Why do people want to ban more and more things?

I have a serious problem with mathematical definitions of uber.

If we took x-act's current diversity measurement as our basis for deciding bans we could end up stuck accepting a metagame we all hate. For example imagine a metagame where there are 4 pokemon that are so good that no other pokemon has any chance at all against them no matter how bad the condition of these pokemon were, and there was no possibility of these pokes fainting in the same turn against each other. In this situation every team would consist of those 4 pokemon, and two more pokemon that would basically have no impact on the battle whatsoever. So if people all chose their last two pokemon randomly then x-act's diversity figure could be huge, despite the metagame essentially only containing 4 pokemon.

This is of course an absurd situation, but it technically would be possible.

(I am not trying to bash x-acts work, I think I'll come back to why I think his system is great later on.)

The problem with any mathematical definition is it requires us to have solved the game. And there is a solution to this game, it will be incredibly complicated and involve a huge collection of teams which you select with certain probabilities, and then there will be a prescriptive set of probabilities for every possible scenario. The mathematical definition would need to know this for all possible rulesets and then pick the one that has the largest range of potential different battles.

But if that was practical, who would want to play pokemon? There would be no creativity, winning would just be a case of following instructions and crossing your fingers.

The other issue with mathematical definitions is they only work until there is a change made to the possible rulesets. For instance new versions or NYPC pokemon..

The other problem I have with imperfect useage based systems, is they count the useages by people who suck at pokemon. I dont see why that should happen. If bad players find themselves trapped into using the same 6 pokemon every team then rather than changing the rules to accomodate those people we should just teach them to be better players. Only the top level players uses should be considered.

Also useage in different contexts should be considered. Playing on ladder is different to playing in tournaments. And unfortunately they both need identical rulesets. IMO the weighting between the two should be a tournaments:ladder ratio of 1:0.

As for xacts work, I think it is important for us to strive to solve pokemon as best we can. That is essentially the whole purpose of this site. Obviously we dont actually want to achieve that fully, but I dont think we ever will..

Have a nice day.
 
I think you can solve the "people suck" problem with Weighted Usage pretty nicely.

However, one main problem is that a lot more competitive people play the Suspect ladder and a lot more random noobs play the OU ladder. This makes alternate metagames look more centralized when really there are just more serious players.
 
yeah we don't actually have strong enough stats for a real definition as "metagame trends" like new strats popping up almost always exist but the amount of "significant" new strategies is always decaying with time, and the metagame is headed towards a stable equilibrium that we are able to "perceive" with stats and will be able to "refine" as we get more meaningful stats


weighted stats is probably a great idea to check out too, there might be more meaningful patterns, and coming up with a formula is relatively undautung, it's just a large linear operator right? x__x

Hip i dont forsee a situation like yours simply because "size of team" and "defensive stats and defensive typing" probably bound the amount of threats any team can handle at around 50 =\
i dont see the metagame ever centralizing to that effect because "that would be boring". we can see an ideal solution coverned by our own playstyles and current teambuilding criteria... a "respectable answer" (i.e. no one is really seriously calling for anything to be banned) is not far at all lol.

the problem is it shifts with every ban and we have to eventually permute all of the bans, which is a brute force solution but it's really all we have with something as complex as the "metagame function". luckily this function is also a large function of "what we like" and we have stats of "what we like" ^__^
 
Q. Why do peple want to ban more and more things?

A. "What? I have to adapt to new threats and shit? BAN!"

I know this to be true because when I first saw Skymin I was thinking a bit along the same lines. Now I just like it banned because it takes luck into a factor too much imo.
 
we adapted to scizor. we adapted to heatran. new threats always require new adaptations and result in metagame shifts. we didn't ban rotom-h did we? we adapted to a metagame where spinners have it rough. is it "broken?" whos to say. we didn't realize chomp was broken until the yache set popped up, or deoe was broken until the ds set came up, but that stuff came up and had "too centralizing" an effect on our metagames.

we ban when we don't like dealing with stuff, not when there's a new threat. "dont like dealing with stuff" is a result of team constraints vs, an actual, quantifiable number.
 
And there were people wanting to test/ban both Heatran and Scizor. (not alot but some here and there)

I wast intening to imply that I thought that was a good reason to ban stuff. I was intending to imply that some people dont bother trying to adapt to stuff before crying for banning it (TTar in the early days of D/P comes to mind).

Edit: Going off of the title I was assuming we were talking about the people who are crying for bans for every new threat they havnt adapted to yet, if that isnt the subject matter then you can understand why my post was a little off.
 
those people are "stupid", twice as "stupid" as people saying sr is a suspect. that is everything is "suspect" at one point or another right now since we don't know why we're banning it apart from "this is what people don't like dealing with". every thing in the metagame affects the metagame to some degree, we just need to define what a good effect and a bad effect is.

if we take precautions (standard/suspect ladder reqs) we can "regulate" this but we can't physically go to a person and say "Shaymin is fine in ou, to deal with it" if they haven't learned to deal with it, or if them dealing with it has "unpleasant effects" on their teambuilding, that's the bottom line.
hell, ttar might be a suspect later on, I'm certainly not discounting it, especially with chomp gone =\


tldr; people will clamor for stupid bans, and thier threads will get locked. just like that retarded scizor one =\
 
gorm said:
those people are "stupid" but they're only half as "stupid" as people saying sr is a suspect.

Agreed, hence the mocking tone I was attempting to imply in my post. With SR gone, how many people would be clamoring for Mence and Gyarados to be tested next? Then it will be something else that Dos and mence used to keep in check that people will want tested. Like you said later in this post, we dont really have guidelines for banning something because we dont have a concrete idea of the ideal metagame.

that is everything is "suspect" at one point or another right now since we don't know why we're banning it apart from "this is what people don't like dealing with". every thing in the metagame affects the metagame to some degree, we just need to define what a good effect and a bad effect is.

The problem with this is that peoples own bias and opinions will likely prevent this from ever happening. Its kind of one those 'in a perfect world..' type things.

if we take precautions (standard/suspect ladder reqs) we can "regulate" this but we can't physically go to a person and say "Shaymin is fine in ou, to deal with it" if they haven't learned to deal with it, or if them dealing with it has "unpleasant effects" on their teambuilding, that's the bottom line.

mmhm

hell, ttar might be a suspect later on, I'm certainly not discounting it, especially with chomp gone =\

Possible I guess though it isnt something that is too ground breaking, its really slow and has enough weaknesses that having a few pokemon with those moves isnt difficult.

tldr; people will clamor for stupid bans, and thier threads will get locked. just like that retarded scizor one =\
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the point of my post is that with our current process we are headed to a "perfect world" so long as we are supplied with statistics =\

everyone seems to be worried about "stupid people" while not recognizing that people wanting scizor banned represent 1/2000 members or something, and people who think an sr test is needed don't understand how our suspect process works =\

i posit the following: in general, the more educated populace tends to be closest to "right". this is just a consequence of the amount of information people have about effective teambuilding. here "right" is referring to "what metagame is ideally strategically diverse" which is a funciton of teambuilding constraints. we have these numbers.

if this is true then weighted usage statistics can point us in the direction of an "ideal metagame", and again, we have these numbers, or at least rudimentary (unrefined) forms of them due to an unstable "new" metagame.

its really slow and has enough weaknesses that having a few pokemon with those moves isnt difficult
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lets not turn this into a ttar discussion, especially since "in the future" refers to a future metagame anyways so we couldn't even argue for or against right now.
 
gorm raises a good point - numbers are ultimately the best way to decide on these things.

adding on from that argument, we can set a benchhmark of what we think to be uber and see how the cards play from there.

I'll elaborate later - I can't say eveything I want to say typing on an iPod.
 
i just want o address hip's concern directly
The problem with any mathematical definition is it requires us to have solved the game. And there is a solution to this game, it will be incredibly complicated and involve a huge collection of teams which you select with certain probabilities, and then there will be a prescriptive set of probabilities for every possible scenario. The mathematical definition would need to know this for all possible rulesets and then pick the one that has the largest range of potential different battles.

But if that was practical, who would want to play pokemon? There would be no creativity, winning would just be a case of following instructions and crossing your fingers.
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to address this specifically, we don't need to map out a function for every permutation of team opposition because we actually know what people are using so we can use those numbers (weighted somehow).

for the second point, as you said, that's not a desired solution.. but since we're mapping out "what we want eventually" based on "what we use now", ending up somewhere we don't want doesn't seem like a possible solution for "what do we want" =)
 
"Half as 'stupid'" :P Gormy I like ya, but some of your statements lately seem a little...Not so nice.

Well perhaps there needs to be a better explanation of the suspect process in an easier spot to notice because I think a lot of people feel confused. Everyone seems to just like to throw their ideas into a hat and hope someone else really likes it.

But yeah I agree education should be a priority, not just some tutor thing, but really I think something like even a class would be even cooler and better.
 
the problem with the whole class thing is that while it would work, it would be hard to organize. one on one tutoring works great atm, and cool as a tutoring class would be, what would happen if a class teacher could not teach for irl problems? I think it has to be thought about in further depth.
 
Hipmonlee said:
For example imagine a metagame where there are 4 pokemon that are so good that no other pokemon has any chance at all against them no matter how bad the condition of these pokemon were, and there was no possibility of these pokes fainting in the same turn against each other. In this situation every team would consist of those 4 pokemon, and two more pokemon that would basically have no impact on the battle whatsoever. So if people all chose their last two pokemon randomly then x-act's diversity figure could be huge, despite the metagame essentially only containing 4 pokemon.

This is of course an absurd situation, but it technically would be possible.

(I am not trying to bash x-acts work, I think I'll come back to why I think his system is great later on.)
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This is actually a very good observation and I'm currently tackling it. Look at the Diversity thread to see how. ;)

EDIT: Tackled!
 
there is a class right now its called the policy review, please attend xD. and MTI you know im using "stupid" as a parameter for "don't have the optimal priorities straight!" i dont actually think you are stupid i just don't think it's worth testing at this stage in our suspect test methodology evolution e_e
 
(is very tempted to make infractable post)

At what point does "I don't like to deal with it" become Uber? I personally don't like to deal with Vaporeon at all. He walls Empoleon completely and Wish-stalls a lot of my team. If enough people wanted Vaporeon Uber, would it be because they don't like to deal with Infernape and Empoleon being walled?

I'm not even joking here. What's the difference between this and Shaymin-S? Now before someone spits out "But Shaymin-S has no counters / increases luck" you're missing the point, as we don't ban things for either.

I guess the "don't want to deal with this" mentality kind of scares me. While I guess I would ban Chomp and DX-S because "I don't want to deal with it", the real reason I'd want to is because that they are so hard to deal with that you either resort to ridiculous trends that don't really stop it as it keeps geting more popular (Garchomp) or every game comes down to a speed tie (what Deoxys-E turned into). Basically, they centralized "too much".

I dunno.
 
That's what I meant by 'the community doesn't want it in the metagame" when I made the uber definition, Chris is me, not "I can't counter Vaporeon so let's ban it!". I'm sure that an intelligent voting system wouldn't vote Vaporeon as being uber. There _might_ be the minority that want it uber (long odds, but let's give it that), but the vast majority would say it's not.
 
Well, what do we consider "the community" then? If we consider it "every competitive Pokémon battler" you'll probably manage to find about half of them don't like "SkarmBliss" (despite it sucking) and want the combo banned. If we do what we have now, we eliminate some problems, but as the Shaymin vote emphasized, people will still vote for reasons many people see as "dumb".

I'm just wondering if there's any good way to obtain an "intelligent voting system". Being decent or even good at battle hasn't proven to be it, but what else can we do? I'm honestly borderline for "make the badged members do it in some public forum for accountability".
 
as level of education on smogon goes up yeah I'd consider everyone part of the competitive battling community. It's not like we're letting idiots choose who to ban (cress!) so i dont see how that will be a problem =__=

in the meantime i think suspect+regular ladder rating is as good a criterion as any for voting on a pokemon... I don't see any other "fair" way to "sort" through users. It says "hey you can participate in this" and if the resulting vote is bogus, we fix it in phase 3 E___E
 
True, there is the restriction that only the badged members get to choose who is a Suspect here.

I just think the "good at battle" restriction doesn't actually prohibit anyone but people that have just started the game from voting. It doesn't make people analyze the metagames they are playing (it's a "hoop" to jump through), it doesn't even remotely guarantee you even know basic facts like "performance in Ubers has no impact on OU", so the restriction seems all but arbitrary, not acocmplishing anything as there's no tie between skill in battling and any knowledge whatsoever about tiers.

Also, if there was a truly domineering suspect, it would be way harder to win consistently as games would be decided by stuff like speed ties, but that's getting off topic.
 
Blame Game said:
what competitive game/community does define this sort of thing though? I mean I know nothing about Magic or whatever, but when it comes to, say, the fighting game community (and, you know, the pokemon community up until around early DP), bans happen "when it's obvious." and obviously those games aren't "all statistics" like pokemon is or whatever, which is why I would have loved to know what MtG actually does since it's more easily comparable. regardless
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Actually it isn't comparable at all. In an official tournament sanctioned by DCI the standard tournament only allows cards from the most recent series. At this point in time the oldest set allowed in standard tournament play was first released in the summer of 2007 (Tenth Edition).

So if we were to go by that standard no pokemon in any earlier games would be allowed. Only new to DPPt would be viable, and none would be banned.

Now there are other DCI sanctioned styles but Standard is obviously the one used in tournaments that hand out the big $$$. Vintage is the style that most represents Pokemon, as it allows from all sets and bans a VERY limited amount of cards. Basically any card that requires you to ante a card from your deck, or a card requiring you to flip it in the air for it's effects to happen are the only that are banned. Cards are also restricted, meaning that you can only have one per deck.

TL;DR: MtG can't help us out here.
 
Hipmonlee said:
The other problem I have with imperfect useage based systems, is they count the useages by people who suck at pokemon. I dont see why that should happen. If bad players find themselves trapped into using the same 6 pokemon every team then rather than changing the rules to accomodate those people we should just teach them to be better players. Only the top level players uses should be considered.

Also useage in different contexts should be considered. Playing on ladder is different to playing in tournaments. And unfortunately they both need identical rulesets. IMO the weighting between the two should be a tournaments:ladder ratio of 1:0.

As for xacts work, I think it is important for us to strive to solve pokemon as best we can. That is essentially the whole purpose of this site. Obviously we dont actually want to achieve that fully, but I dont think we ever will..

Have a nice day.
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This can't be stressed enough imo.

It's really the problem I've had with a lot of the statistical analysis in the past. For instance, although Colin had set up weighted usage statistics in the past, they were not nearly weighted heavily enough. Though the time period I'm thinking of was quite a while ago, and I feel confident saying that overall battlers have become better on average, the statistics we should care about revolve around winning teams. Wobb was always a striking example for me, as I consistently played (and lost) to the few people who were using it at the top of the ladder at the time. At the same time, I was assured that since the numbers were okay, Wobb was perfectly fine.

That's the real problem with a lot of our numbers. Sure, usage overall is very helpful, but can it really be applied to our definition of 'overcentralization'? I don't think it can in most cases. Why would losing teams be taken into account when considering how much a pokemon is really affecting the metagame? There are a lot of things that skew the data, such as people refusing to use powerful pokemon (and how well they do as a result), and the fact that pokemon like Ninjask are overrepresented on teams that suck.

Even just having statistics about the top 50, 100, or 150 accounts would be extremely helpful, in this case. 'Scizor is the most used pokemon' is one thing, but 'Scizor is used on 90% of the teams in the top 150' is competely different (I'm not saying that's anywhere near true, mind you).
 
Sure I'll agree that our current usage statistics usually leave us scratching our heads but:
1. I kinda want to try takin a look at a weighted usage list (also whatever happened to that "pokemon that top trainers use", found here, that put celebi at #1 ^__^)

2. Our usage stats stabilize as time goes by in a given metagame (this isn't really well demonstrated with current statistics, but notice the jump in diversity when garchomp was banned)
 
Actually, uh, the metagame stayed roughly the same size and X-Act numbers said it was just as centralized or something, if I remember correctly. The Suspect ladder was _more_ centralized than OU for whatever reason.
 
The reasons why the Suspect ladder is more centralised than the Standard one are simple to me. They are the following:

1) More intelligent people play in the Suspect ladder than in the Standard one.
2) Suspect ladder players need to get to a certain rating/deviation, and hence they just go for the best teams to do so. Standard players can experiment with their teams more.
 
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