It's a difference in causation. One implies that MK is good and thus people play him, and the other implies that MK is good because people play him. It's a fine distinction, but it's there regardless of whether or not people acknowledge it.
Talking about the number of top players which play a character / the popularity of the player at the top level (pick whichever term you like, either works fine here), or analyzing the performance of those top players, does not in any way require commiting to
why the character has either become popular at the top level / has large representation at the top level.
So.. yeah. I don't see how causation can be a part of using the term "popularity of X" or the term "larger number of X". I don't even see which way you're saying is which...
I'm not debating that you've done the best job with the data available. I'm saying that, despite that this is the best we can do, it's not a method for establishing anything conclusive simply because of the nature of the data.
Not only have I done the best possible job, I've done a good job, I believe. See my next comment for more elaboration.
And you can assure me to within a certain degree of error that players of equal rank are of equal skill? Don't make me laugh.
This is one of the figures which accomplishes that. And I'll show the un-annotated version so you can follow along with the analysis yourself if you want. Feel free to print it out and get a pen.
Look carefully at each of Snake and MK.
First, there's the obvious outlier points; #1 and #2 of each of Snake and MK clearly are a lot better players than everyone else. (In this figure, #1 and #2 of MK are clipped off; #2 of Snake still appears. More on that later.) (Also... MK still beats everyone else among the outliers too.)
Then there's a plateau of reduced score variation by rank before a dropoff. This is the highest level of play that players can reasonably expect to achieve; that there so many players at about the same performance level suggests that there is some reason that it is very hard to score much more than this as that character.
In my original post I used the term "high" to describe this skill level, you've been using the term "top". Whatever you
call it is just semantics; either way, it is clear that this plateau corresponds to this same skill level for both MK and Snake.
With Snake there is a bit more of a gradation within this tier than for MK, but it's still clear that spots 3, 4, 5, and 6 are all part of the same group, after which there is a notable drop. The difference in shapes becomes a lot less if you mentally (or on your printout) artificially lower MK's number 5 spot a bit; this action would be strictly in favor of anti-ban, so the fact that it helps make the mirror between Snake and MK clearer without doing anything about MK being 2.5x better than Snake is pretty bad news for anti-ban. Also, If it makes you feel better, you can play the what-if game and assume spots 4, 5, and 6 all stepped up their game to spot 3. MK's still clearly just better at that skill level.
Heck, you can even suppose that Snakes 3, 4, 5, and 6 all stepped up their game to that of Snake number 2 while the MKs remained totally stagnant (completely unreasonably skewed in favor of making MK not look so scary and, looking at what ACTUALLY happened in the more recent data, clearly not what happened; instead MK dominates some more). Even with a ridiculous buff like that to help out Snake, MK is still just better at that skill level.
Instead, it appears that playing as MK just nets you something like 2.5x as much score (and allegedly dollars) as playing as Snake will.. if you get up to the top skill levels. Choosing another character just makes it even worse.
Two things:
1) Why isn't it possible?
2) Who said I cared about low levels of play? If this community is going to ban MK even partially because he dominates placings that aren't even near money, I'm definitely out.
1.) Not clear what you're asking. Why isn't what possible? If you're still on the "determining equal skill levels" bit, I think I've again answered that it actually IS possible, and
I've done it.
2.) Um, very ironically good question. Who DID accuse you of caring about low levels of play? I'm not seeing the post you're defending yourself against here.
If you
did choose to go to the lower levels of play things would get very silly in favor of MK, but as a responsible debater I do what I can to focus my attacks on the strongest points the opposition presents.
Also.. I recall there's a post by Samurai Panda from the introduction of one of the MK debate threads which addresses this. Jist of it is that you can't get top players without them being medium level players fist, so you need to care at least a little bit about whether people stick with the game through the medium skill level.
M2K just doesn't listen, plain and simple.
