Pokémon Taboo — the untouchable topics

With each passing day, and every new revelation or product of tireless research, Unchartered Territory gets a better idea of what to expect when the competitive Diamond & Pearl metagame is finally established. This subtle solidification will not occur for quite some time after the games are officially released, though. So we should still make sure to exercise some patience on a few hot topic issues and not let either our excitement or our assumptions, however educated, get the best of us.

There are still a few topics on which there is no use in debating/discussing currently, and such discussion threads are robbing our board from benefitting from discussion that actually can be held intelligibly. These topics are as follows:

• DP's Tier System
  We don't have a metagame yet, guys, so how can we tell which pokémon belong where? More importantly, what good does it do us to speculate to such ends regardless?
• Double Team
  Lost among the multitude of opinionated posts on this subject in the past six or so months on this board has been a general consensus that Double Team, without Baton Pass, may end up not being as cheap as we would be inclined to think from prior generations. That, literally, is that. What use is it to discuss it any further besides actually discussing on what timetable we can test such things?
• The Tiering of specific "borderline uber" pokémon
  Technically, this falls under the Tiering system, but I'll use this bullet to specify, for posterity, that Darkrai, Ho-oh and Tyranitar's status in uber cannot be determined without testing, so please stop talking about them in that regard. As with Double Team, the real issue is how easily we can go about testing it without reinventing the wheel, why is why we are not very keen on testing Double Team with Baton Pass since it's pretty obvious that Zapdos, Umbreon and Ninjask would still greatly constrict the standard competitive metagame if they were allowed in.
• Gain some battling experience by any means possible, if you have not already, should you desire to intelligently contribute to our discussion topics.
  It may not seem fair to impose such a mandate, but it is evident to myself and my fellow moderators and admins that a good number of you are basing your arguments on either faulty or non-existent battle experience. Some of you even actually admit to never having played competitively, yet cannot wait to sound off on why you think Tyranitar is uber or why Double Team isn't that hard to beat. This topic on bias, tone and perspective by Mekkah underlines some of the points you'll want to keep in mind when discussing things even if you are an experienced battler. But please, until you've gotten your feet wet, be a little fair to us as a board and hold your respective tongue on such competitive battling issues. If you can't, we'll have to do it for you, and there are no ways about that.

I'll be hyperlinking the most recent offenses so you all have a better idea of what kinds of discussion our moderation would like to come to an end.


Thanks,

Jump

http://www.smogon.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19146