Hi, I'm also an old semi-retired player. I used to play on PO, and I still play old gens on showdown occasionally. I made a new smogon account because I wanted to share my thoughts on this Machamp suspect.
innisfree said a lot of what I wanted to say about it already. Pokémon is an RNG and prediction game. If you don't want to play with RNG and prediction elements, I recommend deleting your account, and trying out a perfect information zero luck based game. Chess is fun! Or, innis recommended TF2, so maybe try that.
If you think that banning Machamp will make Generation 4 OverUsed Competitive Pokémon less "uncompetitive" you are fooling yourself. As someone who played this meta a lot, I have won (and lost) games because of a Gyarados Waterfall flinch, a Heatran Fire Blast miss, full paras, damage rolls, and random critical hits, probably more than a thousand times more than winning or losing because of a Machamp dynamic punch confusion self-hit. Why? Because Machamp isn't that good of a mon to use in the format. DPP/HGSS OU throughout most of its life has been has been a fast paced meta, and a slow guy that's weak to sand and spikes just isn't getting the chances to hax his way through the majority of teams unless you support it a ton. Acting like inducing confusion + doing damage is somehow a greater threat to this puristic idea of "healthy competitive Pokémon" than someone using an inaccurate move like Focus Blast or a move with a freeze or a flinch chance on an actually good mon is insane mental gymnastics to justify banning something that was never an issue.
Speaking of DP/HGSS OU being a fast paced format, there's a pretty telling reason for why this suspect IS an issue today. As someone who has played this format since 2009 on and off, seeing the recent trend of players drooling over Clefable like it's a newfound god amongst mortals makes it clear why Machamp is on the chopping block. Clefable is a fine alternative to Blissey, but it's being treated like it's one of the best Pokémon in the format. But guess what? Blissey has always been a pretty big liability on any team that isn't full stall, and Clefable is the same. They are abused by Machamp, among several other phys attacking mons that scare them out and can pressure physical walls switching in. Clefable never was going to be better than Blissey in this regard, and I would certainly never consider either as a candidate for top 4 in this format. So why is it being used so much? I remember reading on some part of the Dugtrio discussion that Dugtrio being gone would make Heatran and TTar better, which are Pokémon that "we want to be good" in a format. Clefable is also a Pokémon that it seems the playerbase "wants to be good", because slow teams based around Clef/Heatran/TTar are familiar to you if you're coming from XY/USUM or forgot how high octane gen 4 is, and Machamp shows why those kinds of teams are full of liabilities in gen 4 specifically. And don't get me wrong - it's fine to innovate with previously underused mons like Clefable, and it's fine to try out slow teams in gen 4. Metas shift over time, and new strategies evolve to beat what is popular contemporaneously. But when you're banning stuff that develops to punish YOUR development because you believe a meta "should" have certain Pokémon being the best, that's not facilitating a metagame, it's killing one. If you are having trouble with Machamp, you should try using a decent offense team without a passive mon that Machamp can abuse and you'll see how inefficient he is without a pink blob to come in on. That's why he wasn't a major issue for 90% of this generation's lifespan. RNG is not the point - every feature of mons has RNG. The impetus behind this suspect is that the kind of teams which dominate gens 5-8 don't work as well in gen 4, and Machamp, as a stallbreaker, is at least one part of the reason.
Machamp isn't broken by any definition, and "uncompetitive" really can't be defined. If you want to ban him, ban him because you think the meta would be more fun without him. Personally, I never had an issue facing Machamp, and I think he makes the format more fun. First of all, he does a good job of ensuring the format stays fast-paced, because the best defense is a good offense when it comes to slow mid-bulk stallbreaker guys like Machamp. He is easily pressured, and because of that he will almost never get in without a sac or double switch, and when he does get in, in most cases he still has to make a prediction that could end his entire career if he's wrong, even if there is high reward. Those interactions are a large part of why I WOULD choose to play competitive fucking Pokémon of all things instead of chess. This game that was literally designed to make Rock/Paper/Scissors more luck based, and again, I just don't understand how Machamp being able to confuse + hit things is more uncompetitive than anything else in this game. Especially this format. I mean come on, everyone is memeing about "what about Jirachi" right now, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Literally any Pokémon can hax you, and I don't see why a 50% chance to do so is very different from a 60% or a 30% or a 20%.
I also think it's hilarious that the mindset these days is to go back to ban things in older generations that players for DECADES have found ways to deal with. There's a reason Machamp was never touched before. This suspect isn't about making the format more "fair". It's about enforcing modern generations' concepts of what's "good" and "bad" in Pokémon formats onto a tier that has been totally fine without those sensibilities for a long time. You can see the same thing with the gen 4 Dugtrio ban, which I think was one of the most comically unnecessary bans in the history of Pokémon simulators. Dugtrio was pretty awful in gen 4 ou because any time you had been trapped and revenged by Dugtrio, you basically get a free setup turn. Plenty of things abused it because immuning EQ or tanking an 80 base attack aerial ace is not a rare thing. It's also completely cooked by priority of any kind which is everywhere. But instead of recognizing that HGSS is in fact, not BW or XY or USUM, but a high-paced format where single setup turns are valuable and choice locking can be a huge liability, we took the approach of "Dugtrio disables slow teams centered around Heatran and TTar" (despite slow teams centered around Heatran and TTar being a marginal portion of the gen 4 ou metagame) and decided that was "unfair" to have Dugtrio in the tier, despite having negligible ladder usage, and mostly being used in creative ways on teams, because it beat a team archetype popular in BW/XY/USUM OU, a completely different format. Do you realize how ridiculous that is? It's not even banned in Gen 4 UU apparently, which is even funnier. Anyway, this post is about Machamp, not Dugtrio, but the point is that the trajectory of these suspects and bans is showing a trend towards forcibly making all major formats blend into one nearly identical thing.
Sort of a side point here, but I think bans have gone far enough in the modern generations, and now going back to sterilize old generations is not going to make those formats more fun. As someone semi-retired, when I do get the itch to play mons, it's almost never gens 5-8, so I'll say something controversial here. We banned every salient feature that made those generations fun to play. Were a lot of them "broken"? Sure. BW Swift Swim Kingdra was dumb as hell. But is it more fun to play BW without it? Not for me. And guess what? RBY Tauros is at least as broken as BW Kingdra, but many people love playing RBY. I'm sure if GSC came out today Snorlax would be tried and hanged for being uncounterable too. Probably ADV Aero would get banned too for outspeeding everything and being able to win with an "uncompetitive" Rock Slide flinch strategy. And each of those would be a loss for their respective metagame. I'm not saying Machamp is as significant of a loss as those cases, because Machamp is historically barely an OU mon by usage, and certainly not broken, but it would show that as a community, we would rather adapt a metagame to fit our playstyle than adapt our playstyle to fit a metagame, and that just doesn't seem like a fun approach to this silly RNG prediction game.
It's been fun playing Gen 4 a bit lately, which I have because this suspect has put a spotlight onto it so the ladder has been fairly active, but I honestly am not super invested in mons anymore, and I have a life, so grinding to 85% GXE just isn't worth it. I think cutting Machamp is a myopic choice that will have little impact on your experience playing this format except to make slow and stale teams safer to use, which, if you want that, then vote for it. Personally, several gens' OUs feel about the same at this point, and this would certainly help gen 4 lean that way which seems a waste of a perfectly fun and unique generation, but you'll be the ones playing it more than me, so by all means, ban him if you want. I always find it amusing to watch as a playerbase convinces themselves that they're making this RNG based game more "fair", because Sisyphus would have better luck getting that boulder up a hill.
