question
What criteria do you think is necessary to ban a character (ANY CHARACTER) in brawl?
I see some problems.
1. Character has no counters or poor matchups
2. Character has no poor stages
3. Character has shown to do reliabily well in local tournaments across the US, taking at least one placement in the top 3 on a consistent basis.
4. Character wins a multitude of local tournaments across the US
5. Character has shown to do reliably well in national tournaments across the US, taking several of the spots in the top 8.
6. Character fits the previous criteria consistently at high levels of play for at least half a year
Sure; fine. I don't really have the credentials to comment.
7. Character prevents a large majority (3/4) of the other characters from being played competitively
This one sounds too strict; so what if a character keeps the large majority of characters from being used? What if the large majority of characters. . . just aren't good?
Assessing if this character is
causing those characters to be used less - even if this would be a good criterion - would be very difficult and controversial.
8. Character has a even matchup at worst with a large majority (3/4) of the highest ranking characters on the tier list
I think you may have meant something else. you seem to have said that, for some large majority of the cast, the minimum of matchup values for that set is 'even matchup'. This leaves unstated what the character is like w.r.t. the complement of that set; for example, the character could be completely dominated by the remaining 1/4 (or whatever fraction) of the cast. In particular, that 1/4 of the cast could be the top tier.
Now, 1-6 imply that this character is doing really well, so that forces that possibility out.
But the character could still have bad matchups against lower tier characters
(who, say, suck against every other high tier character). We could have a rock paper scissors situation, but affected by popularity. I may be outdated, but I thought Donkey Kong, actually, was in this position. Almost. Imagine a Donkey Kong, but who did better against the Snakes and Falcos of the world, yet was still nothing special against our friendly Marios and Links. A crucial midpoint, "inverted" to the tier list.
I think you need an independent argument for why we would want to get rid of a character who dominates an upper echelon of play, but has
existing - merely unpopular and problematic-to-master - counters.
9. Character has no other characters in the game that share these qualities
I think what you want to do is you want to connect this criterion to criteria 7 and 8, so that the condition "satifying 7, 8, and 9" is part of a disjunction of conditions in the whole banworthy definition.
That is, the banworthy definition should go like this:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, AND [ (7, 8, and 9) OR (7.2, 8.2) OR (7.3, 8.3, 9.3) . . . ]
where, for example, 7.2 and 8.2 might be harsher assessments of the character's beating out of the
entirety of the cast, and with more drastic qualities like matchup
one-sidedness, as opposed to your mere "majority," and "worst case matchup even" conditions 7 and 8.
Your 7 and 8 only seem to have their broadness vindicated by the stringent condition of 9, wherein it seems that, by the condition (7, 8, and 9), you're asserting by this definition of banworthiness that, any sort of character who,
alone, is producing "unlikeable" features in the metagame (specifically, the features covered by [7 and 8]), is one which is justifiably removable from its game.
Presumably the loneliness is getting in that the new meta game would be much richer without the character.
Thoughts?
