Who remembers the days back when Minus used to actually give to the community? The days where the developers had their own ideas, but didn't place themselves above those who we were developing for. The days BEFORE Pin Clock was project lead. These are the days that I with the help of others intend to bring back. Ever since MAXIMUM was released and development of 3.3 began, the game has been drifting further away from what most people have come to know and love. There has been a stream of bad decisions coming with every release since. Everything from the initially botched release of 3.3 to the release of 3.Q which somehow forgot to include the Wifi Code. Blatantly overpowered characters have remained imbalanced, fan favorite stages have been removed and replaced with levels that offer little to no variety than what is already on the list, toxic moves and mechanics have been left to sit for the sake of "not forcing the players to relearn a part of their favorite character." In that same light, the argument for not balancing our roster for team play has been that we have no team meta. When the real reason we have no team meta is because we haven't taken the time to make builds that work well in team play.
Minus needs a new direction. It used to be a game about interesting mechanics, unique characters, and crazy unexpected combos that practically every character could perform. This led to an amazing experience that was unrivaled in my eyes and likely in the eyes of many others. As of late, there has been a stronger focus on competitive play. This isn't a bad thing on its own, but when you have a leader who is afraid to tone things down that need toning down, you wind up with a roster full of characters who are generally on the same level in basic play. When that evolves into higher level play, you end up with a small portion of characters who have nearly unbeatable advantages over 80% of the cast. Can this be changed? Yes. Will it be changed when you have someone who mains those characters and refuses to see them toned down? No. Why is it, that Lucario, ROB, and Dedede remained unchecked for so long? Instead of receiving the one time nerfs that they could've had long ago, they were constantly being mininerfed over multiple releases. However, these nerfs were only targeting excess power instead of hitting core elements until 3.Q. Not because we didn't already have highly skilled players telling us ways to fix these problems, but because we couldn't get the go ahead from our "leader." ROB had an abundance of powerful projectiles that he could fire in quick succession as well as the speed to capitalize on any openings he created with them from anywhere on the stage. His crazy combo game and good at everything design put him so far above the rest of the roster that he can only be fought one way if you want to beat him. Lucario on the other hand has many advantages above nearly the entire roster. High speed, moves that combo into themselves and eventually KO, easy setups, low endlag on his attacks, grabs that true combo into KO moves, a true spike that can combat ledge games, a strong projectile, one of the safest counters in the game which is safe on whiff or shield, and a jab combo that true combos into a special grab move capable of KOing practically anyone except Bowser from 60% or higher.
To make a good fighting game you should know what the people want out of it. Don't go into it with the mindset that you know best, or that there is only one way for things. In Brawl Minus, we know that fun is important. But if we're wanting to have a competitive scene then we need a stronger focus on balanced gameplay, not give every character a really hard to learn but easy to master combo that all but guarantees a stock. This isn't to say that the characters all need to be toned down to any certain level, but things like 0-death combos are not fun to be a part of, and they aren't particularly fun to perform. They shouldn't be possible to pull off unless your opponent DIs into it giving you so many hits. Small flaws like chaingrabs or inescapable hitconfirms that always lead into "given" combos are not appealing to watch. Having hitstun so high that other characters can take advantage of it far more than others isn't good design. Making sure that every single move has to be "better than Vbrawl" is horribly flawed and doesn't allow as much technical freedom in balancing a character either. After adding in the new tools that makes the character Minused, their old moves may actually not need changing at all because of how it now affects their kit. There are things like this that lead to extremely polarizing matchups. Overuse of character specific mechanics, or bad mechanics in general can force characters to be played a certain way in order to be effective. In fewer words, there's a fine line between flashy appeal, and over the top one sided mechanics.
Fear of change has been holding Minus back for a long time now. Infrequent releases wouldn't be problematic if the content was actually made to appeal to the player base and if that content was substantial given the amount of time that the players were waiting for it. However, we've seen more and more that Pin Clock is unwilling to take risks and listen to the community. Unwilling to experiment. Unwilling to do whatever it takes to create the most enjoyable experience for the largest amount of the vocal population. Without experimentation, MAX would have never happened and we'd all still be playing 2.X.6. This unwillingness to cooperate goes beyond the community, it stretches into the BR as well where idea after idea has been turned down so often that conflict arises whenever the thought of "change" is brought up. At first it doesn't seem like a problem. It seems like firm leadership. Someone has to say no sometimes, right? That much is obvious. The difference between firm leadership and disrespectful dictatorship lies in shutting down what your team has to say without even listening. When you have a multitude of people leaving your team due to your stubbornness and bad decisions, it's time to evaluate the situation. When you find yourself in heated arguments and spewing profanity and insults, there has to be a problem. When you have those who will actually follow you only speaking when you ask them to, and NOT voicing their opinions because they feel it would be a waste of time to even try, it's time you consider what you might be doing wrong. It could be that the team has different ideals of what the project should be, but as a leader it is your job to discuss what everyone wishes to see from the project, and to unify those ideals to create one cohesive project.
Projects like Brawl Minus aren't meant to be headed by a single individual. Selfish and stubborn people aren't the best leaders to have for team based projects either. Separating the backroom from the community with little to no word of what is going on is not keeping in touch with your players want. Giving someone who would remove the rights of someone who simply wants to share a bit of backroom discussion isn't fit for someone claiming to be a leader. I've had my threads deleted, my ability to send private messages locked, and my account has been recently deleted. If I had been okay with all of that up until now, the account deletion alone is proof enough that Pin Clock abuses his powers.
As the minus community, we have a voice. We may not be many, but we have the power to shape this mod into what we see fit. We can support it, or we can reject it. Most of us know what we want from Minus. We want a fun game that offers an experience that we can't get from any other mods. While some of us don't care for balance and would prefer individuality of our stages and characters, there is no reason that we cannot have both. The people who care for balance will request balance, those who care for stages will request stage changes, and those who just want a fun experience will be content with getting both sides of the spectrum. There are still players who prefer to play individual versions over the most recent one, and if we are to change that, we must take the best from all worlds, and unite to make our vision a reality.
Signed,
The ex BR member who did a hell of a lot of work for 2 years only to be turned down from rejoining the BR for saying what no one else would and for wanting a fair compromise.
Minus needs a new direction. It used to be a game about interesting mechanics, unique characters, and crazy unexpected combos that practically every character could perform. This led to an amazing experience that was unrivaled in my eyes and likely in the eyes of many others. As of late, there has been a stronger focus on competitive play. This isn't a bad thing on its own, but when you have a leader who is afraid to tone things down that need toning down, you wind up with a roster full of characters who are generally on the same level in basic play. When that evolves into higher level play, you end up with a small portion of characters who have nearly unbeatable advantages over 80% of the cast. Can this be changed? Yes. Will it be changed when you have someone who mains those characters and refuses to see them toned down? No. Why is it, that Lucario, ROB, and Dedede remained unchecked for so long? Instead of receiving the one time nerfs that they could've had long ago, they were constantly being mininerfed over multiple releases. However, these nerfs were only targeting excess power instead of hitting core elements until 3.Q. Not because we didn't already have highly skilled players telling us ways to fix these problems, but because we couldn't get the go ahead from our "leader." ROB had an abundance of powerful projectiles that he could fire in quick succession as well as the speed to capitalize on any openings he created with them from anywhere on the stage. His crazy combo game and good at everything design put him so far above the rest of the roster that he can only be fought one way if you want to beat him. Lucario on the other hand has many advantages above nearly the entire roster. High speed, moves that combo into themselves and eventually KO, easy setups, low endlag on his attacks, grabs that true combo into KO moves, a true spike that can combat ledge games, a strong projectile, one of the safest counters in the game which is safe on whiff or shield, and a jab combo that true combos into a special grab move capable of KOing practically anyone except Bowser from 60% or higher.
To make a good fighting game you should know what the people want out of it. Don't go into it with the mindset that you know best, or that there is only one way for things. In Brawl Minus, we know that fun is important. But if we're wanting to have a competitive scene then we need a stronger focus on balanced gameplay, not give every character a really hard to learn but easy to master combo that all but guarantees a stock. This isn't to say that the characters all need to be toned down to any certain level, but things like 0-death combos are not fun to be a part of, and they aren't particularly fun to perform. They shouldn't be possible to pull off unless your opponent DIs into it giving you so many hits. Small flaws like chaingrabs or inescapable hitconfirms that always lead into "given" combos are not appealing to watch. Having hitstun so high that other characters can take advantage of it far more than others isn't good design. Making sure that every single move has to be "better than Vbrawl" is horribly flawed and doesn't allow as much technical freedom in balancing a character either. After adding in the new tools that makes the character Minused, their old moves may actually not need changing at all because of how it now affects their kit. There are things like this that lead to extremely polarizing matchups. Overuse of character specific mechanics, or bad mechanics in general can force characters to be played a certain way in order to be effective. In fewer words, there's a fine line between flashy appeal, and over the top one sided mechanics.
Fear of change has been holding Minus back for a long time now. Infrequent releases wouldn't be problematic if the content was actually made to appeal to the player base and if that content was substantial given the amount of time that the players were waiting for it. However, we've seen more and more that Pin Clock is unwilling to take risks and listen to the community. Unwilling to experiment. Unwilling to do whatever it takes to create the most enjoyable experience for the largest amount of the vocal population. Without experimentation, MAX would have never happened and we'd all still be playing 2.X.6. This unwillingness to cooperate goes beyond the community, it stretches into the BR as well where idea after idea has been turned down so often that conflict arises whenever the thought of "change" is brought up. At first it doesn't seem like a problem. It seems like firm leadership. Someone has to say no sometimes, right? That much is obvious. The difference between firm leadership and disrespectful dictatorship lies in shutting down what your team has to say without even listening. When you have a multitude of people leaving your team due to your stubbornness and bad decisions, it's time to evaluate the situation. When you find yourself in heated arguments and spewing profanity and insults, there has to be a problem. When you have those who will actually follow you only speaking when you ask them to, and NOT voicing their opinions because they feel it would be a waste of time to even try, it's time you consider what you might be doing wrong. It could be that the team has different ideals of what the project should be, but as a leader it is your job to discuss what everyone wishes to see from the project, and to unify those ideals to create one cohesive project.
Projects like Brawl Minus aren't meant to be headed by a single individual. Selfish and stubborn people aren't the best leaders to have for team based projects either. Separating the backroom from the community with little to no word of what is going on is not keeping in touch with your players want. Giving someone who would remove the rights of someone who simply wants to share a bit of backroom discussion isn't fit for someone claiming to be a leader. I've had my threads deleted, my ability to send private messages locked, and my account has been recently deleted. If I had been okay with all of that up until now, the account deletion alone is proof enough that Pin Clock abuses his powers.
As the minus community, we have a voice. We may not be many, but we have the power to shape this mod into what we see fit. We can support it, or we can reject it. Most of us know what we want from Minus. We want a fun game that offers an experience that we can't get from any other mods. While some of us don't care for balance and would prefer individuality of our stages and characters, there is no reason that we cannot have both. The people who care for balance will request balance, those who care for stages will request stage changes, and those who just want a fun experience will be content with getting both sides of the spectrum. There are still players who prefer to play individual versions over the most recent one, and if we are to change that, we must take the best from all worlds, and unite to make our vision a reality.
Signed,
The ex BR member who did a hell of a lot of work for 2 years only to be turned down from rejoining the BR for saying what no one else would and for wanting a fair compromise.
I don't think the people can really decide based upon hearing one side of the situation, so I feel as if it's only natural that I provide my side of the story as well.
It's story time, so I shall tell you a dev room's tale of Brawl Minus' development
Most of this will be building based upon facts that Sammi has already established, such as Kien bringing personal manners into game development that do not belong in game development, amongst other things.
Back when Moo added me to the Brawl Minus team in the times before 2.x.6 was released, I had only desires to to do my part the the best Brawl Minus that could be released would be released, and always wanted to further development and push the envelope further and further each update of beta. For example, when the beta started to slack, it was my idea to push The Storm Update, and develop a system that everyone wouldn't feel rushed every wednesday-friday by pushing out a few small beta updates and follow those by one large one. This system worked well for developers and myself when I was testing, and everything went pretty much swimmingly until MAX came out, after which point we all congratulated each other for our work and Minus, being "Maximized" was considered done.
Then time passed and the community began to have issues with certain aspects of MAX, which made me want to give the community a Valentine's gift in rebalancing Minus to be more enjoyable for everyone. When I proposed it to Moo, he liked the idea, but said that he was too busy with life to direct it, and passed the duty on to me and that's pretty much how I started to direct Minus. The word "Leader" is simple and more to the point of the role, but really I simply oversee all development and proposals.
So what went wrong?
There were disagreements on how things should be balanced that started off as debates and turned into arguments. I'm not going to name any specific instances (R.O.B.), but it was all rough and no one could come to terms on how things should be handled. And it wasn't just between Kien and I. Sammi, Glyph, Gold, Mech, Tybis, and anyone else not mentioned, everyone had their own views on what was "not nerfed enough" and "nerfed too much". Our goal of providing balance was vague as we never knew where the fine line was. Then it got nasty and personal. People started accusing each other of bias, and saying their views were better based upon their skills in the game, and that those who played better designed better, which really doesn't make much sense. Those who design better are better designers. Those who mostly debated these changes and considered skill the highest were the first to leave after being tired of disagreements. Glyph was one of those people. There was also an incident with Kien involving Link's infamous "37% damage fTilt jesus christ" and all of us requesting that be nerfed. The only way Kien would agree to this was if we sped up Mortal Draw. Personally this makes no sense, as nerfing one thing is not an excuse to buff another thing without seeing if said thing needs buffing in the first place. But ultimately we went with it since it didn't seem worth battling further.
After 1.01, I wanted to go back to that pushing the envelope thing I did before, and proposed adding Pichu to the game as Brawl Minus' first new character, as well as create a more polished game. At the time we had recruited TSON, the co-founder of Minus and responsible for most of the original coding, who agreed with this mindset. An argument involving coin element on Luigi's dTilt had ultimately caused Ellipsis to quit the team, who had disagreed with this change. Ellipsis later returned and apologized for acting irrationally, and agreed on removing the coin element on Luigi's dTilt. The development went on for months, with the community, as well as Glyph and Kien, pushing for a release date. I did my job of calculating when things would be ready by asking everyone involved in the coding of Pichu and other things, and between the two dates I proposed, April 29th and April 22nd, April 22nd was the day voted upon. The 22nd was, needless to say, a very very busy day. The vBrawl CSS had still not been made, and we had to rush out that at the last minute. Once that was all set, we transferred both versions off and had it ready for upload. But there was a mistake somewhere, and a test build was uploaded instead! Naturally we did what we could to rectify the situation as soon as possible! I wanted to keep my promise of getting the game out on the 22nd, but at the same time it was my mistake to not test the uploaded build, and delay the release of the game when that happened, and I have taken responsibility and apologized on several occasions soon after this happened. There was another incident with Kien. It was discovered that Mortal Draw could be combo'd into. Mortal Draw is an OHKO so that's uh really kinda unhealthy. Kien insisted on this change staying in, as he did not his main Link to be any weaker, and felt that the only one who should defeat Ganon's OHKO Punch should be Link with a better OHKO for Lore reasons that really had nothing to do with Minus balance. Mortal Draw got slowed down after a long battle.
3.5 was mostly smooth sailing. The removal of the SEP caused us to pick and choose what stages remained in the game, though. This is where I will directly confront one of Kien's points, regarding the stagelist. All of us in the dev room decided which stages would remain in the game based upon their popularity and how frequently they were played, which is how we wound up with a stage list very close to the one we have today. Some stages may be similar to others, like YS Melee, Battlefield, Dream Greens, and FoD, but when deciding which we would take out, we had decided against it due to A. All of these stages offering something unique, as well as being popular in their own right and B. There wasn't a stage to replace them with. Also Gold left during this period for his own reasons, as well as Glitch, who never really left the team but instead isn't a BR. Naturally he's still working on this very site and supporting Minus outside of the game itself.
3.Q had two bumps in the road during development: The first one is an incident once again revolving around R.O.B. basically, Kien made a new R.O.B. build form vBrawl, that focused on making him pretty much a zoner. Not only did it miss R.O.B.'s basic design in its execution (R.O.B. by design is a character who uses his projectiles to create openings and then rush in for combos).The build was fairly wonky and still needed a lot of things determined, and its proposal did not sound popular on the forums, so this R.O.B. build was ultimately rejected, and R.O.B. was once again given nerfs instead. The other was bigger, and this was related to SAHunterMech, who proposed a Gan-NUKE in place of the Gandouken, which was similar to Falcon's Punch aura in 2.x.6, in which the would be huge GFX hitbox surrounding the punch, only rather than Falcon's multihit, this would be a single hit. This sounded nice on paper, so it was developed and tested. And during testing, it had the same problems Falcon's, which was discourage actual edgeguarding and just use punches on the edge. Mech tried to rework it, but ultimately nothing worked right, so it was scrapped. Mech was upset and left, but is willing to work on non-fighter things if needed.
Now let's get to 4.0 development, and where we are today. There was another incident with Kien. The first is the Venus Lighthouse incident. When discussing stages, Kien proposed Venus Lighthouse. It was debated and people liked it, but Tybis and I expressed concern for anti-competition (we have since changed our minds, but this was our mindset at the time). This caused Kien to create a thread which, since this was a BR discussion and BR discussions should not be brought out to the public, I deleted on sight. This caused another incident with Kien, involving him acting against the interests of the BR and sending mass PMs. It gave us a view on Venus Lighthouse, but not in the way we wanted to get that view. Kien lost PM privileges and we agreed to reconsider Venus Lighthouse. There was another incident with Kien. While discussing Lavaville vs Norfair, a debate now known on the forums, BPC's request was brought up, and the two of us got in a hot debate about stages and the value of the request. We ultimately decided on what is now known in the 4.0 preview changelog, thanks to Moo messaging BPC himself about the matter. Despite it already being resolved and not involving him at all, Kien wrote a long essay and essentially left the dev room in a fit of rage. I had no interest in reading as the first two paragraphs were all personal insults towards me, and if the beginning of it was just mocking me and spitting on my image, I saw no reason why I should have to read further. Then several weeks later, there was another incident with Kien. Tybis mentioned Kien wanting to come back to the BR, so as leader I went to talk to Kien myself. Kien's immediate response was something along the lines of "Well my wishes were already broken because I wish to never talk to you again". We tried debating terms which were essentially listening to each other more. Since Kien has actually left the BR in fits of rage several times before, I figured I should test it this time. The results were...disappointing, to say the least. We can talk the talk together, but we just simply cannot walk the walk. And on top of this, the dev room since Kien's absence has been much more peaceful. I'll even confess, there was even relief from multiple people when he left. There were no arguments that lead to nowhere, no long essays, no personal attacks on one another, things were just...starting to work. Several people asides myself have shown that They don't want Kien back. All of these factors combined, alongside all of the aforementioned incidents, let me reach the conclusion to decline Kien reentry into the backroom.
And here we are today. Kien further harassed me pushing for him to get in, but I decided to block Kien since talking to him was only causing me stress and nothing seemed to change on either party. Kien then sent out mass PMs discussing a community uprising against me (which I learned of thanks to an anonymous tip) and telling the community that I am some sort of tyrant because I have the flaw that was mentioned in this thread (I skimmed, will reply to individual posts later) that if I'm not confident in someone's abilities, I shoot their ideas down if they don't seem right a little too early. As anyone else currently in the BR can tell you, I'm rather trustworthy of the likes of Sammi and Tybis, and Maw has warmed up to me very quickly. Nowhere in any point has Kien shown me that he knows "what he's doing", from his intense bias towards the Zelda franchise to making questionable changes to various characters (3.Q Dorf, among the others I already mentioned), and on top of that his personal vendetta and arrogant attitude against me only pushed me to trust him less as a team member. This is a fate that could have been avoided if both of us were a little different and more open to one another, but we have passed that point now, I am afraid.
Anyways, the thread has brought attention to the dev room and we all discussed this thread as well as my leadership, and came to the conclusion that I'm a fair leader to the team and that this thread was more unneeded drama, but did make us want to involve ourselves in the community more. We love the community, it's just we're busy with our lives too, but if it lets you trust us more as a development team, we are willing to make more time for the ones we make our game for.
and now we're discussing trading card games.
And that is my story.
TL;DR there were a lot of mistakes over Minus history, and I list a few incidents in which Kien and I got in debates that should not have happened and never ended well. Kien left the BR in rage and got even more enraged when I decided to not let him back in due to the fact that he acted against the BR. He's a capable coder but not a team player. We're going to work to involve ourselves more as a dev team with our community. Trading card games.
Now after writing the longest post I've ever made, it's time to read the rest of this thread and respond to individual posters. Feel free to reply to this one with any questions as well, and I will kindly answer them.
It's story time, so I shall tell you a dev room's tale of Brawl Minus' development
Most of this will be building based upon facts that Sammi has already established, such as Kien bringing personal manners into game development that do not belong in game development, amongst other things.
Back when Moo added me to the Brawl Minus team in the times before 2.x.6 was released, I had only desires to to do my part the the best Brawl Minus that could be released would be released, and always wanted to further development and push the envelope further and further each update of beta. For example, when the beta started to slack, it was my idea to push The Storm Update, and develop a system that everyone wouldn't feel rushed every wednesday-friday by pushing out a few small beta updates and follow those by one large one. This system worked well for developers and myself when I was testing, and everything went pretty much swimmingly until MAX came out, after which point we all congratulated each other for our work and Minus, being "Maximized" was considered done.
Then time passed and the community began to have issues with certain aspects of MAX, which made me want to give the community a Valentine's gift in rebalancing Minus to be more enjoyable for everyone. When I proposed it to Moo, he liked the idea, but said that he was too busy with life to direct it, and passed the duty on to me and that's pretty much how I started to direct Minus. The word "Leader" is simple and more to the point of the role, but really I simply oversee all development and proposals.
So what went wrong?
There were disagreements on how things should be balanced that started off as debates and turned into arguments. I'm not going to name any specific instances (R.O.B.), but it was all rough and no one could come to terms on how things should be handled. And it wasn't just between Kien and I. Sammi, Glyph, Gold, Mech, Tybis, and anyone else not mentioned, everyone had their own views on what was "not nerfed enough" and "nerfed too much". Our goal of providing balance was vague as we never knew where the fine line was. Then it got nasty and personal. People started accusing each other of bias, and saying their views were better based upon their skills in the game, and that those who played better designed better, which really doesn't make much sense. Those who design better are better designers. Those who mostly debated these changes and considered skill the highest were the first to leave after being tired of disagreements. Glyph was one of those people. There was also an incident with Kien involving Link's infamous "37% damage fTilt jesus christ" and all of us requesting that be nerfed. The only way Kien would agree to this was if we sped up Mortal Draw. Personally this makes no sense, as nerfing one thing is not an excuse to buff another thing without seeing if said thing needs buffing in the first place. But ultimately we went with it since it didn't seem worth battling further.
After 1.01, I wanted to go back to that pushing the envelope thing I did before, and proposed adding Pichu to the game as Brawl Minus' first new character, as well as create a more polished game. At the time we had recruited TSON, the co-founder of Minus and responsible for most of the original coding, who agreed with this mindset. An argument involving coin element on Luigi's dTilt had ultimately caused Ellipsis to quit the team, who had disagreed with this change. Ellipsis later returned and apologized for acting irrationally, and agreed on removing the coin element on Luigi's dTilt. The development went on for months, with the community, as well as Glyph and Kien, pushing for a release date. I did my job of calculating when things would be ready by asking everyone involved in the coding of Pichu and other things, and between the two dates I proposed, April 29th and April 22nd, April 22nd was the day voted upon. The 22nd was, needless to say, a very very busy day. The vBrawl CSS had still not been made, and we had to rush out that at the last minute. Once that was all set, we transferred both versions off and had it ready for upload. But there was a mistake somewhere, and a test build was uploaded instead! Naturally we did what we could to rectify the situation as soon as possible! I wanted to keep my promise of getting the game out on the 22nd, but at the same time it was my mistake to not test the uploaded build, and delay the release of the game when that happened, and I have taken responsibility and apologized on several occasions soon after this happened. There was another incident with Kien. It was discovered that Mortal Draw could be combo'd into. Mortal Draw is an OHKO so that's uh really kinda unhealthy. Kien insisted on this change staying in, as he did not his main Link to be any weaker, and felt that the only one who should defeat Ganon's OHKO Punch should be Link with a better OHKO for Lore reasons that really had nothing to do with Minus balance. Mortal Draw got slowed down after a long battle.
3.5 was mostly smooth sailing. The removal of the SEP caused us to pick and choose what stages remained in the game, though. This is where I will directly confront one of Kien's points, regarding the stagelist. All of us in the dev room decided which stages would remain in the game based upon their popularity and how frequently they were played, which is how we wound up with a stage list very close to the one we have today. Some stages may be similar to others, like YS Melee, Battlefield, Dream Greens, and FoD, but when deciding which we would take out, we had decided against it due to A. All of these stages offering something unique, as well as being popular in their own right and B. There wasn't a stage to replace them with. Also Gold left during this period for his own reasons, as well as Glitch, who never really left the team but instead isn't a BR. Naturally he's still working on this very site and supporting Minus outside of the game itself.
3.Q had two bumps in the road during development: The first one is an incident once again revolving around R.O.B. basically, Kien made a new R.O.B. build form vBrawl, that focused on making him pretty much a zoner. Not only did it miss R.O.B.'s basic design in its execution (R.O.B. by design is a character who uses his projectiles to create openings and then rush in for combos).The build was fairly wonky and still needed a lot of things determined, and its proposal did not sound popular on the forums, so this R.O.B. build was ultimately rejected, and R.O.B. was once again given nerfs instead. The other was bigger, and this was related to SAHunterMech, who proposed a Gan-NUKE in place of the Gandouken, which was similar to Falcon's Punch aura in 2.x.6, in which the would be huge GFX hitbox surrounding the punch, only rather than Falcon's multihit, this would be a single hit. This sounded nice on paper, so it was developed and tested. And during testing, it had the same problems Falcon's, which was discourage actual edgeguarding and just use punches on the edge. Mech tried to rework it, but ultimately nothing worked right, so it was scrapped. Mech was upset and left, but is willing to work on non-fighter things if needed.
Now let's get to 4.0 development, and where we are today. There was another incident with Kien. The first is the Venus Lighthouse incident. When discussing stages, Kien proposed Venus Lighthouse. It was debated and people liked it, but Tybis and I expressed concern for anti-competition (we have since changed our minds, but this was our mindset at the time). This caused Kien to create a thread which, since this was a BR discussion and BR discussions should not be brought out to the public, I deleted on sight. This caused another incident with Kien, involving him acting against the interests of the BR and sending mass PMs. It gave us a view on Venus Lighthouse, but not in the way we wanted to get that view. Kien lost PM privileges and we agreed to reconsider Venus Lighthouse. There was another incident with Kien. While discussing Lavaville vs Norfair, a debate now known on the forums, BPC's request was brought up, and the two of us got in a hot debate about stages and the value of the request. We ultimately decided on what is now known in the 4.0 preview changelog, thanks to Moo messaging BPC himself about the matter. Despite it already being resolved and not involving him at all, Kien wrote a long essay and essentially left the dev room in a fit of rage. I had no interest in reading as the first two paragraphs were all personal insults towards me, and if the beginning of it was just mocking me and spitting on my image, I saw no reason why I should have to read further. Then several weeks later, there was another incident with Kien. Tybis mentioned Kien wanting to come back to the BR, so as leader I went to talk to Kien myself. Kien's immediate response was something along the lines of "Well my wishes were already broken because I wish to never talk to you again". We tried debating terms which were essentially listening to each other more. Since Kien has actually left the BR in fits of rage several times before, I figured I should test it this time. The results were...disappointing, to say the least. We can talk the talk together, but we just simply cannot walk the walk. And on top of this, the dev room since Kien's absence has been much more peaceful. I'll even confess, there was even relief from multiple people when he left. There were no arguments that lead to nowhere, no long essays, no personal attacks on one another, things were just...starting to work. Several people asides myself have shown that They don't want Kien back. All of these factors combined, alongside all of the aforementioned incidents, let me reach the conclusion to decline Kien reentry into the backroom.
And here we are today. Kien further harassed me pushing for him to get in, but I decided to block Kien since talking to him was only causing me stress and nothing seemed to change on either party. Kien then sent out mass PMs discussing a community uprising against me (which I learned of thanks to an anonymous tip) and telling the community that I am some sort of tyrant because I have the flaw that was mentioned in this thread (I skimmed, will reply to individual posts later) that if I'm not confident in someone's abilities, I shoot their ideas down if they don't seem right a little too early. As anyone else currently in the BR can tell you, I'm rather trustworthy of the likes of Sammi and Tybis, and Maw has warmed up to me very quickly. Nowhere in any point has Kien shown me that he knows "what he's doing", from his intense bias towards the Zelda franchise to making questionable changes to various characters (3.Q Dorf, among the others I already mentioned), and on top of that his personal vendetta and arrogant attitude against me only pushed me to trust him less as a team member. This is a fate that could have been avoided if both of us were a little different and more open to one another, but we have passed that point now, I am afraid.
Anyways, the thread has brought attention to the dev room and we all discussed this thread as well as my leadership, and came to the conclusion that I'm a fair leader to the team and that this thread was more unneeded drama, but did make us want to involve ourselves in the community more. We love the community, it's just we're busy with our lives too, but if it lets you trust us more as a development team, we are willing to make more time for the ones we make our game for.
and now we're discussing trading card games.
And that is my story.
TL;DR there were a lot of mistakes over Minus history, and I list a few incidents in which Kien and I got in debates that should not have happened and never ended well. Kien left the BR in rage and got even more enraged when I decided to not let him back in due to the fact that he acted against the BR. He's a capable coder but not a team player. We're going to work to involve ourselves more as a dev team with our community. Trading card games.
Now after writing the longest post I've ever made, it's time to read the rest of this thread and respond to individual posters. Feel free to reply to this one with any questions as well, and I will kindly answer them.
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