For people who are saying that Scorpion can't be banned because he may have bad matchups and he has been ranked below 1 on the tier list before. Now I don't have a strong opinion on banning him or not. I am not a high enough level player to really know for sure, but I do have a history with fighting games.
For that reason I want to talk about a character named O. Sagat. Now O. Sagat is not the best character in Super Turbo. He actually has bad matchups against Claw and Boxer as well as Dhalsim, however he also has multiple 9-1 and 8-2 matchups. So although he isn't broken, he forces character selection in a way very few other characters do.
http://www.strevival.com/strategy/rankingchart2013/
So next I'm just going to post a long excerpt of David Sirlin's perennial
Playing to Win.
"That's all well and good, but Japan has also shown signs of a soft-ban on another character in Super Turbo. I bring up this example because it lives on the threshold. It is just on the edge of what is reasonable to ban because it is "too good." Anything less than this would not be reasonable, so perhaps others can use it as a benchmark to decide what is reasonable in their games.
The character in question is the mysteriously named "Old Sagat." Old Sagat is not a secret character like Akuma (or at least he's not as secret!). Old Sagat does not have any moves like Akuma's air fireball that the game was not designed to handle. Old Sagat is arguably the best character in the game (Akuma, of course, doesn't count), but even that is debated by top players! I think almost any expert player would rank him in the top three of all characters, but there isn't even universal agreement that he is the best! Why, then, would any reasonable person even consider banning him? Surely, it must be a group of scrubs who simply don't know how to beat him, and reflexively cry out for a ban.
But this is not the case. There seems to be a tacit agreement amongst top players in Japan--a soft ban--on playing Old Sagat. The reason is that many believe the game to have much more variety without Old Sagat. Even if he is only second best in the game by some measure, he flat out beats half the characters in the game with little effort. Half the cast can barely even fight him, let alone beat him. Other top characters in the game, good as they are, win by much more interaction and more "gameplay." Almost every character has a chance against the other best characters in the game. The result of allowing Old Sagat in tournaments is that several other characters, such as Chun Li and Ken, become basically unviable.
If someone had made these claims in the game's infancy, no sort of ban would be warranted. Further testing through tournaments would be warranted. But we now have ten years of testing. We don't have all Old Sagat vs. Old Sagat matches in tournaments, but we do know which characters can't beat him and as a result are very rarely played in America. We likewise can see that this same category of characters flourishes in Japan, where Old Sagats are rare and only played by the occasional violator of the soft ban. It seems that the added variety of viable characters might outweigh the lack of Old Sagat. Is this ban warranted then?"
So that's the question. I think Scorpion is very much akin to O. Sagat. His inclusion invalidates certain otherwise viable characters completely, however he is not dominant in a way that is unbeatable and clear cut like ST Akuma.
(Full text of the article:
http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/what-should-be-banned.html)
