[mtr]

Efficiency
To be honest, I fucked this one up pretty badly. I struggled with the general concepts behind this characteristic throughout the writing process. When I finally decided to push the whole document to finish, I didn't spend the proper time getting this characteristic into shape. It was the last characteristic, and I guess I got lazy. But, shortly after posting the OP, I really regretted how I presented Efficiency. I think Efficiency needs a complete overhaul.

For most of the time while writing the OP, the last characteristic was called "Simplicity". The overall goal of the characteristic was to say that we need to be practical and realistic in the implementation of rules for our metagame, and not make the metagame too complicated and convoluted. Many others have referred to this same general concept as wanting the "Simplest possible ruleset". I agree with that wholeheartedly, and I actually wrote the Simplicity characteristic that way originally.

But, at the last minute, I had second thoughts.

For one, I felt like using the word "Simple" in regards to a goal of the metagame, was too misleading. Because our metagame ISN'T simple. You could argue that in making our metagame, we have added all sorts of rules, conditions and strategies, that do not exist in normal ingame Pokemon. Basically, the metagame is a COMPLICATION on top of the Pokemon game. I thought it was a bit of an oxymoron to say "Let's make Pokemon complicated (by having a metagame), but let's keep it simple."

I was also concerned about the "public relations" aspects of plastering the word "Simplicity" as a clearly stated goal of our metagame. It's so hard to establish competitive Pokemon as a "serious pursuit". I felt like it might be a disservice to the community to imply to the rest of the world "We play a simplistic game, and we LIKE it that way." So I changed up the characteristic at the last minute, and steered away from the word "simple", and tried to phrase it in terms of "Efficiency", which seemed to be a decent compromise at the time.

I retrospect, "Efficiency" is fail as written. Somewhere during my last minute rewrite of the characteristic, I almost completely lost sight of the primary goal. Mea culpa.

For those of you that mention the need for a characteristic that encourages "the simplest possible ruleset", rest assured that I intend for the characteristic currently called "Efficiency" to serve that purpose. We may rename the characteristic entirely, or perhaps we may still use the word "Efficiency", for the same PR reasons I just mentioned -- but the wording of the characteristic needs to be changed completely, regardless of the name. I don't have any specific wording suggestions right now, but we can probably come up with better wording in a dedicated thread later.

Actually I think Sirlin may be somewhat useful to bring into the efficiency discussion. For example, let's say that we've tested Mew in OU, and using a lvl 93 Mew is the "best" strategy in OU. Why can't we ban lvl 93 Mew? Because then lvl 92 Mew becomes the best strategy, and so on. It's like banning camping in FPS games. As Sirlin puts it, why ban staying in one spot for 3 minutes if then staying in a spot for 2:59 becomes the best strategy?

A rule in a game must be discrete. Banning Mew or an Uber altogether is discrete. Banning things like lvl 85 Groudon is not. The extension of this is that discrete rules are the simplest possible rules.