Add to the list everything going in the Smash community right now, which has spilled over into other communities that support the Smash community. Nintendo is more or less cancelling events because people still like Smash Bros Melee.
To be fair, they're cancelling events because they're using emulation to play Melee. They've previously allowed it at events. Not saying that's necessarily the right choice, but it's important to get the facts straight.
Also, there's been lots of serious issues with the Melee community leaders recently with sexual misconduct, so it's also possible that Nintendo just wants to distance themselves from the whole scene.
They previously "allowed" it at Evo 2013 after massive backlash from trying to shut down the Melee stream, years before anything related to sexual misconduct was talked about. There is nothing recent enough about how they treat the Melee scene to blame emulators or sexual misconduct, it's been documented to be happening since the scene was revived post-brawl.
The evo shutdown was presumably attempted to avoid any comparisons between their newest game (Brawl) and Melee; similarly, the recent shutdown probably has more to do with how bad Ultimate's online is compared to emulated Melee, rather than the mere fact that they're on an emulator in the first place. Other emulated online Melee tournaments without Ultimate have gotten away with it so far.
Honestly if I could play smash bros on my macbook with my friends and relatives I'd sell my switch today.
The switch screen is too small for local multiplayer and hooking it up to a TV w/ power is too bulky and annoying because they're picky about adapters unlike laptops. You also need a case to transport them because they turn on too easily when their buttons are exposed. A 13" laptop is way better.
(I'm not doing local multiplayer today because COVID, but I know I will in during future trips)
Indeed it feels very clunky at first due to the complete absence of an input buffer; you must only input commands once they become possible. The learning curve is brutal.
Other than that the game is far more responsive than Ultimate, with only 3 total frames of input latency even online, unlike the 6 frames offline and at least ten online of Ultimate.
It would be nice for Ultimate to have better latency…
I'm not sure when you tried. The current state-of-the-art emulation for melee is much more responsive than console melee; on a high-refresh-rate gaming monitor, you have 2 whole frames of extra input lag to play around with. For local play you can just set the appropriate buffer to match console melee; if you're playing online, those frames are used to send inputs to your opponent(s), making online possible without any extra delay.
Mmmm, if they're trying to play on a Mac, Slippi is currently a bit rougher than the other platforms. A common misconception is that Slippi = Dolphin; in reality, Slippi is (currently) a fork of an older Dolphin and doesn't have the features for macOS that modern Dolphin has (e.g, a Metal/MoltenVK graphics backend). OpenGL on macOS is a nightmare - and indeed, if you opened mainline Dolphin right now and tried to play it using OpenGL, it will tell you in bright yellow letters that it's going to be bad. :)
I backported an earlier version of the Metal/MoltenVK backend to Slippi which should hopefully be in the next release, whenever they get around to it. This provides decent performance on Intel Macs and ARM Macs under Rosetta 2, and ideally tides the (mac) community over until Slippi finds parity with mainline Dolphin.
