OU The current state of the RBY OU community and a request

Sceptross

is a Community Contributor
I'm opening this thread because I'm starting to see a few trends that I have never seen before in RBY, but that I've seen before in other communities and even other generations in this website, and it never, ever ended up well. And I don't want the same to happen to us.

Since I want this thread to stay short within possibility, I'm going to go straight to the point:
  1. In this last SPL, I've seen the least amount of engagement I've ever seen on the biggest public place we have to discuss RBY on this website, the RBYCord. The same occured with the SPL thread, it basically died by week 3 which is absolutely unprecedented in a tier that was always known for the passion its playerbase had in it.
  2. I'm also starting to see a lack of a bridge between established and inexperienced players, which is something I do not recall at all in the 8 years I've been playing this game on and off. I don't think I need to say why this is very damaging to the tier.
  3. Speaking of the RBYCord, I see the activity on it dwindling, with the OU channel and the SPL/WC channel barely getting any activity, especially if we consider only game discussion/armchairing. Plenty of SPL games simply had zero discussion there, and the OU channel stays without activity for several days on a regular basis. I spent the last 2 years seeing very interesting discussions frequently on the channel related to the biggest tournament of the moment, but in this SPL it just didn't happen.

I wouldn't say we are at a point where things are dire, but I do think the alarms are starting to be raised and generally when we take action about these things when they are dire, it's already too late. More importantly, I also think there is no actual lack of engagement, at least for now. I am not omnipresent, but it's pretty evident people are engaged, but discussing things in their private circles instead. These two things are what urged me to write this post. If engagement was nonexistant, this post would be useless. If things were dire, it'd be too late. But none of those are true.

Obviously I'm not saying this and expecting other people to do the work - I've been trying to make my part and try to be helpful towards people who ask for advice, as well as try to engage in fun discussion here and there, within my limited availability during these months, in order to try to be the change you want to see (working as auditor in March moment!). I'm also working on a few resources for this forum as I already discussed on the RBYCord a couple times. Unfortunately they won't be coming out for a while as I'm really busy, but I'm slowly working on them. That's what I feel I can do to try to help a bit with making our community a pleasant and helpful place for everyone.

I am well aware of the reasons why people slowly started to stay away from the public places. So before peoples' feeling of belonging to the community drops to a point where it stops making sense to interact with it, I urge you all to try to forget about the feuds and issues of the past, leave things behind your back, swallow your pride (within the realm of possibility, this is never easy!), and make an effort to try to bring things to where they were.

Almost everyone I talk to mentions how much fun they had in the past interacting with the community. I share the sentiment completely, I've had a blast interacting with you all. I can assure you efforts were made to remove the issues that slowly made people stray away from it. So this post is, more than anything, a request for everyone to try to at least partially move from their private circles back to the public places. Not only for the sake of a community which (at least for me) was always awesome to be a part of, but RBY itself, and that I'd hate to see wither away.

If you got to the end of this, thank you for reading, I appreciate you did :heart:
 
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I completely agree with Scep that something needs to change. RBYcord is going through a positive feedback loop where good players leaving has led to less discussion which has led to more good players leaving and so on. I'm more focused on the whole "hostile to new players" issue because I think that's the biggest consequence of the RBY community's current state.

This has been really sad to see because personally, when I joined the RBY community in 2021, RBYcord felt like a much better place than it is today. In fact, I mainly learned RBY through discussions on RBYcord and ladder. I didn't really play friendlies/discuss RBY stuff in private until around Summer of 2023, meaning the first year and a half of my RBY journey was spent in RBYcord.

I think the main problem with the current state of the RBY community is that discussion primarily takes place in cliques/jerks rather than the general community. I'm guilty of this myself too, almost every convo I have about RBY is in a private server. The problem with this is if you are new to RBY or Pokemon as a whole, you will obviously not be in any jerks so how are you expected to learn the tier? I think this is the ultimate cause of the divide between experienced and new players. I've also noticed that the newer players who do end up being established are the ones who find their way into jerks quickly.

There's also a general lack of resources currently which is making RBY hostile to newer players. The OU dex is outdated, the lowertier dex is at a complete standstill since UU is taking 3000 years to figure out what the fuck to do with the tier, and so on. I'm glad Scep mentioned that he is working on resources. I would like to highlight the ones that I found most useful learning RBY since I was new at a time when this generation actually had good resouces. One such example is this video. I learned so much listening to Amaranth/Troller/Nails ramble about RBY for an hour and a half, I think I watched this like five times when I was a noob. Sadly, this video is now outdated and there is no good "overall resource" for the tier equivalent to what I was fortunate enough to have in 2021. There was also this banger written by Amaranth which also really helped me. Sadly, just like the BKC video, this is outdated and has no modern equivalent.

Overall I think in order to "revive" RBYcord and make this tier beginner-friendly again, we need people to be more open to discussion and perform a resource overhaul. The more accessible a resource is for new players, the more they will learn and will want to stick around.
 
I've mostly stepped away from RBY but I want to respond to this because it relates as to why I became so unhappy interacting with people in the space. I left somewhere in 2022-2023 for context. That also means that what I say could be completely untrue and not indicative of the situation, but given the subject matter of this thread, I'd venture a guess not.

Definitely my biggest problem was the way top players interacted and treated... well just about everything about the tier. This isn't true for EVERY top player, but I unironically believe that it could encompass about half of them. I remember a specific occasion in the RBY Discord where I was discussing lead Tauros in the Overused chat because I saw it used in a tournament game and my message was deleted and told to go to the #NotSerious channel. A moderator also brought up that it totally should have been fair to discuss in the Overused chat since it was showcased in a tournament game and that it was fair to ask questions about things like that but the admin ignored them. Another similar occasion occurred when discussing Fire Blast Tauros and why I told a fairly new player at the game that it wasn't a good idea to rely upon, which also got moved because it wasn't "serious" enough despite it having been brought to tournament games in the past. Non-top players also mentioned to me they felt the same way about how it felt impossible to talk.

This kind of behavior makes it questionable to know what is even acceptable to talk about, and who is allowed to talk about it. Now I'm not going to pretend I'm a top player or that I've put in the countless hours that some have for this dinosaur tier, and I know that reaching the top of the ladder isn't exactly a real accomplishment in the grand scheme of things, but I'd like to think I have enough experience to tell somebody that Fire Blast Tauros isn't generally a super great idea to be defaulting to. If I was a top player and said that in the Overused Channel, would I have been moved? Probably not. I legit would never know how or who to ask in order to improve because it simply feels that unless you are seen as a top player, something that in the oldest tier of competitive Pokémon would be somewhat hard to achieve anyways because people have so many years to look back on for top players as examples, you simply aren't taken seriously at all.

Again, this is the oldest competitive Pokémon metagame there is, people have had nearly 30 years at this point to analyze Generation 1 and see how it ticks, it's bound to be harder then some to enter then other metagames because of how much it has been developed. Outdated resources are compounding the issue, a newcomer may only have something like FSG's ancient Gen1 Battling Explained videos to go off of, but I'd argue that the current player base is the bigger issue, because why would a new player even want to play more of the tier if the top players are having their own discussion in private chats either by DMs, in separate servers or for all I know channels IN the RBYCord that only top players have access to (that's just me theorizing at that point but it's definitely how it feels when you are on the outside)

This game is ancient and the top-players should be listened to more seriously then some random guy reaching Top 500 on the ladder without using Snorlax because "they don't need it", but if you care about the tier growing, which in all fairness might not be a priority for some who just want to see the tier be as it is, then you might want to think about ways to inspire new people to actually stick around instead of letting these people draw a circle they say is allowed to speak in. Might as well get rid of open tournaments at that point and just have it be invitationals.
 
I have many thoughts on this and I've had this discussion several times with people like nicole7735 trying to figure out the best way to go about fixing it, but those convos have also repeatedly ended with (understandable) reasons that we're too busy to commit to it right now. Anyway lots of things on the mind:

Community Engagement
Even when I was new (2022), most of the best players did not interact with the community much if at all. Amaranth was a very notable exception at that time that I appreciated a lot, but the lack of other people at his level engaging much also means its him fielding tons of ideas from newbies, many of which have been brought up 500 times and are known to generally be weaker strategies, and I don't imagine that's very fun. I say this while acknowledging I'm very opinionated and have had a lot of really dumb and insistent opinions that I've later changed as I learned more, and now, despite being nowhere near his level, I also find myself getting frustrated by many new players coming in and insisting on some very underthought opinion being a fact about whatever tier and plugging their ears if someone contradicts them on it.

I think this is something that's a community responsibility rather than like "this is new players' fault" or "more experienced players need to be more patient" - I think we need to cultivate high-level discussion between those experienced players, and I think we need to shift the culture of how we talk about things. Smogon's full of big personalities and it often feels like you have to say something bold or stubborn to be heard at all - hence "X is dogshit" instead of say "I think X is overrated" or "Y set might be more useful overall than the standard" or "Z thing has a niche on/vs this team." I think we can very much change that in RBY if the community regulars and people like council/moderation/QC make an active effort to both do this themselves and also to nudge newer/less active people toward this, and I think this is one of the easier issues to solve. I do think, however, we have to note that just because all opinions on the game can and should be be respectfully engaged with does not make all opinions equal, and it's important to find some balance there, especially when someone is actively trying to improve their game rather than just playing for fun - it's not helpful to anyone, imo, for someone to say "I think Sandslash is better than Rhydon" and we all go "that's your opinion and I respect it :D" and hugbox them out of learning. That said, a lot of people are just playing to make a silly funny team that they like and are content with playing it in friendlies or ladder even if it's less than optimal, and that's fine, and we don't need to debate them on it. There should be space for competitive discussion and for the casual parts - this is, after all, a children's game that lots of people primarily play to play single player, or complete the dex, or hunt shinies, or just use their favorite Pokemon in battles, rather than to win a tournament.

Moderation
It is no secret to anyone that moderation was slow to respond to issues in RBYcord and things dwindled in large part because of it. I do want to note, however, that the space has been better the last couple months, things have been responded to, I personally am committed to making sure future issues get responded to more quickly, and we have seen activity pick up since we took a more active hand with moderation. I am hoping people will give it another chance and trust moderation to do its job in the future, but I don't expect people to just immediately rejoin and move on. Still... please give things another chance? Pretty please?

Authority Activity Level
I think a lot of things in RBY re: moderation (forums and discord), QC, councils, etc. hit a big point of stagnation in 2023-2024, which directly impacts everything - resources, community engagement from established players, tier development, general feeling of like, people being active and present and caring about RBY. This is another thing that again, I've been working really hard on righting the ship with - I basically replaced every single lower tier's QC team with new appointments, took on a ton of C&C work personally, and lately I've been doing the same with councils, asking inactive people if they'd like to continue or step down and getting new people who are active and motivated in to help with things. I think this has been incredibly successful in low tiers, measured by the fact that I don't have to do Literally Everything for analyses or resource updates to get done anymore (shoutout gastlies Gangsta Spongebob Maris Bonibell Wanted in 49 States Teh Volk among others). I do think there is still a ways to go here - in particular OU is really lacking on the C&C front right now and being solo carried by Amaranth which means nothing gets done because you need at least 3 people involved to get analyses done. This is one I don't really know what to do with - we can't browbeat people into working on these things and asking people to solo carry entire sections of resources is insanely demanding, but that's usually been what's happened to get things moving in the past. I'm open to thoughts on how to restore activity and motivation.

Culture/Outlook on RBY
I think lately there's been an uptick in people focusing on their personal record over developing these tiers and I think that's been unhealthy for several reasons: one, results-oriented thinking is just not a good measure of skill or growth, two, it encourages hoarding knowledge and not sharing it, which slows development, and three, it just makes everything more hostile. Yes, we are playing a competitive game. Many of us are competing to win as much as we can, especially in team tours where you want to help your team win. I want those things, but if you take that to its furthest extent, the optimal thing would be, for example, to support BO1 in SPL so people on my level could cheese better players more easily or discourage them from signing up, or to never share any info or metagame thoughts, including viability rankings, to not announce tournaments so the best players miss them, to be a complete asshole in scheduling to call act on as many games as possible, etc. We haven't gone that far, but I do think we have hit a point where a decent number of players are hiding info on teams, meta takes, replays, etc. even after a tour ends - I won't speculate on motivation because for one it might be "I'm too busy/don't care to write a post" and for another something else, but the outcome is less to learn from, less discussion, more circlejerking a few ideas with friends and never seeing any other takes. I think we do need to create a better sense of community, acknowledge and celebrate contributions, and really encourage meta development and collaboration as part of personal growth instead of personal growth being outracing the meta then trying to pull the ladder up behind you. I also think this would give people a reason to move back into RBYcord, of course, and I think we could do more things that facilitate engaging in the community besides competition - I've had things on the mind like teambuilding contests, some livetours with silly rulesets, a speedrun competition for RB, stuff like that. I don't know, that might all be silly but I want to get people to engage with each other again. The RBY Awards were a half-attempt at this but ultimately I feel like people just get mad every time that X or Y player got snubbed, so I wanna try stuff that's less polarizing and see if we can, you know, have fun around each other more? That would go a long way for the culture, I think.

All this stuff is stuff I'm having to personally work on, too, this isn't meant to be me looking down from my ivory tower, but I hope we all can discuss and work on it together. I miss 2022 RBYcord and wanna see us get back to that and then surpass it.
 
I want to be said since I've been mentioned a lot: I simply don't have the free time and the hyperfocus on RBY that I once did. I'm maintaining the QC/dex because nobody else is stepping up (I've been looking), even the tournaments like LT/WC I'd hand off if I had anyone I really trusted. And I'm not rejoining RBYcord because I just... don't want to talk about the game that much anymore. I could have talked about my SPL and made a nice teamdump, make updated "state of the meta" guides and so on, but it's just really tiring.

I'm not retired to private discords or hiding strats or anything, I'm just outright not talking RBY with almost anyone. I blocked 90% of my team from talking in my channel in RBYPL, I'm just generally done with discussing this game that much. It takes a lot of time and energy out of me and I don't want pokemon to be that in my life currently. You will not have the golden age Community Contributor Amaranth back for the foreseeable future, my IRL priorities have changed and there's no space for it anymore. Maybe in the future if I have breaks from work for longer stretches of time I could come back and get some stuff done for a short bit before going back to it, but that's a distant possibility and it will not resemble anything like what I've done before.

It is deeply flattering and rewarding to read that my resources were appreciated by so many - but all of that is not up to me anymore. I believe in the people who are still here to carry the torch and correct course, Sabel and Sceptross are two of the kindest people I've ever met online as a whole and I'm sure things will get back on track under their lead. This is just no longer my space to influence (it hasn't been for a few years) - other, more passionate people must shape it and I am sure this is the start of that process. It should no longer be about "filling in for Amaranth", people need to make their own proactive contributions, their own projects, their own metagame studies, etc. The possibilities are endless and anyone with a bit of effort can make a contribution for the better - as long as effort is going in to make the community a better space, results will come.

Thank you guys again for all the mentions - I have faith things will get better than they ever were when I was around
 
I know I'm probably not experienced enough to make a post here that people will read but I started writing about this in discord after reading and it got long enough to where I thought it wasn't appropriate there. So will start, I'm an inexperienced player, and am so new that the current state of RBYcord is the norm for me. I wanna talk specifically about the 2nd topic.

So recently, I roped Celdanami into playing RBY, and among all the Arcanine and Shitmonlee discussion he mentioned that he noticed RBY doesnt have any of the basic bitch resources, including but not limited to, a Set/Core/Team bazaar (set posting makes sense not existing since its rby.), A Role Compendium, and a Lead MU chart, I didnt really notice this since RBY is normal for me, so when looking through other gens i noticed we dont have a Teambuilding competition either. When looking through old resources i also noticed That the Guide to teambuilding is outdated, and that while our mechanics are well documented, there isn't really one resource with all of it.

I noticed that the only actual resources we have, that the new players will find helpful, are the VR, the Samples, The Dex, dead discussion threads, and RBYcord. All of these are the literal bare minimum.

So I think we should work on more actual resources. I wish i could elaborate on what i mean by this but i really do think we have a lack of OU resources and dont have much to say besides that. This is literally the OU tier for our generation, but it has about the same amount of updated resources as the Low tiers, which is sad.

Not really the greatest read out there but i wanted to just put down my thoughts.
 
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Soda_Eesti said:
RBY doesnt have any of the basic bitch resources, including but not limited to, a Set/Core/Team bazaar (set posting makes sense not existing since its rby.), A Role Compendium, and a Lead MU chart, I didnt really notice this since RBY is normal for me, so when looking through other gens i noticed we dont have a Teambuilding competition either. When looking through old resources i also noticed That the Guide to teambuilding is outdated, and that while our mechanics are well documented, there isn't really one resource with all of it.
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Quick thoughts:

Set Compendium: sure, this is a quick thing, I could make this myself since there's not that many options anyway
Role Compendium: seems immensely unhelpful in RBY OU, we don't have hazard setting/removal, we have 2 viable statuses, 2.5 borderline mandatory mons per team, no pivoting, etc. I feel like if anything this would cause people to misunderstand how to use various pokemon more because they see it on a role compendium when the unified Special stat and maxed Stat Exp. make this less divided into roles than later gens.
Team Bazaar: this would sort of be fine but I don't see how this wouldn't just be RBY OU teams that are full of Pokemon that are objectively not very good. In gen 3+ there is a lot more room to come up with interesting ideas but over here the "casual" teambuilding tends to be "I stuck a Pokemon I like that has little to no niche in OU on my team." I mean, we could try it, at least, but my guess is it'd basically just look like the Jank Thread.
Core... Compendium? Idk: Again, it is RBY OU, the "core" is "Tauros + Snorlax + usually Chansey" and then you add 3-4 mons barring Laxless stuff that is just "Tauros + Chansey + 4" or the rare weird brings by high level players of Tauros + 5 non-normals, but that last one isn't a "core." Not sure what this would do to help people get into the tier when the most typical issues vocal new players seem to have is either thinking that the top 3 are actually overrated and this is just an old player conspiracy to not try new things, or that actually Swords Dance is really strong and everyone's just too bad to understand it.
Lead MU chart: I think this would make way more sense as a post by someone strong at OU than a "Chart" because just "Gengar beats Jynx" is again, not like how later gens work, different teams have different ways of playing their openers based on what's in back. One team with Starmie lead might sack it to Jynx and be fine with that, another switches to sack something else, and so on; also, I have genuinely never seen this as a resource anywhere but ADV where it's like, 6 years old and includes things like lead Milotic? Idk if this is something needed, though an update/new perspective to Amaranth's great lead matchup post from years ago by someone like Sceptross for example would be awesome.
Teambuilding Competition: I support this one just for involving the community a bit more and maybe flexing a little creativity, though I suspect building viable and creative teams in OU will be difficult for the typical entrant. If you do low tiers sometimes as well this looks a lot more viable.

Soda_Eesti said:
When looking through old resources i also noticed That the Guide to teambuilding is outdated, and that while our mechanics are well documented, there isn't really one resource with all of it.
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Sure, centralizing these and updating them as well as a Lead Matchup mini-essay would probably be a good idea, I can poke around and see if someone's willing to write on teambuilding and leads, the mechanics stuff is easy enough for me to gather into one spot when I have time.

Soda_Eesti said:
I noticed that the only actual resources we have, that the new players will find helpful, are the VR, the Samples, The Dex, dead discussion threads, and RBYcord. All of these are the literal bare minimum.
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I mean "only" seems like kind of a stretch there, that's a lot of resources! We update our samples a lot more regularly than basically any other non-current gen in every single tier, our dex has been one of the most active oldgens in updating information, the discussion threads have activity after each tournament when people share thoughts and teams, and RBYcord it's not hard to spark a discussion or ask a question and we have one of the biggest cords of any oldgen.

I agree with the premise we could do more and it'd be good, just saying that even for my criticisms of some of the resources we at least have all the ones that are fairly helpful in RBY already (even if they need updates), most of the other ones are kind of "fluff" to do for this gen instead of really helping in my opinion, but I'm open to hearing from you or others if they think any of those would be useful and why and if so I'll help with the work.
 
Not too sure if people aren't involved as much as before. Maybe there has been less players getting into rby, but we already have one of the biggest community. Wcop started and it seemed to me that people were quite excited about it, so I dont rly get the feeling.
Also Im ngl I didnt take part in spl discussion nor watched the games (besides for our team :D) cuz we had the goat himself marcoasd doing a complete thankless job of covering every single game, every single week without fail, and I was basically waiting for his recap for almost every series. If you want to support rby and the community, I cant stress enough that you should go ahead and watch his videos if you want to learn (a lot) about rby from one of the undisputed very best ever.
To address other stuff that was said in the thread, I dont feel like ressources are lacking, nor are incomplete, and theres plenty of tours to get started (for OU). Furthermore, theres always been a couple of good players giving new players advice in the samely named channel in the cord. Id just recommend people that actually want to improve to just play the game and ask for advice there. You could even get my own horrendous analysis of your game (or hopefully someone better does it) :D
Anyway enough yapping for now, I love rby and Im sure y'all also do. if you're not happy with how the community is doing rn, try to get people hyped. There is a lot of banger matchups for wcop, surely if you want to you can do something about that.
Thanks for reading my crap, cya next tour!
 
Quarante8 said:
I cant stress enough that you should go ahead and watch his videos if you want to learn (a lot)
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i'm learning quite a lot indeed!

to not make this post a one-liner, i think it'd be worth having more discussions on the forums too, not just discord. because right now, beyond the occasional effortposts and vrs/teamdumps, there aren't many "lower effort" conversations on the forums by high-level players. these tend to go to discord, which is mostly fine, but a lot of that information tends to get lost because. y'know, it's discord. now i'm not saying that we should strive to be like the cg ou discussion thread (god no) but i think using the ou discussion thread to it's fullest potential would do us a lot of good
 
I've been lurking in these threads for several months, but I hadn't posted anything because I'm not really a competitive player and I'm generally gunshy about making new accounts and spreading my email around more than I need to. However, this thread inspired me to try and get more involved with the community. (And in the process, I discovered that I already had an account this whole time, I just haven't used it in 14 years!)

I've been doing RBY-related theorymon articles on Reddit every Thursday for a while now. It's a very casual and inherently speculative affair, but after reading Sablette's remarks about wanting "more things that facilitate engaging in the community besides competition", I'm starting to think that my articles may be worth more than I've been giving them credit for? It's nice to think that I could actually be of some help in improving the RBY community, even if only in a small way.
 
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