Smogon Tours for Suspects

Approved by Mcmeghan ~

There has been a lot of talk about the suspect process and the issues that go with it, namely bandwagoning, lack of demonstration that voters know the meta, and lack of an accurate depiction of the meta. The problem I will be focusing on is seeing the meta accurately.

The main methods we have used so far to try to depict the meta without (or with) a certain pokemon have been suspect ladders and (recently) suspect tours. The suspect ladder is also used to determine if players are good enough or knowledgeable enough to vote (it fails there too). Both, however, don't really show how the meta would be with the change. For suspect ladders, people just use whatever team they have without the suspect, and think of it as a chore to be done quickly rather than using it to test teams in the new meta or build the best possible team. Suspect tours offer a fairly insufficient award in reqs, so while people do join them they will once again use a generic team rather than adapt to what is a new meta.

The other issue, from a council perspective, is the only method we have to question a pokemon is suspecting. This process is long, and more importantly it is final. We can't just look at how the meta would be without something, if we do then there is a good chance it will be gone. While this is the community's decision, our role as council is to do make sure the community doesn't, for lack of a better word, fuck up. And while the community is good and generally benevolent, I won't pretend like I truly trust the community given the bandwagoning and general pro-ban sentiment of many. Furthermore, the permanence and lengthiness of the current process makes it impossible to do more interesting and unusual suspects, like scald or stealth rock or fuckin twave idk.

So my proposal is that we use smogon tour weeks to suspect stuff. This could be for oras only, although if its possible and whoever is in charge/the community wanted to, it could carry over to other tiers in stours (spikes-less bw, volc-less bw, dragon dpp, sr-less dpp anyone?) I know this sounds fairly drastic and some people might reject it out of hand due to it messing with an official tournament. It would indeed change it, but that change wouldn't be for the worst. IF we choose the suspects well, it would make the meta even more balanced. It would also place an emphasis on individual teambuilding, rather than using the most successful teams all year. It would also keep the meta and the tours from gettin stale, something that tends to happen in my experience.

The benefits would also be excellent. We wouldn't have suspects entirely based in theorymonning. We could actually see how the meta changes as the best players on the site try to adapt to the new meta. We would have a way of seeing the best strategies and playstyles (the teams making deep runs in the tours). We would also have room to experiment with the tier and optimize it like we never could in the past. People always complain about the council moving too slow or w.e, and this would certainly help. You might think that it would be better to have realistic suspects in a way that wouldn't affect an official tour. However, the only way to get people to actually try their hardest to make teams and theorymon for the new meta is to relate it to an official tour.

Now just to answer some questions people had when I explained this to them. At least at first, this wouldn't replace a suspect ladder in any way, it would just be a smogon tour with a slightly altered banlist. It could be any combination of drops and bans (I will get to implementation soon), although they will always be within reason and with the intention of making the meta "better" (however u want to define it). The same suspect would be on for all 3 days of a tour week; it wouldnt switch.

The implementation is something I'm not sure about and would like community input. My original idea was that the council would just pick the suspect. I would still be open to this, but I think it probably should be in the hands of the community. My current idea is a simple vote, with eligibility based on some amount of smogon tour/tournaments in general activity. The details, such as whether the same thing could be suspected twice in a season, or whether drops would be allowed to be voted for, or whether " no change" would be an option, I am also unsure of"

Please respond with whether you think this idea is reasonable/good, what you think the method of implementation should be, the possibility of old gen changes, and your ideas about suspects in general. I saw BKC made a thread about bp in dpp that might relate to this.

One last thing, don't reject this without thinking because its different and weird. Thanks!

Edit: If it wasn't clear, this is still a TD decision, but they are interested in what the community has to say
 
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Reymedy

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We run suspect tests to be able to get a metagame as competitive as possible to run our tournaments.
Not the other way around.
I don't understand your logic and I'm getting annoyed by the council members and tier leaders implying constantly that we voters are too stupid to take good decisions.

You already changed the rules with Hoopa, and now you plan to change them possibly every single week. From the point of view of someone who plans to play it and attempt to win it, it's totally silly and it's gonna drasticly change the tournaments in a way that is unhealthy.
Stability and consistency are the more important things, alongside competitiveness, to provide a good metagame. I'm surprised that you even thought about doing something like the decision you've explained in your article. I don't think it's worth breaking down this big text, as the idea as a whole looks incredibly flawed to me and does not make any sense.
 
Tour is probably a better testing ground than ladders thanks to the higher levels of competition/motivation, so this is a good idea from a perspective of improving the tiering process, but I think it kinda lost sight of the goal of the process, ie creating better tiers to compete in [in tournaments]. You're compromising one of the biggest and most prestigious official tournaments by basing it on an extremely volatile metagame in an attempt to create a better metagame for official tours. Reymedy posted above while I was writing this and he got it right; tiering isn't the end goal here. I don't think there's much else to be said about this so I'll move on to the other points.

The implementation of this is tied closely to one's ideas about the suspect process in general. As I tried to explain in the thread I made a while back (it went nowhere and died), the criteria for banning something are highly subjective to the point where it doesn't make sense (to me) to limit tiering decisions to a small set of users, so I agree that it should be decided by the community with small restrictions (the tournament activity thing in the OP would be fine, adding things like forum/ladder activity would work too). Regarding the three "details" you mentioned, my answers would be no (to avoid walking in place) / yes / yes (both for reasons of subjectivity). More thoughts re: suspects/banning in general here.

As for old gens, if the activity is there I see nothing wrong with continually working on their tier lists for as long as they're being played in official tournaments; the goals of tiering should be the same across all gens.
 

Sapientia

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So you say the suspect process how it is right now messes up with the tier?
And messing up with the tier means basically creating an unhealthy / unbalanced metagame which damages the competitiveness of our tours...

...and to solve this issue you just do whatever you want with tournaments and make their tiers a complete mess?
Doesn't sound very reasonable to me.

I don't know why people complain about voters being stupid all the time. Can anyone provide me with example of stupid voters, stupid votes, stupid reasonings or anything? Because I don't see how any of the votes we had in ORAS so far where objectively wrong or bad. But maybe that's just me being only a part time player lol
I also don't understand why we add a maximum of matches allowed to play for reqs, when we actually want players to do matches in a different metagame. Therefore more matches -> better understanding of the meta
 

Genesis7

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I don't like this idea, I don't want to play a test meta in an actually relevant tour. If the Ruins of Alph guys and the OU council want to run suspect tours like they did for BW during WCOP this year I'm all for it but, don't use ST as the suspect tour.
 

Luigi

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Other than the concerns that it's intrinsically flawed that the above 4 users have outlined, the number of games would be insignificant, looking at the last suspect test: we had over 700.000 battles played on the suspect ladder in contrast to the 576 that would be played over 3 days of 192-man tours. It's simply not worth compromising the integrity of one of the most prestigious tours on the site for such a small amount of games, regardless of how much more people would care about those 576 (not that they'd be all that informative either, since no one will have "figured out" the new metagame yet by the first tour they join).
 
not only does this effectively add yet another blockade to join a tournament for a newer user (a demarcation is inherent from having to explain that the tournament is not just standard oras / bw / dpp ou), but it also creates a hella volatile environment by testing in dangerous waters. suspect metagames haven't been previously played and are new to everyone involved. it makes building so much more difficult, and it effectively stunts development in the current metagame. tournaments expedite the process of maturation in a tier, and that aspect would be made moot with this process. the logistics of it are hella shaky too. the lackluster number of battles compared to a standard suspect, despite the qualms with the current testing methods, is also a huge factor in me disliking this. i just don't see how it's pragmatic to effectively fuck up one of the only prestigious tournaments smogon has left for the sake of ~TESTING~.

re: small pool of games- i think if a person is competent in a metagame, playing 0 or 200 battles won't really affect their judgment in regards to a suspect decision, but it's not like you can feasibly cherrypick who these dudes are.
 

Aberforth

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Yeah I'm in just about full agreement with just about everyone in this thread. Testing a new metagame as part of an official tour for the sake of getting more people to care about the tests and getting higher quality voters or something rubs me the wrong way. It seems very much opposed to the current point of our tiering system, and fucking with one of the biggest tournaments we have on the site to test radical ideas is something to be avoided. Something like baton pass I could understand, but when you're talking about some of the things in the OP of the thread was talking about (ie: no stealth rock in DPP) it could end up doing a lot more harm than good to the tournament
 
There were already some sort of suspect tests during smogon tours, but if I remember correctly there were not official weeks of smogon tours season but just pre-season testing or similar stuff. While I agree to suspect test during certain smogtour weeks, I think also that the maximum timing we should use for suspecting in this tour is just 1/3, in order to not compromising too much the smogtour "quality" (?) and avoid to make it an actual suspect testing ground more than a tournament. At the same time, just 1 week of suspect testing is really too few in my opinion.
I believe the best way to solve all issues is creating some pre-season smogtour weeks in which testing stuff; the top # will get particular privileges or can count that results as a step to get TC badge or alumni etc. tl;dr pre-season weeks = live suspect tours. It could work at best together with a ladder but I didn't understand whether or not Council's gonna remove it from their OU suspects with this proposal, yet.
The idea's cool though.
 
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Yeah really disagree w/ using tour as testing grounds; Smogon Tour is pretty much the most prestigious individual tournament on the site and testing around different stuff in it creates volatile metagames and makes preparation even harder; like Reymedy said, we should have stable metagame for tours (obviously for general playability etc. and stuff but yeah) and not the other way around. The tiering stuff mentioned in the OP is pretty important (BP in DPP and the ORAS issues/BW reun), but this really isn't the way to go about it and I'm guessing live tours + council/suspect vote would be good enough (the BW ones were relatively successful although the winners didn't take a part in voting).
 

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