I don't know what to think anymore.
I am a Sirlin fanatic. I own a hardback copy of Playing to Win, still in perfect condition. I've written him emails asking him to further clarify on certain points, just so I had no ambiguity in my head of what it was exactly that he wanted me to do. I bring up "Introducing the Scrub" at the first sign of the word "Cheap."
Sirlin plainly states in his article "What should be banned?" the rules for banning. We have no problem with the first two rules, as they are about tactics. The third rule is the whole heart of the matter, though.
Sirlin said:
Well duh, but we have yet to figure out if it is warranted or not. Currently, it is possible to do well in a tournament, even win a tournament, without playing Metaknight. However, playing Metaknight gives you the greatest chance of winning, as he has no bad matchups and no bad stages.
Sirlin said:
Only in the most extreme, rare cases should something be banned because it is “too good.” This will be the most common type of ban requested by players, and almost all of their requests will be foolish. Banning a tactic simply because it is “the best” isn’t even warranted. That only reduces the game to all the “second best” tactics, which isn’t necessarily any better of a game than the original game. In fact, it’s often worse!
Is the game better without Metaknight? Is it more competitive? Will the better player win more often? Character matchups come into play more. There is less neutrality. Simply because the vast majority of tournament matches played are going to be played between two characters that do not have a neutral matchup with each other, players who are better will still lose. The game goes from 0% character, 100% player, to 10% character, and 90% player, or something along those lines.
It's not as if diversity doesn't exist already; not everyone who is winning tournaments plays Metaknight, just the majority. There are still people out there who are placing highly and winning tournaments who aren't playing Metaknight.
Without Metaknight, there would still be a "best character"; it just wouldn't be Metaknight anymore. This new character would become the center of the metagame, and Smashboards would revolve around tactics for beating this new character. The pikachu boards would be working on a way to beat GaW's turtle, or perhaps find a way to catch Rob's top while it was being thrown. The PT boards would be looking for ways to force Marth into an Ivysaur upsmash.
In Melee, most non top tier characters were countered by another character, be it a top tier character or not. Not everyone was countered by sheik; some characters had an advantage over sheik. Not everyone was countered by Marth, some characters had an advantage over Marth. Ness might have done very poorly against Marth, but Ness's upthrow > uair did well enough against fast fallers that he had a standing chance of beating them, even if he didn't have the "advantage" against them.
In Brawl, every single character in the game is countered by the same character: Metaknight. This is a slight exaggeration, but it isn't far from the truth. Instead of the counters being spread around the tier list, they are focused only on one character. It is not that he inherently is broken, it's just that he happens to have a moveset that happens to do very well on every stage and against every character.
Is there any difference between these two concepts? Yes. Akuma wasn't just the counter to every character; he was broken. There was no chance, no hope of beating him. In Akuma-legal tournaments, everyone who played Akuma would get higher placings than everyone who didn't play Akuma. He was all the characters' counter to such an extreme that he ceased to be simply the conglomeration of all counters, instead becoming the
only viable tournament character.
All that is speculation; obviously. Akuma was banned long before he was able to actually dominate the tournament scene. That doesn't change the facts, though. You cannot compare Metaknight to Akuma. Metaknight was at least designed with the game in mind; Akuma was designed to destroy all of the other characters in the game.
So, yes, there will be more character diversity in the game if Metaknight is banned. The only thing we will actually lose is Metaknight; nothing else bad will happen. In this case, second-best tactics are better for the game than best tactics. However, that is not the only criteria.
Sirlin said:
The only reasonable case to ban something because it is “too good” is when that tactic completely dominates the entire game, to the exclusion of other tactics.
Does Metaknight completely dominate the game? No. He does not. Other characters are still winning tournaments, and over half the characters who place top 8 in tournaments aren't Metaknight.
So, what does Sirlin mean by dominate the game? Every single character's metagame right now is solely about how to beat Metaknight. However, he doesn't actually dominate the game; he is just doing well in tournaments. He dominates the metagame. He does well in the game.
What do we do?
The game would be
better if Metaknight were not in it.
Sirlin said:
Only in the ultra-rare case that the player is right and the game is worth saving and the game without the ultra-tactic is a ten times better game—only then is the notion even worth fighting for. And even in this case, it may take time for the game to mature enough for a great percentage of the best players and tournament organizers to realize that tactic should, indeed, be banned. Before an official ban takes place, there can also be something called “soft ban.”
This is the stage where we are at right now, except instead of soft bans, we are simply testing the waters with various MK-less tournaments.
Sirlin said:
There seems to be a tacit agreement amongst top players in Japan—a soft ban—on playing Old Sagat. The reason is that many believe the game to have much more variety without Old Sagat. Even if he is only second best in the game by some measure, he flat out beats half the characters in the game with little effort. Half the cast can barely even fight him, let alone beat him. Other top characters in the game, good as they are, win by much more interaction and more “gameplay.” Almost every character has a chance against the other best characters in the game. The result of allowing Old Sagat in tournaments is that several other characters, such as Chun Li and Ken, become basically unviable.
This sounds exactly like our situation! Old Sagat severely hurt character diversity. Metaknight severely hurts Character diversity. Old Sagat is soft-banned in Japan, and this allows many characters to be played who wouldn't have had a chance to be played otherwise. However, Metaknight, instead of being the 2nd or 3rd best character in the game, is the absolute best character in the game, having
no bad matchups.
Sirlin said:
If someone had made these claims in the game’s infancy, no sort of ban would be warranted. Further testing through tournaments would be warranted. But we now have ten years of testing. We don’t have all Old Sagat vs. Old Sagat matches in tournaments, but we do know which characters can’t beat him and as a result are very rarely played in America. We likewise can see that this same category of characters flourishes in Japan, where Old Sagats are rare and only played by the occasional violator of the soft ban. It seems that the added variety of viable characters might outweigh the lack of Old Sagat. Is this ban warranted then? To be honest, I am not totally convinced that it is, but it is just barely in the ballpark of reasonableness since there is a decade of data on which to base the claim.
We are in the game's infancy right now. Perhaps we are almost at the glass ceiling of skill; perhaps this game is as shallow as it seems and very soon people will get to the point where they cannot get any better, and Metaknight will simply win everything. Or perhaps Metaknight's skill cap is about to be reached, and eventually some other characters will surpass him. Is it worth the wait?
And yet, banning him
right now will make the game better
instantly! What do we do?
I don't know.
