Wait, there's debate about changing the rules? Why?
times are a changing, and some of melee’s objective imperfections, as well as viewership experience (sponsorship, revenue via ads/views), and a bunch of other things are being discussed with a greater fervor. If you’ve paid a fair amount of attention, you’ve probably at least heard of, if not seen, the following incidents as of late:
the quad cast at summit 4 literally yell over each other in a fever while mew2king timed chudat out multiple times in a row, and how not only did it hinder spectator experience and elongate tournaments but gave someone down in stocks/percent an ability to exhaust an opponent by making them do nothing/something overly risky
Hungrybox getting coached mid-set in a phase of evo 2017 where it was banned and allegedly only getting a yellow card “because both parties had violated the rule,” the other party being Sfat when bob$ ran up on stage and visibly pretended to coach sfat as a joke after crunch legit coached hbox
several instances of players ledge grab stalling, some to time someone else out entirely
the smashbox being developed, as well as hax’s B0XX and Arduino thing, with controversy behind that
Shine 2017 setups using a Universal Controller Mod (UCF) to equalize controller quality for things like dash backs and shield drops, and a set of top 8 being replayed in its entirety with a different outcome when they realized they had played on a setup without the tournament-standard UCF mod
Some shitwad going to a socal weekly and turning off/turning setups back on with ucf as opposed to without without informing the TO, which ended up disorienting westballz and that led to some heated debate
so hey how about that wobbling huh
mods are growing a plenty, different controllers for accessibility are being made, people are getting paid to advise top players, traditions are being challenged with the idea that maybe we can do better. With all this in mind I suppose the community as a collective thought a decent approach would be to make a group of people who are all knowledgeable and consistently engaged with the community about these issues to help determine where it might be worth our time to deviate from what we’ve known for a good while, and I think it is! But change, bad or good, will run into some opposition and/or obstacles and we’ll just have to do our best to get around them as best we can, and I guess the first one is the classic “why do women in smash matter?”
iirc, the 25 had already voted a week or two back, when there was only five of them (juggleguy, blur, a couple others), on things like a 7 minute timer, a ledge grab limit, wobbling, mid set coaching, and non-gc controllers.
This was the premise that was posted on melee it on me. For some additional cultural perspective, and to plug The Lads, here’s also an episode of a SoCal Melee podcast “Bad Melee” where one of their talking points was about those previous rulings (timestamped to begin when they discuss that topic).
