All right, for those of you who know anything about fighting games, this may be interesting. I play Super Smash Bros Brawl on a semiprofessional level in my country (I tend to place top half at large tournaments and top 3 in smaller ones), and now for assorted reasons, they have decided to ban the character I use. Quick quiz: what do you call a person who wants a character who does not win international tournaments in their area at all banned?
Answer: A scrub. Fuck the scrubs in the German Smash community. I have no interest in being forced to learn a new character because some people are willing to bitch and whine to no end about something that isn’t broken. What a bunch of dicks.
The same thing I call people who post on the Straight Dope for fun.
I imagine that would suck balls. Sounds like a lot of hard work now down the drain for you. The only thing I could compare it to is maybe losing a half finished manuscript for a novel. I also imagine that, if you love the game that much, you will learn a new character. And maybe it will improve your game.
I travel across the country to go to major tournaments, but generally place just a few spots short of top 8.
Idiots in the community intent on banning him.
The latter.
“He’s broken”. Fun fact: anyone saying that about a character who not only loses, but loses a lot and hasn’t been winning anything at a high level around here in a long time is stupid.
Nope, and that’s what so funny.
A person who wants a character banned; that character does not win tournaments.
You’d think the OP has something to do with it.
I am Budget Player Cadet. I’m smashboards famous, bitch. And yes, this is Metaknight. I don’t plank because it’s banned in any serious tournament.
Germany has had… no MKs winning major tournaments. Orion comes close, usually placing top 3, but every single major tournament in the last year in my country has been Marth, Marth, Marth, Diddy Kong, Snake, Marth. You must be American…
I think he’s saying that the character is not normally regarded as being really good or overpowered - i.e. it would be more understandable if everyone who won tournaments won with a particular character, because that character was overpowered, so they banned the character that was winning everything. But since that isn’t the case, the OP feels like whoever banned the character is a sore loser targeting him and/or his cohorts specifically and unfairly.
I would say “deal with it”, but I don’t think the problem is with you, it’s with the attitude of competitive console gamers in general. They tend to see the released product as untouchable, and if something is imbalanced, you just deal with it and adapt. PC games, on the other hand, are more likely to receive balance patches to fix the metagame from becoming warped. Before this was due to technical constraints, but now there’s no excuse; it’s just a culture thing. Starcraft: Brood War and Warcraft 3 were patched many times because they could, while it was impossible to patch SSB: Melee. But now that SSB: Brawl could theoretically receive balance patches, they don’t because the community would get pissed. Now whatever pro-gaming entity controls Brawl in your country has taken it upon themselves to balance the game, and you’re not happy. Am I right?
The community is grassroots, built from the bottom up for all intents and purposes. MLG had us for a year and then dropped us because we sucked.
Nintendo does not have the ability to patch brawl; not unless they do it the way Capcom does, with new releases.
This attempt to balance the game is retarded because MK isn’t actually winning around here. As said, it’s Marth that’s taking the majority of top-3 spots at our tournaments. Then there’s like 1 or 2 MKs who place well, and then the entire rest of the cast.
(Semi-)seriously, though. Just because the character in question hasn’t won a tournament doesn’t mean it’s not overpowered. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a character to be OP in the sense that in the hands of lesser players it performs extremely well. These generally receive the most ire because nobody likes losing to an inferior player just because they’re playing an OP character.
That said, banning one character in a console game seems misguided, because there is almost certainly a “next best” character that will then be targeted.
If what you say is true, then yeah, a ban was stupid. But for for quite a long time the metagame was totally warped by Meta Knight, was it not? That kind of stuff drives people away from the game.
Let me give an example from competitive Magic: The Gathering. Earlier this year the metagame was so warped by one deck that was incredibly dominant, taking maybe an average of 5-6 top 8 slots per tournament and comprising 50-60% of the metagame. (White-blue Caw Blade was the deck.) Fortunately Blizzard banned the two most offending cards relatively quickly. They learned from their mistakes many years ago when the dominating Ravager Affinity drove so many players to quit. Now the Caw-Blade deck, in its new form, is very good and has its place in the metagame, but it’s nowhere near as dominant (right now it’s getting 1 top 8 spot on average).
