Banning in Gen 5

[Chou Toshio]

First I'll say that fundamentally, I agree very much with Maniaclyrasist, and that I agree with pretty much everything Doug said. From 4th gen it became clear that tiering was subjective, and we were not pursuing anything objective like some aloof concept of balance, but were merely constructing a "desired" metagame. To me, there's nothing wrong with that.

Do I think that we have gotten to be ban happy? Yes. Do I think it is startling to look at the number of nominations and bans? Yes.

But . . . when I actually read the nominations, do I heavily disagree with them? . . . no, not necessarily.

This probably goes back to Jabba's post but, there seems to be an awfully distinct rivet between "those who play the game," and "those who don't."

Due to my absence from my computer for the last month (most of my posts were via iPod), I didn't get to really participate in Round II, but I played Round I extensively and intensely. When you continue to play the ladder for hours you begin to understand. I think the opinions of those who do play heavily are more unified than one would expect. Even if not unified regarding "how to" fix the problems, we all "see the problems." It's not about comfort zones, but about the reality of how undesirable the current metagame is. Even without playing Round II (and have refrained from nominating for it), I can still imagine from Round I the abilities and impact of many of the nominees. "Drizzle, Landlos, Latios, Doryuuzu, Kingdra, Garchomp, Nattorei, Rankurusu...etc" with the exceptions of Garchomp and Nattorei (and obviously non-drizzle Kingdra), I can't really say I disagree with the others. The I really do believe the meta would be better off without them.

To give you an idea: in the 1st round of play, even with Darkrai and co., my team's only options for beating Rankurusu were A) sleep it B) Trick-Scarf it C)Hope it's a Trick Room variant and hope I get lucky playing round it. If it was a calm minder and I couldn't pull off A or B, I would lose. Needless to say I'm not about to agree with those who find a Ranku ban laughable.

Coming from this difference of "people who have actually played" and "people who haven't" it's very difficult to see eye-to-eye, and I'd say I definitely see things differently now than I did in 4th Gen (when I played less).

Honestly, can you say that those who play and make the nominations are the ones "stuck in the past"? Maybe the ones who are "stuck" are the ones who haven't yet come to terms with OU's identity as a subjective desired metagame, and not come to terms with the resulting bigger ban list. I mean-- there are more pokemon, that the ban list should also become bigger makes sense.



. . . also, with this dialogue, I would encourage everyone to stop throwing around (or even using) the phrases "broken" or "balanced" or like language . . . because frankly, none of us really know what you are talking about when you use them. Those terminology are far to vague to even be useful to dialogue except to talk about how hollow and unuseful they are (see Doug's post).

 

[undisputed]

I really agree with Chou toshio about the divide between players that actually play and those that don't. A lot of this anti ban crap has been coming from people who, frankly put, don't play enough to really understand why things are nominated. Rankurusu is the perfect example. It's so obviously over powered to good players it's ridiculous. Rain was like this last round. I hate to bring up the huge contrast between PR members and non PR members, but I believe it really speaks volumes.

I want to play in a fun metagame. This one isn't fun. I think we should adopt this philosophy.

 

[Rhys DeAnno]

I hate to bring up the huge contrast between PR members and non PR members, but I believe it really speaks volumes.

Well, it definitely does speak volumes, but it does this independent of skill level. As we saw last round, members who had already been in PR had 21 for banning Drizzle and 3 against (3 abstains), and those who were not had 3 for banning Drizzle, 14 against (6 abstains). While old PR members definitely hold certain opinions very consistently, there is a large population of newer or previously less connected players with objectively similar skill level that seem to have different ideas.

 

[undisputed]

I am suggesting that these new ideas are probably a lack of general experience. The posters in PR likely have participated in previous votes and can use past precedent to determine future outcome. There is no objective standard to make a vote, and while the majority of PR members share common experience, these new players are merely shooting in the dark for the most part. I feel that the fact that rain can be beaten made non PR posters vote one way and the precedent that rain takes a decent amount of preparation to beat made PR posters vote the opposite.

And by no means am I calling anyone bad or stupid, I just believe that some players are operating under different reasoning than that used by players that have shaped tiers up until gen 5. I feel like some votel results are skewed by the different criterion used by old and new users alike, and I am obviously partial to the criteria older players use because of their tiering experience.

Edit: I'm going to use myself as an example. The latias vote was my first suspect vote. I originally thought it wasn't broken and planned to vote it OU. I thought it was perfectly beatable, which it is. However, after talking with some of my friends that are some of the best players around, my viewpoint changed. I started to realize that latias might require a little more effort than a team can afford to ensure coverage. Scizor and ttar the two main counters were slaughtered by the specs set which really convinced me. However while I was new and knew nothing different than the latias meta, I was inclined to keep the status quo because it was beatable. I realized for the vote that the status quo was a good meta, but the one without latias was better. Even if only a little.

Also, the part about some players not playing enough to understand why things are being nommed is directed at some other PR members; not recent voters. Sorry if that was a misunderstanding.

 

[Chou Toshio]

tl;dr, there may be some real difference of opinion between the groups:

a) Have played recently / taken part in voting and have PR access
b) Have PR access but haven't played enough recently
c) Have played a lot but don't have / only recently got PR access

Keeping in mind significant variation of opinion even inside each of these groups.

 

[shrang]

I'm going to echo the sentiments on the abstaining. If someone has decided to abstain, it does NOT mean they don't want to vote, which means can't be ignored in terms of the total outcome.

One thing I'm really concerned about it the lack of required reasoning behind voting. Right now, if you meet the voting requirements (1400), you get to vote. However, this means you can vote however you like, as long as you get the requirements, if you really hate a Pokemon, you can ban it. You don't have to provide reasoning whatsoever. While the paragraph system in 4th gen was really tedious and annoying, it still provided a way for people reason their vote and make it more legitimate while keeping those who don't know what they were talking about out of our voting process. A good player is not necessarily a good debater, neither is he/she necessarily a good decision maker. The paragraph system at least helped us weed out people who don't know what they're on about. While I don't want to see the paragraphs themselves implemented, I'd still like some sort of way to discriminate between good, logically thinking players from just the good players who are good at battling only and nothing else.

 

[Chou Toshio]

I think a lot of people are banning stuff under the pretense of it being "broken", and I think empirical evidence proves that there are very few "broken" Pokemon out there. This was true in the 4th generation too. [....]

But, by virtue of the Uber metagame's mere existence, I think we proved that our concept of "banning broken pokemon" was completely flawed. We banned pokemon that were unpopular amongst certain players. And that's what we are continuing to do in the 5th generation. I'm not saying that is a bad thing. In fact, when I posted my thread on Characteristics of a Desirable Pokemon Metagame -- I used the term "DESIRABLE" very deliberately. tl;dr We strive to create a metagame we LIKE TO PLAY, not simply arrive upon the barest banlist that will produce a metagame that we CAN PLAY.

But people continue to persist this notion that voting to ban a pokemon is based on the concept that it MUST be banned to make the metagame competitive. That's not true. That hasn't been true for a very long time.

Shrang, I think you have to face the fact that OU is built on people's preferences, their desires for the metagame. It's not about achieving any goal except making "the game the players want."

It took a long time for smogon to realize (and we wasted a lot of time really) that no matter what, tiering is for the players, the metagame is for the players, and it's going to come down to subjective preferences anyway.

This is why Phil specifically said "use any reasoning you want," because we cannot be sure what it is we want.

The players all have different desires, preferences and so forth, but it is as a group that we must use these preferences to tier.

Hearing the reasoning behind the votes is largely pointless in this context.

When "good" and "bad" for the meta can't be defined, or even why something would be good or bad, tiering is purely about player preferences. Hearing the reasoning behind said player preferences would be largely pointless.

 

[ToF]

Everyone is gonna have some form of personal bias when nominating Pokemon for suspect voting, regardless of how experienced or good they are at the game. It's just a part of human nature to be more inclined to nominate things that you have difficulty dealing with. For this reason, I like and suggest that the new suspect team require paragraphs once again to weed out those that qualify at an arbitrary rating from those that qualify and have sound reasoning behind their nomination reason. It's one thing to qualify for voting at an arbitrary rating number and then nominating things that troubled your team on your ladder run as a quick-fix to make your team better. It's another thing to actively look at the metagame as a whole and determine several controversial Pokemon or abilities that make it unhealthy based on your playing experience.

On more controversial nominations like Rankurusu and Landlos, you need sound reasoning as to whether they are justified as suspects. If the power of bandwagoning is really strong, a way to mitigate this is to require individual paragraphs from members. This essentially weeds out those who actually know what they are talking about from A METAGAME PERSPECTIVE from those who are simply nominating it from A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE. Yes it's more time consuming obviously, but I think it was the best way to get a knowledgeable pool of voters who care more about the general health of the game rather than their own personal list of problematic Pokemon. Those that are simply bandwagoning other people's nominations will obviously show a lack of depth in knowledge and reasoning in their paragraphs.

So, in summary, rating numbers should only be half of the suspect process. I know paragraphs will be much more time-consuming, but if you're really looking to the quality of the voting pool, this is the only way to really make sure every nomination has a purpose other than personal bias.

 

[Nails]

I know paragraphs will be much more time-consuming, but if you're really looking to the quality of the voting pool, this is the only way to really make sure every nomination has a purpose other than personal bias.

If you can bother spending the time building a team that's good enough to reach the voting requirement on the ladder, and then spend the time actually battling on the ladder to raise your rating high enough, then surely it's not too much more to ask to have voters write 3-4 sentences on why they think certain pokemon are broken.

I'd like to throw out the idea that the nominations thread be blind, to prevent bandwagoning. People can post what they themselves have determined to be broken instead of what other people say is broken.

 

[capefeather]

I do agree that perhaps this thread is a bit presumptuous about what's going to happen. We haven't even gotten the vote going yet, and maybe the voters will be a lot more conservative than the nominators were. Whatever we do, we shouldn't be so harshly judging these nomination posts or the users who post them. Open-mindedness goes both ways.

Any way you look at it, though, the length of a lot of the nomination posts (some from "respected" users) is more than a little bit worrying. In the past, we've very readily seen the huge metagame shifts that have resulted from the banning or unbanning of one or two Pokémon (e.g. ducks UU, Salamence ban, Arceus introduction to Uber), so having so many Pokémon on the chopping block seems presumptuous in itself, even if all of these seem to be crossing the line. That's where my worries of people striving for some sort of specific, unrealistic "ideal" are coming from. Maybe we really only need to ban one or two of these things. "Fairness" means nothing to me, and I'm not convinced that any of us really know sufficiently the consequences of one ban compared to another, so I'm more and more inclined to default to simple modifications to the ruleset. If Drizzle is banned, for example, lots of good checks to the other stuff might rise up. I won't go by "broken" vs "not broken", because a lot of the nominations admittedly are convincing; I'll go by "most broken".

 

[Chou Toshio]

So, in summary, rating numbers should only be half of the suspect process. I know paragraphs will be much more time-consuming, but if you're really looking to the quality of the voting pool, this is the only way to really make sure every nomination has a purpose other than personal bias.

The issue with that is not the work to write paragraphs, but the reading of paragraphs.

A) Who has the right to read and judge these paragraphs and deem what's "unbiased" and "reasonable" and what's not? In retrospect, it really wasn't fair to give Jump that kind of power, and even Phil and his advisers should avoid such a position now.

B) It may be some work to write them but it's a shit lot of work to read all of them!

No matter how I look at it, paragraph writing is a really pointless practice-- definitely pointless in regards to "removing bias"

Putting logistics and politics aside, the point of Doug (and my) earlier posts is that tiering is going to be inherently about preference-- in other words, it's about people's bias. Disillusioning yourself to think otherwise, that we are aiming for some "great purpose" is ridiculous frankly.

conclusion: There's really no point in "trying to weed out bias." Not only is it futile, it's trivial.

 

[Philip7086]

Speaking as someone who might be considered one of the most ban-happy persons of the 4th gen, even I agree with the sentiments in the OP. Lets try to keep a few things in mind here, though.

1. Suspect Nominators != Voters

Sometimes when I read the suspect nomination posts, I can't help but shake my head. Luckily, the people who qualify as voters are not always the same people, and they tend to post less and more logical suspect nominations (I say "tend" to because I know this isn't always true). So with that in mind, don't be fooled by what you read in the nomination thread -- ban-happy people will always be vocal and so it will always appear as if our community as a whole is ban-happy. Appearances can be deceptive!

If you look at the votes from the first round of testing, I think you'd be surprised to see how reluctant our voter pool is to ban things. Manaphy and Drizzle, which utterly dominate the metagame, didn't hit a super majority. Latios, who everybody thought was ridiculously broken in 4th gen didn't even hit a simple majority. The only questionable ban was Deoxys-N which I believe was theory-banned more than anything (I also completely agree with this ban, and think that Deoxys-N would have been just as good as Deoxys-A... but that's just one man's opinion). I think as far as voter results goes, we're not looking as bad as the suspect nomination threads make it out to be.

2. Nominations Get Screened

My Policy Review team and I read through all the nominations and hand-pick which Pokemon/abilities we feel have a legitimate reason for being put on trial. This means that you will never see something like Charmander up for vote (or to be more realistic, Nattorei). If you haven't noticed, every one of my team members (except lazy ass Gouki) have posted in this thread agreeing with the OP. I hope that you can trust in us to not allow bad nominations through.

3. The System Can Now Correct Itself

Lets not forget that all users are allowed to nominate banned Pokemon to be tested in the OU environment. This means that if by some chance a Pokemon was wrongfully banned, users can easily step in and say "Hold on, let's revisit that". I think if the people posting in this thread used the same amount of effort to unban a specific Pokemon, the motion would easily go through!

-----

So yeah, despite how things may appear at a glance, I'm not completely convinced that there is a real issue at hand... yet. I'd like to ask that no conclusions be drawn until we see the results of this round of testing. If we find that our voters are, indeed, too ban-happy (subjective, really), then we can start rioting in the streets about how the end of the world is near. If it comes to that, I already have some solutions that I've contemplated which I would like to propose. But like I said, lets not jump to conclusions here.

Thanks for the good thread Maniac.

 

[Giga Punch]

I agree with the OP.

I think in the most general sense as this is a new generation of pokemon and a metagame still in its early forms that we should as Doug mentioned be using the process of voting then banning a pokemon as a final extreme. Opinions will always vary on what one user feels is "broken" and should be nominated as opposed to what another user feels is just "really good". While I was not a voter last round as opposed to this round of suspect testing, the voting results clearly produced banned pokemon whether or not you voted agree or disagree with said results. With the possible exception of Deoxys-n which may have just been lumped with Deoxys-a, three pokemon and one ability were deemed by majority that the 'final extreme' must be taken upon them and the affects they have in the metagame. Whereas Drizzle, Manaphy, Latios, and other popular variables did not reach that majority at least to be banned last round.

As opinions differ and naming nominations I do not particularly agree with would be fairly pointless, the "controversial" nominations (for lack of a better word) such as those that become that much better (or simply some of the best choices the metagame has to offer selection wise) when in their preferred weather, rankurusu, or nattorei to just name the more popular examples. All nominations should be reflected upon as whether their affects on the metagame really deems that the 'final extreme' be taken. Honestly for just a random example, we would not want to move something like nattorei to ubers simply because "it is one of the best walls" anymore we would consider Lugia in OU because it has "various OU counters".

While I may have just restated things that were said in other posts my opinion that we should only be banning as a final solution was my general point. One can tweak or make a new team because such and such throughout all of their laddering period "gave their team trouble" but once something is banned, a bit less variety is taken from the OU metagame and will most likely not return.

 

[obi]

Abstain should be removed from the voting options. If you think a Pokemon should be banned right now, vote for a ban. If you do not think it should be banned right now (either you think it does not deserve a ban or else has not proven it should be banned), vote OU. If you feel you are not qualified to vote, then don't vote. By putting "Abstain" as an option, I think people also see that as "I'm not sure if it's OU or uber", which in my mind should be a vote for OU. The reason is that you then have the next period to see how it works out so it has more time to prove itself uber (a much easier thing to do than to prove itself OU after having been banned).

 

[Rhys DeAnno]

Those simple numbers hold water for the previous four gens, but the banning of abilities complicates things. For example, if Shadow Tag is banned, Wobbuffet is essentially banned, and if DW Shandera is ever released, Shandera would be in a crippled quasi-banned state that will probably result in it being UU instead of OU. Already with Inconsistent banned one could argue Octillery is effectively banned from standard (good riddance, but still).

Drizzle is even more ambigous, since several Pokemon which flourish in infinite rain but are rather useless otherwise (OU Parasect for example), are also in a weird psuedo-state between being banned and not being banned. Somewhat less ambigously, if Swift Swim is banned in conjunction with or instead of Drizzle, several Pokemon experience the "Shandera effect" of still being usable but becoming lousy. I think if it was ultimately a choice between Drizzle and Manaphy (I'm not saying this is true, just using an example), that it would be very misleading to think a meta with Drizzle banned was less ban-happy than a meta with Manaphy banned.

 

[cim]

Abstain should be removed from the voting options. If you think a Pokemon should be banned right now, vote for a ban. If you do not think it should be banned right now (either you think it does not deserve a ban or else has not proven it should be banned), vote OU. If you feel you are not qualified to vote, then don't vote. By putting "Abstain" as an option, I think people also see that as "I'm not sure if it's OU or uber", which in my mind should be a vote for OU. The reason is that you then have the next period to see how it works out so it has more time to prove itself uber (a much easier thing to do than to prove itself OU after having been banned).

Abstain in its strictest definition counts against the affirmative (or at least it should) - I'm surprised if we didn't implement this.

 

[Nails]

I don't think people should use the option as frequently as they do, but people should definitely have the option to abstain from voting something broken or not broken if they want to. Say for example I used a rain team on the ladder for the first day, qualifying to vote easily, and then took a break from playing OU and didn't touch the meta for the rest of the test. I feel that rain is broken and want to ban it, but I haven't played the meta for a couple weeks and so I have no clue what else has happened since I left. I don't want my votes on things that I don't have a fully reasoned opinion on to affect the outcome, but I know that I feel rain is broken. I shouldn't have to have my vote counted results if I don't want it to. The system offers all of the options that it needs to, the option to abstain from voting on a certain suspect is necessary.

Even if people use the option too much in my opinion, it needs to be kept around.

 

[Philip7086]

Abstaining does not necessarily mean "unsure". In fact, I know some users who believed something is probably Uber before, but abstained because they liked it in the metagame. Other people just don't care about certain suspects and just want to get one particular one banned in the bunch. Forcing users to weigh in on something they don't want to weigh in on, for whatever reason, doesn't make sense to me.

 

[Seven Deadly Sins]

Abstain doesn't mean "I don't know", it means "I believe I am not informed enough on this particular subject to have a say, so I waive my right to vote on it". Forcing people to vote on issues they don't think they're qualified to make a decision on in either direction is a bad idea, and Abstain needs to stay in its current form for this very reason.

 

[coyotte508]

I truly don't understand where you get this sentiment from. We currently have less pokemon banned in Gen V than in Gen IV even though it had less pokemon. If one calculates the ratio of the amount of banned pokemon compared to the total ammount of pokemon in each generation one gets the fellowing results:

Gen 1: 2 Banned/151: 1.324%
Gen 2: 5 Banned/251: 1.992%
Gen 3: 15 Banned/386: 3.886%
Gen 4: 25 Banned/493: 5.070%
Gen 5: 17 Banned/649: 2.619%
Currently Generation V is being the least ban happy generation since GSC.

I do agree however that Generation IV was clearly ban-happy while Generation III was reasonable to that expect.

That is why i propose to strive towards a Banishment ratio the competitive metagame had during the ADV generation or 3.886% of the total ammount of pokemon.

This would mean that in my proposal one should strive towards banning 25 pokemon maximally during Generation V to reach the potentially healthy metagame Generation 3 once had, in other words room for 7 more pokemon to ban.

I don't understand. It's really not comparable. And it also depends a lot on the new pokemon introduced, what if there was 10 Groudons introduced in gen V.

Gen V and Gen 3 are really different, you can't just say "we should ban 25 pokemons because in gen 3 we banned 3.886010362% of the pokemons". Also look at gen 4: it introduced 6 ubers with around 100 new pokemons (not counting manaphy yet), gen 5 only introduced 2 ubers with 150 pokemon introduced. The number of ubers really depends on the number of high BST legendaries GF decides to put in their new games, as well as the way the metagame change. Gen 3 and Gen 5 really are completely different games, because of things like the special/physical split, end of turn recovery taking part after the switchins, as well as the large amount of new moves/abilities introduced.

Those are two different games, setting a ban ratio for gen 5 based on gen 3 is for me alike to the April's Fools joke with the hax formula.

 

[capefeather]

Abstain doesn't mean "I don't know", it means "I believe I am not informed enough on this particular subject to have a say, so I waive my right to vote on it".

Well, at the very least, that's what it should mean. I'm just remembering Jumpman posts where he didn't want to qualify voters who "weren't sure", and that mentality may still be around in a system for which it isn't really fit. I do agree that abstentions should definitely stay as an option, which is why I tried to focus it solely on not turning simple majorities into supermajorities. But if people know that abstaining means something very specific, and not just "I'm not sure", then maybe that's fine and the qualifying system is what needs to be fixed (which is already being dealt with, last we heard).

 

[cim]

Not having enough information should default to OU, no?

Under the posted logic for "Abstain", posting a ban thread for Masquerain would have 1 Uber vote, 0 OU votes, and 99 Abstain votes, because literally no one has experience with it.

The only way you can be unqualified to speak about a Pokemon is if you haven't played with or against it - in which case hey it's probably OU.

If you're really adamant about not voting, you could also choose... not to vote!

 

[jrrrrrrr]

Not having enough information should default to OU, no?

Agreed.

Banning is supposed to be an extreme measure. If the qualified voters aren't convinced that it's uber, then it must be OU. That is the entire point of requiring a rating on the ladder to see who can vote: to poll the top players to see if they're convinced something is broken. A pool of 51 people where 23 did not vote uber shouldn't count as a >66% supermajority for banning.

I think we should just eliminate abstentions altogether. How the Deoxys-N votes were counted for pro-banning is utterly ridiculous. Luckily we have a failsafe in the system to bring it back to OU for proper testing, but that is an uphill battle because of our ban success percentage. We need to address this issue now so that the second round of suspect banning isn't tainted like the first.

 

[JabbaTheGriffin]

Some people just don't want to vote on a pokemon (maybe they don't really care how it gets voted, shit like that, phil listed good reasons). Abstentions are there for people who don't want to vote on a Pokemon, not for people who are unsure of what its tiering is (those people should clearly be voting OU)

Forcing people to vote on something they don't want to is just ridiculous. Maybe make it clear that if someone is unsure on a suspect they should vote OU, but if they don't want to vote, they should abstain. I think it may be unclear to a few people that that's how things should work (the D-N vote is an example, I'm sure a few of those abstainers abstained because they had never seen D-N so they weren't sure). But other than that I don't see the problem in allowing players to abstain.

 

[jrrrrrrr]

Forcing people to vote on something they don't want to is just ridiculous. Maybe make it clear that if someone is unsure on a suspect they should vote OU, but if they don't want to vote, they should abstain. ... But other than that I don't see the problem in allowing players to abstain.

Ok, fair enough...but I still don't think that abstentions should help something get banned as they did with D-N. Since banning is an extreme measure, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the supermajority has to be of all eligible voters explicitly voting "Uber" before banning something. I change my stance from advocating removing abstentions to just making abstentions count in the total vote tally (but not for one side or the other).

If we still used some form of sexp we wouldn't have to deal with this gray area where some voters clearly aren't qualified to vote on certain suspects but their votes matter anyways. I think we should look into something like this, it worked really well last time at weeding people out and solving these questionable cases in voting.