Unified Diff of Smogon's OU vs Shoddy's 42 most popular

+Abomasnow is a fad.
+Jolteon is definitely worthy of OU
+Mamoswine is a Pokemon I thought was BL... but I guess the rise of Ice teams helps it.
+Milotic is a Pokemon that still has viability as a special tank.
+Scizor is an okay Pokemon... but I bet this one's mainly because it's a favourite of many.
+Snorlax is here because everyone's bored of Blissey.
+Spiritomb is a tank with base 50 Hp, 'nuff said.
+Umbreon is a useabl- *shot*

-Aerodactyl is a Pokemon totally worth OU, it has the movepool to OHKO a lot of sweepers (and outspeed them), but I suspect that it's not doing too well because of the stall teams running around, which he can't really do a whole lot to.
-Celebi is a Pokemon I've never looked into, or seen in competitive play.
-Dugtrio is usable, but suffers for the same reason as Aerodactyl.
-Rhyperior... HOLY CRAP! With all the stall teams running around, I thought he'd be second only to T-tar! Quite the scary Pokemon, though. I guess it got a little too much pre-DP hype.
-Slowbro another Poke worthy of OU... but IDk why he isn't used lots... Pursuit weakness?
-Suicune lost a bit coming into DP, IMO, but it shouldn't push something with such defenes out of OU.
-Mojo is worth OU. Base 100 Hp, and base 125 De. OU for sure. Use him, people. Good attacks, and support moves.
-Zapdos is BL, I guess.

+Abomasnow is a great subseeder and subpuncher.
+Jolteon is too predictable.
+Mamoswine has great STAB attacking types and respectable speed.
+Milotic is completely outdated in the modern metagame.
+Scizor is a powerhouse, if only for the SD Technician LO Quick Attack from hell.
+Snorlax is here because people remembered how good it was.
+Spiritomb has no weaks and 3 immunities.
+Umbreon.

-Aerodactyl is soon to be forgotten as Staraptor makes it look bad.
-Celebi was nearly uber last gen and remains amazing with seed, BP, and perish song.
-Dugtrio never works out.
-Rhyperior is too slow and dies to too much. Worst typing ever.
-Slowbro falls in the same pool as Milotic. Not good enough.
-Suicune see bulky water comments.
-Mojo dies to ember.
-Zapdos should be at the top, people are forgetting about it's great defensive abilities, U-turn, and Roost.



Just being argumentative.

Infernape_Kong said:

If that's the sole purpose, just 'would ya look at that, slowbro is getting more us this gen, interesting' rather than determining the potential of characters, why use it to determine which Pokes are banned from UU and NU battles? What's the point of 'woah, that's a clefable, you can't use thta in this UU battle, people are using it on OU teams now'?

If these are how the tier lists actually work, then we really ought to have two lists. One for practical purposes, one devised by debate and thinking rather than asking Colin for a list of Pokemon used a lot on Shoddy.

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And now you're forgetting the purpose of UU. The purpose of UU is to have Pokemon that you don't see much. If you allow Pokemon that are used often in there, that defeats the entire point of having UU.


I was outlining on Shoddy how I feel we ought to do tiers, and I should probably post it here. Rather than just lumping all Pokemon into a tier, so it's basically just a list, we could use the data we have to sort Pokemon by how often they are used and stick a number by it. This would show how the lowest used OU Pokemon is closer in usage to the most used BL and UU Pokemon than it is to Blissey.

And then I have a word of caution to all the people saying that the tiers should be based entirely on the most recent data from Shoddy. This brings us into another question of the purpose of tiers, and this one hasn't been addressed as well. Do we base tiers on long-term trends in usage, or in the more volatile fluctuations? If there is some "Mismagius gonna perish trap u!" trend going around, and it's thought that it will quickly pass, do we bump Mismagius up to OU for the duration, then drop it back down (assuming the usage goes up enough)? Or do we realize it's a transient fad and keep it at UU or BL?

In other words, the heart of the issue here is whether the tiers are designed to explain the past or predict the future. The first is going to be a lot more accurate (we have the data), but the second is more useful. However, even if we go the route of saying what has happened instead of making statements of what likely will happen, we still have the issue of how far back we go. In the future, we will not want to have the usage of Yanmega, Crobat, and Froslass from when people didn't realize how much they suck impacting the tiers of the aforementioned future (after people stop using sucky Pokemon as much). However, we also lose quite a bit of predictive power if we shorten it to just the Pokemon used that day (and that would make maintaining a UU team difficult).

If the statistics are gathered every month, I think the key should be take into account the statistics of up to the last 12 months, but weighted. The last month could have a normalized weight of 0.2, the second to last 0.15, then 0.1, or something like that, so that, while the latest months count more, they won't override the established tier list unless the "fad" is no longer and becomes a somewhat established trend.

Along with that, tiers could be revised only every 2 or 3 months, to dilute temporary trends even more.

Ah, I almost forgot! Even if an initial cutoff point for being OU is established (let's say 5%), if a pokémon that had a 4.9% usage previously raised to 5.1% in the next revision, it shouldn't be promoted. A high enough change should be necessary to get the OU status, to prevent minor fluctuations to interfere.

The initial cutoff percentage, necessary fluctuation for a promotion/demotion, number of months taken into account and their weight, plus the number of months that has to pass to revise the tier list should be the parameters to adjust in this proposed method. If they are adjusted well, I think it could provide an accurate ans stable enough list to be used.

Obi said:

Do we base tiers on long-term trends in usage, or in the more volatile fluctuations? If there is some "Mismagius gonna perish trap u!" trend going around, and it's thought that it will quickly pass, do we bump Mismagius up to OU for the duration, then drop it back down (assuming the usage goes up enough)? Or do we realize it's a transient fad and keep it at UU or BL?

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Hrm, I would think that the top X Pokemon are solidly established in use and will not change any time in the recent future, by virtue of "it must be a good Pokemon to be up so far in the first place" and simply because it will take a while for them to fall out even if they should permanently lose popularity.

So really, the issue would be the lower to middle end of OU, which is likely to fluctuate and exchange with BL as trends come and go - and I think that's fine. We can have a dynamic list to be updated every few months.

We can probably predict long-term trends that will stay by looking at how it exchanges every month. For example, Forretress and Tentacruel seem to have gotten a lot of use recently and we might predict that as being more than just a fad.

But really it should not matter if things exchange between BL and OU since both are useable in the standard metagame, there is no BL metagame, and both are banned from UU. Since UU/BL is determined by power, your comment "Or do we realize it's a transient fad and keep it at UU or BL?" would have us leave it at BL. And in my opinion that doesn't really matter because BL is just the less-used area of OU.

That's a really good point.

The fluctuations, unless they happen among those pokémon not powerful enough to be labeled as BL, won't affect the metagame that much because they will only mean changes from OU to BL and vice versa.

If the statistics are gathered every month, I think the key should be take into account the statistics of up to the last 12 months, but weighted. The last month could have a normalized weight of 0.2, the second to last 0.15, then 0.1, or something like that, so that, while the latest months count more, they won't override the established tier list unless the "fad" is no longer and becomes a somewhat established trend.

Along with that, tiers could be revised only every 2 or 3 months, to dilute temporary trends even more.

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Damn, that's what I was going to suggest.

If we were to ever do this dynamic tier list based on recent usage results (which I definitely suggest), there's no reason why it would have to discard the previous data. Or better yet, we can just have the tier list lag behind a month as such:

This month's usage reports.
This month's tier list based off of last month's usage.
The difference is a suggestion of what is going +/- and allows enough time for fads to die.

We will be updating the tier list soon, thanks for your input everyone.

Heh, I saw something weird between the two lists. I wonder why Porygon2 is #89 on the general usage list, but #82 on the weighted list.

That's a whole 7 ranks, so can someone tell me why experts favour the drinking bird so much more than the newer players? Heh, it just seemed cool to me. I rather like Porygon2, so yeah.

Probably because the newer players instantly assume it's a worse PorygonZ.

I stopped reading after post #78. And then I remembered another post-http://www.smogon.com/forums/showpost.php?p=23925&postcount=1

Why not just base the actual usage in tiers like that and then base power by having cutoff line betweeb each usage tier.

So by using this post as an example, ubers is tier1, OU/BL is tier2-4,UU is tier5-8 and NU is tier9-11.

I also think that OU & BL should just combine into one tier that has two lists based on usage since BLs aren't allowed into UU and if for some reason everyone stopped using salamence, it would just go to the bottom of the usage list while still remaining OU.

That list appears to be an actual "battle tier", and not "metagame tiers". That is, this list attempts to split pokemon into strengths and capabilities, while OU, UU and so forth attempt to instead create fun and balanced metagames (with the help of faux tiers like Ubers and BL)

We have yet to make a stable UU metagame, so it is a LONG time I think before we can even put D/P pokemon into a tier list like that.

chaos said:

We will be updating the tier list soon, thanks for your input everyone.

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Thats awesome. UU/BL is comming along smoothly as well. I sent groudon a PM so that a couple of quick and simple "understanding" tournaments can be held. I don't think it is time for UU to be put into even a test tournament, far too many pokemon nominated for testing right now (Pinsir, hitmonchan, swellow, steelix, torterra, etc. etc.)