I agree with the valid, and well-written points each side has taken the time and energy to write out to support their arguments. That is to say, I think BOTH sides make a good argument, although I wound up voting "pro-ban" based off of the points they made, as well as some personal observations.
On the subject of over-centralization:
1) Take a look at most of the character boards. Usually, when starting a matchup discussion/re-discussion thread, Metaknight is far and away the usual "first character" chosen. While I can concede that one can argue that this is because he is the "best & most used character" and that "everyone needs to know the matchup", that alone should say SOMETHING about the current metagame. While in and of itself it is a trivial, cloudy point at best- when combined with other things (listed below) it becomes more readily apparent that the metagame IS revolving around MK.
2) A fair bit ago, there was a big uproar about the 'broken-ness' of tornado, so much so that M2K actually wrote an article/guide/whatever on the moves that BEAT the tornado. To my knowledge, during my time in the smash community there has never been such emphasis on "beating" ONE move. Even now, during "How to deal with (insert move)" threads on various character boards, the tornado is usually the first or nearly the first one used.
3) Every time anything new that is found (chaingrabs, infinites, locks, glitchy character buffs), the first question is "Does it work on Metaknight?". Not "does it work on this char's WORST matchup" (which may or may not be MK).
4) As said before, it appears that the tier list is reflective of how well said character does against MK. And, this is a double-edged point. With MK being the most used character (and if any other char were the most used, the same would still apply) it makes sense intuitively to base character rankings on how well they perform against him. "Oh, well, character X gets ***** by character Y, but... you never see character Y because he is essentially non-viable thanks to MK, and so we'll put character X a bit higher up on the tier list".
Inversely though, I was under the impression that the tier lists were comprised of tournament performance and analyzing where/how the character's individual metagame fits in with the game's metagame as a whole, among other things. The fact that MK has *become* the metagame to some degree, has turned it into a "how well does Character X do in tourneys, and how well does Character X do against MK"
People point to Wario, Diddy, Snake, and a few other chars to strengthen BOTH sides of this argument:
Anti-Ban: "Well, they would be that high up if MK were banned anyway, because they have these bad/good matchups and have these good/bad things going for them"
And, I personally am not arguing that they would still be high up on the list. Some may rise, or fall. However, its important to see why they would be there in the event MK was banned. Generally, the big 'Selling Point' for these chars is their performance against MK (you can't argue that people didn't flock to Wario or Diddy or ICs the moment it was purported that they went even/close to even with him). However, if MK is banned, they would hang around their same tier placement for OTHER reasons. And of course, they may move up/down as more emphasis is placed on characters learning those SET of matchups instead of just one.
On The Subject Of "Quit Crying and Get Better Scrubs"
I think that it is safe to say that people HAVE been trying to get better. The time and effort people have put into analyzing the MK matchup should be PLENTY enough evidence to support the concerted effort of the community to "get better". In essence, the former point leads to this one: If MK *HASN'T* been over-centralizing the game, then WHY has there been so much concerted effort to find ways to BEAT him. And, the fact that such time and effort has been put into finding ways to beat him directly translates to people TRYING TO GET BETTER.
Also, the former point leads to this one: there HAS been such an effort to "find a way to beat Metaknight" that some people (individually), and some groups/character boards altogether have become unfocused on their other matchups. This leads to a lack of knowledge of said MU all across the board (some more than others) and can lead to players boxing themselves in and getting bracket-blocked by characters they shouldn't.
Ex: Members in character board A (who gets utterly ***** by MK) have focused a lot of time talking about Metaknight and how to deal with/beat him and such. Character board B (who gets beaten by MK, but to a lesser degree) has expended effort on the same subject, but markedly less than character board A. Now, character B user has a far greater understanding of the matchup against character A than does character A user. The result? Character A user loses a MU he SHOULD win, simply by not knowing the matchup due to the time spent analyzing the MK matchup.
The above both stagnates the player, and the character to a certain degree. They may get marginally better at the MK matchup, but it comes with a trade-off of getting better overall (usually). Like someone a few posts ago said concerning a temp ban of MK (and I am paraphrasing, I apologize if I get it grossly wrong, I'm just shooting to get the same gist) "If you ban MK for 6 months, then everyone will forget how to fight him, and all this arguing will start again". Having MK around has already DONE that, but to other MUs. Other characters have "forgotten how" to play against other chars because MKs dominance/overuse/superiority/whateveryouwanttocallit has more or less "banned" ("banned" used for illustrative purposes, and used loosely) some of these chars in tournament play.
On The Subject Of Character Diversity:
While character diversity is a moot point in terms of competitive play, I feel that it should be mentioned as its a point that people have addressed.
Should MK be banned Snake would be the best.
-->ROB goes even with Snake
---->GaW counters ROB pretty hard
------->GaW is countered hard by Snake
-->Olimar does well against Snake
----->Marth counters Olimar
-------->Marth countered by DeDeDe
-------->Marth countered by Snake
And it goes on and on and on. We get the "triangle counter" system from melee, but with a wider array of characters turning it into a counter system similar in structure to a color wheel. Because of this, tournament placings will be more diverse, and the char portraits by people's names won't be "main/MK", but instead "Main/odd secondary/odd tertiary" or "Main/whatev"
On The Subject Of MK is beatable
It has more or less been beaten to death; MK is a **** good character in the game of Super Smash Brothers Brawl. He is "designed" (I use the term loosely to mean the "standard things which we can't change" as well as "discoveries" we as the community have made concerning him) to counter almost every possible situation.
He has a plethora of recovery options (multiple jumps, drill rush, cape, glide, shuttleloop, shuttleloop glide, tornado) to neutralize gimping. You generally will not gimp a MK unless he messes up or you take a very high risk course of action, because generally speaking no character has the tools to do it consistently.
He has a superb gimping game (disjointed & fast F-air, D-air, U-air, SL that can kill at around 60%, U-air chain to tornado for early KOs + the recovery options to make it back to the stage safely) to neutralize superb recovery options.
He lives much longer than his weight should allow when momentum cancelling/DI are taken into account. The "weight to percent KO'd" ratio, if I were to hazard a guess is superior to any character which neutralizes the built in trade off between maneuverability/small size vs ability to live.
He even "breaks" (to a minimal degree) the more or less standard "lightweights can't outright KO well" with his D-smash, F-smash, Shuttleloop to some degree, and even U-tilt if its fresh and the two are on a high platform. Couple that with the gimping + recovery, and MK has no problems netting kills.
MK has the ability to be incredibly offensive in a very defensive game, and his offensive options are generally much safer.
MK does not have a projectile, but his small stature, multiple jumps, option to powershield (universally available) and overall speed make getting around most projectiles child's play. In essence, he trumps projectiles (a generally defensive tactic) with his offense. The only exceptions I can think of are grenades, bananas, and (Falco) lasers.
Put all of this together, and you get a VERY, VERY good character. I concede that MK is beatable, but he is beatable not because of one character having implicit advantages over him, but because the player using MK has to make a mistake. To me, the character is designed as "perfectly" (in terms of being designed to be dominant) as one could hope for.
...
...
Flipping the script for a moment and moving from a "character only" assessment to the application.
The players who play MK are beatable, which is evidenced by tourney placings. But, as Fiction mentioned in his blog entries and such: MK *generally* only loses to MK. Out of each tournament, look at the well-known+top+better than mediocre MK players and see how many times they were either sent to loser's or out of the tourney by an MK, either by losing to an MK once, or twice in dittos.
You will occasionally see a well-known MK losing to a char that he should destroy, but we only see the posted result in text form, and not the match itself in its entirety ("real life" things that may affect the player). Was thehe MK player could have been playing badly? Or was the opponent playing exceptionally well? Did the MK player SD at a low percent? A myriad of things can explain this. And, I do not want to come across as applying these external aspects to strengthen the "pro-ban" argument. I concede that the SAME could be said for the player who LOSES to the MK player. But, in a MU that is 70-30, if the disadvantaged character user wins, it deserves more scrutiny and analyzing than if the advantaged one won- simply because it went against the norm. There needs to be assessment to see what caused that "blip" in the norm, to see if it was some sort of applicable, tangible evidence or something more abstract and irreplicable.
On The Subject Of "Ally/M2K"
Really, this in and of itself is somewhat enigmatic. While I realize that these two players are operating at the peak of the current metagame (and to some degree evolving it with each match they play), it is still hard to separate the player from the character. Ally has beaten legit people with Captain Falcon, does that mean Captain Falcon is suddenly leagues better than the matchup discussions and assessments make him out to be? No. He beat them because he is a vastly superior player. M2K has wrecked low-tier tourneys using Ike against low-tier mains. Does that mean Ike vs _______ is now in his favor, or even? No. M2k was simply a far superior player.
Of course, this begs the question of: "Then shouldn't the better player win, regardless if the other person is using MK?" Not really. Person A may be better than Person B, by a value of "5" (I know, assigning values to something that abstract is silly, but its for illustrative purposes). But, in order to 'overcome' the matchup, where Character X beats character Y by a value of 8, then Player A will not win. He is still better than the opponent, but not "better enough". Of course, this is the nature of character matchups, and is in no way exclusive to MK. However, one can usually improve by picking up another character, stage counterpicking, or actually GETTING BETTER. This isn't applicable with MK (refer to "...get better scrubs") as it has been tried, and tried, and tried.
Back to the point at hand, to surmise: MK being beaten depends more on the MK player messing up than it has to do with the tools the characters have to deal with MK. That isn't a bad thing, if it were applicable across the board so that every char could only beat another char if they outplayed the user. It isn't. MK is the only character that affords the player the ability to play with more mistakes, sloppier, and not as well, and allow them to beat 3/4 of the other viable chars who play a near perfect game. As such, MK losing to someone OTHER than MK is a "blip" in the graph, and these blips need to be analyzed, and are often times done so with no tangible explanation and so it is labeled as "so and so was playing CRAZY GOOD, or so and so was playing poorly, or this happened, or that happened, etc"
Pointing to Ally/M2k as an example for either side is, imo, folly. Because, while they are playing at an obscene level, it is clear that 98% of the players (even regular/well-known) tournament attendees will never reach this level, for a myriad of reasons.
On The Subject Of Comparing Games To Find A Standard:
Let's face it... Smash was not designed to be competitive. We, the community made it as such. Therefore, we simply can not apply criteria used to assess what is/isn't banworthy from other games to this situation.
As much as the community WANTS to be taken seriously by other communities, it really isn't going to happen, regardless of whether MK is or isn't banned- simply because of what the franchise was originally (and still is) designed to be.
Deciding our ban criteria; be it character's, techniques, stages, rulesets... whatever- with any inkling of "What will the SF/GG/insertcommunityhere" in mind is absolutely ridiculous. We are attempting to make a decision that is the best for our community, not what is best for our community's image in the eyes of other communities, and I sincerely hope that the decision is made with that in mind.
