I just want to quickly express my feelings about the removal of the suspect slot, which I believe is a concern shared by other players who care about SMOU. I understand the impression that it was taking up a slot for nothing, emphasizing SMOU over the entire generation. However, the suspect slot played a crucial role in ensuring healthy tiering decisions. Without intending to offend other communities, SMOU is simply much more active than the rest.
The suspect slot for Aegislash, for instance, helped discard the Pokemon as a viable option in a much faster process than any alternative, allowing experienced players to run a "what if" scenario. Most players ended up converging on the same opinion-that Aegislash's presence would lead to a catastrophic metagame dominated by weather wars.
Now that more exotic ideas like Mega Metagross and Aegislash have been tested, I think this was the perfect time to explore a tier without already-established and centralizing Pokemon. Tapu Lele is the best example of this. Since the beginning of the generation, its fairness has been a topic of discussion, with at least half of the active competitive community questioning whether it was handled correctly. Many feel that Lele is too centralizing or are simply curious about its impact. Personally, I don’t think Lele is problematic, but community sentiment should always take precedence over individual opinions.
Manaphy has also been at the center of recent discussions, particularly due to its role in rain teams and the unfair advantage provided by Tail Glow. It would have been interesting to test the tier without Manaphy lurking as a constant threat to fat/balance teams, forcing an offensive approach that isn’t necessarily healthier.
In my opinion, these two Pokemon would have been much more logical candidates for a suspect test compared to what we had in previous years, like Blaziken, Metagross, or Aegislash, whose outcomes were either entirely predictable or simply the result of certain influential players’ preferences.
All of this to say: the removal of the suspect slot couldn’t have happened at a worse time. We had just finished testing unbans that, frankly, didn’t make sense to some, while real concerns raised by the community were left unaddressed. With the metagame reaching an extreme level of matchup-based unfairness and offensive domination, this would have been the perfect time to properly evaluate potential bans.
Finally, I’d like to know who exactly are making these decisions "collectively," because the process is rather unclear and we have no trace of it nor any info on its process. It could be just two people, a hundred people who don’t play SMOU at all and don’t care, or a single person pushing their own vision and hijacking the tier—something we’ve seen before. I feel like, in this light SMPL is present itself as an excuse for a tournament that isn’t being run in the best interest of the generation but rather to fit a predetermined schedule which I think was not the point of it previously.
