I've talked to most of the posters here about this IRC and most of my thoughts have found their way to the forums through them I think, but fwiw I basically stand as follows: I agree BP probably isn't powerful enough to ban simply on its power alone, but that it creates problems beyond power. It's not as relatively powerful as RBY Tauros or GSC Snorlax, even, to compare with other "oldgens", as faulty as it is to compare team styles with individual Pokemon. What I do think is true, is that unlike the case with those two Pokemon, removing BP makes Advance as a game somewhat more objectively fun. I know fun is a relatively nonobjective measure, but while you can argue about how powerful BP is or isn't, I think it is much more difficult to argue that games including BP teams don't fail promote the sort of metagame characteristics we tend to want(things like good prediction being rewarded and games not ending before they start in some matchups and games that involve as little RNG(luck as a counter) as possible). Even the people defending BP based on power have mentioned it is boring, and I think it's boring in a way that's very different from Stall, which creates long, slow games but still requires the user to make a lot of predictions and gives the opposition chances to break the team open. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable supporting a ban based on this line of thought -- it's certainly not something we'd have done back during Gen 3, and sort of plays into that whole ban-happy culture I like to mock -- but I would certainly agree with the posters who think a BP-less Advance would be a more fun game, which is sometimes a good thing to consider with a game we play as a hobby, I think.
A lot of what deterred BP before, which I guess people nowdays can't seem to imagine(jrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...), really was the culture thing -- obviously it didn't stop everyone, but I think it was a pretty significant deterrent to using BP because we had a smaller, tighter community back then and people cared about being respected. When BP was used, the user were often people who were sleazeballs anyway or who were in matches against what otherwise would have been a superior opponent and whipped their BP team out in order to try to eek out a win they didn't really have to earn... I guess trying to explain the psyche of players is useless, but needless to say from the posts in this thread peer pressure isn't going to deter any of the new guys, which is a problem for the tour, if not for SPL, where a smaller community of players is competing.
Incidentally(@Mekkah) CB Tauros is pretty weak against most BP teams... I actually lead it on the joke team I was using to get my feet wet in Adv again and it tends to get set up on more than anything. At least making them pass Intimidate is kind of convenient sometimes...? Vaporeon still sets up at least one acid armor if passed from Ninjask rather than Zapdos lead for the speed and barring a CH Tauros just doesn't hit hard enough to stop set-up much of the time in my experience, though if I were using it + WW Skarmory as you suggested I would probably be fine with that team. This is just the problem I have with that argument, though -- I feel like for the most part the pro-BP side is kind of assuming every non-BP team includes said WW Skarmory, which I would say is an unreasonably specific counter no matter how good Skarmory is. Given that the only other three Pokemon that can even passably exist in OU with Whirlwind are Hariyama, Crobat(lol), and Aerodactyl(who best functions with a Choice Band), I'd say "Whirlwind" tends to actually mean "Drill Peck-less Skarmory," which is awfully limiting, especially considering the more common psuedohazing move is blocked by Mr. Mime. Incidentally I had to laugh a little at the idea of "BP teams not using a steel." I think it's worth assuming that by BP teams we mean "reasonably well constructed BP teams" rather than "5 random Pokemon with BP."
However the main reason I'm replying is because I can't get over how stupid both of CIM's posts in this thread are(as well as a couple others by different poters) and since the admins have told me they aren't going to do anything about it I figured I'd just comment on it instead.
chrisisme said:
you guys sound like the idiots who bitch about people using "standards" - "they're too easy to win with!"
+
the people that don't play adv don't get to make a decision on adv? sounds fine to me!
if you have no interest in the metagame other than what happens in a series of single elimination tournaments i would say that the decision would better rest in the hands of players that enjoy adv more than 2 months out of the year
OK I think you're already plenty aware I think you're the worst poster who has ever graced this forum and Inside Scoop but let me take a moment to try explain some of why these posts are absurd at best, and why some of the other posters in this thread who have made similar posts should probably think about re-evaluating their logic.
First of all in response to the second part of what I quoted, the idea of suspect testing Advance to begin requires a pretty big leap of faith as we would need a rather large amount of people who aren't current playing Advance to participate in a suspect test for something that I suspect not that many people actually care about. As you would know if you actually used it(and I'm pretty confident you've played fewer games of competitive Advance than I've played of Hello Kitty Online), the ladder is pretty much completely dead most of the time. Queues are often 10 minutes or longer. It would be completely impossible to have a valid suspect test under those conditions, and I'm not sure the 60~ people this might make care are enough to make it active or varied. Like g80 said and you for whatever reason thought you were qualified to disregard, most good players don't even play on the ladder right now, which doesn't mean they don't play at all, but does contribute to the fact the ladder tends to have really poor competition. Many of the active Advance players who are still around are hiding teams for SPL and pretty much exclusively play friends and teammates so things are in a bad part of the cycle right now, and even when they're not I can't imagine mopping up people like the guy using Fly Aerodactyl Mekkah hit earlier is very appealing to them.
Secondly, and most importantly, people really need to try to better judge their own experience with Advance because
the ladder is not going to give you a representative view of competitive advance. Like I mentioned a moment ago, most of the best players either A) don't play on the ladder much at all or B) a quit years ago. The ladder also offers zero incentive - we give nothing for being on top of the ladder. No suspect votes, no leaderboard on site, no nothing. There are very few high level Advance tournaments right now(basically just SPL I guess), so outside of casual matches the competition people face is not representative of the highest level of play, which is presumably what we want to set policy on. Even then, the type of shit people pull to fool around or to test teams and what they use in a tournament, especially when official trophies are on the line, are very different. Even SPL is a different game, since the people playing there are playing it instead of another metagame because they love Advance rather than simply to win at all costs, it's a much different demographic with VIL and Jabba and G80 or whatever compared to the people we'll get in tours or the people who play on the ladder right now.
Point being, there are an awful lot of people posting right now who fulfill many or all of the following:
1. Weren't around for significant portions of Gen 3, if any at all, and thus have no firsthand experience of it being "OU"
2. Have never played in an old gen match in SPL, or in SPL at all, or in some cases haven't even watched the SPL Adv matches
3. Have never played in an Advance tournament on Smogon, or have never had any real success if they did
4. Have Advance experience limited to playing with their friends or the co medically lackluster ladder
I think most of the people posting in this thread have not really seen competitive Gen3 OU anymore than say, the people many of the same posters are whining comment too much on BW have seen of Gen 5 OU. Put your own experience into perspective here, guys. Some of the newer guys have pretty good posts here, but for those of you who are going on next to no experience or are trying to present limited experience as more than it is, if you think what you are don't isn't completely obvious or that your posts are needed in this topic you are fooling yourselves(I'm calling you out for your shitty post too, Erazor, after you were shocked and awed to find out Salamence was OU in Gen 3 like 20 minutes before you posted here). Everyone doesn't need to weigh in on every topic. It just adds unnecessary noise.
