Alright, apologies for wall of text but here’s some general suggestions I have for the game.  A lot of them would be big changes and very much easier said than done, but I feel like they’re necessary for this game to thrive as a competitive platform fighter.  Some of them are also smaller changes that I think would be easy fixes.  I don’t have any proper thought out character-related suggestions because I haven’t played Brawlout enough to get a proper understanding of every character.  However, as someone that studies games and spends most of his free time playing platform fighters, I feel like there are general things that could be improved on.  Also, I think I’ve mentioned a few of these already before but I’m saying them again because it’s fuckin important

For starters, I think I mentioned in in here before but it’s *incredibly* necessary that the stages get revised.  The unofficial names of the stages were also mentioned here before but I have a shit memory so I forgot them lol, so I’ll just be using whatever sticks best for me.  Going from left to right, I will be calling them Battlefield, Cave, Rock Wall, Ice, and Pokemon Stadium.

Battlefield needs the right platform.  There is no reason not to have it.  Like, literally none, it just promotes randomness/port priority.  Symmetry should be a key factor in designing stages, and it just makes zero sense to not have the right platform there.

As of now, Cave is a great stage for FFAs due to the wide top platform giving more movement space.  However, in 1v1s the top platform is a bit too much.  I’m not suggesting to change it, I think this stage should be left as is actually.  BUT, I don’t think it should be legal for singles in competitive play.  As a stage, it should be used for doubles only competitively.  It works perfectly for doubles and shortening the top platform could potentially ruin that.

Rock Wall needs to lose the crumbling rock hazards.  Casually I think it’s great but competitively it just adds jank, which causes frustration to the players.  There’s a time and place to make the game more spectator friendly, stage hazards in competitive play is not one of them in my opinion.

Ice is of course the biggest offender.  Similar to rock wall, Ice needs to lose the walkoffs.  It’s good casually but its horrendous competitively.

Finally, Pokemon Stadium, my personal favorite stage, is NEARLY perfect in my opinion.  However, I would move the platforms a little bit closer to the center.  This way they can be used more for movement options in neutral and will overall see more use throughout the match.  As of now it kinda has similar edgeguarding to rock wall post-crumble and has neutral similar to theoretically FD, but if they move closer to the center it will able to be more unique and more fun to play on.

Aside from that, the other big deal that I wanted to mention is that as of now, the game is... a bit volatile.  Neutral game is often slow and drawn out, and can lead to extremely long matches.  However, some characters will kill stupid fucking early with rage, and since everyone in this game has a bad recovery some characters (P A C O) will die at dumb percents.  Because of this, it’s hard to decide what’s the proper amount of stocks and the proper time limit for a match.  I think this leads to two options.

The first is that you guys modify the characters to speed up their neutral game.  This, as one can imagine, would be a very hard thing to do.  I don’t recommend this option.

The second idea is to add ledge mechanics.  This eliminates one huge area of volatility, therefore making the game not so bipolar.  I personally think it should be similar to melee, brawl and 64, where only one person can grab the ledge at a time.  This not only increases the strategy in edgeguarding, but makes it a lot more fun for the people that could have potentially died at 20 because volt had rage and hit them with a forward air.

If the second idea would be implemented, I personally think the game should move to two stocks six minutes instead of three stock seven.  This makes the now slower game faster, therefore increasing the spectator friendliness in a field where being spectator friendly goes a long way in a game’s success.

My third idea is controller related and based off a hunch that I’m confident is correct.  To prelude this, in Smash 4 the character Greninja has a bug in which side b comes out at more angles than a side b is supposed to. Angles in which every other character would use up b will come out as side b if you’re playing greninja.  As one can imagine, this often causes numerous SDs and frustration across players of multitudes of skill levels.  I think Brawlout has the same thing.  I have hundreds of hours into Smash 4, and I nearly NEVER misinput a side b (I don’t main Greninja).  However, in Brawlout I seem to be doing it every other stock.  I think that if this was fixed, it would make the game a much more enjoyable experience for players that use controllers of all skill levels.

My final suggestion is actually super easy and minor. The 7:00 timer starts during the countdown. Delay it so it begins once the 3 2 1 Go ends.

Once again, apologies for the wall of text but I feel like it’s all important things to at least consider.  This is a really fun game and I’d love to see it grow competitively.