Baton Pass - a move that passes everything to another pokemon that the pokemon using that move has, good or bad.
But is smogon the one who is passing on something, or the pokemon themselves?
To me, this isnt a problem of calcs, or results, or logical arguments for or against baton pass. I think that the site itself is the one who needs the complex ban.
I dont know why smogon insists on banning everything, and i dont know if it only distrubs me but, do you think we are jumping the gun with this? Shouldnt we wait to see if the ingenuity that has been so shirked in the past, will come through like it always does? Why is the first thing we decide to do is ban something when things get tough? You know, when we wanted to go to the moon and we found out it was hard to do we didnt just complex ban gravity so we could just jump to the fucker. We powered through it, and planted a flag on that motherfucker.
I can remember a time when smogon was shooting for higher quality. Badges used to be hard to get. Bans were few and far between, and none of them were complex, you were either banned or not. You didnt get a cute little ladybug for correcting a sentence on a smog article nobody will read, you had to do more. But now I think smogon has gone soft,
Stallion and C_M is right, if we can innovate to the point where we can use mold breaker mega gyara with roar, a pokemon that has NEVER been thought of, what could we do with the other 718 pokemon?
I speak as someone who has qualified for a suspect vote
at the risk of making a 'poorly-worded argument' that will get deleted, it seems to me that the main problem with baton pass isn't that it's broken, uncompetitive, or even that it can get lesser-skilled players a win against a more competent player.
it's that
baton pass is cheap, like hadouken spam, infinite combos, camping, or using fucking oddjob in goldeneye.
it's annoying, and even more annoying to lose against, especially against someone who has no idea what they're doing, and that seems to be the underlying issue. on the subject of ingenuity and other possible counters, volcanion is coming (eventually) and will have haze. take that how you will as we can only theorymon at this point, obviously, but it seems like it will be a toptier mon and could be another potential wrench in the cogs of baton pass chains.
the above isn't an argument for or against banning baton pass, just stating that we should call it what it is. what this has to do with your post is i don't think people want to be ingenious about countering baton pass. they want to socially-reinforce the notion that cheap strategies are lame and people who use them should feel bad when they use them. it does have precedence in pokemon though; just look at sleep clause, but then again, this is the same logic that people use to justify 'no legendaries', and i think we all know smogon's stance on that one.
as an actual discussion of what to do with bp, and let me preface this by saying again that i am not stating my opinion in support of or against a ban of baton pass or this action, but i believe that limiting the number of baton passers seems likely what's going to be decided based on the discussion of the thread.
if that happens, i see the problems already of everyone arguing about whether or not 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 is the right number. 5 seems too high considering some teams self-impose this anyway, and 1 seems low enough we might as well ban it outright at that point, so maybe 2-4 is what we should look at. but we should look at it, i don't think that simply discussing will achieve the most desirable outcome for everyone. 4 may be enough of a restriction for some people, and 3 may not even be enough that 2 would make sense, (and i'm unsure of how to do this), but i don't think that anyone can be sure of the correct number of limitations without actually testing out the possibilities.
as an aside, i wonder how many bp teams have been created as a result of this thread.