Someone has to crash the party :(
To me, CAP 3 has been a learning experience not just for competitive Pokémon (though there's certainly room to learn more by actually using Mollux) but also for the process itself and the people participating in the project. Deck Knight honestly got dealt a very bad hand here. CAP 3 started in the wake of leadership drama, the likes of which haven't occurred in CAP in a very long time (I sure don't remember anything). Many once prominent CAP participants left between CAP 2 and CAP 3 for one reason or another: Jibaku, reachzero, DarkSlay, zarator, tennisace, Rising_Dusk near the end... I'm afraid that the lack of influence from people who have "been there" have caused the CAP community to become more confused and directionless, causing even more drama. I can't possibly imagine how anyone found the more heated CAP 3 discussions fun. They were trainwrecks. Again, I really can't blame Deck Knight for all of this; I disagreed with how he handled some things, but all things considered, I'm just glad he didn't blow up or something.
If we are to continue to try to make successful CAP projects that give us a better idea of "the metagame", we're going to have to learn (and relearn, in many cases) some hard lessons from how this project went along, as well as possibly the playtest. I say this because there have been a lot of newer users who have won with first submissions. Let's take a look at how the competitively driven submissions panned out:
Concept: Theorymon - a CAP mod, but still a relatively new contributor. His concept ended up being interpreted in wildly different ways, and the resulting disputes got settled with a vote where people didn't really get the benefit of understanding the purpose of each option.
Stats: Rising_Dusk - a relative veteran, but one who really disliked the concept and basically made his stats for the purpose of Drought. Lack of information once again plagued this stage and the secondary ability stage, as the stat spread made for Drought was paired with... Illuminate.
Movepool: nyttyn - new. When he started out making his movepool, he went in with no idea of how a movepool should generally be structured. Over the next week and a half, people helped him trim down his movepool, mainly to fit in with the canon, but without much to say on the actual competitive moves. The more I think about it, the more I think the combination of Stealth Rock + Rapid Spin + Recover + Toxic Spikes might end up being overpowered. We'll see come playtest, though. His attitude about winning this really bothers me, too.
Now, I'm not saying that it's bad for new contributors to win. It's great for new contributors to win, or for a winning submission to be used in an unintended manner. It's another matter entirely when these happen to all three competitive submission stages. To me, it is an indicator that there's some serious reflection to do, at least when the playtest is done. People are already telling me that they don't know what Mollux was supposed to be about.
I really do hope that the playtest proves my fears about Mollux wrong, but that doesn't seem likely. Either way, I don't believe that we should continue like this and end up repeating mistakes from the past.
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