Competitive Smash pisses me off. Like yeah, let's strip the game of all its features and everything that makes it fun. Ban a ton of stages. Ban items. Ban characters.
It'd be a lot more fun playing the game as it was meant to be played and I just cannot see the appeal. If you want something so strict go play Street Fighter or something.
Since I'm a bit into the competitive side of smash, let me offer you my perspective.
First of all, it's not that I want to play a competitive fighting game, it's that I want to play smash competitively. I suppose I shouldn't have to explain, but there's a thrill to knowing that you're mastering a certain craft, whether that be in gaming or in some other field. You want to test your knowledge and skills with others. I like smash a lot, so I want to play better at it. This entails playing with people better than you so you yourself can learn, practice, and further hone your playing skills. This is more or less the entire point of the competitive scene, at least for me.
It's still playing, it's not a boring strict thing that I'm enjoying. I'm having fun in the same way, just with a different mindset. Obviously, if people gather at a party just to play for casual fun it would be boring to turn off items, have a time limit, and restrict stages. That's why no one does that at a party scene: these features are all fun, that's why we keep them in.
With a competitive mindset, you seek to hone your mastery of the game. In the case of fighting games like this, the character you play as. You pit these skills you've accumulated against the skills of whoever you're playing against. This is a battle of skill and mastery: whoever has more is and
should be the victor. It's where this 'should' comes into play that we have to start thinking of situations that would deny the 'should'. There's always the case where the one with the more skill/mastery loses anyway because that's just how the match worked out due to misses, slips, accidents, luck, misreads, outplays, etc. And then there are the cases where the victory didn't go to the one with greater skill/mastery because of a chance element, mainly due to the whims of the RNG goddesses. Here is where you have to start drawing the line and try to remove factors that can arbitrarily tip the match to someone's favor. The most important part being 'arbitrary' part, a chance element. This is especially the case when the arbitrary factor tips the match regardless of the skills of the competing players: a starman spawns on top of the winning player; a bob-omb spawns in front of the forward smash that would have killed the other player; both players get a pokeball, one gets a goldeen and the other gets a lati@s; ships randomly start shooting at you in Corneria; etc etc etc. The chance factors impede the comparison of the opposing skills, thus we consider it and then take it out. This is what you mean by strict, but don't think of it like that. It's just weeding out elements of unfairness. It would be entirely unfair to the loser in a situation like this if he lost through no fault of his own. That's what the rules try to prevent.
I think the competitive smash community is rather well known for being quite bitter and needlessly toxic, but like any other absolutely disagreeable people, just ignore those. I have fun playing like this, and so do those playing with me. I also have a lot of fun playing without the tournament rules with other friends. I'm pretty sure the original Metroids weren't supposed to be sequence broken and speed run, but there are some that have fun doing that and the others that have fun playing it 'the way it was meant to be played'. I'm sure the same applies for Nuzlocke runs on Pokemon. The way a game was 'meant to be played' never has and never should dictate the way a person should have fun playing the game.
(The assholes that pompously declare their way of playing superior? Fuck them, ignore them, move on. Fortunately, this forum is devoid of those.)
