The MK ban ruling can and will play a huge factor in an OOC/OOS tournament. A test of player skill in a OOC/OOS tournament should not insist that a certain character cannot attend. Take OC3 for hypothetical taste, what if the TO insisted a MARTH ban on the ruleset. Players from all states who play very strong Marth's would not bother attending this tournament. Switching back to our current situation, you are asking to host a TEST tournament determining player skill by banning a character that your community has ZERO pro-level experience with. I believe your community is skipping the part of what metaknight does to the community.
Don't get me wrong, I am highly in favor of the MK ban through SBR; but I am not for a tournament that forgets why they declare a specific ruling. Your community sounds as if they have not witnessed a top 3 placing of MK/MK/MK over and over and over again. For proving grounds, I believe you should allow MK and witness first hand how destructive this character can be. Call me greedy, but you guys will understand my position after witnessing a tournament of this caliber with MK allowed.
MK Banned tournaments should only be done in local tournaments. After Dallas did a MK banned tournament, the character usage was soooo diverse...doing so was hard to determine if one character had an advantage over them all. Many matchups were 50:50 or 6:4 (hardly a counter). They led to closer matches and game winner was determined more so by mindgames than outright moveset destruction. I am somewhat unhappy about Xyro doing a MK ban test run at hobo 12. However, I see the reasoning is because their local tournaments pull such HUGE numbers that can and will be an extremely good data collector.
Overall, leave the MK banned tournaments to communities that already know why we host them. We still have MK allowed tournaments because test runs are simply that...test runs.
You sound like you think you know better than I do.
The SBR is looking for tournament result data from all sorts of tournaments to determine how to handle the metaknight situation. I've attended smash tournaments for years now, and I am confident that if only local tournaments try to ban him for the sake of the SBR's need for data, the data will be skewed.
We need some larger, multi-state tournaments to try it as well. I've seen plenty of tournaments with MK taking 5 of the top 8, and 2.5 of the top 3 spots. It's happened in Texas. It's happened in Florida. It's happened in California. It's happened in MD/VA. We know it's happening. What we don't know is what sort of character diversity we would have if we removed him from the equation. If it's just the same 3 or 4 characters in the top 8-12 anyways, then it may or may not be worth banning MK. If suddenly we see 12-15 characters in every region doing well, with lots of interesting matchups and whatnot, then we probably know what's best for the community, and should remove MK to create a much more exciting, diverse, and competitive environment.
As much as I am against premature character banning in general, I am very interested to see how this situation plays out and this El Paso tournament is an ideal testing ground for this sort of ban. Texas is by far the most metaknight-full state, and El Paso is IN TEXAS. The local EP crowd might not be loaded with metaknights, but it looks like dallas is coming, and that city is by reputation simply flooded with the Texas Tornado, Metaknight. (i like how that worked out...)
In your hypothetical situation of a Marth ban at OC3, I imagine no one would attend since Marth is nowhere near the runaway god tier character that Metaknight is, and there was almost never a conversation about banning him in Melee, as far back as I can remember, which is late 2k3, or early 2k4. A national tournament at the level of OC3 would be foolish to go out on a limb against the grain of the entire smash community and ban a character. The atmosphere surrounding the Texas smash scene in particular (and the overall brawl scene in the US in general) is very different from the atmosphere for OC3, because the community is begging for a decision to be made and nationalized so we can all know what to expect at FC -829 next year, or whatever ends up being the big national event in summer 09. This regional el paso tournament might prove to be a valuable piece of data for the SBR to make a suggestion in time for next year.
Resisting it on principle is kind of silly. It's early in Brawl's life, and we need to explore what ruleset promotes competition, enjoyment, and ultimately, a long tournament shelf-life for Brawl.
They probably can get collective data from MK ban tourny's hosted by CA or AZ themselves...somewhere further west coast. A test run collectively gathering NM, AZ and west TX doesn't seem very fruitful in my opinion.
I'm against the merit of hosting a MK banned tournament in El paso.
We need data from multiple states/regions to get a broader, more balanced set of data. It may be that certain characters will rise on the national level without metaknight but CA and NM don't happen to have anyone good maining that character.