Proposal Sleep Clause, Freeze Clause and the ulterior failure of Smogon tiering

[Ortheore]

what even is the argument here bro
are we trying to play cartridge or are we trying to make the game/tiers a competitive experience like ??
im sure each tier can have their individual discussion on sleep legality cuz ik some ppl have issues with it but that should be up to the tier, freeze is a whole other thing like what do you gain from having more games be hax bullshit even if its a small amount
if you want to go play a romanticized version of cart then go do that but i assumed most people are here to play a competitive game

You do realise that improving cart accuracy and having a competitive game are not mutually exclusive goals right?

I still stand by this, and I think this can be applied to other gens as well. I know PS! is a “simulator” but I think that we’ve never had a true simulator and at this point regardless of gen we need to accept that we play a modded version of the games we love. And that’s okay! We all love Pokemon and want to make it competitive but I think that trying to make that happen while remaining “cart pure” just isn’t going to happen. And again, that’s regardless of gen.

What you're describing sounds an awful lot to me like we shouldn't even try, and just accept whatever bastardised implementation was here first, because of long forgotten decisions made in an era where dial up internet was still common and many online spaces were still fine with slurs. No-one's suggesting we'll get perfect cart accuracy, but this debate will always exist, so imo we should either resolve discrepancies as much as possible, or develop better justifications for those discrepancies than "eh, it's always been this way".

The way to do that is to actually try these things and see if they work. Threads doing nothing but discussing the issue aren't going to resolve anything, which is why your prior thread was never going to end the debate like you hoped

On Sleep/Freeze Clause:
I’m very much of the idea that the status quo should be maintained in vast majority of cases (overall, not just Sleep Clause). I think that eliminating Sleep Clause or changing it in RBY, for example, is a terrible idea that would throw 20+ years of meta development out the window. Hell, I even disagreed with the BW sleep ban because I felt like shaking up the rules in a generation so long after it was current gen was a bad idea. But I’m not an active BW player and that already happened and I think the players are mostly happy with it so whatever, the sleep ban there can stay lol. What’s important is that it’s a ban on Sleep as a whole and not a change to Sleep Clause.

Keeping things how they’ve always been just because they’ve always been that way is usually a terrible argument, but I believe there is historic merit to keeping Sleep Clause because of what I mentioned above. I don’t want to throw out all those years of meta development just for the sake of “cart purity.” Freeze Clause I’m a little less married to (as I said at the start of the previous thread, I think accepting bad luck is just part of the game). But according to tiering leadership, removing it was off the table as well, which is how I assume it’ll be with Sleep Clause too, at least for non-current gens. Overall I guess I’m indifferent at this point on Freeze Clause, but for the love of god, please keep Sleep Clause as it is. It’s the best option for not throwing out years of meta development, graying out buttons or auto-lose conditions suck ass… I don’t want to change the way the game is played just for the sake of cart accuracy.
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I think changing Sleep Clause should be a non-starter. Whether a gen wants to ban sleep or not, that should be up to that gen’s council to hold a vote that qualified members of the playerbase should take part in. So really the two options should be sleep legal with sleep clause, or ban sleep altogether. I mean maaaaybe something different can come about for Gen 10 and beyond if someone has any bright ideas? But for RBY-SV the status quo is best for not throwing away years and years of meta development. This is a case where history matters and I would hate to lose that.

Can you explain how a modification in how sleep clause functions would be "throwing out" years of metagame development in RBY? The impression I get from that expression is that you're characterising this as a full reset, where we forget that Tauros is the best pokemon in rby and so on. That seems like wild exaggeration to me, so surely I'm interpreting that incorrectly- could you please clarify?

Moreover, can you explain why it would be as awful as you say when we've literally already been through much greater upheaval in the form of Crystal's mechanics discoveries circa 2015? Having played throughout that period I can tell you that it sparked a far greater rate of change in the meta than normal which was fucking exciting, but we were ultimately still adapting the previously existing meta to fit the new rules.
edit: Starting these paragraphs off with those sorts of questions seems a bit confrontational, sorry. I mean to challenge your post but I still don't want things to deteriorate to an argument

In RBY specifically, I struggle to see what impact modifying sleep clause to be cart accurate would have aside from the rare scenario where you spam sleep against an already sleeping pokemon to catch a wake. Though that does occur, it's not at all common, and I'd very sceptical if someone claimed changing that interaction was some sort of calamity

This notion of throwing stuff out makes no sense to me and seems like a fallacious exaggeration, one that characterises those advocating for a cart-accurate sleep clause as destructive. That couldn't be further from the truth, when we're proposing an alternative that functions the same in the vast majority of scenarios. After all, the goal of sleep clause mod and a cart-accurate sleep clause is the same, they're just different methods of reaching that goal

The same argument can be applied to literally every tiering action that occurs in older games. Are we throwing out all DPP OU results prior to January of this year when they banned Machamp? It seems silly, but I struggle to see how that would get a pass when replacing sleep clause mod with a cart-accurate implementation doesn't

This is a case where history matters and I would hate to lose that.

If history matters you should document it and make that record available for other people, so that they can understand what's occurred previously and why. You should not constrain the present and the future by insisting that their current experience reflect that of years/decades past. Apologies if this is a little too flippant, but we're trying to simulate pokemon games, not doing some sort of historical re-enactment. Living out the way things were is not necessary for preserving, valuing and understanding them

If making a change improves something, we should implement that change. I believe a cart-accurate sleep clause is an improvement, because it achieves the same goal as the current mod, while improving the state of cartridge accuracy. Like I said, cart accuracy is an issue that will always exist, no matter how much people point out that achieving perfect accuracy is impossible
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Melbelle the main objection I have to your post is that I really don't think a cart-accurate sleep clause should resolve all the edge cases where it differs from the existing mod, because yeah, then it gets really convoluted and it kinda shoots itself in the foot. I really think it's better to take a step back and look at what the goal of the existing mod is, how we can replicate that on cart, then if there are certain situational interactions that behave differently, so be it.
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Change isn't inherently bad ffs, idk why people act like it is though

 

[Melbelle]

the main objection I have to your post is that I really don't think a cart-accurate sleep clause should resolve all the edge cases where it differs from the existing mod, because yeah, then it gets really convoluted and it kinda shoots itself in the foot.

I'm confused by what this means in this context. Isn't what sleep clause mod does is aim to allow sleep only to one pokemon, and to avoid creating alternate lose conditions (by instead causing move failure)? Unless I misunderstand not allowing edge cases to freely sleep would imply being able to abuse it to win off forcing sleep. The only edge cases I mean are truly unavoidable ones, if you have any other possible option, sleep should result in clause activation.
By all means if what you mean is to allow forcing these cases to be an acceptable win condition, I suppose it's easier to understand but I'm unsure if the reception would be great (and at least in the context of RBY, if you can somehow actually force this you're almost certainly winning anyway).

Change isn't inherently bad ffs, idk why people act like it is though

This is something I agree on that only makes me think more that it's best to just ban sleep. Why not ban it if it's broken if unrestricted? I don't know any other gen's sentiment on it but it seems a mostly RBY phenomenon that people would rather make rules around what's a broken move normally to nerf it, rather than just accept it's a broken move on the cartridge where you can sleep multiple times. Doesn't "you can use sleep moves but only sleep 1 pokemon at a time" give off similar vibes to "you can use mewtwo but only at level 70 and without amnesia"?

I don't understand how there can be any logical way to justify creating rules to allow moves that otherwise are completely broken without said rules. It seems like a mostly RBY only phenomenon that we prefer to restrict sleep rather than ban it due to how deep it has affected the meta.
I think if we do a full 180 and decide cart accuracy is important we just accept that sleep moves are simply definitionally broken and it's much preferable to just ban broken moves rather than create rules to restrict them. I don't see why we can't allow fly&dig/OHKOs/evasion by creating rules about their allowed usage if sleep gets a pass.

The only reason we are trying to justify a cart accurate sleep clause instead of admitting they are broken on cartridge is because we like sleep moves and don't want change, is it not? When has nerfing broken elements by creating house rules around them ever been acceptable?

That said I'll admit while I don't think it's a very clean option, I would prefer a cart accurate sleep clause to sleep clause mod simply because creating a house rule that you unplug the link cable and declare yourself the winner on clause activation is an actually possible rule on vanilla RBY cartridges.

 

[phoopes]

Warning to those reading: this post is all about RBY, not getting into the can of worms that is later gens because I don't have an informed enough opinion

Ortheore

I think the "bastardized implementation" of Sleep Clause was actually pretty good the first time around, and I don't want to see it changed. Why? Because this "bastardized implementation" gets it right: what we're looking for is something that's competitively balanced, and I believe in an RBY context that Sleep Clause Mod is going to be the most competitive thing that also preserves history of meta development. The way I see it, here's what we have:

Option 1: Ban Sleep
-This is the option that throws out meta development completely IMO. I think this is a non-starter. As mentioned before, I didn't even care for it when BW banned sleep, let alone a metagame as old as RBY. To me I feel like this is going to start us back maybe not at square one (obviously Tauros still good lol) but I think this is on another level even past the Crystal_ paraslam rediscovery ten years ago. I think the difference is that back then, we were discovering (or rediscovering) something that was a mistake in how we understood the game. This time around, we are not changing a mistake in how we understand the game, we would be changing a "mistake" in our own ruleset. This is something that far from everyone agrees on though. Maybe a vote on banning sleep should take place? I think I know the result already but could be worth it just have some sort of finality to this debate.

Option 2: Keep things as is
-Best option IMO. I am a fan of the status quo because I think the meta is fun, competitive, and still sees developments to this day. As I said before, keeping things the status quo for the sake of it being the status quo is bad, but this is a case where I think if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Because not only is it "not broke," it's actually great.

Option 3: "Cart-accurate" Sleep Clause
-To my understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong), this means that if you sleep two of your opponent's Pokemon (whether on purpose or by accident), you insta-lose. This... sucks. I can't imagine why anyone would want this? Adding an insta-lose condition is something that falls in the range of "not fun for 99% of people" hence I don't think it should even be entertained. And trust me, I was a fan of Agility + Partial Trapping in RBY Lower Tiers. I was a fan of Sand Veil/Brightpowder in DPP NU. Did it suck for me specifically when these things were banned? Yeah I guess so. But I would rather alienate the miniscule minority of people from a tier rather than a vast majority just for the sake of "cart accuracy." And I think that's what making an insta-lose condition for sleep does. I didn't even talk about meta development here because I don't think I even have to. Cart-accurate Sleep Clause sucks because (like I said, if I'm understanding correctly), auto-loss conditions inherently suck and are not going to be fun for 99% of people.

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idk if that's going to be a satisfying response to you, but ultimately what it boils down to is that I think the meta/ruleset is great the way it is, banning sleep entirely would be too much of an upheaval, and making sleep clause cart accurate creates scenarios that are blatantly unfun for the vast majority of the players. You're not going to please all of the people all of the time, but keeping things as is not only please the most people out of any of the solutions, but also lets us keep a great metagame without throwing a huge wrench into it.

 

[Ortheore]

Option 3: "Cart-accurate" Sleep Clause
-To my understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong), this means that if you sleep two of your opponent's Pokemon (whether on purpose or by accident), you insta-lose. This... sucks. I can't imagine why anyone would want this? Adding an insta-lose condition is something that falls in the range of "not fun for 99% of people" hence I don't think it should even be entertained. And trust me, I was a fan of Agility + Partial Trapping in RBY Lower Tiers. I was a fan of Sand Veil/Brightpowder in DPP NU. Did it suck for me specifically when these things were banned? Yeah I guess so. But I would rather alienate the miniscule minority of people from a tier rather than a vast majority just for the sake of "cart accuracy." And I think that's what making an insta-lose condition for sleep does. I didn't even talk about meta development here because I don't think I even have to. Cart-accurate Sleep Clause sucks because (like I said, if I'm understanding correctly), auto-loss conditions inherently suck and are not going to be fun for 99% of people.

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idk if that's going to be a satisfying response to you, but ultimately what it boils down to is that I think the meta/ruleset is great the way it is, banning sleep entirely would be too much of an upheaval, and making sleep clause cart accurate creates scenarios that are blatantly unfun for the vast majority of the players. You're not going to please all of the people all of the time, but keeping things as is not only please the most people out of any of the solutions, but also lets us keep a great metagame without throwing a huge wrench into it.

So as kind of a side note, there are 2 proposals for cart accurate sleep clause- DQ, or to prevent selection of sleeping moves when the clause is active. Preventing selection of sleep moves creates an array of interactions where its behaviour can be awkward, although how relevant they are varies significantly (some would reasonably occur, many are very esoteric though). It does not create loss conditions, and the alternative (DQs) has previously been criticised by staff for that reason, suggesting that preventing the use of sleep moves is the less unlikely option to be implemented.

Having said that, I do favour the DQ proposal (provided that there's sufficient warning in the UI), so let's talk about that. The biggest thing that sticks out to me is your point that a DQ would apply in accidental cases- I would adamantly disagree with this, as that seems unfair to me. Something that I think is implicit in my posts thus far that I'm now realising I should've articulated better, is that I've assumed that sleep clause only really triggers when using dedicated sleep moves (LK, Spore, etc). The reason I've assumed this is that to my mind, the goal of the clause is to prevent players from spamming sleep, and the only way to actually spam sleep is to use a dedicated sleep move. In a DQ context, this means that you cannot force the opponent to trigger a loss condition, instead they have to consciously choose to take that risk. In that scenario, there is effectively zero impact on the meta since a DQ cannot be forced. So yeah, your post sounds as though you think this would cause catastrophic metagame upheaval but I really don't see how this would be true

This does mean that there are loopholes where multiple pokemon on a team could be put to sleep, but they're either highly unreliable (Effect Spore, Relic Song, etc.), or require an extremely specific and unrealistic scenario (e.g. the Ingrain-Passed Scarf Darkrai mentioned earlier in the thread). Either way, my thoughts are that they wouldn't be notable enough to actually act as a detriment to competitive play, so I don't think they need to be restricted unless practical experience proves otherwise.

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Regarding banning sleep in rby, I feel like this thread shouldn't be overly specific to any one generation, so idk if that's something we want to get into detail about. Additionally, I don't really think anyone's disagreed that leaving the decision of sleep clause vs ban in the hands of the respective communities is the way to go

For rby, suffice to say that a ban is something I'd be extremely reluctant to do, as I believe that with sleep clause (whether the existing mod or cart-accurate), sleep in RBY improves the overall depth of the tier and makes the game significantly more interesting. I have been talking a lot about testing things, so I suppose if you want to catch me out on that I'd go along with a test, but from my current perspective it just doesn't seem like a good idea. It could also be argued that in terms of policy, banning an entire status effect is substantially different from categories of moves (OHKO/evasion), but I haven't really thought through whether that holds up and honestly I cbf. Imo, sleep clause is a fairly intuitive rule in the majority of cases and RBY is better as a result of it, I'd just like it to not depend on a mod

 

[Teh]

I think it’s silly that this site prides itself on having consistent tiering and values while also picking and choosing what mechanics to conveniently ignore because We Don’t Like It. The vast majority of the cart-inaccuracies can be easily fixed too, so it’s not like we’re incapable of it.

We should decide whether or not we want to play Pokemon or if we want to play a mod. Because right now we’re playing a mod, literally no different from any of the other Pet Mods on the site, but everyone pretends that this is more real. I'm fine with both outcomes but I think if we do go with the "embracing being a mod" route we should mod out a bunch of the other objectively bad and uncompetitive aspects of the game to make this the best possible competitive experience it can be (goodbye 1/256 misses/fails!) Or we could choose to do nothing, and have an objectively worse competitive experience and extend this debate into the future indefinitely.

 

[BigFatMantis]

I think it’s silly that this site prides itself on having consistent tiering and values while also picking a choosing what mechanics to conveniently ignore because We Don’t Like It. The vast majority of the cart-inaccuracies can be easily fixed too, so it’s not like we’re incapable of it.

We should decide whether or not we want to play Pokemon or if we want to play a mod. Because right now we’re playing a mod, literally no different from any of the other Pet Mods on the site, but everyone pretends that this is more real. I'm fine with both outcomes but I think if we do go with the "embracing being a mod" route we should mod out a bunch of the other objectively bad and uncompetitive aspects of the game to make this the best possible competitive experience it can be (goodbye 1/256 misses/fails!) Or we could choose to do nothing, and have an objectively worse competitive experience and extend this debate into the future indefinitely.

I mean, this thread was never going to go anywhere. The whole premise involved analyzing and eliminating several clauses throughout 8 generations in a plea to standardize 40+ metagames along the way. Status quo will always be preferred and if anyone wants actual change they’ll make separate threads more specifically tailored to a single issue/gen/metagame and take it from there. Trying to do this in one fell swoop was doomed from the start and was only going to create a very predictable outpouring of words on both sides to no conclusion whatsoever in a jumbled mess that you have to navigate very carefully to try to find which arguments pertain to the actual metagames you play.

 

[Teh]

I mean, this thread was never going to go anywhere. The whole premise involved analyzing and eliminating several clauses throughout 8 generations in a plea to standardize 40+ metagames along the way. Status quo will always be preferred and if anyone wants actual change they’ll make separate threads more specifically tailored to a single issue/gen/metagame and take it from there. Trying to do this in one fell swoop was doomed from the start and was only going to create a very predictable outpouring of words on both sides to no conclusion whatsoever in a jumbled mess that you have to navigate very carefully to try to find which arguments pertain to the actual metagames you play.

At the very least it's nice to hear that the tiering policy is being looked over and revised, and hopefully we have a more clear policy on cart-accuracy going forward. The last thing I want to see with the update is it just saying "We Are Cart Accurate Except In These Cases Because Lol" but worded differently. This middle-ground is not ideal and I'd rather we just commit to something, anything! I do not care because right now we have the worst of both worlds, a mod that still has some of the bad parts of cart-accurate play that also has arbitrary restrictions that prevent it from being the real thing.

 

[Legitimate Username]

I thought this would be interesting, so here's some data from last month. The attached files include every battle id in March where the sim printed "Freeze Clause activated" in the log. If it activated multiple times in a battle, the id appears more than once.

Format	1+ Freeze Clauses	Total Battles	Percent
gen1ou	304	25210	1.21%
gen2ou	17	7227	0.24%
gen3ou	258	183465	0.14%
gen4ou	69	73069	0.09%

Okay what are we doing here. I feel like I'm pointing out that the emperor has no clothes on, looking at these stats. Why are we outright modding the game mechanics for THIS of all things. Freeze is apparently JUST SO BROKEN that it warrants modded nerfing and yet the approach is to remove the most minuscule insignificant case that has basically no meaningful statistical impact on games? I don't understand what the benefit is when the numbers make it clear that, outside of potentially RBY (very different fishing meta there), this has basically no effect. At least if you go and patch out full paralysis or critical hits you might actually make the game more fun instead of doing basically nothing while still bringing in a fake game mechanic. I don't get what the practical tangible metagame-impact defense of this clause is supposed to be outside of the most extreme cherrypicking of games. Like I'm sorry that you might miss 8 Focus Blasts in a row can we clause in a guaranteed hit after 7.

Anyway (at least past the first 2 gens) sleep is a garbage mechanic that is obviously overpowered in vanilla and is still completely broken for turn economies with RNG bullshit when clause nerfed, and I'm legitimately still shocked that the "just let us more freely change things that make the game better" crowd hasn't been pushing harder to just finally kill it already over the "tradition and the status quo is everything" crowd. I was kind of hoping that gen 9's ban would finally be the turning point for us to actually have it gone from these metas it does not belong in rather than watching the community uselessly spin its wheels over this for like a decade. Being free from Sleep Talk and guessing/praying for good wakeup turns would actually be kinda rad!

 

[Melbelle]

Okay what are we doing here. I feel like I'm pointing out that the emperor has no clothes on, looking at these stats. Why are we outright modding the game mechanics for THIS of all things. Freeze is apparently JUST SO BROKEN that it warrants modded nerfing and yet the approach is to remove the most minuscule insignificant case that has basically no meaningful statistical impact on games? I don't understand what the benefit is when the numbers make it clear that, outside of potentially RBY (very different fishing meta there), this has basically no effect. At least if you go and patch out full paralysis or critical hits you might actually make the game more fun instead of doing basically nothing while still bringing in a fake game mechanic.

I think a lot of it stems from RBY deciding to implement it a long long time ago.
Then GSC having a tournament game bailed by Gar getting 2x Ice Punch freezes was enough to mod it more.
Then ADV/DPP disliking Ice Punch Jirachi and by that point if it can be justified in more than one generation, why not just let the councils go wild and implement more mods at will.

As much as I did direct a lot of posts so far about RBY specific and on sleep, the real minimum I hope for one day is at least removing this horrifically egregious clause from this website. Sure, keep sleep clause mod if you must avoid banning sleep or adding loss conditions, but clausing out a very specific instance of bad luck because you can tie it to a status seems ludicrous. Luck and odds management is part of the game, 10% freezes are part of the game, why is this specific case justifiable just because people long before Smogon decided we don't like freezes. Sometimes you just get so incredibly unlucky that you can't win. There are absolutely zero calls to mod out bad luck but we just inherited this ancient clause and applied it to nearly half the gens now.

In RBY especially this actually can lead to game states where you purposely absorb the freeze on something else in order to prevent it on something else. Chansey trying to absorb freeze so your Mewtwo cannot be frozen in Ubers or the multitude of cases you may prefer to prevent freezes on something in particular in OU very clearly shows this extends well past a get unlucky less clause and can have meta altering effects.
RBY does not need to be an exception that gets a "less bad luck" clause. It's part of the game to get unlucky and freezes aren't something inherently needing an exception to this rule.
Let's allow Jynx to go 3:1 by turn 3 in a small amount of games and let's have a nice laugh about how sometimes luck just doesn't want you to win.

 

[BeeOrSomething]

While I agree there is nothing inherently wrong with change, there is also nothing inherently wrong with the status quo and getting to pick and choose for the game we signed up to this site to play. No matter what, choices made will always be made at some arbitrary degree, and that's impossible to avoid. But it's not a serious issue. These arbitrary decisions have been made and they stay with us now because most players like them as they are.

If you feel like the game isn't what you want to be then that's fine but it's not such a game breaking issue that compromises any ounce of integrity out there. "Good enough" is perfectly fine and if it offends you so much then I'm not sure what the point is to continuing to play or argue about it considering that numerous times over it's been shown that it won't ever change.

I understand desiring a "more accurate" simulator but not wanting one and being fine with where we are already isn't something that somehow eliminates all possible progress. It just is what it is. Pokemon is a very luck based game and this is where the community has collectively drawn the line at what is and isn't too much.

If enough people felt different then it would have been changed, but it hasn't. I don't see any point to continuing this or even having started it up in the first place. I agree with posts like those of peng and bfm's.

Side note: I don't have a serious issue with removing freeze clause but I also don't have a serious issue with keeping it. It doesn't really matter to me whether or not it's there. If people want it gone then sure go ahead.

 

[Hipmonlee]

Just in the interest of historical accuracy, I wanted to point out that there was no sim enforced freeze or sleep clause until Netbattle. The RBY and GSC eras were both played entirely without freeze clause and with a sleep clause where you simply lose if you sleep multiple pokemon.

So it's ADV's fault we have a freeze clause today, not RBY's!

 

[SoulWind]

I have read all posts and appreciate everyone who gave their thoughts on the matter.

While I understand both points of view, I still find it silly to entertain these clauses forever just because it is what people have ingrained into their minds after all this time from playing. If we have threads dedicated to discovering every tiny detail about mechanics to implement them as accurately as possible, mods that conpletely rework mechanics should have no place in the game we play. The simulator will obviously never be a 100% replication, but this is an avoidable luxury.

When Crystal_ changed RBY completely 10 years ago with his discoveries, everyone raised their hands to their heads and claimed the tier would be unplayable with those changes, many opposing to implement them. A decade later, here we are.

This will be my last post on the matter as there is really nothing left to say.

Just want to end it saying this is a really delicate matter and I hope it isn't closed with a bland ass resolution as usual. There needs to be a proper explanation if the choice is to keep things as they are and why. I believe we must be open to change and not just keep things because it is the most comfortable solution.

Thanks for reading!

 

[Wenderz]

My personal stand is to let the playerbase of each metagame decide what they want for the metagame(s) they play instead of lumping all of smogon tiering into a drastic policy change without consulting the players. I know this sounds like an unrealistic expectation given how many metagame there are and in this partciular case, whether sleep and freeze clause get kept or not would likely be decided by the "principles" of the people in charge of each metagame, and it may always bring up cases like "why is sleep allowed here but banned in the upper metagame ?" (such cases exist already like Drought in SM RU but that's besides the point). I'm sure most metagame have dedicated playerbase that will care about it. That said, I'm not too passionate about the outcome of a sleep ban or lack of freeze clause in every single existing metagame, so I won't linger on this (too much). This sin't the point of this post.

I'm a bit curious about the mindset that push for people to ask for changes on these clauses specifically. Here's an open question: are the proposed changes purely motivated by the sentiment that smogon metagames should be a one-to-one experience to cartridge gameplay (emphasis on cartridge here) while keeping competitive integrity ? Clearly, no one is arguing for our metagames to turn into a fully "modless", cartridge copypasted gameplay, we're not discussing about removing every widely accepted ban (evasion moves, OHKO moves, etc.), it has already been established in this thread that we'll always stick to an essentially modded version of the games.

If those clauses are looked at now because they seem like some weird and arbitrary decisions made by a small group of players years ago, does the fact that some Pokemon games that got the official stamp had those exact clauses enabled or available in the ruleset hold any weight ? NC97 has been mentioned already, I know that Pokemon Battle Revolution has those clauses too, and if I recall they function pretty much exactly like they do in current smogon metagames: you'd get hit by "But it failed!" if you try to sleep a second Pokemon on PBR under the clause.

Sorry for small and blurry picture

I know I know, this isn't cartridge, and I'm not pushing for playing under a DPP OU PBR ruleset wih team preview, no Rotom-A, 70% Hypnosis, etc. This is moreso a question about the legitimacy of sleep and freeze clause when official (or semi official I guess) games have alredy those clauses implemented in-game. Do the clauses still feel completely arbitrary, or just superficial and unneeded ? I am certainly not opposed to change regarding decisions that have been imposed for the past 3 decades (ADV UUBL list for instance), but on this particular topic I'd like to hear more.

I'm also asking whether it boils down to a distaste for complex bans in general. Again, we're not discussing about lifting every bans, banning sleep moves outright still results in distinguishing cartridge from showdown gameplay. If I recall, Soulwind, the OP poster, made a thread regarding about standarizing a Drypass only clause in favor of a straight Baton Pass in every metagame that has such a ban implemented.

I'm not trying to call out hypocrisy or whatever, and for the record I am in favor of Drypass only implementation whenever possible, I'm just asking, and I may open a big can of worms... where do we draw the line exactly ? As far as I'm aware, complex bans are there to try to find a compromise to balance out the positive and negative that something provides. Sleep for instance can be argued in many metagames to have a positive influence as a progress maker in spite of the added RNG factor, but it should be obvious for anyone who played Pokemon that unrestricted sleep is gamebreaking in singles smogon metagames. So while I certainly sympathize with people who wish to see Sleep gone entirely, I think that sleep clause, on top of being a thing in Pokemon games already, makes some degree of sense.

I reiterate, those are questions to get a better understanding of people's position towards sleep and freeze clause' legitimacy.

 

[dk]

sleep clause is a bend-over-backwards contrivance that preserves an inherently nonsense status for no real reason beyond some strange, almost religious-feeling apprehension to nuking an entire status condition. speaking mainly from an adv/dpp perspective, the amount of variance it adds, especially in non-preview where you have little context for what to sleep fodder if the sleeper comes in early, is too uninteractive for how influential it is on game results. get rid of sleep clause and apply common sense to tiering sleep (banning it completely) and these tiers (adv and dpp at least) will just be more playable.

also would like to say that people that are hyper conservative when it comes to old gen tiering deserve more skepticism than they may be currently receiving. current gen formats are often complete messes held back by sluggish tiering and excessive restraint (i'm genuinely amazed that sv singles never adopted something like vgc's open team sheet for combating tera variance silliness---getting outdone by the pokemon company of all entities is so silly it's basically an achievement), and it stands to reason that the older tiers with more potential to be playable shouldn't be held hostage by people that hate change for the sake of hating change. if you've been in the dpp community over the past year or so, you've seen some real brain-bending mental gymnastics used to defend things like machamp, for example. people don't understand what they want a lot of the time because change is scary.

 

[Melbelle]

Clearly, no one is arguing for our metagames to turn into a fully "modless", cartridge copypasted gameplay, we're not discussing about removing every widely accepted ban (evasion moves, OHKO moves, etc.)

Hello this is Melbelle and I would argue for a fully modless cartridge copypasted gameplay.

But this little snippet misses something crucial: move/pokemon bans are not mods.
I can play on cartridge and set house rules with my opponent in advance (don't bring OHKO moves, Evasion moves, Zacian, etc).

Now sure, if my opponent decides he doesn't want to listen, there's no validator on cart telling them to fuck off, but if we agreed to some rules, and my opponent breaks them, all I'd do is say we agreed to XYZ rules and they broke them and consider myself the winner regardless. I think having the site "implementation" being stopping you from loading banned things instead of losing if you do choose to use them is very clearly a pure convenience feature, and not a mod whatsoever.

To more clearly articulate my thoughts on more than just defending bans, I believe the simulator itself should just be a purely convenience feature rather than attempting to be a competitive mod for the games. The simulator exists to mimic cartridge behaviour with the convenience of not requiring the physical games, and more subtly, move animations and HP bar drain not taking an eternity to complete, being able to complete multiple turns in seconds rather than minutes.
There is inherent value in maintaining accuracy to cartridge, to be able to say we are simulating the games, rather than saying we are making a mod for the games. This is clear by the fact in 99%+ of cases, we just stay true to cartridge and handle most issues by adding house rules to not bring it, rather than mod it.

 

[Karxrida]

i'm genuinely amazed that sv singles never adopted something like vgc's open team sheet for combating tera variance silliness---getting outdone by the pokemon company of all entities is so silly it's basically an achievement

This was actually suggested very early on in SV, but the community has such a bizarre and pathological aversion to common sense solutions to problems that it was shot down. And people continue to bitch about Tera but won't entertain the blatantly easiest answer to the problem.

You can tell most of us are American lmao.