Sure, this infinite requires selecting one distinctly sub-optimal custom, another trade-off custom, and then using that trade-off custom in a way that's pure suicide if your opponent has a functional shield button, but then again, most of the country banned the stage Wuhu Island on the basis of an obscure glitch that has essentially zero relevance to competitive play and that further is no longer even mechanically possible in the game with the latest patch. I'm coming to understand that imaginary balance problems are a lot more insidious than real balance problems; real balance problems quickly make themselves clear since people actually do the associated stuff and win tournaments or at least do very well in them in obnoxious ways whereas imaginary balance problems survive in the public mythos for a long time. For a related example, consider that I still hear almost every day about how broken ledge stalling custom Villager is despite the fact that it has been clearly demonstrated to be a generally ineffective tactic if used against an educated opponent (that is, it can ONLY work with surprise factor which is why ADHD doing it the very first time was the very best performance it has ever had). If it were a semi-decent tactic, everyone would know the limitations as people would try to do it and would lose for various reasons. As an awful tactic, no one tries it since the percentage of educated players is high enough that even making it out of pools with ledgestalling Villager at any major would be impossible, but enough players are not educated about how to counter it that the myth that it works just survives.



I'm not really convinced this is an infinite in the first place not because of any flaw in the mechanical theory behind it (it's sound) but just because of this community's repeatedly poor track record in documenting how combos actually work. This was plainly done against an inert opponent; they did better than most in showing that mashing doesn't matter, but they didn't explore the critical topics of DI and SDI. I'm sure we all remember Link's "infinite" that wasn't actually an infinite since you could just SDI out after 4-5 jabs which actually resulted in fairly modest damage with the real point of the whole set-up being that Link could hit confirm into his smash attacks. I do worry that hysteria about this not real infinite was a contributing factor into Link basically being patched out of the game (the patch removed, by far, the best thing about Link as a character)... That's not to say this is decisively not real, but there has not yet been enough evidence presented for us to conclude it's definitely an infinite.



Of course, the broader point is that even if it turns out to be real (which is plausible), our current best intuition suggests this combo is not powerful and will likely come up exceptionally rarely if at all. My fear is that as an imaginary balance problem it will be a lot more powerful than it could be as a real balance problem. If it were a real balance problem, we'd have ample tournament evidence of it being dangerous, could quickly analyze what makes it tick, and could easily issue some concise ban to address the issue since we can probably agree that we're all better off without Ice Climbers as a speed character existing. If it is an imaginary problem, it can create a lot more hysteria. We need more effective avenues to dissipate hysteria over imaginary balance problems; I used to be a believer in "if you think it's broken, go out and win enough tournaments with it to prove your point" but clearly most people are not inclined to remain calm until such tournament winning happens. The evidence also suggests that imaginary problems will quickly disseminate from smashboards postings and youtube videos but responses that rigorously analyze the situations to prove there is no problem do not tend to go nearly as viral. When stuff like this infinite comes up as, at best, a very vague possibility of a balance problem that needs substantial additional time and exploration, how should we be responding to this for the health of the game?