Meta Knight Legal at Big Tournies contradicts Ban

[Magma Dolphin]

So this is a serious question concerning meta knight's banning. It was purposely not posted in the Q & A thread because with the ban few people check there, but many would see a new post. Feel free to move if such action is desired.

The question is:
If big tournies are allowing meta knight as a legal character, why is he banned? It seems that the only people who follow unity are the people who made it. This question arises after I received word that Chibo will not be banning meta night at the upcoming COT 6 as well as observing the upcoming tournies thread and noting that a significant number allow meta knight to be used...

 

[ぱみゅ]

He is banned under the Unity Ruleset.
There is no way to impose a character ban, so decision is all upon the Tournament Organizer.

Many countries still allows him, a lot of small and big tournaments all over US and Canada do, and people can decide not to go depeding if he is banned or not.

 

[Magma Dolphin]

so... all the work to establish one ruleset for brawl tournaments (i.e. the unity ruleset) is pointless because people do not have to use it?

I just find that silly

 

[Player-4]

You can't force someone to use a ruleset. I mean how could someone make a ruleset for a game and force someone to use it? That's what's actually silly.

Some TOs take rulesets and modify them to cater to their scene or for their own benefit I.E. certain stages being legal/illegal. Most though, go straight with Unity.

 

[Magma Dolphin]

Not to draw a comparison, but does the melee scene have one set ruleset that all tournies use? If so, I understand the desire to create one ruleset in brawl as it would parallel how it was in melee and make a standard playing environment.

Not having a standard ruleset in brawl leaves the tournament scene as a whole lacking...

So while TOs do not have to use a ruleset, I feel not doing so weakens the tournament scene as a whole...

Perhaps that is a bold thought, but I wanted to raise this idea on the MK boards as one critical issue to a ruleset that everyone HAS to use to be an official tournament will be meta knight's legality....

 

[C.J.]

The ruleset for melee is largely consistent across different regions and tournaments.

 

[Psychoace]

maybe worrying about banning metaknight and stages is what made us worse than Japan.

 

[ぱみゅ]

Maybe worrying about being worse than Japan made USA worse than Japan.
Srsly, just keep playing the game and practice a lot.

 

[Magma Dolphin]

Maybe the fact that Japan has consistency and a standard playing environment allowed them to focus specifically on character development without having to worry about adapting to ever changing rulesets...

This is why we need to pick a ruleset, agree on it, and then leave it alone instead of constantly changing rules. I think this is what unity attempted to do, but because not everyone uses it, it failed.

 

[Player-4]

I'm just gonna move this thread, it's not really about MK as much as it is about rulesets

 

[Magma Dolphin]

That works, sorry that the thread evolved a bit differently than I originally expected it to.

 

[-DR3W-]

I see what you're saying, but the character was banned to the ruleset specifically. No matter how loosely you want to look at that statement, it is reality, and people do not have to abide by it, as previously mentioned.

 

[WindMajor]

Maybe the fact that Japan has consistency and a standard playing environment allowed them to focus specifically on character development without having to worry about adapting to ever changing rulesets...

This is why we need to pick a ruleset, agree on it, and then leave it alone instead of constantly changing rules. I think this is what unity attempted to do, but because not everyone uses it, it failed.

I wouldn't say that it failed because Unity is still one of the most popular rulesets for Brawl (if not, THE most popular). 100% unity is something that we won't see for a while given the amount of ruleset decisions that are borderline in popularity and the recent influence of the Japanese ruleset.

Hopefully though, we won't be over a decade old and still not have a single standard ruleset like Melee.

 

[Magma Dolphin]

I see what you're saying, but the character was banned to the ruleset specifically. No matter how loosely you want to look at that statement, it is reality, and people do not have to abide by it, as previously mentioned.

I completely agree, not everyone is going to use the unity ruleset or any established set for that matter. However, I think all of use here can agree that melee became a pretty successful game that developed competitively by having agreed upon rules that almost everyone followed. Eventually all tournies adopted the same ruleset and worldwide competitions for melee developed with players abiding by almost the same rules (minus anything that was different between the games themselves).

The next step in evolving brawl competitively is developing a standard set that >80% of players and tournies use worldwide. This will move us forward.

Unity was a great start and I think there is a lot of good stuff there, but I do not think unity is the standard rule set we are looking for.

 

[WindMajor]

but I do not think unity is the standard rule set we are looking for.

I agree man, there's not enough Norfair.

 

[Magma Dolphin]

I agree man, there's not enough Norfair.

^ this made me smile. Personally I like Norfair as a level as I play Kirby (and played meta knight on the side pre-ban) and enjoy the mobility the stage grants. In terms of it being an equal playing field for all characters, I understand unity's decision to remove it from the stage choices.

Equal playing advantage that makes most matches primarily player-skill dependent is going to be one of the harder tasks to accomplish

 

[infiniteV115]

iirc 60% of the tournaments in North America use the Unity Ruleset, so I wouldn't say the URC has failed.

 

[Magma Dolphin]

iirc 60% of the tournaments in North America use the Unity Ruleset, so I wouldn't say the URC has failed.

Perhaps failed was a rather harsh way of putting it. However, the point I want to emphasize is that a standard playing environment with agreed upon rules will allow players to focus on character development primarily and stage advantage secondly. I think this is important to improving the overall caliber of players, not only in the US, but everywhere.

Again to draw a parallel (not to sound like a broken harp) but melee has a more rigid set of rules that many-most of the active melee players use and that game had great success competitively (MLG more then one season). I dont say this to cause a melee vs brawl tangent (personally, I like brawl more as Kirby is viable), rather, its an example of the success a rigid ruleset has.

URC just is not at this level and I think we should change it to make it so, or enforce its use

 

[Shiny Mewtwo aka Jigglysir]

iirc 60% of the tournaments in North America use the Unity Ruleset, so I wouldn't say the URC has failed.

60 is a fail.

Well, that's what my parents keep telling me.

 

[deepseadiva]

Unity.

Half the country plays a game where MK is the best character in the game.

The other half plays a game where Snake is the best character in the game.

This country loses to Japan's Olimar.

Thank you URC for your historical crap on Brawl's already sad lifetime.

 

[#HBC | Joker]

Melee's tournament scene isn't strong because of a universal ruleset. In fact, in the days before Brawl, when the Melee scene was bigger than it is now, they didn't have this universal ruleset you keep speaking of. Yes, most of the rules were universally used to the point where most rulesets were clearly copy/pasted, but different regions generally had variations from each other. I know certain stages (i.e. Pokefloats) were sometimes legal, sometimes not.

It's the same way with Brawl. Pretty much everybody uses the same rules, there's just certain tweaks people like to make, like banning RC/Brinstar, making MK legal, and whatnot. Admittedly, those can be pretty big changes, but people are aware of the varying rulesets and can adapt accordingly without much trouble. The better players are still gonna win tournaments, the only people really affected are MK mains, which is unfortunate. They still have the option to only attend MK legal tourneys, however, which is why many TOs choose to legalize him.

 

[MR. K]

why didn't SWF do what they originally said with the unity ruleset up...

ANy tournaments not using the unity ruleset would not be listed on the tournaments page.


I am almost positive i remember reading that here, yet I see it never went through.


all these mk legal tournaments beside banned mk tournaments more or less though just show why he needed to be banned, or at the very least that he still is very very very very VERY much a problem and overall degrades the quality and variety of brawl, John5324552424524numbers charts show this.

 

[#HBC | Joker]

There's a lot wrong with what you just said. For one thing, not listing MK legal tournies would suck for people who want to attend them, so why would they do that? I think what you read was that they wouldn't Sticky nonunity tournies, and I'm pretty sure they did throw that rule out.

As for John12346's chart, that doesn't prove ANYTHING about MK degrading the metagame. All it proves is that around half of tournies allow MK, and the others don't. Guess who goes to MK legal tournies? ****ing MK players! So of course he's gonna win a lot of $$. That doesn't prove anything about quality or variety though.

 

[Arcansi]

As for John12346's chart, that doesn't prove ANYTHING about MK degrading the metagame. All it proves is that around half of tournies allow MK, and the others don't. Guess who goes to MK legal tournies? ****ing MK players! So of course he's gonna win a lot of $$. That doesn't prove anything about quality or variety though.

There is no logical connection here.

Just because they go to the mk legal ones, how do they automatically win money? There are no door prizes, and it's not like all the good non-mk's just go to to the mk illegal ones.

Quality // Variety can be shown by looking at most big tournaments doubles final match(es) with MK legal.

That's...one way.

 

[WindMajor]

why didn't SWF do what they originally said with the unity ruleset up...

ANy tournaments not using the unity ruleset would not be listed on the tournaments page.


I am almost positive i remember reading that here, yet I see it never went through.

They said that any tournament not using Unity would not get stickied, nor would they get the cool front page coverage on both SWF and AiB. They did this when the Unity Ruleset launched, and continued with it for quite a while until just recently when the sticky rule was dropped, due to it not being necessary anymore.

 

[Arcansi]

They said that any tournament not using Unity would not get stickied, nor would they get the cool front page coverage on both SWF and AiB. They did this when the Unity Ruleset launched, and continued with it for quite a while until just recently when the sticky rule was dropped, due to it not being necessary anymore.

Wasn't it due to a thread pointing out that the rule was actually bad for community growth and more dictator-y then Unity-like?

 

[WindMajor]

It probably influenced the decision in a minor way, but it wasn't the sole reason why it was removed IIRC. They just decided to remove it randomly.

 

[John12346]

As for John12346's chart, that doesn't prove ANYTHING about MK degrading the metagame. All it proves is that around half of tournies allow MK, and the others don't. Guess who goes to MK legal tournies? ****ing MK players! So of course he's gonna win a lot of $$. That doesn't prove anything about quality or variety though.

While this is true, I think he was talking about 2011 data, where we were looking at about 90-95% MK legal tournaments. In that respect, we can probably draw the same conclusion, just from different data.

|
|
V 2011 dataaa. We're probably not going to get a good scope of a MK legal metagame in 2012, for sure(Similarly, we'd probably want to look at 2012 for MK banned data).

 

[#HBC | Joker]

Even still, the fact that MK wins $$ doesn't prove he ruins the game, or that the ban was the right thing to do. Actually, the fact that there are so many successful MK legal tournies out there just shows that banning him wasn't such a great idea afterall.

You can't even trust those #s (from 2012) 100%, because they're skewed by the fact that there are probably players who won't go to MK legal events as long as there are MK banned ones. That just makes it that much more likely that an MK player is gonna land in the $$.

Really though, it's just all kinds of silly to draw any major conclusions about the quality of the metagame from john12346's data alone, especially only a couple months into the ban.

 

[F00LY]

Fact: My school held a tournament recently, and had no clue what rules to do, because when they looked it up, they found so many conflicting rule sets. We wound up having the most ******** stage list I've ever seen + a MK ban and chaos with how the grand finals should be handled. True story.

 

[infiniteV115]

Really o.o
I attended both a mini Brawl tournament at my uni as well as a LAN party at another uni and both used the Unity Ruleset. I assume this is because the Unity Ruleset was easy to find, but it might also be because I recommended it XD
Though, with the former, 'pools' were done in the format of FFAs (top 2 make it out) and bracket was Bo1, single elimination (to save time) and with the latter, nobody knew the ruleset other than me so it pretty much also winded down to FD (occasional BF) and people not knowing whether they could switch characters.

 

[The Ben]

Fact: My school held a tournament recently, and had no clue what rules to do, because when they looked it up, they found so many conflicting rule sets. We wound up having the most ******** stage list I've ever seen + a MK ban and chaos with how the grand finals should be handled. True story.

This has nothing to do with superior rulesets and everything to do with your school being disorganized.

 

[Magma Dolphin]

You can't even trust those #s (from 2012) 100%, because they're skewed by the fact that there are probably players who won't go to MK legal events as long as there are MK banned ones. That just makes it that much more likely that an MK player is gonna land in the $$.

^This itself as a problem. You just spoke of the overall brawl tournament community as falling into one of three mindset: those who attend tournaments with MK banned, those who attend tournaments with MK legal, and those who attend both (there is also that group that attend neither, but you can't get data from them anyway).
The fact that we as a community has a divide on this issue and other staples of game play (timer length, legal stages, legality of infinites, etc...) means that in one sense we are learning different games...

We should be playing under the same rules, not one group learning the game as if meta knight doesn't exist and another group learning the game as if he did. I feel it creates a disconnect that we should not have. Same with stage legality, timer length, and the other key elements of play

 

[Siyh]

Why don't we just adopt Japan's rule set, that way us and them play the same game? People won't have to worry about stage follies and every character is legal. It seems so simple and easy to do. Metaknight is a difficult character to versus if you don't know what your doing, but honestly people shouldn't attend tourney's if they don't know what they're doing regardless. This makes all serious players have to step up which in turn will increase Brawl's community skill level. Theoretically speaking of course.

 

[ぱみゅ]

Why don't we just play and try to get better at any scenario, and then easily addapt to whatever ruleset they give us?
Seriously, you gain nothing by complaining about this.

 

[Magma Dolphin]

Quote:
Originally Posted by F00LY
Fact: My school held a tournament recently, and had no clue what rules to do, because when they looked it up, they found so many conflicting rule sets. We wound up having the most ******** stage list I've ever seen + a MK ban and chaos with how the grand finals should be handled. True story.

This has nothing to do with superior rulesets and everything to do with your school being disorganized.

^While the school may have been disorganized (we really can't assume one way or the other), the fact that they did not know which ruleset to chose is still a valid point. A true universal ruleset would be simple to find, simple to use, and simple to implement.

Why don't we just adopt Japan's rule set, that way us and them play the same game? People won't have to worry about stage follies and every character is legal. It seems so simple and easy to do. Metaknight is a difficult character to versus if you don't know what your doing, but honestly people shouldn't attend tourney's if they don't know what they're doing regardless. This makes all serious players have to step up which in turn will increase Brawl's community skill level. Theoretically speaking of course.

^Switching to Japan's ruleset is an option. However, many players feel that Japan has too few stages, some dislike the timer being different, and many dislike MK being legal.
We could shoot for a Japan/Unity hybrid in which there are more stages to choose from (ones that are pretty even for all characters mind you), a longer timer would prevent some stalling tactics and make others difficult, but having MK legal or not is going to be a large point of conflict.

Also, does Japan have a LGL?

 

[ぱみゅ]

I seriously think that, as long as it is well structured, has an idea, and covers any possible issue, any ruleset is good.

 

[Magma Dolphin]

Why don't we just play and try to get better at any scenario, and then easily addapt to whatever ruleset they give us?
Seriously, you gain nothing by complaining about this.

^I dont mind getting better across multiple scenarios, I just find it silly that we have an "established ruleset" and we dont use it... Again, multiple rulesets create divides. Which means we will eventually have pockets of players who use ruleset A vs. ruleset B vs. ruleset C, and etc. But we will not really have one brawl community then, we will have many...

 

[ぱみゅ]

^I dont mind getting better across multiple scenarios, I just find it silly that we have an "established ruleset" and we dont use it... Again, multiple rulesets create divides. Which means we will eventually have pockets of players who use ruleset A vs. ruleset B vs. ruleset C, and etc. But we will not really have one brawl community then, we will have many...

Funny thing is that we DO have many already.
First off, as I said in my very first response to this thread, there is no way you can force EVERYONE to play the same ruleset. At best you can recommend using it.

Now, this game is very variated and allows all kind of different styles and gameplay. The problem is that not everyone like all of these styles.
Some people thinks stages are too gimmicky, other thinks that game is slow enough so you can pay attention to everything on the screen.
Some people think MetaKnight is too powerful, some other people think he is not.
Some people would like to play with certain items and consider their usage skillful. Some don't.


My point is that there is nothing wrong with Rulesets being different, but is your responsability as TO to craft it carefully according or your and your community's needs to warrant their assistance.

 

[Magma Dolphin]

My point is that there is nothing wrong with Rulesets being different, but is your responsability as TO to craft it carefully according or your and your community's needs to warrant their assistance.

^ perhaps we are using "community" differently. You seem to be referring to local communities. Like TO's in NJ have there rules while TO's in CA have others. I'm referring to the community as anyone who plays. I dont think a unified ruleset should be used just in the US, I think it should be used by everyone with very minor modifications (if any) being made to it on a local community level...

You are absolutely right, many players have different opinions on how to play the game and choose to structure tournaments according to those opinions. From this diversity a number of rulesets have sprung up, and (often tournament by tournament) the rules change.

What I am saying is that if we decided on a ruleset that the majority (>80%) of players and tournaments used without modifying them, then we would no longer have to discuss banning MK, or legalizing stage X, or how long the timer should be. And without having to worry about all of that, we can start progressing again.

It's like an equation, set all the variables, then manipulate one or two of them. I'm saying, set the time, set the stages, set MK's legality, etc.. and then manipulate your skill as a player; because in this scenario only your skill will change. There would be no johns about the other elements. This puts the pressure on players to advance and encourages development