How to handle different rulesets

In Gen5 there are 4 different battle styles, singles, doubles, triples and rotation battles. This in itself gives 4 different rule sets, add in the possible inclusion or exclusion of the miracle shooter and the optional mechanic of viewing the opponents team before the match like in wifi battles and we have 16 possible rulesets. This number increases even further when you consider that within each rule set different tiers like OU UU and little cup could exist.

This large number of possibilities is probably more than smogon is capable of handling, so decisions need to be made on which rule sets should receive official support and tiering(I personally think that it would be a huge mistake to use the same tier lists for different formats with the possible exception of viewing your opponents team before the match as it is a relatively minor change.)

Discuss what you think should be done to manage the large number of different possible rule sets in Gen5.

Depending on how VGC is run, the official Doubles (or Triples) rules should be the VGC ruleset, no questions asked.

Singles will be handled the same way they have been, hopefully using a refined version of the UU testing process (which I have advocated, feel free to chime in in that thread).

As for non-Singles non-VGC metagames, that's going to be an interesting proposition. I'd like to hear some more input from players that play metagames other than Singles for that.

As for Miracle Shooter, I'd prefer to just see it barred from the majority of competitive play, though obviously if VGC allows it it'd be folly not to allow its use in whatever metagame VGC takes place in.

I'd also like to move for team viewing to be absolutely unconditionally allowed at the beginning of all metagames.

Hi, I have been messing around with Rotation battles, and I have absolutely fallen in love with it. I would like to urge everybody to try it out too, as I think once people are familiar with it they'll enjoy it a lot as well. I definitely would like to see some official support for Rotation battles. Here are some neat mechanics that change the way the game is played:

• Contrary to popular belief, Rotation battles are not Triples battles -- Rotation battles are most similar to Singles battles if anything.
  • When a Pokemon is rotated out, all of its effects get carried along with it. In other words, you really only rotate Pokemon out to put them on standby, and when they come back in, it's as if they never left the match at all. The "effects" that a Pokemon keeps include:
    • Any stat buffs/debuffs
    • Toxic/Sleep counters
    • Leech Seed
    • Effects of Encore, Taunt, etc.
    • Move locks from Choice items
• When you rotate a Pokemon in/out, they do not receive damage from entry hazards at all.
• Rotations happen before move are conducted, which means that if you want to keep something alive until the end, your opponent cannot stop you from doing so in any way (Pursuit can't hit you if you're rotating out).
  • Yes, you can rotate a Pokemon in and attack with them on the same turn.
• You cannot Baton Pass or U-turn to Pokemon on the Rotation Grid.

There are a lot more neat little mechanics that we have yet to fully discover, but this style of play seems really sweet so far. There's a lot more prediction involved, seeing as you have a lot more things to keep track of and watch out for (something can essentially switch in, not take entry hazard damage, resist your attack, and attack you back all in one turn!). The biggest problem with making this an official metagame obviously is that since the mechanics are so different from any other style of play, we would need to do some hefty work to a simulator to get it to be functional. I hope this isn't the preventing factor for officially supporting Rotation battles, though.

Anyways, this is just the first of probably many Rotation battle plugs you'll see from me. I'd really like to see us go somewhere with it.

Seven Deadly Sins said:

I'd also like to move for team viewing to be absolutely unconditionally allowed at the beginning of all metagames.

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Why?

It's very, very easy to justify not having this be absolutely, unconditionally allowed, unlike any other game mechanic we don't want to implement.

Unlike other game mechanics, we can treat a simulated battle as one mediated by a judge. At the beginning of the battle, the Judge covers the top screen of each DS and then your team must be picked in the order you submitted your team.

This particular solution was discussed when someone proposed using PBR mechanics to implement soft sleep clause and no one seemed to mind back then.

Because whining about a mechanic and bending over backwards not to implement it because people are crying about something THEY HAVE NEVER PLAYED is fucking silly.

I'm not whining about it. Consider it analogous to blind character selection for a fighting game. Generic fighting game mechanics generally mandate both players pick their character at the same time. This obviously doesn't work in a tournament setting, so judges mandate blind selection. I don't see why we can't at least consider the same, and why we have to dismiss any discussion of seeing if that's viable as "whining".

Blind character selection is a necessity in a fighting game because of the possibility of counterpicking before the game begins. If anything, teambuilding is analogous to blind character selection, because you don't know who your opponent is using until the beginning of the game.

Anyway, there is no reason to just ban this because a couple people that want to keep using their Vileplumes "for surprise value" may find it objectionable. There's no way that the mechanic is "broken", and implementing more non-enforceable rules on simulators just serves to broaden the divide between "the Wi-Fi metagame" and "the Simulator metagame".

I'm not actually arguing the merits of one or the other, I just made the analogy and brought up the point to show that it's totally not outside the realm of possibility like a lot of people seem to think it is. The analogy just shows how it's not unreasonable to make such a "mechanic modification" vis a vis other games.

Chris is me said:

Unlike other game mechanics, we can treat a simulated battle as one mediated by a judge. At the beginning of the battle, the Judge covers the top screen of each DS and then your team must be picked in the order you submitted your team.

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You have got to be joking.

Chris is me said:

I'm not actually arguing the merits of one or the other, I just made the analogy and brought up the point to show that it's totally not outside the realm of possibility like a lot of people seem to think it is. The analogy just shows how it's not unreasonable to make such a "mechanic modification" vis a vis other games.

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SDS just explained why your analogy doesn't work. People already have the equivalent of double blind pick in Pokemon. We make our teams before the battle. If you want a fighting game analogy, it's like showing all 3 members of the team on Marvel vs Capcom 3 before the battle starts - which MvC3 does.

Anyway, I think instead of making decisions on these one by one, it's easier if we stay consistent. First we decide if we want to simulate local adhoc, wifi, or IR play, then we base our decisions moving forward on that.

I like the idea of sticking with local wireless and using however that's set up like we did with Shoddy. That allows the use of things like Rotom versions and is what will be used in any local tournaments like Nintendo's or the ones the UK Smogonites have been running.

I'd honestly like to emulate WiFi as far as mechanics go, simply because it minimizes the "Sim-Wifi" gap that tends to occur when sims emulate a method of play that isn't the common irl method of play. Most non-sim play is going to occur on WiFi because it's the easiest to access, and all others require everyone to be right next to one another, which is obviously unfeasible.

When I first played Gen 5 on Wi-Fi, I thought team viewing was going to be the end of prediction. I thought it was going to be broken, and I thought it was going to be just as "bad" as an endless string of Shoddy rematches against the same player over and over and over again.

Then I played with the mechanic a few times. Sure there are some differences, but it's far from "the end of the world" that myself and a lot of other Gen 4 battlers were predicting.

While "scouting" in the traditional sense is largely gone, you still don't know what the opponent is going to lead with, what their movesets are, etc. And if you think about it, most people don't just shoot off "random" predictions in a "blind" match without first having seen their opponent's team anyways.

I'd hate to see an environment in which the Shoddy and Wi-Fi metagame were so different based on a fundamental rule change that strategies and maybe even whole teams that are viable in one are not very viable in the other. Note that when I say "based on a fundamental rule change," I am not referring to the fact that nobody plays stall on Wi-Fi because two hour long battles are boring (they are).

And of course, it goes without saying that both players have access to the same information about each other, so there is no advantage being given to one over the other. You still both pick your leads independently, and neither player gets to see what the other has chosen in that regard.


All that being said, we also need to determine what to do about the Miracle Shooter both on Shoddy and in our standard ruleset. Since I personally find the idea of stalling for 12 turns to get an instant +6 in one of your stats (or, since points carry over and you don't have to use all of them at once, any turn after that when your opponent doesn't instinctively spam Whirlwind) or stalling for 14 turns to revive your Forretress with 64 Rapid Spin PP to waste until it can't fight anymore to be absurd, and since the Miracle Shooter can easily be turned off by a menu option when you host a game, I would like to see it left out of our standard metagame. I really don't want to see a game of strategy and skill boil down into an item-based crapshoot.

Everyone needs to think bigger.

The Smogon University ShoddyBattle server hosted over 600,000 battles per month, with battles contested on three rated ladders. The smallest ladder on that server (Ubers) hosted ~20,000 battles per month. That ladder was "playable". Maybe it wasn't the most active ladder in the world, but it was sufficient traffic to sustain an active and involved player base. On the CAP server, we sustain a niche metagame with less than 5,000 battles per month. That ladder has sporadic activity, but it has sustained a niche battling community for three years and counting.

Pokemon Laboratory is currently on pace to host roughly THREE MILLION battles this month.

Stop and think about that for a second. There are 80,000 to 100,000 battles PER DAY being conducted on PokeLab right now. That is a massive increase over anything we have ever experienced on ShoddyBattle. I can speculate many reasons for this dramatic increase in battle traffic, but that's really not the point of this post.

I think it is very short-sighted to think of the Pokemon metagame in terms of a single battling format, or a small number of battle formats. With literally millions of battles per month being conducted, there will be an appetite for many different battle formats. And each of those formats will be able to host a competitive ladder and sustain adequate activity to make it competitive. But it will require us to shift our thinking and free ourselves from the limited mindset of "one singles OU ladder" as "THE metagame". Yes, one ladder may end up having the majority of traffic. I don't know if that will be singles, VGC, rotation battles, whatever. It really doesn't matter, because a vast increase in battle traffic is an opportunity for us to satisfy a wide range of battler interests.

The OP makes the assumption that we cannot handle the large number of battling formats that are possible in the 5th generation. My response is -- Yes we can.

I'm not literally suggesting that every single combinatorial permutation of battle formats be implemented as a distinct competitive ladder on PokeLab. But, I would rather start from 16/20/whatever large number of metagame formats and "trim down" from there, rather than start with the assumption that 2 or 3 metagames is the desired norm and begrudgingly work upwards.

Think bigger. A lot bigger.

Based on traffic, the collective battling community is already thinking much bigger than ever before...

holy.. three million battles? In the first month? Anyway, especially given that I would support starting off with a wide range of formats. If two turn out to be very similar we should trim down the less popular one, but all rulesets which have significant interest should be catered for on our sim. At the start we don't know exactly which will be most popular, so we should be as inclusive as reasonably possible (tiers which are identical other than a few bans would be unreasonable). The most important principle I would like to take into 5th gen tiering is this:

.. it will require us to shift our thinking and free ourselves from the limited mindset of "one singles OU ladder" as "THE metagame".

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In order to embrace this a lot of changes will be needed around the site, for example the way analyses are handled will need careful thinking about (tier specific analyses for a dozen tiers? more generalized analyses for similar tiers?), official and unofficial but non-gimmick tournaments could be given more variety (additions of the most widely played metagames to the tour and SPL), tiering processes for not just a large number of tiers but a significant number of rulesets running simultaneously could be a nightmare even with the new efficient system which is likely to be in place. Handling what we count as "UU" when a Pokemon is common in one ruleset, but not another.. there is a lot to sort out, and I've not even touched on the necessary mindset changes. But I believe it is worth the effort, and that competitive Pokemon will be a vastly better game as a result if we succeed.

Syberia said:

don't want to see a game of strategy and skill boil down into an item-based crapshoot.

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How is miracle shooter a crapshoot? There's no luck involved at all. It just adds another layer of strategy.

That said, I don't think anyone wants MS to be the standard metagame but a lot of people want a separate ladder for it.


On another subject, I agree with SDS that we need to emulate wifi since that's the way most competitive matches will be played in gen 5. As hiding teams is unenforceable on wifi we must force revealed teams for all competitive ladders.

I don't have any issues with anything that happens on a separate ladder, and it would probably be beneficial to have as many different rulesets as people are willing to play.

I agree with the_artic_one. If you don't like miracle shooter, just say that. Don't make up BS like "I really don't want to see a game of strategy and skill boil down into an item-based crapshoot." to rationalize your response.

I'd like to mention that even though this thread is about how to handle the possible large amount of different rulesets that have been introduced in Gen 5, with the introduction of Pokemon Lab, a lot of different rulesets are available already in Gen 4.
There is already a VGC ladder next to the standard ladder, and even though doubles or triples or sextuple (we need a different name for this) doesn't have their own ladder, these battles are also possible at the moment.
I've seen a few RMTs sprouting up for sextuple battles as well, posted in the OU RMT forum. This and that one, for example.
Now, I don't know how big a playerbase there is for these varying rulesets, but I'm assuming that if Lab is on it's way towards having 3 million battles this month, this could also be in part of the added playstyles/rulesets introduced with Pokemon Lab. I'm sure Doug can provide us far more accurately at the end of the month how many battles have been done, what rulesets have been used, etc.

The reason I'm saying this, is because this thread seems like a speculation what rulesets may or may not be viable when Gen 5 comes around. However, some of the rulesets being mentioned (VGC, Doubles and Triples) are already possible on Pokemon Lab, right now, in the 4th gen. Even though I don't feel we should immediately switch to accomodating all these rulesets that are now possible, and re-arranging the forum and site for these rulesets in Gen.4, I do feel we can use this time to accurately measure how much battles are being held under each ruleset.
We could use this information in this transition time to Gen 5 to see what rulesets are more popular and which are less popular. In other words, which rulesets could or should be officially adopted as a standard laddered ruleset, and which shouldn't.
Following on that, we could also use this information to figure out what changes are exactly needed to the site and forums when we know what to expect from what amount of rulesets we are talking about. (And keep in mind that Gen V will introduce another two rulesets that aren't possible as of yet, Miracle Shooter and Rotation Battles)

To sum up, I don't believe we should hastily officially implement all the different rulesets Pokemon Lab has to offer now and accomodate them officially by rearranging the forums and sites. I do believe that we can use this time where these rulesets are already possible for play on the simulator, to make the transition to Gen 5 much smoother, when it'll be likely that we will be accomodating more rulesets than we are now.