Long post warning. The three bolded posts are my concerns.
How much dominance is too much?
This has been brought up before and quickly dismissed, but it's a serious question. The pro-ban argument has shown a lot of information that Meta Knight is dominating; this is something that shouldn't come as a surprise. However, we don't know if the dominance is banworthy because we don't know how much dominance is too much. The cutoff would be different from person to person, so the information shown could be overdomination to some and perfectly fine to others
Any dominance cutoffs created by this point would be biased — that much is obvious.
What happens after Meta Knight is banned?
Again, this is another point that's been brought up. We only know a few things for certain:
1)An MK ban will force a large chunk of the Brawl community to change their mains for MK banned events.
2)An MK ban (should) bring in more varied tournament results.
The former is the only thing we really know for sure. There's no true proof of the latter happening, but it's hard to argue against with the character rankings and match-ups presented. What happens past then — increased tournament attendance, a split in the community, past MK mains remaining top pros, new players coming, Brawl lasting longer, etc — is all speculation. We have no way of knowing what will actually happen, but there are definitely many concerns about what would happen to the community.
Suppose you take a region, like Atlantic North, that has a good amount of MK mains, and it's after the MK ban. Would all of the TOs follow through with the ban? Suppose they all or mostly don't, and within Atlantic North the competitive scene remains as it usually has been. What happens if they try to host a national, or MK players want to compete in a national out of region? They probably won't be able to well because of the MK-banned vs. MK-legal tournament attendee discord. Suppose some TOs follow the ban and others keep MK legal. What happens to attendance within region with all of the MK mains? Will they only go to MK allowed tournaments? Will non-MK mains go to those same tournaments, or will they keep to the MK banned ones? Will they just switch mains? Suppose most or all TOs follow the ban. What happens to the large chunk of MK mains in the region? There probably won't be enough people that quit because of MK and are waiting to come back to fill in their shoes, so does the region just suffer if all the MK mains decide to quit? Or do they just switch mains?
There are too many questions that we can't answer because we don't know for sure what will happen with an MK ban. The game could turn out better or worse, but we don't know.
(One thing that an MK ban will not do, however, is magically increase tournament attendees. While some increase may happen over time, a bunch of new players won't join the competitive scene simply because MK is banned. Attendance is somewhat different only in the sense that if a region is literally turning into MK dittos and people are quitting in the region because of that, then an MK ban would increase the attendance. It won't bring in new players or tournament goers. That's more of the issue of the tournament itself. I'll expand on this later.)
A possible solution for the “We don't know anything!” dilemna is a temp ban. Banning MK for a time period like 6 months could provide the evidence we need to make a final verdict. However, I'm very wary about a temp ban because we don't know for sure if the evidence and results we find would show what we'd get with a permanent ban. It's all up to what the TOs and players do; if there's a split with MK-banned and MK-legal tournaments, we won't get very accurate results. If certain players just stop playing, or only go to MK-legal tournaments, etc., it's the same result.
Is Meta Knight a real problem in the Brawl community right now?
Think about this question for a second before you instantly say “yes.” This question is ignoring the theorycraft, the ban criteria concerns, the LGL rule specifics, all of that stuff — looking at the real picture of actual tournaments, is Meta Knight a real problem?
MK ban threads usually only come around the time of a national. CoT4, Genesis, SNES, Pound 4, etc, and there's usually not much commotion about the MK ban until then. When the thread comes up and we see tournament results, everybody goes frantic. Why? The results of nationals shouldn't be surprising; top players get top spots, a lot of top players main Meta Knight, Meta Knight gets a lot of top spots.
People like to throw around blanket statements of how much MK is destroying the community, how MK is overcentralizing the metagame, how MK is decreasing tournament attendance — I even heard that the game wouldn't last until 2010 (which is obviously false). However, what MK actually does to the community seems to be quite region specific. For example, I heard that New Mexico (from Dekar), GtaN (from Swordgard), and Puerto Rico (from Kewkky) have all had MK problems or overcentralization to the point where they had to ban the character. He would consistently be taking 6-7 out of the top 8, and people have stopped going to tournaments because of him in the regions. In that case, a ban is completely understandable.
What about everywhere else?
What about places like Atlantic North, where a lot of people main MK but a lot of people are fine with it, and a ban of MK would cut a large chunk of the playerbase? What about places like Eastern Midwest, where MK exists but isn't really dominating? In most places, sure MK has the top results since he's the best character in the game, but he's not a real problem. People have mentioned the slow decline of tournament attendance and have correlated it with the slow increase of MK's results. Honest question: Do you think a ban of MK will boost tournament attnedance in your region?
If you answered yes, stop and think for a bit. I said before in a parenthetical remark that a MK ban wouldn't bring any more new attendees, and except for special cases such as New Mexico, GtaN, and Puerto Rico, his ban wouldn't really bring much more tournament attendance. Certain regions have been having trouble with attendance recently, and more likely than not it isn't because of MK dominance that attendance is declining, but of tournaments themselves.
The MD/VA tournament scene was struggling a few months ago (not sure if it's the same now) mainly because of how tournaments were run. They usually had $10 venue fees, not great venues, top 3 payouts, and sometimes no pools. This is horrible for anybody who isn't around top 5-10 in the region, and it's especially horrible for the worse players. Imagine being new to the competitive scene (AKA probably not good), driving a good distance to go to a tournament, shelling out $30 for entry+gas+food, having the tournament go slowly because of the lack of set-ups, and when it's all said and done you only play two matches because of the lack of pools. That's not even worst case scenario — that happens in quite a lot of tournaments (I'm not taking a stab at MD/VA by the way, this is just in general). They're set up and run badly, and as a result the lower end of the player spectrum has a bad experience and no motivation to go to future tournaments. They don't see much hope of getting better, and it just isn't fun for them. This leads to tournament attendance decline. Things like losing to a planking Meta Knight may contribute a small bit to this, but it's hardly the main reason why attendance is lacking.
Now let's take a look at Ohio. Ohio's tournaments are amazingly well run, and as a result they have a huge and very competitive scene. If you have the time, I'd advise you to read
this thread (it's the chat between AlphaZealot and Takeover, and AZ gives great advice on how to run a tournament. How his tournaments are run are pretty much how most of Ohio's tournaments are run).
Anyway, I've heard from pretty much all sources, from AIM, on SWF, and in person, that Ohio tournaments are just fun experiences. TOs and helpers such as AZ, Nope, Keist, and OS all do the suggested things for smooth and fun tournaments, so it caters really well to everyone. They have cheap entry fees, tournaments that run on time, pools, and tournaments in each region: Springfield, Cincinnati, Columbus, NEOH. The result is a large amount of good players all competing for the Ohio Power Rankings.
I don't know from experience, but I heard that SoCal was in a slump similar to MD/VA, but Champ with 2GoodGaming has stepped it up with tournaments and helped boost the scene there.
Overall, what I'm trying to say is that region's tournament success or tournament troubles doesn't seem to have anything to do with MK. All of those regions have their share of MK mains, good and bad. Their existence doesn't have an effect on the tournament scenes.
Those are my three viewpoints on those questions. I feel that MK's dominance is region specific and we can't put a broad blanket over how MK performs in the world. I feel that we can't know what will happen afterwards if a ban was instituted, and there's no evidence to suggest the ban will improve the community. I feel that MK isn't even a problem in the community right now, and while we can argue over specifics about him on SWF, he doesn't have actual impact on a region's tournament attendance — other factors do and we should be addressing those. Because of all this, I'm anti-ban.
I know for a fact I left something major out I wanted to say. I also lost focus towards the end of this and rambled on some points. This is much wordier than I hoped. Hopefully anyone who wants to say anything about my points won't nitpick at small things and will get the big picture of what I'm saying, but hopefully people aren't strictly arguing against my points anyway; it's exactly what we shouldn't be doing. We've been having redundant arguments over the MK ban since fall of 2008, and we haven't accomplished much or anything since then.
