How the Smash community bravely did the right thing and got punished for it.

In the year 2020, a wave of allegations hit the Super Smash Bros Community, especially centered around Smash 4 and Ultimate (although every game got dragged in the line of fire, especially Melee for some reason). Those included sexual harassement and grooming among many others. I will not go into details because it is frankly not my place to talk about specifics. I was not involved personally, and would find it disrespectful to even weigh in on this. However, I think that the effects of those situations are worth discussing.

The community did everything right. The didn't try to sweep it under the rug, they investigated, prepared statements, banned the offending players, put things in place to try and prevent this from happening ever again, and made everything public. It was a very difficult thing to do considering some of these people were influential, and yet, they did the right thing. Still, they got punished.

Now, you can't talk about the community without someone coming out of the woodworks and calling everyone in the community a predator, no matter if they were even close to being involved with the situation. You'll hear things like "Smelly try-hard predators" or "Nintendo was right to take down tournaments run by predators", insinuating that every single player matches the description. And let's not beat around the bush; this is absolutely weaponized by casual elitist players who already had an irrational disdain for competitive players in the first place. They jumped on the occasion to smear the community's name without hesitation, throwing wanton generalizations because it fits with their agenda. It comes from a place of bad faith. Yet, if you're an outsider looking in, it's deafening, and defending yourself only makes it worse. We were punished for taking action to protect innocents.

And don't be mistaken. What happened was wrong. But also, it is completely messed up to realize that if we had stepped on our morals and protected the alleged abusers, we might have ended up in a far better position and not have to deal with all of this. People talk about creating an environment that is safe, yet when a community tries to do just that and doesn't protect its alleged abusers, it gets lambasted for it. Personally, I think we should have applauded them for taking action, not the other way around. The "critics" throwing insults around are essentially disincentivizing honesty.

If you think Smash is the only community with bad apples, you would be wrong. Communities bring in all sorts of people, some great. Some not so great. The bigger the community, the higher the likelihood of a "not so great" individual getting in there. I can guarantee you that bad apples like this exist in every community. Heck, some of those in the greater Nintendo communities that accused us of being predators were outed as alleged predators themselves. Bad people exist. You may think it os possible to catch them all before they act, but that is entirely naive. All you can do is prevention and react properly when such terrible actions occur.

And so, I will say something many will deem controversial; anti-competitive detractors who throw such insults around are contributing to making the world a more dangerous place for potential abuse victims. By punishing honesty and harassing a community that is making major strides in making their communities safer, you are telling people that doing the right thing will end up poorly for them. Good deeds get punished.

The Humble dev

With Mario Kart World's version 1.1.2 update, a lot of people have taken to the Internet to criticize Nintendo for essentially killing the online mode for them. The reasoning is as follows: Many players are not a fan of playing through intermission tracks, especially online, preferring a 3 lap system like the classic games. While online prioritized intermission tracks, some were able to circumvent this by just voting for random tracks, which defaulted to the 3 lap setup. The latest update removed this exploit.

The fact that we're hearing both competitive and casual players complaining about this feature shows that this isn't a popular decision, but I think this is emblematic of a much more deeply-rooted problem within Nintendo, and many other high profile developers.

Humility is one of the most important things a game developer can have that nobody talks about. And I'm not talking about apologizing for unpopular decision or bending over backward to external demands. I am talking about having the ability to set your pride aside and look at things from another lens. When Project M was being developped, it was being made by core Melee fans for core Melee fans. However, as we continued developing the game, we got a lot of feedback, and not just from the core demographic we were aiming for. We read through them, and people would explain what they enjoyed about Brawl, or even Smash 64, which led us to a realization that our quest for additional depth could lead us in an alternative direction. While Melee's feel was definitely a large influence to our core design, we started thinking about how to perhaps implement features people loved about those two games, and we ended up with something unique, bridging the gap between communities that barely ever interacted prior. We were more than Melee 2.0.

What's more is that we've also realized something shocking; people also played Project M casually. This was hardly intended, but instead of trying to stop it or ignore it, we agreed to one conclusion; that's not what we set out to do, but that's ok. They're having fun, and that's ok. This led us to add new modes like Turbo mode and All Stars Versus, the Turbo Booster item, costumes, whacky stages alongside competitive stages, etc... we embraced them because a fan's a fan. There is no right way to play a game, just one that is right for you.

Going back to Mario Kart, it's quite obvious that they wanted intermission courses, e.g. driving into tracks to be their gimmick for this entry. The issue is that as interesting as it may seem at face value, it hasn't stuck as well as they had hoped. People trying to avoid the feature entirely by using "Random" is a very strong indicator of that. Patching out the exploit isn't even the issue in as much as having to select random to get a 3 lap model shouldn't have been a requirement in the first place. An online mode could have existed for courses with intermissions, and one without. Heck, even offline, Grand Prix is stuck with those intermission maps. Having seen how unpopular forcing intermissions tracks was, a humble developer would have looked at that and said "cleary my vision isn't connecting with people, I should let people play the way they want". Instead, they doubled down and enforced said vision.

And this isn't the first time they did that as a company. During the Wii, DS, Wii U and 3DS eras, they forced divisive control methods as the only ways to engage with games, not offering alternatives. While they arguably are doing better at this nowadays, I remember Masahiro Sakurai forcing his strange control scheme in Kid Icarus Uprising, which was a left-handed person's nightmare, especially if you upgraded to the New 3DS which couldn't use the circle pad pro. I remember Star Fox Zero immediately setting off red flags with just about anyone who tried it, and they stubbornly refused to change the controls in a effort to justify the existence of the Gamepad, leading to a massive commercial flop. I remember them forcing basic menu options to the Gamepad, or forcing motion controls on games that could have had button controls options. Nintendo had an experience in mind, and it did not matter how you felt; you had to play by their rules.

Super Smash Bros is another one for discussion. Nintendo has made it extremely difficult for people to play competitively, whether it's by legal means, or by removing features, or awkwardly adding unpopular mechanics like tripping to prevent advanced play (in this case, it was to punish dash-dancing). They would surgically remove everything that they saw as an exploit instead of just embracing them. Nintendo had a very specific way they wanted people to play, and if you didn't abide by those rules, you couldn't play at all.

It gets even worse when mods are involved. Mods get regularly shut down. And instead of just looking at them and thinking "Wow, our fans did something pretty cool", they go scorched earth. Even when it's not even a mod, they got offended when the Nintendo Minute hosts proposed the concept of a nuzlocke run.

A humble dev would look at criticism as a means to improve. They would look at people playing their games differently as an opportunity to reach new audiences. They would look at sprawling competitive communities and feel honoured that people would devote themselves to art they created. A humble developer would look at fan work and feel thankful for the love and loyalty. A humble dev would listen. He wouldn't always agree, but he would listen.

The path to improvement is intrisically tied with the ability to see other perspectives. I am not an established developer, and yet, modders sometimes see what big name developers at the top of their ivory tower cannot.