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An 'insult'? Did you even read their patch notes, there's very little overlap between the two. You most definitely are out of line.

Being equal, being balanced, and having all the same abilities are three different things you are confusing.

You are saying that characters shouldn't have all the same abilities, everyone (including BBrawl people) agree.

You are saying that characters shouldn't all be equal. That usually means each character has a 50/50 matchup against everyone else. That's also largely true, it's ok for matches to be a little favored to one side or the other. It's inevitable anyways.

That has nothing to do with being balanced. Being balanced means that each character has at least a fighting chance against every other character. In standard Brawl Metaknight is usually favored as a 60% or 70% winner over every other character. That makes him way too good, he always has an upper hand. They don't want to ruin his flavor or make him 'equal'. All the want to do is give the other characters a good fighting chance against him.

The pie-in-the-sky goal is simply to have every character be fun to play AND a viable choice. So that everyone, even competitive players, can pick any character and have a shot at winning. If you read the patch notes you'd know that the characters have very minor changes that don't affect how fun they are to play. For example read Metaknights change list and see how little it changes his playstyle.

There's nothing about balanced that means all characters have to be the same. If you read the BBrawl patchnotes you'll notice that the flavors of the characters are all kept intact (in some cases enhanced). Melee, for example, was quite balanced with a selection of characters that could be played at the top level.

Anyways, even for a party game you don't want one jerk friend to play a god like character and win all the time. Balance is still important.

It's aimed at the competitive crowd (aka no items), but it doesn't force you to play that way. You can enable all the items and still have the same level of fun you always do. The difference is that you get some of the nice balance features. No more 4th player stalling on the ledge for the entire match, tripping or someone constantly destroying everyone with Metaknight.

It's competitively aimed, but there's still fun in it for everyone.

MMOs should take a hint from Dragon Age:Origins or other Bioware RPGs (the original NWN did this as well)

In DA:O most of the origins ( and the common prologue) start off with a sense of trouble. You know something is going to go wrong but it's not an immediate threat. The game lets you stretch your legs and learn the system in a small controlled setting. Then once you move out of the tutorial phase everything goes bottom up and chaos breaks out. The tutorial-ish part lasts long enough to get through explaining the systems. Then hell breaks loose and you get the chaotic 'hook' that shows off your game.

How are you defining closed vs open beta. The 'open' beta for MO seems just as closed as the closed beta for say UO.

A nice list of stuff but the "Some skills won't affect PvP" thing is kinda worrisome. I value player skill > time invested for MMOs but I hate seeing skills or special rules for PvP instead of PvE.

Also any word on if this MMO is going to be sharded or 1-server?

If I had my way I'd call it "Sea of Dreams" and nothing else but of course that'd be marketing suicide. I remember reading an article way back when by the Max Payne Designer (or other guy-in-charge) saying that he felt that games without numbers and subtitles are much better name-wise. Not so much for marketing but for the uh artistic nature of it. His example was that he wanted to call Max Payne 2 simply "The Fall of Max Payne" and at the time I thought that'd be a far better title than "Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne". The same applies to Bioshock 2, I think if it was just called Sea of Dreams it'd be much more appealing artistically.

Glad someone made this comment. I'm too stunned that someone doesn't know about the nukes in SC to have made it myself

I dunno Infamous that sounds an awful lot like my Christmas.

You're putting Mythic in a no-win situation. Either they're faithful to the lore (to an extent at least) with a holiday event or they're 'demeaning' towards the real holiday. Not to mention you are off your rocker if a dark humor joke in a video game affects your enjoyment of the holidays.