I'm going to respond to this topic with a personal story.
When Melee was the latest game, I played the absolute worst character in the game: Mewtwo. I did not care that he was at the bottom of low tier. I did not care how often I lost. I did not care that he had 2 specials that were basically unusable to me. I played him only because I enjoyed the playstyle. I did wish that he was a bit stronger, but I made do with what I had because that's how things were at the time. I was a Mewtwo player and I was resigned to that fate.
During that time, nobody told me to play a better character. Nobody tried to discourage me from doing what I wanted. Nobody tried to dissuade me because nobody considered me a threat.
Then Brawl was coming out. I learned that Meta Knight was going to be playable, and with Meta Knight being one of my favorite characters I couldn't wait to use him. I didn't really care if he was low tier or not. Time passed, the game was released, and it came to be known just how powerful Meta Knight was.
Only then, when I had a high tier character, did the complaints suddenly start coming in. "You only play Meta Knight because he's cheap!" "Meta Knight is so easy to win with it's ridiculous." "Just spam mach tornado to win!" These people all talked about things like "honorable play" and "fairness", but the funny thing is: Nobody really cared when I played a character who was too weak. They only had a problem when I played a character who was too strong. They only had a problem with my character choice when it threatened their ability to win.
If they truly cared about fairness, they would've complained about Mewtwo just as hard as they did about Meta Knight. However, they didn't really care about fairness, regardless of their claims. They only cared about their own, fragile, pathetic little egos. So they complained about things that threatened their egos, and then made up excuses for their complaints in order to further protect their egos from the obviousness of their pettiness.
Sadly, I did not realize their deception at the time. I fell for it and started playing Zelda (another bottom tier character) for the rest of the Brawl era.
This created kindof a conflict between ideals in my head. I had long ago read Sirlin's articles on Playing to Win, and I agreed with the central message: You should play in a way that allows you to actually win, and not let scrubs stop you from doing so. To me, playing to win seemed like it was the single most honest way to play. In truth, at the end of the match, you lost or you won. As long as you played your best and did everything you could do, then the result of the match was honest. You either outperformed the opponent or you did not.
On the other hand, if you did not do your best, and if you played to achieve honor instead of victory, then the results of the match were never honest, and you could always hide your ego behind this dishonesty by saying things like "I lost because my character is weak" or "I wasn't really playing my best". This to me was a huge roadblock to getting better, because I couldn't stop thinking about how weak my character was. I never had to face my own weaknesses, because I was preoccupied with my character's weaknesses.
While such words as "honor" may sound alluring to the naive, in the end it's just a lie you tell yourself to feel better. "You totally suck at this game and always lose, but at least you played with honor, right? You don't have to learn anything or improve as a person as long as you don't threaten anybody's egos with so-called 'dishonorable' choices such as 'playing a character you actually like and want to play as' or 'trying to push the limits of the game' or 'just flat out being better than the other person'."
I began to think that honor had nothing to do with actually being good at anything, or even being a good person. What's so holy and righteous about lying, especially when the lie is actively harmful to whoever believes it? I started to think that honor was just about making other people feel better about themselves, which is little more than a comfortable lie that I can't really have any respect for.
Yet, despite the fact that I felt this way, I still found myself ditching Meta Knight for no other reason than he was strong enough to allow me a reasonable chance to win. It turned me off of the character so much that I don't even play him in Smash 4 either.
What made it even more ridiculous is... it's not as if I only play high tier characters. I played Mewtwo all the time in Melee and he's still my main in that game, so it's provably true that I'm not like that. Further more, I can't really think of anyone who is like that, and even if they were... so what? I had basically endured Brawl Zelda for no reason other than the fact that I was overly concerned about what people thought of my character choices, and once I realized how stupid that was I couldn't kick myself hard enough for it.
Fast forward to today. Smash 4 is out, RosaLuma is my main, I love playing her all the time, and we Rosa mains must be doing a pretty good job with her because I keep hearing complaints about how "OP" she is, regardless of how ridiculous that notion is.
First off, I can think of about 10 or so characters who are currently deemed as "OP" by someone or another (Yoshi, Bowser Jr., Bowser, Peach, RosaLuma, Greninja, Shiek, ZSS, Donkey Kong, Robin, Little Mac), and it's way too early to determine that with any sort of accuracy. Most of those characters are either all-new characters or characters who have been revamped in some way, so it's more likely that these characters have new gimmicks that people don't know how to deal with, and it's highly unlikely that any of them are actually unstoppable. Just because you haven't found a solution to a problem, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
When I hear these complaints I can only think one thing: When these people complain about OP characters, or when they try to imply that you only won because your character is strong... All they're really doing is trying to discourage people from playing characters that they don't know how to deal with, while simultaneously putting you down and diminishing your accomplishments (and in doing so, diminishing their own failures).
The whiner don't want to get better or improve, so they'd rather just discourage people from using those characters so that the whiner can have a better chance of winning with their own favorite character. The whiner doesn't want to admit that they have shortcomings or are anything less perfect than the Second Coming of Christ, so they'd rather just imply that you cheated somehow. It's not really about "playing fair" to the whiner, regardless of what they might try to say or how righteous they want to make themselves sound. To the whiner, it's all about improving their own chances to win in ways that don't involve the whiner improving themselves. Instead of doing the right thing and learning the matchups that are hard for them, they'd rather try to use social intimidation to ensure that those unfavorable matchups never happen for them, or at least happen less often.
Well, those hypocritically unscrupulous kinds of people managed to take Meta Knight from me, because I allowed them to, but I'm not going to make that same mistake again. I'll play RosaLuma until the next generation of Smash comes out, and I don't even care if she gets banned from tournies. Playing to win is the only honest way to play, and anyone who resists my efforts to do that is not only dishonest but is also trying to stifle my efforts to get better. They are not an honorable knight trying to show me the errors of my ways, but rather a highly questionable and selfish person trying to hinder me.
To the TC and anyone else facing that same kind of BS, the only kind of advice I can give you is this: Don't fall for it. The kind of "honor" that these scrubs try to promote is the most dishonorable crap I've ever seen in within the limits of a gaming community. It's toxic, misguided, and dishonest. A scrub is nothing but a liar trying to protect his ego, despite his constant and inevitable losses, who isn't really a part of the scenes and never will be because of one simple reason: They refuse to learn. Let their problem be their problem, and don't ever let it become your problem.
Just play who you want to play. It doesn't matter if you're playing a high tier character because you want to win in tournies, nor does it matter if you're playing a character you're good with just because you like that character. Anyone who tries to tell you not to play a certain character is just an immature person who needs to wake up to the truth of the world around them.
