Heya! Prefacing this with the fact that I'm far from an expert on statistics, but I have an inquiry about the recent UU stats. I also don't want to come off as disrespectful, so sorry in advance if I do!
So, today we saw Steelix and Snorlax rise to UU from RU - this was a huge surprise to UUers and RUers alike, because while these Pokemon aren't
bad in UU, per se, they're far from stellar and are not consistently used in tour play or on the ladder. Their usage at 1630 was as follows:
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| 28 | Steelix | 6.86598% | 1750 | 2.102% | 1537 | 2.287% |
| 40 | Snorlax | 4.64354% | 2587 | 3.107% | 2095 | 3.117% |
This seemed highly abnormal to begin with - after all, just last month Steelix was at 1.86%, and Snorlax was at a mere 1.37%. Originally I had put this down to something like a potential metagame shift I hadn't noticed, or a laddering anomaly - but these numbers are just way too high. On further inspection, though, I noticed even more outliers. The biggest one was Qwilfish.
Qwilfish is a Pokemon that's not even ranked on our
viability rankings - this isn't normally the biggest of deals, the ladder loves to use Pokemon considered unviable (see something like Arcanine in the last generation of UU, which was considered totally unviable but remained UU by usage for a long, long time). The reason it's weird in this case, though, is that Qwilfish is a) far from a fan favourite, b) not UU by usage (so it wouldn't show up in the teambuilder and therefore newer players are less inclined to automatically put it on their team), and c) had very few raw usages:
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| 44 | Qwilfish | 4.05179% | 761 | 0.914% | 693 | 1.031% |
This is very high on its own, but what's even stranger is that when you change to 1760 stats (there are only 2 players who consistently maintain a rating above 1760 on the ladder, and only one of those is above 1760 on the ladder right now), Qwilfish's usage goes even higher:
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| 33 | Qwilfish | 6.03820% | 761 | 0.914% | 693 | 1.031% |
This is
very abnormal. This trend can be observed in other Pokemon, too, primarily those that show up in stall (the two top players, pif and hjkhj, often ladder with stall) - Vileplume at 1630 has ~2.4% usage, but sits at ~5.1% at 1760. Quagsire is at ~1.7% at 1630, but ~4.5% at 1760.
I'm not sure if this is just down to how weighting works, and I would love to have this explained to me if so. But the point of this post is that I'm unconvinced that 1630 stats are currently an inaccurate way to determine usage for lower tiers. On the UU ladder, only 9 players are >1629 right now, while on the RU ladder, it's only 1. This has meant that stats are extremely skewed and has resulted in what I would consider "unfair" tier shifts - in this case, UU has taken two very important Pokemon from RU, two Pokemon that are not truly relevant in our metagame and do not really depict it. Perhaps the weighting could be re-looked at? I'm sure there were no errors in the actual pulling of the usage statistics, but this doesn't seem entirely accurate at all. Thank you in advance. :>
quick edit: i really don't want this to seem like an attack on hjkhj or pif! they're both excellent players who just happen to be high on the ladder, this weighting situation thing isn't their fault at all, sorry if it came off accusative!