So, Canada, Arizona... where you at?
You already know my stance, Idle. I suppose I could post it here, but I'm not about to try and one up anyone (specifically, Hates) because he pretty much summed up how I feel as elegantly as I ever would if I sat down and went debate writer mode. In actuality, I'm somewhat sad, because as close as Namco seemed to have been working with the SC community, they should have seen this coming miles away, and should have known it'd be the catalyst to another community explosion.
However, I suppose I'll go over some points that have been skipped over - because I DO think they are important.
What reason do we have for keeping DJ in? All proponents for it seem to cite two things:
One, that DJ would bring an influx of Tekken players.
Well, guess what? Yoshimitsu has been in this game for a long time now. I'm pretty sure adding one other character into the game isn't going to make it suddenly the next best thing to a Tekken fan.
Along with that, it's not even DJ himself. It's an adaptation of DJ's STYLE put into the game.
Two, that DJ is balanced.
This isn't the issue here. The real issue is that DJ doesn't have a spot in the actual character roster. The only way to allow him is through a tourney standard CaS - EVO has gone against using CaS repeatedly. Why should they suddenly think it would be OK now?
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And, here's a couple big things I think a few people aren't thinking about when they say that DJ shouldn't be banned -
1.) CaS characters generally just don't look that good, and even those that do look good often don't look as good as the standard cast/look out of place standing next to them. Is it really good for our game to have some odd-looking character in big tourney streams beating on the standard cast?
2.) You mentioned that Link/Heihachi/Spawn were banned because practicing against them was bad. Then you cite hitboxes as the reasoning for other bans. How does nobody see that we have the exact same situation here? You can make the CaS available to the entire community, but you're still asking THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY to download that tourney standard CaS just so they can practice against it. Not only that, but let's say I'm a casual player looking to go into tourney for the first time, and my CaS list is full. You want me to overwrite my save and my CaS' just for this one character? And on PS3, in order to avoid this I'd need another user account, you're already asking an awful lot of me if I want to practice against what's used in tourney. How is that healthy for our scene?