Personally, I'm disappointed by the lack of context in the tournament data provided by both the pro-ban and the anti-ban sides. By "context", I specifically refer to comparison of MK's tournament performance to the performances of the top characters in other fighting games. (In the following examples, please note that when I say "significant", I mean statistically significant, as opposed to saying something along the lines of, "well, this difference seems like a lot, so I'll just call it a 'significant' difference.")
As an example, pro-ban cites MK as having "22% of ALL tournament places" (I assume "all tournament places" refers to top-8 placings or better, as found in Ankoku's Character Rankings List). Is this 22% unprecedented among the #1 characters in other fighting games? If the best characters in other fighting games generally take significantly smaller percentages of tourney placings, then MK's performance would more strongly support a MK ban. If previously banned characters in other games had taken a similar percentage of tournament placings, or lower placing percentages, MK's tournament prowess would appear to warrant a ban. If, however, those top unbanned characters typically take similar, or significantly higher percentages of tournament placings, then MK's performance is perfectly normal, and would not warrant his banning.
Similarly, anti-ban argues that MK takes "30.18% of all cash prizes from Brawl Singes events." Does this percentage imply that a ban is unnecessary? Is this percentage of total earnings significantly lower than those of other #1 characters? Is there no significant difference? Or are MK's earnings significantly higher? Without information from other games, we cannot definitively determine if 30.18% is a normal percentage for the game's best character, or an abnormally high percentage. Some might interpret 30.18% of earnings as perfectly OK for the best character in the game; others might feel that 30.18% is too high for a single character.
Do other fighting game communities have readily available tournament statistics? If not, do they publicly archive their tournament results, which would allow for the collection of said tourney statistics? If they do, it's a shame that neither side used this information to give a more complete understanding of MK's tournament performance. Regardless of availability, without the additional data from those characters from other games that are comparable to MK, we, the readers, cannot come to a definitive conclusion on the ban question based on the statistics that both the pro-ban and the anti-ban sides provided, and are left to variable individual interpretations of these statistics, that are based on little more than individual hunches.
This is a fair point, but the data really doesn't exist. Brawl is unprecedented in its tournament stats keeping. The only other example I know if is this post I mentioned but didn't find earlier by AlphaZealot about melee, and even then it's nowhere near as complete as Ankoku's Brawl data (though still good stuff).
http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=201196
I will comment on some cases in other fighting games that I am not a true expert on but know more than some people who like to mention them...
Street Fighter 2':In Super Turbo, Akuma is just obscene. He's like Ryu except better in every way and with a super broken air fireball move that most of the cast just can't answer. I want to be clear what I mean by this. For most of the cast, if Akuma spams air fireball and does nothing else, they won't win (Zangief has it the worst against this).
In HDR, Akuma is obviously the best character, and he probably renders several characters inviable by himself. This ordinarily wouldn't be ban-worthy, but HDR has unique circumstances. It's well known that if Akuma is banned, literally every other character in the game is tournament viable. If he's not banned, a lot of the cast is inviable and the game ends up being worse than Super Turbo... which leaves the community in a bind. Playing ST without Akuma is better than playing HDR with Akuma, but playing HDR without Akuma is the best. Even if banning Akuma in HDR is a bit against the general principles, the greater good here is just too obvious to ignore. Akuma was really toeing the line anyway; he had forced super setups that were obviously buggy (also somewhat random) and really overpowered, and his normals had hitboxes that are even worse than Brawl Snake's. He also had some other really stupid properties like frontal invincibility during his fireballs that don't even make sense and were really overpowered.
A good comparison for HDR Akuma to MK is this. Imagine if MK were a little better because he was really buggy, and imagine if the rest of the cast were extremely well balanced (no Snakes and no Ganondorfs). That's about how they compare.
Street Fighter 3: Yun and Chun Li do tower over the rest of the cast with only something like 7 characters being viable, but the balance is just awful throughout. You look at terrible characters like Q and Twelve and wonder what the designers were thinking and how anyone could think they are even close to useful (they're so bad they make melee Pichu look broken). Bans don't help this game at all even if it has really broken character balance.
Street Fighter 4: Honestly, Sagat is just like Meta Knight. The most recent matchup charts give him an advantage over every other character in the game except Dhalsim, and he is very common in tournaments though far from overpowering. The key factor is that he's not unbeatable at all for other good characters or even average characters (not many characters are truly bad in SFIV, though it has a non-negligibly smaller cast than Brawl to be fair). I don't know exact numbers since the stats aren't kept well in this community, but I think the main difference with Sagat is that there are fewer really notable Sagats as opposed to really notable Meta Knights largely probably because the overall Street Fighter community is so much older than the Smash Bros one with the top players being really entrenched in ways of doing things that are likely not compatible with Sagat.
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core: Eddie is obviously the best character and has no bad matchups, and at the last EVO some guy originally from Saudi Arabia (!!!) showed just how ridiculous he can be with super execution skills. Guilty Gear is insanely technical though so the investment Eddie requires to be able to exploit him is really huge. I don't think this makes him more or less ban-worthy than Meta Knight (to whom he is overall pretty comparable), but it does stop any real trend of people flooding to him.
Guilty Gear also has Kliff and Justice. Justice is broken like Akuma is (just obviously so good that only an idiot would use anyone else if she's allowed). Kliff is banned on the justification that he's console exclusive (Justice is too, though she's auto-banned anyway), and only some people seem to think he's broken on top of that. The Guilty Gear community actually cares about the arcade version for some reason; I guess this matters to them.
Power Rangers the Fighting Edition: Someone HAD to bring up Ivan Ooze. Haha, I am an expert on this game; I daresay one of the most knowledgable people out of anyone anywhere (since a friend and I really explored the game as a serious fighter for about a month). Ivan Ooze is the most broken thing ever, obviously has to be banned. He can just fly away and spam a projectile (that requires one button press to do) and beat most of the cast (only a few even stand a remote chance against that... and then he has other broken stuff that shut people down just as well if not better). He also has a hilarious pseudo-infinite that only works in the ditto matchup and is really easy to set up and do, just for fun and to ensure 100% of the Ivan Ooze gameplay is degenerate.
FYI, for anyone curious, here's what I feel the real tier list for this game is:
SSS+++ (banned): Ivan Ooze
S (overpowered but fair): Lord Zedd
A (standard): Thunder Megazord, Ninja Megazord, Lipsyncher
B (underpowered but viable): Mega Tigerzord
C (not really viable but you can try): Goldar, Silver Horns
F (uselessly bad): Shogun Megazord
So yeah, Meta Knight is not really like the truly broken characters at all, but he's also in a game that pans out a bit differently from the other games with SFIV being probably the closest parallel. I can say that there's no precedent for anyone like Meta Knight ever being banned, if that helps.
<3 Mike lol
