Taking a Step Back

[iss]

In the recent discussion about the banning of Arceus from Ubers, we've had arguments about what makes a good metagame good. We've had arguments about unbalanced metagames, centralized metagames, competitive metagames, and even posts about skill-driven metagames. But what do we really want in a metagame? DougJustDoug tried to rectify this question with this thread. While it does answer some of these concepts, such as skill and variety in a metagame, we are still having too many arguments about these topics. I'd like for us to take a look at these questions as to what we want in a metagame:

• Is it alright for a metagame to have a Pokemon that forces otherwise unneccessary preparation?
• Can we have metagames where a few Pokemon are vastly better than others?
• How much luck is required to make a part of Pokemon uncompetitive?
• Does a metagame become uncompetitive because it is unbalanced?

PM from Berserker Lord

It reallt depends on how much of a threat that Pokemon is if you don't take any preperation to do something about it, how many options are avaliable for taking care of it, and whether those options are viable beyond that. A good example would be Doryuzzu. If you don't pack anything that can take a hit or priority, your likely going to lose. Your options for dealing with it would obviously depend on what style of team your using, Offensive would generally use priority, or a relativley bulky Poke that can take its hits and KO back. A team more defensive would gennerally use something that can wall it and either force it out or cripple it. The Pokes that can accomplish this job are viable for taking care of a large amount of other things, so for this point, Doryuzzu is not causing much of a problem.

A example of something that does cause unescessary centrelization would be something like Darkrai. Much like Doryuzzu, if you don't carry something to handle him, your very likely to get swept. But Darkrai causes much more centrelization due to the fact that its much more threatening when first brought in. The list of viable Pokes that can take on Darkrai is much smaller, often requiring the opponent to get one of their Pokes slept so another can KO Darkrai. Of the few Pokes that can handle Darkrai, they consist of Pokes with Sleep Talk, Lum Berry users, Pokes immune to Sleep, or a good amount of priority. Looking at this list, most Sleep Talkers are defensive, thus often not fitting on more offensive teams. Lum Berry users only really work if used as a lead because unless you can predict Darkrai will be using a attacking move and not Dark Void, Darkrai can just use Dark Void again. The Pokes that are immune to Sleep either aren't any good beyond that or have better things to run. Priority is the main thing Offensive teams use besides Scarfing something to outspeed, but Darkrai can live a priority hit and either KO the priority user or cripple them with Dark Void if he hasn't used it yet. It also doesn't help that most of those options are crippled if Darkrai decides to run a TrickScarf set. So for this point, Darkrai is causing unescessary preperation.

I can't really answer the second one so i'll leave it.

Theres no real defineable point where there is " too much luck", but Inconsistent was a good one to look at, basically taking the entire battle out of the hands of the battlers and into a bunch of dice rolls.

It really depends on how unbalanced it is to be honest.

 

[zapzap29]

Interesting questions.

[*]Is it alright for a metagame to have a Pokemon that forces otherwise unneccessary preparation?

I think taking potential threats when building a team is an essential skill in competitive pokemon. However, I also think that we need to further define what unnecessary preparations are and the extent to which they go.

[*]Can we have metagames where a few Pokemon are vastly better than others?

I don't think we should allow metagames to have a few pokes that are vastly better than all others. This generally leads over centralization and an imbalanced metagame. However, I think guidelines should be established for what defines a pokemon as vastly better, similar to the "portrait of an ubers" guidelines. This should be examined very carefully though due to the subjective nature of what breaks a pokemon.

[*]How much luck is required to make a part of Pokemon uncompetitive?

Luck is inherently part of the game and something that must be taken into consideration into playing. However, I think something ought to be done when luck dictates the outcome of the match entirely. Making the game too based around luck doesn't encourage a competitive metagame and skews the skill of risk management. Inconsistent really seems to be the biggest offender. As for some of the other issues involving luck such as "hax" I think we should leave things as they are in-game. The programmers of the pokemon games implemented such things for a reason and if we changed things too much we wouldn't really be playing pokemon.


[*]Does a metagame become uncompetitive becaus it is unbalanced?

Not necessarily. Unbalanced metagames make playing consistently more difficult but don't completely kill the competitive aspect. Even in said metagames there is still skill involved. They can however take away from the enjoyability of the experience which may or may not matter depending on who you ask.

Those are just my opinions but I do think that answering these questions will help solidify our direction.

 

[lati0s]

Is it alright for a metagame to have a Pokemon that forces otherwise unneccessary preparation?

It depends on what you mean by 'alright' there are certain;y people in this community that would find that situation undesirable but it could still be a competitive environment.

Can we have metagames where a few Pokemon are vastly better than others?

Can we? sure.
again, many members of this community would probably think of this situation as undesirable but that does not mean a metagame like this would be uncompetitive.

How much luck is required to make a part of Pokemon uncompetitive?

I think that 'too much' luck is when a player can reliably introduce a situation where neither player can hope to win without luck.

Does a metagame become uncompetitive because it is unbalanced?

Absolutely not, it might be undesirable but not uncompetitive

In this post I have used the definition of competitive as being 'skill in team building and battling is the most important factor in determining the victor of a battle' one could probably also use the more lax 'skill in teambuilding and battling is the most important factor in determining the most successful player in a lot of battles'

 

[cim]

Is it alright for a metagame to have a Pokemon that forces otherwise unneccessary preparation?

This applies to every good Pokemon in every metagame. The concept of metagaming as a whole is the tailoring of one's team to address other popular teams to an extent; no metagame will let players build teams in a vacuum.

Can we have metagames where a few Pokemon are vastly better than others?

Considering people play Ubers, yes, we can have any metagame lots of people elect to play. Consider that the purpose of Ubers is to be a general ban list for "standard Pokemon" (more commonly OU), if an Ubers metagame is particularly playable than it renders itself unnecessary.

How much luck is required to make a part of Pokemon uncompetitive?

To a very, very, very large extent, luck does not make Pokemon uncompetitive, because Pokemon is a long term luck management game much like Poker. All skill in Pokemon is luck management, from team building to predicting to countering. Because Pokemon is a game of long term luck management, losing to seven Critical Hits in a row or to 2 OHKO moves in a row is not that big a deal, since it is a single loss and presumably for that same game the moves you made would have won you most of your battles. A Royal Flush isn't broken in Poker because it's so rare.

However, I do admit that some luck would cause too much entropy for Pokemon battles to trend toward definitively better players in the long term. There are basically two ways things can be "broken". First, something causes a player to disproportionately win more in a metagame, to the point where even after an arbitrarily large amount of metagaming the Pokemon in question is still quite viable. Your 4th gen Garchomp ban goes here. Second, the inclusion of the move or Pokemon in the game induces a large and difficult to manage amount of luck into the game. OHKOs are the classic example of this, not solely because of the 30% kill figure but that the kill is essentially a random removal of a particular response on a team.

The former ban in particular is notably absent from Ubers, which has a niche mainly in overcentrailzed teams battling each other.

Does a metagame become uncompetitive becaus it is unbalanced?

Now this is a question worth debating.

 

[Nails]

• Is it alright for a metagame to have a Pokemon that forces otherwise unneccessary preparation?

That is the definition of overcentralization. No.

• Can we have metagames where a few Pokemon are vastly better than others?

In OU right now, we're banning the few pokemon that are vastly better than the others, so no. It makes the game difficult to play if your opponent has multiple mons that are near impossible to counter, even if you are too, turning the match into a crapshoot. As far as this applies to ubers, I would say that there aren't any pokemon VASTLY better than the others, as long as each type of arceus is consisdered a different pokemon. Each one has its counters, just like every other pokemon is counterable. The fact that there are such a large number of powerful threats to prepare for is the issue, as each has the ability to steamroll an unprepared team. Just like Kyogre can demolish a team without a water resist.


Arceus is far and away the best pokemon in ubers right now, this is accepted as fact. In any other meta, this would warrant a suspect test and likely a ban. Whether or not we can do this in ubers seems like the main issue.

• How much luck is required to make a part of Pokemon uncompetitive?

Things that break the game make the game uncompetitive. Inconsistent gives you a large chance of being able to simply stall until you've acquired the boosts needed to sweep. Skymin is broken because, while it has the ability to flinch things to death with air slash, it also has huge Special Attack and Speed, Leech Seed and Substitute to punish switches, and Earth Power to hit mons that resist Seed Flare and Air Slash. Jirachi is not broken because while it has the same base 600 stats as Skymin, an even better chance of flinching the opponent on any given chance (Iron Head has perfect accuracy), and arguably better defensive typing, it lacks the speed needed to flinch a lot of the frail pokemon that skymin can. It also lacks coverage moves to hit the pokemon that resist Iron Head (it has no ground moves in its movepool, most bulky waters don't care about a Jolly Jirachi thunderpunch). It has a lot more pokemon that can either force it out completely or don't care about anything it can do to it, and it doesn't do nearly as much damage as Skymin does per flinch.

It's not really the amount of luck, but what happens because of that luck that matters.

• Does a metagame become uncompetitive becaus it is unbalanced?

No. It's less competitive if it's more unbalanced though.

 

[alamaster]

• Is it alright for a metagame to have a Pokemon that forces otherwise unneccessary preparation?

That is pokemon really. Any moderate to top threat in the metagame has to be prepared for. If you don't have a counter to Infernape or Gengar in DP OU then you're toast when you see them in a match. A better question would be is how much is too much preparation for a threat?

• Can we have metagames where a few Pokemon are vastly better than others?

Every metagame has pokemon that are used much more than others, but that doesn't necessarily make them better. Surprise and variety are definite factors in being a successful player. It depends what you mean by better since most pokemon do not have another pokemon in the same tier that can fulfil the exact same role as the other. Going by just usage statistics, I think it's inevitable that some pokemon will be superior to others, not that there is anything wrong with that.

• How much luck is required to make a part of Pokemon uncompetitive?

Since the majority of pokemon is luck based (moves missing, effects, critical hits, evasion, damage rolls, team matchups) I think it would take a substantial amount of luck to make the game completely uncompetitive. There aren't many "game breaking" luck based strategies, and the rest do not hinder the game since most of the time the better player is able to win. As long as someone can consistently win with enough skill, the game will be competitive.

• Does a metagame become uncompetitive because it is unbalanced?

No, the number of metagames that are unbalanced vastly outnumber the balanced ones and that doesn't make them any less competitive. Arguably unbalanced metagames could be more competitive since they force a player to continually prepare for changes to the metagame, keeping it fresh.

 

[Rhys DeAnno]

• Is it alright for a metagame to have a Pokemon that forces otherwise unneccessary preparation?
• Can we have metagames where a few Pokemon are vastly better than others?

These two questions are getting at very related points, since Pokemon that are vastly better than others will tend to be used more often, and therefore these Pokemon may require much more preparation than others, because they are both very good and very common. Skymin in this latest test is a good example, because it could devastate any team without sufficient measures in place, and because of its (likely?) top five usage. Any team weak to Skymin would lose a large percentage of matches against Skymin, and those would be a large percentage of their total matches.

On the other hand, a Pokemon like Nattorei is both very good and very common, but feels vastly "less uber" than Skymin does. I believe that this is because Nattorei has many more common checks (and even counters) than Skymin does, making the amount of preparation teams must dedicate to Nattorrei much lower. More Pokemon can do the job, so the opportunity cost of having one or two of them on your team tends to be much less. A similar situation existed in late DPP with Salamence and Scizor: both had heavy usage and were acknowledged as good, but Scizor had many checks and counters, while Mence barely even had checks.

Though a lot of people talk about DPP as the Gen where people got out of a "counter everything" mentality, I think its clear that the single quality which seems to most contribute to uberness based on being "too good" is a lack of viable checks and/or counters in the metagame. Though a single team often can't hope to counter or even check everything, it generally will attempt to counter and check as much as possible, and Pokemon which are especially difficult to counter and check will seem more uber. People will constantly be stressed to fit material into their teams that can handle the Salamences and Skymins of the world, which causes the resentment that gets them voted uber.

tl;dr : The uberness of a Poke (based on power elements rather than luck elements) is directly related to how many and how common its checks and counters are in the meta.

 

[cim]

That is the definition of overcentralization. No.

Scizor with SD and Roost requires you to carry a Scizor counter. Overcentralization?

Blissey requires you to carry a physical attacker. Overcentralization?

Every Pokemon requires preparation. You can't just say any amount of preparation is overcentralization.

 

[Nails]

Is it alright for a metagame to have a Pokemon that forces otherwise unneccessary preparation?

Scizor with SD and Roost requires you to carry a Scizor counter. Overcentralization?

Blissey requires you to carry a physical attacker. Overcentralization?

Every Pokemon requires preparation. You can't just say any amount of preparation is overcentralization.

I was saying that otherwise unnecessary preperation is overcetralization. You have to run a physical attacker anyways or other specially bulky pokemon will give you major issues. Scizor's counters are quite common too, and they serve many other roles besides checking scizor (heatran counters SD scizor, most other steels, most grass types, ect.).

Otherwise unnecessary preparation is "I have to run a choice band scizor and make sure rocks stay up or I'll get swept by Salamence". Necessary preparation is "Heatran's the most common pokemon, I should probably have a couple pokemon that can switch into it". There's a difference.

 

[Ice-eyes]

I think the main question here is, 'is it enough that a metagame is competitive?' Does it also have to be balanced, de-centralised etc.? Because if not, non-Arceus ubers is probably competitive enough to be standard.

 

[cim]

I was saying that otherwise unnecessary preperation is overcetralization. You have to run a physical attacker anyways or other specially bulky pokemon will give you major issues.

Define "otherwise unnecessary". Does that mean a Pokemon isn't broken if there are 2 or 3 others that share its attributes? If the simple fact that you have to think about a particular Pokemon when building a team was enough to say it was broken, then (pardon the 4th gen analogies) Gengar, Scizor, Swampert, Heatran, Blissey, Skarmory, Gyarados... we should get rid of all of them! Any team in RMT that is replied to with "You have a Gyarados / Heatran weakness" isn't a bad team, it's just not responding to overcentralization...

A much better metric for broken is when a Pokemon is still rabidly popular despite metagame adjustments. "Overcentralization" alone is rarely the problem, because for the average Pokemon when the metagame is overcentralized against it it falls in popularity. The problem is when despite these adjustments, the Pokemon remains as lethal as it ever was; i.e. an arbitrarily high amount of centralization does not make it any less effective against the metagame.

When you get down to it, the truth is all teams prepare for the threats on other teams...

 

[Ice-eyes]

The problem is more with excessive overcentralisation. Certain threats you have to keep in mind. You can be Gyarados or Heatran weak. But if it gets to the point where to prevent a mon from doing huge damage to your team you have to expressly pack several checks and counters specifically to stop one mon (á la DP Chomp) then there is a problem.

 

[cim]

The problem is more with excessive overcentralisation. Certain threats you have to keep in mind. You can be Gyarados or Heatran weak. But if it gets to the point where to prevent a mon from doing huge damage to your team you have to expressly pack several checks and counters specifically to stop one mon (á la DP Chomp) then there is a problem.

I don't think that this is inherently a problem. On the off chance a Pokemon took that much dedication to beat, and everyone did it, then carrying that Pokemon would be a liability as it would be competitively useless against any decent team. (Essentially the "Magneton problem" in Gen 3 on a larger / more dramatic scale)

What's happened in the example of things like Garchomp though is that an "infinite" amount of centralization could not make it unviable.

 

[Nails]

Define "otherwise unnecessary".

When you have to devote a larger amount of pokemon/moveslots/ect. to a certain threat or a small amount of threats than to the majority of the threats in the metagame. Basically what Ice-eyes said, when something is so good that it requires multiple counters on a team.

 

[monkfish]

I don't think that this is inherently a problem. On the off chance a Pokemon took that much dedication to beat, and everyone did it, then carrying that Pokemon would be a liability as it would be competitively useless against any decent team. (Essentially the "Magneton problem" in Gen 3 on a larger / more dramatic scale)

This is a pretty bad argument. If "everyone" is centralizing their team around countering a pokemon then that is overcentralizing, regardless of whether you choose to use it.

 

[cim]

This is a pretty bad argument. If "everyone" is centralizing their team around countering a pokemon then that is overcentralizing, regardless of whether you choose to use it.

Overcentralizing isn't synonomous with broken though. If a non-broken Pokemon is overcentralized against (say, Alakazam in gen 4 with weaville scizor tar around, though of course alakazam was not the force causing the centralizing), then it simply falls into obscurity.

 

[Ice-eyes]

Therefore any metagame-defining pokemon which hasn't fallen into obscurity is broken?

 

[cim]

Therefore any metagame-defining pokemon which hasn't fallen into obscurity is broken?

That's the point I was trying to make. If you define centralization as "broken" then everything is. It's too liberal.

 

[Ice-eyes]

Ah. Your point that non-broken pokemon being overcentralised against fell into obscurity seemed to suggest the opposite.

 

[cim]

Ah. Your point that non-broken pokemon being overcentralised against fell into obscurity seemed to suggest the opposite.

OVER being the key word. I'm defining overcentralization as an arbitrarily / infinitely large amount of centralization. Most threats are not overcentralized against simply because there is more than one threat to consider, or such centralization is difficult to do while maintaning a generally functional team.