Let's talk about the suspecting process
So I know the council is probably talking about possible fixes/changes to the suspect method and there's no easy solution but here's my take
The core issues we face are...
- One: that a large number of players unfamiliar to the meta play lots of games of Dou on ladder (a good thing) but learn little to nothing about the meta, leading to uninformed voters.
- Two: that there are a few suspects that are simultaneously vying for attention, leading pretty much each player to have some image of the "perfect dou meta". Since DOU inevitably has a heavy focus on team synergies, these suspects interrelate and affect each other, but we can only suspect threat at a time
- As an example, some people believe ban Jirachi+unban Salamence-Mega is a perfect meta, but they wouldn't ban Jirachi unless they knew Salamence was getting banned
- Three: that there is a serious lack of any discussion in the suspect thread. We see lots of players posting their thought processes with their vote instead of in this thread which is a problem... in particular lots of good players are just not posting anything
First, let me go over other people's solutions and why I think they won't work.
1) Lots of tours everywhere: I agree with tree here and have to say that I don't think you can get a feel for a meta/develop it with live tours
2) Stats analysis? Don't think this is relevant information and it has literally no bearing on the suspect process and tells you nothing at the same time. You can't extrapolate any kind of conclusion from this data, so it's worthless.
Solutions?
-Get rid of TC. The badge is literally "You threw your 2 cents in 8 times, congratulations!" Quite frankly, it encourages shitters and adds motivations other than caring about the actual outcome of the vote, which should be the most important motivation in our eyes. Like, it's just such a dumb badge compared to the other ones. Every single other badge is "you were a good member of the community and did a lot for Smogon" whereas TC is like "congrats you did a lot of laddering at the right times". The fuck? Why does badge exist and can we at least make it so that you don't get TC points for doubles suspects?
-Secondly, we could take all the people that make ladder reqs and then throw them into a giant round robin tour/their own ladder, and say ~top 50% get to actually vote, but anyone who made it past the suspect ladder gets their "congrats you threw in your 2 cents" badge points. Essentially this would be a pseudo-filtration method for ensuring that voters have to be good (which note, isn't exactly the same thing as being knowledgeable on the meta but has a pretty strong correlation) in order to vote. Obviously anyone who just wants to make it to
16 cents contributed can just opt out of this second phase and still be happy. Essentially, it ensures you
have to care and also be good in order to actually vote, but doesn't hurt the TC badging process.
So these are both potential solutions to issue #1
I don't really have anything for you on issue #2 but I would say polling people or trying to get a feel for people's opinions through polling could help guide future suspect directions. Obviously council is pretty representative of the people's opinions already so this probably isn't necessary but it'd be neato.
As for #3 all I can really say is that
Every time a suspect finishes, the people who didn't get what they want are always up in arms and grabbing pitchforks and lowkey saying the other side was full of singles-playing shitters who don't know anything or were being stupid but like
Quit fucking trying to make that claim: first of all it doesn't help anything, and second of all, realistically, your only way of influencing other peoples' vote is to post and convince people. Idk why you're complaining about the results of a suspect if you're not going to go out of your way to actively engage in the public forum that exists literally for discussion. In particular I really wish (and was talking about this with Major⋈man) that council members would post more. So far I don't think I've seen a single council member post anything in this thread that wasn't some kind of official clarification other than Dawg, and that's a big problem. Why are our top players just not saying anything during suspects? This is insane and needs to change. Discussion doesn't develop without communication.
As for moving forward:
I don't think a Jirachi suspect is anywhere near necessary. I stand by my points made that Azu+Rachi isn't a broken core that I've made in both suspect threads, but also I'd like to point out that Jirachi is one of the best Mence checks in the game so trying to say that banning Jirachi --> we get to unban Salamence isn't necessarily true. The other day I beat Mence+Jirachi with my Garde+Jirachi, by using Jirachi's capabilities to function as a great Sally check. I also think Isa put it perfectly and also it was literally suspected ~2 months ago, if you changed your opinion since that's not really our job to facilitate another vote just for you.
tl;dr tc is stupid, good players need to post more, Jirachi suspect = redundant+not necessary