I assume it would be a teambuilder ban and not an in-battle limitation.
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Baton Pass. Yes, again.
- Thread starter Aberforth
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That scenario won't be a problem if you make it a teambuilder-based ban. Isn't that how our current Baton Pass ban works anyway?
EDIT: Ninjas, man.
EDIT: Ninjas, man.
Banning this move is the only true way to know for sure we will never have problems ever again. We can keep trying all these stupid complex bans that only further complicate things or we can just ban the move that has continued to prove time and time again that it's an extremely unhealthy element in so many major tours and matches. I'm sure eventually we could get to a point where BP is "balanced" but at that point we would have wasted all this time to preserve a move that could have been so easily dealt with ages ago. I'm not going to start another argument on whether or not it's worth keeping because "but dry passing isn't borked" has already been beaten into the ground enough. Like Quote said, every BP ban we've gone through with so far works for a little bit but there always ends up being some strategy pop up again a few months down the road that forces us to take action. The move itself is just so easy to abuse. How many loopholes need to be sewn shut before BP is finally balanced? How many more bullshit tournament matches are we going to have to have in order to eliminate every possible broken element?
There's no denying BP itself is the problem and banning it would be the most sensible option, but if we are truly that adamant on preserving the ability to dry pass with like 5 viable Pokemon in the end, then I guess I'm just going to have to deal with it like everyone else until it's "balanced".
There's no denying BP itself is the problem and banning it would be the most sensible option, but if we are truly that adamant on preserving the ability to dry pass with like 5 viable Pokemon in the end, then I guess I'm just going to have to deal with it like everyone else until it's "balanced".
Banning Baton Pass + (insert here every move/item/ability that can boost 1 or more stats) as teambuilder ban would preserve dry pass while every other use of the move will be denied. Why is this so hard to understand smh
We shouldn't base our tiering around what we're used to. There's no legitimate reason to nerf Baton Pass instead of outright banning it. Celebi loses a niche move? So what? Why do we need to preserve this? Why is Celebi having Baton Pass good for the tier? Is it because Baton Pass is a unique move that we don't want to lose? The reason Baton Pass exists is to keep boosts when switching, so we're already playing with a twisted version of it that's lost its intended purpose. We're supposed to adapt to changes, not shape our metagame around tradition.
For the record, I'm completely opposed to doing anything about Baton Pass, but if we are doing something then a ban is 100% better.
For the record, I'm completely opposed to doing anything about Baton Pass, but if we are doing something then a ban is 100% better.
No there are plenty of reasons to use Baton Pass besides keeping boosts when switching, seeing as there are sets like this
http://www.smogon.com/dex/xy/pokemon/floatzel/
http://www.smogon.com/dex/xy/pokemon/glaceon/
http://www.smogon.com/dex/xy/pokemon/shedinja/
http://www.smogon.com/dex/dp/pokemon/jolteon/
Banning Baton Pass itself is literally the worst possible outcome in terms of collateral damage.
We've seen this before loooong ago. In GSC, they banned Mean Look + Perish Song + Sleep... not just Mean Look or even Mean Look + Perish Song. The move combination ban was tailored to exactly what was untolerable, while the still strong but less borked use of Mean Look + Perish Song alone was kept. We've already done this by severely limiting Baton Pass... imo nothing more needs doing. But if it does, it still would only merit further tailoring, not a full ban. When banning moves or combinations of moves, you should always tread as lightly as possible because of the larger effects this has on many unrelated Pokemon.
http://www.smogon.com/dex/xy/pokemon/floatzel/
http://www.smogon.com/dex/xy/pokemon/glaceon/
http://www.smogon.com/dex/xy/pokemon/shedinja/
http://www.smogon.com/dex/dp/pokemon/jolteon/
Banning Baton Pass itself is literally the worst possible outcome in terms of collateral damage.
We've seen this before loooong ago. In GSC, they banned Mean Look + Perish Song + Sleep... not just Mean Look or even Mean Look + Perish Song. The move combination ban was tailored to exactly what was untolerable, while the still strong but less borked use of Mean Look + Perish Song alone was kept. We've already done this by severely limiting Baton Pass... imo nothing more needs doing. But if it does, it still would only merit further tailoring, not a full ban. When banning moves or combinations of moves, you should always tread as lightly as possible because of the larger effects this has on many unrelated Pokemon.
You didn't say or do anything to explain why these Pokemon losing Baton Pass will be detrimental to our game.
Let's think about it a little. Disregarding the fact that it's merely a filler move on every example other than Shedinja (who is niche to begin with), why does it matter that Floatzel won't be able to get free switches anymore? Will Glaceon losing Baton Pass upset the balance of our game? Will it even have an impact that the generation doesn't have time to recover from? It doesn't matter, it won't upset anything, and the impact, if felt at all, will be minimal.
On the other side of things, the mess of a Baton Pass clause we have right now has resulted in literally years of controversy. If you can really find a positive from keeping it, will it really outweigh the negative of keeping this potentially hazardous move in our game? I see absolutely no way that it can.
Let's think about it a little. Disregarding the fact that it's merely a filler move on every example other than Shedinja (who is niche to begin with), why does it matter that Floatzel won't be able to get free switches anymore? Will Glaceon losing Baton Pass upset the balance of our game? Will it even have an impact that the generation doesn't have time to recover from? It doesn't matter, it won't upset anything, and the impact, if felt at all, will be minimal.
On the other side of things, the mess of a Baton Pass clause we have right now has resulted in literally years of controversy. If you can really find a positive from keeping it, will it really outweigh the negative of keeping this potentially hazardous move in our game? I see absolutely no way that it can.
This is stupid.
It's been what? 2 or 3 years since the original issue? And we're still having problems because people want to "save" some niche Pokémon and strategies.
It's over. We gave it a shot twice (or three times, can't remember) and it still didn't fucking work. Ban the move and never look back.
Don't even test it, just have tier leaders or senior staff or whoever vote on it and put this to rest permanently. We've had enough of this.
It's been what? 2 or 3 years since the original issue? And we're still having problems because people want to "save" some niche Pokémon and strategies.
It's over. We gave it a shot twice (or three times, can't remember) and it still didn't fucking work. Ban the move and never look back.
Don't even test it, just have tier leaders or senior staff or whoever vote on it and put this to rest permanently. We've had enough of this.
That's not the point of Ciele's post; Ciele is saying that, while he doesn't believe anything should be done, if something were to need to happen, it would need to be a total ban of Baton Pass. While he may believe nothing should be done, if the majority of the community alongside the OU council believe something should be done about Baton Pass, he does believe that it should be banned entirely, rather than continue to make complex bans for the sake of preserving a select few sets, which should be irrelevant.
Uh usually to timid to post in these types of places but I can think of a lot of reasons that Baton Pass has effected out metagame. I think Celebi is the best example as NastyPass is very influential as far as I've seen from some replays of higher level uu games. Not only is it a worthwhile strategy but it also stops slower Pokemon from trapping it. Cervix is one of the best if not the best Pokemon UU so you really tear down this Pokemon. Mawile in PU, NU, and RU loses a great niche in passing Swords Dance boost while also making it more vulnerable to Probopass and Dugtrio in PU and RU respectively (which are huge atm.) They're are also a lot of other things to like Sylveon can't Baton Pass out into a Magneton/zone/Dugtrio for Steel-types. Shedinja becomes a game of who predicts better, Musharna gets even worse in RU and NU, Scarf Medicham can't even make a safe play when the opposing team has a Spiritomb. Many microsets get worse (SD + BP Scyther, NP + BP Mr. Mime, SubPass Jolteon and Mienshao, PU Mienfoo with either Calm Mind or Swords Dance, etc.) Banning DryPassing would be like banning U-turn at least in my opinion when all the problems sprout from usually people using speed pass. Rarely will you ever here someone complain about how SD Pass is broken or CM pass is broken. Even MY realized this in there suspect. I truly think there are only two options which are 1) do nothing or 2) ban BP + speed. A third option which would be a team builder ban people already discussed earlier but it throws a lot of viable and niche Pokemon under the bus.
I'm probably in the minority here but can we please not outright ban Baton Pass? We're so close to reaching the point where it's balanced, banning it now would make everything we've done up until this point just a huge waste of time. I know stuff like Drypassing and Nastypass are niche (at least in ORAS OU), but there's no reason to put a stop to those strategies when they're not broken. The only broken element to Baton Pass remaining is the passing of speed boosts. Its continued success in OLT shows how busted the strategy is, but as soon as you remove Scolipede's ability to pass speed the strategy obviously falls flat. If there were any other broken strategies involving Baton Pass I'm sure that they'd have surfaced by now.
If we go about this in the right way, this will be the last time we ever need to visit Baton Pass. Banning Baton Pass + Speed boosts makes the most sense to me. It eliminates the broken element while still preserving those strategies which aren't broken.
If we go about this in the right way, this will be the last time we ever need to visit Baton Pass. Banning Baton Pass + Speed boosts makes the most sense to me. It eliminates the broken element while still preserving those strategies which aren't broken.
This is funny because this exact statement is literally what everyone saod the past couple of times Baton Pass was brought up for nerfing. And after all of that nerfing, here we are revisting it once again (the thread's name is even 'Baton Pass. Yes, again.' and it was created fucking 3 months ago). At some point, we just have to stop nerfing it and just ban it. This is getting absolutely ludicrous, honestly. If it means that we have wasted our time so far, then so be it. It needs to be done. This move is inherently broken and continuing to nerf it just to preserve some niche options on random Pokemon isn't worth it. I used to be of the mindset that nerfing it was the best way to go, but the fact that this move has once again become a problem has radically altered my stance on the matter. The fact is, Baton Pass as a move is broken, and it is finally time to get rid of the root of the problem instead of dancing around it and cutting off some of its limbs.
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Ok, here's the thing, Baton Pass is a matchup based strategy, but there are methods to beat it. Having a pokemon with roar/whirl + something that can take on Espeon works, prankster taunt works, Mega Heracross puts massive pressure on everytime Scolipede comes in. Just by looking at what people are qualifying with in OLT, Baton Pass doesn't seem to be noticeably more dominant than other styles. There were 3 qualifiers who only partially used Baton Pass to qualify, and, at the time of my writing this, this only started to happen last week. We can compare earlier BP to the current one, but that fact is that full BP chains before any nerfs was far more devastating than what we have now, and even when Baton Pass was restricted to just one member, that was still a much greater problem than just Scolipass. It's very possible that people will see this as a greater threat than it is due to remembering the old style of BP rather than what we currently have now.
That being said, I still want it banned. While it might not be dominant, Scolipass can certainly make anyone into a serious contender on the ladder. Personally I think that bans and policy decisions shouldn't be treated as isolated decisions, but the reasons for a ban should generally set up maxims for future decisions.
More specifically, the maxim that while it is possible to beat BP chains, the notion of them winning is silly, and that is why the move deserves to be banned. What I mean by this is that while I did type up a brief defence of BP in the first paragraph, at no point did I defend the fact that it's a very skill less playstyle. While it's not dominant, it is certainly picking up a good number of wins, and people using it can do so very easily. Therefore, by banning BP, the decision would be that we're not prepared to let a team that doesn't require a significant amount of skill, and relies mostly on matchup, get a good winrate. Personally, it's my opinion that teams like this are very detrimental to the competitive nature of pokemon.
If somebody who plays optimally has little chance of winning due to matchup, then this is generally a huge problem, and there's no question that this is the case in a lot of the matches that BP wins. If this statement is true, then even if you can tailor a team to beat BP, that doesn't change the fact that the impact it has on the metagame as a whole is negative. Gen 7 will be approaching soon, and as such, we'll have a whole new plethora of threats to deal with, and some won't be totally broken in themselves, but will cause huge matchup issues and deduct from the skill of the game in the same way that scolipass does. Ideally we'd ban baton pass completely, and then give anything else that depends significantly more on team preview than the plays you make in the battle the same treatment.
That being said, I still want it banned. While it might not be dominant, Scolipass can certainly make anyone into a serious contender on the ladder. Personally I think that bans and policy decisions shouldn't be treated as isolated decisions, but the reasons for a ban should generally set up maxims for future decisions.
More specifically, the maxim that while it is possible to beat BP chains, the notion of them winning is silly, and that is why the move deserves to be banned. What I mean by this is that while I did type up a brief defence of BP in the first paragraph, at no point did I defend the fact that it's a very skill less playstyle. While it's not dominant, it is certainly picking up a good number of wins, and people using it can do so very easily. Therefore, by banning BP, the decision would be that we're not prepared to let a team that doesn't require a significant amount of skill, and relies mostly on matchup, get a good winrate. Personally, it's my opinion that teams like this are very detrimental to the competitive nature of pokemon.
If somebody who plays optimally has little chance of winning due to matchup, then this is generally a huge problem, and there's no question that this is the case in a lot of the matches that BP wins. If this statement is true, then even if you can tailor a team to beat BP, that doesn't change the fact that the impact it has on the metagame as a whole is negative. Gen 7 will be approaching soon, and as such, we'll have a whole new plethora of threats to deal with, and some won't be totally broken in themselves, but will cause huge matchup issues and deduct from the skill of the game in the same way that scolipass does. Ideally we'd ban baton pass completely, and then give anything else that depends significantly more on team preview than the plays you make in the battle the same treatment.
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Can we clarify the scope of the proposed ban? ORAS exclusively?
what makes baton pass as a move inherently broken?
i set up a sub and pass it to a next pokemon, am i suddenly invoking broken strategies? please clarify
the "issue" is obviously speed passing, and people are just speaking through emotional scars from the past devastation they either experienced or witnessed from the times when full bp chains were allowed
times have changed, and bp is far from threatening like it used to be like Googly said.
i have yet to see a worthwhile argument for why the move in itself is "broken" and why it should be outright banned
It's not broken for the little stuff, the same way Greninja wasn't broken for its capabilities as a suicide lead. But, like Greninja, there are several broken elements to baton pass that have proven themselves time and time again to be banworthy, and we dont nerf banworthy things, we ban them, including the not-necessarily broken elements of them. The other moves we've banned haven't been universally broken (sheer cold spheal, swagger sunkern and double team Azurill are all perfectly manageable due to how bad the mon is), but they have been banned universally because restricting these broken moves to a state where it's manageable is not what we want to do.
Baton Pass being an exception to this is nonsensical, as Ciele pointed out earlier, and it's now being talked about for the (fifth? sixth? I've lost count) time, so saying that removing this part as opposed to the other parts that have made it broken in the past, and that it wont become an issue again, when that's literally what we've said time and again now, is just being incredibly optimistic in the face of negative evidence.
Baton Pass being an exception to this is nonsensical, as Ciele pointed out earlier, and it's now being talked about for the (fifth? sixth? I've lost count) time, so saying that removing this part as opposed to the other parts that have made it broken in the past, and that it wont become an issue again, when that's literally what we've said time and again now, is just being incredibly optimistic in the face of negative evidence.
I see.
Is there somewhere I can go to read up on "things Smogon want to do" and "what makes something good for the tier" as per Smogons standards etc
I'm not being sarcastic by the way
This is only partially correct.
You see, the difference with Sheer Cold, Swagger, and Double Team is that they aren't broken only on certain mons. They all, to an extent, render matchup and skill level completely irrelevant in any given battle - whether Sheer Cold Spheal turns the tide of battle in its favor has more to do with how lucky the user is than anything, no matter how poor a Pokemon it is. Even if Spheal were the only mon with access to Sheer Cold, it still would have been banned, because it's clear that such a move does not foster a competitive environment in any way, shape, or form.
The same cannot be said of Baton Pass, which is only broken or uncompetitive if combined with numerous other very particular elements. You talk as though there is precedent to support banning Baton Pass; however, there is, in fact, no such precedent, and only precedent to support keeping the move. Leppa Berry is another non-Pokemon element that is not inherently broken and is far, far less useful than BP; however, we've spent years applying complex bans to keep it around, because, like Baton Pass, it isn't inherently broken, and Smogon has never banned non-Pokemon elements that are not inherently broken.
If you had asked me two months ago how I felt about Baton Pass, I would have adamantly argued that it should be kept around simply because I feel that consistency in policy is important for reasons I'll get to in a bit; however, I realize now that there is more than one direction that can be taken to preserve consistency (although I do still think there's a right answer for other reasons).
The main point of my post boils down to this: if we ban Baton Pass, we had better be prepared to ban Leppa Berry too. Now you're thinking, "Who cares, and why?", but this is important. It doesn't take a genius to see that creating the rule that even non-Pokemon elements that aren't inherently broken should be banned completely could set a dangerously inflexible precedent moving forward. After we theoretically went through with banning Baton Pass, if a new move/item/what have you were to arise that were similar to Leppa Berry and Baton Pass in that it was only broken in combination with one or two other elements but was otherwise an excellent addition to the metagame, we would be obligated to remove it completely rather than simply, as we do now, taking a bit of time to separate it from the things that make it an unhealthy element. Again, an unfortunate lack of flexibility.
Now to address why exactly we would need to ban Leppa Berry and by extension every other similar element in the future should we ban Baton Pass. We can't simply look at each of these partially broken elements on a case-by-case basis because doing so would be entirely too subjective. How many nerfs is too many to a point that the element is worth getting rid of completely? 4? 5? Should the relevancy of the element be taken into account? If so, how is relevancy measured? It would be much better in my opinion to simply have a consistent baseline moving forward that can be applied universally; whether that ends up being that we systematically separate the element from its broken pieces as we do now or that we simply ban it altogether regardless of how close it is to being balanced will be decided by how we treat Baton Pass. Otherwise, we'll end up having to make a new thread driven by subjectivity (i.e., a thread like this one) every time a new element that follows this mold pops up, potentially spending years debating it as we've done with our current two such elements. While ideally it would be easiest to look at it in such a way, this is where Ciele's argument that tradition shouldn't decide how we conduct policy becomes problematic.
tl;dr: If we want to ban BP that's fine, but it could create policy problems down the road.
One last thing to consider: right now, OU is the only tier where Baton Pass is a problem. Interestingly enough, it's also probably the place where BP is least relevant outside of its use by Scolipede. NU had a problem with Baton Pass + Speed boosts, so they held a suspect test and ended up banning the combination. There is no longer a problem with Baton Pass in that tier. Why can't the OU council do something similar and suspect BP + Speed Boost rather than everyone spending time here trying to institute a Smogon-wide ban on a move that only possibly adversely affects one tier at the moment? Next gen, if BP + Speed Boost or + whatever becomes problematic in OU again or in another tier, that tier can simply conduct another suspect test. The answer to this is probably, "Continuously having suspect tests is only sweeping it under the rug and avoiding the real issue at hand," but either way, it is a helpful short-term solution.
preface: i vehemently oppose any sort of extended limitation.
agreeing w. ciele in that we shouldn't attempt to salvage niche sets/pokemon to waffle around a ban. i question what caused the community to rally around this issue though. the proliferation of anti-bp sentiments primarily turned up because floppy achieved an olt run with a quality gxe. i personally don't see anything wrong with a team promoting a mechanical form of play where the player just follows a select pattern. this is mostly because the reliability of these strategies are often wobb(uffet)ly in the long term, and it's probably the case here too. in fact, the backbone of stall allows for this sort of systematic play; however, stall provides more player flexibility and long-term reliability due to the team having more tools in its toolbox for the player to wield. in a similar vein, ho teams, especially dual screens, follow certain patterns as well. lead breaker 1 breaker 2 sweeper 1 sweeper 2 yo
. 'baton pass' is just much easier to vilify since the strategy is based around an individual move instead of certain attributes.
i believe that the current baton pass shenanigans are effective ways to take on the ladder. you can autopilot multiple games at a time and navigate the leaderboard with relative ease. this is because you can play more games than someone using a team which necessitates more thought. the onus lies on the pro-banners to prove that the strategy is broken, and not to state that it allows users to ladder more efficiently. floppy worked smarter, not harder. is there something wrong with catering your team to the format?
agreeing w. ciele in that we shouldn't attempt to salvage niche sets/pokemon to waffle around a ban. i question what caused the community to rally around this issue though. the proliferation of anti-bp sentiments primarily turned up because floppy achieved an olt run with a quality gxe. i personally don't see anything wrong with a team promoting a mechanical form of play where the player just follows a select pattern. this is mostly because the reliability of these strategies are often wobb(uffet)ly in the long term, and it's probably the case here too. in fact, the backbone of stall allows for this sort of systematic play; however, stall provides more player flexibility and long-term reliability due to the team having more tools in its toolbox for the player to wield. in a similar vein, ho teams, especially dual screens, follow certain patterns as well. lead breaker 1 breaker 2 sweeper 1 sweeper 2 yo
. 'baton pass' is just much easier to vilify since the strategy is based around an individual move instead of certain attributes.i believe that the current baton pass shenanigans are effective ways to take on the ladder. you can autopilot multiple games at a time and navigate the leaderboard with relative ease. this is because you can play more games than someone using a team which necessitates more thought. the onus lies on the pro-banners to prove that the strategy is broken, and not to state that it allows users to ladder more efficiently. floppy worked smarter, not harder. is there something wrong with catering your team to the format?
can you guys (especially the dudes responsible for making issues like this progress) thoroughly read and address Threw's points? Thanks.
EDIT: Also posting this on behalf of Martin. whose stance I wholeheartedly agree with:
"There is no past evidence to suggest that Baton Pass itself is the problematic element here. If it was then we would have precedent to suggest that passing stats other than speed is a problematic element, and while yes we have discussed this time and time again what you very quickly notice from all of these BP discussions is that in every one of these "time and time again" cases passing speed has always been the thing that has caused the problems. People wouldn't have complained about Smash 'n' Pass if it didn't boost speed, people will have never complained about Quiver Pass if it was just a variation of Calm Mind, people will have never moaned about GeoPass if it wasn't for it being a double Quiver Dance and so on. On the flipside, there have been no cases to suggest that passing defenses or offenses is even remotely broken or problematic, and what makes Baton Pass different from other simple bans of uncompetitive elements is that there is collateral damage if you ban the move as a whole due to dry passing (a legitimate, competitive strategy which is viable on Celebi and Lopunny in OU as well as a number of Pokémon in lower tiers--including but not limited to Musharna and Mawile in NU) being banned. Banning Swagger doesn't unnecessarily nerf anything, as is the case with OHKO moves and evasion and any other clauses.
Also there is precedent for taking an uncompetitive strategy and just removing the broken element to preserve other users, and this is shown with the Machoke ban in PU. We could have banned No Guard+Dynamic Punch or even just outright banned Dynamic Punch, but instead we banned Machoke to preserve Machop and Golett's niches (if you can call them that) despite them being far less significant collateral damage than is the case with banning dry pass, CM pass, NastyPass, SD Pass, Coil pass (Gorebyss/Huntail) and any other balanced, non-speed-based BP strategies. What makes BP suddenly so broken and uncompetitive that it deserves to be treated differently to Dynamic Punch when it has far more competitive uses than is the case with Dynamic Punch+No Guard, which is a strategy which loses all "competitive" merit when you consider that it's noteworthy users (Machamp and Machoke) can achieve the same thing minus confusion (which is of questionable competitiveness on its own) through the use of Cross Chop. Also, if we have a clause as complex as we currently have for endless battles (which could have been solved simply by banning Heal Pulse) why is a comparatively simple clause suddenly getting treated like some massive problem that needs to be simplified? Seriously, banning Speed Boost+Baton Pass on one Pokémon while limiting to one BPer is actively simpler than our current clause (current: 4 parts; SpeedPass: 3 parts) and only a 3-part complex ban as opposed to Endless Battle clause which has so many parts to it that I honestly don't know how complex to say it is.
The one other thing is just how immensely stupid the argument of "we keep doing it over and over" is. We should aim to get the optimal outcome (one which removes all problematic elements while retaining non-problematic ones) regardless of how many times we have to go through a topic. Unlike the tier names stuff PR is not an argument here because we are handling an issue which people are moaning about without immediately causing other things for people to moan about and shifting the dynamics of cases which aren't related to the reasoning, and it's not like it's hard to spend twenty minutes every now and again in a VR thread. Trying to save the bother of maybe having to make a few more posts on the matter in the future isn't just straight-up lazy. The argument of banning BP to save time on the basis that something might prove broken later on is plain ignorant because it fails to consider that it might notcause problems later on. If defense passing or whatever becomes a problem in the future it can be addressed then, but at the moment there is no reason to cut corners for the sake of a what-if scenario which a) has no practical evidence supporting it's case and b) assumes of problem will happen if it's not removed being based on pure speculation which results in unnecessary collateral damage and changing elements of various Pokémon's dynamics. Banning Baton Pass is not the right direction to take at all, and there are both two-part and three-part complex clauses (BP+speed+1 user-->BP+stat boosts with no user limit if other stats ever become a problem) that should happen before we even consider banning Baton Pass as a whole because of the competitive applications of dry passing (grabbing momentum and dodging Pursuit)."
EDIT: Also posting this on behalf of Martin. whose stance I wholeheartedly agree with:
"There is no past evidence to suggest that Baton Pass itself is the problematic element here. If it was then we would have precedent to suggest that passing stats other than speed is a problematic element, and while yes we have discussed this time and time again what you very quickly notice from all of these BP discussions is that in every one of these "time and time again" cases passing speed has always been the thing that has caused the problems. People wouldn't have complained about Smash 'n' Pass if it didn't boost speed, people will have never complained about Quiver Pass if it was just a variation of Calm Mind, people will have never moaned about GeoPass if it wasn't for it being a double Quiver Dance and so on. On the flipside, there have been no cases to suggest that passing defenses or offenses is even remotely broken or problematic, and what makes Baton Pass different from other simple bans of uncompetitive elements is that there is collateral damage if you ban the move as a whole due to dry passing (a legitimate, competitive strategy which is viable on Celebi and Lopunny in OU as well as a number of Pokémon in lower tiers--including but not limited to Musharna and Mawile in NU) being banned. Banning Swagger doesn't unnecessarily nerf anything, as is the case with OHKO moves and evasion and any other clauses.
Also there is precedent for taking an uncompetitive strategy and just removing the broken element to preserve other users, and this is shown with the Machoke ban in PU. We could have banned No Guard+Dynamic Punch or even just outright banned Dynamic Punch, but instead we banned Machoke to preserve Machop and Golett's niches (if you can call them that) despite them being far less significant collateral damage than is the case with banning dry pass, CM pass, NastyPass, SD Pass, Coil pass (Gorebyss/Huntail) and any other balanced, non-speed-based BP strategies. What makes BP suddenly so broken and uncompetitive that it deserves to be treated differently to Dynamic Punch when it has far more competitive uses than is the case with Dynamic Punch+No Guard, which is a strategy which loses all "competitive" merit when you consider that it's noteworthy users (Machamp and Machoke) can achieve the same thing minus confusion (which is of questionable competitiveness on its own) through the use of Cross Chop. Also, if we have a clause as complex as we currently have for endless battles (which could have been solved simply by banning Heal Pulse) why is a comparatively simple clause suddenly getting treated like some massive problem that needs to be simplified? Seriously, banning Speed Boost+Baton Pass on one Pokémon while limiting to one BPer is actively simpler than our current clause (current: 4 parts; SpeedPass: 3 parts) and only a 3-part complex ban as opposed to Endless Battle clause which has so many parts to it that I honestly don't know how complex to say it is.
The one other thing is just how immensely stupid the argument of "we keep doing it over and over" is. We should aim to get the optimal outcome (one which removes all problematic elements while retaining non-problematic ones) regardless of how many times we have to go through a topic. Unlike the tier names stuff PR is not an argument here because we are handling an issue which people are moaning about without immediately causing other things for people to moan about and shifting the dynamics of cases which aren't related to the reasoning, and it's not like it's hard to spend twenty minutes every now and again in a VR thread. Trying to save the bother of maybe having to make a few more posts on the matter in the future isn't just straight-up lazy. The argument of banning BP to save time on the basis that something might prove broken later on is plain ignorant because it fails to consider that it might notcause problems later on. If defense passing or whatever becomes a problem in the future it can be addressed then, but at the moment there is no reason to cut corners for the sake of a what-if scenario which a) has no practical evidence supporting it's case and b) assumes of problem will happen if it's not removed being based on pure speculation which results in unnecessary collateral damage and changing elements of various Pokémon's dynamics. Banning Baton Pass is not the right direction to take at all, and there are both two-part and three-part complex clauses (BP+speed+1 user-->BP+stat boosts with no user limit if other stats ever become a problem) that should happen before we even consider banning Baton Pass as a whole because of the competitive applications of dry passing (grabbing momentum and dodging Pursuit)."
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The immediate counterargument to Threw's whole Leppa Berry aspect is that Endless Battle Clause is not just the Leppa Berry. There are ways to create an endless battle without the Leppa Berry's involvement, although they are fewer and harder to do (imposter, gen1 wrap on ghosts).
As for the argument over what to do in the future, if it is broken, ban it. I dont particularly care that this is inflexible, because that is the stance we have had on everything not named Baton Pass (and Leppa Berry but the Leppa one has now changed into something more than just the Leppa Berry) and there is no good reason to grant exceptions to this rule that we can decide arbitrarily. It would be akin to getting rid of Kings Shield on Aegislash because we liked the fact that it checked Medicham and so wanted to nerf it rather than ban it outright.
As for BP not being inherently broken, it is. We just no longer have 'true' BP. We have now limited BP such that not only is it not allowed freely, only one mon can have it per team, and it can only pass certain types of boosts. No shit this form of it isn't broken, because that's got so very little to do with what the move actually does that it's laughable that you would say it isn't broken. Without significant nerfs, BP is inherantly broken. Similarly I can point at Blaziken and say that a defensive set with will-o-wisp, rest talk and low kick isn't broken by itself but that's completely irrelevant because that is merely a non-broken way to use a broken mon (or in BP's case, move). We could have banned just the broken bits off of almost everything and it would be manageable, but that creates far more complications than you think banning BP does. And the fact that one of them is a mon and the other is a move is irrelevant, because with the other moves we've banned, if we had only banned parts of them (Swagger in conjunction with Prankster, for example) it would be perfectly fine (someone, I forget who, tried to see how swagger crobat would fare in GSC. It didn't). But we didn't, and so banning BP entirely is more consistent with what we've done in the past, because BP is the the biggest contradiction to our normal policy.
As for the No Guard + Dpunch situation in PU, I'm amused by you bringing that up Martin. because I would say that it shows the opposite of what you think it does. Machoke was a healthy, important aspect of the tier, that added a lot more to the tier than just confusion shenanigans, and the PU playerbase significantly preferred the option of banning No Guard + Dpunch, because it would have preserved a non-broken mon and simply removed the broken element. The collateral damage to the PU tier that meant that they were not allowed to nerf a broken aspect was significantly larger than the collateral of the various BPs that are rarely seen. And yet, they were not allowed to nerf the broken element to preserve some non-broken elements, they had to suspect the full thing.
Drypassing is, admittedly, a non-broken strategy. It's also, funnily enough, irrelevant. The non-broken elements of a broken part of the game do not get to stay around while the broken elements are removed, because we shouldn't nerf things to preserve tiny fractions of them around. As for the belief that restricting BP this time will work when all the other times it hasn't, I'd say you're being overly optimistic. Every time Baton Pass has been brought up, we've thought 'we've found the solution, it wont be broken anymore' and every time thus far BP has proven us wrong, and while yes speed was involved in all previous cases, it's also worth noting that before now, speed was never the single element involved, it was always paired with other boosts, but we couldn't predict the various ways the broken move contorts to extra restrictions to remain broken, and even if it had just been about speed all of the previous times we had to deal with it, we shouldn't be nerfing broken things, we should simply be banning them.
As for the argument over what to do in the future, if it is broken, ban it. I dont particularly care that this is inflexible, because that is the stance we have had on everything not named Baton Pass (and Leppa Berry but the Leppa one has now changed into something more than just the Leppa Berry) and there is no good reason to grant exceptions to this rule that we can decide arbitrarily. It would be akin to getting rid of Kings Shield on Aegislash because we liked the fact that it checked Medicham and so wanted to nerf it rather than ban it outright.
As for BP not being inherently broken, it is. We just no longer have 'true' BP. We have now limited BP such that not only is it not allowed freely, only one mon can have it per team, and it can only pass certain types of boosts. No shit this form of it isn't broken, because that's got so very little to do with what the move actually does that it's laughable that you would say it isn't broken. Without significant nerfs, BP is inherantly broken. Similarly I can point at Blaziken and say that a defensive set with will-o-wisp, rest talk and low kick isn't broken by itself but that's completely irrelevant because that is merely a non-broken way to use a broken mon (or in BP's case, move). We could have banned just the broken bits off of almost everything and it would be manageable, but that creates far more complications than you think banning BP does. And the fact that one of them is a mon and the other is a move is irrelevant, because with the other moves we've banned, if we had only banned parts of them (Swagger in conjunction with Prankster, for example) it would be perfectly fine (someone, I forget who, tried to see how swagger crobat would fare in GSC. It didn't). But we didn't, and so banning BP entirely is more consistent with what we've done in the past, because BP is the the biggest contradiction to our normal policy.
As for the No Guard + Dpunch situation in PU, I'm amused by you bringing that up Martin. because I would say that it shows the opposite of what you think it does. Machoke was a healthy, important aspect of the tier, that added a lot more to the tier than just confusion shenanigans, and the PU playerbase significantly preferred the option of banning No Guard + Dpunch, because it would have preserved a non-broken mon and simply removed the broken element. The collateral damage to the PU tier that meant that they were not allowed to nerf a broken aspect was significantly larger than the collateral of the various BPs that are rarely seen. And yet, they were not allowed to nerf the broken element to preserve some non-broken elements, they had to suspect the full thing.
Drypassing is, admittedly, a non-broken strategy. It's also, funnily enough, irrelevant. The non-broken elements of a broken part of the game do not get to stay around while the broken elements are removed, because we shouldn't nerf things to preserve tiny fractions of them around. As for the belief that restricting BP this time will work when all the other times it hasn't, I'd say you're being overly optimistic. Every time Baton Pass has been brought up, we've thought 'we've found the solution, it wont be broken anymore' and every time thus far BP has proven us wrong, and while yes speed was involved in all previous cases, it's also worth noting that before now, speed was never the single element involved, it was always paired with other boosts, but we couldn't predict the various ways the broken move contorts to extra restrictions to remain broken, and even if it had just been about speed all of the previous times we had to deal with it, we shouldn't be nerfing broken things, we should simply be banning them.
ok so besides the idea of "this is what we have been doing since forever so let's stick to it" (which is horseload in my opinion), WHY shouldnt you be nerfing and not just outright banning?
You mentioned something about complications of doing such a thing? Can you elaborate a little on what those may be?
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