This topic is something that has been resting on my mind since people thought that Luffy was going to be OP from the few video clips they saw of him. Before I start, let me shout out xSOLx Shady and his new video that he made, which is what really moved me to make this thread:

Now if you've happened to see this this video already, you probably know what I'm going to talk about. There is this common mentality that people have in the SSF2 community when they see a character that they presume to be OP. Usually these characters are either new, or were not as strong as they were before due to a lack of buffs. Players don't tend to complain about characters that fit the status quo of being high tier, such as Fox, Falco, Marth and Lloyd; for the most part, it is understood why these particular characters are the way they are. However, when you have characters such as Tails and Link getting buffs and becoming more formidable characters against the normal high tier characters, there is an immediate reaction that leads to the calling for these characters to be banned in tournaments or nerfed. For the longest time, I have tried to understand this flawed mentality and why it continues to persists within the community and frankly ruin the viability of some characters such as Naruto, who went from a character in 0.9b that people would constantly complain about to arguably ones of the lowest, if not the lowest tier character in the game.

To me, the answer to that question is fear, the fear of failure.

Initially, I saw it as the fear of something that was once weak being too powerful, but after immediately seeing statements like the one above, I realize that it's fear. Now as for me, I am not a competitive SSF2 player per say, but I do have my own philosophies when it comes to these topics and ideas. My belief is that instead of making the strong weak to accommodate the strong or those you see as weak, you make the weak strong, which isn't to necessarily accommodate the weak but to put everyone on a level playing field. The reason I think this way though is because when it come to this game and just life in general, I don't operate on fear. If I see a formidable player with a high tier character, I'm not going to disconnect from the room or SD x4 because I think I might lose, I'm going to stay and fight my fight, and if I get my a** kicked then I take it and learn. That's just me though; instead you have others that would rather not deal with the situation at hand and instead complain about the strength of a character that wasn't even in the conversation three months ago. Which leads us to where we are now in the community; a place where the game is getting updated at a pretty regular basis and the comments of the community are being heard by the developers.
A lot of people like to place blame on Mcleod for the lack of balance in Beta as it stands because of their "incompetence on balancing", when in reality it's because of the messages that we relay to them that are born out of this phobia I just got finished breaking down. Players would rather a character be nerfed and become enviable than have there be a level playing field, and we know this is true because as soon as a character does reaches a certain level, that phobia starts to kick in again and people cry for that character to be dragged back down. You cannot deny and say that this isn't having an effect on what's going on right now. The devs are clearly listening, just look at the roster from 0.9b to now, it's obvious.

And if you think that the same thing that happened to Naruto won't happen to Tails if this mentality persist, then I suggest you take a good look at the picture above.
Anyways, what do you guys think about this? I know this post is long but I kind of had a lot to breakdown and I didn't want my claims to look empty. Do you guys think that the criticism about characters like Tails and Link are justified, or are they just coming from a fearful place? Let me know, I want to discuss.

But how did the other person know he was Tails? You can't view your opponents' character in online mode...unless they are in the midst of battle

my theory is that it's easier to yell at the devs asking for nerfs than it is to adapt and get better and find ways to workaround stuff

Well you're not wrong about it being easier than adapting...
But when a character is legitimately broken, we have to tell you guys so you can fix it.
I often enjoy the unmentionable more that I do Beta, but I want to enjoy vanilla Beta as much as I did 9b, so that's personally why I complain so adamantly. I just want for vanilla Beta to be as good as 9b. Between certain "drama" that's happened behind the scenes of the public eye, at this point I feel like that's the only way for the SSF2 community to be good again. It'd make everything that's happened to get to that point worth it.

Then again, I've been directly involved in some of the drama, so who am I to say any of this? I don't even know the full story, but everything that I know is so ridiculous and f*** up that I don't even want to know the full story in fear that it'd be even worse.

Do you think that complaints about characters truly come up because they are broken or do you think it's based mainly off emotion? Just today, I asked people to explain why characters like Naruto were considered broken and it eventually came down to them feeling annoyed by his style and saying that he wasn't fun to play against in 0.9b. If we as a community are going to make our opinions on characters known to the developers, then we can't come to them with complaints based on feelings while at the same time criticizing them for not understanding balancing. A line has to be drawn somewhere.

Lol I was just explaining why I complain. I actually placed Naruto pretty low on whatever tier list I made just because I thought he had a low skill ceiling to match his skill floor and because everyone knew how to deal with him. In 9b, I complained about Zelda and how long Beta was taking because zelda was legitimately broken. Other people complain and expect change just when they don't like something.