Umm, no. While general consensus is that Lightan is the worst in the game, PTX was considered quite high by many players. He had a couple bad matchups but also a handful of matchups that were completely in his favor. PTX has a nasty 50/50 game, ToD combos in the corner, immunity to Megacrash, ability to wavedash, a super armored tackle, unblockables, and an inescapable unblockable on an incoming character that leads into a lvl 3 for 32k damage. Nothing about him is middle tier. And again there is still some confusion in this thread about why the giants were banned.
**Giants were not banned because they were a dominant force in TvC. **
Anyone who played the game seriously would have known that. There was just no way to be consistent with the giants when there were multiple hard counters to them in this game.
Giants were not banned because they were boring.
Do you honestly think the community cares anything about what some dipshit stream monsters have to say about this game? The same stream monsters that shat all over this game because it had a burst mechanic? Lame ass characters exist in any game and giants are no exception, in fact I think fighting against Saki is twice as lame as fighting against a giant. If some people left the game because the giants were lame then thats their problem not the community.
**Giants did not “split” the community **
The rumor that giants split the community is a complete lie. For the longest time people have learned to live the giants. People who quit the game because of the giants will not be missed, we didn’t want to deal with your whiny ass anyways. Oh boohoo, Marn and Justin quit the game because they didn’t like the giants, hint they didn’t even like the game to begin with. The common misconception is that TvC died because of the giants and that is completely false. The real killer of the game was MvC3 and its much larger community. Giants are to TvC as X Factor/Dark Phoenix is to Marvel 3. People complained about both but have learned to deal with it.
Giants were not officially banned at all
RoyalFlush banned the giants at his tourneys because some of regulars were really contemplating on not coming if the giants were allowed (more on that later). Can you really blame the guy for trying to keep his scene running? The tourneys were already pretty small averaging out at usually 10-12 entrants, and it honesly didn’t even matter because none of the regulars mained the giants in the first place. Please refer to this thread for his reasoning on the ban: For the remainder of TvC tournaments in SoCal.... I AM BANNING GIANTS! But as it stands, giants were only banned for tournaments run by RoyalFlush in SoCal. Regular tournament rules allow the use of giants. The ban on giants for this particular side-tourney was purely up to the TO (yourmother) so bring this up to him.
Giants were looked down upon because of the counter pick issue
Like I’ve stated above, giants had some absolutely ridiculously skewed matchups in their favor. We are talking about 9.5-0.5 bad. No matter how good you are with Roll, you are not doing jack shit against PTX and you might as well just die so your next character has a bunch of meter. This creates a problem in a tournament environment as people playing certain team combinations are forced to pretty much give game 1 and switch to an appropriate counter pick team which creates the second problem in that the giant player can now switch to a regular team and sweep you since you are probably not familiar with your giants counter-pick team. While instances of this were rare, they have happened before (Keits pretty much stealing a win off RyRy at Evo).
I don’t like how people who have never played TvC at a competitive level (or at all for that matter) are coming in here and talking like they actually know the game. Playing against the giants, no playing against PTX (Lightan was never the problem) is not something that can be compared to. You can’t just bring up characters like 3S Chun and expect a fair comparison because giants have completely different mechanics and play by a completely different set of rules. Likewise you can’t compare the giants to ST Akuma or whatever ridiculously broken character as they were banned for completely different reasons. Giants were an experimental character design that is exclusive to TvC so it was a very tricky matter to deal with. And I know I’m going to get a bunch of replies from players that will still use these comparisons. I really wish we can get RoyalFlush to comment on this matter so we can listen to his exact reasoning because as of now people are only looking this issue in one direction.