No need to fly off the handle.
I get annoyed when people open their mouths and dump all over the discussion with irrelevancies.
My impression of what you are calling "bad for the game" and why I brought up Macs lack of results is "breaks competition". To clarify even further, Mac is bad for the game because he wins in a cheap way. Unfairly, without merit through the KO punch.
And that's where you're incorrect. I don't think he breaks competition. He's not SF2 Akuma, he's not Brawl MK. He's
poorly designed, and IMO matches with him suffer because of that design.
I consider KO Punch an excellent example of that bad design, because it emphasizes the gameplay pattern (i.e. "Don't bother actually hitting Mac or trying to KO him normally, just get him offstage and gimp him") that he
by design forces matches into. It's the same as the other mechanics in Smash 4 that reward getting hit without dying (rage, Aura) or, seen from another perspective, punish hitting people without killing them.
Again, I bring up Macs lack of results, because if this really was a degenerate mechanic, there would be abuse, and there would be more wins. There is no abuse. You cannot abuse Mac in tournament because his flaws will always be exploited.
What I've been trying to say is that his results don't matter (although he's obviously weak, which also does speak to why I think he's poorly designed), and I'm not saying his mechanics are exploitable for power. What I'm talking about is the effect that they have on the game as it is being played. What do people do when you've got KO Punch charged? Do they approach you, desperate to land a hit to drain your charge? Do they try even harder to bait you out and punish you? Or do they just run away even harder, spamming whatever projectiles they might happen to have because being near Little Mac is poison, and a charged KO Punch reduces the game to whether or not they're in the right spot when Mac happens to press a button?
In short, does KO punch make playing the game
better?
"Bad for the game", past your definition, would be an element that is overtly controlling. An element that not only controls certain matchups but the game as a whole. Meta Knight was an element in Brawl that would have benefitted from being removed. Ice Climbers.
You're right, that was some heated rhetoric that I should have clarified. What I meant was that it makes for poor
gameplay. What that brings me to is another comparison. You highlighted the Ice Climbers as characters that could have been removed and would have made the game better for their removal, right? This would have been because of their ability to catch opponents in chaingrabs that would (properly played) go from 0-death without the opponent being able to play. This brought their gameplay to the binary state of players ending up either alive or dead based on
one grab. Now this is/was obviously broken as **** and couldn't be allowed in the next game, but the thing about the Ice Climbers was that they were the logical end point of the existence of
chaingrabs. Which were promptly removed in Smash 4, and I think everybody breathed a little sigh of relief once they found out, because chaingrabs
weren't fun. They might have been unique and they might have been interesting (I don't consider them to be, but that's a matter of opinion), but they made Brawl a worse game for their existence.
That is the sort of thing I'm talking about when I refer to something as making for poor gameplay.
Removing Macs Punch would detract from Smash 4. The game is that much more enriched with it included.
[Citation Needed]
Hell the game could do more with these crazy polarizing characters. they add value, while a more bland traditionally balanced character like your asking for would be much much more boring.
Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a character who can shoot an absolute
wall of projectiles across the stage, filling all available space that you could think to approach through and knocking you back (for the sake of a silly visual, go ahead and imagine Unlimited Lloid Works) and thus preventing you from ever even getting near the character. OP, right?
But wait, this character is literally the lightest piece of fluff in the game, and one simple smash attack or a couple of tilts will suffice to KO the character. Does this make the character less OP? Probably. Does it make the character a good design?
Hell no.
But wait, said character is countered by the existence of characters with projectile reflection or absorption moves! That certainly makes them less OP, but then you've got the problem of characters that
don't have projectile reflection or absorption moves, and the fact that the existence of this character means they are now absolutely terrible and will never see competitive viability. "Oh well, it's polarizing!" is something I imagine you might say to that, and the answer to that is that I've been building to with this whole thought experiment.
If something is actually polarizing in a competitive game, it is
BAD DESIGN.
handed to them a free comeback chance and turns the match into a game of Keep Away until the opponent manages to land enough safe blows. It's like if Sandbag was introduced as a playable character, but every 50-60%, he gained a screen nuke that eradicated every other fighter onscreen >30% or so. The KO punch essentially removes the need of worrying about smart play or character matchups. You can juggle that Little Mac player all you want, and it won't make a difference in the long run as the match will eventually degrade into Red Light, Green Light: The Fighting Game no matter who's winning.