Banning in Gen 5

[gengod]

OK!

Recently I've been constantly looking through the suspect testing thread at the nominations of members of the community and I'm a bit appalled at some of the Pokemon that people are even suggesting. At the moment it seems like almost every new thing is a problem, Drizzle, Landlos, Latios, Doryuuzu, Kingdra, Garchomp, Nattorei, Rankurusu...etc

Then we have people coming up with multiple suggestions with how to possibly neuter the problems people have, like with Aldaron's proposal and threads stating how we should just ban all weather. Why the fuck is everyone so damn ban happy all of a sudden? It seems to me and a few other members I've spoken to that a lot of the community is simply unwilling to accept a lot of the changes from Gen 4 to Gen 5 and to put it bluntly is just trying to make Gen 5 as similar to Gen 4 as possible because that was their comfort zone.

There is definitely a pretty big difference in terms of offensive capabilities when comparing the two metagames and for the most part it seems like a lot of the community is just lazy and wants to play a metagame where they feel comfortable being able to switch from counter to counter for everything. Initially we had the same problem with the transition from Gen 3 to Gen 4 but not to this degree.

I'm not even sure if this is just a rant but I would like to suggest people think a lot more about this in a larger scale. Each generation of Pokemon is adding bigger and bigger threats and we might just have to accept that and learn to play the game as it is without trying to ban everything that we find that might be an issue.

 

[eric the espeon]

I was considering making a similar thread, and agree with your thoughts. It seems we've been moving from banning only that which is broken, only what must be banned to have a balanced metagame, to attempting to ban everything we don't like. It was developing in Gen 4, but the scale of this ban happiness has jumped astronomically in the shift between generations. You cannot come anywhere near countering everything, a good team is able to deal with everything important somewhat decently, or simply overwhelm the foe before they get a chance to do the same to you. Banning until this is no longer the case is, as you have put it, lazy. If we end up with a huge list of questionable bans, especially if they include complex (combination) or semi complex (non-Pokemon) bans, it will be much less likely that our tiers will be as universally accepted as we have become accustomed to.

 

[coyotte508]

I was considering making a similar thread, and agree with your thoughts. It seems we've been moving from banning only that which is broken, only what must be banned to have a balanced metagame, to attempting to ban everything we don't like. It was developing in Gen 4, but the scale of this ban happiness has jumped astronomically in the shift between generations. You cannot come anywhere near countering everything, a good team is able to deal with everything important somewhat decently, or simply overwhelm the foe before they get a chance to do the same to you. Banning until this is no longer the case is, as you have put it, lazy. If we end up with a huge list of questionable bans, especially if they include complex (combination) or semi complex (non-Pokemon) bans, it will be much less likely that our tiers will be as universally accepted as we have become accustomed to.

Moreover, it could lead to a very stallish metagame.

 

[jrrrrrrr]

I agree with your entire post Maniac but I honestly have no idea how to address the problem. When Salamence was banned in gen 4, this was the inevitable outcome: anything that stands out even remotely is going to get banned. Was Salamence good? Yes. Would it have been banned if we didn't just go through years of testing with a 100% ban rate? Probably not. Our suspect testing process has always had a bias towards banning, although it has gotten better. We don't even have usage statistics from our server and we've already banned 4 pokemon and an ability.

Things like this especially annoy me:

Deoxys-N: 28 Bans, 11 Do Not Bans, and 12 Abstains (71.8%)

1/4 of the voters abstained and it was still banned. More people said "I don't know" than playing it safe and keeping it available for further testing. Of the people who voted to ban it, how many of those do you think even used Deoxys-N on their teams? How many do you think even faced one, considering that Deoxys-A and Deoxys-S were available at the time? If you count the abstentions into the voting tally, D-N barely even gets a majority vote from those who qualified. All of that while we don't even know if it's OU. That to me is the definition of the lazy voting found in the OP. This is definitely a problem and it's only going to get worse by the looks of that UT thread.

 

[capefeather]

I think that we've gotten to a point where we can identify certain flaws in the system that weren't as bad when it was applied to UU. I do remember that I was a huge proponent of this system back when we were trying to decide on the process, but a look back at all this indicates to me that something may need to be changed. I think that the big problem here compared to Gen IV "New UU" is that "New UU" had no comparison whatsoever to another metagame. This system was great when people could readily accept that they were playing a brand-new metagame. However, now we can't help but subconsciously remember Gen IV - maybe even Gen III - so we try to mould Gen V into something that we enjoyed before. But the previous gen crowd doesn't have to like the current gen for the current gen to be legitimate. The "cool kids" are (unintentionally) trying to coerce people into sharing their goals, but the only reason we're even having this talk at all is that the opinions of these "cool kids" clearly don't constitute a consensus. Hell, even at least one of Phil's "people" doesn't like what's going on here... I don't have a solution right now, but it's something to think about.

I also want to talk about abstinence in voting. It always bothered me a little because it essentially helps to turn majorities into supermajorities, like in the Deoxys-N case... and now various people are clamouring for a retest. "Well, the cool kids know that it's Uber"... except that attitude has nothing to do with how our ruleset is accepted by the overall competitive meta-community. I'll admit that I vehemently try to avoid abstaining from a vote (though it kind of cost me back during Froslass/Raikou UU...) for precisely this reason. (I would abstain if my indecision would be accurately reflected in the vote.) Unlike the previous problem, though, I think that I have a solution to this.

1. Change the supermajority criterion to requiring a supermajority from ALL eligible voters. The whole point of having a supermajority quick-ban mechanism is to represent a voting pool that is "very certain" that a suspected element should be banned, and yet currently the people who abstain are shut out of this entirely. We all play the same metagame, and people who abstain sometimes have good reasons to do so, and yet we are essentially ignoring these facts right now.

2. Change the simple majority criterion as follows:

a) A simple majority from non-abstaining voters is sufficient to label the voted-on subject as a "controversial suspect" during the next round.

b) However, a simple majority from ALL voters is required to ban a "controversial suspect".

Condition a) makes it so that "abstain" doesn't automatically mean "do not ban", since labelling a subject as a "controversial suspect" has little to do with voters being sure of their opinions. Condition b) has the same idea as 1., in that we should avoid having lingering controversy when a suspect is banned, but the "double simple majority" idea is somewhat preserved. The hope is that abstaining voters in one round will eventually pick a damn side in a subsequent round.

 

[Aldaron]

My proposal was made with the intent of stopping an avalanche effect of future bans from occuring (preventing Sandstream / Drought / Landlos / Terakion / Dory / Latios / Garchomp bans). It was also made in mind with the knowledge that Drizzle was inevitably going to be banned, so I had to do something.

I agree; people need to get over their comfort zones. While I disagree with your inclusion of Rankurusu in your list (because it beats everything, not just stall or defense or offense or bulky offense or semi stall or whatever the fuck), I do agree that people are moving to ban simply to adhere to the patterns of the last couple generations.

 

[zapzap29]

I think one of the problems that needs to be addressed is the sheer number of pokemon we can ban simultaneously. This wasn't as much of an issue in early gen IV since the suspect testing period was longer and the community couldn't just nominate whatever they didn't like. Overall, I think banning lots of pokemon/abilities at the same time could have an adverse effect on the metagame because the variables in which they are banned are very different.

What I propose is to have a limit on how many pokemon/abilities can be banned per round. This would put pressure on the people to make nominations that actually count and stop voters from banning things that they consider annoying and actually vote on the suspects that matter.

 

[DougJustDoug]

I agree that it seems the community is very "ban-happy", but I thought that was true in the 4th gen too. I'm not certain that being ban-happy is necessarily bad, but I think people should get a clearer idea of why pokemon are being banned. 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. And I'm not basing my comments on my own opinions of individual pokemon, or my playing experience in any generation metagame.

In the 4th gen, we ended up with 25 banned pokemon. TWENTY-FIVE. Ostensibly, that means that 25 pokemon were deemed to be so powerful, so centralizing, so anti-competitive, so cheap, so whatever -- that they made the game... well, suck. They make competitive pokemon a crappy game to play, right? That's why we banned them. If the metagame was good with them in it, we would have left them in that metagame.

The idea behind banning, is one of extremes. Meaning, if the metagame is just "kinda worse off" with a pokemon in it, we generally don't think it is a good idea to banish it from play completely. Banning a pokemon is kinda like the death penalty, and we reserve such punishment only for the clear-cut worst offenders. That's why we have such high thresholds for deeming a pokemon "broken", as opposed to "really good". We can quibble as to whether people voted in the 4th gen based on personal preference or playstyle or whatever -- the point is that most people in the community were supposedly voting based on clear criteria that indicated a pokemon was so clearly broken, that the metagame itself was consequently "broken" with them in it.

So, we banned pokemon. We banned a LOT of pokemon.

In fact, we banned so many pokemon that a fully developed metagame came into existence as a result of it -- we call that game "Ubers". We took all the pokemon that were supposedly so freakishly good that they simply could not be played competitively -- and then PROVED beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they actually could be played just fine in a competitive metagame. The irony of that is astounding, IMO.

The 4th gen ubers metagame had an active ladder, had meaningful and consistent stats, had fully-formed strategies and analyses, had an avid following of top-notch competitive players, and it even became a critical part of Smogon's standard competitive tour and other tournaments. How much more "playable" can that metagame be? Not much. Was it the "best" metagame out there? Perhaps not. But, you cannot say that the ubers metagame was "broken". If it was truly broken, if it was truly anti-competitive, people would not play it, except for gimmicks and laughs. That didn't happen. Ubers was very playable and very popular.

Yes, some people may argue, "Yeah Doug, but Ubers was ultra-centralized and basically was a war between a few combinations of weather teams, it had very little variety, and it was hyper-offensive. That's not what we want in a metagame." Fair enough. I won't argue that at all. But, let's be honest with ourselves that we can't call anything in ubers "broken", unless you use the term "broken" as a synonym for "not my favorite".

I know OU was much more popular than Ubers, so there is justification to say the numbers prove out that we succeeded in making a "better metagame" by banning 25 pokemon from standard play. 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. 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. Maybe it used to be true back in the day when Mewtwo was the only pokemon capable of wrecking everyone and everything, but now the banlist is just a list of powerful pokemon that are played by good, competitive players interested in using high-powered pokemon and high-powered battle strategies in a popular competitive metagame.

I'll write that again, in italics: "The banlist is just a list of powerful pokemon that are played by good, competitive players interested in using high-powered pokemon and high-powered battle strategies in a popular competitive metagame."

Funny thing is, that used to be a pretty good description of the OU list, right?

I'm not one to say what is the right level of banning or not. I am interested in the process we use to determine the banlist, I'm keenly interested in the statistics and supporting information we use to argue about bans, and I'm interested in the principles we use to build our metagames and the community at large. I really don't care which pokemon we ban or how many we ban. But I do think the OP is correct to question if our current banning philosophy is an expression of the metagame we think will be best, or merely an expression of the metagame we are currently most comfortable with.

 

[Bologo]

I'm glad someone made this topic, because some of these nominations make me want to stop playing. Honestly, what was the point of starting with a small banlist if people are going to add like 10 things at a time to it? At this rate, we're going to have an even bigger banlist than Gen 4 had, despite it starting with a banlist that was twice the size. People need to accept that there's almost 650 pokemon, and that pretty much everything has gotten stronger this gen. I look at stuff like DW OU, and it's very rare to see something that doesn't have a niche in the metagame.

I agree with zapzap that people need to be limited with the amount of nominations they can make. Honestly, it makes me cringe when there's people making up to 10 nominations at a time. Not only are a lot of these people not putting any thought into their nominations (which is what I see with a lot of the Reuniclus nominations), but like others have said, people are just nominating whatever they find annoying. The funny thing is, a lot of these people making up to 10 nominations aren't even qualified to vote, which is definitely saying something.

If people were limited to something like 3 nominations (arbitrary number), then people would definitely be forced to only nominate what's absolutely broken. If more than 3 things are actually broken, I'm sure everyone else's nominations will get the broken thing suspected with ease.

I don't think de-nominations would need a limit though, because 1), there won't be many of them unless the community made a horrible mistake, and 2) if the community unjustly banned more than 3 pokemon, we have a bigger problem than anyone would've thought. Although they're not used much (except for Deoxys-N this round), I have a feeling they're going to come into play a lot next round if voters are really planning on banning all the shit that's being nominated.

I'm kind of sad that SEXP isn't taken into account anymore though. That really seemed to help with the UU nominations, because it could weed out the people who obviously didn't play with the stuff they're nominating (or who didn't play at all). Of course, correct me if I'm wrong here. It just seemed to me that UU rarely had more than 4 pokemon on the chopping block at once, because shitty nominations were quickly weeded out.

--

I also think we really need to do something about abstains. Although it's extreme, here's an example of what could happen (let's say we had 10 voters):

1 ban, 0 do not bans, 9 abstain (100%).

Does anybody else see what's wrong with this? People don't even have to submit paragraphs anymore, yet they're abstaining whenever they feel like it. I could understand abstaining when you had to submit paragraphs, because there are some suspects that just don't matter to you enough to write up an essay on them. But really, when people literally just have to type in the pokemon's name and ban/do not ban/abstain, why are they picking abstain?

If these voters are qualified enough to vote, it probably means that they played with the pokemon enough to actually get that high of a rating. After all, the top players are going to abuse the top threats, which are the ones that pass the nomination phase, right? If, during all this time, they barely even saw that pokemon, that probably means that a) it's not broken, or b) it needs to be tested more since even the top players didn't realize its brokenness, if any. Yes, I know that Gen IV Wobbuffet wasn't used very much, but I'm fairly sure it was used and abused by the top players just fine (that and there was no rating threshold to vote for Wobbuffet since it was a straight up bold vote).

What I'm saying is that people really don't have a good reason to abstain from voting on a certain pokemon anymore. There's no rigorous process to give yourself qualification to vote on a certain suspect, you just get the rating, and vote.

Personally, if it were up to me, I'd just get rid of the "abstain" option completely and get people to vote ban/do not ban, for the reasons I mentioned above.

--

I'm not sure what the Little Cup suspect system is doing differently than the Standard suspect system, but their voters seemed to be much, much more conservative with their bans, since only the extremely obvious pokemon have been banned, and in their last round, only Inconsistent got banned, while nothing else did. Maybe we should think about that.

--

Personally, I just hope that Phil and his cabinet are smart enough to look at the reasoning given by each nominator, and maybe give nominations by qualified voters more weight. I'll be happy as long as they reject the nominations that lack actual reasoning or any kind of substance.

 

[Nails]

Speaking only for myself

I fully believe that drizzle, doryuuzu, randoruso, and potentially drought and Latios unbalance the metagame as they are potentially overpowered. I will be voting Latios uber as I feel it is too strong for the meta and I'll be voting drought OU despite the fact I feel it will be broken. With that said, I'll let it have a meta without the weathers since it might not be broken.

I faced deoxys-n in the previous meta. The power difference was negligible; the difference is that its defenses are a lot better, so roobushin's Mach punch doesn't cripple it. I would've abstained if I hadn't played against it, but the few matches I had were very much the same as the ones I played against deo-a. It's a ridiculously fast and powerful sweeper with amazing coverage.

As for abstinence, if a person has no opinion on a subject then why should that affect the vote? Of the people who had an opinion on it, the vote was 28-11, a clear supermajority. The 12 people shouldve voted if they felt it deserved more time to test. I'd be interested to know how many of the 28 people that originally voted it banned want a revote.

 

[capefeather]

They're not affecting the main result of the vote; they're affecting the supermajority / simple majority distinction, and I said before that the whole point of that was to quick-ban suspects that the voter pool was SURE was broken. I don't find a 54.9% rate of people saying "yeah this should go" a convincing indication that people were SURE.

 

[Ulevo]

I'm glad someone made this topic, because some of these nominations make me want to stop playing.

This is pretty much the sentiment I am having. Between PO's Beta Server having a significantly larger pool of players and the SU often being dead or stagnate with the same players, and having to deal with these ridiculous nominations that are more than likely going to be implemented due to our flawed voting system, I just don't want to play.

Much like what Aldaron had said, I made the proposal in PR about banning auto-weather as a compromise, because like he noted, I felt something needed to be done.

All I have to say on the matter is that something needs to change. Every single powerful threat that happens to play really well is being voted for a ban under faulty, paper theory logic, mostly by bandwagoning Smogon forum frequents and not competitive battlers.

The community has been given too much rope, the new generation has a lot of new toys to play with, making effective strategies much less obvious and more dynamic (i.e. not for the person incapable of critical thinking), and we have an influx of new, inexperienced players. This is the result.

 

[coyotte508]

If you look at the suspects nomination thread, you'll see that most of the too ban happy people are the ones who didn't make it to the req, so the ban happy thing is not yet proven. I mean, let's see the results of this round.

This was in answer to that:

we have an influx of new, inexperienced players. This is the result.

And the fact that the system is "flawed", because it's not confirmed yet, we don't even know what will be up to vote and what will be banned. New, inexperienced players can't reach 1400 so easily.

 

[Nails]

Something I thought might help with the overboard nominations is a Blind thread like we have for voting, just open to anyone who wants to post their nominations. And if it matters, I honestly wouldn't care if paragraphs were reintroduced. It'd make people think about their vote and decide why they're voting in the way they're voting, which is a good thing.

@Bologo - Little Cup requires users to send in paragraphs to the mods in pm's, if their paragraphs are approved they get to vote. Ask Vader and Dubulous for more detail but that's the basic concept.

 

[reachzero]

I have always been a supporter of the idea that Pokemon (and abilities and items, I suppose, with the banning of Inconsistent and Soul Dew) should only be banned if they are blatantly overpowered and unbalance the metagame in which they are Suspect. I think history has taught us that balanced metagames are the most enjoyable to play: Standard was at its best in Diamond/Pearl immediately after Garchomp was banned, and in DPPHGSS immediately after Salamence was banned (i.e. the present Gen. 4 metagame). What I am trying to say is that banning overpowered Pokemon is a desirable outcome. The players cannot control the power balance of the Pokemon in the starting set of a metagame. Players of Gen. 5 Standard could not determine the Pokemon that GameFreak gave us any more than players of Gen 4 UU could help the fact that Staraptor, Crobat, Cresselia or Yanmega dropped into UU. All we can do is try to keep track of which Pokemon do and don't unbalance the metagame; that is, decide how much power it takes for a Pokemon to be "overpowered". Obviously that can be a very fuzzy judgment, which is the whole point of the Suspect process...

I think one point that it is extremely important to keep in mind is that making a Pokemon a Suspect is not the same as banning it--it is gauging the opinion of qualified individuals as to whether or not the Pokemon is overpowered, not inherently declaring the Pokemon to actually be overpowered. I feel that Pokemon like Rankurusu are excellent examples of this--even players that would vote Rankurusu OU (like myself) will concede that Rankurusu is a top-level Pokemon that at least approaches the limit of how good is too good. Frankly, I don't believe that any Pokemon that wasn't worthy of the Suspect tag got very much support in the nomination thread, and I would very much like to hear the critics specifically put a finger on which Pokemon were wrongfully accepted as Suspects.

In terms of limiting the nominations, I think that is unfair to the players. As previously noted, we cannot really choose how many unbalanced Pokemon we begin with in our metagame. Why should I have to choose whether to get rid of Darkrai or Deoxys-a because of an arbitrary nomination count if I believe that both are unbalanced?

I'm kind of sad that SEXP isn't taken into account anymore though. That really seemed to help with the UU nominations, because it could weed out the people who obviously didn't play with the stuff they're nominating (or who didn't play at all). Of course, correct me if I'm wrong here. It just seemed to me that UU rarely had more than 4 pokemon on the chopping block at once, because shitty nominations were quickly weeded out.

Unfortunately, we just don't have the statistical support on Pokemon Online that we had on Shoddy Battle, but honestly, SEXP played only a relatively small role in the actual UU voter selection; I could count on one hand the number of voters we ever disqualified for a specific vote on the basis of insufficient SEXP. In terms of bad nominations being weeded out, on the other hand, we did a great deal of that, and I expect that Philip7086 and the rest of us will do a great deal of that now. If a nomination is unreasonable, why would we take it seriously? I think nominating Nattorei in this testing period is just as ridiculous as anyone else does who read the nomination.

In terms of abstentions, I don't understand why anyone who abstained would complain about their abstention not being counted. If you want a Pokemon to stay in Standard for another voting period, vote OU. If you are unsure as to what to vote, vote OU. Abstaining is a way of saying "I feel I am not qualified to make this decision." Why should we count unqualified votes toward the outcome? If we had an overwhelming number of abstentions, such as in the hypothetical example Bologo put forward, we would obviously face the same situation as if we had too few qualified voters by virtue of the rating requirement--we would almost certainly be compelled to declare a "misvote" and not count it.

tl;dr: If so many Pokemon are being selected as Suspects that some are being wrongfully chosen, which ones have been wrongfully chosen?

 

[Jibaku]

Two cents post since I just read through this quickly

Posting to agree completely here as it parallels part of my LoA post in IS where it said ban happy people are driving me nuts. As I mentioned to firecape (and partially to Phil), I feel that people are reverting back to their DP mentality to decide bans, unaccepting of the threats in the metagame that make it "5th Gen". Oh and let's not forget the bandwagon factor. I suppose this is an unintended side effect of having early suspect tests, and that we overestimate the players' ability (even the good players) to adapt to the new metagame (and perhaps this could be a lesson in the future).

Unfortunately I don't have a better solution right now, but I need to get this out :)

 

[Cyrrona]

While I typically tried to avoid bans in Gen. 4, my perspective in Black and White has shifted considerably. People are attempting to remove so many things right now because there is too much in the game. Other users have alluded to this in some of the recent PR threads, but I'd just like to take a second and develop the point further. As it stands, it is virtually impossible to build a team that doesn't have gaping weaknesses to something else in this cluttered, chaotic metagame. (If anyone disagrees with this, they either haven't played enough of Gen. 5 or they're not looking at their team critically enough.) This is bad. It's an undesirable characteristic for any metagame to have, and I don't see why we should tolerate it here. The overabundance of extremely powerful/viable pokemon prevents builders from achieving stability in their lineups and turns the game into a glorified rock-paper-scissors replica—one where the outcome of far too many battles is determined almost exclusively by team matchup. Some ban-compromise proposals were supported by claims that the plans would help promote "metagame diversity," but I find that to be more of a deterrent than anything else. We should be cutting down metagame diversity so people can actually respond to more than 50% of the sets they'll encounter.

Because of all this, I disagree with the OP's trivialization of the current suspect nominations. I suppose you’re entitled to want a metagame where nobody can come remotely close to even checking everything and where you’ll simply auto-lose because of team advantages or weather-setters dying a fair portion of the time, but I personally don’t find anything about that appealing. You can sit back, dismiss the objections of the majority and tell people to “just adapt to the new game” if you like. There's a point, however, where that isn’t feasible anymore. This is why people are currently pushing for bans. It’s not because they have some automatic aversion to change…it’s because they feel the pokemon/abilities in question harm the metagame. They value and desire a metagame where skill—not the luck of the draw on ladder—is primarily responsible for a victory. Removing a multitude of things from the get-go might startle some of the more moderate bystanders, but I believe it’s the only way to achieve any kind of balance in Gen. 5.

 

[Rhys DeAnno]

Two things have been bothering me in specific.

First, everyone is acting like the Drizzle ban or complex ban is just "one ban" and is a much less restrictive idea than banning multiple Pokemon. This is pretty silly, since a Drizzle+Swift Swim ban nerfs all swimmers sans Kingdra to the degree they will barely ever be used in high level Standard play. All the complex ban is going to do is let one Pokemon, Kingdra, stick around in mid-OU in exchange for completely nerfing the style of offensive rain into a gimmick instead of just bringing it down to sanity. Even if Manaphy, Kingdra, Ludicolo, and Kabutops had to be banned to balance Drizzle, that would still be much less restrictive even than a ban on Drizzle+Swift Swim (and almost certainly Manaphy too).

The second thing that's really bugging me is how people are jumping at banning abilities to "edit" Pokemon making them fit for OU. I've seen a lot of people arguing to ban Sand Veil to make Garchomp more reasonable, never mind that Garchomp's DW ability isn't released yet, or that Garchomp is the only remotely possibly overpowered Sand Veil user. Other people want to ban Magic Guard, so Rankuruusu is crippled instead of just banning it, which would screw up Clefable and future Alazakaam. People talk about banning Shadow Tag since Wobbuffet has another ability and therefore could "stay OU", even though banning Shadow Tag is effectively banning Wobb since that's the only way it doesn't suck (I'm convinced many of the Shadow Tag ban proponents just want some way to ban Shandera from DW by proxy with the Standard suspect voting).

I think banning abilities instead of Pokemon is rarely a good an idea and should be avoided whenever it's possible to ban Pokemon instead. To enforce this on a ban happy community, I believe abilities should require a higher threshold than 2/3+1 once or 1/2+1 twice to ban, perhaps something like 2/3+1 twice or 7/9+1 once. Note that this would have little effect on the possible Drizzle ban, since you can just as easily ban Politoed instead (seriously who cares about nonDrizzle Politoed, it's about as good as Telepathy Wobbuffet).

 

[JabbaTheGriffin]

I fucking hate posts like this. They all imply that the people nominating some of the pokemon you mentioned are stupid. People getting so up in arms over nominations (that they would consider quitting) is just ridiculous. Instead of making posts and topics telling us we have no clue what we're doing with our nominations/votes why don't you instead qualify for voting and then vote with your beliefs, rather than criticizing ours.

I could be classified as banhappy and i talk to a lot of people that are the same way. We make our nominations/votes based on what we believe is unbalancing the metagame. I have no idea how you could call that being stuck in a "gen 4 state of mind." Calling us lazy and being condescending accomplishes nothing.

 

[Lee]

Gen V isn't Gen IV, so it's very dangerous for people to try and twist it until it is. Likewise, it could very well be dangerous for us to keep up the 4th Gen taboo surrounding the word 'ban' where members were darn near publically flogged anytime they suggested something might be broken. I understand 'fun' is subjective but in all my time here, I've never seen such universal condemnation of a metagame like we are seeing with the current one so it's logical that people are striving to change it. I don't like saying this but it's obvious to anyone who has played lately that there's a handful of things that need to be banned if we're going to achieve our goal of an ideal metagame so it's poor practice to get angry at people for making nominations. The voting requirements are high enough that we can be reasonably confident that the voters are motivated players with a good understanding of the metagame. We can trust them to do the right thing.

 

[supermarth64]

Personally, if it were up to me, I'd just get rid of the "abstain" option completely and get people to vote ban/do not ban, for the reasons I mentioned above.

If there were to be a discussion about this, I wouldn't support this. An uninformed ban is a terrible type of ban as Pokemon should be banned for a specific reason instead of "oh cool this sounds strong let's ban it without any experience whatsover."

Taking a closer look at the Deoxys-N vote, I support the notion that abstains be included in the "overall" vote. You can't really say that those people believe that it's too powerful/not powerful enough, only they have that choice.

Also even though people are nominating all of these Pokemon, it's not like they give a quick count of which Pokemon should actually be put up for banning or not without actually reading the substance of these posts. If that were true, a single person could convince like 50 other people to all vote to ban Rankurusu and it would automatically be voted. These nomination posts are still read.

Even though people are ban happy, it's a matter of an informed minority vs an uninformed majority. We should trust in the best players, not randommember132

 

[Ulevo]

I fucking hate posts like this. They all imply that the people nominating some of the pokemon you mentioned are stupid. People getting so up in arms over nominations (that they would consider quitting) is just ridiculous.

I can't speak for others, but I'll reply to this post since it seems geared in my general direction in terms of concerns I've had regarding the entire process.

It's not that the individuals who are agreeing with you (by you I mean anyone who nominates a particular Pokemon that stems a following of other nominations for that same Pokemon) are stupid. It's the unnecessary political bangwagoning of inexperienced players that perpetuate the idea that the single threat in question is "broken" when all they're doing is agreeing with another user, or a group of people. This snowballs, and could eventually influence the votes of the experienced players who have voting rights.

If you need any evidence of this, Rankurusu is a perfect example. I am not implying you're wrong for nominating Rankurusu (even if I disagree with it's nomination). You're more than welcome to nominate a suspect when you've reached the right to vote (a privilege I and other users do not have, admittedly). However, prior to it's first mentioning in the nomination thread, NO ONE had even muttered a word of Rankurusu. There was plenty of discussion regarding Doryuuzu, Landlos, Drizzle--- Rankurusu was not on the topic of interest. Suddenly a single nomination comes up, and now everyone is debating about it. So what. Was Rankurusu a problem this entire time and no one said anything?

All I am saying is that this has consequences, and leads to mistakes like having Deoxys-N banned prematurely. And this is a big problem, because most Pokemon who are nominated and subsequently banned won't have the same excuses for a second chance the way Deoxys-N did because unlike most threats being nominated right now, Dexoys-N was utterly outclassed and neglected. It won't be so easy to correct mistakes with other Pokemon.

 

[Seven Deadly Sins]

Gen V isn't Gen IV, so it's very dangerous for people to try and twist it until it is. Likewise, it could very well be dangerous for us to keep up the 4th Gen taboo surrounding the word 'ban' where members were darn near publically flogged anytime they suggested something might be broken. I understand 'fun' is subjective but in all my time here, I've never seen such universal condemnation of a metagame like we are seeing with the current one so it's logical that people are striving to change it. I don't like saying this but it's obvious to anyone who has played lately that there's a handful of things that need to be banned if we're going to achieve our goal of an ideal metagame so it's poor practice to get angry at people for making nominations. The voting requirements are high enough that we can be reasonably confident that the voters are motivated players with a good understanding of the metagame. We can trust them to do the right thing.

I'm quoting this because of just how important it is to note.

We can go on all we want about philosophical things, but I think what we need to remember is that the purpose of this is to make a "fun" metagame. A metagame that players enjoy playing, and one where they are motivated to play it more and feel that they can improve in it in an absolute skill-based way. At the time, as far as I can tell, the common consensus is that we're about as far from that metagame as we've ever been, and these recent events are simply the ramifications of a community that is displeased with the metagame it's being forced to play in.

We've given the community the power to mold the metagame the way they see fit, and placing the final say in the hands of only the most skilled in the metagame, assuming that their skill and experience means they "know what they're talking about". To chastise the userbase for exercising the power that we've given them, and to bring up countless ways to downtalk them and imply that their opinion is "wrong" is ridiculous. On top of that, we trust the qualified voters to "do the right thing" regardless of what happens. If something gets nominated that shouldn't get banned, we trust the "top tier" which has earned voting rights to make the decision as to whether or not that decision was justified. The community asks, and the qualified voters answer.

So of course, what does this boil down to? Are we so untrustworthy of one another and so accusatory that we want to give anyone a sound tongue-lashing whenever it seems like the people who've put in their hard work make a decision that we don't agree with? Are we going to try our damnedest to make the community pay for having an opinion, or go out of our way to condemn them for their opinion being "wrong"? In that case, why have a process at all if we're so sure that it's producing the wrong results?

 

[makiri]

In my day we only banned Mew and Mewtwo.

 

[reachzero]

It's not that the individuals who are agreeing with you (by you I mean anyone who nominates a particular Pokemon that stems a following of other nominations for that same Pokemon) are stupid. It's the unnecessary political bangwagoning of inexperienced players that perpetuate the idea that the single threat in question is "broken" when all they're doing is agreeing with another user, or a group of people. This snowballs, and could eventually influence the votes of the experienced players who have voting rights.

If you need any evidence of this, Rankurusu is a perfect example. I am not implying you're wrong for nominating Rankurusu (even if I disagree with it's nomination). You're more than welcome to nominate a suspect when you've reached the right to vote (a privilege I and other users do not have, admittedly). However, prior to it's first mentioning in the nomination thread, NO ONE had even muttered a word of Rankurusu. There was plenty of discussion regarding Doryuuzu, Landlos, Drizzle--- Rankurusu was not on the topic of interest. Suddenly a single nomination comes up, and now everyone is debating about it. So what. Was Rankurusu a problem this entire time and no one said anything?

My guess would be that you don't use IRC, and if you do, that you don't frequent #dreamworld. I think I've seen a discussion (or at least a series of complaints) regarding Rankurusu in #dreamworld just about every day for the last two weeks. I suspect the real issue is not that Rankurusu was never discussed, but that there is a major split between the users that do the majority of their discussion on IRC and those that do the majority of their discussion on the forums.