Whoa... what happened to my thread...
I intended to talk about hypothetical melee bans, but I suppose I should give my two cents on the Brawl issue.
I play Magic the Gathering semi competitively, and a few months ago, a very expensive and powerful pair of cards were banned from the most popular format, Standard. For those curious, I'm referring to Jace, the Mind Sculptor, and Stoneforge Mystic.
Magic is very different from Melee, first of all, because there is variance, and second of all, because people don't put in the same amount of time and dedication to their deck as people do to their characters.
Now, Wizards of the Coast don't lightly ban cards from the most popular format, they want people to be able to play their cards. When they banned these cards, a lead developer gave a long article explaining exactly why they were banning these ridiculously powerful cards.
The first reason was the oppressiveness of the deck that ran a full playset of Jace and a full playset of Stoneforge Mystic. That deck, known as Caw Blade, was strictly the best deck, and no other decks could come close to its power level or consistency. The top 8's of large tournaments were all Caw Blade decks.
The second reason was that because Caw Blade was that, as a control deck, the mirror matches became very long battles of attrition. Often times, players would time out and the result of the game would be a draw, or a win without finishing the game.
The third reason was that as the popularity of Caw Blade rose, the cards in the deck skyrocketed in price, providing an additional barrier to play the best deck in the format.
All three reasons basically coalesced into the biggest reason that he gave.
Caw Blade made the game not fun.
Oh, sure, there were many people who still enjoyed playing, they would show up and play Caw Blade dittos all day, but tournament attendance declined very steadily. At the beginning of summer, which is when Magic has most of its business, tournament attendance was at the lowest it had been in quite a while. R&D had to do something immediately, and as a result, we had our ban.
This final point is the thing that I am most interested in.
Has tournament attendance significantly decreased because of Meta Knight? I don't think you can prove that MK is the cause of a decrease in attendance, but a correlation graph would be nice.
I mean, let's consider that Falcon is the best character in the game, and all characters better than he is no longer exist. Falcon is the top character and the only way to beat Falcons is to main Falcon yourself.
Would we ban Capt. Falcon at that point? I don't think so. No matter how much DD camping and OP aerials we see, Falcon embodies the ideals of melee for a lot of people. He punishes with exciting combos. He is fun to play, and he is fun to watch.
But if say, the best character was Jigglypuff, and the best Jigglypuffs were people who zoned with bair and didn't approach, and Melee became a game where the best strategy was to plank and camp with Puff, and it wasn't even close, I think we would ban Puff. It's just not fun to play against.
Say what you will about scrub johns, skill, brokenness, and character prevalence; to me, a community will not survive if its game is simply not fun to play. If the dominant strategy becomes not fun, there are simply only two alternatives. Either another, more fun strategy becomes dominant, or the dominant strategy has to be excluded.
I think we were lucky in Melee, we have one character who a decent percentage(myself not included) of people do not enjoy watching, and people consider that character unfun to play against and unfun to watch, but we are lucky in that the character is not dominant. No matter if who else becomes the best player, they are still considered entertaining, fun to watch, fun to play against, and that is what makes Melee's metagame so healthy after all these years.
It's the Wombo Combo, I Killed Mufasa, **** x2, Tipping an Illusion, Axe Effect, Genesis 2 Grand Finals simple, pure enjoyment of watching a game that looks fun.
Now, it's always up to the population to decide what's necessary. I would say that if you had a poll on the melee boards about banning Puff, I don't think you would get even close to a majority vote. Granted, Puff hasn't dominated our metagame like MK has in Brawl, but I'd like to think that our community is mature enough to think of alternative solutions to outright banning the problem.
The problem is quite clear, MK is making Brawl not fun. Not fun to play, not fun to watch, but he keeps being dominant. It doesn't look like a new strategy is going to emerge superior over him, so the problem has to be removed somehow. I'm sorry to hear about how this decision was made, M2K, I really think the decision could be made is a much better way, and alternatives to outright banning seem to be much more reasonable. I can understand why you're angry and frustrated.
Anyways, that's how I see it. I hope the issue gets resolved in a more fair way.
tl;dr: Barlw is not fun, but still, the way people went about banning Meta Knight is stupid.