shit, and nintendo was working with the community, and giving respect to everything people have fucking done for this game and community i might consider moving over. dan salvato, vgbc, miom, samox, all of them have to get respect, and they’d have to let us be grassroots while still supporting us. otherwise there’s no reason to leave everything we’ve built on a hope/whim that it’ll work out. you do have elitists and purists as the vocal minority of the melee community but respect fundamentals to the game and community behind it is far more important than stupid shit like wavedashing.