You Don't Get to Choose Which Strategies Are Strong in the Games You Play

Sirlin wrote Playing to Win over 15 years ago, but apparently this is a thing that still needs to be talked about. If you haven't read that book, or at least the section I linked, go do that first.

When you play fighting games competitively, you play to win using any tactic available. This includes rushdown, keepaway, runaway, grappling, and anything in between. If a game is dominated by playstyles you hate, or even if you just hate one of many viable playstyles in a game, you are free to pick another game to play instead. If someone today were to join the Super Street Fighter II Turbo scene and try to get fireballs banned, they would be (rightly) told to go play any of the other popular fighting games with stronger anti-fireball tools. Super Turbo is a game where projectiles are strong, and no amount of complaining will change this.

However, the competitive community's understanding of which strategies are viable changes over time. Sometimes previously weak strategies or characters become viable-but-not-dominant, such as when Urien's unblockable aegis setups were discovered in Third Strike, and sometimes people come up with new top strategies or make old strategies obsolete, such as Valle CC in Alpha 2, Roll Canceling in CvS2, or Sentinel invalidating a large portion of the cast in MvC2.

Things like this are super common with almost every fighting game. This means that even without patches or updates, the game players start playing early in its lifespan isn't the same as the game they're playing by the end.

You could easily imagine someone choosing Third Strike as their main game in 1999 because they thought that parries would eliminate all setplay and force people to make hard reads on offense and defense, only to find out about all manner of unblockable setups and option selects later down the line. For a more extreme example, maybe they only ever wanted to run sick Remy fireball traps all day, which became useless when everyone learned to consistently parry projectiles.

To sum it up, there will be times when new discoveries will cause your favorite game to change, either on a fundamental level or just with the addition of a new non-standard matchup. When this happens, you have two options:

1. Deal with it.
2. Stop playing.

The fact that you liked the "old game" before people knew how to play it properly means nothing. Just as someone can't seriously expect Super Turbo players to ban fireballs because they don't like zoning or MvC2 players to ban Sentinel because so many characters have horrendously bad matchups against him, an old-school Third Strike player can't demand a limit on how many projectiles people can parry per round just because they thought zoning was viable back when no one knew the Remy matchup. It doesn't matter how beautiful they thought their Remy vs Oro SA2 fireball wars were or how boring the spectators think it is when Chun Li just stands there and effortlessly parries every projectile that gets thrown at her; Third Strike is a game where projectile zoning is generally a weak strategy, and you don't get to force your opponents to let you zone just because you assumed that's what the game was about.

The point is, this also applies to Super Smash Bros Melee. It doesn't matter how aggressive and rushdown-oriented the playerbase seems to have collectively decided the game is; if someone can win a tournament with a patient runaway playstyle despite the *eight minute* timer per round, there are only two possible causes:

1. Runaway isn't viable in Melee at the top level but Hungrybox's opponent didn't know the matchup well enough, so it's just a temporary thing and people are complaining about nothing.
2. Runaway is viable in Melee at the top level, in some matchups and/or on some stages. That's just how the game works, and you don't get to force everyone to play aggressive just because you assumed that was the only viable strategy before people knew how to play properly. Deal with it, or stop playing.

Just as people who don't like Fox or Falco don't get to demand a ban on shooting too many lasers and people who don't like Sheik, Marth or Ice Climbers don't get to ban people doing too many chain grabs, people who don't like Jigglypuff don't get to demand a ban on staying back at the ledge for too long. In the unlikely case that Ice Climbers seriously can't deal with Jigglypuff sitting back at the ledge, Ice Climbers players should accept the terrible matchup or pick someone else just like people did vs Sentinel in MvC2. Bowser sucks vs the Melee top tiers too, but I don't hear people demanding bans on every tactic that stops him from being competitive.

I doubt this tactic will end up being top tier and I'll be shocked if tournaments end up being dominated by Jigglypuff vs Jigglypuff timeout-fests, but if that does happen, maybe Melee just isn't a game for people who like rushdown, and no amount of complaining will change this. There's always Project M and Rivals of Aether and Brawlhalla and Brawlout and Icons, not to mention the mountain of standard 2D fighters out there, so hopefully one of those will suit the way you want to play. Regardless of what happens, the answer isn't to ban everything you don't like just because you preferred the game before people knew how to play it properly.