Tiering Nomenclature

[lilyhollow]

(This is not some 'huge thing' or anything, but it has been on my mind lately and maybe some people have thoughts on it.)

There are a lot of official playable tiers. Not counting Ubers, there's OU, UU, RU, NU, and now PU. People who browse Other Metagames also know of FU, and it's not some pie-in-the-sky thing to imagine that that too will one day be an 'officially recognized' tier.


Concern:
The nomenclature is rather confusing and not entirely friendly to new players. It's not immediately clear that RU (Rarely Used) is the playable tier beneath UU (Underused). It's not immediately clear what PU even stands for at all (let alone FU), and it's even less clear why there would ever be a tier beneath NU (Never Used) in the first place. Even if these things did 'make sense,' it's just kind of a lot of things to keep track of.

There's even more weirdness to unpack when you take a look at some of the older gens. In Gen 3 we also have UU, but it's actually the third playable tier, not the second. For tradition reasons or something, gen 3's second playable tier is instead called BL, which used to make sense, but in modern parlance is one of the most confusing possible things we could ever call it.

Proposal:
Change it to something simpler and more consistent. I don't think you need anything fancy here. Like Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 would do. It's already consistent with the way we refer to banlists, too.



We have been using the current terms for a very long time now, so I understand this kind of change would require some 'adjustment.' Are there other reasons not to consider this?

 

[BKC]

who cares if a new player doesn't immediately understand why certain tiers are named the way they are? it's not brain surgery, nor that important. what matters are the tiers themselves. I think trc said something like pu is keeping its name despite being below nu because that's what the community recognizes and has been playing with it since the beginning despite the contradictory names that no one actually gives a fuck about (whoa! how can something be used less than never?! this incredibly minor detail is really throwing off my perfectly balanced zen and I am leaving competitive pokemon forever)

we do not need to change tier names older than some of our users (especially not in favor of something so grotesquely devoid of any personality whatsoever like tier [number]) to babysit people who aren't asking for it. they'll be mildly puzzled for a few minutes (if that) and will then shrug and say hm looks like that's how they do things here. matter of fact they might be so intrigued as to how pokemon's usages seeped into the negatives that they'll stick around to ask how this mathematical anomaly came to be. kindergarteners are not the people reading our site and thus we do not need to hold their hand every step of the way.

 

[Lutra]

I came up with the following transitional system a few months ago, to solve the eventual problem with too many different names:

e.g. RBY 1U (OverUsed)

• The tier category name can be representative of the standard tier categories of a subgeneration, such as RBY, Stadium, GSC... or more specific niche tier categories such as RBYNW (RBY non-wrap) or RBYLC (RBY LittleCup), in the form RBY XY (Z)
• The tier level number represents the nth tier level in a tier category - each new lower tier level formed from a broad cut-off of what is viable in the existing higher tier level e.g. RBY 1, or RBY 2 (ban transitivity from RBY 1), RBY 3 (ban transitivity from RBY 2).
  
• The tier stage name represents what makes a tier unique from another in a tier level - i.e. higher ones having less bans (and therefore being less developed) than lower ones, e.g. RBY 1P compared to RBY 1U.
  • A is reserved for the alpha phase of tiering, or Anything Goes in tier level 1.
    
  • B,C, D... then follow on with more and more bans.
    
  • P is reserved for traditional tiers such as RBY Ubers and BL where no higher Pokémon are banned.
    
  • Q, R, S... are tiers in between the traditional broken and balanced tiers where less broken Pokémon are banned.
    
  • U is reserved for the balanced tier, or 'Used tier' of the tier level.
    
  • V, W, X... explore alternate tiers where Pokémon could be banned.
    
  • The initial order of existence is A, then B...If a balanced tier is finalised in a tier without any additional bans, A will be renamed to U. If there are Pokémon bans, a P tier will be formed. If there are more than one set of bans, the other letters will be used.
• Hierarchial names are listed in brackets.
  • 1U = OverUsed = OU
    
  • 2U = UnderUsed = UU
    
  • 3U = UnderUnderUsed = UUU
    
  • The tier level corresponds to the number of Us in the hierarchial name.

 

[Luigi]

I came up with the following transitional system a few months ago, to solve the eventual problem with too many different names:

e.g. RBY 1U (OverUsed)

• The tier category name can be representative of the standard tier categories of a subgeneration, such as RBY, Stadium, GSC... or more specific niche tier categories such as RBYNW (RBY non-wrap) or RBYLC (RBY LittleCup), in the form RBY XY (Z)
• The tier level number represents the nth tier level in a tier category - each new lower tier level formed from a broad cut-off of what is viable in the existing higher tier level e.g. RBY 1, or RBY 2 (ban transitivity from RBY 1), RBY 3 (ban transitivity from RBY 2).
  
• The tier stage name represents what makes a tier unique from another in a tier level - i.e. higher ones having less bans (and therefore being less developed) than lower ones, e.g. RBY 1P compared to RBY 1U.
  • A is reserved for the alpha phase of tiering, or Anything Goes in tier level 1.
    
  • B,C, D... then follow on with more and more bans.
    
  • P is reserved for traditional tiers such as RBY Ubers and BL where no higher Pokémon are banned.
    
  • Q, R, S... are tiers in between the traditional broken and balanced tiers where less broken Pokémon are banned.
    
  • U is reserved for the balanced tier, or 'Used tier' of the tier level.
    
  • V, W, X... explore alternate tiers where Pokémon could be banned.
    
  • The initial order of existence is A, then B...If a balanced tier is finalised in a tier without any additional bans, A will be renamed to U. If there are Pokémon bans, a P tier will be formed. If there are more than one set of bans, the other letters will be used.
• Hierarchial names are listed in brackets.
  • 1U = OverUsed = OU
    
  • 2U = UnderUsed = UU
    
  • 3U = UnderUnderUsed = UUU
    
  • The tier level corresponds to the number of Us in the hierarchial name.

The point of the thread was to simplify things dog o_o

 

[Slimmer]

A tiering nomenclature change after all these years of "OverUsed"/"UnderUsed"/etc history would be more confusing than keeping them. SmogDex and forums explain perfectly the reason of these names and the history of this nomenclature (up since 2006 iirc). I don't think that a change after almost 10 years would be good, honestly.

 

[Queen of Randoms]

Also it's probably important for new players to suck it up and get familiar with the tier names, as it serves as an introduction into how the tiers are created: usage.

We want to limit the number of new players asking: "Why is Moltres RU isn't it OP legendary???!!!?!???" and "Why is Sylveon OU it's not even good!??!??!?" I see a lot of people that lack the actual fundamental understanding of our tiering system, and I think that changing things to 1,2,3,4, etc. and taking "used" out of the names will open up more of these types of questions for people who are still under the misguided assumption that some higher power is choosing tiers based on how good they think Pokémon are.

 

[Aldaron]

I can see the benefits of both sticking with our system and going with a more objective, open-ended system.

I at one point supported the new system but I've started to go back to the "keep things as is with minor changes side". Queen of Randoms point is correct in that the current nomenclature at least somewhat points toward usage, not perceived power, as the driving force behind tiering. That is important and not something I think can be adequately reflected in a "Tier 0 / Tier 1 / Tier 2" system.

I do want to emphasize that we already have precedence for changing the names within our nomenclature. In gen 4, the tier below UU was called NU, not RU.

If the concern about NeverUsed not being the lowest tier is large enough, we can simply do what we have already done in gen 4 and drop NU to the lowest and find another name.

I don't actually think there is any even moderately pressing concern to change anything, but if some people decide we absolutely must, we have at least two more words that work within a spectrum of usage.

"Seldom", which is generally considered to be less extreme than "Rarely", and"Barely", which is in between "Rarely" and "Never", so we have:

OverUsed -> UnderUsed -> SeldomUsed (current RU becomes SU) -> RarelyUsed (Current NU becomes RU) -> BarelyUsed (Current PU becomes BU) -> NeverUsed for the next time another tier becomes official

I wouldn't actually change anything during a gen though, so this is only for next gen, and only if purists want NeverUsed to be the last tier. I will admit it is nicer to have NeverUsed as the last tier (because it makes the most intuitive sense, especially if we're defending our current nomenclature on the grounds of it pointing towards usage), but it isn't really anything pressing to me.

tl;dr our current nomenclature helps point towards usage (over perceived power), and that is important. we can change NU's ordering around because we've already done it before and we have at least 2 new and unique words ("Seldom" and "Barely") that work within a usage spectrum.

 

[Andy Snype]

this is a minor topic that will be brought up over and over again, especially as time progresses. There's only so many words that can fit in this nomenclature. I'd rather just do a numerical system for the sake of scaling for the future. There are a lot more numbers than words that can be used that intuitively fit this nomenclature in my opinion. Having a lot of tiers is a discussion topic for another thread and I think will be a bridge that gets crossed when we get to it.

The community that does it because that's how we did things around here won't matter as much in a few years anyway as a good portion of them are going to retire from competitive mons and leave the site anyway. Assuming mons ends up growing / Nintendo doesn't stop the Pokemon games from becoming released, the number of people on the site that cares to have the nomenclature as it currently is a really small number compared to the number of people that get introduced to the game, so we'd really only be appeasing a lesser fraction of the majority of the incoming playerbase. I don't think that makes sense and like BKC implied, this shit really doesn't matter when it comes to playing the game.

 

[Aldaron]

Steven Snype your post is confusing to me as the first paragraph supports a numbered tiering system and then the last sentence of your second paragraph seemingly agrees with bkc, whose post is 1000% against that

please explain further lol or tell me how i read your post incorrectly

it seems like you want to move to a numbered tiering system because the majority of people who care now won't be relevant later, but then you agree with bkc >.>

 

[lilyhollow]

I'm actually more concerned with the 'big picture' than the details here, since it's the big picture that has the potential to cause feelings of 'overwhelmedness' (is there an actual word for that) in new players.

A super new player isn't even getting to the point where they're caring what the actual tier names 'mean.' Really the whole thing for them is "what even are all of these letters and shit?" The fact that NeverUsed isn't the lowest tier is weird/confusing, but anyone who's to the point where they're even able to process the weirdness of that, at least gets what all of the letters are for, lol.*

(I speculate all this as someone who is by no means a new player, but having had extremely muted activity during basically all of 5th gen and X/Y, and therefore the like entire rise of PS as a whole, i do have at least a little perspective there i think)

So the whole NU thing is really like confusing icing on a confusing cake. Really the whole thing here is that we have all of these different names, some of which have meanings and some of which kind of don't, and it's not immediately clear what they're referring to, and even when it is made clear, you still have to sort of mentally keep track of what order they're in. And it's just sort of a lot to process for someone who's also potentially trying to get used to everything in the whole game/simulator/community.

I want to stress again that this is not meant to be some "sky is falling, please lord somebody save the newbies" type thing though. This is all about the marginal benefits of 'improving new user experience to some small but appreciated degree' versus 'kind of being a weird/annoying transition for the players who already are integrated and know what's what.' I think marginal improvements are a thing worth considering, though they might not be as sexy as the more pressing issues.

* Because of this, I would actually recommend not changing NU every gen so that it's the new lowest tier. It would also conflict with any new, lower tiers people might try to introduce, but I think in general it would actually do more harm than good to keep changing from gen-to-gen like that. While we're at it, I actually think Ubers is fine being called Ubers, I think that name does a really good job of establishing a general idea of what the format is, the fact that it's sort of 'beyond' the whole usage-based tiering thing, etc.

 

[Taliheim]

A super new player isn't even getting to the point where they're caring what the actual tier names 'mean.' Really the whole thing for them is "what even are all of these letters and shit?"

An easy solution for this would be to have the tiers show up as their actual names instead of their acronyms in PS!. Anybody even logging on to PS for the first time would at least grasp what each tier means - Ubers are powerful, so probably banned; Overused allows Pokemon that are, well, overused; Underused seems to let, well, underused Pokemon shine, and therefore probably don't allow Overused Pokemon; and so forth.

They could still have problems with thinking that Overused ONLY allows OU mons, Underused ONLY allows UU mons, etc, but at that point they just don't know the way the tiering works, and that's going to happen no matter what we call it.

PU can stay since it's technically the tier's name and not an acronym - people will probably think it's not in line with the rest of the tiering system at first, but to be honest, that can be remedied pretty quickly by a simple question. Yes, people now can ask what OU/UU/etc means, but that comes with the pitfall of no formatting backing it up, and will still seem relatively confusing, while the formatting of the drop-down Format list can portray correlation between the tiers, meaning that pretty much everyone except children could extrapolate the general standings of the tiers without even trying to.

 

[Magnemite]

PU can stay since it's technically the tier's name and not an acronym - people will probably think it's not in line with the rest of the tiering system at first, but to be honest, that can be remedied pretty quickly by a simple question. Yes, people now can ask what OU/UU/etc means, but that comes with the pitfall of no formatting backing it up, and will still seem relatively confusing, while the formatting of the drop-down Format list can portray correlation between the tiers, meaning that pretty much everyone except children could extrapolate the general standings of the tiers without even trying to.

This simple question you speak of seems like no big deal at first but it's insanely annoying when it's asked like 50 times per day and then derails the PS room when people continually talk about what they personally think it should stand for

As for the topic at hand, I really don't see any problem with the status quo. Like yeah it's not the most optimal way but I've always felt like changing the already long-established names would both be confusing for a lot of people and take tons of work to actually implement. I don't see how "being confusing to new players" is a huge issue when new players are always going to be confused about something and our current system isn't actually very confusing at all if you bother to look it up.

 

[Taliheim]

I completely get what you mean - although probably not that many will be directed towards the PU room, with the Help room being easily portrayed and accessed. And if it IS actually a problem, you could change the room description to say "we do not stand for anything", though that might not fix the latter part of your worry.

 

[Magnemite]

I completely get what you mean - although probably not that many will be directed towards the PU room, with the Help room being easily portrayed and accessed. And if it IS actually a problem, you could change the room description to say "we do not stand for anything", though that might not fix the latter part of your worry.

The problem isn't that the answer isn't easily found, the problem is that people don't know how to read

 

[Arcticblast]

Short post:

-Used is basically our brand at this point; changing it fucks things up a bit

Edit: you know you've made it when Legacy Raider likes your post

 

[DragonWhale]

This is most likely a dumb suggestion, but why not call PU "Please Use"? Up until "NeverUsed" the name implies that the usage is slowly going lower and lower, i.e. the players are less inclined to use them. After the "Never" mark we can call it as if Smogon is pleading to the player to use it lol

 

[Andy Snype]

Aldaron The point BKC made sarcastically is that regardless of whatever the discussion of this results, this isn't really going to make a difference as to whether or not people quit mons because this is just nomenclature about what we call the tiers rather than this being a discussion that actually affects how we play in-game. I disagree with most of his post except for the point heavily implied in his sarcastic comment:

(whoa! how can something be used less than never?! this incredibly minor detail is really throwing off my perfectly balanced zen and I am leaving competitive pokemon forever)

that nomenclature is a nebulous factor to determine whether or not people that want to play competitive pokemon, where the implication is that the 'detail' is extrapolated to nomenclature seeing the rest of BKC's post is nothing specific for supporting the nomenclature other than it's been around for so long for the community. There are more important factors for people to consider when they want to play Mons, i.e. the actual tier system of the mons and the presence of a fun / skill-rewarding/ <insert factor people like seeing or playing in Pokemon games> game.