jrrrrrrr
wubwubwub
If this would be more appropriate in The Policy Review, can someone move it there please? I just figured posting it here would get more attention.
Ok, first of all, this topic is not designed to offend anyone running the current UU process. I was originally supposed to be running it but I ragequit so yeah...it would be pretty hard to criticize the people that volunteered to fill in for me once I left.
With that said, the biggest mistake people make when discussing UU is automatically assuming that it is "OU lite", so they think that the same things that work for the OU suspect tests will work for the UU process. This isn't OU, it is an entirely different playing style with entirely different pokemon and strategies, not to mention that the tier is constantly undergoing huge changes unlike Ubers and OU. The current suspect test process is extremely flawed, and me and jabbathegriffin have come up with a solution to fix it:
- Be a little different with nominations, taking more of a "common sense" approach rather than a "strict adherence to characteristics" sense. This might mean being a little more strict, it might mean being a little more lenient, but the point is that this aspect of the process needs to be tweaked. Once again, no offense to the people in charge, but I don't see how people who don't play the tier could be qualified to know if someone's reasoning is legitimate. Like, this example: http://www.smogon.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1939869&postcount=7. Here, we have a bunch of damage calculations sorted out really nicely, and a "good looking" nomination for Mismagius. However, if you actually look at the calculations together instead of individually, you would see that Mismagius actually loses most of the matchups that the poster is talking about (most notably those against Umbreon, Crobat and Registeel). Someone who had actually played the metagame would know that Mismagius doesn't stand a chance against those pokemon and would have been suspicious of that post from the get go. Most of the comments left on the nominations were along the lines of either "I wish you explained this more (not specific enough)" or "a more general explanation would have been nice (too specific)". I feel that having a group of people that consistently plays the tier doing the reading would avoid those explanation problems and make the nomination process easier for everybody. If someone reading the nominations actually plays the tier, it should be pretty obvious if a voter knows what they are talking about. This is the least important of the concerns and the easiest to fix, so I figured I'd get it out of the way as a precursor to the more serious problems.
- The one-month period where we play a metagame without the suspects in it needs to go. It is completely useless, and it skews the voting to an immeasurable degree.
First of all, having this one month testing period leads to people who get access to vote, but do not have any idea of what the metagame was like BEFORE the suspects were banned. This leads to a lot of eligible users who either decline to vote (as evidenced by the current uu voters thread), or the opposite problem, people who vote based on what I would call "improper knowledge".
Secondly, removing the suspects turns the question people are voting on from "is this suspect broken?" to "which metagame do you prefer?". The whole point of the suspect nominations is because people do not think they belong in UU. Letting people play an entire month without them in UU is obviously going to skew the opinions towards voting the suspects BL (because they just played an entire month in a virtually non broken metagame). The nomination process is supposed to be about investigating the suspects, not the metagame.
Finally, since they can't play with the suspect during this one month process, how are they supposed to know if its broken or not? The very idea of taking the suspects out compromises peoples opinions on the matter. Could you imagine if Jump and Aeolus made a post tomorrow saying "ok, to see whether or not you think Garchomp is broken, we are going to prevent you from using it"? That is what the current UU process is doing. Jabba and I propose removing this part of the process completely, since it is not only useless but it also goes against the entire idea of a suspect test.
- There needs to be a process of bringing back things that were voted BL back into UU. Since the metagame shifts every single time there is a new tier list put out, and every time there is a suspect test, the tier is constantly fluctuating. There are some things that are currently BL that many people do not feel are BL anymore, and this problem is only going to grow as more things are voted out of UU. For example, Raikou and Froslass were both hotly contested before they were even banned, and now that things such as Registeel, Chansey, Rapid Spin Hitmontop and Dugtrio are popular in UU, there is a pretty good chance that these pokemon may not even be broken in the tier anymore. The current system has no way of accounting for this, making the same obviously flawed assumption that sparked this UU testing process in the first place: that something that was once BL will always be broken in UU.
Jabbafat and I have been talking about this for a while, we'd like other people's opinions on this.
Ok, first of all, this topic is not designed to offend anyone running the current UU process. I was originally supposed to be running it but I ragequit so yeah...it would be pretty hard to criticize the people that volunteered to fill in for me once I left.
With that said, the biggest mistake people make when discussing UU is automatically assuming that it is "OU lite", so they think that the same things that work for the OU suspect tests will work for the UU process. This isn't OU, it is an entirely different playing style with entirely different pokemon and strategies, not to mention that the tier is constantly undergoing huge changes unlike Ubers and OU. The current suspect test process is extremely flawed, and me and jabbathegriffin have come up with a solution to fix it:
- Be a little different with nominations, taking more of a "common sense" approach rather than a "strict adherence to characteristics" sense. This might mean being a little more strict, it might mean being a little more lenient, but the point is that this aspect of the process needs to be tweaked. Once again, no offense to the people in charge, but I don't see how people who don't play the tier could be qualified to know if someone's reasoning is legitimate. Like, this example: http://www.smogon.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1939869&postcount=7. Here, we have a bunch of damage calculations sorted out really nicely, and a "good looking" nomination for Mismagius. However, if you actually look at the calculations together instead of individually, you would see that Mismagius actually loses most of the matchups that the poster is talking about (most notably those against Umbreon, Crobat and Registeel). Someone who had actually played the metagame would know that Mismagius doesn't stand a chance against those pokemon and would have been suspicious of that post from the get go. Most of the comments left on the nominations were along the lines of either "I wish you explained this more (not specific enough)" or "a more general explanation would have been nice (too specific)". I feel that having a group of people that consistently plays the tier doing the reading would avoid those explanation problems and make the nomination process easier for everybody. If someone reading the nominations actually plays the tier, it should be pretty obvious if a voter knows what they are talking about. This is the least important of the concerns and the easiest to fix, so I figured I'd get it out of the way as a precursor to the more serious problems.
- The one-month period where we play a metagame without the suspects in it needs to go. It is completely useless, and it skews the voting to an immeasurable degree.
First of all, having this one month testing period leads to people who get access to vote, but do not have any idea of what the metagame was like BEFORE the suspects were banned. This leads to a lot of eligible users who either decline to vote (as evidenced by the current uu voters thread), or the opposite problem, people who vote based on what I would call "improper knowledge".
Secondly, removing the suspects turns the question people are voting on from "is this suspect broken?" to "which metagame do you prefer?". The whole point of the suspect nominations is because people do not think they belong in UU. Letting people play an entire month without them in UU is obviously going to skew the opinions towards voting the suspects BL (because they just played an entire month in a virtually non broken metagame). The nomination process is supposed to be about investigating the suspects, not the metagame.
Finally, since they can't play with the suspect during this one month process, how are they supposed to know if its broken or not? The very idea of taking the suspects out compromises peoples opinions on the matter. Could you imagine if Jump and Aeolus made a post tomorrow saying "ok, to see whether or not you think Garchomp is broken, we are going to prevent you from using it"? That is what the current UU process is doing. Jabba and I propose removing this part of the process completely, since it is not only useless but it also goes against the entire idea of a suspect test.
- There needs to be a process of bringing back things that were voted BL back into UU. Since the metagame shifts every single time there is a new tier list put out, and every time there is a suspect test, the tier is constantly fluctuating. There are some things that are currently BL that many people do not feel are BL anymore, and this problem is only going to grow as more things are voted out of UU. For example, Raikou and Froslass were both hotly contested before they were even banned, and now that things such as Registeel, Chansey, Rapid Spin Hitmontop and Dugtrio are popular in UU, there is a pretty good chance that these pokemon may not even be broken in the tier anymore. The current system has no way of accounting for this, making the same obviously flawed assumption that sparked this UU testing process in the first place: that something that was once BL will always be broken in UU.
Jabbafat and I have been talking about this for a while, we'd like other people's opinions on this.