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Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v4 [PALAFIN RETEST]
- Thread starter TPP
- Start date
I feel like most OLT players are gonna want Kyurem gone, the amount of matches in OLT that just ended with it just winning the game outright or genuinely ripping a massive hole into someone's team before going down with its various sets is super alarming.
Like watching some of the OLT matches, i've seen tons of teams prepping for Kyurem the best they can, and a lot of them still lost to it and got steamrolled because they didn't guess the set or Kyurem got into the perfect position to win the game outright via stat drop or freeze hax or just generally good positioning, to the point where a lot of OLT players probably dreaded seeing it in team preview because of the amount of variance you have to deal with when facing it and knowing that if your kyurem checks go down or get frozen you oftentimes cannot do anything about Kyurem.
Also I think Kyurem makes other threats harder to deal with, for instance something like Gouging Fire which really doesn't like dealing with stuff like Lando-T or its other good checks/counters has a way easier time because Kyurem really discourages the use of these ground type mons that keep stuff like Gouging in line because they are all liabilities into Kyurem for the most part. I think when a pokemon is not only busted but enabling other mons too in unhealthy ways, that is when something needs to absolutely go, and I think Kyurem is a prime example of that. (I don't think Gouging Fire is broken, but it is really strong because of Kyurem discouraging its popular checks and counters that most of which don't do well into Kyurem. I guess we can keep an eye on it though...)
I hope the top 32 olt players will say suspect Kyurem because I think personally that suspecting Kyurem is probably the move to improve the meta where it stands right now, knowing that it is now a constricting presence and genuinely not balanced or healthy at the current moment and is in fact even more unhealthy and broken than it was during the first suspect because of innovations that genuinely make it the most unhealthy thing in the tier right now in my opinion.
Like watching some of the OLT matches, i've seen tons of teams prepping for Kyurem the best they can, and a lot of them still lost to it and got steamrolled because they didn't guess the set or Kyurem got into the perfect position to win the game outright via stat drop or freeze hax or just generally good positioning, to the point where a lot of OLT players probably dreaded seeing it in team preview because of the amount of variance you have to deal with when facing it and knowing that if your kyurem checks go down or get frozen you oftentimes cannot do anything about Kyurem.
Also I think Kyurem makes other threats harder to deal with, for instance something like Gouging Fire which really doesn't like dealing with stuff like Lando-T or its other good checks/counters has a way easier time because Kyurem really discourages the use of these ground type mons that keep stuff like Gouging in line because they are all liabilities into Kyurem for the most part. I think when a pokemon is not only busted but enabling other mons too in unhealthy ways, that is when something needs to absolutely go, and I think Kyurem is a prime example of that. (I don't think Gouging Fire is broken, but it is really strong because of Kyurem discouraging its popular checks and counters that most of which don't do well into Kyurem. I guess we can keep an eye on it though...)
I hope the top 32 olt players will say suspect Kyurem because I think personally that suspecting Kyurem is probably the move to improve the meta where it stands right now, knowing that it is now a constricting presence and genuinely not balanced or healthy at the current moment and is in fact even more unhealthy and broken than it was during the first suspect because of innovations that genuinely make it the most unhealthy thing in the tier right now in my opinion.
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i hope they all unanimously say "qb kyurem" so we can just kill it here and now and move on to better things. it's spent far too long in this tier as is
Last night, we put out a tiering survey to the players who qualified for OLT — the Official Ladder Tournament.
As the results trickle in, it seems increasingly likely we will have our next suspect in the immediate future.
As the results trickle in, it seems increasingly likely we will have our next suspect in the immediate future.
Does it rhyme with Crouching Liar
Can't wait for the palafin suspect test!
In a metagame of full of evil Pokémon like Lando-T, Iron Moth, and gambit, we need a true hero rn
Palafin boys it's time
It’s not a retest
So this isn't just a shit post, I hope its a kyurem suspect. Probably the one mon everybody hates.
i'm curious about something. so the suspect reqs process is designed to make sure players are competent in the current meta, right? but olt qualifiers just happened. should the people who qualified get to bypass the reqs grind in this particular test because they've already proven their skill in the environment that the suspect test is being held in?
It’s not a bad question. My inkling is to say no because the metagame a month ago (when cycle 1 happened) isn’t necessarily the same as the metagame right now. It’s better than generic tournament reqs where it’s a smaller sample of games as it did take place on the ladder at least, so I get it, but still a hard sell.
Speaking of OLT, where can we see the highlighted teams for the recent cycles? I think one of your council mods stopped posting those teams lmao
This thread and a few of the big posts in this thread have posts on OLT trends: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/the-official-olt-xi-discussion-thread.3747911/
Some people like to remain private or are busy and don’t share of course
Playoffs are ongoing so plenty more will be out there this weekend
It not being a retest is definitely interesting, given Kyu and Gouging have been suspected in DLC2 already. Tera Blast real????
Edit: Unless retest meant bringing something down.
Edit: Unless retest meant bringing something down.
fair point, the first cycle did happen a while ago and olt is a period where the meta changes very rapidly. there wasn't even mainstream public discussion on gouging fire until cycle 2 so it'd be kinda weird if, say, that were the one being suspected and the cycle 1 qualifiers got a free pass
pretty sure he meant it won't be a test of something that's currently in ubers. i'm fairly confident it's going to be kyurem but i can't be certain
I prefer Gouger to be Goneger over Kyurem, but as already said, wouldn't mind the Ice Dragon to be the one banned. Main difference here is the power of DD sets. Kyurem is better vs Dondozo, but Gouger is better vs literally everything else, while also being able to beat Dozo with Tera Dragon. Gouger Defensive typing is way better than Kyurem's one, easing set-up opportunities. Gouger also massively benefits from Sun, using CB to high success and also being able to use DD + Morning Sun in that weather. Kyurem falls more in the uncompetitive department due to Freeze being able to cheese through checks. Between a broken Mon and a uncompetitive Mon, I prefer to ban the broken one first, even though in practice I would vote Ban to either and to several other Mons too.
Here's some actual stats:
SV OU July 2024, 8ish months after DLC2:
Total battles: 1064872
SWSH OU April 2022, like 1.5 years after DLC2:
Total battles: 1415268
Hell, fuck it. If you go to December 2021 stats, one of the worst months for SWSH activity for several reasons: BDSP came out at the end of November, and tons of players were trying to play BDSP OU instead of SWSH OU, especially players who disliked the more defensive nature of SWSH, and it's still very close to the numbers of SV OU only like a few months after DLC2 tiering has calmed down.
Total battles: 1042648
BDSP OU had 904866, clearly taking a lot of the activity for that month, and the next few months where SWSH activity would be partially taken by BDSP, and then it would recover. The last few months of SWSH all had pretty good activity relatively, or at least much above the last few months of SV despite there not being a "second CG OU" type deal with BDSP, and hey- there's that interesting gimmick! Jangling keys in front of the competitive scene! Oooooh Tera, Tera Tera Tera- that offensive threat Terastilized and it gets Adaptability now, are you excited yet???
An interesting fact is SV OU out-performed SWSH OU in their respective first months, extremely hard. About a 2.6m SWSH versus a 3.4m for SV, clearly tons of interest and people trying the game out. And this isn't just because Dynamax sucked or whatever, because while Dynamax was obviously super broken, it was also fun to a short extent casually (until you were taking the game seriously). There were some banger ass blunder videos from the Dynamax era, it was so funny; it was divisive but also a lot of people wanted to try out the broken funny button before it would inevitably get banned, and there were tons of new Pokemon to try all the more. Anywho, factually, SV OU has had considerably less players than SV OU over time than SWSH anyways, which is funny because SWSH was considered pretty fucking boring and people were longing for the next gen as is, but they kept playing overall: Why? Because the meta was still fairly solid, and the gameplay shone through with zero gimmicks. If you logged in you would just get to play competitive Pokemon without a gotcha mechanic edged into every battle. The competitive scene is also overall bigger in Gen 9 than it was in Gen 8, too, which makes it even more surprising. This is also something that's been true for several months in a row. It is not something about last month specifically, it's been true for several months with the playerbase peaking at 1.8m in January DLC2, to now being just over 1m for two months in a row.
So, the answer to your question here should be obvious: Because it's the fucking health of the game and website? Why do you think OU gets special treatment and it's always been treated differently than other tiers in almost every way? That the council has to play it safer than basically any other but the Ubers, for fear of some sort of backlash to Smogon as an institution?
Because it's supposed to be the least alienating metagame on the website. It is the breadwinner of Showdown. CGOU is the tier that is supposed to get the most users and keep them active.
Despite the selection bias, the last survey to directly include Terastilization and the Big Question was in March 2024. Despite what Finchinator suggests, it is a far more important stat than I think most people here realize:
"
Do you feel that any tiering action at all (ban or restriction) is needed on the topic of Terastallization?
- Qualified: 51 said Yes, 59 said No -- 46.4% support for tiering action on Terastallization
- General: 518 said Yes, 447 said No -- 53.7% support for tiering action on Terastallization
- Qualified: 31 said Yes, 79 said No -- 28.2% support for an outright ban of Terastallization
- General: 273 said Yes, 692 said No -- 28.3% support of an outright ban of Terastallization
Now I want to be clear with how insane this is as a statistic, so let me explain. Terastilization is a mechanic used in every single match of SV OU, it is something that has had years for people to get experienced with, and it's a mechanic that many pose as a good thing for the meta, and yet still as of March 2024, 46.4% of the Qualified playerbase felt that Terastilization was problematic enough to warrant tiering action in a general sense, nerf included, of course.
That is about half of the qualified competitive playerbase at that time thinking that Terastilization was a problematic mechanic. If you got everyone in a room and made them raise their hands, essentially half of every hand would raise. That is a HUGE fucking portion of the playerbase, and that is on top of the selection bias- a lot of people who just didn't like SV OU stopped playing, from all playerbases. Despite the argument here being that skilled players who don't like Tera as is didn't do their job, or whatever, they fucking clearly play(ed) and clearly voiced their sentiment.
Next, outright ban. This is the one the council defends the most as a reason to kind of just drop the conversation, but again I don't think you realize how big of a number 28.2% of the qualified, or even the fucking General playerbase is. 1 out of 4 of every competitive player, who played with the mechanic every match, every game, every time they went in the builder, still disliked it enough to think it should be outright banned. While this obviously not enough for tiering action on the surface of it, don't act like people weren't showing up to say they outright want the mechanic gone, because over 1/4th of both playerbases did.
And do not be surprised when these players drift away from the meta, or even just Showdown as a whole over time, as has been happening since basically the first few months of SV OU. Outside of OLT, this game is never gonna grow, because this CGOU alienates at minimum 1/4th of the audience (after more than a year, the audience after that) hard. If you don't like Tera, you literally just don't like SV OU, it is oppressive- it is in every single match, it influences almost every play, it influences the builder.
SV OU has been kinda a failure not just because I said so, but because contrary to the growth of scenes like VGC and Youtube content putting more light on the competitive scene, more social media about competitive Pokemon than ever, the games themselves pushing competitive Pokemon harder, it seems that the numbers are regressing even further than SWSH. People were arguing in the original Tera Policy Review Threads that SWSH had less players than usual because that game didn't have an exciting gimmick, but SV OU has failed to perform even harder. This entire post was a comparison with SWSH, a meta that albeit stable still was considered boring by many people, with metas like Gen 6 OU out-performing both SWSH and SV even in its final months (2016-08 , Total battles: 3402706), and SV OU has shrunk the active playerbase even further.
If you want competitive Pokemon to be more popular, you need it to be a consistently fun experience for most playerbases, and SV OU is fun for fewer than ever before. At the time when competitive Smogon should be soaring- romhacks using our language, ideas, structure like Radical Red, social media memes hitting millions of views with Showdown, a Reddit based on Smogon with 214,000 followers, and people being more accepting of the idea of banning elements as a fan community than ever, and the actual count of players is shrinking.
There isn't really anything that can be done anymore, including the Council. SV OU as is is not going to change drastically, since the numbers aren't there anymore, and it's going to solidify even more as people who don't like Tera continue to dip, especially as other tiering action has understandably slowed down, but that usually helps to get people more active- it's a community event. Without much exciting news around the corner, SV is also going to be rotting for an extra potentially 2 years, as Legends Z-A is rumored to be later 2025, and I doubt they will pull a BDSP -> PLA early 2026 for the next generation of Pokemon. This could be the longest OU in a long time, if not the longest time, and the numbers are already stabilizing to be at SWSH's lows when it had competition with a second game. And SWSH was already not a high-earner of players. (Again, one of the arguments in the Tera PR thread that was popular was that Tera would help net new players in, when it was assumed SWSH being gimmickless was part of why it dropped players).
What would help the next gen do better numbers would be something closer to Gen 7 with gimmicks that are fun and don't dominate the strategy of the game. Z Moves could do busted shit but the item requirement and one turn nature meant it wasn't an all-consuming aspect of the game, and Megas in Singles are functionally just extra Pokemon you can use one of. USUM was still a controversial tier, but the elements were not all-encompassing; if you disliked Z-Moves, you could still enjoy the game because Z Moves were just a thing some sets used and you would account for/try to see the set of, and react, once it's done their Z is just gone from the game. Again, I do not want to downplay that Z Moves were controversial, but you could still enjoy the game even if you felt like it could be cheap at times, or made some dynamics cringe. On the other hand, Tera is basically THE element for skill expression in SV OU, and because it's on every Pokemon, it's something you have to always consider. Of course, Tera can be linked to certain sets too, but if that set will be Tera'd continues to be based on how the match plays out. It's too dynamic to ever count it out, and it's all-encompassing; if you don't like Tera, you will not enjoy SV OU. Maybe you still like trying to get some heat mon, or maybe you still want to prove yourself competitively, but most people will just stop playing.
With the next few years looking dry as fuck in terms of new entries with online battling, I have a really bad feeling about the next years of Smogon and its health, and you should probably be worried too, even if you like Tera and like SV OU. In the meantime, for my fellow SVOU haters, try out some OMs, oldgens, etc. because there is still plenty of good stuff to play on this website; I've been enjoying getting into Monotype, recently, and it's a fun time. A lot of these are held together through community and it's pretty wholesome, honestly.
But yeah, I'm sure SV OU hemorrhaging players is a affirmative dunk on anti-Tera.
This is a false dichotomy. 1 in 4 people wanting tera banned is not at all the same as saying 3 in 4 people want tera to stay. There are many other positions in that 3/4. Ambivalence or neutrality, various restrictions/complex bans (Tera Blast being the most prominent), and even one position I've heard that I would describe as anticentrist - that it's ok if tera is completely free or completely banned but any compromise is worse than one of the extremes.
I understand election fever has taken over the US, but let's avoid turning everything into a two-party framework.
We are not, again, going to somehow act like numbers which are below half are a majority, are we? We did this a few months ago, and the notion was equally as nonsensical as it is now.
as a matter of fact, let me make a handy tera-hater-to-english translation chart:
TERA HATER PHRASE | ENGLISH TRANSLATION |
| "1 in 4 people want a tera ban" | "we should ignore the 3 in 4 people who don't want a tera ban" |
| "the first suspect got a majority vote for action on tera" | "the latest surveys don't support my opinion so i'm going to ignore them and use old data that does. also please don't look at the stats breakdown to see how few people voted ban" |
| "about half of people from the last survey wanted action" | "support for action went down between the last two surveys and has been decreasing since the gen began" |
| "people have been leaving the tier because of tera and we should ban it to attract them back" | "we should tier based on what might attract people who aren't playing instead of the consensus of people who are playing" |
| "tera is breaking everything" | "tera has broken 4 or 5 of the 20-odd mons we've banned and almost all of those instances are tera blast specifically" |
| "this is a strawman argument" | "how dare you call me out for actively misrepresenting statistics" |
it was literally a yes-or-no question. there is no dichotomy less false than that (and it is a dichotomy because there are only two possible options to take). there was a separate question on the survey that all of those "other positions" regarding complex bans or restrictions would fall under. half of the people who have those other positions do not want an outright ban. accept that you are in a minority of a minority
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So your proposed solution to this is to ban Tera.
The mechanic that more than 50% of the playerbase likes, and at least 50% of them don't want to see it go, potentially up to 75%, or even higher.
"Let's cater to the minority and reject the majority" is not the way to satisfy the playerbase.
No no, you see, the fact that player numbers dropped means we have to cater to people literally not playing the game over the people who actually continue to do so and interact with the process consistently.
My proposal is nothing. There isn't anything that can be done this far into the generation.
It's not about the majority, it's about what turns people off. The point of the thought exercise is that most of the people who like Tera still like you know, I dunno, competitive Pokemon, and that they'd still play if Tera was gone. The people who don't like it?
Well, that's why my several paragraph post that you're trying to sum up into one or two catchy gotchas goes into the stats of the playerbase numbers, and how they're going down, even lower than the generation that was already notably less active. You can try to argue that if Tera was banned, numbers would go down (I fuckin doubt it, gimmickless SWSH performed better long-term), but regardless SV OU is performing poorly.
You can use the split as a reason that nothing can happen, and I'd agree, through tiering there is not really anything that can be done; but you will have to deal with the consequences no matter how snarky your post replies to mine. You trying to own me in the marketplace of ideas is not going to make the SV OU player count and therefore monthly battle count increase.
Regardless of what happens to the tier, Tera is a controversial element that had actual consequences from how we treated it; it's not a mechanic people who dislike it are simply ignoring, or able to look past as a whole.