What's wrong with the Brawl community?

These fellows have some serious problems, from what I've seen so far. After all, who would've thought trying to make a game competitive that seems to have been play-tested for about 35 minutes would be hard? The issues with Brawl are worth many posts here so I wont go into them all right away, but lets focus on one little morsel of complete bullshit imbalance, this Asshole:


Now before I go on I want to make something clear: The point of this post is not to illustrate how insanely, horribly, ridiculously stupid this ability Dedede has is. The point of this post is to show you the difference between the right and wrong way to fix a problem in a game that could be competitive.

We're gonna talk about chain-grabbing today, something that should give any game designer a deep, dark shudder of disgust. Let me explain. So your character has a grab attack, which removes control from the victim for a short period. Great. Now what happens when you make the cool-down on this move smaller than the amount of time the victim is not in control of their actions? Oh and also, you fail to make the grab move the victim far enough away that they are no longer in range of standard attacks? Well what happens is:
His name is Herbert H. Samuels-Dick, and he is what happens.

King Dedede is capable of chain throwing much (if not most) of the cast of brawl INDEFINITELY. There is only one limitation to this chain-throw, which also happens to be its strength (lucky!). With most of the characters it works on (there are a handful of exceptions), Dedede (and the victim) must continue to move forward with each subsequent throw.

Great! Once I get to the edge of the stage, I'm free! Well, that's assuming you have the luxury of an edge. On many stages in Brawl, there are places where the ground leads right off into the "kill zone", meaning once you get a SINGLE grab (not hard to do), Dedede can kill you for free. The only other possibility is: if there's a wall he can chain grab you against, he can just build up your damage forever until he decides to let you go.

Woops! We forgot to test it! Sometimes these small companies like HAL can't afford to really playtest their games, so problems like this are bound to come up. It's okay, they can patch it, Right? Oh right they didn't bother to make it patchable, sweet!

Now, I'm going to look at this problem as if I'm a tournament director. Here we have a character who is otherwise about on par with the rest of the cast. He has one ability that, if abused, severely breaks the game on many stages. I have a few options here:

1. Ban the character

• This solves your problem, but removes one of the more interesting characters from the game. What if someone comes to your tournament who has only ever played as Dedede? Most players at a tourney are totally clueless and probably can't even pull off the chain grab. They'll probably end up going home with a sour taste in their mouth.
  

2. Ban the chain-grab

• Say you can only do 2-3 repetitions of the grab and throw combo. Requires a bit of oversight from tourney admins, but nothing players couldn't work out themselves. You can have a "one warning" policy. Sometimes someone will try to pull some shit, but at least the high profile players will stick to it in the finals.
  

3. Ban all the stages with walls or platforms that lead off the stage

• Solves part of the problem, but still, a lot of people are going to be annoyed when they lose control of their character for upwards of 15 seconds. Not to mention, these are some of the most interesting stages in the game. What if my character is great on the banned stages and poor on the ones left over? We've created new imbalance.

4. Do nothing

• Let the players deal with it. "If it's so bad, dont get grabbed in the first place." Every tournament ends with Dedede vs. Dedede (exaggeration, of course). Seems like what hardcore people would do, until the finals of your tournaments are decided by 1-2 second who-grabs-who-first fiesta relays.

So which do they pick? Number 3. WHY!?!?! Did they not think about this? For even 10 seconds? If you don't agree with me off the bat that option 2 straight up blows option 3 out of the water, let me highlight one very important point. The ONLY downside to option 2 can be completely nullified by good management. Option 3 on the other hand? Sorry, those stages are gone, and who knows what character is going to start dominating on whatever is left over. I've thought about this a while and my only conclusion is this: Smash players are terribly frightened of all the cool things about the game they play.

The best example is how they ban items, completely out of hand. Before the game even came OUT it was assumed that items would be banned. Try going for a long chain grab when items are on, and you'll see that it barely ever works. Smash is the only fighting game with items, and you turn them off without even trying it out. Cowards.

But even this hypothesis doesn't really cover the blatantly illogical idea of totally banning MANY great stages, just so that King Dedede is allowed to do his infinite chain grab. Do you tournament directors get that? Read that again. THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE DOING. Ban the chain-grab, and leave my stages alone, please.