Before I get into the negative stuff here I would like to point out there are some great things to celebrate here - a BW OU survey for both the qualified playerbase and wider community, a ladder suspect, and a quick turnaround vote before the beginning of SPL have all been excellent and I'd like to thank the council for these aspects of the process. There are many positives to take here.
That said it does feel like the most important part of the process, the format of the vote itself, was some kind of monkey-paw version that I don't think benefitted anyone.
Volcarona and Cloyster are linked Pokemon that are played on the same archetype - whilst not always used together, the fact that "VolcCloy" has even been coined as a phrase should indicate that these are Pokemon that are tied, as much as Alakazam+Reuniclus or Thundurus-T+Politoed.
Many people view VolcCloy as an issue and had an intention to ban one, but few are pro-ban on both, which feels like needlessly hitting the same archetype with a double nerf. Indeed, this aim to avoid a double ban felt shared by members of council who indicated their preference 2 weeks ago, to utilising a voting system that finds a preference between single ban of Volcarona or Cloyster. For myself and many others, it felt like these discussions from members of council on discord along with the precedent of last year's two Volcarona + Cloyster votes, suggested a high likelihood that Volcarona and Cloyster would be voted on with a ranked preference system, where users had the ranked choice between do not ban, ban volc, ban cloy, and ban both. This would have allowed pro-ban to rank individual Volcarona and Cloyster bans above a double ban, which basically all sides wanted to avoid. Speaking to many of the pro-ban users it is clear that a common order preference was the follows:
ban one
ban the other
ban both
ban neither
Instead, the format of the vote we were given plays Volcarona and Cloyster off against eachother with none of the additional nuance, benefitting the status quo on top of the required 60% supermajority. A player who is incredibly passionate on Volcarona will vote ban on it, but the vote lacks enough nuance for someone to specify that they may only favour a Cloy ban if Volcarona does not go. For two Pokemon that are commonly run as partners and are largely the face of a similar issue, running the vote in this way seems shortsighted - it is very likely that people view both of the individual ban options as positive whilst wanting to avoid doing both simultaneously, but the vote does not allow that point of view.
The result is that the only way for either proban option to realistically get a majority is for people to vote for something they do not want - the most common vote, with 13/30 or 43%, was double ban on Volcarona and Cloyster, which anyone active in the community can tell you is not representative of people's true opinions. People did this as it gave them the best odds of avoiding their worst case scenario, a no ban situation, even if double ban is their second worst case scenario.
Strikingly, only 6 players voted for a Volcarona only (3, 10%) or Cloyster only (3, 10%) ban, of which three have now publicly indicated that they would have voted double ban if they had realised that they had just voted against their own interest. The majority of the pro-ban side would have taken either/or Volc and Cloyster ahead of double and ahead of no ban, but were unable to vote for this.
The sad thing is that this doesn't even help out the anti-ban players anyway. Double ban got far far far closer to getting pushed through here than it ever could have with a ranked system, and players worried about losing Volc or Cloy due to strengthening Reuniclus etc surely should have been terrified at the proposition of both leaving. Nobody truly benefited from voting on two linked Pokemon as if they were fully distinct.
I think we need to learn something from this process. Firstly, the way that OGC defines its "consistent" set of tiering principles needs to be more public. Its completely reasonable for players to have assumed that a ranked choice vote would have been used after the last two times we were allowed to vote on Volc and Cloy, a ranked choice vote that was forced upon by OGC themselves when I had originally intended to get people's thoughts on Gems only. The counterargument is that Gems in the last vote made a material difference to the format needed, which 1) I think is serious mental gymnastics and 2) if this was all public it would have encouraged many to rally behind including Gems in the vote today so we could have used a ranked choice system. This is not the first "consistency" OGC decision that feels arbitrary; DPP being allowed complex bans for baton pass but not for Snow Cloak, despite Snow Cloak already have a complex ban; ADV not having true agency over their own baton pass ruling either. There are messy precedents everywhere and when some of these old, late-stage metagames are built on inconsistent precedent it is jarring to enforce suboptimal tiering practices in the name of surface-level consistency. The vote this week is the worst form it could have taken.
If we really, truly, cannot have a ranked vote on this next time for whatever reason, then we simply cannot simultaneously suspect 2 closely related Pokemon like this again. I asked Finchinator whether we would ever tier like this for Reuniclus + Alakazam and the answer was "I would not act on either pokemon personally [but] i would lobby to vote on reuni or zam and not together at all" - we can all clearly see that this is a flawed tiering approach if you swap Volcarona Cloyster with any other common pair, so it is clear this vote should just never have been held in this way. I understand that the community pushed for a vote, but we did so believing ranked choice was a standout format to use, which council members agreed with on discord recently.
Many are left with a bitter taste in their mouths. Double ban, an approach that very few want, came far too close to winning here. Meanwhile, as some of the single ban voters start putting their hands up to admit they actually would have taken either ban but didn't realise the implications of their vote, its also becoming clearer that the 50-50 outcome for both Volcarona and Cloyster may be skewed slightly more towards pro-ban than the raw numbers suggest. I am not advocating any re-test now, but I hope when we revisit this issue again post-SPL that we are far more careful with the format and ideally take a solution rooted in pragmatism rather over supposed consistency.
