This Policy Review is presented to you by both DougJustDoug and Rising_Dusk.If you are not an experienced member of the CAP community, it is strongly recommended that you do not post in this thread.
This thread is intended to contain intelligent discussion and commentary by experienced members of the CAP project regarding CAP policy, process, and rules. As such, the content of this thread will be moderated more strictly than other threads on the forum. The posting rules for Policy Review threads are contained here.
Introduction
The CAP metagame has always been the ugly duckling of CAP, a thing that has always been put at the back of our minds when it comes to developing CAPs. It isn't our primary concern, after all, what or how our CAPs do in a metagame with them all mashed together.. Or is it?
There is a very troubling issue that has arisen lately in the CAP metagame, that of revisions at large. Awhile back, Syclant, Revenankh, and Pyroak underwent major revisions to be up to date and on par with the rest of the CAPs. Recently, however, it has come to the attention of the community at large that some of these revisions have actually broken these CAPs in accordance with the Uber characteristics of Smogon. That this has happened indicates that there is a very fundamental issue at play here in CAP, one that must be addressed.
Secondly, Doug and I want to address something else that has been brought up time and time again. Accessibility of the CAP metagame. We have just completed our milestone CAP and broken into the double digits. We have 10 CAPs, and let me tell you, there are basically no good teams on the ladder that don't use at least 3 of them. The CAP metagame is looking more and more distant from OU with every CAP, and this is an issue for new players, especially now that the server isn't necessarily booming with CAP activity in the first place. You have to prepare for monstrous threats and things that you just don't have to worry about in OU. It's gotten to a point where I fear that an OU team without ample preparation for the CAP metagame cannot and will not do well. A proposal that simultaneously addresses this while fixing the revision issue at large would be a great boon to the CAP community.
The Problem
Revisions have no regulations around which they function. In the past, revisions have been very haphazard and more of a "Hey, maybe these things need to be revised because they kind of suck." They also had virtually no proper leadership and weren't supervised or organized properly. It ended up, tragically, becoming more of a flavor poll than anything competitive. If revisions are to continue, then a definitive and absolute policy for how they are to be run as well as how we determine if they are even necessary needs to be crafted and agreed upon.
That leads into another point that needs to be addressed, though. Why do we need revisions at all? The idea of a revision is that we fix something that we "failed" to do correctly the first time. Why should we create such a safety net for our CAPs? If anything, it makes more sense to put more pressure on the community to get it right the first time. If we didn't allow revisions at all, Topic Leaders would have to be absolutely certain that what they were doing was to the best of their and the community's ability. These are the sorts of things that will be primarily discussed in this Policy Review thread.
Proposal
Doug had suggested a possible solution for this to me, one that might seem a bit harsh at first, but that I think would really steer CAP in the right direction. No revisions. Ever. This puts a lot of pressure on the CAP process and community to get the CAPs right the first time.
This proposal takes it one step further, though. All CAPs must be accepted into the CAP metagame after the standard playtesting period takes place. After the standard playtesting period, we would have an "unlimited CAP metagame" stage where all CAPs are allowed and lasts for a week. During this week, players are able to test how all of the CAPs mesh together and discover for themselves how they interact and which ones should stay. It's important that these acceptance criteria be spelled out perfectly, but a good start is listed below.
We have to determine in any given season...
- which CAPs are too weak
- which CAPs are too strong
- which CAPs are poorly conceived
- which CAPs do not benefit the metagame enough to be worth having around
In order to determine who gets to vote on the answer to that question, Doug and I feel that a checks and balances between the server crowd and the forum community is in order. The top players of the previous CAP season, as ranked on the ladder and as interviewed by the mods, would be the people that get to vote on what's on the competitive slate for the next season. In this way, you'll see that the suggestion looks a lot like the Smogon Council, and it could indeed be our very own "CAP Council," a constantly updated group of relevant and current players from the server that determine which CAPs are used and which aren't.
This proposal is very exciting for me, and solves many of the problems CAP has been plagued by:
- "Get it right the first time" on the forum with new CAPs. As CAPs might not get accepted into the metagame, and no one wants that, there is a lot of pressure on the forum community to Create-A-Pokemon properly and not resort to fixing them after the fact.
- "The CAP Metagame is unplayable" is an oft-heard complaint that would be fixed with this. Things that are broken in the metagame or that the server users don't think are healthy for the metagame can simply not be accepted into it at the council's discretion. Furthermore, by removing certain CAPs that don't fit in a metagame, the metagame becomes more accessible to newcomers.
- Even if it bothers you, as the TL or a participant of CAP, that your CAP is not accepted into the CAP metagame, there is a chance that a future CAP can bring it back by making it interesting, useful, or more relevant. In this way, the disapproval of certain CAPs is not an irreversible or permanent tiering.
- It gives the server regulars some legitimate and serious control over the metagame. This is something I favor a lot, especially because I feel that the server users really deserve a say in what goes on here.
- The forum and server become "equal partners" in determining the future and success of the overall CAP project. This is perhaps the greatest achievement of this whole proposal, as it really meshes the server and the forum together into one meaningful conglomerate.