Sorry for the one liner but will any of the current defensive walls such as pex and clef ever be suspect tested? I think pokeaimMD did a poll of over 5k people voting for a Ou suspect for pex and more than half wanted a pex suspect.
Joey is a great guy and his poll was a fun piece of evidence showing that a lot of people don’t enjoy Toxapex (which I happen to agree with), but that cannot be used in an official capacity at all due to the lack of qualifications that come alongside it. Any individual can vote in the twitter poll he made. Needless to say, there needs to be a certain system used to weed out the players who may be less knowledgeable about the metagame. That aside though, let's break this down.
I am personally a member of the council and I used to be the individual in charge of it. Who do you think was the first person to bring up the prospect of tiering action on Toxapex on the frums, before it hit the masses and became a widespread knee-jerk response to "fixing" the metagame by people who perhaps were unsure what to scapegoat? It was me
here and then again, in this thread,
here. These were important discussions to have to gauge public perception for those who can present more qualified and justified opinions. Why did I do this? Because I, as a member of the SS OU Council, believe defensive Pokemon can be banworthy and do deserve suspect attention. Does that necessarily mean we should act on Toxapex or any given defensive Pokemon? No, but if they do have the restrictive characteristics of a banworthy Pokemon, then absolutely -- just like any offensively problematic Pokemon.
I can safely say that, if believed to be overly problematic, the council will act on defensive Pokemon. Personally, I have advocated for a Toxapex suspect to the council and in this thread, but we also have to accept that there are other problems in the metagame and Toxapex is a very reactionary Pokemon. Trends in the metagame as recently as the last few weeks have compromised it's effectiveness quite a bit (i.e: the rise in CM+Thunderbolt Clefable, Reuniclus, Spikes, Alakazam, Kyurem, Magnezone, etc. as well as Amoonguss being a more popular option on common balance structures). Right now, I still believe Toxapex is suspect worthy, but Cinderace's retest absolutely had to come first and Urshifu is a more pressing suspect to me as it quite literally forces Clefable (or niche Pokemon like Weezing-Galar) on to almost every single balance team if you do not go very far out of your way. That is a much more unhealthy dynamic than anything Toxapex has introduced to the tier, especially given the abundance of offensive responses to it that have naturally grown in popularity. In fact, those responses exhibit a lively and even somewhat healthy metagame -- trends forming to counter prior trends implies that we are seeing the tier evolve in front of our eyes and there is some semblance of competitive balance and teambuilding evolution. I do not view Toxapex as a great, positive presence in the tier, but it is nowhere near as pressing as something like Urshifu right now to me.
Just curious, I’ve been on this site for a while and I’ve noticed that the people of power for these “ban list” really defend this “defensive” meta year after year.
I do not think this meta is particularly defensive. If we go through S and A+ rank, 5 of the 8 Pokemon (Dragapult, Excadrill, Zeraora, Volcarona, and Urshifu) are more offensively geared than not. If you go down the rest of the higher ranks, it remains around (or slightly above) evenly split, too. However, let's say this is not indicative of everything as viability is not fully indicative of usage so much as effectiveness. What are the most common archetypes recently? During OLT, we saw an abundance of hyper offense and weather teams, which you can find many examples of
here. Of course, there was also some stall. As OLT passes and we reach a more stable metagame state, we are seeing lots of balance, but there is still not much making the metagame more defensively oriented than offensively oriented. Perhaps if you take the most linear of perspectives and claim games lasting more turns makes the metagame defensive, but that is not fair considering some strategies enabling offense simply take lots of turns (see: WishPort Clefable, boosting sweepers with recovery moves, VoltSwitch/UTurn pivoting chipping things down, managing the hazard game to make consistent progress, etc.). To put it bluntly: this metagame is not a defensive metagame and if you are goin "year after year", then you are even more mistaken as the later stages of SM became very open to bulky offensive teams, which arguably had stints of being just as good as balance. But ok, this aside, there are still some underlying points here that we can discuss in the context of the tiering system and this generation's tiering.
Would be nice to possibly have something new for a change. Maybe instead of banning the mons ppl “think is broken” how come the council doesn’t ban the top ten mons with the most usage instead?
To put it bluntly: this is ridiculous. The reason I included that break down of the top Pokemon being roughly split between offensive and defensive Pokemon was to prove a point: without all of these Pokemon, certain walls will find themselves nearly impossible to break and certain breakers will find themselves nearly impossible to wall. Urshifu is not top ten in the usage right now and usage is the only tangible statistic we could use to determine a "top x # of Pokemon", so without Clefale or even Toxapex (which is hardly even a check, but it can help form a core to soft-check it), have fun using Galarian Weezing on every team. Blissey is not always in the top ten in usage either, but without some of the strongest attackers and most effective utility presences to take advantage of it, have fun running the same offensive cores on every team. I could come up with countless more examples beyond this, too, but taking an arbitrary number of Pokemon at the top of the metagame and implementing a sweeping ban of them all would not only make the tier for the worst, but it would also not be backed by any concrete logic and take so many things away that the tier needs.
This type of ban is used in a lot competitive games such as Call Of Duty and I think this would really shake up Ou scene. What do you guys think?
Call of Duty is not Pokemon. Hell, VGC, which implemented something similar, is nothing like Smogon singles metagames. The way you can apply counterplay in Doubles formats is vastly different and makes this far less of an overall restraint. Applying an arbitrary, usage based cutoff on banning the best Pokemon would create a horrible imbalance. There is not a full-on correlation between the best Pokemon and the most banworthy Pokemon and implementing this for the sake of change is silly when the metagame is already changing at a very impressive rate as any players who witnessed OLT or the reactions to those trends can attest to.
I understand what your saying it’s just ever since 2007, I have always questioned the council and these ban list. I mean let’s be serious, we quick ban Cinderace but suspect test magerna? Really? This should of been the other way around tbh and quite frankly it seems like the council favors tournament play more than anything else.
What evidence do you have to back any of this beyond the rhetoric that a lot of disconnected players seem to frequent? Have you looked at the actual sequence of events and justifications posted or are you just saying this out of sheer personal dissatisfaction without consulting the sources?
We had pages of discussion in this threads, which have virtually no tournament players besides myself posting frequently, as well as a survey sent out to tournament players and the verdict was that Magearna and Cinderace were similarly problematic. Magearna was clearly problematic before Cinderace was -- from the first days, people complained about it and once Choice Specs + Trick became a metagame staple, it had to go. Cinderace took weeks after release and DLC coming out to find a more permanent place in the metagame and then thrive with the pivot + Heavy Duty Boots set, which ultimately proved to be broken. Therefore, suspecting the clear-cut issue and giving Cinderace a little more time was the best solution. With the extra time of the Magearna suspect test, we were able to at least remove Cinderace for a few months after with the quick ban that we were now able to justify given the length of Cinderace being a problem (i.e: it was not just a trend, the metagame was clearly not reacting well to it), so that meant we could have some time for the tier to settle and then we could get to it promptly after OLT as holding a mid-OLT suspect is impossible. And before you spin that as us catering to tournaments, we have no power over the tournament schedule and that has nothing to do with the council, so that's just not true.
As for your point on us favoring tournaments, you provide little actual concrete evidence. Meanwhile, I have posted in these threads hundreds of times and engaged with people regularly via these forums, PS, YouTube, Discord, etc. and these things oftentimes help shape my opinion, which is obviously relayed to the council regularly. In addition, we are also already planning on including ladder players in the next survey as a system was put in place to make this possible. We have went well out of our way to do this and include the public in the tiering process (hell, the current retest is even more evidence o that as instead of just banning Cinderace and setting a mid-generation precedent that this is ok to quickban months after release, we made sure the public got to decide with a vote). To put it bluntly: I do not see how you justify these claims and I think your distaste is merely out of dissatisfaction with specific metagame progressions that you try to scapegoat on decision making atop the tiering hierarchy instead of actually trying to dissect the root of the issue.
EVERYONES OU EXPERIENCE. EVERYONES! A majority of people that even refers to the council’s banlist build there own leagues around there banlist such as adrive’s WBE League which feature Smogon players such as chimpact, Moet and pokeaimMD. I’m just saying this whole suspect banning isn’t the wave and the fact that something is getting tested 2 months before a major DLC drop is also confusing.
We tier just for OU dude. What people do with our tiering list we cannot account for and that is their own decision. We tier for Smogon's SS OU tier and only that. This has been a given for years.
Finally, complaining about the tiering system is all fine and well. I personally believe we could consider looking into changes to fit the DLC model better, but like...the OU council cannot do that. The OU council merely works with the system they are given, which is a pre-established tiering infrastructure. If you have an issue with that, it is best to consult the tiering admin. Bringing that up in this thread when you have followed things since 2007 and claim to have a deep-seated distaste with the council leads me to question your actual experience and base of knowledge, with all due respect. I can help refer you to all of the right places if you would like, but making blank statements like that and aiming it at the wrong people is not particularly fair.
So you mean to tell me ace and everything else is just going to remain banned with a whole list of new mons that will shift The meta?
No, nobody said this. In fact, on more than just a few occasions, I have publicly stated that what happens with this re-test has no impact on post-DLC2 tiering. Even if Cinderace is banned now, if we determine it is not an issue in the DLC2 metagame, it can and will be either reintroduced or retested. Same goes for everything else that may be banned now or has been banned recently. The metagame now is entirely different than the metagame with >100 new potentially viable options. I do not know why you or others would assume that we would hold the bans over no matter the change in circumstances, but that is not the case and working off of that assumption is not representative of what is happening.
As I alluded to above, we alluded to in multiple official posts, and I alluded to in various prior posts in this thread and the suspect thread that are very publicly visible, the Cinderace suspect test is giving voters a chance to decide where it resides in this metagame. It is not fair for the council to be the sole deciders of the tiering placement of a Pokemon that was around for a long time prior. If it was a prompt quickban upon Libero's release, that'd be one thing, but it was not and the public deserves the power to vote on Cinderace. Setting a precedent to give the council this unchecked power is unfair, too, and this is coming from someone on council. If anything, given what you have stated about disagreeing with the council, you should be appreciative of the limitation and self-check that this imposes.
I just feel like there should be another way to ban things than just pointing out certain mons Smogon tourney players don’t like.
Sir, you are quite literally posting in a thread where you can do this without being a Smogon tournament player. I am the most outspoken guy on council and I play on the ladder for dozens-hundreds of games every week. Countless people from various different backgrounds discuss matters here, get voting reqs, and do so much more that impacts our tiering process. You have provided no evidence to actually back this claim.
I see a lot of people pointing out these walls never getting a test but over the 12 years I been here I never seen any defensive Pokémon ever get tested. I Been around longer than almost everyone in this thread and I can tell you things been the same around here for too long, and something should be changed with this banning/suspect/quick ban process.
With all due respect, I do not care how long you have been around when you have not been paying attention to what is happening or using actual facts as a basis for your arguments. I strongly implore you to read the other posts -- including the tiering policy and suspect OPs and anything members of the council put out -- before making such misleading allegations. For example, we suspect tested Dugtrio/Arena Trap, which thrived the most on stall, numerous times. We also suspected Mega Sableye. Same goes for Shadow Tag, which was almost only used on Stall teams.
Instead of the council being in charge of everything, they might want to start having polls done on there Twitter so more of the PUBLIC can be apart of what exactly gets banned/unbanned because at the end of the day it’s the council that gets the final say not us unless it’s a suspect test.
Twitter polls deciding tiering decisions are an awful idea and if you believe that letting random twitter user #34 who has never played a game of SS OU deciding things is a good idea, then I advise you to rethink this and lurk more before posting again.
To be fair, once megas came out I stopped playing.
bruh. You need firsthand experience to engage in these discussions and make the claims you have been making.
But over time there has been way more testing for offensive Pokémon than defensive Pokémon. Yes, Sableye got tested, but you mean you tell me in the past 4 years the only defensive Pokémon that deserved to be tested was Sableye? Something doesn’t sound right.
Stall was a problem last generation, so Dugtrio got suspected. Then, eventually Arena Trap did. Arena Trap and Shadow Tag were also banned this generation. Sure, Dugtrio and Gothitelle are not defensive Pokemon, but their usage was almost exclusively on stall (especially for Gothitelle) and enabling defensive combinations to wall the metagame.
Has any one wall stood out as broken? Absolutely not last generation. This generation? Toxapex and Clefable can be argued and I personally resonate with them, but let's look at a timeline here: We have quite literally had a suspect going at almost all possible points since the Arena Trap test back in March. Let me timeline it for you:
- Arena Trap test in mid-March (hindering stall / defensive cores)
- We used the next week to see the metagame settle, but we knew we had to handle Melmetal's retest
- Melmetal retest in early April
- Gave the metagame a few weeks to settle after two consecutive tests and collected opinions on what to handle next
- Dracovish test in mid-May
- DLC1 was coming up in June and there was no time for another suspect
- DLC1 comes out and everything is hectic to an unprecedented degree
- We give the metagame a few weeks to settle and survey a lot of players (something we will also be doing for ladder players again on a semi-regular basis moving forward to help include the general public more in our tiering process)
- Magearna test in mid-July
- Cinderace quickban with condition that we retest it because we cannot have a test overlap with OLT
- OLT happens until early/mid-September
- Cinderace retest in mid-September
There have been more pressing issues that even the public clearly supported (hence every suspect ending in a ban) which we had to deal with. So yes, that absolutely does sound right.
PS: Double posting is against the rules. Please use the edit button next time. I will let this slide so others know the same and you do for the future, but it may lead to an infraction if you do so again. Thank you!
