It certainly sounded like you were claiming that allowing 670+ BST pokemon into the B/W metagame would disrupt diversity, but if not I apologize for the misunderstanding.
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What did we learn from tiering in generation four?
- Thread starter Cathy
- Start date
Define the "best" metagame. You can't because there isn't one. The best metagame we can make, is simply the one that the community wants. Period.
I agree with Aeolus and disagree with Colin: we should start with an initial banlist. If we had tried to create the first balanced metagame in this generation, we would have ended up with Ubers-lite, because OU isn't the first balanced metagame, it is the standard balanced metagame.
Granted, I agree that everything reasonable to test should be tested in due time, but starting with no banlist will at least at first lead to a huge waste of time and manpower getting rid of the obvious suspects, and may even result in us playing a metagame that isn't what we want OU to be.
Tangerine puts it better than I can:
Granted, I agree that everything reasonable to test should be tested in due time, but starting with no banlist will at least at first lead to a huge waste of time and manpower getting rid of the obvious suspects, and may even result in us playing a metagame that isn't what we want OU to be.
Tangerine puts it better than I can:
I don't think too many people would argue that an "Ubers-lite OU metagame" would have sweeping, devastating effects across the entirety of Smogon or anything. It's just that even a relatively small dip in popularity, or morale or whatever, is a concrete reason to support a 'traditional-OU'-styled banlist (whether this banlist is formed before or after the game releases is largely irrelevant here). This is clearly contrasted with the "philosophically pure banlist"'s justification, which just seems to be... philosophical purity.capefeather said:
edit: That being said, I haven't made or seen any strongly supported statements in support of a "traditional-OU" banlist's potential popularity. It's mostly been just conjecture, but I haven't even seen conjecture in favor of a philosophically pure banlist actually being more popular than a traditional one, or more likely to foster a community of loyal, happy players, or whatever. It seems that everyone is in agreement that a traditional banlist is at least slightly better for the community than a philosophically pure one, so long as "resemblance to other competitive games like Street Fighter" is not used as a metric in determining what a "strong community" is.
mtr: I actually agree with the entire reasoning in that post you quoted. We simply disagree on what it means.
And the community at large might really enjoy the metagame I just made up. It doesn't matter what "best" is here. What I said applies to it regardless.
I would say that all of this is a matter of "philosophical purity" in differing senses, and not on anything really serious as far as practicality is concerned. I just don't think that the reason "some people won't like this" is much more compelling than "we should just not ban some of these guys". But I did just give another reason: let the power creep counteract the "diversity creep".
Chou said:
And the community at large might really enjoy the metagame I just made up. It doesn't matter what "best" is here. What I said applies to it regardless.
Blame Game said:
I would say that all of this is a matter of "philosophical purity" in differing senses, and not on anything really serious as far as practicality is concerned. I just don't think that the reason "some people won't like this" is much more compelling than "we should just not ban some of these guys". But I did just give another reason: let the power creep counteract the "diversity creep".
I'm not actually convinced that diversity and importance of team matchup is actually as closely linked as people make out. I have played pokemon rulesets that result in very little diversity but have almost a 100% reliance on team matchup to determine outcomes.
If anything, the significance of team matchup is more closely linked to the length of battles..
Have a nice day.
I think it should be much more compelling to most people, because most people can agree that having more players, or having happier, or more loyal players, is a strictly positive thing. If you don't think so, then okay, I have nothing more to say to you personally. I'm only addressing the people who think that Smogon's popularity, or its player loyalty and morale, are things we should constantly pursue whenever feasible--which is probably most of the people in the community to begin with.capefeather said:
I don't know why, but I stupidly overlooked your "power creep vs. diversity creep" thing for some reason. It's concrete, and it might even be better-supported than the "the community will maybe dislike having an Ubers-lite OU" conjecture. We should also definitely consider that a lot of past-gen veterans have terrible things to say about 4th gen OU, such as the fact that it is very team-matchup-dependent. I'm not convinced that "less diversity = less team-matchup-dependence," though, which apparently Hipmonlee just posted about. Even if that were definitely true, one could argue that it would be better to just unban a few Pokemon, like Manaphy and Latias, and let them centralize the metagame themselves. This wouldn't have the effect of turning OU into "Ubers Lite," yet is arguably just as likely to solve the "team-dependence" problem.
So I don't know about "power creep" inherently solving the weird and kind of vague 4th gen OU problems that a lot of veterans have. That sounds like it would be difficult to prove. What about 4th gen Ubers itself, though? Does it have the same team-dependence problem that OU does? If not, and if we can expect 5th gen "Ubers" to resemble it fairly closely (I imagine that we can), that sounds like pretty fair support for an Ubers-lite 5th gen OU to me.
You say that like it's a bad thing?
The whole point is that we wouldn't get the exact same list we had now. You're saying we shouldn't do it differently because the result will be ... different? If it's a balanced and diverse metagame that happens to be different (allows more pokemon) that is bad?
No idea what you are getting at. What point are you trying to make?
@Chris-- it's not that "being different" itself is a problem. The point is to have the best competition, we want to maintain the popularity of the game, and most players and communities have expectations of what they expect "OU" to be based on tradition-- which imo is not a bad thing.
I strongly disagree with "the best metagame is the one the community desires". I can damn well say that I would love a metagame with "no critical hits clause" or one where jirachi and breloom are banned...and so would many others. There are many strategies and factors in this game that annoy the crap out of most high level competitive players, but we put up with them because, strictly speaking, they are not "broken" strategies. We might look at them and say "god I would love if this didn't exist", but that's not the sort of thing we should do.
Ultimately, our goal should not be creating the most "fun" metagame because at the most fundamental level I can think of, Smogon is a competitive community. Some strategies and Pokemon are not "fun" parts of the metagame, but if they are competitively viable without being overcentralizing and imbalanced, then they should still be allowed. I mean, think about it, what if the community decided sometime down the line that stall was a really boring and lame style of play and that we should ban skarmory/blissey/forry/roserade because it would result in a more "fun" metagame. Something like that is way too subjective and open to abuse for me to ever support as a serious metric in suspect evaluation for a site as competitively focused as ours.
I do, however, want to agree with...whoever posted it that the most fundamental question we must answer before we can do anything else is: "What do we want our metagame to achieve or fulfill?"
Personally, I believe that an ideal metagame would be one that "has the greatest number of available strategies with few or no objectively imbalanced strategies". Why? This simply goes back to the competitive aspect I referenced before. We want the greatest number of available strategies because that allows the largest and healthiest potential community to form around the game. A metagame with less diversity and no room for experimentation is not going to be very successful compared to a metagame with more diversity. On the other hand, too much diversity, where every possible strategy is available, would result in centralization around the styles of play that inevitably emerge as dominant; hence Kyogre usage in Ubers being something like 58%. That's why the "imbalanced" part of the definition is in there.
This is definitely a case of "easier said than done" because there are several issues this definition brings up almost immediately:
1) How do we weight diversity versus imbalance? That is, should a slightly imbalanced strategy be allowed if it contributes heavily to diversity?
2) What is the "objective" method for determining imbalance?
3) What if the ultimately balanced metagame is just not fun (see: UU for the last few months, in a lot of people's opinions, although those people are silly)?
And more.
Until we decide what we want out of our metagame, however, we absolutely cannot begin answering these questions, all of which are fundamentally relevant to our tiering process...which is why, in my opinion, this generation's tiering process was so arduous and controversial. We adopted a process that dealt with each Pokemon's "brokenness" without looking at it through the holistic viewpoint of the entire metagame. That is not to say that the Characteristics of an Uber is unnecessary, just that it means very little when we have some people saying things like "salamence's ability to 2hko the metagame increases the need for prediction and competitive skill/team building" while we have others saying "salamence's ability to 2hko the metagame makes the metagame more centralized". We cannot evaluate either of those (somewhat true) arguments without first establishing the purpose of the metagame we are setting out to create.
Just a quick note on the "Ubers lite" versus "True Standard" debate: I think we should just stick to our usage rate method of tiering, and if we end up with highly centralized play in "Ubers lite" and decentralized play in "Old Standard", we should make "Old Standard" the official tier. If on the other hand we end up with a very decentralized level of play in "Ubers lite", I don't see any reason why that can't be the standard metagame. It seems like a very rough cut off though...
Ultimately, our goal should not be creating the most "fun" metagame because at the most fundamental level I can think of, Smogon is a competitive community. Some strategies and Pokemon are not "fun" parts of the metagame, but if they are competitively viable without being overcentralizing and imbalanced, then they should still be allowed. I mean, think about it, what if the community decided sometime down the line that stall was a really boring and lame style of play and that we should ban skarmory/blissey/forry/roserade because it would result in a more "fun" metagame. Something like that is way too subjective and open to abuse for me to ever support as a serious metric in suspect evaluation for a site as competitively focused as ours.
I do, however, want to agree with...whoever posted it that the most fundamental question we must answer before we can do anything else is: "What do we want our metagame to achieve or fulfill?"
Personally, I believe that an ideal metagame would be one that "has the greatest number of available strategies with few or no objectively imbalanced strategies". Why? This simply goes back to the competitive aspect I referenced before. We want the greatest number of available strategies because that allows the largest and healthiest potential community to form around the game. A metagame with less diversity and no room for experimentation is not going to be very successful compared to a metagame with more diversity. On the other hand, too much diversity, where every possible strategy is available, would result in centralization around the styles of play that inevitably emerge as dominant; hence Kyogre usage in Ubers being something like 58%. That's why the "imbalanced" part of the definition is in there.
This is definitely a case of "easier said than done" because there are several issues this definition brings up almost immediately:
1) How do we weight diversity versus imbalance? That is, should a slightly imbalanced strategy be allowed if it contributes heavily to diversity?
2) What is the "objective" method for determining imbalance?
3) What if the ultimately balanced metagame is just not fun (see: UU for the last few months, in a lot of people's opinions, although those people are silly)?
And more.
Until we decide what we want out of our metagame, however, we absolutely cannot begin answering these questions, all of which are fundamentally relevant to our tiering process...which is why, in my opinion, this generation's tiering process was so arduous and controversial. We adopted a process that dealt with each Pokemon's "brokenness" without looking at it through the holistic viewpoint of the entire metagame. That is not to say that the Characteristics of an Uber is unnecessary, just that it means very little when we have some people saying things like "salamence's ability to 2hko the metagame increases the need for prediction and competitive skill/team building" while we have others saying "salamence's ability to 2hko the metagame makes the metagame more centralized". We cannot evaluate either of those (somewhat true) arguments without first establishing the purpose of the metagame we are setting out to create.
Just a quick note on the "Ubers lite" versus "True Standard" debate: I think we should just stick to our usage rate method of tiering, and if we end up with highly centralized play in "Ubers lite" and decentralized play in "Old Standard", we should make "Old Standard" the official tier. If on the other hand we end up with a very decentralized level of play in "Ubers lite", I don't see any reason why that can't be the standard metagame. It seems like a very rough cut off though...
Oh please FlareBlitz, now I think you are missing the point.
What makes a strategy "broken" or "imbalancing" is-- completely subjective.
The point that I, Doug, and others are getting at is that what we have learned from Gen IV is that no matter what pretty words you use to dress up the process or goal, the act of tiering is 100% subjective, and comes ultimately down to preferences.
There is no denying this. Preferences may result from a number of incentives and reasonings, but ultimately, it all comes down to the same thing. Whether you think your biased and subjective decision is made "because you think this will create a balanced metage" (whatever the fuck that is) or you think "this will make it fun!" your thought processes really aren't all that different, and the validity of the decision is pretty much the same.
Whether you want to call it "fun" or try to make up "competitive reasonings" for it, at the end of the day, we have to make policy decisions about making a desirable metagame for the community.
What makes a strategy "broken" or "imbalancing" is-- completely subjective.
The point that I, Doug, and others are getting at is that what we have learned from Gen IV is that no matter what pretty words you use to dress up the process or goal, the act of tiering is 100% subjective, and comes ultimately down to preferences.
There is no denying this. Preferences may result from a number of incentives and reasonings, but ultimately, it all comes down to the same thing. Whether you think your biased and subjective decision is made "because you think this will create a balanced metage" (whatever the fuck that is) or you think "this will make it fun!" your thought processes really aren't all that different, and the validity of the decision is pretty much the same.
Whether you want to call it "fun" or try to make up "competitive reasonings" for it, at the end of the day, we have to make policy decisions about making a desirable metagame for the community.
Bolded part is what I disagree with.
I do agree that there is a large degree of subjectivity involved in our tiering procedures, and that's something I'm fine with (which is why I outlined the objective determination of imbalance as one of the major issues). However, whether we make tiering decisions based on competitive impact or fun definitely has a large impact on both the processes behind our decisions and the decisions themselves. I outlined the reductio ad absurdum scenario of the community deciding that stall isn't fun anymore; if we were basing this purely on fun, whoever was in charge of voting rights would accept arguments like "stall is boring because it minimizes exciting aspects of the game like prediction", whereas if we were basing our system off competitive merit that argument would be irrelevant.
If we just throw our hands in the air and say "well it's all subjective" we might as well not have a tiering process. Hey let's just open a thread in stark (or the 5th gen analogue) and throw up a bold vote asking players what they want to ban every month.
We need to establish both a purpose for our metagame and a process that is the most efficient at achieving that purpose if we want to have any sort of credibility for why our tiers are the way they are. Stating that both are subjective contributes nothing meaningful, as that has already been obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to tiering debates these past few years...what we should be focusing on is, what sort of subjective measure do we want to consider as our "goal", and what sort of subjective measures will we use to attain it?
VGC threw out all those expectations and is wildly popular.
Those expectations are CREATED by making giant theory ban lists. They're not there already.
It's because this type of thinking is sound that we went through everything we did in 4th Gen. The premise you outlined here is what we've pursued this whole time, and is still solid premise.
. . . the simple fact is that it hasn't led to any particularly good results yet.
I would be perfectly willing to ackowledge your points-- once someone has figured out exactly "what we should be focusing on is, what sort of subjective measure do we want to consider as our "goal", and what sort of subjective measures will we use to attain it"
Because I promise you we could spend months arguing about just that due to differentiating opinions and lack of any solid means of actually defining what it is we want.
If someone can actually figure it all out and put it together in a meaningful and time-efficient manner, go for it I say.
I will point out though that my main point was never about fun really-- it's about the fact that it does come down to desire, what is desirable.
Even your sentence above states, "what sort of subjective measure do we want"
Just high-lighting the need for speed people. A few months would be reasonable. 1 year + would frankly, not be reasonable.
edit: And mention that I actually would be all up for banning Jirachi, and maybe even Machamp and Breloom if people really wanted to go that route. Nothing wrong with that really.
After reading Hipmonlee's post, I think my characterization of Gen 4 voting as "bandwagon thinking and popularity contests" is unnecessarily negative. It implies that the people that voted were mindless sheep and their opinions and votes were frivolous or lacked substance. That's not true at all, and I should not have described it that way. While there were a few people with some dubious reasoning, for the most part, I think everyone that voted put significant time and effort into gaining voting rights, and they were doing what they believed was best for the metagame. I can't ask for much more than that.
In fact, even in hindsight after acknowledging many of the problems with Gen 4 tiering, I think a huge positive that came out of Gen 4 tiering was that we clearly established that the community is actively interested in participating in tiering, and many people will go to great lengths to influence the process. That's a good thing, IMO.
But, in the end, I just don't think all the actual suspect test battling had much meaningful impact on the final results. I think most people had preconceived notions going into the tests, and most subsequent changes to their opinion was inspired by the general community opinion that developed somewhat independent of the actual suspect ladder battling and supposed "test results". That's really at the heart of my use of the phrases "bandwagon thinking and popularity contests". But, I should have used different words that were not so snide and pejorative.
As Rising Dusk pointed out, populist thinking is not "bad" by any means, it's just.... popular. In the absence of objective proof, we have to fall back on popular opinion to decide what is "right". There's nothing wrong or harmful about it. That's democracy, right?
I also agree with ChouToshio that following the popular subjective community opinion on tiering does not mean we are adopting a metagame based on "fun". It means we are adopting the metagame that the community subjectively deems is "most desirable" or "the metagame the community wants". I think we discovered in Gen 4 that the community is going to adopt the metagame they want, regardless of how many testing hoops we make them jump through, or how many controls we put in place to try to force them to make the "right decision". Complicated tiering processes may have a small impact on the community opinion, but I don't think it was worth all the effort that went into it.
I think we need to put better definitions in place for discussing and debating community opinion on these matters, which is the exact reason I started the Characteristics of a Desirable Metagame thread earlier this year. Since that thread, I have received numerous requests for Smogon to formalize the content of that thread, and make it more publicly available for helping guide policy discussions and debates. I had planned to resurrect that topic sometime closer to Gen 5. Based on recent discussions, I guess that time is now. Look for more soon.
In fact, even in hindsight after acknowledging many of the problems with Gen 4 tiering, I think a huge positive that came out of Gen 4 tiering was that we clearly established that the community is actively interested in participating in tiering, and many people will go to great lengths to influence the process. That's a good thing, IMO.
But, in the end, I just don't think all the actual suspect test battling had much meaningful impact on the final results. I think most people had preconceived notions going into the tests, and most subsequent changes to their opinion was inspired by the general community opinion that developed somewhat independent of the actual suspect ladder battling and supposed "test results". That's really at the heart of my use of the phrases "bandwagon thinking and popularity contests". But, I should have used different words that were not so snide and pejorative.
As Rising Dusk pointed out, populist thinking is not "bad" by any means, it's just.... popular. In the absence of objective proof, we have to fall back on popular opinion to decide what is "right". There's nothing wrong or harmful about it. That's democracy, right?
I also agree with ChouToshio that following the popular subjective community opinion on tiering does not mean we are adopting a metagame based on "fun". It means we are adopting the metagame that the community subjectively deems is "most desirable" or "the metagame the community wants". I think we discovered in Gen 4 that the community is going to adopt the metagame they want, regardless of how many testing hoops we make them jump through, or how many controls we put in place to try to force them to make the "right decision". Complicated tiering processes may have a small impact on the community opinion, but I don't think it was worth all the effort that went into it.
I think we need to put better definitions in place for discussing and debating community opinion on these matters, which is the exact reason I started the Characteristics of a Desirable Metagame thread earlier this year. Since that thread, I have received numerous requests for Smogon to formalize the content of that thread, and make it more publicly available for helping guide policy discussions and debates. I had planned to resurrect that topic sometime closer to Gen 5. Based on recent discussions, I guess that time is now. Look for more soon.
I was originally just going to reply to Blame Game, but... man.
I guess that in many ways it's natural for us to have the opinions that we have right now. I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of people in Smogon are really into the Pokémon franchise itself, including how Game Freak and Nintendo label the Pokémon, and perhaps many of us follow other Pokémon communities religiously. However, some of us just don't do that. I can't speak for SDS, CiM, etc. (I mention SDS because I see him arguing using Smash Bros. a lot) but I don't play Pokémon outside of simulators these days. I come from other competitive communities that just play the game as it is, minus broken/detrimental stuff that is determined through playing. This is in spite of possible minor surges in popularity or "desirability" if, say, Meta Knight got banned. Early central game communities have generally decided that they should only care about the game itself, not popular preference, not Nintendo, not even the game's developers. All that is artificial as far as the game is concerned. So naturally I'd be more than willing to sacrifice what I see as negligible rejection of Smogon for the integrity of the game, and I'm probably about as much of an "outsider" as it gets. Nonetheless, outsider perspective is important.
What this basically boils down to is whether to an action that perhaps a central competitive Pokémon community of some sort should have taken back in Gen 2. Even if in Gen 2 it resulted merely in an attitude shift, that would have made a big difference down the road. In reality, though, the idea of not banning a "superboss" Pokémon just because Pokémon Stadium 2 said so has been ingrained into the culture, apparently without anything like Smogon to decide for itself what the game is. Consider if Smogon somehow didn't exist until VGC had a few years under its belt. The tiering systems Smogon employs might have been drastically different if that were the case. In any case, it's very difficult indeed to look at this mindset now and suggest that it could be changed.
Because of all of this, I always find it at least a bit surreal when people compare generations competitively. I remember a comment that chaos made once on IRC somewhere that the "real" Gen 1 was actually very defensive because of the effectiveness of evasion moves. (Now, I'm not one to suggest that Evasion Clause should be removed, but that's a different matter.) "Should" Gen 2 have been a stallfest? "Should" Gen 4 have been the most offensive generation?
To this day, from what I've seen, the closest thing to a defense against the "well, other game communities do this" mentality has been "well, Pokémon is different". Well, yes, it is different, in that when we ban a Pokémon, we really ban 1/6 of the entire "avatar" that a player can use (i.e. the team). However, that's still an argument for banning individual Pokémon with different reasoning from other game communities, not for banning a whole class of Pokémon just because they "look" similar (by which I mean stats, movepool, etc.) and one of them would probably utterly destroy the competition.
I guess that in many ways it's natural for us to have the opinions that we have right now. I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of people in Smogon are really into the Pokémon franchise itself, including how Game Freak and Nintendo label the Pokémon, and perhaps many of us follow other Pokémon communities religiously. However, some of us just don't do that. I can't speak for SDS, CiM, etc. (I mention SDS because I see him arguing using Smash Bros. a lot) but I don't play Pokémon outside of simulators these days. I come from other competitive communities that just play the game as it is, minus broken/detrimental stuff that is determined through playing. This is in spite of possible minor surges in popularity or "desirability" if, say, Meta Knight got banned. Early central game communities have generally decided that they should only care about the game itself, not popular preference, not Nintendo, not even the game's developers. All that is artificial as far as the game is concerned. So naturally I'd be more than willing to sacrifice what I see as negligible rejection of Smogon for the integrity of the game, and I'm probably about as much of an "outsider" as it gets. Nonetheless, outsider perspective is important.
What this basically boils down to is whether to an action that perhaps a central competitive Pokémon community of some sort should have taken back in Gen 2. Even if in Gen 2 it resulted merely in an attitude shift, that would have made a big difference down the road. In reality, though, the idea of not banning a "superboss" Pokémon just because Pokémon Stadium 2 said so has been ingrained into the culture, apparently without anything like Smogon to decide for itself what the game is. Consider if Smogon somehow didn't exist until VGC had a few years under its belt. The tiering systems Smogon employs might have been drastically different if that were the case. In any case, it's very difficult indeed to look at this mindset now and suggest that it could be changed.
Because of all of this, I always find it at least a bit surreal when people compare generations competitively. I remember a comment that chaos made once on IRC somewhere that the "real" Gen 1 was actually very defensive because of the effectiveness of evasion moves. (Now, I'm not one to suggest that Evasion Clause should be removed, but that's a different matter.) "Should" Gen 2 have been a stallfest? "Should" Gen 4 have been the most offensive generation?
To this day, from what I've seen, the closest thing to a defense against the "well, other game communities do this" mentality has been "well, Pokémon is different". Well, yes, it is different, in that when we ban a Pokémon, we really ban 1/6 of the entire "avatar" that a player can use (i.e. the team). However, that's still an argument for banning individual Pokémon with different reasoning from other game communities, not for banning a whole class of Pokémon just because they "look" similar (by which I mean stats, movepool, etc.) and one of them would probably utterly destroy the competition.
But why have they decided this? Because it is very important to the actual, practical integrity of their game, and not just the philosophical idea of it. If anything, the "just play the game" philosophy that is so pervasive throughout most competitive communities is nothing more than a byproduct of practical issues that those communities would have had had they adopted another philosophy.capefeather said:
If I went up to a Street Fighter arcade cabinet in the 90s, an attitude of "X character is cheap," or "Y tactic shouldn't be used in situation Z," would not be feasible, because chances are that my opponent couldn't care less. Move up to local tournaments, and you see people formulating rulesets based on whatever the "generally accepted rules" are--or risk poor community support. The same applies to larger events, with the added caveat that there are other countries on the planet that we would like to be able to compete with fairly. So the fundamental difference between Pokemon and "traditional games" is not that bans are less impactful (though that does help), but that it merely doesn't suffer from any of these potential issues. We ban Blissey, and that's it: suddenly, everyone is playing Pokemon without Blissey. Do we have to worry about the potential backlash of such a decision? Yes. Likewise, it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that the potential backlash of an "Ubers-lite" metagame is necessary to consider as well.
If this generation was any indication, an Ubers-lite metagame would provoke a huge backlash among both the population of players and the potential voter pool. Think about it this way: the 3-1 metagame is what we would probably consider Ubers-lite, and it was a mess of overwhelmingly offensive teams seeking to outdo each other. As we have seen, players reject very offensive metagames. I mean, this generation we banned Salamence and Latias partly for those reasons.
The de facto truth is that an Ubers-Lite will always be more offensive than OU simply by nature of the fact that most of the suspects we test are offensive.
The de facto truth is that an Ubers-Lite will always be more offensive than OU simply by nature of the fact that most of the suspects we test are offensive.
Okay, I'm just going to respond to one thing Cathy said in the OP about Stage 3. I personally really liked Stage 3, because it was probably one the best most comprehensive suspect tests we've done in a while. It was good because you can assess the power of the various suspects in a metagame that was as balanced as possible with them in it. The only "bad" thing about it was how slow it went, but if time isn't that much of an issue, Stage 3 style testing is good. The only thing I've having a problem is the bit where it says "We spent a year doing nothing". You can't really blame the people for voting each of the Suspects Uber, it's the nature of those Pokemon. Yes, IF we decide to hold Suspect Tests, especially on Pokemon that were Uber going down to OU, you would have to prepare for them to go straight back to Ubers and the Suspect Test not changing anything. Stage 3 wasn't completely useless, it was basically reaffirming that the Pokemon we were testing were indeed broken. Now if we went and tested them AGAIN, then that would be stupid, but we didn't, so it's okay (Stage 2 was different to Stage 3 because every suspect was tested alone, therefore those were different environments).
So what you're saying is you found the 3-1 metagame unbalanced?
Then we'd have to ban stuff to fix it!
I think you're seriously missing the point. We're not proposing making the "minimally acceptable metagame". We don't want any metagame in particular either. The proposal is to start with a clean slate and find the balance point from there. You're saying you oppose that because one metagame that could possibly be created would be universally disliked? Then that doesn't have to be the "final" metagame, we can ban some broken stuff...
I mean, unless 3-1 was perfectly balanced and you think that some perfectly balanced games are terrible, I don't see how you could possibly argue that it would end up like a metagame that you found too unbalanced. "Ubers lite" isn't going to be OU if it's broken!
I have been thinking over this and I agree with DougJustDoug about people's bias when it comes to voting to tier Pokemon. I also think that many people (are going to) have preconceived ideas about which Pokemon from previous generations are Uber / not Uber, perhaps with the exception of a few which are borderline. For primarily this reason, I think it would most likely be a waste of time to start with no bans, because if what I am saying is true about people just automatically classifying a certain group of Pokemon (i.e. legendary base 670s with amazing movepools, abilities, etc.) as Uber, then that's how they are going to vote with this proposal, and we will essentially have done it just to show we are being "fair" with tiering while not having a stable OU metagame for months or whatever after we have a simulator. A constantly changing tier is not going to be very good for tournaments among other things, but I don't know what the actual tiering system will be so I won't say much about that here.
I don't really mind too much if we do this, but I would rather an initial (not long after release) ban list like Aeolus proposed just because it seems more practical. If the way we are going to be doing bans at first will result in pretty much the same thing as an initial ban list (e.g. a bunch of polls get put up for ladderers to vote on simultaneously early in the development of the metagame) then I don't have much of a problem with this.
I don't really mind too much if we do this, but I would rather an initial (not long after release) ban list like Aeolus proposed just because it seems more practical. If the way we are going to be doing bans at first will result in pretty much the same thing as an initial ban list (e.g. a bunch of polls get put up for ladderers to vote on simultaneously early in the development of the metagame) then I don't have much of a problem with this.
To underline: Practicality is a good thing. Unfortunately, pragmatism and philosophy often do not mix.
In other words, Logic and Common Sense do not always see eye-to-eye, and frankly, most of the time, Common Sense is the better advisor.
In other words, Logic and Common Sense do not always see eye-to-eye, and frankly, most of the time, Common Sense is the better advisor.
What's impractical with a streamlined and faster testing process and this kind of ban list? Please say specifically and concisely how it is inherenty impractical to test Pokemon with any process instead of making nebulous posts that say "impracticality is bad everyone!"
Slight tangent: Logic beats "common sense" every time. You're confusing logic with bad logic. Most logical fallacies for example are "common sense".
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Shrang: Cathy wasn't saying Stage 3 was a waste of time. She was saying Stage 2 was because the results were by design never to be used. I also think S3 was reasonable excluding SEXP / secrecy / time (as in "I liked the lack of isolation")
Define "Ubers-lite" and why it's a bad thing. If we had started Gen 4 with Latias, Manaphy, Darkrai, and a few others not banned, but had Salamence, Garchomp, Magnezone, and Dugtrio banned, then how would this exact argument not apply to the unbanning of Salamence, Garchomp, Magnezone, and Dugtrio? Unbanning them certainly would make Gen 4 OU more like "Ubers-lite", because the concept of ubers is not some sort of a priori notion, but is created after the fact of tiering. Generation 4 is different enough from anything we had played before that whatever tier we developed as the standard would seem so obviously Generation 4, and any change from ubers to it would be "Ubers-lite", because that would be the only Uber tier to compare it to.
I was actually just about to make such an argument!
It is a couple of years ago, and we have a BL list of 60 Pokemon. The thread I linked only comes about after I propose this idea in several other places much less formally. The first time I propose it, the idea was rejected immediately.
I don't believe this to be true, and continue to make my case. I take the argument to IRC, Shoddy Battle, and various threads, encountering all of the same arguments in this thread. Finally, I make that post.
In other words, the game will be centralized around these few Pokemon who really don't deserve to be in that tier.
Looking at the starts (keeping in mind that this was based on Pokemon that existed long ago, so before Scizor had Bullet Punch), this is how the set of Pokemon who have 5% usage or more in UU currently is distributed:
There are 4 formerly OU Pokemon this list, 17 formerly UU Pokemon, and 21 formerly BL Pokemon. Removing from the old BL list Pokemon who are currently BL or OU gives us 24 formerly BL Pokemon that aren't even used on 5% of UU teams. Admittedly, you have to go down to the 8th most used Pokemon (Clefable) to find a former UU, but it starts to get evenly distributed around 15th or so.
People even complain about the effect it will have on our popularity. People say that the concept of UU is too ingrained in the minds of the players to change now. It will ruin our credibility across sites to make such a sweeping change with such huge risks.
Given this overwhelming outcry against the change, it was surely unpopular. Right?
In fact, the change made UU more popular than ever, and I've pretty much just heard positive things about it. The process was faster than any we've used to get to what is essentially a "final" game. Bans are rare. Consider that there are 10 Pokemon that have been banned since the process began over two years ago, and most of them were right near the beginning.
People are opposed to certain things because the changes are unexpected. People get used to one thing, so they have this knee-jerk opposition to it. However, when it's actually implemented, it suddenly gains popularity.
What's more, most of the people playing Gen 5 competitively will not have any pre-conceptions except those that we give them. Just as most people who played Gen 3 had no competitive experience with Gen 2, and most who played Gen 4 had no competitive experience with Gen 3, I doubt that most of the players of Generation 5 will have much experience in Generation 4.
Really? You think if 4th gen's banlist stopped at, say, Deoxys-S, Kyogre and Arceus, that that metagame would have been just as popular with players (assuming it were equally balanced)? You think that many of the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st gen community mainstays would have been at all comfortable with this ruleset? Or that new members, whose experience with "competitive" Pokemon probably amounts to the Battle Tower ruleset or similar, would be unaffected by the fact that suddenly, Mewtwo is their favored sweeper, not Starmie? I don't think so.obi said:
I guess your BL/UU example is considerable, but on the other hand, "it's just UU." The pre-conceived notions people had regarding "what a UU Pokemon was" were not as strong, especially for new players (who would likely have no preconceived notions at all). I believe Rain teams were fairly dominant in that metagame too, which was not the case in 3rd gen UU, rendering their perceived resemblance even less relevant.
I would say more, but I don't have time at the moment.