Iam Canadian said:
The nice thing is that with downloadable content, the concept of releasing rebalanced versions is effectively obsolete. After all, if Nintendo really had the inclination, they could just release patches online.
I think I'd rather have a [somewhat] broken game than to have them release a patch a few years down the road, once I've gotten used to all the little quirks and balances of the various characters, and then be forced to completely relearn them all over again. And chances are, any single patch wouldn't be able to completely balance the game anyways.
If you look at the various territorial releases for Melee, they re-balanced the game for the PAL release. It's better, no question [from what I've read, at least... never having actually played the PAL version personally], but Fox/Marth/Sheik/Falco/Peach are all still overpowered to various degrees, and Kirby/Bowser/Pichu/Mewtwo still suck pretty hard. With new discoveries and strategies being discovered all the time, Nintendo would have to release a series of patches to be able to come at all close to 'balancing' the game, and frankly I think we're better of dealing with any brokenness than to have to constantly re-adjust to new changes made to the game. Especially in a game as competitive and precise as Smash is.
And all things considered, I doubt Brawl would be released at a point where it's unbalanced enough to warrant a patch to begin with. Yeah, tiers a pretty prevalent in the tournament scene and Fox is a monster, but it's not like there's
one character that'll guarantee a victory in casual play, and even for tournaments they've never had to resort to banning any characters outright. Melee was more balanced than the original, and I'm sure they'll do a pretty good job again with Brawl.