shrang, I went back and found what I believe to be your original response to the uncompetitiveness claim.
I think your definition of "uncompetitiveness" is confusing and slightly off. I also think that a good definition is important, because it sets the tone and the standard for any debate. Here's my shot at a definition.
A competitive game is played to win - this is what distinguishes what we do here from playing on your cartridge. A competitive game should have winners, but they should not be arbitrary or random - instead, we would like if the winner of a game was determined by the skill of the players involved. Now, skill in Pokemon is not like an athletic event...you can't get more damage out of your moves by working out or something. Every player has complete access to the exact same set of moves and information. So skill in Pokemon is about
choices. Every time you build a team or choose a move you are making a series of choices, and a better player shows his skill by making the better choices. This is what it means to be "competitive" in terms of Pokemon.
So, my definition:
A competitive game element increases the number of meaningful, balanced choices available to the player.
Meaningful: if a choice has little or no impact on the game, it isn't particularly relevant (i.e. you can choose the gender of your pokemon but that has nearly zero effect).
Balanced: if a single option is so powerful/good/useful as to be the "correct" choice most/all of the time, it isn't much of a choice at all.
I think this definition has several benefits over the one you've offered. First is that you cite the notion of "unfairness", but this is incredibly subjective and almost impossible to define. On the other hand, it is - while not 100% straightforward - much easier to analyze the ability of a game element to affect the choices available to battlers. Also, it's tough to see how anything can be "unfair" in Pokemon at all, since every battler has equal access to and ability to use every game element.
I also think that "something they can't inflict on their opponent in return" is a very poor marker of competitiveness. Reciprocity implies fairness, but not competitiveness. For example, Rock-Paper-Scissors is completely reciprocal, but the limited pool of choices makes it unattractive as a competitive game. A less extreme example might be checkers, which has reciprocity (outside of first-move advantage) but is strategically shallow enough that it has been solved by computers (something that will never be the case for Pokemon).
Finally, I think centering the discussion on the amount of choices available to a player is beneficial because it gets to the core of what competitiveness is. Applying such a definition to other bans: something like Swagger reduces the number of choices (by about half) by ensuring that about half of the time, your attempt to make a move does nothing (and is actually detrimental). Meanwhile, Moody makes your choices far less meaningful because the Moody Pokemon will gain a boost at the end of every turn independent of your choice, meaning the best strategy is one of neutralization (stalling and negating opposing choices in order to passively rack up stat boosts). This is a good explanation for why these past bans are uncompetitive.
Applying this definition to Shadow Tag, it seems clear that the ability can only ever remove the number of choices available to you. Even possible countermeasures to STag (eg Shed Shell) require forfeiting a choice (your item). Most importantly, STag removes the
single most important choice in competitive Pokemon. As I mentioned earlier, switching and picking matchups is the core functional game element of singles battling. Pokemon is not a series of 1v1 matchups, it is a 6v6 team game, but STag reduces it to the former.
The ability for both players to run STag doesn't change that fact. That both players can remove choice does not make removing choice more appealing, even if the game is still playable with fewer choices - we should be striving for a game that maximizes choice (chess not checkers).
Sure thing, let's talk about definitions of competitiveness and let's talk about how your definition differs from mine.
About reciprocity:
- "Fairness" is actually not that hard to define, actually, at least in the material level. Obviously, if you have something access to something that your opponent doesn't that gives you a significant advantage over the opponent, then it is unfair. There isn't really an ifs or buts there. Luck is one of those things, and it's one of the things that got a lot of things banned. Team matchup is admittedly, another one of those things, but there really isn't much you can do about it apart from preparing to cater as many matchups as possible. I'd also agree with you that the amount of choice available to each player is also equal.
- The only thing we would aim for obviously, is that there is a discrepancy on skill. I think we can all agree on this one.
- The reciprocity argument is there to make sure the only thing that matters, is skill.
Your definition:
A competitive game element increases the number of meaningful, balanced choices available to the player
Firstly, before we even get into this, how do you define "meaningful" and "balanced"? You're telling me that "fairness" in the reciprocity sense is subjective, but the fact that you and I are debating this obviously means there is a discrepancy and subjectivity about what is meaningful and balanced. If you've been reading anything I've been saying lately, pretty much the main argument is that Shadow Tag does not decrease choices that are meaningful, presuming if having that choice is important at all.
Before we talk about what is meaningful and not, I'm going to point out problems in your definition first. You point out that to be competitive, you must
increase the number of meaningful choices (my emphasis). Does this imply that everything that doesn't increase a meaningful choice is therefore uncompetitive and should be banned? You asked this question in your previous post too, by asking what Shadow Tag adds to competitiveness. If this is true, then there will be a couple of glaring issues I would see with that:
1) Overcentralisation: Overcentralisation would result in the apparent choices you have being decreased because the metagame resolves around a couple of threats that are too powerful. Sure, you can say that people technically have the choice to run other things, but no-one making a
competitive team would use them, therefore these overcentralised Pokemon would have, in your words, removed the number of "meaningful" and "balanced" and therefore uncompetitive. If you look around Ubers, pretty much every Pokemon we have meaningfully limits choice in some way such that each of them can be deemed uncompetitive through removing choice in your definition. We've specifically mentioned that we're not going to use overcentralisation as an argument for banning things, but I see that the word overcentralisation is currently being blurred with uncompetitive because of such definitions. This may be a good definition for OU, but it doesn't fit with Ubers.
2) Shit Pokemon: Technically, these Pokemon do not add any meaningful or balanced choices available to the user. No-one is going to consider Magikarp a meaningful choice for any team. If we are going by your definition, then these Pokemon are all uncompetitive. Should we ban them too? I know this is a rhetorical question, but if you're on the same track as I am, then it is obvious that there are two different types of uncompetitive, one that gives a player a significant advantage and one that is just shit, and therefore the whole problem of "choices" is a problem.
Now that's sorted, we can argue what's meaningful and what's not meaningful. I hope that if you've been paying attention to what I've been saying in my recent posts is that Shadow Tag, while I'm not going to disagree that it removes choice (assuming you had one in the first place, which I'll address later), that this choice that was removed is not meaningful. I've noted a number of examples already, and I'm not going to go through them again apart from listing the key points, again using Gengar as the main example since he's the suspect:
1) I just noticed you have "balanced" in your definition too. However, Ubers is not balanced, never was supposed to be, and never will be, so we'll just ignore the balanced part of the definition.
2) Just because Gengar has the ability to completely eliminate your choice by removing your counter, doesn't mean it will. See Taunt/Destiny Bond 50/50s + using Pokemon that either force these situations or using Pokemon that don't give a shit about Gengar at all.
3) Just because you got the choice removed in the one or two instances that Gengar was in, this does not suddenly de-legitimise every other choice in the game. I'm just going to quote what I wrote yesterday because I'm tired of writing the same thing over and over again:
Personally, if "one turn" is all it takes to dismantle your entire defense for the opponent's strategy so you are guaranteed to lose, you've made a sub-optimal team. Again just because Mega Gengar dismantles say, your Poisonceus and makes it easier for your opponent's GeoXern, and you have nothing else that can remotely stand a chance against stopping GeoXern either setting up or sweeping, then I think it's better for you to go modify your team instead of blaming it all on Gengar. I understand that you can say "well Pokemon isn't a vacuum, your other Pokemon might be down too, it could be late-game and MGengar just removed your last check", but unless Gengar removed or helped to remove EVERY one of them (not an impossible scenario, it could happen, but which I'd question how you made your team to be that Gengar weak), it just says that you got outplayed in every other part of the game too. I'm not saying that you'd have to carry multiple checks to every Pokemon because it's impossible, but I am saying just because Mega Gengar removed your choice in that one turn does not mean the rest of the choices you make in the game suddenly become moot. You can blame Shadow Tag for that one turn, but you sure as hell cannot blame it for the whole game.
4) About the above point, I know one of the counter-arguments is that Shadow Tag + team matchup (team matchup is heavier from what I've seen emphasised) together removes your choices and therefore skill. My main rebuttals these are:
i) Why is then logical to ban Shadow Tag if it's mostly a team matchup problem? I guess you can't ban team matchup since there's no way of doing so banning Shadow Tag is the only thing we can do, but how do you know that banning Shadow Tag will really help? Team matchup is going to be there, people are still going to counterteam, and you're still going to lose people who are worse than you because they counterteamed you.
ii) If you say that you can beat counterteamers if Shadow Tag is banned, then why can't you ban it when Shadow Tag is around? Before you launch into the choice-reduction argument, I've already argued that it doesn't reduce choice in a meaningful way. If you lost because a Shadow Tag trapping, you either didn't build your team properly or you got outplayed for the rest of the match when it counted too.
iii) Believe it or not, beating an opponent with a huge inherent advantage itself takes skill, so please don't make the argument that Shadow Tag + shitty team matchup = auto-lose. There's a word for that, called
pessimism. People seems to think that between two players of skill, the person with Shadow Tag + good team matchup will win all the time, but forget that skill itself is not a constant measure like experience in a video game. Skill is something you have to
display. It is as much about the ability to display your skill as it is your inherent "skill", if a thing even even exists. So in the end, the question of team matchup has a large portion that is actually psychological. You can display more skill than your opponent even with an unfavourable team matchup. I'm not stating that it's not hard, but to think that you can actually measure "skill" in and of itself is a useless exercise.
Last point against your definition, is word "choice" itself. I've posed this question twice already, and no-one's yet provided a satisfactory answer (Melee's just said it was irrelevant even though it attacks the core of his argument itself - dismissing something that you can't answer doesn't mean you've provided a satisfactory answer).
Also, if we really want to dig into this, care to explain why adding an amount of risk to a choice such that there is only one reasonable choice is substantiatively different from taking away that choice altogether? I did remember Melee use quite an interesting phrase before: Illusion of choice. Is that implying that you actually don't have that choice? Is there anything different from being coerced into the result (Shadow Tag) as compared to being manipulated into making you think that you chose that result (risk)? This isn't a rhetorical question and I'm very open to everyone's interpretations on this, but my opinion is that if any reasonable person would choose the same choice given the risk, that there really isn't anything specifically different apart from the fact that you thought that you made a choice. If it really is an illusion of choice, why the hell do we even care about it anyway?
- If we're going to use your definition (not just yours, this is something repeated all the time by pro-banners), you're going to have answer if that choice even exists at all. If it doesn't, aren't you just lying to yourself by defending an illusion that doesn't exist? This last paragraph address if there is a choice at all, while the stuff before address if it's meaningful or not.
