capefeather
toot
Hi. Since the CAP server has become the new Smogon server, I thought that this should be discussed once again. My previous thread on the subject met with (I thought) a rather disappointing turnout, and though it could be blamed on the lack of usage stats, I'll admit that it could also have been blamed on its emphasis on explaining stuff rather than on actually sparking discussion. I especially thought that maybe it would at least catch the attention of the tiering leaders...
I decided to attach a poll to this because if I didn't do that, I might as well have bumped the old thread or changed the OP or something. You CAN read that thread not too far down on the list from this one; in fact, I'd recommend it. In any case, the options right now seem to boil down to "individual" and "collective" cutoff.
Individual cutoff is basically the way we've been tiering until now: A Pokémon's usage-based tiering is decided by its individual frequency of usage in our ladder. There are actually multiple ways to achieve this, as outlined in the previous thread. Mainly, there's a hard x% cutoff (like in PO) or a slightly more complicated calculation like X-Act's formula (like in Smogon's 4th gen tiers).
Collective cutoff is an idea that was X-Act proposed some time after Smogon started using his current cutoff formula and, when mentioned again in my previous thread, got support at the very least from coyotte. Essentially, a Pokémon's usage-based tiering is decided by its inclusion in a group that makes up (or exists in) a certain proportion of all teams. One potential disadvantage to this is that it requires the usage of teammate statistics to be calculated correctly.
Like I said last time, I believe that the choice comes mostly down to whether we want to reflect the utility of the individual or we want to reflect an accurate threat list. Of course, anyone is free to interpret this in a different way or even suggest a different cutoff method altogether. In any case, I'm really hoping that more people care about this now that we do have working usage stats, because sometimes I do see people criticizing the usage tiering system.
I don't know if I should be giving my own opinion on this in an OP, but I think that an individual-based cutoff would fit the best with how we think about OU vs UU. Whenever I see people talking about usage tiers, they may talk about how many Pokémon should be OU or whether a certain Pokémon should be OU, but in the end their thought process always seems to come down to how often they see a Pokémon (if at all). People may also notice that I'm personally not as serious about how arbitrary the system ends up as Cathy or X-Act might have been; I think that the system should just reflect our common intuition accurately.
This poll is not intended to be necessarily binding, and is intended to get a quick feel of what people are thinking about this.
I decided to attach a poll to this because if I didn't do that, I might as well have bumped the old thread or changed the OP or something. You CAN read that thread not too far down on the list from this one; in fact, I'd recommend it. In any case, the options right now seem to boil down to "individual" and "collective" cutoff.
Individual cutoff is basically the way we've been tiering until now: A Pokémon's usage-based tiering is decided by its individual frequency of usage in our ladder. There are actually multiple ways to achieve this, as outlined in the previous thread. Mainly, there's a hard x% cutoff (like in PO) or a slightly more complicated calculation like X-Act's formula (like in Smogon's 4th gen tiers).
Collective cutoff is an idea that was X-Act proposed some time after Smogon started using his current cutoff formula and, when mentioned again in my previous thread, got support at the very least from coyotte. Essentially, a Pokémon's usage-based tiering is decided by its inclusion in a group that makes up (or exists in) a certain proportion of all teams. One potential disadvantage to this is that it requires the usage of teammate statistics to be calculated correctly.
Like I said last time, I believe that the choice comes mostly down to whether we want to reflect the utility of the individual or we want to reflect an accurate threat list. Of course, anyone is free to interpret this in a different way or even suggest a different cutoff method altogether. In any case, I'm really hoping that more people care about this now that we do have working usage stats, because sometimes I do see people criticizing the usage tiering system.
I don't know if I should be giving my own opinion on this in an OP, but I think that an individual-based cutoff would fit the best with how we think about OU vs UU. Whenever I see people talking about usage tiers, they may talk about how many Pokémon should be OU or whether a certain Pokémon should be OU, but in the end their thought process always seems to come down to how often they see a Pokémon (if at all). People may also notice that I'm personally not as serious about how arbitrary the system ends up as Cathy or X-Act might have been; I think that the system should just reflect our common intuition accurately.
This poll is not intended to be necessarily binding, and is intended to get a quick feel of what people are thinking about this.