obi
formerly david stone
I would also like to make the following bold proposition:
The game will become increasingly centralized as time goes on. This effect is more pronounced the more stable the rules are.
My reasoning: In the beginning, people are less knowledgeable about what works and what doesn't. For this reason, even people who are "playing to win" will be playing with a wider variety of strategies. As time goes on, certain strategies are shown to be a huge liability, and therefore are used less. The standards prove themselves to be worthy of that title over time.
However, as a counterbalance to this, I also suspect that there is a stable equilibrium of centralization, and this is almost certainly above 6 Pokemon. This should be best viewed not as a number but a range. Consider the following scenario: There are only 6 Pokemon that are used enough to be OU. No matter what these 6 Pokemon are, there is a very specific way to beat them (a "counter team") a large proportion of the time.
Now this team is only as good as the number of people that use the original standardized, centralized team. As use of this counter team increases, use of the original team decreases, as it would have a horrid win:loss proportion against that counter team. However, by the very nature of the specificity of this team, it is likely vulnerable to a wide variety of other teams. The lowest equilibrium, therefore, it likely one super-powered "standard" team, the counter team, and then a variety of teams that still have a shot at beating the standard team and utterly trounce the counter team.
However, I suspect that this is more of a psychological "standardness" than a structural one. What I mean by that is if one player wins a lot with their team and posts about it explaining it, this will naturally encourage others to use that team. The team didn't get better (in fact, it got worse as people slowly adjust), but it still gains in usage for psychological reasons (people want to use the "winning" team, or the team just reminds them of Pokemon X they've been meaning to use).
In short, there are more things to centralization than just the legal Pokemon.
The game will become increasingly centralized as time goes on. This effect is more pronounced the more stable the rules are.
My reasoning: In the beginning, people are less knowledgeable about what works and what doesn't. For this reason, even people who are "playing to win" will be playing with a wider variety of strategies. As time goes on, certain strategies are shown to be a huge liability, and therefore are used less. The standards prove themselves to be worthy of that title over time.
However, as a counterbalance to this, I also suspect that there is a stable equilibrium of centralization, and this is almost certainly above 6 Pokemon. This should be best viewed not as a number but a range. Consider the following scenario: There are only 6 Pokemon that are used enough to be OU. No matter what these 6 Pokemon are, there is a very specific way to beat them (a "counter team") a large proportion of the time.
Now this team is only as good as the number of people that use the original standardized, centralized team. As use of this counter team increases, use of the original team decreases, as it would have a horrid win:loss proportion against that counter team. However, by the very nature of the specificity of this team, it is likely vulnerable to a wide variety of other teams. The lowest equilibrium, therefore, it likely one super-powered "standard" team, the counter team, and then a variety of teams that still have a shot at beating the standard team and utterly trounce the counter team.
However, I suspect that this is more of a psychological "standardness" than a structural one. What I mean by that is if one player wins a lot with their team and posts about it explaining it, this will naturally encourage others to use that team. The team didn't get better (in fact, it got worse as people slowly adjust), but it still gains in usage for psychological reasons (people want to use the "winning" team, or the team just reminds them of Pokemon X they've been meaning to use).
In short, there are more things to centralization than just the legal Pokemon.
I was talking about the specific case of Wobbuffet and Deoxys-S, not unbanning in general.Then why is it that unbanning everything (i.e. playing ubers) would give you only 14 'OU' Pokemon?
Is this according to your old predictive function, your current one, or just a raw top 75% calculation?And the OU list consists of 47 Pokemon if you COUNT Wobbuffet and Deoxys-S. That means you have 45 Pokemon, plus Wobbuffet plus Deoxys-S.