A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, the folks at Game Freak gave unto us a RPG where we assumed the role as trainers for animalian/anthropomorphic creatures known as Pokémon. And it was good when we were figuring out how to beat the RPG portion (which really was never all that hard, even before people started to figure out they could get almost infinite supplies of TMs and healing items through the Missingno. glitch). Then, people started discovering vs. battling and created a metagame. This took enjoyment of those games to a whole new level, increasing the replay value to almost infinite levels.
As with anything though, the players got accustomed to battling and found ways to make trouncing other players easier. They mowed down teams with Mewtwo, spammed OHKO moves like Fissure and used Double Team/Minimize to gain evasion boosts so that even the most reliable of attacks would miss. This caused an overcentralization of the newly formed metagame, and so certain decrees were passed. Mewtwo was to be given the designation of "Uber," and OHKO/evasion moves were banned. This continued on into the new generations, as Mewtwo got company and a whole tier for Ubers was created. That part's fine. Letting overpowered Pokémon compete in OU is like letting the Yankees, Red Sox and Angels compete in the International League. It's just not fair and an unnatural matching.
But the thing with the banning of OHKO/evasion moves and chance-based hold-items (like Quick Claw) is that it seemed like an attempt to eliminate a very natural element of anything in life from the Pokémon metagame: luck. It almost seems like a majority of battlers out there deemed that they didn't want an "inferior" player winning a battle over a skilled player because they happened to get a few bounces to go their way. Sure, there's still a modicum of luck (CHs and mispredictions being two big examples), but it's still not a respite from how robotic and calculating this game has become in certain circles (here being one of those circles). I mean, when you can calculate a damage range to a hundredth of a percent, it becomes less of a game and more of an accounting exercise.
This begs the question, "Why is luck frowned upon?" or more specifically, "Why are people so afraid of getting out-lucked?" I think that's what it all boils down to. People are afraid of the extreme examples, even though the odds of those scenarios actually happening are miniscule. Let's take OHKO moves for example. Even if we discounted the fact that Horn Drill, Guillotine and Fissure all have failsafe type counters and that there are Abilities that prevent OHKO moves from working (an ability had by 4 OU critters by my reckoning), the odds of one of those moves hitting more than once a match are pretty low. Given the base accuracy of the move given by Game Freak, the odds of the OHKO moves hitting twice in a row is a mere 9%. The odds of two out of three turns resulting in OHKO moves hitting is 18.9%. In the most extreme example, 6 straight OHKO moves being successful is 0.0729%, and that would assume the user has a speed advantage or a defensive advantage (with Leftovers/Black Sludge recovery) over all 6 victims, something that won't be guaranteed. Compare that to the odds of a maxed-out PP OHKO move failing every time. There is a 5.76% chance of 8 straight misses from an OHKO move. Comparatively speaking, there's only a 2.7% chance that you'll score three straight OHKOs. Factor in one miss to that, and the odds go up to 7.56%, and if you factor in the fact that on the miss you have a chance for an absolutely free hit, that's not a great percentage to be playing with. Sure, you might get an outlier in one match, but over the course of hundreds and hundreds of battles, you're not going to fall victim to hax all that much. It also means running an OHKO based team all the time would result in epic fail more often than not. So why be scared to the point of banning every OHKO move? If anything, the only combo that should be banned is the extremely cheap Mind Reader/Sheer Cold Articuno.
To be honest, the question of evasion moves is a little more tricky seeing that one evasion boost brings 100% base accuracy moves down to 75%. Three out of four still ain't bad though, especially when you have very strong moves that have base accuracy of 100% (Earthquake, BoltBeam, Energy Ball, Psychic etc.). Honestly, what's wrong with a little spanner in the works every now and again? Do we really need to have Ice Beam work all the time? Of course, it's a lot easier to spam Double Team successfully than it is the OHKO moves, and the fear of matches turning into severe games of chance is tangible and considerable. However, there are more ways around the DT/Minimize problem than there are around OHKO, making dealing with it a little less headache-inducing. For one, Haze was at least widespread enough in previous generations before the offensive shift in the metagame, and it can be learned by a few useful OU critters. No-miss moves have gained in both power and diversity. The amount of Aura Sphere Lucario and Togekiss walking around are considerable. Aerial Ace is still pretty popular, and Shock Wave, Magical Leaf, Faint Attack and Swift are alright options since they have the same base power as AA. No Guard Machamp shits all over DT users, provided that they're not Ghosts. Even without all those buffs against the evasion moves, you need some luck to get past the first DT unscathed. You need luck on both sides of the coin to deal with DT/Min. So really, what do people have to fear?
Besides, why is Double Team so taboo when you can get the same effect as two DTs on certain Pokémon without ANY of the setup? Garchomp, Gliscor, Froslass, Sandslash, Dugtrio, Cacturne, Mamoswine and Glaceon can get this if paired with a weather inducer and equipped with a Brightpowder. Even if you ban Brightpowder from the equation, you're still getting 25% evasion, and on a Pokémon like Garchomp, that can be huge. So why do these critters, four of which are OU staples, get the extra boost in evasion while everyone else can't even get the inferior option (i.e. one that wastes a turn to set up)? And yet there's all this noise about a Garchomp problem. (More on that later)
Still, for whatever reason, people fear luck and value skill despite the fact that luck is a very, very real part of life. To try and eliminate it is to make something unnatural, less fun and more problematic. I know that people here are trying to make it so that only the most skilled zomg battlers are going to win, but you can't eliminate things from the equation to do that. A truly gifted battler is going to factor in everything, not eliminate the things that give it a little trouble. Besides, skill will beat out luck most of the time anyway. It's very rare that you see someone get lucky all the time, but at the same time, while the more skilled player will win 99 times out of 100, that 1 win will mean the world to the person who gets their ass kicked the other times, and that will keep people coming back and getting better. If they can build on that lucky bounce they got, they can stick around long enough to develop skill, and the metagame is a lot better off in the long run.
Conversely, banning things en masse isn't going to improve the metagame all that much. I've seen all the arguments going on about banning Garchomp, Stealth Rock or both. Those about banning Stealth Rock I find kinda shallow. It all boils down to people whining about not being able to use 4x weak critters or not being creative enough to get them in the field of play. Garchomp, though, people are saying that he's nigh uncounterable, and there could be a kernel of truth to that as is, especially if it's used in a Sand Stream team with it's relatively unfair Ability. However, what if you equalized things and let other Pokémon use DT? Garchomp's Outrage all of a sudden doesn't hurt as much when it's missing 25% of the time. Evasion moves are the best Garchomp counter out there. As for Stealth Rock, well, directly, evasion/OHKO doesn't do anything about it. Indirectly, well, when you have a 25% chance of evading a move after one DT, it helps with a 12.5-50% loss in HP to deal with (i.e., you stay alive a little longer).
Of course, none of this guarantees that people will start using DT en masse, at least I don't think it would. The point is not to get people to start spamming evasion moves, but to provide counters to some of the more "broken" aspects of the metagame without resorting to banning. And besides, shouldn't we be striving to play a game as close to the way Game Freak designed it as possible? It's very honorable to get rid of some very cheap aspects of the game. For example, I'm all for the Sleep Clause, for banning MindColdCuno (as mentioned before), shunting Wobbuffet to Ubers and for punishing the folks who run away from battle when it's apparent that they're going to lose. But to push luck out of the metagame is to make it more of a contest in programming rather than competitive gaming. Right now, the only thing keeping it from being a total calculation fest is the sheer number of Nature and EV spread combinations. Sure, I've put out a lot of math stuff here too, but if you add in all the evasion and OHKO stuff, you have so many different factors going in that you might as well just leave the calculations to the work world and just play.
This isn't a slam on smart playing or skilled players, not at all. If you play a game, you should want to be good at it, and you should want to win. However, eliminating luck completely from the equation only causes problems. I think that the so-called Garchomp problem here is a direct result of those bannings all those years ago. Of course, it took a near-broken combination of stats, typing and ability and a very taxing entry hazard to produce it, but it happened eventually. I think the only course of action should be to lead by example in the world of the Pokémon metagame and at least test out a game with the removal of the Evasion and OHKO Clauses.
Besides, it's better to be lucky than good anyway, right? :p
As with anything though, the players got accustomed to battling and found ways to make trouncing other players easier. They mowed down teams with Mewtwo, spammed OHKO moves like Fissure and used Double Team/Minimize to gain evasion boosts so that even the most reliable of attacks would miss. This caused an overcentralization of the newly formed metagame, and so certain decrees were passed. Mewtwo was to be given the designation of "Uber," and OHKO/evasion moves were banned. This continued on into the new generations, as Mewtwo got company and a whole tier for Ubers was created. That part's fine. Letting overpowered Pokémon compete in OU is like letting the Yankees, Red Sox and Angels compete in the International League. It's just not fair and an unnatural matching.
But the thing with the banning of OHKO/evasion moves and chance-based hold-items (like Quick Claw) is that it seemed like an attempt to eliminate a very natural element of anything in life from the Pokémon metagame: luck. It almost seems like a majority of battlers out there deemed that they didn't want an "inferior" player winning a battle over a skilled player because they happened to get a few bounces to go their way. Sure, there's still a modicum of luck (CHs and mispredictions being two big examples), but it's still not a respite from how robotic and calculating this game has become in certain circles (here being one of those circles). I mean, when you can calculate a damage range to a hundredth of a percent, it becomes less of a game and more of an accounting exercise.
This begs the question, "Why is luck frowned upon?" or more specifically, "Why are people so afraid of getting out-lucked?" I think that's what it all boils down to. People are afraid of the extreme examples, even though the odds of those scenarios actually happening are miniscule. Let's take OHKO moves for example. Even if we discounted the fact that Horn Drill, Guillotine and Fissure all have failsafe type counters and that there are Abilities that prevent OHKO moves from working (an ability had by 4 OU critters by my reckoning), the odds of one of those moves hitting more than once a match are pretty low. Given the base accuracy of the move given by Game Freak, the odds of the OHKO moves hitting twice in a row is a mere 9%. The odds of two out of three turns resulting in OHKO moves hitting is 18.9%. In the most extreme example, 6 straight OHKO moves being successful is 0.0729%, and that would assume the user has a speed advantage or a defensive advantage (with Leftovers/Black Sludge recovery) over all 6 victims, something that won't be guaranteed. Compare that to the odds of a maxed-out PP OHKO move failing every time. There is a 5.76% chance of 8 straight misses from an OHKO move. Comparatively speaking, there's only a 2.7% chance that you'll score three straight OHKOs. Factor in one miss to that, and the odds go up to 7.56%, and if you factor in the fact that on the miss you have a chance for an absolutely free hit, that's not a great percentage to be playing with. Sure, you might get an outlier in one match, but over the course of hundreds and hundreds of battles, you're not going to fall victim to hax all that much. It also means running an OHKO based team all the time would result in epic fail more often than not. So why be scared to the point of banning every OHKO move? If anything, the only combo that should be banned is the extremely cheap Mind Reader/Sheer Cold Articuno.
To be honest, the question of evasion moves is a little more tricky seeing that one evasion boost brings 100% base accuracy moves down to 75%. Three out of four still ain't bad though, especially when you have very strong moves that have base accuracy of 100% (Earthquake, BoltBeam, Energy Ball, Psychic etc.). Honestly, what's wrong with a little spanner in the works every now and again? Do we really need to have Ice Beam work all the time? Of course, it's a lot easier to spam Double Team successfully than it is the OHKO moves, and the fear of matches turning into severe games of chance is tangible and considerable. However, there are more ways around the DT/Minimize problem than there are around OHKO, making dealing with it a little less headache-inducing. For one, Haze was at least widespread enough in previous generations before the offensive shift in the metagame, and it can be learned by a few useful OU critters. No-miss moves have gained in both power and diversity. The amount of Aura Sphere Lucario and Togekiss walking around are considerable. Aerial Ace is still pretty popular, and Shock Wave, Magical Leaf, Faint Attack and Swift are alright options since they have the same base power as AA. No Guard Machamp shits all over DT users, provided that they're not Ghosts. Even without all those buffs against the evasion moves, you need some luck to get past the first DT unscathed. You need luck on both sides of the coin to deal with DT/Min. So really, what do people have to fear?
Besides, why is Double Team so taboo when you can get the same effect as two DTs on certain Pokémon without ANY of the setup? Garchomp, Gliscor, Froslass, Sandslash, Dugtrio, Cacturne, Mamoswine and Glaceon can get this if paired with a weather inducer and equipped with a Brightpowder. Even if you ban Brightpowder from the equation, you're still getting 25% evasion, and on a Pokémon like Garchomp, that can be huge. So why do these critters, four of which are OU staples, get the extra boost in evasion while everyone else can't even get the inferior option (i.e. one that wastes a turn to set up)? And yet there's all this noise about a Garchomp problem. (More on that later)
Still, for whatever reason, people fear luck and value skill despite the fact that luck is a very, very real part of life. To try and eliminate it is to make something unnatural, less fun and more problematic. I know that people here are trying to make it so that only the most skilled zomg battlers are going to win, but you can't eliminate things from the equation to do that. A truly gifted battler is going to factor in everything, not eliminate the things that give it a little trouble. Besides, skill will beat out luck most of the time anyway. It's very rare that you see someone get lucky all the time, but at the same time, while the more skilled player will win 99 times out of 100, that 1 win will mean the world to the person who gets their ass kicked the other times, and that will keep people coming back and getting better. If they can build on that lucky bounce they got, they can stick around long enough to develop skill, and the metagame is a lot better off in the long run.
Conversely, banning things en masse isn't going to improve the metagame all that much. I've seen all the arguments going on about banning Garchomp, Stealth Rock or both. Those about banning Stealth Rock I find kinda shallow. It all boils down to people whining about not being able to use 4x weak critters or not being creative enough to get them in the field of play. Garchomp, though, people are saying that he's nigh uncounterable, and there could be a kernel of truth to that as is, especially if it's used in a Sand Stream team with it's relatively unfair Ability. However, what if you equalized things and let other Pokémon use DT? Garchomp's Outrage all of a sudden doesn't hurt as much when it's missing 25% of the time. Evasion moves are the best Garchomp counter out there. As for Stealth Rock, well, directly, evasion/OHKO doesn't do anything about it. Indirectly, well, when you have a 25% chance of evading a move after one DT, it helps with a 12.5-50% loss in HP to deal with (i.e., you stay alive a little longer).
Of course, none of this guarantees that people will start using DT en masse, at least I don't think it would. The point is not to get people to start spamming evasion moves, but to provide counters to some of the more "broken" aspects of the metagame without resorting to banning. And besides, shouldn't we be striving to play a game as close to the way Game Freak designed it as possible? It's very honorable to get rid of some very cheap aspects of the game. For example, I'm all for the Sleep Clause, for banning MindColdCuno (as mentioned before), shunting Wobbuffet to Ubers and for punishing the folks who run away from battle when it's apparent that they're going to lose. But to push luck out of the metagame is to make it more of a contest in programming rather than competitive gaming. Right now, the only thing keeping it from being a total calculation fest is the sheer number of Nature and EV spread combinations. Sure, I've put out a lot of math stuff here too, but if you add in all the evasion and OHKO stuff, you have so many different factors going in that you might as well just leave the calculations to the work world and just play.
This isn't a slam on smart playing or skilled players, not at all. If you play a game, you should want to be good at it, and you should want to win. However, eliminating luck completely from the equation only causes problems. I think that the so-called Garchomp problem here is a direct result of those bannings all those years ago. Of course, it took a near-broken combination of stats, typing and ability and a very taxing entry hazard to produce it, but it happened eventually. I think the only course of action should be to lead by example in the world of the Pokémon metagame and at least test out a game with the removal of the Evasion and OHKO Clauses.
Besides, it's better to be lucky than good anyway, right? :p
