So, uhh, this line took me from mildly preferring diverse metas to majorly preferring it. I may not personally like Hyper Offense in Pokemon, but a dislike of balanced builds runs deeper. The entire point of a limit on how much you can put in a team/rpg character/army list/whatever is so that you can't be excellent at everything, and you're telling me that not having a clear top pick also contributes to that goal. I would welcome "commit to something" as a game rule in more than just Monotype.
No team is excellent at everything - balance teams try to find a, well,
balance where they are good enough into everything that they don't have too many bad matchups, but they don't have a ton of incredible ones either. Think lots of 60/40 and 40/60 matchups, almost nothing more polarized than that. They have enough juice in the tank to not just fall apart, but actually winning generally requires the pilot to have good decision making skills; they can
not lose in the teambuilder, but winning and not losing are different things. They aren't winning strictly out of the teambuilder, so they need to outplay to win. The extreme ends of the spectrum tend to just say "I will sacrifice my [damage/survivability] to buff my [survivability/damage] to the extreme and attempt to beat every matchup by [overwhelming it with sheer damage / being unkillable and winning via attrition]."
When all you have is a few degrees of hyper offense and stall in the format, games are going to play out more or less the same way every time. Hyper offense mirrors will be decided on speed stats and "which player gets momentum first," hyper offense vs stall will always just be hard aggressor vs defender matchups that usually put the onus on the stall player to make the correct plays, and stall mirrors will play out... idk how stall mirrors play out any more, I haven't seriously followed singles in years. Whichever player has more time to play 400 turns of Regenerator pivoting, I guess.
Balance hinges on knowing what the meta it's trying to play into looks like. If the meta is completely unpredictable, balance cannot exist, and a format where balance doesn't exist encourages linear gameplay. You're welcome to not enjoy balance, but trying to remove it entirely will make for a largely worse gameplay experience.
(There's an argument to be made that balance will eventually force itself into existence anyway, because that "only hyper offense and stall" format will eventually crystallize around the Pokemon with the highest stats, at which point you can start building balance because you can expect to see those high-statted Pokemon in more games. That isn't what I'm here to talk about, but it's a neat thing to think about.)
I guess you don't like the phrasing but you knew what I meant.
No! I don't! Would you happen to have some specific numbers? Is 20% usage too much? 40%? 60%?
Lando-T had 70% usage in USUM at one point.
Hey look, a number!
If you asked me if 70% usage in a modern format is too much, I would agree with you in pretty much every case. However, I still think that this statistic needs to be contextualized. Was Lando-T usage inflated because it's too good, or is it just a convenient answer? Does Lando-T's presence make the format worse, or are you just bored of seeing it?
High usage contributes to staleness.
see above
There were no objective rules that said that Arena Trap and Shed Tail should be banned. They were looked at individually and banned.
There are no objective measures for brokenness either. Has X checks and Y counters? It doesn't include any details
I can put Arena Trap into my teambuilder. I cannot put usage into my teambuilder. Usage isn't a trait of a Pokemon, it's a statistic. An observation. You can say that Arena Trap is broken because it unfairly restricts the options available to the opponent and allows the user to set up one-sided game states too easily. You can't say anything like this about high usage because it's not a thing a Pokemon has. I can point to specific reasons that I believe Mewtwo is broken, because Mewtwo is a part of the game and can be banned. I can't say "60% usage is broken," because that's not a thing I can actually ban. The best I can do is say "hey, this Pokemon has incredibly high usage," and examine what might be causing that high usage. It might be a result of a Pokemon being broken, or it might just be a result of a Pokemon having broad applications.
I don't want to totally ignore the idea that incredibly high usage Pokemon can make a meta feel stale because you always see the same Pokemon. I have my own reasons for disliking SS Doubles OU (and would attempt to make a LOT of ill-intentioned bans if put in charge of it). However, as a former tier leader and a (mostly) normal human being, I understand that this isn't what Smogon does. Pokemon are banned when they are broken or uncompetitive. Usage does not make a Pokemon broken; it is at best a result of a Pokemon being broken. Hell, sometimes high usage might even point to something different being broken - if I remember correctly, way back in the Deoxys-Defense days of BW OU, Pokemon with strong hazard stack matchups had inflated usage because they could counteract the very broken Deoxys-Defense, who was sitting all the way in
ninth place in ladder usage.
The one time I worked at a grocery store, we were expected to take expired goods out back to the dumpsters, stab them a bunch of times with a metal rake to puncture any packaging, and then pour cleaning solution all over them so people wouldn't go dumpster diving for them.
when I say "eat the rich" I am not using a metaphor
