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

[SoulWind]

What exactly justifies mantaining these mods?

Why should the game be deliberately changed to fit 2 status conditions that are completely RNG based?

Is Smogon greater than the game itself so that it can enforce archaic and made-up mechanics at will?

Why is the purity of the game not respected?

In the case of Sleep, complaints about it are not new. 2/9 gens have banned Sleep completely, while other communities have expressed the will to do so recently. When you think about it, the amount of tournament games decided because one mon woke up first turn or didn't until the last turn is quite terrifying.

In the case of Freeze, well it's a 10%. Chances of 2 freezes happening at the same time are low, and other than in gen1 you can always thaw or use a Cleric.

This text also applies to other mods like RBY Counter patch, which is the biggest indicator of the consequences of giving the wrong people more power than they should have.

Let's remember: both these clauses are 20+ years old and were created by an extremely primitive group of people. We are stuck with rules created by grandpas in years in which 90% of the current playerbase didn't even exist. And I know there's gonna be a certain conglomerate of people ready to defend them here because they are sadly too afraid of change, the pinnacle of evolution.

It's about time to accept Smogon tiering is obsolete, insanely inefficient, full of inept people and in need of a whole rework. Problems are never looked at when they have to, everything is fixed years later instead of doing it in time and it takes gigantic effort for things to be looked at even for the dumbest stuff. I am pretty sure there's a lot of users that think just like me too.

The removal of these rules is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more aspects that desperatedly need to change in order to stop blocking our formats from reaching their biggest potential. I strongly believe a debate has been needed for a while and I want people to express their opinions and ideas about this here.

 

[UT]

Speaking for myself, not as a member of Senior Staff (and I have no relevant tiering authority anyways).

SV usage tiers are already fully cart legal in terms of gameplay mechanics (we don't talk about Timer Clause); I would personally support (and did propose) seeing this extended to all official tiers (a few still have Sleep Clause Mod) but that is likely a conversation for gen10. For modern tiering this is an issue that is largely already addressed, and likely will not be an issue going forward.

As for old gens, I think it is reasonable to leave them as they are unless there is momentum from their relevant tiering leaders and playerbase. If (picking at random) the DPP playerbase / tier leaders want to remove Sleep Clause Mod then I support that, and if they are running into specific obstacles within tiering policy we should discuss those, but a blanket change to the mechanics of oldgens should not overrule their player bases. Maintaining the status quo in oldgens if the majority is happy with it is fine, but that should be a gen-by-gen policy discussion.

It's about time to accept Smogon tiering is obsolete, insanely inefficient...and in need of a whole rework.

There is a new tiering framework in the works (cc shiloh Aberforth Star feen) that will hopefully address some of the inefficeny, but if there are any specifics you want considered let's hear them.

 

[HANTSUKI]

I'm a grandpa and I've been defending for a while the ban of sleep moves in all generations, so I would be totally in favor of the removal of those clauses.

I hate sleep as a mechanic and if your opponent froze 2 or more of your mons, he just played better and you should accept the fact.......

 

[peng]

This comes up every year and the reality is muddy because, beyond the "obvious" mods, there are countless other ones that we have taken as standard and forget about. HP bars aren't presented as %s in-game, if we were being cart accurate it would be expressed as a fraction of pixels and have way less accuracy. Some of the gens have cart priority that means mons don't switch in the proper order. The cancel button makes interactions around Magnet Pull / trapping completely inaccurate. Modern gens can't hit 100 turns realistically due to the cart in-game timer. No matter what we do, we are playing a modded version of the game unless we choose to go without QoL features, too.

My take as someone who only plays old gens: we have been playing these old tiers for decades in some cases and the entire competitive history of these games has been played with some of these inaccuracies in place. Competitive ADV is the "incorrect" version of ADV. Undoing all of these, introducing some potential instability into the tiers by altering key mechanics (GSC Jynx with free-er clicks, no thanks), just to make the simulator accurate to a cart metagame that basically nobody ever played, arbitrarily in 2025? I would prefer we were consistent with our own history rather than the romantic idea of playing a 100% accurate cart meta - when nobody has ever played serious 6v6 singles on cart ever.

I agree that Sleep is a stupid mechanic and, whilst BW OU got one of the worst versions of it, that tier did improve when we banned it and theres an argument that other gens would benefit too. That said, this decision should be made on a per-gen basis, not changed decades later for cart accuracy reasons.

Adding new mods in the modern day is quite bad and I think there's real arguments to be made against, like, counter dysync fix in RBY, or when we added freeze clause to dpp like 2 years ago. Thats kinda bad. We should probably stop doing that? IDK

 

[leoperi]

Sleep is important to make progress on rby and i think is also important on gsc specially bc makes non sleep talk lax sets better to handle . and i enjoy anyone being able to fish for freeze it really makes you want to dont let your opponent click the moves to fish for freeze .

 

[DerpySuX]

Sleep clause itself is not completely unfounded, at least in generation 1.

NC97 (everyone’s favorite format) was played with a sleep clause in effect, and it is an official Nintendo format. This sleep clause is actually stricter than the one Smogon uses, as it activates even if a teammate the target used rest before attempting to sleep it. So, at least in Gen 1 this does have some basis.

Despite that, at this point I generally view smogon formats as separate from the game of Pokemon itself to be perfectly honest, and sleep/freeze clause are just the tip of the iceberg. If we’re talking about making formats more console faithful, the timer in recent gens also needs a rework, as it’s woefully misrepresentative of the way it works ingame (not just the overall timer but turn to turn is very different), and that’s just one other example.

In my eyes, smogon’s way of doing things has been outdated compared to the direction the games have been going for a while, but I also don’t take them super seriously so it never concerned me. Smogon tiers feel more like a mod or mini game that uses Pokemon as a base, rather than a ruleset within the games themselves. I’m fine with that personally, if that’s how people enjoy the game then by all means, but I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t prefer to see smogon formats take steps to “catch up with the times,” so to speak.

 

[cityscapes]

Who is any of this for?

What person has ever been helped by a nebulous, abstract idea of "purity" (the importance of which we are meant to take as a given)? Even if we, as a community, collectively value simplicity while agreeing that tiering action isn't in violation of it, you know what isn't simple? Fucking Pokemon. Learnsets make no sense, stat spreads make no sense, old gens have strange and outright glitched behavior, the game is infested with RNG to its core (with or without sleep ban). 99% of people learning RBY OU have no prior concept of the mechanics; we could easily add in 10 more random clauses and the game wouldn't be any more difficult to learn. We are building a house on top of a fucking ocean here, and you're concerned about it looking nice.

Your attacks on an ill-defined group of "extremely primitive, inept people" are doing a great job to help your case too. The only thing anyone does on this godforsaken website anymore is appeal to emotion and try to rile people up, instead of actually putting in the effort to articulate what they want and why they want it. The OP straight-up makes no effort to persuade anyone and is just like "I'm sure many of you are already on my side, but unfortunately we are up against contemptible people scared of real change" like some fucking wannabe dictator or some shit. Give me a break. Do you even believe these changes will improve your own experience on this website at all?

 

[PDC]

minus any bombastic language involving smogon's "primitivism," this post has a pretty solid fundamental point: tiering probably needs to be standardized in some fashion going forward. whatever that may look like is for more informed and active players to determine. however, we also need to admit that smogon is a community of hobbyists on a civilizing mission toward a game which is unwieldy.

to make pokemon playable on the scale we have been accustomed to the past ~20 years, we needed to fundamentally alter numerous components of the cartridge mechanics. i understand that the approach has generally been described as being "faithful to the cartridges as much as possible," and such a position is warranted if we are to still be playing "pokemon." as a corollary, we also need to admit that the way in which we play the game is an absolute modification of any mechanics that we would encounter on a cartidge format. some of these alterations are merely procedural and fall within the limits of theoretical possibility (e.g. perfect ivs, evs, all moves available, etc) that are necessary to uphold the threshold of competitiveness.

others, like the timer, hp bars, greyed out moves, sleep & freeze clauses, and probably several other generation specific prohibitions are mechanically inconsistent with a cartridge experience. the question is where we draw the line on irreconcilability and what we deem an acceptable distortion to allow a playable, competitive game at all. i don't think we need to discuss the ramifications of removing the timer and the hp bar, as those modifications are entirely off the table and would destroy every imaginable constructed metagame in itself. i also think that we should keep the clauses for old metagames intact (1-8) unless a genuine standard broken / tiering issue came up (e.g. BW sleep mechanics).

going forward, i think we need to have a tiering framework that differentiates clearly between procedural alterations to pokemon, and substantive components that impact the game beyond our overarching principles. smogon needs to clearly delineate these lines going forward. to start, prior to generation 10 i think we should have a big retrospective on the validity of "sleep clause" vs. a "sleep ban." in the same way we avoid altering movesets of pokemon in complex bans (usually) to avoid arbitrary distinctions of brokenness which might completely change upon the discovery of a new set/spread/innovation, we should likely start viewing mechanics such as sleep in the same way. is sleep broken per se? i have no idea, but it is a little difficult to arrive at the clausal conclusion without jumping through hoops to distinguish it earnestly from moveset alterations. freeze clause is more difficult to deal with as we do not have a "freeze" status move (...i think) like we do w/ sleep. regardless, we should probably inquire into whether or not the possibility of being 2x+ frozen is really "broken," in the same way being crit 10x in a row technically may pose the same problem. basically, we need to admit that this modification is for the comfort of not encountering an absurd sequence of hax at a rate that is found in other components of the game we accept as normal or necessary.

the only way for this to make sense going forward is to really fashion out a proper schema of what we mean as alterations necessary for the facilitation of competitive pokemon itself and alterations that are superfluous. further, i think it is worthy to really take a look at what we deem necessary to facilitate a competitive game on a simulator, (further, newly) define what we mean by broken, uncompetitive, desirable, and metagame health. i don't think we need to get into a discussion about the "purity" of the game b/c that ship has already sailed -- we will never play a game that is pure, and you can easily argue that the procedural limits placed upon pokemon have a substantive impact in altering it far more than any sort of in-game clause ever will. rather, we need to admit that certain procedural alterations are necessary to "make competitive pokemon happen," and then look at all other clauses and mods for an inclination of whether they are competitive (whatever that means) or not in relation to the substantive gaming experience.

back when i was a council member in oras i used to think a lot about what our tiering philosophy should be. i generally arrived at a position that disregarded metagame enjoyment for the sake of abstract competitiveness. regardless of whether or not this thread will actually turn into anything, which they normally don't, i think this type of discussion is at least enjoyable for those of us who have been through decades + journeys of tiering.

 

[BigFatMantis]

it doesn’t really make any sense at all to alter oldgen tiering if the actual oldgen community for that tier does not want it altered. Any kind of blanket request to eliminate mods etc. will just very obviously result in nothing being done and it’d be a wasted conversation. If thing need to change in oldgens, it has to be done case by case in each oldgens within those communities to see if that’s what they want. Thats the conversation that needs to be had if you actually want the change to happen. And no matter how much is changed, we are still never playing the actual cart games in oldgens. With all the modifications we make to the game, mechanics, mods, clauses, and bans (banning sleep moves is still basically not playing what the cart games are supposed to be), the idea of a romantic arena where we are hooking up link cables to fight in accordance to all cart rules and mechanics is a fantasy that isn’t built for the way we play on this simulator.

 

[Karxrida]

HP bars aren't presented as %s in-game, if we were being cart accurate it would be expressed as a fraction of pixels and have way less accuracy.

Don't have time to scrutinize everything rn but I wanted to say this is already possible to track in person with calculators and communication between the players. The mod is just QoL at that point.

Even if we threw everything else out the HP% display should stay.

 

[Ortheore]

Wholeheartedly on board with OP on this stuff. I think adhering to archaic mods because "it's always been that way" is incredibly counter-productive, especially when you consider that this logic applies iteratively until you reach their origin some time in the 00's. If you want to find stuff from that era you can either do a date-based search here (which only goes back to Dec 2004), or hit up the Internet Archive to try to find stuff on Azure Heights (their forums seem to be no more ;_;). Or ask someone who was around in the Azure Heights days since I know there's a couple still active. On that note, I found evidence of sleep clause being enforced by gentleman's agreement circa 2002, which is pretty cool in terms of working out a history, looking this stuff up can be a crazy rabbit hole for me it turns out.

The other thing with digging into this is that you might notice that the community as a whole has come a long bloody way since then, yet because we stick to the way things have been, we're effectively constrained by decisions made when competitive pokemon was in its infancy and when online spaces were a lot less mature and applying much less developed ideas and reasoning. With how the community has developed, why the hell should we uncritically accept these apocryphal choices?

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Specific to the mods mentioned by OP, sleep clause can very reasonably be reworked to be cart-accurate, while I straight up don't think freeze clause is needed. Banning sleep is also an option, but as a RBY player I hate that idea when a reasonable compromise is possible. Also saying that some esoteric format or side game had these clauses implemented should justify modding every single Pokemon game thereafter is an absurd stretch and should hold no weight- we're not simulating some hybrid of idk, DPP and Stadium or some such combo. I saw that argument floated earlier and wanted to address it

Another point that's been made is that it's impossible to perfectly simulate cart mechanics. This is true, but I think is being used too much as a sweeping argument to justify not bothering with change. Just because we can't perfectly achieve the ideal of replicating playing through link cables, doesn't mean we shouldn't try, and shouldn't have justification for why we depart from that. And really I think refocusing our solutions to issues through the lens of "what would we do if we were playing on cart?" rather than only considering what this would mean for the simulator is better for reconciling these discrepancies. I think the debate over cartridge accuracy vs simulator QoL is an underlying conflict that will always exist, but we should take measures to mitigate it wherever possible

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Regardless, the issue I have with these kinds of discussions is that it never leads anywhere. To actually resolve this, we need data and we need tests. For freeze clause, collect data on how often it's activated. Also run a test where it's unbanned in the appropriate metas and see how often it would activate (to test the assumption that freeze clause's existence has a meta impact). For sleep clause, we should test the different proposals for how a cart-accurate sleep clause would work- that's a little more cumbersome, as it would require dev work to implement (gentleman's is not an adequate solution lol).

Empirical investigation is in the interests of both sides. Those of us who object to the status quo see its only claim to validity being that it was here first, with no clear evidence of who made that decision and how that decision was made, meanwhile cart accuracy will always be a legitimate and valid concern for a significant portion of the community. This means that this discussion will never even remotely be settled, and will repeatedly re-emerge. If we test, collect data or do anything else besides sit around talking about this, either the status quo will change, or there will be legitimate evidence justifying its position, meaning we won't have to revisit it (at least for the foreseeable future).

Side notes

I'd even go so far as to argue that the term "old gens" is detrimental. I don't agree with treating them differently just because they're not the most recently released set of games, when they can still be played and their metas continue to evolve. If you want to preserve the way things were when that generation was new, save the tierlist and their VRs from the time and look at it whenever you want, because when they're actively being played, the way things were will only grow increasingly more irrelevant over time

When tiering old gens, I'd be curious to see data on voting patterns based on when they started playing the tier. The G4 Arceus vote sticks out to me, since voting on Arc as a whole, rather than individual forms, runs counter to implementing any kind of tiering principles (majority of forms cannot reasonably be argued to be broken imo), and instead skews the assessment towards people liking what they're used to. At least, that's what I think, but I haven't been active in any ubers format for a while so I don't really want to push things

Is creating an emulator that replicates gameplay experience of simulators viable for older games? I always wonder this, especially in the context of these discussions. Also explaining that it's a simulator not an emulator and that we don't run code from the actual games when someone asks about it irl is always strange lol

 

[chimp]

 

[Zarel]

HP bars aren't presented as %s in-game, if we were being cart accurate it would be expressed as a fraction of pixels and have way less accuracy.

The Switch is 1080p; the 48 pixel HP bar is from the 3DS. Modern games actually have around twice as many pixels. Really the main issue is that you don't really have the time to count the pixels one by one so you only know an approximate percentage. But how would we even fix that?

Some of the gens have cart priority that means mons don't switch in the proper order.

To be clear, this is just Emerald.

The cancel button makes interactions around Magnet Pull / trapping completely inaccurate.

No it doesn't, we intentionally remove the cancel button for these interactions so they're accurate.

Modern gens can't hit 100 turns realistically due to the cart in-game timer. No matter what we do, we are playing a modded version of the game unless we choose to go without QoL features, too.

So yeah I'm not disagreeing with the spirit of the post, but I just wanna be clear that Showdown does in fact go as cart-accurate as possible.

 

[Karxrida]

Is creating an emulator that replicates gameplay experience of simulators viable for older games? I always wonder this, especially in the context of these discussions. Also explaining that it's a simulator not an emulator and that we don't run code from the actual games when someone asks about it irl is always strange lol

This is absolutely possible for Gen 3 at least because people still do PVP for Mega Man Battle Network this way. The problem is the obvious legal issues of us running an actual emulator for the Showdown playerbase via browser. The Battle Network community is able to get around this by having every player legally rip their own ROMs (the Legacy Collection has the original GBA ROMs in the files and they're super easy to take out of the PC version) and using a peer-to-peer program.

 

[Marty]

For freeze clause, collect data on how often it's activated.

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%

 

[Melbelle]

I'm sure this'll lead to nothing as most arguments for more/complete cart accuracy tend to, but I do think at a minimum freeze clause is a silly addition in all gens. I also say this as an RBY main of years knowing full well that freeze is permanent. I don't get the idea behind wanting to minimize the chance of hax in this specific manner, as far as I'm aware we don't completely mod any other game element because of their hax potential*, so I don't see the justification for doing so for freezes. Bad luck happens, whether its crits, flinches, full paralyses, or secondary status effects, why do freezes get to be treated special?
(* sleep clause mod technically nerfs effect spore/dire claw/relic song but isn't the intended target)
And no, removing freeze clause would absolutely not completely warp the RBY meta, freeze spam strategies would still have inherent flaws. Even if it did, if the reality of the RBY meta is on cart it's completely different than on sim, I would argue this makes the clauses more egregious, not less.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I am a naive non-gen3/4 main or even player at all. Wasn't the biggest issue these gens had in regarding multifreeze Ice Punch Jirachi's ability to fish for it? I don't see how if the #1 issue regarding multifreeze is a specific Pokemon's ability to go for them, the first solution is to mod the game.

Not much more to add besides that I'd also support sleep clause being fully cart accurate in all gens, even if this gets interpretted as needing to outright ban sleep in every gen including gen 1. This would completely turn the gen 1 meta on its head as sleep is a very core part of the meta, but if that's the tradeoff we need in order to make the meta not just a make-believe meta that only exists in Pokemon Showdown's spinoff of link battles, that's fine. (although gen 1's special due to little to no edge cases where sleep move usage could be forced so a forfeit on 2nd sleep is realistic here. but id understand if a clean move ban is still preferred to adding alternate lose conditions).

Given that an outright sleep ban across all gens would be dramatically more impactful and controversial, I don't think we necessarily need to go full cart-accurate in one fell swoop, I would support doing so, but just starting with freeze clause would be at least a small step in the right direction but then still begs the questions of if we removed one clause due to cart accuracy issues, why do we turn a blind-eye to another? If the intent is to remove cart inaccurate clauses, it's hard to justify removing one but ignoring others due to blacklash.

I find it unlikely this thread will lead to anything, the arguments against freeze and sleep clause are as old as the clauses themselves, aka, older than most people on smogon dot com and have been rehashed thousands of times already to no avail. Not sure why making a thread with them again is likely to do anything (although I guess there's a 0% chance of change if no one does)

So, at least in Gen 1 this does have some basis.

I don't think an official format having a rule is a great justification for modding to game to do something similar to it. (or at least doesn't make it any more justified in RBY than any other gen in my opinion). It just isn't the same rule, NC97 had you forfeit the game, not cause sleep to fail, so even if we're simulating a somewhat similar rule, the way we are doing so is still just not a possibility on cart.

The attached files include every battle id in March where the sim printed "Freeze Clause activated" in the log.

For what it's worth, the number would be higher if people actually went for 2+ freezes. In RBY, Jynx would get one freeze then be free to go for a second one, the entire existence of Amnesia+Reflect+Ice Beam+Rest Snorlax, I mean IBLax in general should be more viable even if on a more standard ref/slam/rest set.. Sure Jynx gets to near autowin 1% of games early, but doesn't suddenly jump to #2 on the VR due to this. I'd even be willing to bet if we removed Freeze clause and gave it a few years, it's unlikely Jynx, Cloyster, or any other mon capable of firing off multiple ice moves is unlikely to have any major viability shifts.

The Battle Network community is able to get around this by having ever player legally rip their own ROMs (the Legacy Collection has the original GBA ROMs in the files and they're super easy to take out of the PC version) and using a peer-to-peer program.

I'm unaware of this community, do they actually verify everyone is using a legally ripped ROM or do they just say "we don't support anyone using illegally downloaded ROMs, if anyone is using illegal ROMs that's on them not us".
Overall though I think it's probably still unreasonable for PS to go this route for a multitude of reasons, only one of them being the Nintendo higherups in contact with those running PS almost certainly being very unhappy with it.

 

[Brigtel]

While im not a big fan of the language used and don't have such an absolutist position, I do agree with the spirit of this post. We have inherited rules and mechanics from a very different time that are kept around because they're already here, they have precedent, they have history, they're kinda convenient, but because they're so established they are not regularly subject to rigorous review as to whether or not the reasons for having them are still sound. I don't however believe we should NEVER mod the game for any reason or impose unpopular changes to old gen councils. I'm not a prominent player of any gen so what I'm going to say is just a proposal that could hopefully help a bit.
Mods should be treated like complex bans (the most complex of bans in fact), meaning not completely unacceptable but to be avoided whenever there is a simpler solution.
Keeping modded mechanics into the game should not be the default, it should be something that has to be justified for every context it exists in, and in every new context we introduce them in. For example, the default for any new generation should be no sleep clause no freeze clause, almost certainly a sleep ban because everyone agrees it is by itself a broken mechanic, and then if people want to reintroduce sleep clause they have to show that bringing sleep back would be not only beneficial for the tier, but it would be so beneficial as to warrant a mod for the game. Same with freeze clause though the assumption is no freeze ban by default, for obvious reasons. But it shouldn't just apply to newer gens: wherever these mechanics exist, the burden of proof shouldn't be on those who offer a change to a simpler policy, it should be on those who want to keep a more complex one. We let sleep clause pass in other generations because sleep isn't so problematic there, but instead we should be asking "is sleep so beneficial that it should have a special clause made exclusively to keep it around?". That doesn't mean these tiers can't have these clauses, just that the burden is on them to show their necessity, and to keep justifying it throughout the years.
I also think that, for a tier like gen1 that is so old and so well established, and where sleep and freeze are such central mechanics, the justification for a sleep and freeze clause can be mostly historical, it is justified because undoing these would disturb decades, soon 30 years, of metagame development. In other tiers these mechanics are not as central, I don't think, though others who are more knowledgeable can contradict me.
A similar framework could be applied to other mods mentioned here, though most of them sound very obviously justified, the rng mod which is implied by the simulator, the hp bars mod, the timer mod, etc...

Specific to the mods mentioned by OP, sleep clause can very reasonably be reworked to be cart-accurate, while I straight up don't think freeze clause is needed. Banning sleep is also an option, but as a RBY player I hate that idea when a reasonable compromise is possible.

To be clear, there is no reasonable way to implement sleep clause to be cart accurate. Maybe you can find some very complex set of rules that would work for gen1, but as soon as you introduce things like encore, choice items, and abilities, it starts to break down. Say you click spore with your choice band breloom, as your opponent sends in natural cure starmie. Cart-accurate Sleep clause says you can't click spore, but its your only move, so you should be forced to switch. But now that means we've very artificially nerfed sleep to be completely nullified by natural cure, because of our strange rules, since they can just switch out. So maybe you say, if they have natural cure you can still click spore? After all there is no way it would lead to two pokemon sleeping. But now we've very strangely added a new effect to sleep, in that it reveals whether or not your opponent's ability is natural cure. What if I baton pass ingrain to my scarf darkrai and start spamming dark void? Clearly there is no other option than to let me spam it, but should that be allowed just because its a bad strategy? I'm still putting multiple mons to sleep and benefitting from it. Should it result in a loss because you're not allowed to pass ingrain to pokemon who learn a sleep move? There are probably other scenarios, but you can see how it leads to us having to make both very complex rules and arbitrary calls like this.

I hope this will be a positive contribution to thr discussion!

 

[gastlies]

Say you click spore with your choice band breloom, as your opponent sends in natural cure starmie. Cart-accurate Sleep clause says you can't click spore, but its your only move, so you should be forced to switch. But now that means we've very artificially nerfed sleep to be completely nullified by natural cure, because of our strange rules, since they can just switch out. So maybe you say, if they have natural cure you can still click spore? After all there is no way it would lead to two pokemon sleeping. But now we've very strangely added a new effect to sleep, in that it reveals whether or not your opponent's ability is natural cure. What if I baton pass ingrain to my scarf darkrai and start spamming dark void? Clearly there is no other option than to let me spam it, but should that be allowed just because its a bad strategy? I'm still putting multiple mons to sleep and benefitting from it. Should it result in a loss because you're not allowed to pass ingrain to pokemon who learn a sleep move? There are probably other scenarios, but you can see how it leads to us having to make both very complex rules and arbitrary calls like this.

This can be avoided by making Sleep Clause: "If you sleep two Pokemon, you lose"

If you spore the Starmie there's nothing preventing you from clicking Spore again. If it wakes through Natural Cure then you just sleep what switches in and no issue, if it was analytic or something u slept two Pokemon and boom u lost the game. Tough but you could have also chosen to just not click Spore so its fully on you.

Personally I don't have a strong opinion on either side but I just wanted to clear that confusion up, if sleep clause was made cart accurate then that is how it would be implemented.

 

[BigFatMantis]

This can be avoided by making Sleep Clause: "If you sleep two Pokemon, you lose"

If you spore the Starmie there's nothing preventing you from clicking Spore again. If it wakes through Natural Cure then you just sleep what switches in and no issue, if it was analytic or something u slept two Pokemon and boom u lost the game. Tough but you could have also chosen to just not click Spore so its fully on you.

Personally I don't have a strong opinion on either side but I just wanted to clear that confusion up, if sleep clause was made cart accurate then that is how it would be implemented.

There was a previous thread about this though, and it was made clear that adding "lose conditions" was not going to be on the table re: any changes.

 

[Ortheore]

There was a previous thread about this though, and it was made clear that adding "lose conditions" was not going to be on the table re: any changes.

That rings a bell, but it's really a shame that it wouldn't be considered. With proper measures in place to prevent accidental DQs I really don't think it's unreasonable and it is honestly exactly how you would logically implement sleep clause if we didn't already have the mod in place on the simulator. The only reason this isn't seen as normalised is because the mod has been in place for so bloody long imo

I also think that, for a tier like gen1 that is so old and so well established, and where sleep and freeze are such central mechanics, the justification for a sleep and freeze clause can be mostly historical, it is justified because undoing these would disturb decades, soon 30 years, of metagame development. In other tiers these mechanics are not as central, I don't think, though others who are more knowledgeable can contradict me.
A similar framework could be applied to other mods mentioned here, though most of them sound very obviously justified, the rng mod which is implied by the simulator, the hp bars mod, the timer mod, etc...


To be clear, there is no reasonable way to implement sleep clause to be cart accurate. Maybe you can find some very complex set of rules that would work for gen1, but as soon as you introduce things like encore, choice items, and abilities, it starts to break down. Say you click spore with your choice band breloom, as your opponent sends in natural cure starmie. Cart-accurate Sleep clause says you can't click spore, but its your only move, so you should be forced to switch. But now that means we've very artificially nerfed sleep to be completely nullified by natural cure, because of our strange rules, since they can just switch out. So maybe you say, if they have natural cure you can still click spore? After all there is no way it would lead to two pokemon sleeping. But now we've very strangely added a new effect to sleep, in that it reveals whether or not your opponent's ability is natural cure. What if I baton pass ingrain to my scarf darkrai and start spamming dark void? Clearly there is no other option than to let me spam it, but should that be allowed just because its a bad strategy? I'm still putting multiple mons to sleep and benefitting from it. Should it result in a loss because you're not allowed to pass ingrain to pokemon who learn a sleep move? There are probably other scenarios, but you can see how it leads to us having to make both very complex rules and arbitrary calls like this.

I hope this will be a positive contribution to thr discussion!

I broadly agree with the first part of your post, but the point about disturbing decades of metagame development strikes me as odd, because I straight up don't see why this is a concern. Sure, this might precipitate shifts in the metagame that occur faster than the baseline rate (debatable), but I don't see why that's inherently a bad thing. It's not like we're throwing everything out and starting from scratch. Hell, it's happened before with Crystal's mechanics discoveries lol.

As for dismissing cart accurate sleep clause, I adamantly disagree, mostly because finding specific scenarios (which are mostly edge cases) where a cart-accurate sleep clause behaves differently to the existing mod is just kinda... not unreasonable, especially when it still functions the same in most cases. In implementing cart-accurate sleep clause, the goal shouldn't be for it to function exactly the same way as the existing mod, but to achieve the same goal(s), namely preventing players from spamming sleep without outright banning it. So I think the rules can be really simple- don't sleep more than 1 opposing pokemon. There are only 2 exceptions I would grant:

• If you cannot switch or select a move other than a sleep move, then breaking sleep clause is allowed. Sure, it violates the rule, but if you're in that position you're clearly at a massive disadvantage, to the point where it doesn't matter if sleep gets spammed (so yes, I'm fine with Ingrain Scarf Darkrai). It's also a scenario that isn't remotely common.
• Moves that can inflict sleep as a secondary effect, but aren't primarily used for that reason (i.e. just Relic Song to my knowledge) would be exempt. If in the future there were other moves added with secondary sleep effects this could be revisited (imagine Scald but for sleep lol), but for now I think it's reasonable

A simulator should simulate the experience of playing the games it supports as much as possible, which means wherever possible/reasonable we should arrive at solutions that mirror what you would reasonably implement on cart (sorry Karxrida, but the workaround for HP % mod you proposed earlier doesn't seem remotely reasonable, even if it's technically possible). To insist on amending how the game works to fit an already existing simulator experience is very much the tail wagging the dog. Edge cases where the simulator functions differently to a cart-accurate mod are interesting to discuss but in my eyes, where the simulator diverges from what's possible on cart, those simulator-only plays should never have been valid in the first place.

I like DQs more than disallowing clicking sleep purely because preventing the option of selecting sleep moves seems constraining and can be exploited, but I think either option should be considered before a mod

 

[Karxrida]

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%

Maybe we need more data for Gen 1 specifically (cause losing the mod could make freeze fishing actually viable and skew the data), but I cannot see how anyone can defend keeping it in later gens when it's rarer than 1/256 misses (0.3906325%), which we did not mod out of RBY. There is no consistency there. Even then, the idea we absolutely need a mod to deal with such a ridiculously rare occurrence is low-key insane.

And no, removing freeze clause would absolutely not completely warp the RBY meta, freeze spam strategies would still have inherent flaws. Even if it did, if the reality of the RBY meta is on cart it's completely different than on sim, I would argue this makes the clauses more egregious, not less.

RBY is also already equipped to deal with Freeze considering dedicated Paralysis and Sleep absorption is a major part of the meta.

I'm unaware of this community, do they actually verify everyone is using a legally ripped ROM or do they just say "we don't support anyone using illegally downloaded ROMs, if anyone is using illegal ROMs that's on them not us".

I don't think they a have a way to verify directly and go the "we do not condone this" route, but they provide instructions on how to rip the ROMs from original hardware/Wii U and their fanmade PVP client will even automate the process if you have the Legacy Collection on your PC. Plus they're a very small community that doesn't attract much attention from Capcom. Meanwhile, we're working with a franchise that's the biggest IP ever and connected to litigious companies.

 

[Melbelle]

Maybe you can find some very complex set of rules that would work for gen1

Gen 1 wouldn't need complex rules, there's no way to force your opponent to use a sleep move in RBY.
The only "exception" is if your opponent is on their last mon and gets pp stalled to force sleep move usage. I would argue if you get in this position to begin with your chances of winning is near zero anyway (and should not be difficult to add an exception for, if we even do, I think if you can force your opponent into this scenario which also requires you to have at least two pokemon, unstatused or already asleep, you can argue it's just a deserved loss at that point)

Gen 2 and onwards though would need an outright sleep ban. Even if we could code every single edge case that forces the move usage, I believe the rule gets too complex.

There was a previous thread about this though, and it was made clear that adding "lose conditions" was not going to be on the table re: any changes.

I think the situation is a little different when we were applying it to gen 9 and not working under the assumption that the only options are ban sleep moves or make secondary loss conditions. (not that we are at that point yet, option 3 here is do nothing and keep the clause)

While I agree RBY losing sleep would be bad for the meta, I believe making the simulator possible on cartridge is preferred even if it means needing to outright ban sleep moves. I also am not sure how I feel on secondary lose conditions, the rules applying to team creation is a lot cleaner than rules applying to how you play the actual battle. It's also consistent to have sleep banned across the board instead of in every gen except RBY.

Giving one exception to one gen because it's easier to account for every edge cases where sleep moves are forced doesn't sit well with me even if I would prefer the meta to retain sleep. That kind of thinking reads like "we would allow sleep in gen2+ but it's hard to program".

It's also literally changing the rules around what's objectively a broken move in order to keep it. At that rate why not allow dig/fly by forcing you to spam it when you get the bug until the bug gets disabled, why not have OHKO clause where you get 1 KO and can't do it again, and why not come up with a ruleset that tones down evasion? There's no consistency if we ban some broken/uncompetitive moves, but keep another by nerfing it through the ruleset.

While I understand why losing sleep is not ideal, I believe it's the only logical decision to keep cart accuracy intact. The reason I believe people suggest a cart accurate sleep clause is they've enjoyed playing with sleep when combined with the sleep clause mod, not because it's an ideal solution to cart accuracy.

If a move is broken it gets banned, not nerfed by adding more rules. We shouldn't play pick and choose and ban broken moves we don't like, and nerf broken moves we do like.

(edit: added some more thoughts)

 

[Tree69420]

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

 

[phoopes]

Remember when I made a thread that said it was going to be the last thread with regards to modding vs. cart accuracy in RBY? Pepperidge Farms remembers

On RBY, I’ll just quote myself from that thread:

In short, what I’ll say is this: I think at this point it is going to be impossible to simulate a version of RBY that is completely cart accurate. We’ve proven time and time again that there’s just so much going on here with minor nuances that are discovered every so often that I think we should embrace the fact that the standard Smogon version of RBY is just that, a Smogon version, not a 1-to-1 simulation of the original games. Therefore, I don’t think we need to be all that concerned about making every minute change that comes up over the years.

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.

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.

This is also why I’m okay with Desync Clause in RBY (though I do support a revote on what to do with Counter since the playerbase overall seems to be unhappy with how it took place). If something makes the game literally unplayable or even just terrible (I think Acid Rain glitch is patched out on simulator, right?) then it should be patched out.

Moving forward for Gen 10 and beyond, it should really be a case by case basis on whether to ban sleep or institute sleep clause. I don’t think there needs to be a third option of modified sleep clause, either keep it the way it is or just ban sleep entirely. I think this is the simplest solution, and the one that will be best for meta development in the years to come.

I know this post was kind of made through the lens of RBY, but it’s just what I know best. All in all though, I’ll try to summarize it:

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.

 

[Teh]

honestly just buff freeze clause if removing it isn't an option. the current implementation isn't even particularly good since a lot of the time the most optimal play is to just sack the frozen mon immediately and if that happens its like freeze clause doesn't even exist. i've had multiple games where i've sacked a frozen mon to tauros or whatever then got frozen like 20 turns later and i'm just like "wow thanks freeze clause u really saved my ass there." the current implementation only really safeguards against dumbass unserious freeze fishing which isn't even particularly viable

either make it unable to happen after the first freeze no matter what or just remove it altogether. both options stop freeze fishing while also dealing with the actually problematic part of freeze