Ok, here's a question. Let's say that Meta isn't really too good, but that people ARE really just flocking to him because they're sheep. Meta keeps flooding the playing field, and his inherent good-ness allows him to sweep like he has been doing, just at much greater numbers. Eventually, the playing field is reduced to almost nothing but Meta, but not because he's too good; just because people are dumb.
What then? Go ahead and allow the metagame to crumble due to overcentralization? Let the game turn into Meta dittos because everyone is playing him? As of now, the only thing that can stop this is finding a chink in Meta's armor, so to speak, but there is no reason to expect that to happen as of now.
Allow me to take this idea and put it this way:
Suppose MK is not "broken," but he is still such a good choice, with such good returns for your effort, and such good matchups against all characters, that indeed, people who simply see no point in looking elsewhere all flock to him. They are still
motivated by MK's goodness, so it is not a popularity factor. It's not loyalty. It's truly a decision motivated by attention to the character's goodness. What I am stipulating is just that, even though other options are possible, viable, in this universe people are deciding they just don't want to bother with other characters, since MK is just the best choice (by Game Theory).
Diversity
could be there, but people just don't feel an impetus for it. Looking for counters to MK, people just don't want to do it. Let's break this hypothetical into two. (1) People don't look to counters because they just don't believe they will exist, so go with the known MK; or (2) Time has passed and the consensus of the elite is that the game is nearing maximization, and the matchups being just the same (but still "reasonably winnable" for enough cases, by asumption!) mean there is
reason to believe no other character will ever have a better matchup against MK.
Now, what has been said about banworthiness ignoring a character's mere popularity, and looking to actual goodness in theory fighter, would conclude that this situation (1 or 2), no matter how overwhelming the uniformity of the field, so long as the assumption of "reasonably beatable" is in play, Meta Knight will never merit a ban.
The meta will just shift, by player choice, to Meta Knight. He'd be beatable, but no one will ever try to do it. In the second case, they've surely got good reasons. But even in the first, though it's not backed up by proof, you can have good reasons to suspect! You can make a good guess, that the world will remain in favour of MKs, but moreover, you can have a good reason to believe, that
even if it's possible that another character could become even slightly advantaged to MK, your course of action is still
expected to be profitable for you (for the mathematical definition of expectation). You think "I think I am best served, thinking about this by weighting each possibility by its
probability, by sticking to making my MK better and practicing my MK ditto. Let others worry about other characters and lose those tourney pots in the meantime."
So the world will be, in either case, one where people are using Meta Knight, and there's no way they're all being scrubs, because they have a competitively-minded reason for using MK, all of them. So you have the uniformity, but not the brokenness, and not just because of scrubbiness or sheepmindedness.
Something seems wrong with that. I don't know what.
It seems that the only force against this happening, is a drive among players to break up uniformity, to "get tired of" MK and want to look for other things, motivated with complete indifference to tiers, motivated by diversity
for its own sake.
But what if, as I stipulate, that doesn't happen? Can you establish that this drive will always exist?
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Oh God, please no one make a poll. Don't let even the whim seize you. You with the power to do it, you know fletch71011 is right.
@Zylar: I don't think a percent handicap would even work against MK, let alone the problems of justifying it. Think about this; unless you set the number so he's imminent to be K.O.'d, MKs advantages are in his absolute superiority in attacks. He can keep himself from being hit, barraging the opponent, maintaining flawless spacing and giving very little lag. If he starts eating you, it doesn't matter what his damage level is - you still have every difficulty in landing a hit (
a fortiori, landing a K.O. hit).
