What makes a character bannable?

Nothing should make a character bannable IMO. Now I fully understand that some characters are higher “tiered” than others and there are some characters that someone who’s never played the game before can use and beat seasoned veterans with but that doesn’t make the character unbeatable, nor does it constitute an unfair advantage.

Each and every character has weaknesses. This is true of every fighter game since MK1, if not earlier. If you aren’t good at one character, try a different one. If you suck, practice more. The ability of a character to be unbeatable or “MONSTEROUSLY POWERFUL OMG WTF WE HAVE TO BAN IT NO FAIR HAXS!!!1!1one” is 100% in your mind.

oddjob from goldeneye would be the closest thing to really unfair IMO. If you were to have a match with 4 equally talented players and 1 was oddjob, you know who’s gonna win. There are ways though to make games fair without having to ban characters, like random selection. Everyone then at least has an equal opportunity to get the cheap character.

wtf is a character…

cereal..?

If the game is so unbalanced why do you keep playing it?

When PC games are terrible we quit playing them and they quickly die. After a couple fails the developer learns to quit making terrible games or they close shop. This cool trick also works with console games.

the key word here is ‘if’

if they get you in the infinite combo you are dead.

pro-tip: don’t get stuck in the infinite combo

seriously though, cheap moves can be avoided, some more difficult than others. Does it warrant a total ban of a character? hell nah. Ban the combo, or the situation, call it an exploit and be done.

Nickname said:

if you want to prove your skilled superiority over another player, always choose the same character as them. If the move is so noobish and *edited*, you should be able to out-noob them if you really are the better player.

I prefer to die with honor using a lower tier character. Or kicking thier noob *edited* before the combo

If I had to pick I’d have to say the philosophy that I most agree with is the one used for competitive pokemon. There’s actually a couple things in competitive pokemon that can land a pokemon in the Uber category (which for the comparison is the same as being banned). When a pokemon is used very frequently and appears on almost every team, red flags are definitely thrown up. The same is true of fighting game characters. High usage, especially in tournaments, leads to some suspicion. However this alone is no basis for a ban, simply a likely indicator.

At this point you have to figure out if the character fits into one of two categories. The first category is the “unfair” category. Generally, characters don’t fall into this category. Going back to the pokemon example, a pokemon that was banned for this reason was Wobbuffett. Wobbuffett is a guaranteed kill, and a high possibility for a double kill. The equivalent to that in a fighting game would be a character that had an unblockable, unavoidable, invincible, instant kill move that could be performed regardless of any gauge or resource. In other words, a guaranteed kill. As far as I know, there’s no fighting game with such a character.

The second, more common reason for a ban is limited counter measures. Once again pulling the pokemon analogy, the likes of Mewtwo and some other legendaries are banned for this reason. There are only a handfull of pokemon that can stat-wise compete with such pokemon (and most of those pokemon are the legendaries themselves), and therefore when making a team you either include such counter measures or resign yourself to lose against such pokemon. The equivalent of this in a fighter would be a character that cannot be successfully defeated, regardless of player skill, unless certain “counter-measure” characters are picked. Characters like this do exist, but are few and far between.

In short, there’s not many situations in which a character should be banned.

~Arch Angel~