You seem to be under the impression that Brawl is vastly different from Melee when it comes to item mechanics. That’s untrue. Items spawn is the same way as Melee. The items in Brawl has skewed the risk-to-reward ratio even more towards the reward side. In the case of items, Melee experience definitely carries over to Brawl.
The best players have already shown that they can easily win with items on at places like GameStop and Best Buy. The winners of all of them were SWF users who played without items 90% of the time. Hell, at my EB Canada tournament I knew how to use the items better than most people there and I never play with items. Of course I still lost, but I blame that on myself and my refusal to get used to WiiMote controls before the tournament, not items.
You seem to be under the impression that brawl and melee are the same game. They are not. Continually talking about how ‘items have not changed’ (when they have) is not only narrow, but extremely questionable. Why don’t you people ever mention the MULTITUDE of things you can do defensively in brawl that you could not in melee?
The sooner you learn that “new game = new rules”, the better off your entire outlook is going to be. You do NOT have any more experience with BRAWL than anyone else.
Tournaments held in the first few weeks of release are BOUND to favor old melee players. Thinking that won’t change as new people get used to the game is absurd.
Here’s the thing a number of you keep blocking out, or are totally oblivious to and you need to go read up on your own history. Items were in Melee until one, and ONLY one aspect came to be too much for competitive play - exploding capsule spawns in the middle of attacks. Until this came to be such a problem in Melee that items as a whole had to go as a side effect in order to alleviate the problem, they were in play, with a number of individual items removed from play (such as similarly removed-from-play items in Brawl such as Tomatoes, Hearts, Pokeballs, etc.). This one problem has become an option in Brawl, thus removing it altogether without compromising the rest of the list. Let us not even go into the whole shift in defensive option boosts Brawl gave us to make those rewards far less significant than they were in Melee.
More and more I see people from the Smash community that have joined in well after this all went down and have no idea how their own game came to be the way it is, but are under the belief that it is better and that’s that. It’s so ingrained that contrary beliefs are viewed as a joke. It’s why I gave up on the Smash community back in 2k5, after being there since the beginning. Now that I see there’s people that are willing to return to the roots of the new game in the series with a fresh start, I’m having faith in this game’s success as it is. Maybe after Evo, things will come to light to show, once again, they aren’t worth it. Then again, considering the differences between the two, I’m guessing this conservative ruleset may be opened more for next year.