Going to make this public:
Starting notes:
1. I'm very lazy, so I simply copy-pasted this thread from the one I made in Inside Scoop, so if something doesn't make sense to you, that could very well be the reason.
2. This thread is not here to discuss whether this should happen, but rather to let everyone know it is happening.
3. Know that UU Beta will be live anytime soon, as I have reviewed the stats and I deemed it ok to start. Read on to know what I'm talking about.
4. UU Beta will be updated every month as opposed to every three months.
5. If you want to discuss the UU Beta metagame, join #xyuu on SynIRC.
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Basically, I'm going to try something "new" this generation, in terms of tiering, and I feel like I should let everyone know how I plan to handle things come XY UU. Extreme conservatives, proceed with caution.
The first thing that'll need to happen is a "UU Beta" ladder on Showdown, which will:
1. Be created as soon as I, and a few UU players' whose opinions I value, feel is "right". I was actually hoping to start this in early January, but looking at last months OU usage stats, that's probably not happening. I do want this in early March at the very latest, though.
2. Have a grand total of zero bans, no matter how broken something is/seems.
3. Be the only UU-related thing on Smogon. Aside from maybe a single general discussion thread. No forum, no C&C, no Hub. In other words, UU Beta will be an unofficial tier.
The second thing that'll happen is the transition from UU Beta into "Smogon's official UU", and this is where shit gets fun.
The first thing I will do when this happens is pick an official UU Council, and within the first couple of days we will come up with an initial banlist. This banlist will, theoretically, include every potentially broken threat in UU. We will make this assessment based on our experiences on the UU Beta ladder. We will also take the single discussion thread into consideration.
A UU forum, UU C&C, and the XY UU hub will also be set up at this time.
From there will will tier backwards. Instead of picking suspects from the pool of UU Pokemon, we will suspect test every BL Pokemon in isolation by reintroducing them into UU one at a time. Suspect tests won't last a long time (at least initially), we'll only have these Pokemon on the chopping block for as long as we need to in order to determine their correct tiering. We being the UU Council and myself.
Potential problems (we've thought of everything!):
1. Pokemon that appear to be broken after the initial banlist is selected.
2. Drops from OU and potential backlogs of suspects.
To address these concerns, I'll just paste one of my posts from the thread I made in Senior Staff a couple of weeks ago:
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Ideally, we'll have a ~6-10 Pokemon initial banlist (I'm really aiming for less, but let's overestimate for the sake of argument) and, at minimum, three months to get all of them tested before the first round of OU drops (more on this in a bit).
We'll give each one 1-3 weeks of testing by introducing them individually into UU and make a quick decision afterwards.Really broken ones will be obvious right off the bat so we can quickly just call them BL. If anything else becomes apparently broken during the first few stages, we'll send them to BL and treat them as if they were part of the initial list. No biggie.
By the time the first round of drops comes, we'll ideally only have 1-3 untested Pokemon in BL + the drops. From there we'll decide which ones should be tested first (most likely the drops).
The potential issue here would be a large amount of drops. Here's what I was thinking of in order to prevent a huge shift in the meta in the middle of testing: omit the first round of drops. This will almost definitely give us enough time to test every initial ban so we can tackle the drops without having to worry about "which one do we do first?"
As for stuff that will appear bannable in the later stages: same thing. We just send them to BL, then drop them later, test them in isolation, and come to a decision quickly.
The way this works in my head is such that once we're done testing all the Pokemon in the initial list, we'll never have a "waiting list" (except when there's a lot of drops, but even then they should be dealt with quickly) and we'll be able to respond to things that become apparently broken quickly. Besides, its not like we'll ever actually have any "broken" Pokemon in the tier, so we really /are/ responding to them--immediately, actually.
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The goal here isn't just to shake things up for the sake of change, by the way. I'm doing this because I strongly believe that this system will lead to a more balanced and enjoyable metagame after every single round, a opposed to having chaos in the early rounds and then some really shitty metagames in-between good ones.
There's also some more objective pros:
1. We won't need to do that staggered-ladder-double-qualifier thing anymore. You know, that thing we were forced to do with Vicini's suspect test, which we pretty mich have to do because lower tiers never get enough activity on the suspect ladder when we do two ladders at once. We ban something for x time then bring it back and people have to qualify twice to vote and we waste a fuckton of time, yeah...
2. It eliminates the problem that comes up when more than one suspect is put up at the same time; aka. is one broken without the other? This is because the system pretty much forces suspects to be tested in isolation.
3. It saves time and effort wasted on suspect testing Pokemon that would rise up to OU anyway. Since we're testing Pokemon from least-likely-to-be-broken to most-likely, some of these will end up in OU by the time we get to them anyway, eliminating some unneeded tests.
Okay, that's about it. Any questions?
