Albert.
Smash Master
omfg Espy's sig has multiplied
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Official Metaknight Discussion
- Thread starter Hylian
- Start date
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Overswarm
is laughing at you
- Joined
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Copy pasta.
Imma ask this again: What exactly is anti-ban's argument?
In addition to this, MK being "broken" is not a criteria set by anyone... especially the smash community. If "broken" was what was necessary to ban things, we wouldn't have banned multiple stages, food on low, or dozens of other things. Being broken isn't necessary in the slightest; we've already set this precedent in the past.
MK doesn't just dominate the metagame... he's doing better than he was before by a significant margin.
To make matters worse, not only are MKs losing primarily only to other MKs, the other characters are still dropping sets to other characters. That's ridiculous.
The other character mains seem to be dropping sets to other characters on a more frequent basis if the data is indicative of a trend; we'd have to see more to be sure, but this is pretty convincing... Ankoku posted a list of some of the top regional players at Pound 4 that made it to bracket and who they beat / lost to.
However, all counter characters (to my current knowledge) highlighted in red. That means if the character is highlighted in red, that means a hard counter took place... a hard counter being a character that undeniably does well and requires the opponent to change their playstyle drastically to even compete. Ignoring soft counters and tier disparities.
Boss
Defeated Hunger
Lost to Seibrik
Lost to Infern
DEHF
Lost to ChuDat
Defeated Mikey Lenetia
Defeated Ling Ling
Defeated Fatal
Lost to lain
Infern
Lost to NEO
Defeated Boss
Lost to Logic
lain
Defeated dmbrandon
Defeated CO18
Lost to Havok
Defeated Hunger
Defeated DEHF
Lost to Judge
It seems to me that having a hard counter is a pretty big deal at the highest level of play.
Except for MK.
In other words, MK breaks the counterpick system based on all evidence we currently have. These are all good players losing to good players so the "player skill" argument might not hold water if other tournaments are researched for players that are non-MK, but Flayl did the research for MK mains and found the exact opposite of what we found looking at non-MK mains.
MK breaks the counterpicking system, and we have data to prove it.
Did I mention that he also doesn't have any bad stages because we banned them all, and the other characters at the top of the tier list have a greater advantage on the starters than MK does? Diddy gets two counterpicks in every set vs. MK and we still are only getting one Diddy that's really wowing anyone.
Did you know on the smashville platform that MK can jump upwards 4 times and glide farther than Diddy can attack him? All Diddy can do is throw a banana and hope to do 4% if the MK just lets it hit him.
Metaknight has also been the most common "stalling" character in the game... and the only one to show any issues with planking in the tournament scene to date.
So what is anti-ban standing on now?
Imma ask this again: What exactly is anti-ban's argument?
Not only does D3 and the Ice Climbers bypass hitstun, free movement, and DI in their infinite chaingrabs make this entire thing invalid, but Metaknight DOES ignore game mechanics. He can go invisible and be untouchable for however long he wants; we have to ban it. If the argument is "after banning the things that were ban worthy, MK is no longer banworthy", you could apply that to anything at any point in competitive gameplay... making this argument pointless.
In addition to this, MK being "broken" is not a criteria set by anyone... especially the smash community. If "broken" was what was necessary to ban things, we wouldn't have banned multiple stages, food on low, or dozens of other things. Being broken isn't necessary in the slightest; we've already set this precedent in the past.
Looks like Omni focusing on isolated incidences isn't new!
MK doesn't just dominate the metagame... he's doing better than he was before by a significant margin.
There are a grand total of 6 unique individuals that have overcome the top level MK obstacle on more than one occasion. This means that except for the one-time shots, we have 6 horses you could bet on for the race. Two of them share the same character (Snake), and each other player plays a different character. This is strong evidence showing it is the player and not the character itself is the deciding factor for them.... but can the same be said about the 9 Metaknights?flayl's data said:
To make matters worse, not only are MKs losing primarily only to other MKs, the other characters are still dropping sets to other characters. That's ridiculous.
This argument is infinite. A game is never "done". This isn't so much an argument as it is a stalling tactic.
The multiple top MKs are losing to the top players of various other characters, and no one is emulating them at all. That means no one else has the "I only lose in dittos and to super top players" badge for their character on AiB.
The other character mains seem to be dropping sets to other characters on a more frequent basis if the data is indicative of a trend; we'd have to see more to be sure, but this is pretty convincing... Ankoku posted a list of some of the top regional players at Pound 4 that made it to bracket and who they beat / lost to.
However, all counter characters (to my current knowledge) highlighted in red. That means if the character is highlighted in red, that means a hard counter took place... a hard counter being a character that undeniably does well and requires the opponent to change their playstyle drastically to even compete. Ignoring soft counters and tier disparities.
Boss
Defeated Hunger
Lost to Seibrik
Lost to Infern
DEHF
Lost to ChuDat
Defeated Mikey Lenetia
Defeated Ling Ling
Defeated Fatal
Lost to lain
Infern
Lost to NEO
Defeated Boss
Lost to Logic
lain
Defeated dmbrandon
Defeated CO18
Lost to Havok
Defeated Hunger
Defeated DEHF
Lost to Judge
It seems to me that having a hard counter is a pretty big deal at the highest level of play.
Except for MK.
In other words, MK breaks the counterpick system based on all evidence we currently have. These are all good players losing to good players so the "player skill" argument might not hold water if other tournaments are researched for players that are non-MK, but Flayl did the research for MK mains and found the exact opposite of what we found looking at non-MK mains.
MK breaks the counterpicking system, and we have data to prove it.
Did I mention that he also doesn't have any bad stages because we banned them all, and the other characters at the top of the tier list have a greater advantage on the starters than MK does? Diddy gets two counterpicks in every set vs. MK and we still are only getting one Diddy that's really wowing anyone.
The IDC has been banned, yes. Planking is banned in some areas, yes, but not by the SBR. However, when it was banned, MK invented scrooging and now we have another hot topic.
Did you know on the smashville platform that MK can jump upwards 4 times and glide farther than Diddy can attack him? All Diddy can do is throw a banana and hope to do 4% if the MK just lets it hit him.
Metaknight has also been the most common "stalling" character in the game... and the only one to show any issues with planking in the tournament scene to date.
So what is anti-ban standing on now?
adumbrodeus
Smash Legend
Arguments =/= rigid criteria formed out of community consensus.
Going back on that, especially if the process is so publicly known is a heck of a lot more difficult.
What, are you suggesting that you might do it, after giving the community your guarantee that you would respect the process and it's results? Especially since most likely you would be tied with personally negotiating it?
Lol, it's ok, I can probably count on one hand the number of people here with experience in latin.
Overswarm
is laughing at you
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- May 4, 2005
- Messages
- 21,181
From what I've seen in tournament results and BBR statements, kirby does a pretty bang up job.
Results show the exact opposite... except with Metaknight.
adumbrodeus
Smash Legend
Actually, more to the point is that most top level players have such a deep divide between their main and everyone else at this point in the metagame that counter-picking is pointless.
I intend to be good enough with my secondaries that this is not an issue.
I intend to be good enough with my secondaries that this is not an issue.
Oh yes there is a CP system, for those of you who seem to think that it doesn't matter at the top levels. The CP system is very prevalent/evident/influential at even the highest level of play. Brawl IMO is a game with heavy matchup extremities compared to most fighting games. Only very VERY unbalanced games like MVC2 are likely worse.
Stages certainly make a big impact on Brawl. The stages available for a set can GREATLY affect not only who wins, but how big of a margin they win with. Stages allowed can also reasonably affect character viability.
At the higher/highest level, most people play exclusively with their main. This doesn't mean that the opportunity to CP them is not there, or that people don't take advantage of it. At that level, you would be shocked however to know how weak people's secondaries/CP characters are, and they know this, and they tend not to use those characters at the higher levels unless they feel it is warranted.
Stages certainly make a big impact on Brawl. The stages available for a set can GREATLY affect not only who wins, but how big of a margin they win with. Stages allowed can also reasonably affect character viability.
At the higher/highest level, most people play exclusively with their main. This doesn't mean that the opportunity to CP them is not there, or that people don't take advantage of it. At that level, you would be shocked however to know how weak people's secondaries/CP characters are, and they know this, and they tend not to use those characters at the higher levels unless they feel it is warranted.
adumbrodeus
Smash Legend
We were talking about characters, not stages.
And the point that people were making was more along the lines that people simply don't do it (or at least it's not relatively prevalent, I do see some, but overall there's a prevelence of players with a clear "best" even at the top levels of play), as opposed to "it's useless".
Overswarm
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Whether or not people actively pick a CP character in a set is irrelevant; the counters exist and occur.
Dark 3nergy
Smash Hero
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Well in that case, they would be correct. People DON'T abuse the CP system sadly. Most of the time, people don't abuse the fact that a LOT of characters, even ones that are considered "good" have at least 1 matchup that is roughly 65:35, or multiple ones that are 6:4.
The truth is that a lot of top players, frankly, do not have developed, reliable secondaries. In the event that they do have those secondaries, a lot of times they won't use them for whatever reason. If people don't abuse the system, that's fine. To suggest that the system is fine/not abuseable/isn't that strong however, would be foolhardy.
The truth is that a lot of top players, frankly, do not have developed, reliable secondaries. In the event that they do have those secondaries, a lot of times they won't use them for whatever reason. If people don't abuse the system, that's fine. To suggest that the system is fine/not abuseable/isn't that strong however, would be foolhardy.
adumbrodeus
Smash Legend
And? Did I say I disagreed?
Just clarifying his point.
Quite frankly, yes.
Which is why I don't plan on falling into the trap of leaving my secondaries underdeveloped.
LolNo, not robots but you were close.
Nanomachines
I would assume people who want to take anything away from it would do so keeping in mind that it is biased. I did not intend that thread to be "ok which ever one has most posts wins" thread, it was just to get an idea of who is quiting if anyone for either reason, which is why there's no poll. Are they top level players, low level players, etc?
You know, I'll be honest about why I wrote that thread up. I find it very hard to believe that the smash community will be torn at all by a ban, temp-ban, or no action. If the thread dies with no one posting in it on either side it will suggest (not affirm) that there won't be as huge or dramatic a split as some people have forecasted.
TechnoDreamer
Smash Cadet
No, you're missing something. The problem is that even if you create universal ban criteria, you will ALREADY KNOW as you are creating them whether or not they will ban the current Meta Knight.
And because of this, depending on who is developing these criteria, they will be biased, even if they don't intend to be.
The two criteria I mentioned are UNIVERSAL, as in, ANY character with Shuttle Loop and Mach Tornado should be banned, but that's obviously just an absurd example.
So yes you can create criteria that are "like a ruler," but you already know exactly how they will measure everything, and it can immediately be determined whether a character will be banned or not banned.
Edit: My point is that with a ruler, the method of measurement or determination existed before the "competition," that is, jumping as far as you can.
With the ban criteria, the results (i.e. tier list, matchups, tourney results, understanding of the metagame - all things that are necessary to know to decide whether or not to ban) are already determined, and now the method of measurement or determination must be decided.
It's like if you had that jumping contest, but didn't tell the players before hand whether the highest jump one, farthest jump, fastest horizontal air speed, or whatever else won the contest. Yes all of those things make "better" jumps by some absurd argument, and perhaps some combination of them should be used to create the final winning criteria, but you still have to develop the criteria BEFORE the jump, rather than after it.
I'll be frank, I'm not really sure I agree with the fact that some bias is bad, provided that all parties involved can agree that the bias isn't to the degree that they feel it influences the decision too much.
TechnoDreamer
Smash Cadet
I agree with that! As long as parties agree. But that's not objective, unbiased criteria, which is what I am arguing is impossible.
Rather measured discussion and consensus (or as close to consensus as possible) is the best way. So in my opinion, you can't develop "criteria" to judge the matter on, but rather observe data, make judgments, and then explain what criteria you DECIDED were important in the specific matter. Pragmatism is necessary.
Edit: Flayl, Falco boards think MK:Falco is 50:50 (with no planking). So even that is a difficult criteria to apply.
Rather measured discussion and consensus (or as close to consensus as possible) is the best way. So in my opinion, you can't develop "criteria" to judge the matter on, but rather observe data, make judgments, and then explain what criteria you DECIDED were important in the specific matter. Pragmatism is necessary.
Edit: Flayl, Falco boards think MK:Falco is 50:50 (with no planking). So even that is a difficult criteria to apply.
How would you guys like me to prove the MK:Falco matchup isn't even?
I can take an equal number of MKs and Falcos and find out their set score. How does 1 per region sound?
edit: Before anti-ban jumps on my nuts, by prove I mean "show a strong correlation that the player that picks MK wins".
I can take an equal number of MKs and Falcos and find out their set score. How does 1 per region sound?
edit: Before anti-ban jumps on my nuts, by prove I mean "show a strong correlation that the player that picks MK wins".
TechnoDreamer
Smash Cadet
That's why I specified. LG rules aren't standard. I was just trying to point out that saying things such as "ban characters with no negative matchups" doesn't work by itself. Although I guess you can say "ban characters with no negative matchups based on SBR rules."
But if you look at the Falco boards matchup thread, the number they present is 50:50. Although I think Meta boads have everything 55:45 higher, so I guess you could use that.
In any case, it's obvious that a ban on matchup numbers alone is silly.
And as far as Meta Knight versus Falco in each region, there are more good MK's than good Falcos, and matchup numbers are based in part on theory. So you'd need a hypothetical world where the same number of people play MK as Falco, and have the same level of competence, natural talent, skill, practice time, partners of all characters, etc.
Maybe it's not 50:50, but it's one of a few that's close (it's important that there are a few that are close. Ban if there are no 50:50's, but what about 4 55:45 matchups?)
Budget Player Cadet_
Smash Hero
With planking allowed, doesn't the matchup become nearly unwinnable for Falco?
TechnoDreamer
Smash Cadet
I suppose if MK had a % lead he could just plank for ever, since Falco can't do much about it. But I've never seen an MK player plank for 7:30 before. I think that would count as stalling, even if planking isn't banned per se. Not sure on that one.
Budget Player Cadet_
Smash Hero
He's not making the game unplayable for the opponent, and if the opponent approaches, he will stop camping and smack them away.
Humpy Thrashabout
Smash Journeyman
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2009
- Messages
- 294
If someone where to prove (hypothetically) that banning Metaknight creates a richer more diverse game, would that be a valid argument for banning? I'm just trying to understand some of the thoughts behind a ban. I've seen it stated before (by SBR members) that MK can't be banned just because a bunch of people don't like that he is in the game, that it would take some proof of brokenness. But if it could be proven that the game might be more interesting or deeper with his exclusion that seems like it would be the SBR's obligation to ban him.
If the anti-ban people could come up with a list of things that would need to be proven for them to agree to a ban that might be a step in the right direction for both parties. It would provide some platform on which both sides can work to support instead of just a endless argument that neither side can claim is helping.
If the anti-ban people could come up with a list of things that would need to be proven for them to agree to a ban that might be a step in the right direction for both parties. It would provide some platform on which both sides can work to support instead of just a endless argument that neither side can claim is helping.
If planking isn't banned, I don't see why doing it for nearly the entire match would be considered as stalling. That's like saying I can aircamp, just not for a really long time.
Things like Infinite Grabs/IDC are different, in that you can use these things to stall and your opponent literally has no chance at stopping you once you get started. Planking, no matter how strong, allows the opponent to move, try and hit the planker, throw out attacks basically.
Things like Infinite Grabs/IDC are different, in that you can use these things to stall and your opponent literally has no chance at stopping you once you get started. Planking, no matter how strong, allows the opponent to move, try and hit the planker, throw out attacks basically.
xxCANDYxx
Smash Lord
Nanaki
Smash Lord
I'd call it 'camping smart-like'.
Overswarm
is laughing at you
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- 21,181
I'm Overswarm, nice to meet you. The resident Falco player in Ohio now plays not Falco.
Crow!
Smash Lord
Here we go.
My raw results are here: LINK
Feel free to peruse that, try to reproduce my results if you want, and most importantly, if you want this sort of ranking set up for your own character so you see who's who within your main, you can find all that info here.
----------
PURPOSE
----------
The main idea here is to determine the skill distribution among characters. This should give, as objectively as is possible, a display of which characters are "popular" at various skill levels.
If a character is simply better than another, one would expect the shape of these curves to be the same, but one curve to be higher than another at any given rank, vertically in the plots I will make.
If a character is simply more popular than another, one would expect the curve at any particular skill level to stretch out to higher ranks, horizontally in the plots I will make.
Of course, the two ideas are difficult to separate. We will therefore search for convenient reference points in the data to compare one character to the next.
-----------
METHODS
-----------
I created a Python script (provided in the zip file above) to use Ankoku's tournament results .txt exports and used Ankoku's scoring system to determine how much each player scored in each tournament for 1. the past 13 months of complete data (January 2009 through January 2010), and 2. the past 6 months (August 2009 to January 2010) of complete data.
These players and results were binned into the characters they represented. Within each character, players with identical names are automatically combined, and for each of Meta Knight, Snake, Diddy Kong, Falco, and Marth player, I manually went through the lists to find names that appear to be of the same player and combined them.
I admit that I do not know the tournament scene as well as I might; it is possible that I failed to merge some results under separate player names that should have been together. I invite people to inspect my .xls files in the .zip above to verify I didn't miss anyone.
It should be noted that no integer number of months would exactly reproduce Ankoku's current score per character, but 6 months came pretty close. Either Ankoku's export wasn't a complete represenation of his data, or the method of treating odd cases was different from mine. I have no reason to believe the errors are systematic, so the results should not be biased either way.
----------
RESULTS
----------
Above, I show, for each of the past 6 and 13 months, how many points each player scored with a given character as a function of their rank within that character, at two different levels of zoom for each data set, for each of the five best overall performing characters.
(Note: I know I accidentally changed the rank scales between 13 to 6 months. It's probably still fair, though, since 13 months has more people in it than 6. If this really bugs someone, I'll go through the effort to fix it and reupload.)
Below, I show histograms: they show how many PEOPLE scored between X and Y points. At each successive bin, the point values are doubled. These histograms should be better at displaying how the tournament scecne looks for the medium-low skill levels.
Fun fact:
In the past 6 months, Ally is the 9th highest ranked Meta Knight. (Overswarm is 10th).
----------------------------
ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSIONS
----------------------------
At this point this report becomes slightly more subjective.
Looking at the top few spots, it is obvious that the top player of each of Meta Knight, Snake, and Diddy Kong are outliers and do not fit their characters' overall trends.
For Diddy, Marth, and Falco, except for the top 3 players, those characters appear to be farily close in tournament performance from one to the next, though it appears Falco wasn't as good a year ago as he has been in the past half year. Snake has been better than those three, but the degree by which Meta Knight is better than Snake at all ranks is much higher than the amount by which Snake is better than the others.
This much could have been guessed just by Ankoku's summed data in his ranking list, but this does show that Meta Knight isn't worse than other character(s), in which case his high overall performance would require a very, very long "plateau" at a medium-high skill level, much longer than for Snake, to make up for the point difference observed.
As for popularity versus character goodness, first let us look at the 13 month data again.
There is a "kink" at around rank 6 for both Meta Knight and Snake, indicating the rank at which the players drop off from being high level players to being the next level down, indicating equal popularity. Throughout this zone, each MK player scored more than 2x as many points as each Snake. At 13 months, the rest of the data is pretty smooth and does not lend itself well to differentiating between skill and popularity; suffice it to say that MK's dominance does not disappear at any level, although some of the other characters do cross each other from rank to rank.
In the 6 month data, there are two usable kinks in Snake's data, and one in Meta Knight's data. For high level play, MK is about 2x better a character than Snake and slightly more popular among players at that level. It is not immediately obvious where to link up the second kink, but the two extremes of justifiable locations both say that MK is more popular, and differ in saying whether at medium-high level of play MK continues to be a 2x better a character at 1.5x the popularity or if instead MK is 3x as popular as Snake at that level.
Without a specific reason to believe that the selection of Snake or MK changes greatly between high and medium-high play, I'm inclined to believe that MK simply continues to be slightly more popular but 2x as good as Snake, and 3-5x as good as other characters.
Looking at the tails of the rank plots, it is clear that the amount by which MK has been outperforming other characters at ranks up to 27 or so has increased dramatically between 13 months ago and 6 months ago. For the next 10 ranks it's less pronounced, then it becomes roughly equivalent to the 13 months ago level.
Now let us compare the 13 month and 6 month histograms. The amount by which MK is more popular than other characters at lower levels doesn't appear to have changed much, but at medium and medium-high levels of play it does; his increased level of dominance appears to come primarily from there.
A side note: there are a lot more players in the 13 month data than in the 6 month data; a bit less than half as many, it appears. This would be consistent with both the following theories:
1. At every month, the set of players that make it to the top 8s in some tourney is selected in such a way that the players who have earned points in previous months are preferred NOT to hog the same spots again, so that the total number of unique players is linear in time.
2. The number of competitive players (that is, those who play brawl and actually have a shot at getting top 8 or better) has gone down by more than 50% in the past 13 months.
The first theory is obviously wrong. I can't prove or disprove the second with the data I have right now, but it is clear that the competitive Brawl community has been shrinking by some amount.
So, how much better is MK than other top characters? Let me finish with one more graph.
My raw results are here: LINK
Feel free to peruse that, try to reproduce my results if you want, and most importantly, if you want this sort of ranking set up for your own character so you see who's who within your main, you can find all that info here.
----------
PURPOSE
----------
The main idea here is to determine the skill distribution among characters. This should give, as objectively as is possible, a display of which characters are "popular" at various skill levels.
If a character is simply better than another, one would expect the shape of these curves to be the same, but one curve to be higher than another at any given rank, vertically in the plots I will make.
If a character is simply more popular than another, one would expect the curve at any particular skill level to stretch out to higher ranks, horizontally in the plots I will make.
Of course, the two ideas are difficult to separate. We will therefore search for convenient reference points in the data to compare one character to the next.
-----------
METHODS
-----------
I created a Python script (provided in the zip file above) to use Ankoku's tournament results .txt exports and used Ankoku's scoring system to determine how much each player scored in each tournament for 1. the past 13 months of complete data (January 2009 through January 2010), and 2. the past 6 months (August 2009 to January 2010) of complete data.
These players and results were binned into the characters they represented. Within each character, players with identical names are automatically combined, and for each of Meta Knight, Snake, Diddy Kong, Falco, and Marth player, I manually went through the lists to find names that appear to be of the same player and combined them.
I admit that I do not know the tournament scene as well as I might; it is possible that I failed to merge some results under separate player names that should have been together. I invite people to inspect my .xls files in the .zip above to verify I didn't miss anyone.
It should be noted that no integer number of months would exactly reproduce Ankoku's current score per character, but 6 months came pretty close. Either Ankoku's export wasn't a complete represenation of his data, or the method of treating odd cases was different from mine. I have no reason to believe the errors are systematic, so the results should not be biased either way.
----------
RESULTS
----------
Above, I show, for each of the past 6 and 13 months, how many points each player scored with a given character as a function of their rank within that character, at two different levels of zoom for each data set, for each of the five best overall performing characters.
(Note: I know I accidentally changed the rank scales between 13 to 6 months. It's probably still fair, though, since 13 months has more people in it than 6. If this really bugs someone, I'll go through the effort to fix it and reupload.)
Below, I show histograms: they show how many PEOPLE scored between X and Y points. At each successive bin, the point values are doubled. These histograms should be better at displaying how the tournament scecne looks for the medium-low skill levels.
Fun fact:
In the past 6 months, Ally is the 9th highest ranked Meta Knight. (Overswarm is 10th).
----------------------------
ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSIONS
----------------------------
At this point this report becomes slightly more subjective.
Looking at the top few spots, it is obvious that the top player of each of Meta Knight, Snake, and Diddy Kong are outliers and do not fit their characters' overall trends.
For Diddy, Marth, and Falco, except for the top 3 players, those characters appear to be farily close in tournament performance from one to the next, though it appears Falco wasn't as good a year ago as he has been in the past half year. Snake has been better than those three, but the degree by which Meta Knight is better than Snake at all ranks is much higher than the amount by which Snake is better than the others.
This much could have been guessed just by Ankoku's summed data in his ranking list, but this does show that Meta Knight isn't worse than other character(s), in which case his high overall performance would require a very, very long "plateau" at a medium-high skill level, much longer than for Snake, to make up for the point difference observed.
As for popularity versus character goodness, first let us look at the 13 month data again.
There is a "kink" at around rank 6 for both Meta Knight and Snake, indicating the rank at which the players drop off from being high level players to being the next level down, indicating equal popularity. Throughout this zone, each MK player scored more than 2x as many points as each Snake. At 13 months, the rest of the data is pretty smooth and does not lend itself well to differentiating between skill and popularity; suffice it to say that MK's dominance does not disappear at any level, although some of the other characters do cross each other from rank to rank.
In the 6 month data, there are two usable kinks in Snake's data, and one in Meta Knight's data. For high level play, MK is about 2x better a character than Snake and slightly more popular among players at that level. It is not immediately obvious where to link up the second kink, but the two extremes of justifiable locations both say that MK is more popular, and differ in saying whether at medium-high level of play MK continues to be a 2x better a character at 1.5x the popularity or if instead MK is 3x as popular as Snake at that level.
Without a specific reason to believe that the selection of Snake or MK changes greatly between high and medium-high play, I'm inclined to believe that MK simply continues to be slightly more popular but 2x as good as Snake, and 3-5x as good as other characters.
Looking at the tails of the rank plots, it is clear that the amount by which MK has been outperforming other characters at ranks up to 27 or so has increased dramatically between 13 months ago and 6 months ago. For the next 10 ranks it's less pronounced, then it becomes roughly equivalent to the 13 months ago level.
Now let us compare the 13 month and 6 month histograms. The amount by which MK is more popular than other characters at lower levels doesn't appear to have changed much, but at medium and medium-high levels of play it does; his increased level of dominance appears to come primarily from there.
A side note: there are a lot more players in the 13 month data than in the 6 month data; a bit less than half as many, it appears. This would be consistent with both the following theories:
1. At every month, the set of players that make it to the top 8s in some tourney is selected in such a way that the players who have earned points in previous months are preferred NOT to hog the same spots again, so that the total number of unique players is linear in time.
2. The number of competitive players (that is, those who play brawl and actually have a shot at getting top 8 or better) has gone down by more than 50% in the past 13 months.
The first theory is obviously wrong. I can't prove or disprove the second with the data I have right now, but it is clear that the competitive Brawl community has been shrinking by some amount.
So, how much better is MK than other top characters? Let me finish with one more graph.
Overswarm
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Crow!
If I see you at a tournament
I'm buying you lunch. Or singles entry. Something.
Halberd, you wanna read that. It shows a lot more than MK's numbers; plus, the words are what is important! The charts are what need to be interpreted by the words
If I see you at a tournament
I'm buying you lunch. Or singles entry. Something.
Halberd, you wanna read that. It shows a lot more than MK's numbers; plus, the words are what is important! The charts are what need to be interpreted by the words
Crow!
Smash Lord
I'm about 50% sure I'll be at Delta Upsilon III this weekend if you're going to that... I saw you when I went to II.
Gnes
Smash Master
Dear god...that was amazing.
rPSIvysaur
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**** charts are ****
Dark 3nergy
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crow i purpose a pie graph to be put in there somewhere. But thats just me liking variety
I joke, seriously i think if you want the charts to have a stronger impact you might as well use all the different variantions graphs to your advantage. It makes reading the information easier and much more dynamic. You can talk about alot more with different graphs.
I also believe we should apply this chart data to ankoku's tournament results thread as it is updated. Makes for easier reading
I joke, seriously i think if you want the charts to have a stronger impact you might as well use all the different variantions graphs to your advantage. It makes reading the information easier and much more dynamic. You can talk about alot more with different graphs.
I also believe we should apply this chart data to ankoku's tournament results thread as it is updated. Makes for easier reading
Just read it.Crow!
If I see you at a tournament
I'm buying you lunch. Or singles entry. Something.
Halberd, you wanna read that. It shows a lot more than MK's numbers; plus, the words are what is important! The charts are what need to be interpreted by the words
And ****, OS you did a good job and I was really impressed by your charts, but these charts are just like O_o
Might wanna ask Hylian to link to that on the first post as well.
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