Please, enlighten us Overswarm. What stages are more advantageous for MK than Brinstar and Rainbow Cruise? Delfino is one example, but it's usually picked by MK players because Brinstar/RC are both banned. Are you saying you know MK's stage advantages better than Otori, M2K, Ally, ZeRo, etc?
Yes, I do.
While individual matchups may switch around (MK vs. D3 might show a better performance on Brinstar for MK than he would on Halberd, for example, despite Halberd being statistically one of MK's best stages), the overall stats don't. We recorded every single match of every set during the entire MLG season.
Given the fact that using cold hard numbers
has allowed me to see the future and determine which characters will become more viable over time and which will become less viable, I still don't know why people could see that MK has a higher win % on stage X rather than stage Y, but see one win between two top players on stage Y and say "stage Y is better than stage X". It's irresponsible.
The data looked something like this (info cut off on left/right):
We got data like usage on stages, both total number and average use. I sometimes limited it to just the top placing characters on those stages (most wins) like this:
OMG MK has a 5% swing from Smashville, the most balanced stage evar, to Norfair, more like nofair!....
Wait, Snake has a 3% swing towards Smashville while all the other characters shown have a fairly even rate on both stages, meaning the stage doesn't effect the outcome for them. Cept G&W, who loves him some norfair as much as Snake loves Smashville.
Is a 2% difference in win rate enough to say "Norfair obv imba", or do we need more data? It's pretty obvious this isn't conclusive. It's that easy. At this point anyone that says Norfair is imbalanced needs to collect some cold hard data, or compare Norfair-legal tournaments to Norfair-illegal tournaments to see if there is a swing in MK placements.
There were also comparisons among the whole cast:
Usage is a good indicator of what to look at, but it's difficult to account for popularity alone so you have to look closer.
So you first just look at average and total usage to determine what's important and what complaints are valid:
Looking at that totals chart you can tell that Smashville is a popular stage by comparing it with the averages. Stages that are commonly used as CPs (both by the CPer and the person being CPed by) should have a big divide between their total usage and their average usage. You can see this for stages like Brinstar, Rainbow Cruise, Halberd, Delfino, etc. Castle Siege was a curious one; if I recall correctly, other people were taking MK there, but I can't say for sure right now. But you can look at those charts and say "we obviously need to make sure MK doesn't have an unseemly win % on Smashville in comparison with his average win % on other stages" because it is the most commonly played stage, and even though Brinstar is played barely 1/6th of the time he is played on Smashville you can see in the averages that MK is played there a decent amount more than his other stages, which are pretty much all in a normal range (except for Green Greens, one of MK's few bad stages). [for those playing the home game, FD was the most banned stage
by far at every event; it is far and away the most polarizing stage in the game. It's basically a counterpick placed on the starter list.]
So if people are coming in with one assumption (Smashville is a balanced stage for MK and not broken) and you can challenge that with another assumption (Rainbow Cruise isn't just a good stage, it's MKs best stage and he owns everyone on it), you do so. Since we had stock and character usage, we could do things like average stock count:
And we can say that MK isn't really owning on Rainbow Cruise much more than he is on Smashville. There's a 4% difference in the amount of two stocks, and the majority of said two stocks were against characters like Olimar which obviously would have a hard time with the stage. Another fun fact: Diddy one stocked multiple high level MKs throughout the events, enough to where it makes me wonder if Diddy might have an advantage on that stage due to MK not being able to mess with his recovery.
I did this over and over again and showed that if someone wanted to ban Brinstar or Rainbow Cruise, they needed to ban Delfino too because that stage was straight up better for MK on average. Brinstar/Rainbow were just bad stages for certain players characters, and they were salty because they played a character that did poorly on two stages and couldn't just ban both. They didn't want to have a secondary or play a better character, and wanted the stages banned to fit them.
Think of it as IC players complaining about Melee stages and saying that DL64, FD, and PS1 were the only stages that could be viable. Things like that.
I don't have all my numbers and charts on hand; some are at home, some are lost forever, some are back in back room threads or deleted MK threads, so I can't give you everything you'd like to know (not going through those numbers again).
But TL;DR, I don't **** around with banning things. When someone says they "know" something, I tell them to prove it and I mean it. When you say "You saying you know MK's stage advantages more than (top player)", I will answer with a resounding yes.
Also, this fits in line with what we were discussing earlier Strong Bad:
http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=262937&highlight=originalist+vs+constructivist