Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v4

Sachumberto said:
Same approach led us to unban such mon as Darkrai, and has directly contributed to make this meta shitty, sry but the council since the start of 2nd dlc has just been an immense joke, and has to improve at a certain point, or just stop being
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As an fyi, us making decisions you disagree with doesn’t make us “an immense joke”.

You’re welcome to express dissent and dislike the metagame, and we’re here to listen, but calling us a joke is not going to do anything for you; if you choose to insult us instead of giving us constructive feedback we won’t be compelled to listen.
 
i know you guys don't like opposition, but have no worries we will get there:

vertex and ctc calling out the whole community so that we can share their opinion about the metagame is ok,
youtubeur being able to influence their community about a suspect and directly changing the outcome of this is ok
but calling out one of your innumerable mistakes and management of this tier is suddendly not ok ?

yeah i knew something was wrong with y'all but it looks like you guys don't even give effort in hiding it anymore,
no need to answer this post i don't care about this tier, im just throwing my 2cents about your most recent posts pce.
 
Leftiez said:
but calling out one of your innumerable mistakes and management of this tier is suddendly not ok ?
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Bruh we both are saying this is ok!! The issue is that what he said is both incorrect and not council errors. He’s mad at the community for how they voted and the concept of suspect tests.

How about you read before accusing? You guys should be critical of authority!! You guys deserve the best tier possible. We don’t get there by people spewing misinformation and being rude though.
 
I feel like a lot of gripes with the tiering leaders would be solved if there was less assumption of ill intent and more "its fucking hard to work within the confines of Smogons systems" especially with a community difficult as this one lol. You have to respond in kind and be respectful, if you come swinging you aren't going to make serious headway and it kinda makes you look like a jerk. Questioning things is great! Criticism is great! but being vitriolic about it is not encouraging communication. Nor does it breed a healthy ground to do so.
 
Leftiez said:
youtubeur being able to influence their community about a suspect and directly changing the outcome of this is ok
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Idk what anyone's supposed to do about that, influencers have a voice and their message and arguments can reach more people. Do you want the council to act like the Romanian constitutional court?
Leftiez said:
but calling out one of your innumerable mistakes and management of this tier is suddendly not ok ?
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The recent comments were filled with hostility and vitriol, and some of the arguments were based on falsehoods. Hardly something that is conducive to a healthy and productive conversation.
Leftiez said:
yeah i knew something was wrong with y'all but it looks like you guys don't even give effort in hiding it anymore,
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LIke this, for example. You approach these people with such contempt, do you expect them to respond nicely?
Leftiez said:
no need to answer this post i don't care about this tier, im just throwing my 2cents about your most recent posts pce.
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Finch, Ausma and the rest can fend for themselves, but I didn't want to let this pass myself. I have expressed disagreement with the way the Palafin suspect has been done, but these inflamatory posts do nothing to steer the conversation in the way you guys desire.
 
Criticism is good and something I’m open to. I’m on vacation this week and have responded to over a dozen PMs with questions or critique on tiering.

The difference here is that these are gripes that aren’t with the council being held against the council. You cannot be mad something suspected wasn’t banned by the community — the community decided that. You can’t be mad something that never got any survey or public support wasn’t suspected — the community decided that and this puts you in a firm minority, so expecting the council to act against the community isn’t fair.

In a generation with a lot of close suspect tests, everyone is going to be on the other side of one or two. I get it. That doesn’t mean it’s open season to be rude though. You want change? Go be the change you want to see. Post in threads, participate in suspects, respond to surveys — the people citing issues here haven’t done all of these or even close.

Never going to be a time where everyone is happy, but it’s lame when a thread like this could be productive and instead ends rude, misleading, etc.
 
It's 3 a.m., so I won't bother writing this super well, but I do have something I want to say.

First of all, I want to thank you all for the amount of work you put into this tier, the surveys, the constant engagement, and the countless hours spent writing pieces for the community. It is something we should be deeply grateful for, so thank you truly.

But it is undeniable that there are problems with the tier, and its tiering process, this palafin suspect is maybe the most glaring example. The community is split in 2 currently maybe it was split like this from the start of this gen, but this was not the case in previous gens, while a lot of ppl did disagree on things, it wasn't like this, where it looks like there are truly "2 factions" always going at each other. Maybe this is a bit dramatic but you get the point LOL.

The ppl who are "mad" are probably from the part of the community that in some way felt abandoned, since right now the tier is probably in its worst state ever, instead of trying to fix it we do this suspect, that at the end of the day only a small part of the community wanted. Personally, I do not think it's gonna get unbanned from what I can see, but you can never say never. I do HOPE it does remain uber tho.

The biggest gripe we have is probably how some suspects were handled, or some tiering decisions were taken. For example, the fact that Darkrai was unbanned, there was a suspect on sleep immediately after, can we truly say this was the right decision? that it wasn't influenced by Darkrai's presence in the tier? While sleep has always been annoying this is the first fairy gen in which it's banned. And I do not know if it truly was bc it just was broken this time around, or because Darkrai just got unbanned, and ya didn't want to make it Ubers again.

The tera retest that had to happen at the start of dlc2 but ended up never coming is another example, the terablast suspect too.

Let's not talk about the kyurem suspect LOL, in a way was a deeply flawed suspect, but it wasn't your fault.

And now we have this, debatable, palafin suspect since in the end it was wanted by a small part of our community, that paid with likes to get it. While I can see how this is a fun thing for the holidays, and I do agree that the likes shop was fun the tier is currently in very bad shape and this suspect, probably won't help.

One last thing is that not everyone has the time or the energy to always post on the forums, it's, for example, 3:30 am for me, and I am making a sacrifice to write this (my sleep), for you guys it's a responsibility, so it's different, but they shouldn't feel obligated to post to have a decent tier to play in, it normally should happen naturally.

But I don't want to only be negative, and as I already said, we are deeply thankful for all the work you guys do, and we can see that you try to listen to everyone's opinions and act on them.

What most ppl would like to see is probably more frequent surveys and suspects, it's been a while since the last survey, and we probably need more of them. But most importantly we need good suspects that bring good change LOL, this gen has been a bit too obsessed with unbanning or trying as hard as possible to ban things, I think that ss ou, for example, was handled way better, if banning something would bring about a more balanced and competitive meta, we should do it (and do so fast, waiting months and months for a suspect is not always the best when something is broken, I do understand that you need data to support a suspect, but if we do more surveys we could then have said data!) in any case ppl are mad bc we know that this tier could be better and we wish for a day in which it is, better (preferably not in 10 months tho) trying to unban new and untested mons can always be fun, but before doing so we should try to bring the tier in a state where most ppl think is indeed fun and balanced! Then we can try to bring new and untested mon, or at least do so when the tier is not pure suffering to play. Well, this is deeply personal but I think at least part of the community would agree with me.
 
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I don't understand why people are acting like this is "getting in the way" of an "actual suspect test". Realistically, if the test had not been funded, there would not have been a suspect in December, full stop. The Likeshop test was specifically designed to be out of the way of significant overlap with tour circuits to cause minimal friction. Furthermore, this was simply a more popular option in the community than Terastallization, a mechanic that I think is widely regarded to be FAR more controversial than Palafin would ever be. It's completely fair to dislike Palafin's presence in the tier, but to act as though it is deliberately obstructing other tiering action is disingenuous.
 
To double up on Carl's basic point:

Other than Tera Blast (which Finch has point-blank stated would be on the next survey, and strongly implied would be acted on with high scores) what would you suspect? Tera Blast hasn't had support in previous surveys, and without evidence that opinion has turned against it, wouldn't hit 50%, much less 60%. Kyurem has survived two tests now and tiering admins probably wouldn't allow a test yet, Gliscor just survived a suspect of its own, and there's no signs that anything else has meaningful support.

There's at least a dozen mons that have small, passionate hatebases that want them banned, but none with enough to justify a test. There's the perennial "I hate terastalization" crowd, but again, no signs that they've grown beyond the 25% or so from the last two surveys. There's a few other Ubers that get named, but none have the support - or a clear rationale to be tested - of Palafin, so they weren't going first regardless.

Really, what's being put off that has a fart's chance in a tornado to justify a suspect right this moment?
 
I might as well just get this out while the subject is on tiering decisions.

I will neither understand how the sleep clause mod was around for as long as it was nor the incessant whinging that resulted in its removal and sleep’s ban, as if we aren’t better off without it. I mean, what’s changed? Amoong fell off a cliff. Is that it?

If the only thing stopping Red Card Amoonguss from Sporing twice, or Darkrai and Valiant clicking Hypnosis multiple times all over the opponent’s team was a mod that can’t actually be replicated in-game, then we’re not actually playing the game.

That it took Darkrai and Iron Valiant haxing their way through with it for this to be brought up in DLC2 is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, since they both ended up being top-tier mons despite the former’s status as “fraudulent”. Remember Iron Boulder? First impressions don’t tell the full story, people.
 
Finchinator said:
If council bans something and then retests it, then the council ban can be used to manipulate the threshold needed for something to remain in the tier/be banned. Think about it: if we just suspect X Pokemon, it needs 60% to get banned. If we ban something and then retest it, then it would’ve needed 60% to return to the tier — flipping the entire status quo causing that much of a deviation was a huge issue with Melmetal last generation.
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Im not really a fan of this, because it’s a little inconsistent.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but any Pokemon that starts Ubers, whether via council vote or box-art status, requires a 60% unban to drop back, if it is suspected down. Any Pokemon previously allowed into the tier and then banned by council vote is only 50% + 1.
But what’s the difference between a council vote to quick ban a threat and a council vote to keep a threat Ubers before the generation? They’re both essentially council quickbans, and sure there’s some precedent for the Ubers threats to continue being broken, but you can very much say the same about the quickbanned threats, and if anything they have more precedent by being allowed into OU only to become broken later. Flutter Mane and Landorus-Incarnate are both absurd threats that terrorize the tier, but since Flutter Mane got three days to run rampant through the tier, any theoretical resuspect should require 10% less votes to approve?

I do think it’s worth having a discussion over the voting threshold, since it’s inconsistent over which council bans count as “potential manipulation” and others are seen are perfectly fine.

(If it turns out I misread policy and it’s actually 50%+1 for all drops disregard everything I said.)
 
Faction 1:
I want to play Pokemon, not whatever weird custom game random Smogon forum goers craft for everyone. This means as few bans as possible, just enough to keep the game functional.

Faction 2:
We have the ability to make the game as fun as possible. If banning a Pokemon would obviously make the game more fun then why wouldn't we just ban it?

Faction 1 can obviously go play Ubers instead. And Faction 2 can go play UU instead.

For what it's worth I'm Faction 1. I've seen plenty of games trashed by "balancing" from Reddit and online forums. In some of those games I was a top player and we laughed at how wrong the attempted community balancing was. I'm not a top player in Pokemon, but I can only assume the same thing happens here.
 
I'm happy with the palafin suspect test. Its been a while since I touched this tier primarily due to the same sort of teams (glowking gambit pult etc etc) being spammed again and again. This palafin suspect test is making me happy and I genuinely do hope we don't banish it to ubers. Every powerful mon/sweeper gets banned, and while I do get why its unhealthy for the meta, I (along with others, hopefully) enjoy such mons. We almost banned kyurem and theres almost no debate on the kyurem ban nowadays. I believe this sudden reaction to a new set/mon is bound to settle down after a while, and there will be better advice/opinions after halfway through the suspect test.
However, I do want to get a sort of uhhh page (?) on palafin with its sets/good supporting mons to help builders :)

A dedicated link to this is probably impossible right now before the suspect test ends, so can anyone enlighten me on the sets it runs, the type of teams its good on, usage tips and supporting mons?

also, Finchinator thank you for initiating this suspect test. Been a long while since i've had such fun in SV OU.
 
Agree with Kibo, retesting mons is fun but we should do it in a good state of the meta, which isn’t rn. Now I have a question, y’all don’t like the current state of the meta right ? (Maybe you like it, personally I don’t) but what do y’all want to do to have both a fun and balanced tier ?? Imo, Gliscor survived only because there was still Kyurem in the tier. But yeah, unless the community finds the current meta perfect, every tiering actions end up not supported enough so what do y’all want lol, except unbanning more and more Ubers in hope that it suddenly solve SV ??
My personnal view is Ban Kyurem > Ban Scor > see how meta develops, maybe Waterpon. Might get reqs for that palafin suspect if I find enough time.

Btw Finch you should take a week off Smogon if ur on vacations smh but even though I don’t agree with all of you and council’s decisions, a lot of ppl still recognize ur efforts to lead the tier, that’s all I had to say :Smogjynx:
 
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I've been kinda iffy on :palafin-hero: from the start, and it's a shame that it got more traction than :solgaleo: which was objectively the better retest. I honestly don't think much has changed from Pre-Home that made Palafin more fair, the main difference now is that if you run into :ogerpon-wellspring: you have a semi-useless mon, and there's also a few more offensive checks like :raging-bolt:, :kyurem:, :walking-wake: etc. overall I can see Palafin being fine due to these new additions, but it is very borderline. Even Waterpon is not particularly hard to chip and KO over the course of a game, and once you have Palafin positioned correctly, it's gg. Speaking of Waterpon, I don't like how common Palafin made it on the ladder, because that mon is even more obnoxious and not something you want to see every game.
 
Mewthree69 said:
I've been kinda iffy on :palafin-hero: from the start, and it's a shame that it got more traction than :solgaleo: which was objectively the better retest. I honestly don't think much has changed from Pre-Home that made Palafin more fair, the main difference now is that if you run into :ogerpon-wellspring: you have a semi-useless mon, and there's also a few more offensive checks like :raging-bolt:, :kyurem:, :walking-wake: etc. overall I can see Palafin being fine due to these new additions, but it is very borderline. Even Waterpon is not particularly hard to chip and KO over the course of a game, and once you have Palafin positioned correctly, it's gg. Speaking of Waterpon, I don't like how common Palafin made it on the ladder, because that mon is even more obnoxious and not something you want to see every game.
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Yea where my Solg retesters at???
 
Kibo said:
The community is split in 2 currently maybe it was split like this from the start of this gen, but this was not the case in previous gens
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This is a great point by you!

I actually think there’s always been a bit of a split in how the community perceives tiering, but it’s probably most extreme this generation when we started with a close Tera test and evolved to various close suspect tests afterwards.

Think of it like this: if a suspect falls 5-10% short, then the largest percentage of the community possible can be upset with the result. If a suspect is near 100% support, then less people will be sad with the outcome. We have a ton of the former.
Kibo said:
The ppl who are "mad" are probably from the part of the community that in some way felt abandoned, since right now the tier is probably in its worst state ever, instead of trying to fix it we do this suspect, that at the end of the day only a small part of the community wanted.
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Taking aside the bit about the state of the tier (which I disagree with, but everyone has their own opinion), this is what I don’t get from your post honestly.

There’s more opportunity for people to shape the tier now than ever. Council power is way smaller than ever before. Surveys happen every few months, we have had more suspects on average this generation than ever before, and I personally want to have more suspects on Pokemon in the tier. We committed to a survey in January and future suspects, too.

I think the current metagame can still use work — Tera Blast, Wellspring, Kyurem, Kingambit, and potentially others come to mind in no particular order. Inspecting Ubers is worth discussing as well. It’s important that any council keeps an open mind and is proactive, but we have been the most proactive OU council ever and a lot of the suspects have just ended with close decisions.
Kibo said:
For example, the fact that Darkrai was unbanned, there was a suspect on sleep immediately after, can we truly say this was the right decision? that it wasn't influenced by Darkrai's presence in the tier? While sleep has always been annoying this is the first fairy gen in which it's banned. And I do not know if it truly was bc it just was broken this time around, or because Darkrai just got unbanned, and ya didn't want to make it Ubers again.
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This is a good example.

Darkrai was unbanned due to community survey support. In your post, you ask for more surveys and action — this was largely the result of one.

Perhaps the root of your distaste is simply disagreement with outcomes of community tiering?

I could go decision-by-decision with you (for example: sleep was handled properly within tiering conventions from the point Darkrai was unbanned and this isn’t really an open debate anymore — you can argue to change overarching Smogon policy, but that much goes above my head), but the fact is that it just boils down to a lot of people disagreeing with Tera or specific suspect results.

If people want to argue process, sure. Here are some questions:
- should surveys be more often? less often?
- what content should be added or removed to them?
- should something about suspects be changed?
- what other changes do you have in mind?

I can’t dictate how people respond to surveys. I can’t control how people vote in suspects. And those things aren’t going away. But we can change the processes if you feel strongly about them. And I am all ears as to what people have to say on those
 
Finchinator said:
should surveys be more often? less often?
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I think it isn't about less or more often it is about what is on the survey imo. In the week after the gliscor suspect it was pretty clear to me that despite having a pretty damn close vote I think so much innovation happened during the suspect that gliscor isn't nearly as complained about because we have far more ways to deal with it. However this is innovation that should have happened without the suspect test so how could we have solved this?

I feel like if we had something in the survey where the participants explained why they felt the pokemon was broken we might not have needed the gliscor suspect in the first place because if a good portion of people just said something along the lines of "it's annoying" then they could have just not done the suspect and instead did some kind of event to encourage innovation with that particular pokemon. I am not entirely sure what the right solution is but maybe the suspect wouldn't have happened if something like this was on the survey.
 
UltraSword said:
feel like if we had something in the survey where the participants explained why they felt the pokemon was broken we might not have needed the gliscor suspect in the first place because if a good portion of people just said something along the lines of "it's annoying" then they could have just not done the suspect and instead did some kind of event to encourage innovation with that particular pokemon
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I feel like while this might be objectively true, it's the wrong direction. Like Finch said, with close results there will be more division, but this doesn't mean suspecting is bad, it just means it's more complicated. This compkication implies that more things should be suspected, not less. Even now we have very good players think that two completely opposite things not only are true, but are completely obvious.
Obviously (heh), things are not obvious, or there wouldn't be such close suspect tests.

Additionally, while things have been rather heated at times, this does show that people really care about the meta, which is good. Feedback has lead to multiple policy discussions on council qualifications, tiering policy, suspect process, and more. While not all these discussions make there way to this discussion post, it seems rather clearvto me even if people don't enjoy the current meta game, the site itself is going in a really good direction.
This doesn't mean bad things and set backs don't happen, but they are handled well, which they have been.
 
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