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Why do people want to ban more and more things?
- Thread starter Matthew
- Start date
deoxys-s duel screen set isnt even broken. it gets easily beaten by scizor (sd/bullet punch/brick break/x-scissor). instead of people just using this simple counter they scream BROKEN and OVERCENTRALISING and want to ban deoxys-s! imagine if people did this with the previous generations. then stupid stuff like gsc snorlax and adv suicune would have been ubers, even though they are not broken.
scizor is already one of the top used pokemon. this set obviously counters the duel screen lead and functions as an effective sweeper. in this platinum metagame i doubt deoxys is even that viable with all the scizors running around. deoxys-s could carry hp fire but they dont because there are more effective options available. you dont even NEED to carry scizor. just about any mixed attacker destroys the deoxys-s lead because they wont be able to predict which attack you are using (or by using a rarely used set such as choice specs tyranitar). some might say that having hp fire on deoxys-s is pretty centralising (and i can simply counter this by using occa berry with some defensive evs)
scizor vs deoxys-s duel screen
deoxys-s used reflect!
scizor used x-scissor!
deoxys-s used light screen!
scizor used brick break!
the walls shattered!
if deoxys-s continues to set up screens it will be slowly worn down from x-scissor damage.
what else do you suggest it use? taunt? stealth rock? either way the reflect is going to be broken and the deoxys-s will have failed its goal of setting up duel screens.
i don't think there's a single strat that's uncheckable, there are just many that we consider "not viably checkable" eg taunt bp mew--> groudon, or something like dt ninjask-->cradily or whatever r__r. (i'm "guessing" on the second one, I'm sure someone could come up with a better dt abuse strat)
"viable" is a complicated parameter to measure but it will probaby end up being bounded by the size of a team (6 pokemon 4 moves etc)
no one ever said anything like "dsds always gets both screens up", it just does often enough, and without enough ways to stop it that it was deemed damaging. remember when everyone used to lead with cbtar back when dsds was huge xD
"viable" is a complicated parameter to measure but it will probaby end up being bounded by the size of a team (6 pokemon 4 moves etc)
no one ever said anything like "dsds always gets both screens up", it just does often enough, and without enough ways to stop it that it was deemed damaging. remember when everyone used to lead with cbtar back when dsds was huge xD
i think that lugia would be super broken in OU. just like i support the testing of every single pokemon in OU i support the testing of lugia. however with lugia's massive defensive stats and decent offensive stats i predict the metagame will be completely revolved around lugia. lets look at a comparison between lugia and arguably the top ou mixed wall cresselia.
Base Stats
HP: Lugia 106 Cresselia 120
Atk: Lugia 90 Cresselia 70
Def: Lugia 130 Cresselia 120
SpA: Lugia 90 Cresselia 75
SpD: Lugia 154 Cresselia 130
Spe: Lugia 110 Cresselia 85
Oh dear. Lugia eclipses cresselia in every single stat except for hp. Lugia can actually do decent damage with its movepool of strong attacks and average offensive stats. Lugia also outspeeds loads more pokemon letting it cripple them before they get to attack.
Lugia also has roost which is an amazing recovery move which is unaffected by weather.
Its obvious that lugia is too broken for ou, much unlike deoxys-s
dsds set means "decent base stats" are all you need. pair that with taunt and insane speed and you have "essentially borken stats", but there's way more at play here =__= I don't really support using stats alone as an argument in a case like "almost always can set up double the defensive stats." note all the ds sets (zong/azelf/jirachi/whoever gets both) that spawned but could never dream of eclipsing the original =\
I dont think my statements were radical, evasion is a suspect for a reason.
But since you asked so nicely: http://www.smogon.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42180
Have a nice day.
See, this is where I'm always confused. How does banning as little as possible in any way promote competitive gameplay? The reason why less bans are preferable is that we'd like to play as close to the spirit of the original game as possible, not that it somehow makes the game more competitive. It's the opposite - clauses and bans are actually used to make the game more competitive. The only issue is: where do we draw the line?
For the most competitive metagame, you're going to need a lot of bans. There are plenty of things in pokemon that do not promote a skill-based metagame, and most of them have already been claused.
However, if we also want to remain true to the designer's intent, we have to decide where that happy medium is going to be. Though, this idea gets less and less reasonable as time goes on, especially when you consider official tournament bans and what not.
Of course, you have to consider playerbase in this as well. Clause or unclause as much as you want, but don't be surprised when you make decisions that alienate the people who find the game fun and they stop playing. This is always a consideration, though it doesn't usually come into play as much as the others.
First off, Scizor is rarely a lead. So I'm assuming it swaps into a Deoxys-s lead as it uses Reflect. Then when Scizor uses Brick Break, the Deoxys-s user swaps to Rotom-h, who keeps the Reflect alive, and who Scizor will never get past, even Night Slash does pitiful damage to Rotom-h behind a Reflect. So your Scizor logic fails.
Secondly, if Scizor was a lead, and it could somehow stop it, Deoxys-s just swaps out and comes back in later to set up DS.
Deoxys-s overcentralised the roles of leads. What leads stop it? Scarf Azelf and Gengar. Both existed at the time of Deoxys-s, but it was so overcentralising, it was declared uber by an overwhelming majority vote. If Scizor did stop it (and it doesn't), it's still too overcentralising, especially if every Deoxys-S is paired with Rotom-h.
Unlike rapid spin, brick break still breaks screens when it hits a ghost.
well said qibing. i feel like we're happy with using the raw code as a basis at the bottom of things, but beyond that there' no reason to be bounded by "intentions". apparently nintendo has the opinion that dragonite is ban worthy so Im not really worried about their feelings ^_^
unlike sr, the effect of this was pretty much immediate in that coulndt beat it without using crazy unconventional tactic, or a coinflip with your own, so we banned it. "hard to remove" is not an argument so ban something -+-
brick break is rarely the best fighting move a pokemon has access to, and using it to break screens is kinda crappy since screens benefit every pokemon in the game, many of whom happen to beat what ever you have out there bbing.
unlike sr, the effect of this was pretty much immediate in that coulndt beat it without using crazy unconventional tactic, or a coinflip with your own, so we banned it. "hard to remove" is not an argument so ban something -+-
Providing "fixes" to potentially short-term problems is bad because it discourages players from working hard to beat dominant strategies; they know that the longer those strategies continue to dominate, the faster they'll end up artificially removed from the game. It's not difficult to see that, with constant changes made to a game purely to accommodate its players, nobody's going to end up playing on the "highest level," which I think has a lot to do with Colin's (any competitive community's) definition of "competitive."QibingZero said:
Smogon (or rather the Pokemon community in general, though the two are essentially synonymous) is not a competitive community by nature. There's never money on the line, and there isn't any other relevant community we feel the need to, as players, compete against. When you look at fighting game communities, you'd better believe that individual pockets of players have plenty of incentive to keep the game just as it came out of the box. If I'm some Joe-shmoe who thinks Character X is too good, I'm not banning it in my little group of friends until the rest of the world does too; I want to be able to compete in the "big leagues" and to do that I have to know the strengths and weaknesses of this character/strategy just like any other. I have incentive to play on the "highest level" I can possibly achieve within the game, something that just doesn't exist in this community because in the end , right or wrong, we're just trying to make the game as fun as possible.
This is pretty much why people like FiveKRunner and Colin have butted heads with Smogon in the past. "True" competitive games usually give us incentive to keep bans locked away as "last resorts," and the easiest way to justify them is when they're either "officially" banned or obviously broken.
Anyway, I'm not sure I agree with Colin's implication (well that's how I interpreted it anyway) that it's just the way this community thinks that makes it "unwilling" to be competitive. We're really looking at Pokemon in general lacking a lot of the factors that shaped most competitive games to be the way they are; FiveKRunner exaggerates the importance of national tournaments, but if they were as relevant as he pretends they are, I think we'd be playing a much different game right now.
I agree that pokemon is not a very good competitive game by nature. It simply was not designed that way. However, over time we have adopted rules that let us play the game in a fashion that rewards skillful play and resembles a competitive atmosphere - and smogon was at the forefront of that.
I would disagree that our main objective is to make the game as fun as possible, and I venture most people here would as well. If the game was simply about fun, we wouldn't go to all this trouble to argue over whether this or that is balanced/overcentralizing/broken. We would just happily vote on whether or not we think each item is fun or not. Think of the things that would not survive that vote! In fact, the reason why I stated that we try to find a balance between the three issues here (competition, design, and fun factor) is because even the top smogonites don't all agree on how much each should be weighed.
Having said that, the title bar of the site should probably be noted: "Smogon University - Competitive Pokemon Community".
Are you really saying that's disingenuous?
I would argue that banning things is both healthy for the metagame and a requirement in order for the community to be competitive. Obviously not everything should be banned, but things of a certain power level should always be at least looked at. Skymin was a legendary. The vast majority of Ubers are legendaries, as Gamefreak tends to skew them towards the "ridiculous" end of the power scale. As such, it warranted at least testing, especially given its characteristics.
A good example to show why bans are necessary is Smash Brothers. Like Pokemon, it is generally designed with the casual community in mind. Super Smash Brothers under the "out of the box" ruleset of 4-player timed-match free-for-all with all items and all stages is an absolute nightmare competitively. Actual game skill takes a major backseat to sheer luck. It'd be like making the primary competitive format for Smogon Random Battle. As such, Stage Bans and Item Bans were put in to place, and other rules were added to make the game one that tests skill.
Yes, some people take the banning thing a little out of hand. Scizor? Not even in contention for a ban. Stealth Rocks? Probably don't need to be looked at. But things like Deoxys-S and Skymin certainly warranted the looking.
A good example to show why bans are necessary is Smash Brothers. Like Pokemon, it is generally designed with the casual community in mind. Super Smash Brothers under the "out of the box" ruleset of 4-player timed-match free-for-all with all items and all stages is an absolute nightmare competitively. Actual game skill takes a major backseat to sheer luck. It'd be like making the primary competitive format for Smogon Random Battle. As such, Stage Bans and Item Bans were put in to place, and other rules were added to make the game one that tests skill.
Yes, some people take the banning thing a little out of hand. Scizor? Not even in contention for a ban. Stealth Rocks? Probably don't need to be looked at. But things like Deoxys-S and Skymin certainly warranted the looking.
I'm going to draw an analogy to Scrabble, although it's not the 'best' analogy I believe it gets the point across very well.
Whenever I play scrabble, I look up words only to find out that certain words don't count as words, while some ridiculous chemistry term is regarded as a word. You would think that adding in words that "you know are words but not recognized" will make the game more fun and playable. But the idea of the game isn't to add new words - by adding new words you aren't being competitive - being competitive is exploiting the game as much as possible within the rules of the game, or in Scrabble's game, the dictionaries. Does this mean if you're going to be serious about it you should know some ridiculous terms that does not even have valid definitions? Yes, that is being competitive and exploiting the game.
The idea is to "modify the game as little as possible", not just banning as little as possible. You play the game as it is, and you are bound by the rules of the game, not rules you made up. That is being competitive - not "adding new rules to make it more interesting" - that is the direct opposite of being competitive.
Adding rules to ban certain things that are "too much to deal with" can be seen in a similar light (note the use of quotations). Rather than just throwing down the ban hammer on everything the idea is to play the game the way it is supposed to be played, unless something is so broken that it makes the game utterly unplayable. The goal of the game is to create situations where you make a specific Pokemon in your team "broken" to the other player by eliminating threats and weakening things and setting up necessary conditions to win.
Of course, this is actually really hard to gauge in Pokemon *because* there are six Pokemon and there is no practical way to create a system to make this empirical. The only thing we have is usage stats - because in competitive play, usage stats measures how broken something is because it is assumed that the players will use the best possible team which means abusing the most broken thing out there. "We all know it is broken" doesn't cut it in most cases and in addition to that Pokemon community has failed to put together a coherent argument on why "it is broken". This is why there is this voting scheme to begin with because the users have shown that they are incapable of showing something is broken. See the old Wobbuffet thread made by Jumpman? See the Usage stats?
The voting scheme in the end is a way of giving into these crybabies particularly because the administration "knows that it is broken and unhealthy" and thus humoring the community. This leads not to competitive Pokemon but just a new metagame that isn't competitive per say, but a new metagame that is deemed "more fun" by the community, which may have the potential for "deeper competitive play".
Smogon is not a competitive community by any means, or maybe it is and "just really lazy and arrogant" but to me there is no real difference between them. If players refuse to play the game the way it should be played (denial of Wobbuffet's existence because they think it's "broken") then they aren't being competitive and in addition they dont even have any high ground to base their refusal on. Did Wobbuffet, Deoxys E, Garchomp, Shaymin S, etc make the game unplayable, like lets say, "items" in Smash Brothers, or Akuma in Street Fighter? No one has demonstrated that this was actually true. Of course, we aren't playing Smash Brothers nor Street Fighter and it is impossible for one Pokemon to make the game unplayable by itself, but this should be the mindset we are working with. In the end no one has clearly demonstrated Deoxys E and Shaymin S has made the game unplayable but Smogon banned them anyway so I'm not sure if Smogon can be considered a "competitive" community but more like a community that wants to create a "better" game.
I wouldn't call it "laziness" at all, that sort of implies that there's something "wrong." It's just natural to try to artificially improve a game when there's no incentive to focus on getting good at any one "version" of it, because at that point what other priorities do you have besides to have fun? Other than having a community that is just really motivated to sticking with the "traditional" competitive philosophy, anyway (which is pretty much how you could classify Colin's (miserably failed) attempt at a Pokemon community).gorm said:
For example, in SSBB, certain regions started banning Meta Knight at some point. I'm not sure exactly how things have developed since then, but if the central community coming to a consensus that he wasn't banned didn't put an end to that, multiple national tournaments would have.
I wouldn't necessarily call Pokemon a poor competitive game per se, considering that adhering to Nintendo's official rules certainly yields something playable. But yeah, if you strip it down to no-holds-barred link play it'll probably end up a mess; that's not really what I meant though.QibingZero said:
Well no; it's just not "competitive" in the traditional sense that Colin originally mentioned.
Forgive me if I've been unclear up until now (I'm going to use the "lack of sleep" excuse now, sorry :)), but I'll try to explain my position as well as I can:
We're not getting good at "the game" because we have little/no incentive to adhere to it. Unless we have a community that is entirely run by people who follow the "traditional competitive gaming philosophy," there pretty much needs to be some sort of outside factor, like money, to motivate anyone to stick to a metagame that they feel could potentially be improved. Since we don't really have any of those factors, we're going to be focusing on artificially making the game "better" instead of actually improving at it (which is why you could consider it "less competitive," except we don't care if we're "worse" since there's nobody to compete against/nothing to compete for, blah blah blah).
I'm pretty confident that this is even less clear but oh well.
I could not disagree more with pretty much everything you just said. There is no reason to ban something based on "power level." God that doesn't even make sense in the first place, are you referring to "base stats" or what? The only reason Skymin warranted testing is that we have a shitload of Suspects to go through, and keeping around a pokemon as hyped up and initially terrifying as Skymin would be too risky for that process. Otherwise, it was a complete mistake to even consider testing Skymin that soon.wildfire393 said:
I wouldn't compare SSB item "bans" to pretty much any other situation in any other competitive game, unless Pokemon suddenly started asking players which items/moves/____ they felt like banning before each match.
edit: hey, I love Serene Grace
The thing is, there is no "way the game should be played" in Smogon because there is little to gain from doing so in this environment. If Scizor literally just bores 51% of us and we make him Uber, who's going to stop us/make us care? Serebii? The Official Server? Nintendo? I'm not saying that this is the way we should keep going about things mind you, but I really don't think being "lazy and arrogant" describes the reasoning behind Smogon's actions; I think that putting any community in the same shoes we're in right now would have yielded similar results.Serene Grace said:
By power level, I mean the fact that it had a TON of things going for it. Like Serene Grace plus the already frightening Seed Flare. And 127 Base Speed + 120 Base Special attack, which made it the fastest OU special sweeper. I mean hell, regular Shaymin was a Suspect early in D/P. That alone seems like a good reason to test a version of it with a much better offensive stat distribution and ability.
And SSB Item bans are exactly identical to some bans we have in Pokemon. OHKO Clause? Accuracy/Evasion Clause? Focus Band ban? That sounds a lot like specific items and moves being banned to me. And I don't know what you mean by "each match", because there is a competitive standard for SSB where all items are off, much like there is a competitive standard for Pokemon with OHKOs and Double Team off.
The lazy and arrogant was a description I put on the community, not the administration. Lazy because there is little incentive, arrogant because many of them obviously refuses to participate in tests and chooses rather to be in denial about certain things.
Of course there is "no way the game should be played", but hey, Smogon is supposed to be competitive and the users are supposed to be familiar with its philosophy =]
I never said they weren't on the mark, i just pointed out that the bans happened because "the community wants it banned" rather than based on... evidence
Testing something because it "has a lot of things going for it" is retarded. We hadn't even used it yet, I mean it doesn't get much simpler than that.wildfire393 said:
focus band ban?
anyway, my point was basically that items are "options" (in smash bros) and "banning" them is essentially viewed as "playing a different game" nowadays. In fact, there's an entirely separate ruleset used called "All Brawl." But I don't even know how this is all even relevant anymore.
Anyway yeah, agreeing with SG.