swagger ban

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kilometerman

Banned deucer.
Epic as thinking that roar/whirlwind, dark void, scald, focus blast, will-o-wisp, toxic, precipice miss, and many more moves are uncompetitive.
there are much more situations where a swagger confusion hit could lose a game without previous plays and strategies affecting the outcome than there are situations where a toxic miss could do the same. they're not really comparable
 
there are much more situations where a swagger confusion hit could lose a game without previous plays and strategies affecting the outcome than there are situations where a toxic miss could do the same. they're not really comparable
10.8% chance vs 10% chance

Seems very comparable.
 

kilometerman

Banned deucer.
10.8% chance vs 10% chance

Seems very comparable.
The difference between missing a Pblades and losing the game and getting a swagger hit is that you choose to put non-100% acc moves on your mons when building, so that RNG fluke is your own fault. But it's not your fault and it doesn't reflect your skill as a player if you get a Swagger confusion hit.

Obviously Pokemon is an RNG-heavy game but I don't understand why we wouldn't try and limit the game-breaking capabilities of RNG whenever possible, especially in a comp metagame where we want skill to be the deciding factor in winning and losing games.
 
Welcome to Ubers tiering policy.
The only direction is to ban uncompetitive elements of the game.

You went from this
Any move that relies on an RNG roll in order to decide or win 1v1s or games is noncompetitive by nature
to
Obviously Pokemon is an RNG-heavy game but I don't understand why we wouldn't try and limit the game-breaking capabilities of RNG whenever possible, especially in a comp metagame where we want skill to be the deciding factor in winning and losing games.
The answer is simple. RNG is not inherently uncompetitive. Sure, swagger may be unpleasant to play against, however it's simply not uncompetitive. I have outlined the moves that would be considered as uncompetitive if we followed your logic in previous post.
 
The difference between missing a Pblades and losing the game and getting a swagger hit is that you choose to put non-100% acc moves on your mons when building, so that RNG fluke is your own fault. But it's not your fault and it doesn't reflect your skill as a player if you get a Swagger confusion hit.

Obviously Pokemon is an RNG-heavy game but I don't understand why we wouldn't try and limit the game-breaking capabilities of RNG whenever possible, especially in a comp metagame where we want skill to be the deciding factor in winning and losing games.
"Pokemon is a gambling game" - ChaosLord

also, please do not imply that swagger takes no skill. it takes a tremendous amount of planning, set up, and skill to use such a move
 

kilometerman

Banned deucer.
Welcome to Ubers tiering policy.
The only direction is to ban uncompetitive elements of the game.

You went from this

to


The answer is simple. RNG is not inherently uncompetitive. Sure, swagger may be unpleasant to play against, however it's simply not uncompetitive. I have outlined the moves that would be considered as uncompetitive if we followed your logic in previous post.
Like I said earlier the difference is that a player chooses to put moves like pblades and toxic on their mons, therefore when that move misses it is no one's fault but the player's. Having a move like Swagger that uses a RNG roll to decide the difference between a loss and a win is very different. If you want to make comparisons with Swagger to other moves, why don't we talk about one-hit KO moves? Sheer Cold is in the same ballpark as Swagger in that you're banking an entire 1v1 encounter on a 1 in 3 roll.

And also I touched on this a little bit before but I wanted to clarify. A good player will try their hardest to make plays so that entire games won't be decided on a pblades miss or scald burn. Both of those moves are avoidable by playinh well. A good player cannot think ahead and make plays in terms of a Swagger confusion hit, since its the opponent's mon and not his.

"Pokemon is a gambling game" - ChaosLord

also, please do not imply that swagger takes no skill. it takes a tremendous amount of planning, set up, and skill to use such a move
Like I said above yes Pokemon is an RNG-heavy game but this is a competitive meta so we should take steps to make sure player skill trumps RNG whenever possible.

And it doesn't take skill to click a 1 in 3 chance roll to win a 1v1, it is a big risk but that does not constitute skill.
 
Like I said earlier the difference is that a player chooses to put moves like pblades and toxic on their mons, therefore when that move misses it is no one's fault but the player's. Having a move like Swagger that uses a RNG roll to decide the difference between a loss and a win is very different. If you want to make comparisons with Swagger to other moves, why don't we talk about one-hit KO moves? Sheer Cold is in the same ballpark as Swagger in that you're banking an entire 1v1 encounter on a 1 in 3 roll.

And also I touched on this a little bit before but I wanted to clarify. A good player will try their hardest to make plays so that entire games won't be decided on a pblades miss or scald burn. Both of those moves are avoidable by playinh well. A good player cannot think ahead and make plays in terms of a Swagger confusion hit, since its the opponent's mon and not his.


Like I said above yes Pokemon is an RNG-heavy game but this is a competitive meta so we should take steps to make sure player skill trumps RNG whenever possible.

And it doesn't take skill to click a 1 in 3 chance roll to win a 1v1, it is a big risk but that does not constitute skill.
You don't even understand how weak swagger is. Comparing swagger to OHKO is laughable.

85% Accuracy * 33% ^ 2 (You must get TWO confusion hits for it to be effective) = sub 10% chance to be cheesed. 90% chance of getting owned by a boosted foe.

Once again, Swagger hax is roughly equivalent to the impact of Toxic miss in an average Ubers game.
 

shrang

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Let me just say that despite my misgivings of unbanning Swagger, I fully support this on principle given my position on pretty much every ban in this tier. If something does not make Ubers unplayable or significantly adds hax to the tier, then it shouldn't be banned.

Practically speaking, however, I have reservations simply because of the way our tier has actually moved in the last few years. It's very clear that the community actually cares about this tier being as competitive as possible over the identity of Ubers being the official tier that bans nothing unless it's absolutely necessary. Every time previously I've brought up that Ubers has an identity of not banning things I get ridiculed for being an old fart and not being with the times because Ubers is now officially a "metagame rather than a banlist". Let's face it, Swagger adds practically 0 viable strategies to Ubers right now that doesn't rely on cheese factor. The only thing that it adds to the metagame is more volatility because people can now use shit like Swagger GeoXern to cheese past Primal Groudon, or Swagger Mega Mence to make Lugia break its own Multiscale, or whatever the fuck people want to run.

I know there's the argument of "hey lots of other things don't add to the tier, eg shit Pokemon in general, we don't unban them", but those things don't carry a potential to add volatility to a tier. I know how this argument works because I've practically made it every time we've tried to ban something. I know plenty of people when we banned BP made the argument "what's the problem about banning BP as a whole, it adds nothing to the tier". Even Fireburn's annoucement uses it

2. DryPass is nonexistent in Ubers - the only Pokemon that can make use of such a strategy is Mega Mawile, which is frankly a terrible Pokemon in the metagame. Thus, collateral damage from banning the move Baton Pass is also nonexistent.
Basically, we obviously care about what can potentially add or detract to the experience of playing this metagame. The collateral damage of keeping Swagger banned is 0, outside of further soiling our reputation as the tier that doesn't ban things. The potential risk of unbanning it is that we add more volatility in the game and down the line thimo makes a SwagPlay team and some noob cheeses the shit out of some top player with it. If we think that the risk is negligible, then we should just hurry up and unban Swagger.

I'll just address the fact that we can always ban it again, but we've all seen how slow shit happen in Ubers. All that would happen if the above does happen is that we get salty players, a divided community about whether we want to ban this again and then we'd have a few months of people getting pissed off and calling the community toxic again because we have this thing we want to ban and there are people opposing it yadda yadda. I've seen this shit go on too many times already. Why waste all that time and energy if you could have avoided it in the first place.

tl;dr - Swagger getting unbanned is good, just don't regret your decision a few months down the line because top players are getting cheesed by it
 
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kilometerman

Banned deucer.
I think it's due to the bitter taste the Shadow Tag suspect left in our mouths.
Isn't that all the more reason to do one? I mean it wouldn't be a Smogon™ metagame without suspect tests, so it makes sense that we should "remind" ourselves of the process on something rather insignificant like this
 
I think it's due to the bitter taste the Shadow Tag suspect left in our mouths.
I still find it funny that the last suspect that we've done was the Shadow Tag suspect which resulted in the tier leaders rigging the suspect. After this, the community was no longer allowed to vote and the tier leaders have complete control over this meta's rule set.

EDIT: my original post made no sense
 
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kilometerman

Banned deucer.
I still find it funny that the last suspect that we've done was the Shadow Tag suspect which resulted in the tier leaders rigging the suspect. After this, the community was no longer allowed to vote and the tier leaders have complete control over this meta's rule set.

EDIT: my original post made no sense
You dare doubt the divine power and knowledge of Daddy Smogon™? The community will only be able to make decisions on their meta if the all-knowing Smogon™ auth allows them to!

edit:
But in all seriousness, I think that no one in this community is fine with having every tier decision made by the same auth who tried to rig a suspect test a couple years ago. Obviously the council needs to have some power, but to give 6 people the power to do whatever they want with one of Smogon's most played non-OU metas is ridiculous. Smogon is supposed to be a community meta where the players have a say in how things work, if you take that away it just becomes a circlejerk of elitists who enforce rules upon a playerbase with no say in the matter.

As I said earlier, this is the perfect opportunity to bring back a suspect test system into ubers. We need to familiarize ourselves as a community with voting and Swagger is a great place to start, as overall it really isn't that impactful for the meta.
 
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I disagree, dictatorship is the best way to ensure that a tier doesn't drift from its intended purpose. If ubers was a democracy, then primal groudon and xern would have been sent to AG long time ago.
 
Having a higher threshold than OU in this case is silly as well.
This would be enough to quick unban it tbh.


We could all agree swagger isnt uncompetitive as most ppl got several arguments going this way, and I would say swagger is more competitive (not less uncompetitive!) than twave since you can play around easier and -swagplay by extension- may be considered as a whole playstyle regardless enjoyment for opponents and any statistic arguments.

Then, swagger ban never had been needed by ubers nor competitive policy and wont be.

The more RNG+stall you introduce the less skill is going to be the deciding factor in winning games
You cant think like that in pokémon environment + isnt stall one of the most skill-involved playstyle ?
 

kilometerman

Banned deucer.
I disagree, dictatorship is the best way to ensure that a tier doesn't drift from its intended purpose. If ubers was a democracy, then primal groudon and xern would have been sent to AG long time ago.
First off tf do you mean by "intended purpose" and how does relegating every decision to a council of 6 people help that? Especially considering the fact that the current Ubers auth has shown that they use personal bias in their decision making and break rules. Even if the council was perfect it wouldn't be the best system considering that at the end of the day people are human and humans make mistakes and bad decisions, sometimes purposefully. For example the council members play in tours, if they were having a problem facing Gothitelle than they might go ahead and ban Shadow Tag, without having any sort of dissenting opinion or other point of view. The reason that suspect tests exist is to get opinions and votes from both sides of the argument, that way the end decision is the least biased as possible.

Also listen to what you're saying. If you went to OU (or any other tier) and said "this meta shouldn't have suspect tests" you would get laughed at, it's no different here. Suspect tests are a huge part of Smogon and community-driven metagames, why should Ubers be different?
 

Ropalme1914

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I agrer 100% with kilometerman. While I would probably vote to swagger stay banned due to it only bringing more RNG without much else to add to the tier, Swagger itself is probably not broken and it deserves a suspect (c'mon, Mega Rayquaza is super easy to understand why it did not received a suspect since SM did not bring anything to be an answer to him, but on Swagger's case, we had:
-Confusion nerf
-Thunder Wave nerf
-Prankster nerf (which is huge, since before Klefki was the main user of Parafusion and it's barely viabe now)
Suspect Test is one of the main points of why people respect Smogon, since it's actually a good way to see if things deserve to be banned or not with you needing to prove yourselg to be able to vote, Ubers should not be different, especially considering how big it is.
 
The point is that ubers historically doesnt work this way and shouldnt be considered as a tier as the others are by essence. I guess a lot of ppl could explain it better than me
 

kilometerman

Banned deucer.
The point is that ubers historically doesnt work this way and shouldnt be considered as a tier as the others are by essence. I guess a lot of ppl could explain it better than me
It has been a tier since the Mega Rayquaza ban, and should be treated as such. Insisting that Ubers shouldn't be subject to suspect tests and community decisions is nothing more than auth wanting to keep power and making the tier into more of an echo-chamber.

EDIT:
http://www.smogon.com/forums/thread...-is-added-m-ray-is-banned-from-ubers.3523205/
Ubers is a Smogon tier according to chaos
 
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I dont see the point between this statement and the thread. Ubers work this way and no one has reason to complain about council wanting power or whatever which is a kinda dead argument.
I believe ubers doesnt need a whole community to decide while council is doing a good work.
 

kilometerman

Banned deucer.
I dont see the point between this statement and the thread. Ubers work this way and no one has reason to complain about council wanting power or whatever which is a kinda dead argument.
I believe ubers doesnt need a whole community to decide while council is doing a good work.
How is saying "ubers is a smogon tier and it should therefore be treated as such" a dead argument? And why is it that Ubers "doesn't need" community-led decisisions when every other tier (including tiers with MUCH smaller communities than uber's) needs them?
 
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