Psychometric Scaling Methods & Pokemon:

Chaosreaver

Chaosreaver

So as a graduate student, I am expected to utilize different psychometric analysis for classes. My class is filled with nerds and geeks and we have done mock-up experiments for everything ranging from video games to magic the gathering cards, so I thought: Why not Pokemon?

Here's the deal: I need a list of the major 'roles' pokemon fall under in competitive play. I.e: Physical Sweeper, Special Sweeper, Physical Wall, Special Wall, etc., then I'm going to set up something on google docs and have you guys (if interested in contributing the academics of pokemon) rate how associated the terms are with one another.

The impetus of the study would be to create a mental model of how competitive players view the roles of pokemon, so in layman's terms: How do expert pokemon players think of how their pokemon work? Then I'll make a fancy chart thing and show you guys and, since this is a discussion forum, discuss the results.

So far, for roles, I have:

  • Sweeper
  • Wall
  • Tanks
  • Clerics
  • Rapid-Spinners
  • Shuffler
  • Spikers
  • Leads
  • Anti-Leads
  • Baton Passers
  • Staller
  • Revenge Killer
I don't want to get too specific with 'physical' or 'special', but if you have any other major roles, or think something shouldn't be on there, let me know!

Edit: Thanks everyone for all your help. I've got all the data I need, and here's an image to help visualize what we've been doing. I wrote some more detailed things down below, but basically thicker lines equate to higher associations, while dotted lines are weaker associations.
http://imgur.com/3zTVO
 
Thanks for all your input. I stopped at 12 roles, only because if I added more, the time to do the task will get exponentially longer. If you guys would be my best friends ever and go to this link:
https://docs.google.com/a/ncsu.edu/...mkey=dFlDUVhTY0pnckQtTHdkRXp1RVRXNmc6MQ#gid=0
and take about five minutes to complete the form, I'll have a fancy chart-thing for everyone to look at!

It's also occurred to me that pokemon have an incredibly diverse amount of roles, and you could take a lot of those categories and break them into smaller and smaller groups.
 
Improbability said:
Some pokemon are only seen as gimmicks in competitive play. But then again, that gimmick would still fit a certain role.
Click to expand...
Could you give me an example of a gimmick role? Or are all gimmicks unique and could be labeled as just 'gimmick'? Gengar with Destiny Bond + Focus Sash comes to my mind as something that can't really be labeled as anything but gimmicky (or maybe a 'suicide' role?).
 
I'm definitely not the go-to on competitive battling, but from my understanding a gimmick is just a strategy that is so uncommon that it relies on surprise to gain an advantage, or some non-standard combination of moves/items/abilities etc that no team in their right mind would prepare for. But even then, a gimmick is still fitting a certain role, like the gengar set you just said would be an anti-lead as such, or a stall or revenge killer idk.

Honestly, its probably not worth putting in your survey. Saying that, I completed it just now :)
 
Wall breaker is probably more important than cleric and if you're basing this mainly off gen 5 then you don't need anti-lead.
 
Improbability said:
I'm definitely not the go-to on competitive battling, but from my understanding a gimmick is just a strategy that is so uncommon that it relies on surprise to gain an advantage, or some non-standard combination of moves/items/abilities etc that no team in their right mind would prepare for. But even then, a gimmick is still fitting a certain role, like the gengar set you just said would be an anti-lead as such, or a stall or revenge killer idk.

Honestly, its probably not worth putting in your survey. Saying that, I completed it just now :)
Click to expand...

Interesting, I never thought of it like that. Meta-discussion is always fun :)
And thanks so much for completing it!

I have 5 responses now so I'm going to go ahead and do the analysis and come back with an image to contextualize everything.

Wall breaker is probably more important than cleric and if you're basing this mainly off gen 5 then you don't need anti-lead.
Click to expand...

This is true, but unfortunately if I had more than 12 choices, the total combinations are going to start scaling up really quickly and a 5 minute form is going to take 10-15 minutes, at least, and I don't want to put you guys through that. However, your feedback is going into my write-up for class as user feedback :) Thanks!
 
If you are looking for accuracy you may want to consider swapping out shuffler and putting in wallbreaker.
Best of luck with your class.
 
verbatim said:
If you are looking for accuracy you may want to consider swapping out shuffler and putting in wallbreaker.
Best of luck with your class.
Click to expand...
If I ever do this again, I'll take this into consideration.

And thanks!

So far I got 12 responses (Wow! That's a considerable amount, I love you guys <3) and it's really interesting that you everyone tends to agree on a lot of associations. I had 3 more responses come in as I was writing everything up, and when I factored them into everything, the numbers just barely changed. So it seems our community agrees with itself, which means I have some pretty high accuracy with the results.

Edit: Here's the mapping of Smogon's mental model of the roles of (most/some of) the pokemon in competitive play:
http://imgur.com/3zTVO
Basically, to interpret the figure, the thicker lines signify a strong relationship (if the answers fell between 4 and 5 on the survey), so those two terms are very strongly associated with one another.
The dotted lines are weaker associations (between 3 and 4), so they're still associated, just not quite as powerfully. Anything that scored between 1 and 3 was considered not associated enough to be of importance.

Cleric and Rapid Spinner
and
Lead and Anti-Lead had the most variance (Standard Deviation of 1.7, for any stats geeks), so we seemed to disagree the most there.
 
I'm not sure why there was such a variance in Lead and Anti-Lead. They're specifically supposed to counter one another.
Countering=5, no?
 
When I went through it my thought process was in which Pokemon fulfill some aspect of both of these roles, such as Rapid Spinner + Sweeper for Excadrill (and Starmie to an extent), as while their are Wall + Rapid Spinners like Forretress, Excadrill and Starmie use their offensive pressure to Rapid Spin on a forced switch.

I didn't really think about countering at all. As far as leads vs. anti-leads... an anti-lead is still a lead, and is selected because it has good lead properties in addition to the more common leads it is supposed to be an "anti-" too.
 
Deck Knight said:
When I went through it my thought process was in which Pokemon fulfill some aspect of both of these roles, such as Rapid Spinner + Sweeper for Excadrill (and Starmie to an extent), as while their are Wall + Rapid Spinners like Forretress, Excadrill and Starmie use their offensive pressure to Rapid Spin on a forced switch.

I didn't really think about countering at all. As far as leads vs. anti-leads... an anti-lead is still a lead, and is selected because it has good lead properties in addition to the more common leads it is supposed to be an "anti-" too.
Click to expand...

That's an incredibly insightful way at looking at things. Also, about your associations between spinner + sweeper, I noticed wall + spiker, for instance, had a strong association, which doesn't surprise me because Skarmory and Ferrothorn fulfill both roles, so I'd say a lot of people did the same thing as you (including myself).

Sweet graph and good work man, it looks good!!!
Click to expand...
Thanks a bunch :) I appreciate it.
 
I think what alive said is most important. You should really focus on 5th gen OU associations more then anything else if you want to reflect how 'competitive players view the roles of pokemon'

i.e cleric and anti-lead shouldn't be there.

Also something about weather starters would be nice
 
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