This entire debate is more than "Anti-ban vs. Pro-ban who will win lololol," and the tone of your post makes it seem like that. We should be concerned about the community overall and be willing to compromise, because this is a decision that affects competitive Brawl players for as long as the game has a competitive game, not because, "we're beating you at this argument respond to this lol we win."
When anti-ban's only supporter makes a claim, is responded to with tournament data galore and a fully functional argument only to say "I can't read it it's too long" and "data can be interpreted in many ways" even after an engineer and a statistician tell him that the data is sound, I think it's fairly obvious that someone is blowing steam
Not really part of this argument, but there are two things I don't see working well with a temp-ban.
1) The duration. If a temp-ban is let's say 6 months, and you still have to convince a lot of TOs to follow through with it (even if a few people in an area host MK ban tourneys, it's not hard to think that MK mains won't still go to those and not completely drop MK), and the transition obviously isn't clear cut as, "Temp ban starts now, no more MK tourneys," then how would the results work? Like what exactly would you be looking for with results?
We're currently discussing it in the BBR.
Current things I've said we need to take note of is:
-Attendance
-How old MK mains do (if they all plummet and never recover, it could be a sign that MK inflates placements, if they all do just as well or better without MK it could be a sign that MK doesn't inflate placements, etc., etc.)
-Diversity in results (both regional and national)
-Dominance ratios of characters and the trends shown (Does character X just take MK's place? Is MK merely replaced by Diddy/Snake in the short term and long term? How long does it take for a new character to rise up? etc., etc.)
-Issues with planking and scrooging and how often they come up (is this just an MK issue, or will we see more doing it now?)
-"C rank" borderline characters placements in tournament (basically anyone who got wrecked by MK before, how are they doing now)
-Consistency in results / losses by soft and hard counters (is it fairly common for people to lose to hard counters, or does it seem more random?)
-Secondaries (Do more people have secondaries to make up for bad matchups now? Is there a universal that replaces MK, or do people have unique secondaries?)
We're currently asking for anything else we could take note of statistically, if you have any suggestions let me know.
Subjective things such as "are people happy" and "how do people feel" are also important, but not really quantifiable in any strict sense.
Yes, some players are good and would able to transition from MK to some other character, but others would be less able to do that. Learning a new character is tough. If you're good or not, there's still a period for a while where you're mediocre with your new character. How long would it take for results to round out to those good players placing well again? A month? Two? Some MK mains, like aforementioned, might just wait for the MK allowed tournaments, and some may just quit Brawl altogether for Melee.
Most of the MK mains I've talked to have mentioned new characters they'd pick up; most of them came from another character anyway. There was a poll in the MK boards that had similar results as well. None of this is set in stone or scientific at all though, so it remains to be seen.
The 6 month time period is deliberately set as such so as to prevent anyone from "waiting for it to blow over"; you're either along for the ride or not, and there isn't an in-between.
Overall, there'd be a lot of variables for why results aren't clear. For example, you may see a rise in Falcos in a region because they were the Falcos placing below the MKs. Maybe there's a rise because the region has strong Diddy and D3 mains. Maybe there's a rise just because the MKs who can't use MK all just like Falco, and it's out of pure preference. What exactly would you be looking for?
See above for what we'd be looking for.
We have pages of data showing regional results, and it wouldn't be hard to take note of old MK mains and see their placements regionally. If it was an isolated region showing heavy Falco usage and another had heavy Marth usage, we can't know for sure what it means until we compare their travelling results. If all those falco's and marths go to a national and get wrecked, it doesn't really matter if they're winning their local bi-weekly tournament. We'd need to be looking for trends, not isolated incidences.
That said, isolated incidences will be noted so we can look for things. If everyone near DEHF picks up Falco because they know him so well, we might see new things from Falco and it may be that other regions will follow suit. Who knows? We'd need to see.
A time span of 6 months seems too short to find consistent results of what the metagame would clearly be like with MK. Any longer, like a year, and it's pretty much like a permaban anyway.
6 months was a careful choice. It's long enough to really show some drastic change considering how the metagame has shaped thus far. My own personal hypothesis is that Snake and Diddy would basically fill up MK's spots in the short term due to MK mains simply picking who they thought was the "next best character", but after 2-3 months this would drop off considerably due to increases of heavy counter characters like Dedede, Peach, Luigi, ROB, and other hard matchups for these two characters.
I'd expect to see a long-term increase in characters like Marth and Falco, but not to a considerable degree.
2) Transitioning from the end of the temp-ban. If you come to the conclusion that MK's ban-worthy with these results, there's no problem. If you come to the opposite conclusion, it seems impossible to execute for obvious reasons. You just eliminated the best character in the game, the one that many people complain about, the community's on the fence about, many people have a tough match-up dealing with, and you try to reintroduce him. It's obvious that a lot of TOs will think, "okay but I prefer the MK banned tourneys so I'm just going to keep him banned."
You have to remember that if the entire community prefers MK banned tournaments, it doesn't really matter what the data says: they'll continue to ban MK. It's up to individual TOs for that.
The BBR will definitely take into account happiness levels; if everyone is suddenly ecstatic and happy about Brawl, hell yeah! **** metaknight, we don't care about arbitrary principles. If it's some people are happy and some peopel want him back (i.e., reality), we'd look closely at the data gathered and compare it to Metaknight's results and the prior metagame. Depending on what we see, we should see a fairly clear answer. If Omni is able to say "HA! Snake is even more dominant with MK gone! He has nearly 50% of all the placements!", then the game is up and MK needs to be reintroduced. If we're able to say "That was one tournament, the rest of the data shows a game with a much wider roster and no clear victor; people are able to play over a dozen characters competitively and this is in stark contrast to previous data", it'll be likely that MK won't come back.
So while the fear that the "status quo" will remain forever... it isn't the case. I personally would fight to bring MK back if the game somehow fell back into the same cycle without him.
