Written by Glenn | 01 April 2011

Amazingly, the Smash community, be it Brawl or Melee, had never had a universal ruleset. Things were tweaked from here and there depending on whomever was running the tournament. There was a skeleton understanding of what should and should not be in the rules (no items, some stages, etc.).

On Wednesday, a committee of tournament organizers as well as dignitaries at Smashboards will unveil the universal set of rules called the Unity Ruleset; tournaments that want to get the national recognition will be asked to use this format.  The group has been putting together the ruleset for more than a couple months, seeking out information from other active tournament organizers that have run national events (Full disclosure: I will be running a tournament in May and will be using this).

Chris "Alpha Zealot" Brown, one of the veterans in the Smash community and a member of the committee, broke it down:

The reason for the ruleset is basically to make the community more unified and to have a more stable competitive environment. This is important because it can be hard at current to compare the skill of players at different tournaments, when the rules can vary pretty significantly. This is especially true since everyone wants stat-tracking of some sort, and they want it to be accurate. Also we look incredibly unprofessional to potential outside tournaments or sponsors when they know if they pick the game up there will be a several month long debate over rules - since before this there was no real standard, and that debate usually shows the worst of the community ("Me" mentalities).

The Unity Ruleset is only for the US at current. It would be to hard to coordinate and negotiate with other countries as the positions between rules are simply to far apart. Which brings me to my last point: this ruleset is less about "what is competitively right!" since everyone disagrees about what is or is not right in the Smash community, and instead it is about compromise. If one TO, for example, would favor 16 stages, and another would favor 12, then the medium there is 14. That is an example of the type of compromises that get made.

He wouldn't give me any specifics but let me know that public splitting of prize money will no longer be allowed, and that a ban from future national tournaments is possible.