Two arbitrary debate points cause I'm bored

Aldaron

geriatric
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[01:13:51] <&aldaron> i dont know where i stand on that point
[01:13:54] <&aldaron> philosophically speaking
[01:14:06] <&aldaron> whether we should only view the current metagame or take future theorymon into account
[01:14:38] <&aldaron> ive always included future theorymon in judgment calls but im not sure if i can justify using it for deciding policy

....

[01:15:34] <&aldaron> yea my issue with the current metagame is unfortunately something that cant be solved by our traditional approach to tiering
[01:15:48] <&aldaron> i dont think any one strategy is overpowering or unbalanced
[01:16:11] <&aldaron> i just think we have too many good ones that involve using too varied methods to deal with them
[01:16:22] <&aldaron> my issue with the meta isnt actually rain even, it is sun lol
[01:16:33] <&aldaron> you can use normal teams to deal with rain / sand / weatherless / stall fine
[01:16:40] <&aldaron> its dealing with sun that makes you use weird things
....

So I'm curious where you all stand on what I randomly said in some irc channel just now. Note anyone can respond as long your post is coherent and logical. You can also choose to address the merit of each of those concerns, just one, whatever, entirely up to you. I do ask that you respond a particular way for the second point though...more on that in a bit.

You'll note the first concern is more philosophically based and asking for where you stand and justification. So if you choose to respond to that just give me your thoughts on the matter, whatever goes. Just to clarify with an example, what I mean is should I decide whether or not to suspect something based on concerns over what might happen in the future, or should I make my judgments SOLELY on the current metagame in hand?

The second concern can be responded to in two ways. You can either agree with the assertion and propose how to deal with it, or disagree with the assertion and bypass the dealing with it part. I'd prefer you stick to the former...as in even if you disagree with it, play devil's advocate and tell me how you would deal with that situation if you did agree with it.
 
Can you elaborate on the first discussion point? From what I understand, you mean something like we shouldn't ban Keldeo now, because it's only broken in Rain, and therefore we shouldn't ban Keldeo now with the expectation of Rain being banned in the future? I don't agree with banning / not-banning with regard to the future, it just induces unnecessary arguments and theorymon. Ban what's broken now and only now, and just make sure the suspect process is flexible and fast enough to bring stuff back / ban it if future changes affect it's viability in the metagame.

As for your second point, it sounds basically like you feel the same way as me about this meta; that the metagame might be technically balanced (in terms of, no standard OU team or mon is broken, although Landorus arguably is), but it's still rubbish. Stealth Rock, Rain, and Sun basically combine to make our current meta the least fun to play and teambuild for I've experienced. I can't see an easier solution than en masse suspect tests; suspect Rain and Sun at once, for instance, so neither will be broken in the absence of the other and we can get a good picture of what the metagame would be like without them.
 
The first point is something that I've never had to consider, since I'm barely a junior member of the site, but I think unless the staff decided to ramp up their pace to make the suspect process ridiculously fast and efficient, you absolutely have to theorymon about the future. A common train of thought (not my own or the truth, just a trend I've noticed among users over a long period of time) is that the OU Council has been so hesitant to ban Drizzle (or Drought) despite their lo-risk/hi-reward strategies because of how fundamentally that would change the metagame.

The tiers themselves, just the usage stats, not even talking about strategy yet, would undergo a MASSIVE change in that first month alone, because so many Pokemon live and die by Drizzle. Darmanitan and Victini would absolutely rise to OU, free to abuse the most powerful non-Uber attacks in the game. Tornadus (who just rose to OU this month if I remember correctly), Gastrodon, and perhaps Toxicroak would all drop, possibly past UU.

As far as strategy goes, I think stall would drop in popularity, for one. Sand Stall's biggest calling card is that it completely shuts down Rain Offense, one of the most dangerous playstyles in the game right now. There are players who would continue to use it, but I feel like it would drop in popularity. Rain Stall would obviously disappear, and with Hail and Sun Stall being far more tricky to play (in my experience), offense would rise as more players find it easier to use. Sun Offense would explode in popularity. Even if you bring your own weather inducer (through Ability or Move), name me something that comfortably takes V-create or Darmanitan's Flare Blitz or Chandelure's Overheat not named Kingdra (or Chansey and Blissey in Chandelure's case).

My point being: There is a MASSIVE shit storm awaiting Smogon's staff if/when they ban something like Drizzle or Drought. I know that there's some text about how theorymon is not an argument for keeping something or not dropping something, but I believe it has been done in practice. The incalculable repercussions of such a ban are affecting the Council's decisions. This is why we banned Genesect, despite knowing that Tornadus-T would reign supreme, but kept Drizzle for two years. Getting rid of Tornadus-T once he was the problem was easy. Balancing the metagame after Drizzle or Drought leave would not be.

May or may not edit in an argument for the second subject. It's late, I'd need to gather my thoughts on it, and everything I would have to say might have already been said much better than I ever could by the time I got around to it.
 

UltiMario

Out of Obscurity
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Only going to comment on the first point.

It's good that you've looked into the future for judgement calls is a positive thing. There's no reason to make a decision if it looks like the decision would only make a negative progression in the end result metagame, even if it would resolve an issue in the current metagame. The converse of the previous statement would also be true. I honestly don't feel comfortable with the idea of people who don't look to the future and theorymon on the results of their decision to make a suspect vote. Nobody's theorymon is perfect, but at least everyone should make an attempt to theorymon what the result of the ban would be and make a judgement call whether the metagame would, in the end, get better or worse from the decision.

One example I can pull is the Genesect ban. At least I felt when he was put up for suspect test, it was painfully obvious his ban would result in a worse metagame immediately after from becoming a Tornadus-T spamfest... and that's exactly what happened. It's one of those things you have to look far in the future into, seeing what bans a ban could help cause, and if the end result of all those bans would end in a more balanced metagame. Basically theorymonning towards the current metagame at Genesect times to try and make decisions. The converse would be true for an unbanning suspect test, of course.

Sorry if 2AM me typed up something that didn't make sense btw
 
Don't have much time, so I'll only respond to the first point.

Not so long ago, I believed that future theorymon was something we should ignore simply because we have no idea what a metagame would look like 2 months down the line post-suspect and for that reason alone, not decide the future of the game we play based on what some people thought would happen. Plus, and on an almost completely unrelated point, I thought we'd go back and retest things that we thought were once Uber in the new, different metagame anyway, which doesn't seem to be happening now.

Recently though, I've sorta started to lean the other way. Now, I will say that I find the big philosophical posts in the big suspect threads about what will happen to the metagame if X gets banned quite annoying, as they tend to be wrote by people just looking to boost their post count, but I have seen theories by well known players that have made me have a think. I think taking the future metagame into account is something we should be considering if we ban rain (and or sun/sand). Let's look at history here...a next to near weatherless game is going to absolutely dominated by dragons, not to mention your usual Gen 5 steroid pokemon. I don't think that's an unreasonable prediction to make, but I don't think we can realistically go any further than that. I don't see why we should lead ourselves into more work to clean up a metagame that has a good chance of being terrible.

more later
 
[01:13:51]
[01:16:33] <&aldaron> you can use normal teams to deal with rain / sand / weatherless / stall fine
[01:16:40] <&aldaron> its dealing with sun that makes you use weird things
I'd like to comment on these specifically. You are observing that dealing with sun "requires weird things" because of a very rain-centric meta since early BW. Its because of that that using Jellicent is "normal" ("Hey, it also checks Scizor and spin blocks..") but using a scarfed infernape is "weird" or "specific" ("hey, its useless against rain, what a hi-risk, specialized and weird set").

So here we have an inherent bias to observing what constitutes normal teams and what constitutes weird teams because of rain.

I'll also just casually make the observation that pokemon that can counter sun tend to perform poorly in or against rain. (I should also note that these pokemon do not perform well against sand staples, but that is much less of an issue) Some examples:

1. Houndoom can pursuit trap Darmanitan/Victini and could typically run a moderate mixed set if it could use its fully powered STAB's
2. Chandelure can counter Venusaur and Sawsbuck that fail to carry ground type coverage but can only do so much when it has an 80 power STAB against rain teams
3. Running your own fire types can actually give sun teams a massive headache, Infernape is difficult for sun staples to switch into!
4. Victini and Darm can do some serious work against sun teams but are quickly turned useless against rains army

Please note what I mention above does incorporate "theorymonning" (albeit I've used pokemon like mixed Houndoom before), but it is just to be used as a reference

So, we can argue that Infernape will be satisfactory against most sand teams, stall teams and weather-less teams, its a great hole puncher after all! The reality is however, that a pokemon that can completely be nullified by the sheer # of options rain teams have, can and will not do well in the current metagame. Perhaps, relating back to your first point, if we were to consider a rain-less and hence sun-centric metagame, we could theorise that sun would simply become the new rain, the difference between sun and rain however is very clear, it is a difference of homogeneity versus versatility. This in turn would mean that options to deal with sun are less to do with determining how many pokemon you will need that could switch into Thunder, Spikes, Hurricane, Leech Seed, Toxic, Scald, Focus Punch, Hydro Pump, Body Slam etc and more to do with how you can play around archetypes that are much more simple.



edit: You'd be surprised by how many "outside the box" strategies work against sun that will not work against rain and perform nicely against other teams. For example my tailwind + banded outrage strategy makes short work of sun teams (they carry few steels) and does very well against most non-rain teams, but can lose in clutch situations to rain teams due to the popularity of protect/dual-steels/fire weakened etc.

edit 2: I can't double post so I'll post this in an edit. I think the real reason banning rain would be a problem is not because of what we would traditionally consider a sun team but rather because of dragons being able to run rampant with no restrictions on their fire coverage. With the potential to even get a 1.5x boost against non sand/hail teams, these dragons could potentially abuse the sun far more than conventional threats like Venusaur and Darmanitan, Jirachi's standard set would probably become scarf, Ferro would need outrage bait support, etc. I'd hypothesise that we see pokemon like Cresellia and Slowbro gradually rise to eventually make the OU cut in a rain-less meta and heatran would probably be the #1 pokemon again.

I'll finish with proposing a question to you, for the sake of consideration: How many pokemon can make use of water as a coverage type? How does this compare to the usefulness of fire as a coverage type?
 

Lavos

Banned deucer.
i'll stand by what i said in the debate thread on the first point, that we need to evaluate the state of the current metagame, say, if we're suspecting drizzle, and then evaluate what the metagame would be like without drizzle in order to completely ascertain whether or not we should be banning stuff. like i said in the debate thread if we continue to ban the things that we perceive as broken and/or unhealthy for the current metagame, then we will eventually arrive at an ideal metagame, since all the broken or unhealthy things will have been banned. whether this requires an infinite suspect process or not is irrelevant, since there is a finite amount of time until xy is released.

on the second point, i slightly disagree. while i do agree that sun makes you use weird shit to make sure you don't lose to it (example: my sun team back in the genesect meta lost to shed shell heatran and little else, so people started running that set to counterteam it), i think rain often also makes you run some weird combos to get around it. i mean, for a long time people were using latias, celebi, and jellicent as their preferred scarf keldeo checks, but then people started to figure out that if you just paired cbtar with keldeo it could take out almost all the common checks and then where were you? that's one of the main reasons latias and jellicent usage has lowered significantly, and now people are starting to use baton pass of all things over u-turn on celebi for the sole purpose of escaping cbtar's pursuit. i can't really make a team without a fighting-type anymore since if i do i'm pretty much finished against protect + leech seed ferrothorn in the rain, a pokemon that's been overlooked recently but still does just as much work as it did in bw1. sun is perhaps less of a problem than rain in terms of checking it, since at least for sun you know what's coming - it's going to be venusaur 99% of the time plus either volcarona or victini as their team's two main sweepers, along with a ninetales, a dugtrio, and a magic bouncer or spinner (usually xatu or forretress). you know what's coming before you actually face it, which makes it easier to combat despite its brokenness. however, with rain you really don't know what you'll be up against. politoed is obviously a must, but beyond that, you can see rain stall with a bunch of hazard stacking, or the more common rain offense, whose pokemon vary between stuff like keldeo, terrakion, garchomp, landorus, scizor, ferrothorn, jirachi, tentacruel, dugtrio, tornadus, thundurus-t, starmie, breloom, dragonite, and even more besides. there's no predicting what rain offense will bring, and thus it's impossible (yes, impossible) to check every single one of the above threats without leaving yourself open to something else. rain (and sun) bring so many different threats to the table that it creates the sort of metagame where everything's reliant on team matchup. you either win or you lose based on what you have and what your opponent has. skill is hardly even a factor anymore. even some loser like bkc could manage to beat me if i'm using tyranitar sand offense and he's using dugtrio sun, or i'm using dugtrio sun and he's using hippowdon and sheer force landorus, or i'm using rain offense and he's using sand stall. all these complications are caused by the mere presence of rain, and sun to a lesser extent, being so prevalent in the metagame. that's mainly why they deserve to go.

[10:21am] Lavos: if you could give me one word to sum up the current metagame
[10:21am] Lavos: what would it be
[10:21am] BKC: trash
[10:21am] yee: trash
[10:21am] yee: ninjad
 
basically all these posts are saying

[18:17] <yee> 'nah man too much trouble to deal with fuck bw"
[18:17] <yee> "just let it sit"

about the "without weather dragons would dominate" thing... uh what??? dragons are not that big a deal lol, landorus for example is a lot fucking scarier than any dragon [except maybe kyurem-b but that thing is ridiculous]

I don't see why we should lead ourselves into more work to clean up a metagame that has a good chance of being terrible.
we have nothing to lose. nearly everyone hates the metagame as it is. again, refer to the yee quote for the attitude behind this kind of post
 
biggest problem with the metagame?

If we keep weather in, people will complain about why it's still around: obviously it's broken and screws up the metagame as whole
If we kick weather out, people will complain about why it was kicked out: obviously weather is the most important factor of the BW metagame (it isn't btw, the team preview is on a whole), and now the metagame is screwed up as a whole.

However I strongly disagree with people complaining that dragons will take the metagame for themselves once weather is gone. Dragons have more competition then ever before, it was DPP that was the dragon era.
There's also the complaint about the massive ban-storm that will follow with the banning of weather. However the thing is: we don't know what will truely happen. Sure Politoed and Ninetailes, along with several other pokémon will be kicked downwards. Sure certain things like Landorus-I and Terrakion may seem too much after all without weather, but either the metagame adapts around the weatherless-era, or those pokémon were broken after all, with weather being the only thing that kept them out of the spotlight.

I have nothing of value to say other than my opinion as stated above, so that's all.

Edit: I forgot to mention: people who don't want to ban something like Keldeo or so, with Gen 6 so 'close by'. Have to take a look at salamence, who was banned like what? 2 or 3 months before the shift to Gen 5?
 

Conflict

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we have nothing to lose. nearly everyone hates the metagame as it is. again, refer to the yee quote for the attitude behind this kind of post
Oh do we? Well good to know that you speak for everyone. :)
Not to mention that dissatisfied people will always speak up whereas satisfied people dont have any reason to do so - they are happy with the way everythings going so they dont see a need to complain. This holds true not only for pkmn suspect discussion but pretty much for every case involving humans.

I for once like the metagame seein as it is an evolution from what weve had before. BW OU is more similar to DPP Ubers than DPP OU just more diverse than Ubers (a lil bit lower power lvl thus allowing more stuff to be viable). This evolution is a natural thing when you consider that each generation adds ~150 new Mons but one still has only 6 Mons to deal with them. Therefore the disparity ("6Mons" vs. "available Mons") grows. I could draw a graph to make this clear but im lazy and trust you understand my point well.
Not to mention that team matchup even exists in older gens and is sometimes really hard or almost impossible to overcome but it exists to a lesser degree (i.e. it happens not as frequently). BW basically just increased the frequency of that happening due to even more new Mons + new abilities + items.
Anyways the conclusion is the following: Regardless if we ban Rain or Sub or whatever else there will a matchup issue unless we decide to ban a huge amount of Mons - something we should avoid. We dont want to turn BW OU into BW UU and have an Ubers tier consisting of 50+ Mons. Because if we do that it makes the idea of having an Ubers tier kind of obsolete. Which brings me to my next point: Unbanning of Mons voted Ubers in BW1 - i.e. retesting to give certain Mons a chance to come back and possibly enhancing the diversity of the top mons. Anyways....

I consider Weatherwars and handling team matchup (with the help of team preview, which exists thx god) 2 focal points of BW OU that distinguish BW from earlier generations and turn it into an unique metagame. Unique and fun in its own way. Even though i consider older gens (GSC, ADV, DPP) as superior metagames to BW (due to having less available Mons -> less threats to cover) i would hate to see BW turned into DPP2.0 because as soon as BW loses its uniqueness it will lose its allure and own style.

And if you allow me the gaze into the future ill predict that XY will most likely end up being even more diverse and introducing even more threats to cover. This is just a natural process - as explained above. Should we try to ban hella stuff in XY too? No we should try to converse its singularity and let it evolve into something special - something that we didnt have before. Thats because playing the "same old" leads to a loss of passion.
 
about the "without weather dragons would dominate" thing... uh what??? dragons are not that big a deal lol, landorus for example is a lot fucking scarier than any dragon [except maybe kyurem-b but that thing is ridiculous]

we have nothing to lose. nearly everyone hates the metagame as it is. again, refer to the yee quote for the attitude behind this kind of post
yeah, dragons aren't a huge deal right now because there's some stuff you can use to beat them (although a well played dragon team is still tough to beat regardless), but I originally said 'next to near weatherless'. How long do you think Latios will last without Tyranitar, if we decide to ban that too? As it stands, the potentially crazy shit like Landorus-I, Terrakion, Thund-T are kept in line, and they're a bigger problem than the dragons.

However, let's say we just ban sun and rain. Outside of the fact that the best & most stable teams are already sand, I cannot see a single good reason to why we would want to make it even more sand based. It's not even like the sort of good centralisation we have in ADV...it's just shit.

I'd like to think that quote wasn't serious, considering people do care about the state of their metagame and want to make it better. BW as it stands is lame, yes, but it is playable, and there's no point in taking a risky plunge that will leave us with something even worse. I bitch a lot about the state of it, but I'll have been playing competitively for 6 years after the end of this month, and I think it's more of a case of me being bored with competitive mons in general than it is with the state of BW being bad.

Also I agree with Conflict.
 
I'm only going to address the first point as I'm not active enough in the OU metagame to talk about the second.

I'm honestly not sure whether or not we should take in consideration theorymon on a possible future metagame. On one hand, completely ignoring potential consequences and coming to a conclusion solely upon the current state of the suspected element is like tying a blindfold around your eyes and, because there isn't a wall in front of you, walking right off a cliff. On the other hand, we are blindfolded no matter what we do. Nobody can claim to some divine insight that allows them to predict accurately the state of the future metagame or any others after that. We are groping in the dark and can't tell if there's any walls after a certain distance in front of us much less whether or not that wall is made of sponge or barbed wire. Obnoxious and poor metaphors aside, what I'm trying to say is that considering future theorymon helps to guide our actions however it can also completely mislead them into a metagame that is worse or even counter productive to what we were trying to achieve.

I suppose the best thing to do is to exactly what we are using now. The suspect system which uses the council to decide upon the next suspect but invites the entire community to decide the fate is a good compromise between the two. The OU council is the most (or close enough) reliable insight we have available so having them to use it to guide our actions helps to ensure we have a better guess about the dark world around us before actually walking with a decreased risk of flawed theorymon leading us someplace we don't want to go (I'm assuming you guys know what you are doing :P). Afterwards, by having the community focus on just determining what exactly is around us and if it is really safe to move forward or not helps to determine if the element's removal really is a good thing to do without the risk of getting some new and potentially misleading theorymon involved.

Basically, leave the theorymon to the council and have the voters just decide if the suspect is screwing up the metagame.
 
I hate making post on my phone but I'm at work and I don't give a flyin fuck.

My stance is that each individual issue should be looked at on its own. Individual pokemon are easiest to remove out the metagame without worrying about the future. For exampe tornadus-t was removed and nothing really changed. If the issue of drizzle come up for suspect discussion there has to be a discussion about sun. I am not saying one defeats the other but if you are going to look at one it makes the most sense to tackle both at the same time. I think anything that isn't a pokemon needs to take more consideration for the future. The big issue with the steath rock dicussion is that people want to ban it based on the belief that is broken without looking at the benefits that it brings. Since sr is not a pokemon and it has a great impact on the way the game is played (whether good or bad) it really needs to be looked at with the future in mind. The idea is you don't want to open up more possiblilities for less skillful play. I think the policy makers and the community should have control over the future of the metagame. We should never put ourselves in a metagame that is competitvely worse based on the flexibility of individual pokemon policy.
 
I was going to address the second point, but Conflict mostly said what I wanted to say. To clarify, I think it's okay to have a more matchup-based Pokemon. The issue you mention, Aldaron, seems to be that BW is heavily matchup-based, but why does that have to be an issue at all? To give an example in another game, Magic: The Gathering is heavily determined by matchup, and a prevailing skill of Magic is being able to assess the metagame and figure out what will beat it, or even figure out what will beat what will beat it, if you think most of the metagame is smart enough to think on the second-level. Making this kind of judgment and thinking one level ahead is a huge skill in itself, and it's more prevalent in BW than in previous metagames. I posit that the importance of matchup is a function of the number of Pokemon in the metagame. Making BW less matchup-based should be harder than making DPP less matchup-based. I'd guess we can probably say goodbye to any realistic hope of making XY OU mainly based on the goings-on of the battle, though we'll have to see.
 
I consider Weatherwars and handling team matchup (with the help of team preview, which exists thx god) 2 focal points of BW OU that distinguish BW from earlier generations and turn it into an unique metagame. Unique and fun in its own way. Even though i consider older gens (GSC, ADV, DPP) as superior metagames to BW (due to having less available Mons -> less threats to cover) i would hate to see BW turned into DPP2.0 because as soon as BW loses its uniqueness it will lose its allure and own style.

And if you allow me the gaze into the future ill predict that XY will most likely end up being even more diverse and introducing even more threats to cover. This is just a natural process - as explained above. Should we try to ban hella stuff in XY too? No we should try to converse its singularity and let it evolve into something special - something that we didnt have before. Thats because playing the "same old" leads to a loss of passion.
I'm gonna have to ask why you think "DPP 2.0" is going to a problem, because I've seen it said a lot and I don't understand why anyone holds this view. Team Preview on its own makes it about DPP 3599.0 IMO, and that's not even getting to the new pokemon. You can take just about any mon that was in DPP and its role has changed almost completely (Dnite / Rachi / Gengar etc.) and with the whole new BW pile of mons a simple, non weather-based game is so much different it might as well only be sharing the basic "physical battle field" (SR / Physical Special split etc.). There's too many more moves, the unwritten rule of only +2 boost a time got broken and there's so many new abilities like Regerator / Multiscale that allow the KingBro / Tangrowth / Dnite group and so on to even be used defensively very well.

yeah, dragons aren't a huge deal right now because there's some stuff you can use to beat them (although a well played dragon team is still tough to beat regardless), but I originally said 'next to near weatherless'. How long do you think Latios will last without Tyranitar, if we decide to ban that too? As it stands, the potentially crazy shit like Landorus-I, Terrakion, Thund-T are kept in line, and they're a bigger problem than the dragons.

However, let's say we just ban sun and rain. Outside of the fact that the best & most stable teams are already sand, I cannot see a single good reason to why we would want to make it even more sand based. It's not even like the sort of good centralisation we have in ADV...it's just shit.
I don't know how you can possibly actually think this way.



I would like to acknowledge that of course everyone as a human takes some look into the future metagame, and of course if you could prove as 2+2 that the metagame would be permanently ruined by a ban we wouldn't take it, but that's just not ever going to happen with the amount of options Pokemon has. We just find things we agree can't ever exist in a balanced metagame, and once we're done banning them (there's no longer a >50% majority of the suspect voters agreeing something is broken) we've reached our balanced metagame and that's the end of it, whether a group of people like it or not. The fact that this kind of basic agreement we're supposed to have is being debated worries me about the state of internet pokemon.
 
I would just like to say that if rain is banned, splintering will probably occur. If people like using rain metagame then they will go play on PO possibly to the point Smogon decreases in popularity. I personally don't see a reason to ban rain because I think it adds diversity to the metagame. People always talk about how good so and so the rain sweepers are, but if you really look at it in detail, rain hasn't helped much more in ban assistance than any other weather, or barely more. Speed boost blaziken banning was a product of sun, but would probably have occurred otherwise. Tornadus-T was completely at the fault of rain. Manaphy would have been banned otherwise because of tail glow being stupidly strong. The only things that can counter it are like ferrothorn, kyurem-b, and of course it can be revenge killed. Excadrill was completely a product of sand being good with him, without sand he would be RU or something before he got rocks. Darkrai was banned because of massive speed special attack and power, as well as a good sleep move. Thundurus was banned because of prankster, not because of rain boosted thunder. Swift swim was banned, but so was snow veil and sand cloak.
In Summary
Rain Caused: Tornadus-T ban, Swift swim + drizzle ban
Sand caused: Excadrill, Sand cloak, Garchomp (at the time)
Sun caused: nothing really
nbgaf about hail

Another point to bring up is "the ideal metagame" Many people think an ideal metagame is where you can use the most threats effectively, or promoting diversity. I think diversity is an important factor in a metagame, but at the same time there can be ~20 top metagame pokemon and 60 more which are not as good (for example cloyster in gen 5). I think the ideal metagame is where the person who plays better wins as much as possible. Hax should be minimized, and if neccesary the pokemon should be limited. This is why ADV OU ishands down the best tier in competitive pokemon, because there is enough diversity and whether or not you are swept by top threats is not determined by hax. (look at gen 5 when a focus blast miss or stone edge miss can cost you the game, or outrage turns/confusion).

Also Team preview kind of messed up competitive pokemon, it makes th game play differently, hard to explain, somebody else take a shot this?


So basically remove team preview.
 
We just find things we agree can't ever exist in a balanced metagame, and once we're done banning them (there's no longer a >50% majority of the suspect voters agreeing something is broken) we've reached our balanced metagame and that's the end of it, whether a group of people like it or not.
Just one question, what do you mean by a balanced metagame? Because according to my definition of a balanced metagame, no Pokemon metagame ever has been, or likely ever will be, balanced.
 
[01:13:51] <&aldaron> i dont know where i stand on that point
[01:13:54] <&aldaron> philosophically speaking
[01:14:06] <&aldaron> whether we should only view the current metagame or take future theorymon into account
[01:14:38] <&aldaron> ive always included future theorymon in judgment calls but im not sure if i can justify using it for deciding policy
i think we absolutely have to take future theorymon into account. i've always believed that the tiering process is merely a means to reach a better metagame.

in my opinion, part of the problem is that future theorymon and bans within the current metagame have always agreed in the past. banning latias in gen 4 made sense because latias was really powerful, but at the same time latias didn't supress any powerful strategies or other pokemon.

on the other hand, bw is clearly a strategy generation, hence the classification of teams a "rain," "sun," "sand," etc. the big three work to balance each other out (sort of), and banning rain has huge bearing on all these other strategies. in this case, while banning rain or any other big strategy might make sense in the current metagame, the future theorymon doesn't necessarily agree. the next metagame may not be better without rain. whereas banning latias/salamence in gen 4 would almost certainly led to a better meta, banning rain in gen 5 will have unknown repercussions.

we've never had to seriously take future theorymon into account because the future theorymon usually agreed with the ban decision. now, because of the precarious balancing act that is gen 5 weather, we can't afford to ignore the possible future metagame. we should be making the decisions that improve the metagame, even if that means we have to keep pokemon that are "too strong" within the current one

i'll respond to the other one whenever i have some free time or feel like it
 
Just one question, what do you mean by a balanced metagame? Because according to my definition of a balanced metagame, no Pokemon metagame ever has been, or likely ever will be, balanced.
My view is that as long as there is nothing that is agreed by a majority of voters to be broken, it's a balanced metagame. The reason something would be banned in the first place is because (ideally) there was a clear reason it was contradicting DougJustDoug's characteristics of an ideal metagame or something along those lines severely. If nothing is severely hurting diversity / the better player winning etc. it would very likely mean we had reached a "balanced" metagame. I believe it is clear in tiers like DPP OU / UU and BW UU / NU (only omitting RU because I haven't played it in ages) where the banning process is basically done a balanced or close to balanced metagame has been achieved.

One point I think I left out before describes why there shouldn't be worry about reaching into a future metagame. In order to be broken, Smogon has always demanded it to not be "maybe broken" or "some people think it's broken", it's always been "there must be widespread agreement this is broken". For that to happen, there is a required condition of widespread agreement that the broken pokemon is hurting one of the key elements of a metagame, which sounds like a fair replacement for theorymoning the next metagame to me. It is as close to risk free as we can get when we ban due to agreement that a pokemon hurts a metagame and only that, and is certainly better justification for a decision than "Sun might dominate, and then maybe Dragons will dominate etc." We want to be sure and simple as possible about this process if we can be.

On a tangent while were at it why do those thoughts exist anyway? Sun is literally the easiest thing in BW2 to prepare for if you know it's coming, just run a ScarfTran or BalloonTran / Lati@s / Sand / another Dragon if you want to be safe and you basically have a guaranteed win. Fast Fire types like ScarfApe thrown on Sand teams also lead to teams that just embarrass Sun. With Dragons, we have Terrakion and Landorus that are probably better pokemon in the first place even without rain, Shed Shell Skarm as always will be clutch vs a bunch of Dragons, SubTox Glisc is more than a little bit annoying for Dragon teams, any version of Cloyster is a setback, Eviolite P2 can come out of the shadows, Tangrowth + a couple Steels is safe vs just about anything physical Dragons can do etc. and mixed Dragons will just be mixed Dragons, which is fine IMO because wallbreakers should be allowed to exist anyway.
 
Regardless if we ban Rain or Sun or whatever else there will a matchup issue unless we decide to ban a huge amount of Mons - something we should avoid. We dont want to turn BW OU into BW UU and have an Ubers tier consisting of 50+ Mons. Because if we do that it makes the idea of having an Ubers tier kind of obsolete.
fuck i'm sorry guys. i completely forgot that a small banlist takes priority over a competitive metagame. it didn't even occur to me that we take the ubers tier into account when making decisions for OU.

Which brings me to my next point: Unbanning of Mons voted Ubers in BW1 - i.e. retesting to give certain Mons a chance to come back and possibly enhancing the diversity of the top mons.
because we don't have enough broken mons already and we definitely like to bring down broken shit to check other broken shit

I consider Weatherwars and handling team matchup (with the help of team preview, which exists thx god) 2 focal points of BW OU that distinguish BW from earlier generations and turn it into an unique metagame. Unique and fun in its own way. Even though i consider older gens (GSC, ADV, DPP) as superior metagames to BW (due to having less available Mons -> less threats to cover) i would hate to see BW turned into DPP2.0 because as soon as BW loses its uniqueness it will lose its allure and own style.
man how do i keep forgetting all this stuff? it should've occurred to me that our goal is to make bw a ~UniQuE~ metagame, regardless of how competitive it is

Nachos said:
That's interesting.. because people commonly talk about how ADV OU is the best tier despite the fact that it revolves around Tyranitar, and how DPP was amazing when it was all about the dragons and steels.
lol

adv does not "revolve around tyranitar". is it the best mon in the tier? hell yeah. however, you don't exactly bend over backwards to counter it because it's not broken.

so what if dpp was all about dragons and steels? it was a good tier [salamence was broken, latias wasn't].

How long do you think Latios will last without Tyranitar, if we decide to ban that too?
who fucking cares? if latios is broken then we ban it too. god what is with this "never ban anything EVER because then THIS might happen" mentality

However, let's say we just ban sun and rain. Outside of the fact that the best & most stable teams are already sand, I cannot see a single good reason to why we would want to make it even more sand based.
if only teams didn't have to bend over backwards to counter unfairly strong weather abusers, maybe there would be some more variety--Hey!

is there something wrong with the metagame being "sand based"? sand teams aren''t broken, they're not matchup reliant, and usually when you use sand nowadays, it's to make sure that sun/rain don't completely screw you over, not because you love rubbing in 6% damage every turn to everything not ground/steel/rock [there are the rare sand abuse teams but stoutland's not close to broken even with perma sand and sandslash is straight up garbage]. not to mention that the metagame wouldn't exactly be 100% sand, people would be using weatherless a lot more [p. much all good weatherless teams are the same atm btw because they have to compensate ridiculously hard to make sure they're not raped by weather abusers, but with that gone, they have so much more room for diversity].

on a somewhat related note, yee's post is also quality.

also
Thundurus was banned because of prankster, not because of rain boosted thunder
rofl
 
People need to stop talking about brokenness as if it is some sort of innate trait. I can't really say what is and isn't broken, or whether something should be banned or shouldn't be banned, but brokenness is not some magical trait that something just has or doesn't have. Stop talking about "if we just ban everything broken, eventually there will be nothing broken left" because whether or not something is broken depends on the metagame that contains it. What this means is that not only is it possible you will have banned half of current OU, it'll be entirely possible that many things will be banned that aren't even actually broken in the new metagame you've created (in which case they should be unbanned, presumably).

This is also the point Conflict was trying to make, and whether or not it's accurate it's a possible concern: If you're going to ban everything in OU (vast overstatement and simplification, but this is how points get made)... why aren't you just playing UU?

Yes I do like using italics, thank you very much.
 

Neliel

Sacred Sword
I dont have much to say which wasnt already said by Bkc&co, but i would like to post some of my thoughts about the sun thing you have posted.
Imo its not "sun" the problem that makes you use weird things, but its the fact that you cant prepare for anything on team building. For example, if you fill your team of rain checks (think something like, 2 water resistor+sand inducer) to avoid being fucked by rain teams, which is a more common playstile than sun, you will probably have no slot to cover your sun weakness because you also have to think about dragons, fighting types, toxic spikes, ectect so you will end up choosing what you will lose againt in the teambuilding.
This is what building teams force us to do with sun and rain in ou, chose what to lose against even before we have played that game against *insert playstile here* and you cant really do much to avoid this imo, no matter how well you can build teams
Anyway, i think sun teams is what basically force us to not run weatherless teams because venusaur/volca/victini and all these kind of stuff are ridicolous to face, unless you use an even more ridicolous team filled by dragons/landorus ect, so yes i think too sun is even worst than rain and make you do strange builds if you want to be really prepared for that.
 
I don't know how you can possibly actually think this way.

I would like to acknowledge that of course everyone as a human takes some look into the future metagame, and of course if you could prove as 2+2 that the metagame would be permanently ruined by a ban we wouldn't take it, but that's just not ever going to happen with the amount of options Pokemon has. We just find things we agree can't ever exist in a balanced metagame, and once we're done banning them (there's no longer a >50% majority of the suspect voters agreeing something is broken) we've reached our balanced metagame and that's the end of it, whether a group of people like it or not. The fact that this kind of basic agreement we're supposed to have is being debated worries me about the state of internet pokemon.
If a 'balanced metagame is the end of it', then I think we are at the end. Regardless of what you have to say about BW2, it is a balanced metagame, in which case it should stay that way, whether a group of people like it or not.

adv does not "revolve around tyranitar". is it the best mon in the tier? hell yeah. however, you don't exactly bend over backwards to counter it because it's not broken.

is there something wrong with the metagame being "sand based"? sand teams aren''t broken, they're not matchup reliant, and usually when you use sand nowadays, it's to make sure that sun/rain don't completely screw you over, not because you love rubbing in 6% damage every turn to everything not ground/steel/rock [there are the rare sand abuse teams but stoutland's not close to broken even with perma sand and sandslash is straight up garbage]. not to mention that the metagame wouldn't exactly be 100% sand, people would be using weatherless a lot more [p. much all good weatherless teams are the same atm btw because they have to compensate ridiculously hard to make sure they're not raped by weather abusers, but with that gone, they have so much more room for diversity].
lol ttar's influence on ADV OU is stronger than what excadrill had in BW OU when it was around. I don't want to talk about ttar's tiering in this thread (ps. I think it's OU), but the point was in response to Lavos' claim that we should keep on banning things we perceive to be broken or have an unhealthy influence in the hope it would create a good tier. Ttar in adv is somewhat unhealthy (dont read this as broken) for the metagame considering people run 2 counters+ or a Dugtrio just to beat it, and it can always muscle its way past those eventually, but you know what, who cares? It's fun to play and the tier has a good amount of skill involved. And yeah, I agree about DPP being fun when all the dragons and steels were around.

The reason people use sand is because the rest of the team isn't dead weight if the starter dies, because it has a variety of good SR users, because of the boost it gives to Terrakion, because of the chip damage that mounts up over time, because Tyranitar itself helps other Pokemon to sweep and because yes, it helps to beat the other weathers. Sand itself has no notable megabusers like Sun does with Venusaur and Rain does with...nothing now that Tornadus-T is banned, but the weather as a whole provides more benefits than the others, unless you're saying that high powered water moves that can be walled without too much trouble are a cause for something to be broken. Saying that weatherless will flourish because rain and sun will be banned is just guesswork, no better than those who call out others for not wanting to ban something because it might lead to something else being banned. Nobody knows for sure if banning weather will solve all the 'big problems', let's not pretend that we do. Also, how exactly does weather restrict diversity..when OU is the largest it ever has been? Yeah, more pokemon got added, but from the level of complaining you'd think Gen 5 OU would be smaller than Gen 4 and before. For some pokemon, weather creates diversity.

oh yeah, and an ubers list of 50-60 pokemon sounds pretty silly to me. at that point we may as well make Ubers the new OU.
 
Note: I'm quite inexperienced so if this sounds too noobish, just pass on to the next post :)
Seriously, at this rate we might just have Rayquaza descend into OU to stop this weather nonsense lol...
On a serious note, why not? Rayquaza has quite a lot of counters in OU itself(dragons that outspeed and OHKO like Garchomp, Salamence, the Eon duo, even Hydreigon as well as ice types like Weavile that outspeed and OHKO) and would certainly shut these weather wars: who wants to run weather when Rayquaza switches in and OHKOes?
Rayquaza is way too powerful for the standard metagame imo.

He's bulky enough that he can come in on a resisted attack and take minimal damage, and then what do you do? Everything you switch in risks being OHKOed or severely damaged by Rayquaza. Even the pokemon that are supposed to "check" him. And if you sacrifice a pokemon and try to revenge him, your opponent can just switch out. The game would probably just be Rayquaza + a bunch of pokemon that do reasonably well against Rayquaza on every team.
 
mien please do not make such assumptions
You and your circle of buddies is hardly representative for the entire community.
yes, it is just me and my ~circle of buddies~ who don't like the metagame, not nearly every single successful bw tournament player [emphasis on: nearly. already a lot of people have twisted this and acted like i'm parading it around like an absolute truth]

Nachos said:
Regardless of what you have to say about BW2, it is a balanced metagame, in which case it should stay that way, whether a group of people like it or not.
i wasn't aware that a balanced metagame was one where games are decided on matchup and matchup alone a good portion of the time [yes, matchup has always existed, no, it has not always been this extreme and it never should be. i really don't have the energy to write out why weather abuse games are so matchup determined for the 500th time but i'm sure that the good players know it's true and those who continue denying it are either ignorant or arguing for the sake of arguing]

The reason people use sand is because the rest of the team isn't dead weight if the starter dies, because it has a variety of good SR users, because of the boost it gives to Terrakion, because of the chip damage that mounts up over time, because Tyranitar itself helps other Pokemon to sweep and because yes, it helps to beat the other weathers.
right, but it's not broken or unhealthy for the meta.

Also, how exactly does weather restrict diversity..when OU is the largest it ever has been?
when there are more mons of course there will be a larger OU tier... and you're kidding yourself if you don't think weather restricts you in terms of options of defending against it [if you're abusing it then sure you can get creative or whatever, there are a million things that abuse weather].

oh yeah, and an ubers list of 50-60 pokemon sounds pretty silly to me. at that point we may as well make Ubers the new OU.
again, why are we taking ubers into account? although i'm not exactly opposed to just making ubers the standard tier, that's not how we do things [yet...]
 

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