I can't discredit a guy for running with a motif with sprinkles of hyperbole and exaggeration.
They're powerful and effective.
Love it.
A few thoughts and opinions and considerations later.
Brawl Meta Knight and Smash4 Bayo are very difficult to compare. The areas of which people have issues are similar in some ways, but very different in others.
One gets caught up in how discourse is going very easily and often stays within that paradigm for ease's case, not necessarily for appropriate argument's sake.
Bayo and MKs positions as no.1 both in data and tier, near impervious recovery/edge options and large selection of powerful and unique options (being able to fly around and hurt you while doing it); obviously not to the same extent/power level, is about it when it comes to overall comparisons.
Certain tools produce similar game patterns, and of course they both have animosity towards them. My aim in comparing them has mostly been in consideration of different game contexts - it is uncanny how many parallels to the arguments and emotions from all sides exist between MK and Bayonetta,
actually it's absolutely frikken terrifying. The numbers are different, the whys and hows are too, but the results are the same, thus far. However, to be abstract like this is a bit subjective and it's hard to have everyone on the same page for it - rip.
One of the main issues people seem to have with Bayo is lack of interactivity (and maybe self-hurting interaction - like using SDI to survive one potential death at extremely low % only to die from it in a way unexpected to both players; blame rage I guess), something which MK was guilty of through planking and the like, but with tons of rules aimed to curb him and the way the meta went (very few characters played), wasn't primarily seen at high levels of play that far beyond what other characters would do (running the clock was the norm). Many characters are arguably rendered unviable because of said strategies, but this isn't unique to them in either game.
However, it (interactivity) was integral to what constituted hatred towards Ice Climbers. Ice Climbers didn't have a dominant array of options, they just had a small selection of incredibly rewarding tools and a strategy alongside it that essentially negated all their weaknesses ['risk/reward']. MK's risk/reward was fantastic across the array of options he possessed, but they weren't all the best, other characters could shine better than he could (asides from Ice Climbers!!!! ....... and Fox [dammit]); again this is somewhat similar to Bayo but the same could be said for most high/top tiers of any game. Ice Climbers as a character was incredibly unpopular to play and had a large negative stigma for those who did; the emergence of them in any capacity caused outrage which would die down because of inconsistency - but given enough time (and ruleset buffs), which is what we were seeing in 2012 onward, more people were willing to play them and hence the 'dying down' part started to dwindle, things were becoming more obviously a problem that wouldn't take a break in the next week or so when Nairo, Ally, ZeRo (
) etc [it was actually probably M2K] would win a tournament where ICs wouldn't do
as well - ICs never really had the chance to win a national, they didn't have options to deal with certain situations so if you were lucky enough to get them there, then running the clock against them was
the only viable strategy which was doable by
anyone.
Unfortunately there was no conclusion to ICs and thus little to draw off for it to reflect on now in a 'competitive' view point, especially in comparison to Meta Knight who everyone and their mother's dog knows about and was a problem from day one.
MK is NOW considered bona fide 'ban material' to a hyper-majority of us although that was
not the case at all during the period of time which it mattered; and this is why I'm bringing the two up for most of my argument - the very comparative feelings and arguments people have, but still a unique situation, one which takes a little bit from two Brawl characters but still can't be directly compared to either. I think people automatically trust me when I say Ice Climbers was ban worthy too, which I appreciate, but they didn't have the data, consistency or number of players; Das Koopa's post about what he would feel about a Bayo ban and specifically why is... what we would have heard for Ice Climbers. Maybe they weren't bannable, but to many who lasted until the end of Brawl's life time, they were the final nail in the coffin.
How they compare sans context differences, I assume it within my arguments, but I think it should be fleshed out a bit. I can keep it lazy and just say Bayo is more like ICs than MK,- and maybe it would be easier than trying to go with familiarity but
shrug.
Bayonetta is not a typical smash character in many ways, neither are Ice Climbers. Meta Knight had immediate impacts on the game as his overtuning in contrast to the rest of the cast was extremely blatant. He was easy to pick up and play much like Cloud is/was earlier on.
If you were a 'better player' (v.dubious) than someone else and were having difficulties with your main for any reason, then
channeling your hate and anger into the dark side was common. This was further enhanced by the fact our stage list had 2/3rds of it as near auto-wins for MK in like, every match up. This accessibility allowed people to segue away from their mains and characters they loved to playing MK more and more in tournament, and this is what happened, a lot.
For people here from the beginning of the Smash4, it was exactly the same as what was happening with Diddy Kong.
This isn't just the fault of just MK, this is the fault of the poorer balance across the rest of the cast and the ruleset/mentalities we had at the time of 'everything is ok unless its blatantly obviously not ok! [circle camping]'. In smash4 we have vastly better balance, and there are a lot more options for picks that can do well against most of the cast, including high tiers. We don't have Delfino Plaza, Castle Siege, Norfair, Brinstar, etc etc legal - which would likely result in people learning a 'stage pocket' - I would say that if this were the case there would be more popularity for those with great recoveries and vertical prowess for those stages - perhaps Bayo, ZSS, etc would be more popular for this purpose. The point is, there was a lot more incentive to start playing MK than there is to start playing Bayonetta.
Ice Climbers chain grabs were discovered relatively early and fluffs of "BAN" could be heard whenever a guy sat down in training mode, learned how to chaingrab MK and Falco, then went to an event spamming grab; a lot of people did this - but very few kept up with it. Bayonetta arguably had a similar splash on release, people sat in training mode and learned the basic ABK into death combo and went to an event spamming side-b and would cause widespread salt (still seems to happen, just the grounded version??), but very few of those people kept up with it.
Everyone assumed she would get patched, and although right now we don't expect a patch, I'm sure it held people back for a very long time to committing to the character. People also had committal issues to ICs because you had to deal with stages that were auto-lose for you, and MK and Snake had 'easy' ways to combat grab spam and seemed like brick walls/unwinnable match ups for them (it took years for this to change, by a considerable amount of work by players like 9B and Vinnie - in part to prove ICs were broken; Salem also seems to want to prove this with Bayo and has helped convince people and top players she's
at least suspect).
25-30%~ of the points of the character ranking list (linked earlier) was the starting point when it came to MK. And most chars in a top 8 at large tournaments would be MK.
People readily accepted that most of the cast of Brawl was unviable from the get go - Dedede and Falco chain grabs were out there day one, Falco chain grabbed you to the ledge into a guaranteed down air, that's your stock for most of the cast (and I remember sitting down near Fiction at genesis1 as he explained how one needs to SDI falco's dair into the stage and tech to not die from it to a Donkey Kong main, and it was still a very foreign concept to most; a year and a half in - people thought Wario's MU with MK might be close to even at around this time as Fiction maintained dominance over SoCal MKs). Snake was second in the first tier list, yet was considered to have be hard countered by Falco and Dedede.
Idiots (<3) would still be playing Yoshi, Ness, Lucas and Ganondorf (everyone still had some form of meta development), but many were competitively dead on arrival. Imagine if the best player try hards of all your favourite mid or lower characters in Smash4 couldn't and weren't expected to make it out of pools at large events ever? But often still had some success at the local level, or maybe would take a set off Ally's Snake one time (many beautiful times).
But what would MK be like if he had a cohort like Bayonetta's in Smash4? What if instead of a dwindling list of 8ish stages we were still juggling 15+ at the point of Bayo's arrival? How many people would have been willing to migrate to Meta Knight after going 1.5 years into their character considering a saner playing field? ZeRo went from Fox to Diddy during the time Diddy was broken (for that reason), and stuck with him despite feeling other characters were better after patches/dlc. Many long-time top PGR players have dabbled in secondaries, but none have switched character. This can be used [better] by the pro-bayo side probably, but it looks like people tend to be stubborn. At a certain point in Brawl, there wasn't
new MKs rising up from the ashes EVER at high level, the exception being Nairo. At this point of the game we're seeing Bayos rise up despite the 1.5 year lag fall and it's seemingly all new players thus far, will the trend continue like ICs?
Meta Knight was the hardest match up for many characters, but not all characters,
especially at 2 years into the game's life time. There was a lot of dumb and broken stuff in the game available to many characters to allow this to happen. In the long run more and more characters would find their worst mu becoming MK or ICs (Snake would go from Falco/Dedede being 'hard counters' to even, due to consistent counterplay being found).
The trend that is apparently common between the two, but slower - growth in % of tournament dominance, animosity towards her, ambivalence towards the game/issue/community (and the likelihood of me going into permanent deja vu hallucinations every time I use social media). The metrics for which is suitable for one being a problem wouldn't be the same, but % dominance would still be a point for a 'competitive' argument.
But as I've also said, it still isn't an appropriate time to ban her. Instead of the darkest, we might be going down the iciest time line instead,
outcome uncertain (8). Lack of action indefinitely is the norm and poses a similarly catastrophic end (probably will get Smash5 before we reach that point? or at least the announcement, if that's any relief?) but maybe not at all.
But something important - a general observation of most top level players losing to Bayonetta except for one person (this isn't a consistent thing, not remotely a trend yet, chill), hence something is ok -
is one fallacy we should try our best to avoid.
This took forever, #_#
I hope it's an okay read! Time to eat/die.
