Thank you for more accurately interpreting what I was trying to say, I did misuse the word skew.
I stand by the fact that the idea that latios and latias are the same is an illusion created by their typing, ability and dexdata. Their differences in movepool and base data makes them as different as salamence and dragonite, two pokemon who have the same BST, a similar stat distribution and the same typing, but whose slight differences in stats and movepools give them completely different roles in the metagame.
An example of how testing lati@s together could confuse the data: as the month goes by, one lati proves to be more effective than the other in the eyes of the players, and one latis usage steadily rises as the other's declines. At the end of the test, the players vote to move the overcentralizing lati back to the uber tier and allow the "less effective" lati to stay in OU. But as the new OU tier begins to stabilize, it suddenly becomes clear that the lati that remained becomes just as overcentralizing as the banned lati, and was only deemed less effective because the other lati outshined it during the initial test. The OU community turns into CAEVO1 and people are calling for revotes and retesting and whatnot.
Or maybe having two latis in OU at once overcentralizes the game and makes for broken teams, but having only one in at a time is balanced.
Let me know if I misused any big words.
i understand your concern now, thanks (and obviously have made it clear that i was not nitpicking you, as some of our members think i would be so immature as to do). two things:
1) we are indeed going to vote on them separately, to clear that up
2) more to your concern, i think that it is more likely that either suspect will demonstrate to what extent it deserves its Stage 2 tag (uber or ou) regardless of the fact that they are being tested in quasi-tandem. if it is made clear that players are to vote on how each suspect performs in ou against their opponent's teams, regardless of how uber or ou the other ones plays, the the correct votes to that end will be cast. and this has everything to do with how likely it is that latios or latias will play "just barely ou" or "just barely uber"—if either suspect is given either tag in an overwhelming majority, that makes your point all the more moot. and again, the fact that the votes could be close, as they were with skymin (regardless of the purity of the pool), would speak to the undeniable fact that these suspects are dificult to agree upon for the very reason they are suspect than anything else.
and if it is indeed true that, if exactly one of the suspects is given a stage 2 ou tag but proves to be more "uber" when actually allowed on the suspect ladder, we can and will retest then. but besides the fact that I don't think that's very likely at all, how can we even be sure that any suspect that was given a stage 2 "ou" tag but plays more "uber" in practice after a few weeks or months in standard is not because of some new strategy that arises, as with yachechomp or dual screen deoxys-s? such possibilities are very real but outside the control of our aims with the suspect test (or any control, really)
if they
both get stage two ou tags, it is far more likely that they do indeed keep each other in check and therefore both belong in ou, since the presence of both on one team wont necessarily make either one more uber by itself, but besides...isn't it just as likely that "one-month latias-only suspect test grants it ou tag" so we put it in standard then "one-month latios-only suspect test grants it ou tag" so we put it in standard then they're both in standard at the same time anyway and...whatever would happen with two enjoying actual simultaneous use would have happened regardless? unless you actually think it's likely that it is latias and latias
only that would counter and check latios and latios only so much in the projected suspect test that latios would be "incorrectly" given a stage 2 ou tag where it would have been considerably more likely for it to prove itself uber in a true, isolated suspect test where it would only have opposing latios to deal with, which is purposely saying nothing of its actual projected checks and counters in scizor, mamoswine, tyranitar, etc...
and to this argument:
you might as well just test all suspects at once if your only doing it this way to save time.
while your rhetoric is not lost on me, it is misplaced here because you forget that we actually
do plan on testing more than one suspect at a time down the road in stage three. this will be just the practice our staff needs to draw the conclusions and do the things we have to for the sake of competitive pokemon. don't worry about that. as proven by waning interest in our tests but the continued volunteering of at-best-questionable reasoning, we definitely don't place all our confidence in you guys with conducting a test like this by yourselves anyway. don't forget who is actually making the decisions here.
