Appeal to results: talking about Metaknight and the Ledge Grab Limit

Ah, smashboards... You know, the mods killed the whole "Ban Metaknight" discussion for a reason. Well, MLG has come and gone, and it's back. That's surprising because in the last 3 nationals, MK has had relatively lousy placing. Like, not bad placing, but placing that would indicate that being the best character in the game doesn't necessarily make him zomgbroken. For reference:
APEX 2010:
1: DEHF
2: Brood
3: mew2king
4: Lee Martin
5: Ally
5: lain
7: Rain
7: Atomsk
9: Anti
9: Shadow
9: san
9: Shugo
13: Inui
13: Sweet Pea
13: Gnes
13: Malcolm


MLG DC:
1: The_ADHD (EC) - Diddy - $2,500
2: RichBrown (WC) - Olimar - $1,500
3: Mew2King (MW) - Meta Knight - $1,000
4: ESAM (SE) - Pikachu - $700
5: FatalMatt (EC) - Snake - $500
6: MikeHaze (WC) - Marth - $350
7: HavokZ (WC) - Meta Knight/Marth/Snake - $250
8: AllyOrNotAlly (CAN) - Snake - $200
9: Atomsk92 (EC) - King Dedede/Meta Knight
10: Tyrant-WC (WC)- Meta Knight
11: xNecrox (EC) - Meta Knight
12: xxCANDYxx (EC) - Snake
13: Felixtrix (WC) - Diddy Kong
14: LeeMartin (SE) - Meta Knight/Lucario
15: Vinnie_C (EC) - Game & Watch
16: Seibrik (SE) - Meta Knight

MLG Dallas:
1st (9) Gnes -Diddy Kong - $12,500
2nd (3) TyRaNt - Meta Knight - $7,500
3rd (2) ESAM - Pikachu - $5,000
4th (1) Ally - Snake - $3,500
5th (11) Espy - Sonic - $2,500
6th (12) _X_ - Sonic - $1,750
7th (4) LeeMartin - Meta Knight/Lucario - $1,250
8th (7) Atomsk92 - King Dedede/Ice Climbers/Meta Knight$1,000
9th (14) mikeHAZE - Marth
10th (15) -Dojo- - Meta Knight
11th (13) DEHF - Falco
12th (16) Mjg7tlink - Toon Link
13th (6) RichBrown - Olimar
14th (5) NickRiddle - Zero Suit Samus
15th (8) FatalMatt - Snake
16th (10) logic- - Olimar

These are the three most recent brawl nationals. I'm going to discount Viridian City 9 because it's not nearly of the same size and almost all of the entries are from Atlantic North, an area swam–no, swamped is an understatement. Drowning in Metaknights. (That, and the results really suck for the purpose of this article... 6 MKs in top 8, FML.)

Outside of certain regions, and especially on a national scale, Metaknight doesn't really seem to be a problem. Results like are present at those tournaments are a really healthy metagame. I mean, come on. Multiple Sonics in top 8, an Ike in top 16, diddy kong winning multiple major nationals... Dayum.

So I'm not going to use this article to address Metaknight's results, as it seems pretty clear that his results speak for themself (hell, want me to pull up a recent german national where we had a sheik, two marths, and a lucas in top 8?). No, today I'm going to talk about planking.
For those of you who aren't "in the know", Planking is a strategy where a character simply repeatedly grabs the ledge. They abuse the ledge invincibility, the risky position most opponents need to adapt to hit them, and the high risk-reward to stall out the match until time runs out. An alternative version, propagated by characters like Pit, ROB, and Samus, is to basically use the ledge as a very safe camping spot and consistently jump up above it and chuck projectiles in the other direction. In almost all cases, this is easily beatable if you know what you are doing. The problem is that Metaknight's planking is, effectively, unbeatable. I'm not going to go into detail here, but DMG made an exhaustively researched thread on the subject here. So essentially, the character has a broken tactic which is not exploiting a glitch and easily bannable when it gets seen by a judge, but is rather based in the game's physics, by abusing something everyone else can abuse, but not quite to that degree. Additionally, it's very hard to ban, because while the ledge is an amazing defensive position for metaknight, it's a shitty offensive position-Metaknight really struggles getting from the ledge back onstage against some characters. So that guy who just grabbed the ledge 5 times in a row? He may not be planking, it's just that that marth who's pressuring him isn't giving him an opening!

However, MK's planking is broken. This has led to the rise of various rules against Metaknight. The most common (and thank god least retarded) of them is a ledge-grab-limit: a rule that states: "If a player grabs the edge more than X times in a game, and the game goes to time, that player loses unless his opponent has also grabbed the edge more than X times, in which case normal time-out rules apply". Yeah, and that's the best rule we could come up with. We've tried all kinds of other things, but most of them are flat-out retarded (note to self: make article taking the air time limit rule apart in the near future-that shit is beyond stupid). And to be honest? It works. Metaknight can't plank, and except in cases where the limit was placed ridiculously low (under 25, but these are fringe cases; usually it's around 35 or 40), the cases of people losing due to the rule where they were not clearly abusing planking are almost unheard of (there's exactly one case where I have seen this happen, and the metaknight was going for the time-out anyways; I have never seen this be abused to force a loss on the other player by forcing them to grab the ledge repeatedly). From a philosophical standpoint, we are redefining the "broken tactic" (which I would consider a prerequisite to have a rule such as this) from "Metaknight camping the ledge constantly" to "A character camping the ledge for long enough to accumulate 35 ledgegrabs, and then win via time-out". Which, to be fair, is reasonable. The rule has a few flaws, sure, but one of the big ones is easily removed-specifically, that nobody has broken planking other than Metaknight. So we just make it an MK-only rule. No big deal there. Beyond that, the rule has very few actual issues. The brawl community can sit back and relax, and Metaknight can continue being the best character in the game but only slightly above the curve anyways.

Alas, there's more to it than that. There is a fairly large group of people on the smash world forums who believe that, because this is an arbitrary rule necessary to nerf Metaknight, it means Metaknight is broken. Let me start this out by saying: no shit Sherlock. "This character is broken without these rules, therefore this character is broken". Herp derp. That's why you add the rules. But no, they are claiming that because of this, it is better to ban Metaknight. This reasoning bases heavily on the outdated (and probably misinterpreted) views of Sirlin, which seem to point towards such nerfs being ridiculous. However, I can guarantee that if the issue was with a character like DK or Olimar, chars who aren't top tiers, this would not be an issue. It's because they want Metaknight banned. Don't get me wrong, the reasons for banning Metaknight are there. It's not a completely irrational stance to hold. But if you'd like to argue that the game would be less deep without him, you're not going to have much luck. First of all because this places the burden of proof on you, and proving things that aren't blatantly obvious with this theory is damn near impossible, and second of all because you're wrong.

Why am I able to say this? Because of first-hand evidence about the metagame. Metaknight is not a prevalent force in the national American metagame, nor the german metagame. He is ridiculously powerful in both low level play, and in certain areas, but overall, at top level play, the character is not broken. You have a lot of results with him, but you have a massive number of top-level players playing the character as well. I mean, I can't exactly speak for the American metagame, but I can speak for the german one. And I can safely say that germany's metagame would be far worse off without metaknight. Why? Because in germany, Metaknight is just a character like any other. Be it because german metaknights suck, or because we just don't have as many people bandwagoning metaknight, or because we have a lot of people playing other characters at amazingly high levels. I dunno about you, but judging from the fact that the european metagame isn't that far behind the American one, I'm kinda guessing it's the last two. And what a coincidence, the recent major american nationals back me up on this one-given high enough level of play, metaknight is simply not an issue.

Making a decent case that the game would be more competitively deep with him banned would therefore be ridiculous, not leastly because banning a character is, by this theory, a big fucking deal. I mean, think about it or a minute. There are a few variables
 that define what the depth of the game is. You have the physics, you have the stage elements in smash, and then you have the character's movesets. The physics don't change from match to match, and stage elements are, for the most part, fairly uniform. However, character movesets contain incredibly drastic differences. Even if you were to cut down the cast to the top tier, you still have most major character archetypes, and the game is still amazingly deep. Just think of how differently Metaknight plays when compared to any other viable character. The closest comparison, Marth, is still amazingly different. Cut out metaknight–hell, cut out ANY character–and you cut out all of the effectively different situations that character contains. And boy, is it a lot. This is why banning a character is such a huge deal-unless the character is a severe detractor to the game, limiting the "realistic" options a person has to almost nothing other than "pick this character", removing him (and therefore limiting the "actual" options) is very dangerous. And this is why we ban planking, not the character. This is what justifies banning planking. This is also why you can nerf metaknight by banning planking, but not automatically justify a rule like "Punch Time" (ganon gets 3 "free" warlock punches per match)-because LGLs already have their smoking gun which shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that, assuming that Metaknight doesn't lower the depth of the game immensely without planking legal, it is better to have LGLs than ban Metaknight. Punch time lacks this.

Yeah, that's enough for one day. BPC out.