Stage 3? you mean the stage where we retest all the Pokemon in the "balanced" metagame? Don't you realize the flaw in this? suppose that Garchomp really ISN'T uber. suppose that, with Garchomp around, Suspect X isn't uber, but with garchomp not around, suspect X uber. This means at Stage 3, something is going to screw up - particularly where suspect X and Garchomp are both declared uber although they wouldn't have broken the metagame if they were together.
The reason jrrrr is saying that it "doesn't matter" is that, besides the fact that there is almost no logical reason to believe that a suspect that doesn't break the metagame on its own (an "OU" assessment in Stage 2) will break the metagame in Stage 3, that is the entire purpose of Stage 3. "Suspect X" by your hypothesis would have been declared uber in Stage 2. Great. If, in Stage 3,
for whatever reason, both Garchomp and Suspect X appear less uber than they did in their Stage 1-2 performances, we will be better able to determine the cause of the issues. Allow me to repaste from page 3 of my Order of Operations thread.
Every suspect that by itself does not prove to break a suspect-less metagame would be tested together in Stage 2, and we would be much more prepared to at least know the cause of the "explosion" jrrrrr is hypothesizing if we threw all suspects in together simply because, if we can assume anything at all, we can assume that at least one of the suspects will be deemed uber in a Stage 1 test.
To be clear, by Stage 2 here I meant Stage 3—the Stage 3 I had yet to invent, let alone define—so replace the two iterations of "Stage 2" with "Stage 3". That said, there is, as jrrrr is saying, no reason to abandon ship and say that we have to start testing things all over again as if Stage 3 wasn't created to exactly address the understandable lack of confidence in the notion that Stage 1 and 2 would be enough. I'll repaste one more thing
from that thread:
Finally, if I were to offer an addendum to Jabba's proposal, it would be a Stage 3 where we add the suspect(s) banned in Stage 1 to the successful, suspect-free metagame we arrive at following the completion of Stage 2. We'd do this just to confirm that this suspect does indeed break the true metagame, where "true" means one without suspects, which we will have determined through the successful completion of Stages 1 and 2. I actually think this is a necessary step, and it address the very valid possibility that, should Garchomp fail Stage 1 but Lati@s pass Stage 2, that Garchomp may indeed not overpower the true metagame which again is one where there are no suspects, which means Lati@s don't break it by themselves so it would stand to reason that they would probably not be more powerful with Garchomp back in the mix.
I'm not going to say the time to second-guess the validity of my Stage 3 and the validity of Jabba's Stage 1-2 has passed, but whatever disagreement you may have with the system we've adopted and agreed on should be confined to the Order of Operations thread. I am extremely aware of the notion that Suspects may perform differently when considered together as opposed to separately. Further, the addition of the new Platinum moves will allow us to see the effect of all the Suspects on the "true metagame" I keep referring to, one that will, of course, have all the actual moves of the game at every pokemon's disposal.
The hard part was, is and will be accurately being able to determine what is actually uber and what is actually OU in the true metagame. But the purpose of Stages 1 and 2 is to determine which Suspects break or do not break the (August 2008) Suspect-free metagame by themselves, so that we will be better able to determine what is actually too strong for the true metagame. This is an important point, and I urge you all to reread both it and the Order of Operations thread (especially page 2 onwards), since this is an understadably groundbreaking and complicated process for everyone so some level of confusion is to be expected.