I thought I'd wallpost some of my MK ban thoughts since things were quiet. Now they aren't so quiet. Oh well.
[COLLAPSE="COLLAPSE"]So after sitting around this thread and posting one liners awhile, I think I'll throw my spiel. Earlier I didn't want to waste people's time, because historically I'm terribly unpersuasive on forums, almost to the point that I start the engine and head in reverse. But people are now throwing tomatoes at trolls so I feel like things are quiet enough I can't be doing much damage.
I've been pro-ban since Overswarm's hype for it way back when. I would have definitely seen "let's see one more tournament" as valid back then, but pretty early on I was satisfied that MetaKnight was probably not going to have any bad matchups at all, and at worst would have a 45-55 somewhere which would still make him extremely centralizing and a must-secondary.
I was rather confused when Meta Knight failed to consistently take 6/8 each top 8 after things stabilized. I figured people hadn't quite gotten it yet, and it would only take a bit longer.
Then somewhere down the line, I realized the game was never going to degenerate to a true MK ditto fest, ever. After seeing Meta Knight lose to Diddy, Pikachu, Snake, Falco, Olimar, Sonic, Lucario, etc I realized, no one cares about picking a character for the sake of winning. Well of course they care some, Ganon's usage rate isn't equal to Wario's. But they don't care enough. The diverse number of characters toppling Meta Knight a respective minority of the time showed that no one wanted to play the ditto, and no one even wanted to play characters that countered Meta Knight the most.
The balance between playing a preferred character and playing the winningest one is different for everyone. I think to some extent, everyone has a point where they will stop playing to win because their strategy is getting so unenjoyable (the difference between the scrub and a good player is moving that point as far as you can towards winning for long term satisfaction, and respecting other players who are willing to go to the depths you find too intense instead of booing my charizard for chaingrabbing Ness in a low tier tournament.)
That balance, for this community, is such that the game will continue to have diversity. As long as really talented players decide they really don't enjoy two frame upairs, the game will have character diversity.
At the same time, there are players who will main and pocket MK to improve their chances of winning. Some explicitly do this, a lot of MK players who enjoy his playstyle may have stuck with the character for reasons directly linked to his strength.
I pondered for a while, how such a motley mixture of players could ever live in peace and harmony. I analyzed it with game theory, and whether my models were exactly correct, the game theory helped me see the logical conclusion: a player who does not play Meta Knight cannot logically and fairly impose a ban on that character on the basis of character diversity, because he's supplying it. Removing Meta Knight gives him a better chance at winning and doing so under conditions he enjoys (playing his favorite character) but by definition the Meta Knight player cares more about winning than you do in the first place, so from a utilitarian perspective you don't improve things by handicapping the Meta Knight player. This is of course assuming you think Meta Knight is overpowered, and still refuse to play him, you can't really be proban anyway unless he's overpowered.
Two players who are both playing to win and playing a Meta Knight ditto because they are playing to win do benefit from the ban; their odds of winning doesn't change but character diversity increases and they get greater latitude to play a favorite character. A community of Overswarms really is happier with the ban. A community of "my name is robert and I want to win with Rob :D" isn't happier. It's just siphoning happiness away from the Meta Knight players. That's why all the MK mains are angry. This line of logic is unjustified in an intrinsic way (is that a correct use of the word intrinsic?)
Since I want the ban to go through, perhaps it's unwise of me to shoot down the diversity argument hard like that. But maybe the odds are better if the bad logic is kicked out and only good logic is left.
The reason I remain pro-ban is because surgical, subjective nerfs are naturally inaccurate and a slap in the face to many members of the community. First I'll explain how their subjective, then why they suck.
IDC ban was fine, don't strawman IDC into this. It has minor enforcement issues but for the most part it's clear that it breaks the game if it exists and there is a clear cutoff line to remove that component.
LGL is absolutely subjective. Meta Knight started winning too much due to some strategy. The assessment of the metagame really should have stopped there, we should be blind to what that strategy is if we can't describe it in a sentence in a way that makes it clear what constitutes that strategy and what constitutes recovery. But we kept on going and deciding that some subset of the ways Meta Knight uses the ledge is too powerful.
What can you do to make sure this poorly defined group of behaviors never happens? There is no one discrete, clear, obvious solution. And that's where it becomes subjective (or perhaps the second time really). LGL is one solution. How many ledge grabs? That's subjective. LGL proponents try to argue that the LGL is just right because it's in some sort of broad window where planking becomes useless and recovering is just dandy. The burden of evidence is on them to prove that, actually, but we already have people timing out in LGL games. So M2K says, add time to the clock. That's a subjective solution, again. How much time? Why add time, why not add a % handicap to Meta knight so that the current time limit prevents the strategy naturally? Why not add food on low? Why not cause all Meta Knight games to be played on Shadow Moses Island? These can all be used as substitutes for the LGL itself, of course. There's numerous other endgame stats that probably work to restrict planking as well, and it's subjective how much you pare it down. Platform fallthroughs was in melee, so I know that would work. I don't have a wii right now but smashes performed, taunts performed, items picked up with stickers on low (beat the other guy by 20 stickers in a game that times out, you win), and any number of other things work. As does a different number of ledgegrabs. Ledgegrabs aren't naturally related to the strategy anymore than upairs are, and there's no natural number to set like we have with IDC, where that number was definitely 0.
The second subjective thing that happens is number of stage bans available, and the stage availability list. MK friendly stages tend to get banned, RIP norfair. Regardless of whether the stage has too many problems of its own or not, MK definitely accelerated its ban. Now we're talking about banning Rainbow Cruise and Brinstar to nerf MK. Is Rainbow cruise enough bannage if we leave Brinstar in? Are we not going far enough by leaving Delfino Plaza legal? Again, the character is being nerfed in a subjective way.
The first thing I asserted is that surgical nerfs are naturally innaccurate. The proof is in the pudding on that one, but it's also true from a logical standpoint. The characters, playstyles, stages, everything, forms a big rock paper scissors game with everything else. Of course, there are more than three choices, we also have jackhammers paper mache and boxcutters. If you find something that breaks the game - the laser pistol is frying everything - removing it entirely makes it likely that all the other strategies form an equilibrium of counters with eachother (if they don't, a subjective nerf was probably incapable of creating equilibrium anyhow, due to an underlying issue). Undernerfing laser pistol leaves the possibility that laser pistol still beats everything else in the game. Overnerfing it becomes tantamount to removal - if it loses to everything in game, it might as well not exist. So the point of nerfing in the first place has to be aiming for the balance.. which is nebulous. There is a chance you nerf laser pistol just enough for it to stop burning through Mirror pan and leave it good enough to beat paper, admittedly. But you can't be sure you won't mess up and undernerf. And overnerfing is the same as banning - you remove that one strategy, but you make it very likely that you can regain equilibrium.
Analogies are bad for persuasion. I've said that in this thread. This is why I say of myself I'm bad at persuasion, I knowingly do the wrong. To apply it to the situation, nerfing Meta Knight is inherently less accurate than banning him. Undernerfing is a miss, and doesn't fix the problem. Overnerfing is the same as removing him, he becomes Ganon tier and is basically no longer a character (he probably is that fail with no specials). The sweetspot exists but it's too small to hit in one shot.
Bringing me to the second reason subjective nerfs are bad - every single time you nerf Meta Knight, you slap all the Meta Knight players in the face. You slap them twice, it's a doubleslap, jiggz style. First you slap them by making them relearn the game. If you ban Rainbow Cruise, I have to learn other stages. If you raise the time limit, I have to learn to play with less stalling, which was legit until you changed the rules. It might not end with those actions, who knows. It's kinda like banning MK makes people learn a new character, but it's smaller, it's repeated, and it has less promise of ending its cycle. The guys who can still win by huge margins and reap cash of course want to pay that small price. Someone playing MK because that's the best way to get by like me gets pissed at seeing other players rewarded for character selections inferior to mine because they are inferior to mine incrementally and repeatedly. I'd rather have it one and done. It may sound selfish, but it's really not, a preference for playing MK, either for pleasure of high winning likelihood, is a natural prerequisite for wanting to put up that. I don't prefer him or have a talent that lets me win more with him, I just play him because that's optimal in the current ruleset.
That pales in comparison to the thing I hate most about subjective nerfs - it's all tied to the players. If my region didn't ban MK, (it did, I think mostly for the reasons I feel I've refuted above, but I'll take it however I can get it I guess), I would go to tournaments knowing that if I've invented a new tech like shuttle loop cancelling, I'll lose a stage or timer time. If I find a way to camp Falco out indefinitely, I get one tournament win and then that gets banned so the Falco can beat me with his character. If I just play well in general and make good predictions, I might lose a stage anyhow. This doesn't apply to me specifically of course, but to the body of Meta Knight players as a whole. It's all the injustice of banning the character someone's spent time on - injustice indeed if we're not playing mirror matches, as I stated earlier - over, and over, and over again. It's not fun because we lose ground every time we gain ground. The motivation to improve decreases, the rules committee is going to make sure your tournament placement remains constant anyhow. And the newest shiniest thing you can come up with to add to your game (that you might legitimately enjoy, like abusing Brinstar), that's the most likely to get removed. All the other characters in the game lose motivation to improve too. They give up during phases of the nerf cycle where it's clear he's unstoppable (like now. No one's trying to master brinstar against MK right now, they're posting on the forums instead.) It takes away from the legacy of the game too, tournament finals are often remembered as flawed segments of the slow nerf cycle instead of the rise of a new character contender that becomes a feature of the metagame. It's all kinds of bad.
EDIT: What it comes down to is that I'm so anti-ban, I'm pro-ban. I believe we should play the game without an LGL, because when the non-MK players impose an LGL on me, that's unfair just like when a non-MK player banned the MK character in my earlier example. We could go through the exercise of playing Brawl with no LGL, but we all know how that story ends. Everyone and there mother plays MK, the game dies if the rules don't change. MK reaches a breaking point where everyone's love of pet favorites and diversity isn't strong enough to maintain diversity. And at that breaking point, I still hate bans, so I want you to ban as few times as possible for the lifetime of the game to fix this. I'm that anti-ban. So you ban Meta Knight.
tl;dr? : I forgive you[/COLLAPSE]
