Overcentralizing

unloyal18

I always want my team to win. I use my favorites (that are strong of course). Then one time at the Shoddy Official Server main chat, dudes there were talking about overcentralization. I joined the conversation. Some people sided me, the rest against me. My side was to ban overcentralizing pokemon.

But how can we really tell that something is overcentralizing the metagame? Its a very subjective term. Its hard to define. Maybe if it was easily definable in pokemon, maybe some OU are already banned for centralizing the game.

Now, I ask myself what it means.

For me, it is when a pokemon is on most of the team, takes 2-3 pokemon to counter, has the right stats in the right place, a wide movepool and an ability that is easily used.

Tyranitar fits my description perfectly, but he has tons of weakness that on can exploit. The next one, Garchomp. Nobody ever believes me that he doesn't centralize the metagame. They always say he can be defeated. But invinciblity doesn't mean overcentralization. BL pokemon aren't in UU because they will overcentralize it, yet Kabutops can beat BL or even OU pokemon.

So now this is my question. Is the OU metagame really overcentralized? Why or why not?

Discuss.:toast:
 
I'll have to disagree with the Garchomp statement, for the simple fact that you don't need to have fucking HP Ice on everything to beat it.

My argument is the shoddy battle metagame and its current state. I feel Wobbeffet and Deoxys-E have created overcentralization in the fact that pure offensive teams are ripped to shreds. Now every team is stale and I see only 3 fucking strategies:

1) Toxic effin spikes - here to ruin Tyranitar, Garchomp, and more importantly, Wob. I see these every other match. Is it annoying... sure. Is it uncounterable.... No. Does it force me to carry a spinner or poison pokemon? You bet.... OVERCENTRALIZING

2) Bulky sweepers. Every team looks like this now: Celebi, Heatran, Bulky Water X, Garchomp, Choice Scarfer Y. Its annoying as hell, and is a direct result of the Deoxys-E / Wob introduction into OU. I miss my teams of multiple Choice users, and all offensive pokemon.. but it just doesn't work anymore. There seems to be a drastic reduction in speed in the metagame, probably because everything fast and offensive gets butt fucked by Deoxys. Now every team looks slow... and has 1 choice scarfer to compensate. So how do I combat this? Make a team of... well Bulky Sweepers. Overcentralizing.... YOU BET.

3) Pure Stall... is all over the place, with Wob to make things worse. See my T-Spikes argument.

So yeah, the current metagame is very centralizing at the moment. Perhaps more than its ever been. There is no more variety in gameplay and its disguisting.
 
Let's take for example, Darkrai, Garchomp, Salamence, and Gengar.
If Darkrai becomes OU, people would easily ban him for overcentralizing, and because he is a legendary poke, Garchomp is basically on the same case, except he isn't a legend (no uber isn't a legend except wobby in RSE) so he won't be banned no matter how many thousand poke bring ice attacks for him. Mence and Gar are two poke that no matter what won't centralize the game. Gar is second on usage, but don't usually have trouble with beating him (after I know the set). Mence also has 4x ice weakness, yet he isn't the main reason people bring ice attack.

Wobby and Deoxys-E should also be banned in OU. They overcentralized it alot.

3 of the poke said above has a 600 BST. Darkrai has the best stat distribution, then Chomp, then Mence. Mence can't be banned because he won't do good in ubers and he doesn't dominate OU too. Darkrai should stay in ubers, but Chomp, he should be uber despite the fact Rayquaza outclasses him. Being outclassed just isn't a strong argument.

Chomp made one of the biggest overcentralization in pokemon history.
 
It's impossible to make a metagame withou centralization.
We ban garchomp. Now guess what? A new "centralizer" will born.
Centralization is just a part of the metagame.
And RaikouLover, the metagame changes. What can you do? Simple, make something new with capability to change the current metagame (see Obi stall team for a exemple). Your arguments aren't really arguments, they are just pointing out that you are not happy with the actual metagame, all the things that you said can be countered. If you just hate to make your team capable of countering the metagame trends, you just have to make a new trend, right?
 
Pyong said:
It's impossible to make a metagame withou centralization.
We ban garchomp. Now guess what? A new "centralizer" will born.
Centralization is just a part of the metagame.
And RaikouLover, the metagame changes. What can you do? Simple, make something new with capability to change the current metagame (see Obi stall team for a exemple). Your arguments aren't really arguments, they are just pointing out that you are not happy with the actual metagame, all the things that you said can be countered. If you just hate to make your team capable of countering the metagame trends, you just have to make a new trend, right?
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Remember how Medicham and Raikou centralized Advanced, they were stoppable by Skarm and Bliss Respectively. Chomp, and Wobby isn't. If we remove chomp, all other top tier OU will be easy to stop. (SDLuke by Gliscor etc.)
 
Garchomp is the major pain of DP, yes. You can't counter him with just one pokémon, right.But do you use skarmory and weavile only for garchomp? I don't think so.
Take out Garchomp and etc, and you will fell like a weight has been lifted from your team shouldersm and wow, amazing, you can add some force in the place of your previous "garchomp counter" and son you will see that the "100% counters" for lucario and etc just don't work anymore, due to the fact that now the teams are going to have less trouble countering garchomp and etc and adding some force on attack.
 
Garchomp and Wobbuffet should totally be removed from the game.

Even should be counters for Garchomp get screwed over by sand veil hax or Yache Berry. You need like 540 special attack to OHKO a Yache Chomp with Ice Beam. Thats sad. Count how many pokemon are obsolete now that Garchomp is here. Flygon, Dragonite and even Salamence are slipping rapidly from usage. I would rather have all those pokemon in the game than Garchomp. Count how many moveslots (out of 24 maximum!) you waste trying not to get screwed by Garchomp. Count how many teams you've made that HAVE to have multiple steel types to survive against Garchomp.

I'm serious. If Garchomp never existed, it'd free up like three slots in your team that you could use for more fun stuff. I never use fast, frail sweepers like Azelf and Porygon-Z anymore, because I need as many pokemon that can switch into stuff as I possibly can. I never use Dragons anymore because I don't want Garchomp being able to hit more of my stuff. I pack as few Earthqauke weak pokemon as possible, and I usually have 2-3 pokemon with more than 333 speed just so I can revenge kill it.

No one can argue that garchomp didn't take a huge dump all over the metagame. Just imagine what the game would be like if Garchomp never existed.



Wobbufett totally sucks. I used it for a few weeks, and I was disgusted at how effective it was. Every Blissey, Bronzong and Swampert immedaitely got shut down and killed by my Wobbuffet. Late game, I swept with Porygon-Z. I never lost unless I got overwhelmed by Garchomp, Gyarados (scarfed mesprit "countered" both)or if a random scarfer killed Porygon-Z...

You can't counter wobbuffet because you can't switch anything into it. It has made slow walls and scarfers, and slow set up pokemon completely obselete. Wobbuffet has warped the game to the point where teams are basiaclly Celetran, Zapdos, Bronzong, Garchomp and then Lucario/Gengar/Tyranitar. It's disgusting how little variety there is now. This is why I play excusively Wifi now, because no one uses Wobbuffet, and good legends like Celebi and Zapdos are harder to get. I see the occasional Arcanine or Vileplume on wifi, it's more fun and there is much more variety than the horrible ladder on Shoddy.
 
Note that this isn't a debate about "why things should be removed from the game" - but a debate about "what is overcentralizing and what is not". Please keep on topic.
 
unloyal18 said:
Remember how Medicham and Raikou centralized Advanced, they were stoppable by Skarm and Bliss Respectively. Chomp, and Wobby isn't. If we remove chomp, all other top tier OU will be easy to stop. (SDLuke by Gliscor etc.)
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This isn't true at all. Banning Garchomp won't make Lucario, Gyarados, Salamence, or anything else any less threatening. You don't know that Lucario doesn't HAVE to use Crunch, right? That last slot is easily fillable by HP Ice, or Stone Edge. It all depends on what you need to get past the most.

I really don't see how you think Salamence, or Gyarados, or Tyranitar are easy to stop. You can't just slap one pokemon on your team and automatically beat them, like you suggest. Not only this, but D/P is far more team based than any other metagame. D/P has the most options for players ever, and thus, it is even harder to stop these threats.
 
First of all, if you paid attention to colin's discussion of overcentralization, you would know that overcentralization is in fact not subjective--it can be determined by a formula. The problem arises with the fact that the results do not show exactly which pokemon is (are) overcentralizing the metagame.

Second, it is very important to draw a distinction between "overcentralization" and "centralization." Garchomp, TTar, Lucario, etc are all centralizing, however there is actually no overcentralization in the current metagame based on ShoddyBattle statistics. Having centralizing pokes is obviously unavoidable in any metagame, and since there is no overcentralization this could currently not be used as a reason to ban anything from OU (this includes Wobbbuffet on ShoddyBattle).

Note that I am not making an argument for banning anything, I am simply pointing out that overcentralization is simply not a supportable argument for doing so.
 
Second, it is very important to draw a distinction between "overcentralization" and "centralization." Garchomp, TTar, Lucario, etc are all centralizing, however there is actually no overcentralization in the current metagame based on ShoddyBattle statistics. Having centralizing pokes is obviously unavoidable in any metagame, and since there is no overcentralization this could currently not be used as a reason to ban anything from OU (this includes Wobbbuffet on ShoddyBattle).
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I don't think one can say that "based on ShoddyBattle statistics" since there really hasn't been enough analysis done on them as far as I noticed other than "This pokemon was used more, this pokemon was used less"

One thing everyone should note in centralization is that everything is centralized based on the threatlists (check the announcements in the RMT Forum). OU is already "centralized" - OU Pokemon are used more than BL/UU/NU, obviously.

Yet it's really hard to say that it centralized because of one specific threat. Did Bronzong use rise because of Mamoswine use, or because it beats lead Gengar, or because it's a good switch into Garchomp? The answer is "all of above" - we can't really calculate how much centralization one Pokemon is causing because there's a million other factors. This of course does not take into account the obvious such as 269 Ice Beams for Garchomp or Shed Shell on Skarm/Forry/Bronzong for Magnezone, yet we don't have shoddy statistics on that anyway, and we can say that's only a factor of centralization and does not show it's "overcentralizing" The OP's definition of overcentralizing is also a pretty shady one for this reason.

The best way to test whether or not something is "overcentralized" is to remove it from the game and to see how it affects the metagame. If the change is significant (IE, the placement of Pokemon changes quite some bit, significant being a subjective term sadly) then we can conclude that it is overcentralizing.

So yeah I don't think you can use Shoddy Statistics straight up to measure centralization, firstly because it tells you absolutely nothing other than knowing what thing to watch out for. Overcentralization is something that needs to be actively tested.

Perhaps Shoddy needs another Ladder - a "Garchomp less" ladder, along with the standard ladder. This way we can directly compare the two metagames and see what kind of changes are present.

Just an idea.
 
I would just like to say that many people state "if we remove chomp then another pokemon will become number 1 and we will have to ban them!"

Now that is really an incorrect statement.

Lets say we did ban chomp. Now Beedrill moves to number 1. As we all know many things wall beedrill and he can be dealt with easily. Why would we ban him? Simply being the new number 1 most used pokemon would not suddenly make him too powerful to stop. People could just deal with him like they always have. Garchomp however is almost impossible to deal with unless you have 1 counter for each set (basically 3 or so garchomp counters)

Now simply replace beedrill with any other pokemon in OU

We have no need to ban them simply for becoming the number 1 most used because we have proven time and time again that they can in fact be countered.
 
Tangerine said:
The best way to test whether or not something is "overcentralized" is to remove it from the game and to see how it affects the metagame. If the change is significant (IE, the placement of Pokemon changes quite some bit, significant being a subjective term sadly) then we can conclude that it is overcentralizing.
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The problem I see with such a plan is that I'm not sure removing X from the game temporarily will actually change usage all that much.

Let's take garchomp for example. It's definitely a threat to my team and to make damn sure that it doesn't sweep me, I have a bunch of counters to it. Say I use ice beam starmie, ice fang gliscor and skarmory to try and stop any and all forms. Suddenly garchomp is removed from the game. Does that mean I no longer need these pokemon and will stop using them? It doesn't because they also serve other purposes on my team other than stopping chomp. Skarmory helps with my weavile problem, Gliscor my heracross problem and starmie my gyarados and infernape problem.

The point is that no pokemon on a team should be serving only 1 purpose. Therefore, my prediction is that removing that "purpose" won't affect usage at all. At least not on a significant level that we can decide if something is over centralizing or not.

The exception I see to this though would probably be removing certain walls from the metagame. The obvious example is blissey who really only does serve 1 purpose in general and that's special walling. I can actually see a lot of special attackers rising in usage with blissey gone because they are no longer fully walled by a very common and very reliable special sponge. But that's another story.

Kira said:
Lets say we did ban chomp. Now Beedrill moves to number 1. As we all know many things wall beedrill and he can be dealt with easily. Why would we ban him? Simply being the new number 1 most used pokemon would not suddenly make him too powerful to stop. People could just deal with him like they always have. Garchomp however is almost impossible to deal with unless you have 1 counter for each set (basically 3 or so garchomp counters)
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It sounds stupid when you say it like that but in reality it's more of a slippery slope situation than something so drastic as going from garchomp to beedrill. Let's say garchomp is banned because it's so hard to counter. Suddenly gengar becomes #1. That's pretty hard to counter too without knowing the set and when the counter can be put to sleep. So like garchomp it goes too. Then Ttar moves to #1 and oh boy its moveset is huge and the possibilities are endless. Very hard to counter properly so it must go. We go down the slippery slope and maybe eventually beedrill does reach the #1 position. Except by then all of the pokemon that fully walled it have already been moved to ubers. So it too is hard to fully counter...
 
Pffffffffffft. Garchomp being gone doesn't magically make other pokemon just as strong as it. Is Gengar going to get better because Garchomp is absent? No, not really. They are completely different pokemon, and the tier one is put in will not change the strength of the other.

Sure, Gengar will likely become number one if Garchomp is removed, but people managed Gengar before, didn't they? It's not a base 600 powerhouse with Nasty Plot and two excellent STABs. All it has going for it is speedy hypnosis and nice resists.
 
The problem I see with such a plan is that I'm not sure removing X from the game temporarily will actually change usage all that much.

Let's take garchomp for example. It's definitely a threat to my team and to make damn sure that it doesn't sweep me, I have a bunch of counters to it. Say I use ice beam starmie, ice fang gliscor and skarmory to try and stop any and all forms. Suddenly garchomp is removed from the game. Does that mean I no longer need these pokemon and will stop using them? It doesn't because they also serve other purposes on my team other than stopping chomp. Skarmory helps with my weavile problem, Gliscor my heracross problem and starmie my gyarados and infernape problem.

The point is that no pokemon on a team should be serving only 1 purpose. Therefore, my prediction is that removing that "purpose" won't affect usage at all. At least not on a significant level that we can decide if something is over centralizing or not.

The exception I see to this though would probably be removing certain walls from the metagame. The obvious example is blissey who really only does serve 1 purpose in general and that's special walling. I can actually see a lot of special attackers rising in usage with blissey gone because they are no longer fully walled by a very common and very reliable special sponge. But that's another story.
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Did you read my post? I said the same thing on the third paragraph.

I do agree that a period of one month would be "too short" (not that I specified a time frame but whatever), however. But it has to end sometime - we're not going to be able to sit around for a months just to see if something was overcentralizing after all - we'll probably begin see the effects of decentralization after the first month though.
 
What sorts of things are you looking for after removing X from the metagame though? How do you show that the metagame has decentralized or that it has changed because X has been removed.

That's what I was trying to say. Apart from the usage statistics from shoddy what else could we use to check if anything has changed? As I said, the usage alone will not reflect correctly any changes in the metagame after something has been banned.
 
Well reading the data would be the most important issue, anyway with the counter usage data in general we can also check for some flag moves in the moveset, let me take your previous example:

astrohawke said:
Let's take garchomp for example. It's definitely a threat to my team and to make damn sure that it doesn't sweep me, I have a bunch of counters to it. Say I use ice beam starmie, ice fang gliscor and skarmory to try and stop any and all forms. Suddenly garchomp is removed from the game. Does that mean I no longer need these pokemon and will stop using them? It doesn't because they also serve other purposes on my team other than stopping chomp. Skarmory helps with my weavile problem, Gliscor my heracross problem and starmie my gyarados and infernape problem.
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now garchomp is gone, starmie can drop ice beam for another move since the ice part coverage can be dealt with surf + thunderbolt.

I understand it's pretty difficult to interpretate the data in the right way but it's definitely better than doing nothing because it's difficult.
 
The thing is, how many people are going to bother dropping ice beam on starmie just because garchomp is gone. It's not like ice beam suddenly became useless because there's 1 less pokemon to use it on. I still need it to hurt stuff like salamence and celebi. Not to mention the coverage boltbeam offers.

I think it's better to do nothing at all than to misinterpret the data and act on those misinterpretations. After all we can never really be sure what the data is showing given all the factors involved.
 
True but just being able to get a deep look at the metagame may be rewarding, imo the biggest stale in the metagame discussions is that there's a lack of good definition of overcentralization, this testing may prove useful to get at least the definition made clear, even if after that nothing gets banned there will be at least a decent reason (may it be too difficult to sort all the data or just there's no poke overcentralizing).
 
Overcentralisation is not defined by how boring the metagame is. You may complain about the metagame and you could be right, but overcentralisation doesn't mean "metagame is boring". Overcentralisation means having only few counters to a Pokemon, and these, in turn, would be overused just to counter the Pokemon, and so the metagame becomes overcentralised about these Pokemon: the overwhelming Pokemon and the one(s) that counter it/them.

However, looking at shoddybattle's statistics, there is no hint of overcentralisation yet. Maybe there will be in the future once the metagame settles down a bit more, but so far there isn't any yet.
 
X-Act said:
Overcentralisation is not defined by how boring the metagame is. You may complain about the metagame and you could be right, but overcentralisation doesn't mean "metagame is boring". Overcentralisation means having only few counters to a Pokemon, and these, in turn, would be overused just to counter the Pokemon, and so the metagame becomes overcentralised about these Pokemon: the overwhelming Pokemon and the one(s) that counter it/them.

However, looking at shoddybattle's statistics, there is no hint of overcentralisation yet. Maybe there will be in the future once the metagame settles down a bit more, but so far there isn't any yet.
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Bronzong: #6
Starmie: #12
Weavile: #14
Skarmory: #15
Gliscor: #17


Yeah... and these guys are all up there why? Bronzong, Skarmory and Gliscor are usually seen as Garchomp "counters"


EDIT: kind of interesting, but Garchomp has a stat rating of 813 on that Calculator of yours. Does anyone else even come close to that? Salamence hits 780...
 
skiddle said:
Bronzong: #6
Starmie: #12
Weavile: #14
Skarmory: #15
Gliscor: #17


Yeah... and these guys are all up there why? Bronzong, Skarmory and Gliscor are usually seen as Garchomp "counters"
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Yes, and Starmie is also a great Infernape counter, as well as Rapid Spinner, not to mention a potent offensive force. Weavile can take on Cresselia, 2HKO Hippowdon, and is just a good attacking pokemon all around. Skarmory, Bronzong and Gliscor all have Stealth Rock capabilitys, as well as other support options such as Whirlwind, Spikes, Hypnosis and Knock Off.

You think these pokemon would suddenly drop in usage because Garchomp is gone? Players don't put these pokemon on their teams just because Garchomp is present, as they all do tons of other helpful things in battle, like I said before, there are plenty of other things those pokemon do that players use them for besides "Oh man I need something to stop Garchomp"
 
Stats ratings only rate base stats, nothing else.

But to answer your question: Cresselia gets a rating of 837 and Azelf gets a rating of 832. And Salamence actually gets a rating of 814.
 
Aldaron said:
Heh, can someone give me a non arbitrary line of what overcentralized is for competitive Pokemon?
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Nope. Centralization can be measured, but overcentralization is completely a matter of opinion. When X-Act says that there's no hint of overcentralization yet in the metagame, I presume he is going by the arbitrary benchmark of (if I recall correctly) about 50 Pokémon making up about 75% of usage as just centralized enough. I happen to think that metagame is ridiculously overcentralized. But again, that's just an opinion.

There is no formula that can tell us if a metagame is overcentralized because there will probably never be agreement on what constitutes overcentralization. What I'd like to see is a couple of 'standard' tiers: one that caters to the "Just decentralized enough" group and one that caters to the "Much less centralized" group. This wouldn't eliminate all complaints, but it would help to alleviate this constant tug-of-war between the two camps.

Pyong said:
It's impossible to make a metagame withou centralization.
We ban garchomp. Now guess what? A new "centralizer" will born.
Centralization is just a part of the metagame.
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"Something will always centralize the metagame." People have been spouting this line for as long as I can remember. Prove it. There are 2^493 possible ban lists, and what you're telling me is that all those millions of billions of possible tiers are overcentralized by something? Prove it. I want to see your line of reasoning. In fact, I want to see any evidence of this at all. You're making this claim, so I want you to back it up with facts or at least theory.

If all you're saying is that some Pokémon will always be more popular than others, then I agree with you. It's a meaningless statement. In any ranked list, something will always be on top. If you're saying that there will always be the degree of centralization we have now (50 Pokémon constituting 75% of usage), then I don't believe that for a moment. With the right ban list, I think we could get to 100 Pokémon constituting 75% of usage easily. It's just all about what people want and don't want, not what can and can't be done.
 
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