Diancie isn't the main issue that most people are raising questions about or have a problem with (though it is prominent).
The thing is the Meta-game remaining stable, we're sitting on a mountain top currently of powerful Pokemon in OU with the S-rank Pokemon at the very tip, should we get rid of one, the idea is that it spirals out of control and we go through another year of pointlessly banning stuff that checked/countered something else previously. Banning Megagross isn't the main concern, its rather how we're handling this.
And before I'm told "That's not an argument." I think it's valid to look at what's being used at the moment, Meta-gross isn't dominating the entire ladder as an unstoppable force or something you have to look into having on your own team. It's not "loss at match up" and it's most certainly not "if it carries X move I lose." People are treating Megagross like it can run everything at one time and that's what's concerning. Next thing you or I know, it's banned and now we have a long list of Pokemon to kick out of the tier before we address ACTUAL issues.
What I'm saying is that we have literally two stable meta-games:
The one with Mega-Metagross
The one without Mega-Metagross and several other Pokemon that follow
I'm all for keeping as many pokemon that are not causing actual issues in as possible and I have yet to see a game where M-Metagross 6-0'd a game because someone happened to have the right moveset that did not come from a Misprediction.
And before anyone angrily types, "But that's not how Smogon does it you fucking retard." I'm not even using the damn thing. I keep seeing all the S-rank Pokemon at literally it's own tier slightly above OU where all the power is focused, it's like taking shears to trim the tip of a sand castle, it's overkill and not getting us anywhere. On it's own merits, Megagross is powerful, but it's not overbearing and meta-game defining as Greninja, it doesn't require checks/counters from NU to take on, or plenty of other Pokemon that have been banned previously, it's just good. However as soon as one good Pokemon is kicked off, we now have to kick off several other Pokemon because they went from good to great due to Megagrosses absence. And at the end of the day, what changed between the ORAS meta-game and the XY meta-game should this happen, Sceptile got a mega-stone, Greninja was banned, and now Starmie is now back in OU. Literally, fuck all happened, not much changed because we banned everything before it all actually settled.
I guess the proper phrase is that People are tired of walking in a fucking circle.
I'm still for No Ban not because it's healthier for the Meta-game to keep him in, it's healthier for the Meta-game to change and adapt to the tools that were just thrown at us.
This suspect is honestly very reminiscent of Tyranitar from Gen 4 now that I think about it...
I was going to make this post after I finished getting 2700 COIL but I saw your post and... you hit the nail clean on the head. A lot of us are tired of walking in a mindless circle that degenerates the metagame.
The biggest issue with the suspect ladder is we are banning a highly viable Pokemon that will in turn allow more Pokemon to become viable. The problem with this is the cycle will not end. There will ALWAYS be a Pokemon that is as powerful as MegaGross in any given meta. There will always be a stand-out Pokemon that people complain about. Right now, on the suspect ladder, the Fairy Megas are running rampant and people are saying that this is healthy. If anything it's the opposite. You are allowing the meta to degenerate so that you can suspect Pokemon that are fine in the current meta. This is why Pokemon are categorized by viability. You can ban them, but then a new threat comes into the picture to be suspected. Then you ban that, and the process repeats itself over and over and over until there is NOTHING left. Stopping this ban is actually crucial to breaking a vicious cycle and progessing the state of the metagame. If people want to say this ban is simply just about Metagross? They're naive and you're more than welcome to say I'm naive in return but part of banning something is understanding how it changes the metagame and how growth occurs. The suspect ladder itself is proven quite well that you are VERY limited in team building. You are more so limited than you are with Metagross in the tier. Why? because the suspect ladder's dominant mega's can hit a majority of the mega's in this tier for super-effective damage. Which means you are restricting team-building. You are promoting the same over-centralization that people are crying that Metagross causes. Meanwhile the pre-Suspect Ladder had a wide variety of usage, you didn't just have one archetype raining over all. It was used, but it wasn't the only solution.
If anyone takes anything out of this post, I hope it's that they need to seriously think. We shouldn't just ban Pokemon from the tier because they're fantastic at what they do. We need to assess the impact on the metagame as a whole. That's essential, else-wise we're going to degenerate the meta down to a pathetic shell of what it could be.
I'm roughly 700 COIL away from hitting my 2700 so I can attempt to stop this mistake from happening. When the day comes I will be voting no ban, and while I understand a few diehards won't consider changing their mind, I hope that other people, reasonable people, can actually think about this.
I would like to respond to these two posts since they're representative of an awful form of thinking that if popularized is going to fuck up tiering on this site for the foreseeable future. I like to refer to this kind of "argument" as the "Appeal to Stability", because its proponents tend to glorify concepts like "stability" and "predictability". A less charitable soul might slam their heads against their desks while yelling "slippery slope".
The extreme form of this argument is "haha smogon why not just ban all megas already until only magikarp in ou", which is of course rightfully dismissed, but prettying it up with long paragraphs and bold text does not change its essential character or make it any more convincing.
The typical train of thought sounds something like this:
- Sure, Pokemon X is very good/the best in the tier, but it is still "handleable" in some way
- There is always a Pokemon that is very good/the best in the tier
- Banning X necessitates/justifies/makes inevitable the banning of Y and Z which will be the next best in the tier, which is bad
A more nuanced, but ultimately still wrong-headed, form of the argument goes like this:
- Sure Pokemon X is very good/the best in the tier, but it is still "handleable" in some way
- And, Pokemon X is necessary to keep Pokemon Y and Z "in check"
- So banning Pokemon X would be net worse than keeping it in the tier
There are two major (and a bunch of minor) problems that pervade every one of these posts.
1. A non-existent false dilemma wherein they argue that if X is broken, every succeeding "best Pokemon" is broken
2. Making the value judgment that bans are "bad"
Let's explore these two in more detail, shall we?
1. False Dilemma
A false dilemma (or "fallacy of the excluded middle") is a rhetorical device used to paint proponents of a particular viewpoint into a corner where they are forced to defend the most extreme examples of that viewpoint. In this case, we have Terminate and BasedCannon arguing that if a user wishes to ban Metagrossite, they are also compelled to support bans of subsequent "best Pokemon" like Diancite, Sableite, etc., because they will become the best Pokemon in the tier. For example:
The thing is the Meta-game remaining stable, we're sitting on a mountain top currently of powerful Pokemon in OU with the S-rank Pokemon at the very tip, should we get rid of one, the idea is that it spirals out of control and we go through another year of pointlessly banning stuff that checked/countered something else previously.
However as soon as one good Pokemon is kicked off, we now have to kick off several other Pokemon because they went from good to great due to Megagrosses absence.
The problem with this is the cycle will not end. There will ALWAYS be a Pokemon that is as powerful as MegaGross in any given meta. There will always be a stand-out Pokemon that people complain about.
You can ban them, but then a new threat comes into the picture to be suspected. Then you ban that, and the process repeats itself over and over and over until there is NOTHING left. Stopping this ban is actually crucial to breaking a vicious cycle and progessing the state of the metagame.
Notice a couple of things about these statements:
- There is no allowance for agency on the part of pro-ban users. The "vicious cycle" of bans is portrayed as an inevitability with no chance of being stopped. A slippery slope is formed.
- There is an unbelievable amount of hand-waving with regard to what is going to be banned, why it will be broken, and why it is similar to the current suspect. Coming up with accurate comparisons between predicted future banned Pokemon and the current suspect is usually impossible, so it just isn't done.
The first reason this is bullshit is that it presumes that whatever the "best Pokemon" in the tier is will be just as dominant or comparatively powerful as the current suspect. If this was the case, there would be no "settling point" where the metagame would be balanced, because as the most powerful thing is removed from the tier, the next most powerful becomes equally dominant. Unfortunately,
every past metagame using something like the current suspect system demonstrates the exact opposite. 4th generation is eminently balanced. There are certainly top threats (like Scizor and Tyranitar), but these threats are not so far above the remainder of the tier that they create an unhealthy effect on the metagame. The end of BW1, after the Deo-S banning, was a reasonably balanced metagame (to the extent that this was possible with weather in the tier). The end of BW2, after the Landorus banning (and arguably beforehand as well) was balanced. And the end of XY was also a very balanced metagame (with the arguable exception of Greninja). Every OU metagame where suspect testing has been the standard for tiering has shown the same propensities: a period of rapid bans in the months directly following a new game's release (we are in the very tail end of this period related to ORAS), followed by a "settling down" where there are few-to-none subsequent tests. Given that this pattern has been followed almost uniformly in each generation we have observed to this point, there needs to be a lot of compelling argumentation done if we are to believe that this will not be the case in ORAS. Needless to say, none is offered.
The second problematic feature of these arguments is the implication that nothing will be broken if things stay stable, but by banning the current suspect we "break" other Pokemon and require more bans (this is a rhetorical device used to put blame on the users with the opposing viewpoint - it's
their fault that more bans will be needed, because they are the ones who banned the current suspect). Here we come to the trope of "broken checking broken" and its various responses. As we know, we cannot justify keeping broken things in OU because they keep other broken things in check. The inevitable retort is something like "well it's not really broken checking broken, it's more like..." You should stop any time you find yourself saying this. There are 3 options for your argument:
A. It assumes the current suspect is broken, so your argument actually is a derivative of "broken checking broken", and is pointless.
B. It assumes that the posited "next best thing" isn't broken, so your argument is useless, because there's no need to keep something in the tier to keep something that isn't even broken in check.
C. It assumes that the current suspect isn't broken, so your argument is useless, because you're assuming the thing you're trying to prove. This is begging the question.
In any case, arguing to keep a suspect because of its relationship toward other dominant threats in the tier is almost always pointless.
2. Unjustified value judgment
An underlying and often overlooked problem with the Appeal to Stability is that the entire "thrust" of the argument rests on a value judgment that is never justified and is, indeed, baseless. In order to convince anybody that the imagined "vicious cycle" of bannings that is always right around the corner is actually a bad thing, we see a lot of loaded terminology that make bannings seem like something terrible. This is never flat-out stated (because it's unjustifiable), but it's easily seen in the phrases that pop up in this type of post. Examples of "scare terms" are bolded:
The thing is the Meta-game remaining stable, we're sitting on a mountain top currently of powerful Pokemon in OU with the S-rank Pokemon at the very tip, should we get rid of one, the idea is that it spirals out of control and we go through another year of pointlessly banning stuff that checked/countered something else previously.
People are treating Megagross like it can run everything at one time and that's what's concerning. Next thing you or I know, it's banned and now we have a long list of Pokemon to kick out of the tier before we address ACTUAL issues. (what actual issues?)
You are allowing the meta to degenerate so that you can suspect Pokemon that are fine in the current meta. This is why Pokemon are categorized by viability. You can ban them, but then a new threat comes into the picture to be suspected. Then you ban that, and the process repeats itself over and over and over until there is NOTHING left. Stopping this ban is actually crucial to breaking a vicious cycle and progessing the state of the metagame.
We need to assess the impact on the metagame as a whole. That's essential, else-wise we're going to degenerate the meta down to a pathetic shell of what it could be. (this in particular is a fantastic bit of fear-mongering, I'm tempted to put it in my sig)
There's a lot to unpack here.
First off, we have the trope of the "chaotic metagame" as something to be feared. We have a handle on what the metagame looks like now (it's the stability they love to cling to), but if we go through with banning the current suspect, we could have all kinds of "issues" (what exactly those are is never quite clear). However, there is nothing wrong with suspecting things, banning things, or in general making changes to the metagame. These sorts of policy moves are part of any healthy metagame and are more indicative of a healthy, engaged community than any sort of terrifying spiral into anarchy. In fact, stagnation poses its own threat to the metagame, as we saw in the early portions of XY. Ultimately it's wrong to say that change is either good or bad - each instance needs to be evaluated in its context. Claiming that any changes are indicative of the "degeneration of the meta" is clearly off-base.
Second, we have the idea that banning a Pokemon is "taking something" from the tier. BasedCannon says that we are "degenerating the meta down to a pathetic shell of what it could be" (I'm seriously in love with this quote), while Terminate says we are "pointlessly banning" useful Pokemon. I would like to emphasize that
removing a Pokemon from a tier is not an inherently negative thing. There is no reason to believe that banning Pokemon (or unbanning Pokemon) is good or bad
in its own right. Even if it was the case that having more Pokemon in a tier was in itself a good thing (which is highly questionable), removing a Pokemon from a tier often allows space for other Pokemon to find niches and become more viable. On the flip side, allowing a Pokemon in a tier can push others out (see Ubers). The point is that OU as a tier does not "need" any individual Pokemon in it, whether it be Mega-Metagross, Gyarados, Aegislash, or whatever. All it needs is to be reasonably balanced, wherever we (as the community) choose to draw that line.
Alright, this got a bit longer than I intended it to be, but there you go. It's important that nothing I said is particular to Mega-Metagross (in fact I'm still undecided on this particular suspect test). I'm not saying that there aren't good reasons to think Mega-Metagross (or any suspect) should stay in OU. What I want is for people to recognize and avoid this particular class of argumentation, which paints the suspect process (a healthy, reasonable method of keeping the tier balanced) as something to be feared and avoided at all costs, and focuses on "stability" and "predictability" (read: no changes) at the substantial cost of balance in the tier. There is no need to fear changes or tweaks to the metagame - we have a robust system in place to handle imbalance. Being scared of "future imbalances" or "vicious cycles" has never been and likely will never be a good reason to oppose a ban. Good arguments ground themselves in the particulars of the current situation.
