I never really said suspecting was wrong I just don't think the gliscor suspect should have been the thing that caused innovation to find more ways to beat it. Other than that this post is great imo
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Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v4
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I think we deserve a tier not managed by people's smogon reactions and influencers/youtubers. Aren't you leading the tier ? The recent suspect tests results were aberrant, this one will be too, I'm afraid of. I don't want to see another video showing Palafin as "cool", you guys are completely forgetting the strategic aspect of your own tier.
The only reason they did that for Palafin, its because the tier is currently AWFUL and they chose "fun" because they don't find it salvageable any more : so we might as well deban some fun stuff, at least it will be fun even if catastrophic.
How exactly does Dondozo lose to Palafin? I've had this matchup a few times, Bulk Up Palafin ALWAYS loses to dozo even with taunt, Drain simply never heals enough. Only chance to beat Dozo is Tera Water Band in Rain, which requires setup, commit Tera and lose like 70% hp in recoil from Wave Crash. So only one specific set+item+tera of Palafin can get through dozo and requires weather and tera. And mola can probably help dozo against the rain version (assuming you don't have Water Absorb in the team)
i mean they did say that council power is at its lowest so maybe read that
This is totally fair and something I can't really speak to. I'm not actually good at this game. I do watch tourny replays; but only really ones with teams that I like. As a casual consumer/player at low ladder the only place I really see common meta shifts and trends are via the suspect tests and usage stats usually.
Out of curiosity do you also think this with the first Gouging Fire suspect, which was brought on by the breaking swipe set and the kyurem resuspect brought on by the subtect set? I don't mean this as a leading question or a gotcha; I'm genuinely curious where you draw the line. I'm not sure if that comes across just through typing or if it seems confrontational.
This is a really bad faith argument. The meta is much different than when it was banned, there exist at least some checks, and it's priority is nice against HO which a lot of people consider one of the strongest playstyles so it could have a positive effect potentially. People have slso been talking for months about resuspecting it. Additionally, the meta is very complicated right now with a number of potential suspects but no clear one, so it was a good time for it.
Furthermore, whatever won was still able to ve vetoed by the council to prevent memeing and guarantee an eligible suspect candidate.
It's fine to disagree with the process, but you won't actually get a good discussion or create change by setting up a strawman argument. Argue against the best intention of the policy.
Oh yeah the famous checks, like sinistcha and... Pex if u poison jab it (and even lol he has leftovers so he doesn't care about it ? Do you know that dpunch taunt jet punch bu wins against Raging bolt with tera grass/dragon ? Do you know it wins against Ogerpon-Wellspring with tera grass/dragon ? Do you know the bulk of that mon ? I don't think so. If you want to play stall to wall Palafin : play it.
They aren't offensive mons that u can call "answer". Only defensive mons. Here is the first problem. Same problem as Gouging Fire, but lol its ok people are enjoying it. But its a good way, let's continue to make suspects tests with Smogon's reaction, after we'll be able to buy suspect with ladder ELO maybe ?
I'm not saying it is or isn't broken, I'm saying it's obviously complicated and worth testing. You also just completely ignored making a policy argument whatsoever in favor of a weird gotcha with elo? This gen outright countering a mon almost never works (perhaps besides stall) because of power creep and Tera. Role compression is super important and many pokemon need multiple checks for different Tera types. Kingambit is a prime example. We can't just test stuff to ban things like this, we need to look if there are previously banned pokemon that could now be at a similar level. A level that's not clearly broken or balanced, but complicated.
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Now this is why there's a problem with the way the tiering system works. Finch said that Gouging Fire was broken when it was suspect tested, but that's impossible. A pokemon is broken or it isn't. During all of its life in OU, Gouging fire had access to the same ammount of EV spreads, teras and movesets, and if it wasn't banned it's because people hadn't optimised the mon yet. So almost by definition Gouging Fire was broken the first time it was suspected.
If you believe that the meta has developed and people have found ways to better play against Kyurem and Gliscor, so perhaps if they retested it, they would stay by a bigger margin. As before, a mon is either broken or not, so
and 
would not have been broken when they were tested.Now, where is this going? When a pokemon fails to get banned, the playerbase can adapt, and the pokemon can appear less strong after that (
) or stronger (
).Is Archaludon
broken? Is Annihilape 
? Can you tell for sure?When a pokemon is DNB, the meta has the ability to adapt, but when it's banned, it rarely gets a second chance, we rarely get a second chance to better play around it. It's too hard for a pokemon banned to what is essentially OUBL to get another opportunity. It basically took Finch and the youtubers to brute force the Palafin retest through the Likeshop event. Discussion about potential Ubers drops would get constantly shut down by Srn. Many of us were scared about Palafin but maybe it's manageable, maybe it's good for the tier. Why wouldn't others be?
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As I said we had plenty of innovation during the gliscor suspect that made it so that gliscor wasn't nearly as complained about. I feel like that happened in the opposite direction for gouging fire. I think it is totally fair to say that gouging fire wasn't broken during that first suspect but then thanks to stuff that happened during that test and after that we realized gouging fire's true capabilities and decided to test it again. This innovation to build with or to beat certain pokemon seems to only really take of during and in the days after a suspect test and I wish that wasn't the case.
And when the community votes something, they usually have a good reason for doing so aswell. Talking about fairness, it's unfair that bans require 60%+ votes to go through, but to unban a Pokémon that was automatically banned without the opinion of the community, 50%+ is enough to keep it banned. 55/100 ppl wanting Kyurem banned would keep it in OU, but 55/100 ppl wanting Palafin banned would send it to Ubers. How is that fair?
"Because the council had banned Palafin before" yes, without community vote, 2 years ago, in a completely different metagame.
You know who was also in Ubers in a different metagame? Kyurem. In gen 8.
Ultimately we are all biased, I say this because I want Palafin unbanned, you say that because you want him banned. We won't get anywhere at this rate.
So just take the 50%, an actual real majority, since I could also go on about why it should only require 40%+ unban votes to keep Palafin in OU (just like most OU suspect tests)
I find it pretty funny how you are assuming that having only 1-2 weeks of suspect will make people vote unban instead of ban. I'm very confident that, if anything, letting OU have Palafin for longer (let's say 1-2 months) would make LESS people want him banned. People would finally understand that we don't actually need to change our teams so much to handle Palafin, most pre-suspect teams could already handle him well. Bulk Up sets (the ones that got him banned 2 years ago) have fallen off, and Choice Band still has the same exploitable weaknesses it always had.
I'm not saying Palafin should be banned or not. All I'm saying is, if anything, having such a short period of time to test Palafin will skew the opinions more towards Ban than it should, because we all keep copy pasting the same Tera Water Rain CB calcs everywhere to jump-scare people.
You are completely missing the point of my post.
I am glad you admitted that you are biased but I assure you my post certainly wasn't. Go to my post history and you can see that I made a post about how I am indifferent to a Palafin unban. I wanted some consistency with the requirements and tiering policy I was not following some kind of agenda like you seem to be implying.
the difference is that banning something is a change from the status quo, but keeping something banned is a continuation of the status quo. ou tiering policy tends to weight things towards the status quo, so bringing about change in either way requires a larger percentage of the vote than the majority. the exception is for something that was quickbanned (like palafin), which requires a simple majority to drop. so the threshold is actually lower than usual for an unban this time around. the unban camp is being given a concession they aren't normally given, to make up for the fact that palafin was banned without a community vote in the first place
again, the fact that the council banned palafin is actually causing this suspect to be weighted less towards the status quo than usual. you benefited from this. why are you getting upset about it?
this would never fly. it actively weights things against the status quo. suspect tests aren't weighted towards or against banning in particular, they're weighted against any change that would be brought about as a result of the test, with the philosophy of "we can always test it again later". whether that philosophy actually works in a generation like this is up for debate, but that's beyond the scope of this conversation
Alright first of all I wanna say that I am of the idea that Gen 8 was handled way better than this gen, so I do not know if giving more power to the people and less to the council was the right call LOL, but at this point the council taking back all this power would indeed be pretty strange? I would be for it to be honest, but I do not think everyone would be happy with this. I also believe that one of the reasons this gen tiering process was so chaotic was exactly this. It is normal that when you try to change how something works, you need some time to get it right, the problem is that 2 years have passed LOL.
I'm happy to say that there were some positive changes in the tiering process this year, like making suspect tests harder to do, and harder to cheat in them this is a net positive for the community, but I do not believe this alone is enough.
To respond to the questions you gave me, yes I do think some things have to change (if we want to maintain this system where the community holds most of the power)
First of all, surveys should be monthly, a survey doesn't need to always end up in a suspect, it can just be to gather opinions on the current state of the tier, I believe if we truly want the community to have power monthly surveys are a must, I do not know how much time this would take but you can always remove some things from them to make the counting process faster, etc, the important part is that they are constant, and we don't go 6 months or how much time has passed from the last survey, without survey, because if it's the community that has the most power, how can they express it, without this in place? In a truly fair way.
I also do believe tho, that qualified responses should be taken way more seriously than unqualified ones because unfortunately since this is a game based on knowledge and skill, the opinions of people who are more knowledgeable and skilled should be taken more seriously. With this I am not saying to ignore unqualified opinions, I am saying that if for example Darkrai gets a 2/5 on unqualified, but the qualified vote it as a 4/5 (this would be very rare honestly, but still it's just an example) the qualified vote, should weight more, and a suspect should be done on it. I also think it should be harder to get into the "qualified" group.
As for the content in it, I think first of all that competitiveness should be the most important metric, because if you for example watch other games no one likes when there is a broken character or something of the sort, competitiveness, and enjoyment do go hand in hand, but the priority should be to have competitiveness as high as possible since if you are currently using the broken stuff the game is still fun, but it is not for the people on the receiving end. That is why I think competitiveness is a better "metric" than enjoyment, i think it's extremely worrying that from the start of dlc2 not even once has this metric gone above 7, which to me should be the bare minimum, 6 is NOT a good score.
On this note we should try to get competitiveness as high as possible as fast as possible, it shouldn't be a problem if immediately after a survey, the results are worrying there is a suspect, and I mean 3-4 days after a survey fast, and if there is a suspect once a month, that too, should not be a problem, this would honestly be pretty hard for it to happen but if the results call for it, it should be done. I believe anything above 3/5 for the qualified should be immediately suspected, this is a bit drastic, to be honest, but this tier desperately needs change and it cannot change without surveys.
As I have already said, they should be something that is scheduled to be constantly happening, and not only be done when we feel like it's needed. I also believe surveys should directly influence suspects, for example, if we ask "Do you believe this mon should be suspected" or idk "Do you believe this mon should be banned?" or maybe if the rating is above 4/5 it's ban process should be easier, in a way where surveys directly influence suspects, for example, if the question should this mon be banned get above 66% YES, maybe then the suspects should be to reach only 50% + 1 or something. idk. This is just an idea since I see other communities do things like this. I think I have also responded about what could be changed about suspects here since I believe the change that recently happened is already good, this could just be a way to give even more power to surveys and the community.
As for changes I would like to see, in the first place I would love to see a more united community, right now I believe it is quite toxic, but it is so from both sides, this is one of the worst possible things that can happen in a community and I truly wish we could all be more understanding of each other, in a way I have to say it is somewhat the council fault bc if all of this was handled better it would have been easier to not have this much discontent, and I believe the easiest fix to this is having faster actions on what the community think is problematic.
I know Smogon is full of bureaucracy (which I do not think it's a good thing, bc it just slows us down) but with more frequent and standardized surveys we could always have a reason to have fast suspects. And if for example something gets a 3/5 the first month, gets suspected, does not get banned, the next month it's again in the survey, and it gets again a 3/5 it should simply be suspected again, until the rating goes down 3/5 or it gets banned. Or unbanned! You can do this about unbanning mons too obviously. It should be about anything. Change shouldn't be scary but something we welcome with open hands. I believe the mad people just want a better tier to play in, and fortunately, we are still in time to give them such a thing! If you need any help in making any of this real do tell me, as I would be excited to help.
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This is so fucking funny to me because less than a week ago the thread had this exact argument but it was "there are no defensive checks to palafin, only offensive ones."Oh yeah the famous checks, like sinistcha and... Pex if u poison jab it (and even lol he has leftovers so he doesn't care about it ? Do you know that dpunch taunt jet punch bu wins against Raging bolt with tera grass/dragon ? Do you know it wins against Ogerpon-Wellspring with tera grass/dragon ? Do you know the bulk of that mon ? I don't think so. If you want to play stall to wall Palafin : play it.
They aren't offensive mons that u can call "answer". Only defensive mons. Here is the first problem. Same problem as Gouging Fire, but lol its ok people are enjoying it. But its a good way, let's continue to make suspects tests with Smogon's reaction, after we'll be able to buy suspect with ladder ELO maybe ?
I should also note that the reason surveys are happening less right now is because they USED to be about every month or two, and then certain high level players (btw im not using this as a pejorative but to illustrate even those who are qualified are not close to united on tiering decisions) complained that too frequent surveys was leading to rushed suspects and flavor of the month trends. These things really do not seem as simple as "survey more or less" because we have both tried surveying more and less and people are annoyed and thinks the tier sucks in both scenarios. Additionally, qualified responses are *already* the only ones that matter. Sure, the survey is open to people like me as well but it has been stated multiple times this generation that the qualified respondents are already the metric the council looks for when deciding action.
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That or well, this gen is simply far harder to tier around. Gens that are harder to tier around tend to be a pain in the ass to balance. Gens 5/7/9 are all varying cases of this.
GG OU Council for finally updating the sample teams and for bringing back Teams of the Week. I was wondering as to why that page hasn't been updated for months until now
That's the work of our fantastic contributor-base. They deserve all the credit for their hard work and passion for the tier :D
the person you're replying to does seem ill-informed and i don't think they're correct, but who's to say both can't be true at the same time? it's possible for a mon to have no defensive answers with one set and no offensive answers with a different set. we saw something like this with gouging fire—it had both nigh-unwallable sun sets where the only reliable counterplay was out-offensing it, and nigh-unrevengeable ddance sets where the only reliable counterplay was picking a wall and praying. it couldn't do both at once, but you could argue that gouging simultaneously had only offensive checks and only defensive checks depending on set
now, i don't think palafin is the same way. i do believe that the band set, with rain support at least, has no real defensive checks unless people wanna get super comfy with physdef water absorb clodsire or some nonsense. but i don't think the bulk up set has no offensive checks. a correctly positioned encore waterpon can ruin bulk up palafin's day whether or not it's tera grass. raging bolt's draco meteor is still a major nuisance post-tera, even more so if the tera is dragon. dragapult can menace it with a meaty hit from specs draco, or wisp to severely cut into its damage output. banded meowscarada can lmao just kidding meow is a fraud. aggressive pressure from hard-hitting water resists in general can limit its setup opportunities. if you're one of those sickos who runs psyspam, you can even tech into psychic noise on indeedee to lock non-cloak sets out of drain punch and jet punch simultaneously. now i do want to note that most of these things i listed require serious pressure to prevent palafin from setting up in the first place, and also that palafin play is rapidly evolving—who knows, new tech might surface that actually does let palafin beat all offense at once. but my point is, i don't think bulk up palafin is entirely unbeatable by offense as things stand right now
:( but yeah it kind of is
In my experimentation, Primarina also seems like a generally safe option into a lot of builds, barring of course the banded wave crash in rain. Its main three attacking options kind of thud into Prim and it does not want to eat the incoming Moonblast or Psynoise.
I will not stand for this Meowscarada slander. Meowscarada offers invaluable usefulness thanks to its amazing speed tier and incredible coverage with Flower Trick, Knock Off, U-Turn and fantastic options like Triple Axel, Low Kick and Play Rough and it deserves its spot in OU.
252+ Atk Meowscarada Flower Trick vs. 248 HP / 0 Def Palafin-Hero on a critical hit: 344-408 (85.3 - 101.2%) -- 6.3% chance to OHKO
252+ Atk Meowscarada Flower Trick vs. 0 HP / 4 Def Palafin-Hero on a critical hit: 344-408 (100.8 - 119.6%) -- guaranteed OHKO
What it tells me is that Cobalion can fight children, and thats good enough
even drifloon can beat children
DW I know what I'm saying as I play regularly high ladd and offense, and since 3 days its worse than before ! You can't call Ogerpon an answer to bu palafin, because bu palafin is coupled with hazards team. But you can't remove hazards with taunt against defog, and jet punch against court change. So yes, Ogerpon will come, do encore and take 30% with spikes or rocks, and then switch out, and then palafin will be able to setup again. That's the main deal with a mon with a pretty correct bulk and leftovers. U can also run sticky to avoid Ogerpon to be faster than you, and, for the rest, bolt can lose to close combat band, so its basically a 50/50 depending the set. U can be encore'd too if u tclap it or tbolt it, because palafin also runs encore (Savouras for instance).
I'll not answer after that, I respect your pov, as people are respecting mine. But I can ensure you that I know what I'm saying lmfao.
Surveys should be more often, in fact in my opinion should be a regular thing, monthly, quarterly, after every major tournament, your call. Right now surveys feel very "reactive" in that they are usually only released if the meta feels unhealthy to the council or their peers; with the fairly stable place we've been at since the bloodmoon or debatably arch ban, they are so infrequent that the delta in the enjoyment and balance scores is not super useful information in my eyes since there is no constant rate of change and it's difficult to evaluate what meta developments led to a change in scores and at what point. Being able to monitor the change in scores more actively would be more useful for council in pinpointing "what went wrong" if scores were low, or determining the change in overall meta health, I would think. Being able to consistently track the change of opinion on Tera as well as mons like Kyurem, Gliscor, gambit, Zama, etc as the meta continues to evolve (which literally will never stop if Tera is legal, which is not a bad thing necessarily but a reality we must accept) would be useful as well. When even was the last one?
Surveys should not be connected to a promise of tiering action (I don't really think they are but there is definitely a correlation.) overall in shorter terms, "regular check ins" are a healthy communication convention that allows us to be proactive about attending to the needs of the community, even if the need ends up being "do nothing right now." The data and being able to consistently track it is valuable nonetheless
Tera is the largest definer of this generation and it should be on every single survey. A real 1-5 survey question, not the statistic-skewing "do you believe Tera NEEDS to be banned RIGHT NOW" that was put on surveys a few times before the topic was dropped because of the overwhelming no response to that very extreme question. Even if the answer is consistently low and it seems to be a non-issue, that is a useful data point that can be pointed to in tiering discussion. At this point we have literally no idea what the player base thinks of the mechanic as it's been at least a year since the question was asked and even longer since it's been asked in a non-leading way. With other tiers doing away with Tera and feeling positive about it we should at least raise the question, regardless of what the answer ends up being.
As a result of the infrequency of these surveys we have people constantly arguing about "what the real problem with the meta is" (if one really exists) and people (not me but others) being frustrated about DNB votes because "no one can agree what needs to change." No one can agree because we have no idea what others are feeling! Ask us these questions regularly and monitor how the answers change and there you have your answer. Instead, we have half the people in this thread acting like the meta is an unmitigated disaster and the other half literally chilling and no recent data points to point to on how many people feel which way.
Monthly would be ideal but I recognize there's a point where participation drops when they're too frequent. I'm not sure how much work compiling this data is as a good deal of automation for this exists but as an administrative professional I recognize there definitely is work done by finch and others so their time should be considered as well. Quarterly or after every major tournament (by virtue of, most of them significantly change/develop the meta) would be quite reasonable and useful too. but the current system of "every once in a while, but not regularly" is not particularly effective in 1) determining if change is needed and 2) driving that change.
This post is already long but I'll get my thoughts on changes to the suspect process here too. Nothing to complain about with the regular system, but the terms of this unban test are just weird and dated and don't make a lot of sense compared to the rest of tiering policy. My umbrage mostly comes to 1) the 50% threshold 2) the timeframe and 3) the reasoning rules in the suspect thread. I have always been under the impression 60% was what it took to change the status quo and that makes sense. Only 50 to drop an uber is a little lackadaisical and even though I personally think Palafin is looking more ok than not it just seems like an out of place and odd threshold. I also worry about turnout and the community not getting the full picture with only a week to develop, but I understand the flip side of not drawing things out if it's crazy broken - it's an unintended side effect that the pala test is looking more complicated. Also the idea of "the only reasoning allowed in the thread is why Palafin NEEDS to be unbanned" is ridiculous not only for the absurdly high bar but also by virtue of, what percentage of voters are actually going to vote with that logic rather than broken vs not broken. I understand it's policy but it feels very unrealistic and ignoring of the reality of why people vote which way and also makes discussion in the thread challenging by artificially limiting the framework. I understand why tiering policy is rarely changed mid gen but a lot of these regarding the unban rules feel very odd and arbitrary in ways that aren't super constructive. Lugia and solgaleo also would almost certainly need more than a week for things to develop so maybe being proactive about this would be a good thing if dropping palafin turns out to have been a good idea.
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