As the third member of the paragraph review, I would like to share some of my thoughts on this test, past tests, and the bright future of Ubers that awaits us.
A little preface
Now Gengarite was not the first suspect test ran in Ubers (well...it's the first in this gen, but that's not relevant). Me and ibo ran some suspect tests which most notably included Evasion and OHKO moves last gen, in hopes of accomplishing a few goals.
1) The community really liked participating in suspects at the time and we chose to satisfy that hunger because Ubers was going through a somewhat barren period. Having more people play our tier is always a great goal to have.
2) We wanted to establish a message: Ubers is the tier that bans the absolute least. This was meant to highlight what's unique about the Uber tier and separate it from how every other tier functioned. The suspect tests were geared towards UNbanning things and ensuring that everything that remained banned has good reason to stay there. From this, Evasion was deemed manageable and was thus unbanned.
Thoughts on the Shadow Tag Suspect Test
Somewhere down the line, I felt that our intent was twisted. Instead of sending a message about minimizing bans, I think our Gen 5 Suspect Tests were used to justify the classic Suspect Tests for Ubers. This made me really uncomfortable, but I did not attempt to stop this as I was more focused on LoL at the time and felt that my intervention would be overstepping my bounds.
It wasn't until this particular Suspect Test that things got really messy though. Dice informed me that the Shadow Tag thread has degenerated to Melee Mewtwo and shrang battering each other over and over again, and I gave serious consideration about destroying it, but instead I chose to tell MM2 about this so maybe he and shrang can cool things down since I did not want to override another mod's decision. Fast forward and it still continued to happen, which made me realize that perhaps a suspect test wasn't the right approach. This is when I began to express my opinion to MM2 that I'm beginning to feel really uncomfortable about this, and we went through some philosophical mumbo jumbo and ended with hypotheticals. I then tried to join the tag thread (if you can't beat them, join them, right? WRONG!), and I found out how easily I can get caught up in it, but reeling back to my previous stance, I backed off.
Now I'd like to remind everyone that I only signed up for paragraph review. No offense to Fireburn and MM2 (they have been excellent partners to work with and I'd like to work with them again in the future), but anyone who has paid any attention to the thread knows that they are very biased against Tag (especially MM2), and I felt uncomfortable with that so I volunteered to help out because I have a neutral stance. In the end, the results still looked incredibly biased but I did whatever I could to absolutely minimize bias. Collectively, we felt that our review was overall just, but it was obvious from a numbers perspective and some background knowledge that it did not seem fair at all. I can understand that, because I too felt uncomfortable with the numbers before the results were released, although I decided then that the numbers were only an illusion. I foresaw some backlash which prompted me to tell MM2 and Fireburn to be more transparent with this test moreso than any other test, but we poorly executed it and it only gave even more suspicions of bias, and the backlash was far bigger than what I imagined.
For that, I sincerely apologize for the outrages it has caused. I felt that I had the power to stop some of these from happening, but I was too late and the suspect test broke the gates of hell. Perhaps I was just too weak.
The bright future ahead
During this suspect test, theorymonning over ORAS stuff was how I entertained myself against all the shadow tag back and forths. Now with the game out only in a few days, I hope people will put aside this incident and focus on making the best of what ORAS offers us. I'll be trying to do the same, and the Uber metagame is also due for a shakeup.
The destructive PR incident also opened up a permanent reminder to consider and may be of significant help when we revise our Ubers policy. I look forward to finding out how this episode ends, but for now, I just want to enjoy ORAS
Happy Groudoning
I'm not sure how I feel about not suspecting anything in Ubers anymore... *cough* evasion
If this is a big enough issue this will likely just be banned. But first we'll need to sort out our philosophy which will have to wait until sometime after ORAS' release imo.