Analyzing the ruleset debate: Providing (my best attempt at) a neutral viewpoint for the main arguments on both sides
Intro
Hey guys, I'm Sheecacaa3. I'm a YouTube content creator, and the founder, and an admin of Project M Nexus. I've also been playing this game since v2.0 came out (so like 6 or 7 years...). The reason why I'm making this is because, frankly, this whole debate is annoying to me at this point. Both sides are idiotically talking past each other on certain topics, and some things are being framed in ways that are very difficult to make rebuttals to. My goal with this post is to frame most of the major discussion points that both sides are making, and provide some lines of thought for each argument. Another thing people are doing that is muddying the waters is aligning with certain arguments, and not others. There are people who don't think any changes should be allowed (even aesthetic additions), people who want a full balance patch, and everywhere in between. It's important to note that someone might agree with you on one thing, but disagree on everything else. Communication is important!
Also, my apologies if this is badly formatted. Please give suggestions to make this more readable if you have any.
Framing the debate
I'm going way back with this, because this is PM's history, which is relevant to some arguments.
(This is a very rough summary of a critical time in PM's history. Sorry if I don't get all the facts 100%.) PMDT disbands in late 2015, leaving only this. Obviously, the community is very confused, since this seemingly came out of nowhere. (There was a post just a week or two prior to the disbanding advertising new costumes in the version to come) There is a change log for a patch circulating (3.61), and a small group (newPMDT) forming intending to continue development. ExPMDT Strong Bad writes this as a response to the chaos. Several builds come out of this chaos, including ones with the 3.61 changes, leaked content/characters, and more. Ultimately, the competitive scene chooses to stick with 3.6 vanilla for competition.
Fast forward a year or so. The 2016 circuit is going strong, and towards the end, there's talk about "a new build". This news spreads like wild fire. This is apparently a competitive overhaul build, headed by top player Lunchables, with input from several other top players. At some point though, the build development quietly disappears. It's not public knowledge why this was the case.
And now we come to this debate. This is the third time 3.6 vanilla gameplay is being called into question (although pretty mildly in this case, unlike the previous ones). Many are opposed to this based on principles they hold, many are opposed to this due to fear of splitting the community, and others are excited for a more streamlined competitive experience. Everyone seems to have the well-being of the community in mind, and it would do everyone good to acknowledge that before discussing any of this with each other.
Debate topic 1: "What would PMDT say?"
This is usually the first topic that comes up in these debates. "What would exPMDT say about this?" This is actually more complicated than it sounds, mainly because PMDT was a group of 50+ people, and the only time they collectively put out a statement remotely about this topic was in the disbandment post, which actually says nothing about what we should do with the game. Another kink in all this is that they specifically (possibly intentionally) don't say what is and isn't allowed to change, while still being Project M. I believe the mentality is that should Nintendo ever try to do some legal shenanigans, they could point to a random modder and say to exPMDT "You told people that modding stages was allowed. They're continuing to make PM!" I think they deliberately chose not to speak up about this topic to avoid saying something that could put themselves in some sort of legal jeopardy (this is speculation on my part). The only thing they've consistently said, was to stick with 3.6, and anything else is not PM. Strong Bad reiterates this in his "Appeal to the community" post. I think we can all gather a general intention from exPMDT, but I think it would be dishonest to say "this is exactly what they meant by this". The general intention is that "we shouldn't try to restart development of PM, and still call it PM". What they meant after that seems to vary depending on who you're talking to. I'm not trying to brush this aside as if it weren't important. I'm just trying to say that this likely won't be a fruitful discussion to have. You're welcome to have it, but it will be a lot of speculation.
There's also the legal side of this debate topic. Not "keeping the integrity of the game" intact, but actually endangering exPMDT legally. This is an extremely touchy subject since it has real-world consequences. A lot of this comes down to how much you're willing to risk that you aren't in legal danger, and how confident you are that exPMDT aren't in legal danger. Obviously, the safest thing to do in this case, is to not touch anything, which is a major reason why the community stayed with v3.6f in the past. Some are claiming that aesthetic additions are as much a legal risk as gameplay changes. Some people are saying that Nintendo surely would have done something by now if they were going to, or that PM is clearly not a threat anymore. Nintendo's stances on mods have been... negative, to say the least, but not as hurtful as it realistically could be. AFAIK, Nintendo has only issued C&Ds for mods (like Pokemon Uranium), not full blown lawsuits. At the end of the day though, you're playing with fire, and potentially the livelihoods of people we all hold in high regard.
Debate topic 2: "Integrity of the Game"
This is a fairly complicated topic. The stage changes, by definition, compromise the integrity of the game. You can argue that "98% of competitive play is untouched (not that I've seen anyone make that argument yet), this isn't really even a different game!" But you would be side stepping the definition of "integrity", not confronting it. This is where a lot of the principled folks are drawing their power from. This is also where the slippery slope arguments are stemming from. Ignoring the legal arguments, and PMDT's wishes, we've all somehow agreed to stick with 3.6 vanilla gameplay until now. There is a consistent standard in play that the community has rallied around, allowing for competition to occur.
Allow me to make a small scenario for a sec. In order to play in a tournament, you must agree to the tournament's rules. The game has its own rules that you can tweak and modify, but above those are the tournament rules. For example, you could physically switch the game to special modes, but those are against the tournament rules, and you would lose. There is a tournament in the first place because all of the participants have agreed to the rules in order to participate. You would need to garner your own player base in order to run a 3 stock, metal special mode, 1 handed tournament.
The reason why I bring this up is because a competition succeeds when all of the participants agree to the rules. The standard we've been following so far has been exPMDT's gameplay, with minor regional differences for limitations on the gameplay (mainly the stage lists/pick order). The reason why there's a competitive scene in the first place is because people were willing to agree to the rules of PM and tournaments, and compete in it, not because PMDT had some special power to force people to compete in it. (please excuse me if I sound condescending towards PMDT here. I'm genuinely not trying to be) Hypothetically, if every PM player agreed to revert to PM v2.0, we wouldn't be playing 3.6 anymore, but the PM community would still exist. As long as people are willing to compete in it, does it actually matter that it's not pristine vanilla 3.6 gameplay? If, after a switch to PMBR's proposed stages (without calling the new build vanilla PM 3.6, but something unique), everyone is enjoying themselves and continuing to compete, is there actually an issue here?
Well the main issue is when some don't agree to switch, which leads into topic 3
Debate topic 3: "Community Division"
If half the community only wants to play "Vanilla PM" and the other half only "3 stock...etc", then the community gets halved. This same idea is a major concern for the non-PMBR rule set folks, as it should be for everyone else. IF we truly risk splitting the community up over something small like this, is it even worth the risk? How big is the risk in reality? For example, some players are concerned more about the community splitting than if they would personally switch to PMBR rule set. This means that they're voicing a negative opinion that gets added to the sea of negative opinions, without actually talking about the rule set itself. They may be inclined to switch to the new rule set if they were confident that 90+% of the community would switch as well. This is a scenario where people are saying "I'll jump if you jump", but nobody ends up jumping because there was no first person to do it.
On the flip side though, we don't know how many people we would truly lose by doing this, if at all. For some people, that 10% (or however many) of the player base is way too big to lose, and if they knew that it was guaranteed to happen, they wouldn't be as positive about the rule set as they are.
To be honest, I think this is the place where we will get the most 'work' done. Speculation in this area is pretty rampant, and I think putting some numbers to these ideas will do the most good. I advise getting some polls going that allow people to answer under what conditions they would approve, or deny this ruleset. I'd even help out with this if someone wanted to go through with this.
Another question is: How would it realistically affect the community if hypothetically, half of the community decides to go with certain stages over others? Say that the whole west half of the US decides to run Vanilla stages, and the whole east half decides to run PMBR stages... Well technically I think we'd actually be less fractured than we are now, stage-wise... The real concern is that there won't be cross-competition. Is there any merit to this idea? Are the differences between the versions so vast that you can't, or wouldn't want to compete over different builds? I think in this area, the pro-PMBR rule set people are completely justified in saying that concerns of this happening are overblown. That being said, polling and getting responses from the community are the only way to objectively move forward on this front, imo.
Debate topic 4: "Slippery Slope"
This is perhaps the strongest force behind the non-PMBR rule set opinions. The general idea is that, whether it's completely justified or not, the community has stuck with 3.6 vanilla gameplay. It's been a standard that we've held ourselves to. We could change whatever we want, but we all agreed to stay with this. If, for example, we decide to switch one thing in the game, why not something else as well? If we can change G&W's dtilt and throws to be more visually apparent what's happening (technically aesthetic changes, but they affect counterplay), why not fix some bugs? Bowser, Yoshi, Link, etc all have bugs that we could fix to even the game out. We can all agree to those things, right?
Where do you stop, though? When everyone stops agreeing on something? How do you determine that? The idea of a slippery slope is that small changes don't seem to affect anything on first glance, but without being careful, those small changes cause the whole thing to move in a direction that can't be course-corrected. Eventually there's going to be a decision that most people enjoy, but make some people want to quit the game. How many times do you appeal to the majority before you realize that you have a fraction of the community that you started with? (assuming the worst-case scenario that changes to the game come at the cost of disagreeing players)
I think there are arguments to be made about the reality of adding changes, but I think ultimately, many PM players just simply draw the line at gameplay changes, erring on the side of caution.
This topic is going to land entierly on the shoulders of the pro-PMBR rule set people to either prove that no further changes will be made, or establish a clear limit on the changes that can be made to the game that the community can have confidence in. I know that apparently "PMBR held a vote, and said we won't keep making changes", but that's not good enough. It needs to be some kind of ultimatum or contract-type obligation that prevents the game from changing further, or something. I don't know what this would even manifest as, but this is what is going to need to happen in order to avoid the slippery slope. I think this is what must be addressed properly, in order for the community at large to be on board with the proposed changes.
There are some other topics floating around, but I'm pretty sure I'm about to hit the character limit for reddit, so I'm not going to go into as much detail on those ones. I don't think they're as controversial, anyway.
Debate topic 5: "No universal vanilla stage list"
The entire point of this project was to (apparently) unify the community, not split it for the sake of making the game more fun for certain people. I think the strongest argument on this front is being made by Arsenals: "What would you suggest to do in order to have a standardized stagelist/ruleset using on vanilla PM content? The way I see it, there's been a 3 year long debate on this very issue. We finally standardized something last year and in about 6 months it ended because even though "paragon is the best we can create", people didn't like it. They're using different stages, different #'s of bans, different "stupid rules", and different stage striking order (CF/SF). I honestly can not think of a single vanilla solution to standardize a ruleset among the PM community."
A rebuttal to this is "is this debate worth the attempt to create such a standardization?" I think this topic comes down to pro-PMBR ruleset people being able to prove that this is a massive positive for the community, that the vast majority would move to this list, and that there would be no further changes, solidifying this rule set as the universal one.
Debate topic 6: "Legacy Mods are against exPMDT wishes, so if you're for those, you shouldn't have a problem with PMBR's rule set"
I don't think this is a very good argument to make. Legacy has the 'protection' of calling itself an entirely separate mod from PM. I'm not positive on this, but you could argue that it poses no legal threat to exPMDT, which would probably be the main reason that exPMDT would be against it. If exPMDT are against "mods that add to PM and also masquerade as PM", it's not doing that either. The only way this argument doesn't fall flat is if any Brawl mods somehow endanger/affect exPMDT. The way the LTE is right now, you could just call it a tournament legal mod-pack, the same way that custom PS2 skins are tournament-legal mods.
Debate topic 7: "Another hoop new players have to jump through"
I feel like people are blowing this way out of proportion. Personally, I think it's easier than ever to get your hands on the correct version of PM. The first several google and Youtube results will eventually point to http://projectmirror.no-ip.org/ , which could be updated to include the new stage list. Players arriving at tournaments can just be told "hey there's a different version that you should download" (just like when PM was still updating, btw). I can see where people are getting this, but I don't think this is ultimately an issue that will have any impact whatsoever.
I think those are the main points of discussion so far in terms of how this affects competitive players. I've seen some arguments brought up about how this affects modders negatively, but I don't have enough knowledge to fairly represent both sides on this issue, unfortunately. Hopefully I did both sides justice, and provided some new information to think about. Sorry if I misrepresented something, especially the exPMDT parts.
Sorry this was so ridiculously long. That's part of the reason why this debate has been so ugly: there is a lot of very interesting topics to cover, which can't be fleshed out properly on social media. People have also been splitting up and combining debate topics, making meaningful communication very difficult.
If you think I missed something, or want to expand on a topic, feel free to speak up.
Anyway, thanks for reading
-SHEE
Posted May 16, 2018, 7:43 AM UTC · edited