This is the kind of incident that makes me really think tiering and conduct in this Gen of OU is a lost-cause. It'd be one thing if it was just the Kyurem DNB verdict, which I don't share but can respect as due process... but that's not what we got.
The most obvious callout is the Fraudulent voters and the "troll" DNB vote, as those undermine the entire point and spirit of the suspect vote, but I need to add something: multiple suspect threads have essentially devolved into shouting matches between the participants, not simply heatedly arguing their points but actively attacking each others' character and intelligence. Pages upon pages of ZapKingLu positing, CTC putting down people who voted Ban on past or current subjects as not wanting to think, repeated calls for different suspects/unbans (Tera Blast, Volcarona, the 91% Gouging Fire Suspect), all behavior that flies in the face of having a respectful discourse around the topic to the point that the Council is contemplating separate threads so there can be distinct forums for the wider playerbase vs the High-Ranking/Reqs/Tournament level players.
To this latter point I say: to what end? Several of the offending accounts were Tour players, what is this separation going to accomplish besides having the equivalent of Splatoon X-Rank for one thread and Anarchy Players in another? The Same behavior just some are better at the game? Repeated patterns of advocating for different bans, theorymon/slippery slope defenses, attacks on character rather than arguments, all in opposition to the opening post rules of every thread?
It's the same thing every time when I watch this: a few posts (sometimes from Badged users, sometimes just very elaborated posts from "regular" users) become the focal point of response, dozens of pages shouting, a few posts get deleted, CTC gets a forum ban that probably won't even last through the next tiering action thread (yes I am hanging on this particular user because they are both emblematic of my grievances and a case I had repeated interaction/encounters with), moderators say to behave, and it all resumes as soon as the next one hits. Were the Suspect threads my primary basis, I would be prepared to say Smogon is every bit as toxic and elitist as the stereotypes suggest, it gets that bad. I can appreciate that an immense amount of work goes into running the tier and having to deal with both regularity and situations like this vote, but I cannot in good conscience say that this section of the actual Forum is well-moderated in light of what I have observed in the past several Suspect threads.
At this point the Meta itself is stuck in a mess, the conversation and discourse around it is a poorly moderated shouting match, and even the voting process has to be double checked to even trust that people who can vote do (and do seriously). If I'm to be frank, I don't think anything like Kingambit or Tera is what has us in a tiering rut: it's the inability of the community that handles it to act like adults with the game they put this much time into playing and trying to influence, a problem that has existed in some degree or another for over a decade's worth of tiers at least by now and is simply accepted as the norm because those behaviors were not shamed enough to prompt some thought from bad eggs.
SV OU is down in flames for me, and it's not because of any Dragon. If its community can't respect it, how can I?
