After a good two years of lurking around this place, this ridiculous discussion was finally enough to make me register so I could say this:
Welcome to the wonderful world of competitive gaming. The day everyone can play a game competitively in their ideal fashion is the day hell freezes over. There will always be factors built into the game that make some characters or styles dominant and some worthless, and if you want to play the game in a competitive environment, you just need to get used to it. Most of the cast isn't going to be considered tournament viable (except as counter picks) by the time the game has been out a couple of years no matter what. May as well learn why your favorite character is on the list now and not get used to living in some fantasy world were Ness will actually be winning tournaments.
I doubt most of you are terrible familiar with the Armored Core series, but that's the last (and only) online scene I was ever around. It's a series that pretty much epitomizes this simple fact. In the later PS2 installments, there were only a handful of styles that were truly viable for high level competitive play. The people who were generally considered the best at the game personally didn't like these styles, so they started promoting excessive bans for tournament play in an effort to "give everybody a chance". It killed the scene, because all it did was force people to play a game other than the one they were presented with. It made them mentally redress everything, and it allowed only a handful of people - instead of styles - to be truly competitive.
What's happening here obviously isn't so extreme, but just because you dislike the end results of this specific fact of the game, you're looking to pretend it doesn't exist in an attempt to let you play the game the way you want to - not the way the game needs to be played to be played competitively. What's more, you're showing a serious lack of gratitude to those people who host tournaments by insisting that enforcing this ban would be easy. Guess what? It wouldn't. It would cause debate and arguments, it would spawn differing interpretations and implementations across different events, and would in general by a pain. If they don't implement a ban, what happens, Ness and Lucas mains don't go to the event? That's not a real loss for the hosts; it's just you denying yourself the experience.
As for the people claiming that tying this in with other infinites and character specific exploits is irrelevant are burying their heads in the sand. The point is that Brawl is fundamentally flawed from a tournament-goer's perspective. If you want to "fix" one problem, you need to step onto the slippery slope, which leads to "fixing" all of them. This creates even more hassle for everybody involved, and we're really just better off playing the game we have, not a version redressed by the fans. If it doesn't work, it will die. Maybe people will go back to Melee, maybe Smash will just become less iconic in the competitive scene. Either way, people will still have fun playing it in their living rooms where victory isn't of the chief concern.
I'd also just like to note that I think it's really ironic that just a couple of weeks ago, EB360 was promoting Ness' jab locking abilities...not to mention people constantly bringing up dtilt tripping (tripping being another mechanic that I can't imagine tournament goers being happy with, even if it does affect everybody).
Just one final note, this is coming from a Ness main, just so you don't assume that I have no reason to care.
