So now that argument: "Your memories are clouded with Nostalgia", no longer applies. Although to be fair, yes I must admit my memories were biased, old melee wasn't as great as I thought it would be. Still after playing it for a while I still prefer it, and a lot of others do as well. Tell me you wouldn't rather have thrilling melee like this
This post was primarily written with the intention to combat the "Don't project your opinions onto others as facts" argument. Sure, if anyone has bothered to read any of my previous posts on melee you would know that I've already explained myself numerous times. Nevertheless, I'll do it again here with hard facts, to show that my so called "opinions" in fact are facts. Let's do a completely objective investigation of melee. Instead of starting with the assumption that old melee was better, I'll ask the question: "Why and how was old melee better?". And instead of saying "better" which can be interpreted subjective I'll say "Superior". When I talk about melee, which also is a very broad term, I'll be specifically looking at four aspects of melee:
• Mobility
• Responsiveness
• Ping
• Complexity
So, "Was old melee superior in terms of …?"
Mobility - Yes clearly. As you can see from the video we could move much faster and we had a ton more control over our character. Being able to move after we get hit with jump attacks, something you removed in later versions (which let us escape grabs), being able to cancel out attacks meaning we could move whenever we wanted, being able to quick-roll made us be able to move extremely fast. In the old melee the mobility was the most important aspect of the game. When two skilled opponents go up against each other it's usually the one who was the most mobile who got out on top. This clearly took skill, diversifying the skill gap.
I'm also going to add stamina under this section as I guess it kinda counts as mobility? I mean the person with the most stamina can move faster and is in a better position that an opponent with less. Stamina was less of a problem in pre-Steam SFD because grabs didn't require stamina drain + it would fill up when you held your opponent in a grab. Don't get me wrong. I think grabs are broken, the damage being excessive and it having a really unreliable counter, but I appreciated it solely because of this unique perk. Grabs was the only movement that you could do with your character in the game that was stamina positive. I already think stamina drain for punching and pausing even just by blocking is cheesy, but grabs was the one way for you to continue to play aggressively. I mean in the video we didn't use grabs and thus I also put on /ie 1.
Responsiveness - Yes. As I already mentioned we could cancel attacks giving us much more control. Our inputs, even though blocking still seems rather irresponsive then, we could at least control what were our character should be at what time, meaning that we didn't just have to rely solely on blocking as our only defensive option.
Ping - Ping meant a lot less in old melee, as demonstrated in this video Hiwor with 105 ping could move exceptionally well being able to beat an experienced opponent with 1 ping with ease. Good luck trying that today, since most of those moves don't even exist anymore. I even asked him "what ping is better? 1 or 100?". His answer was: "For me, 100". There you see, today everyone would prefer the lowest ping possible because all that mobility aspect with high ping is gone. Thanks for giving low ping players a massive favour, mythologic ;DDD.
Complexity - Crystal clear. Old melee had moves that no longer exist in the current melee system, thus lowering the amount of possibilities in melee and at the same time the complexity. Judging by the fact that today you can kill your opponents of by starting one single combo already speaks for itself (you would know that if you played enough). It's also one of the reasons I stay very far away from those spots, since it's literally just the first person to land a dive. These "meta" combos lowered the complexity of melee since it's what everybody will abuse, thus leading to everyone using the same boring, repetitive playstyle. And you might be shouting: "But everybody was using double hits, and that's a boring playstyle". Well no, having more moves in melee doesn't make melee boring (especially when we can do so much more with them), and no, far from everyone was able to even use double hits. Clearly grabbing and throwing are more powerful moves and take a lot less effort to pull off. Anyway, double hits were only unfair if only one opponent knew how to pull it off and the other one had no idea how. That's how I felt for a long time and It's why I did not appreciate the move back then. Looking back today I'll gladly take that back no matter how broken it seemed, especially since that only meant that old melee had an actually skill ceiling back then.
--> I can even pinpoint to the origin of these nerfs right here:
From my analysis Old Melee was indeed superior in these aspects. These are clearly facts that I even have video evidence of (ask other experts they'll tell you the same thing).
However that's not to say that old melee was better 100% of the time. Remember when at the start I wrote that it wasn't as flawless as I had previously presumed? I do appreciate some changes made, namely the removal of that annoying tumble when blocking a fast Smash attack and sometimes when your opponent super kicks and you block at the same time. All of us agreed that new melee did get that right, that was good change. I can name one more example that new melee did better. Back in the day we could cancel punches by pressing grab, thus cancelling one animation for initiating grab. So you could press a + a (followed closely by R), thus displaying the starting frames for the second punch and suddenly changing into a grab. This was highly problematic because it lead to people getting confused, seeing a punch coming pressing block and then getting grabbed instead. In fact I did this all the time and it surprising how effective it actually was. Both of the problems I just mentioned were things that needed fixing and had to go.
What didn't need to go was quick rolling and ability to cancel attacks. If you had asked me: "Do you think double hits needed a nerf?", I would tell you "yes they probably did need some fixing/tweaking", but the patch that was eventually chosen, overall made melee worse than what it was before. And if it wasn't possible to a implement a fix that didn't affect the entirety of melee as crucially as this one did, well…
...Then I'd rather not have any fix at all. (Including a lot of other Veteran players)
Disclaimer: This took quite some time to research/write, so if you have something to criticize/add, let it be constructive/stick to the topic.