appreciate all the dumbass clowning done at the 11th hour as usual
Finchinator will dugtrio be unbanned if arena is banned?
yes
Can anyone present a strong argument for banning Diglett / Trapinch other than cheese? I don’t have a strong lean to either side.
"Cheese" isn't reason to ban something or we'd ban Volcarona (my view on it). It's an extension of the principles behind the Dugtrio ban.
Can we expect something to be done about the current BW council? I believe the councils were formed to avoid poor tiering decisions, but this case has been handled extremely terribly. I really, really like this tier, but I am extremely scared about what will happen to it in the future, and I do not trust the current council to make the correct decisions, as they have given me no reason to based on their actions in the past.
I'm saddened that we don't live up to your standards, but "something to be done" like... what? If you give some substance we can maybe build upon it to improve, but right now this is literally "you suck, change" without any direction so not sure quite what you're expecting to happen.
The councils were formed so that when there was a (potential) issue with past gen tiers, time didn't have to be wasted running around trying to figure out who would be in charge of such a decision, and the accompanying mess that would go along with it. My source is that I was the person who proposed them for this reason after observing the mess that occurred every time something popped up. Is it ideal? God, no. Not that tiering ever is, but yeah, it's not perfect. It is, however, preferable to the alternative that we had in the past. We of course would love it if someone had a better solution ("stop changing old gens" is not one in case any genius had that great idea). Also, while the journey to get there was not how I'd have preferred it to go, the end result is what needed to happen for the metagame's sake. Before you think this is me jumping through hoops getting rid of everything that annoys me, I would unironically prefer to ban Keldeo than either of the hot button topics that have been giving us grief for a while now.
If it puts your mind at ease, the only issues the BW council has in mind are the ones that have been plaguing this tier and many have been lobbying to fix for a long time now, so you don't have to worry about us impulsively banning Keldeo or Garchomp or something stupid. The only thing going forward might be, should Arena Trap be banned, re-looking into freeing Chlorophyll with Drought, but that'd be open to discussion first, so you could voice your opinion then. Or you could wait until the last possible minute to complain in the most condescending, least constructive way possible.
I did a stupid shitpost about this that got me infracted but genuine question: why does it seem like every bw tiering decision these days is about trying to get rid of anything that threatens sand balance?
As much as it personally inconveniences me to repeat arguments that fall on purposely deaf ears, I'll do it again because I care about this tier I've been playing for 8 years: "lol you just want free wins with sand balance" is the laziest copout ever. Keldeo/Garchomp/Alakazam/hell, Jirachi sometimes/lol Hydreigon jesus christ/fucking Gliscor/Mew/sometimes Reuniclus/Magnezone/even Heatran on a bad day are all things that get in the way of easy wins with sand balance. I assure you that the great thing about sand is that it lets you outplay most matchups if built well, if you have a free win with such a team it means your opponent's is shit. Sun forces you into a corner and punishes you in non-outplayable ways for using the limited methods of countering incredibly tough Pokemon. This stretching thin of resources that sun does is what results in real cases of the popular cry of matchup. Tyranitar keeps teams from being utterly crushed by the incredibly dangerous high-profile threats of the metagame, and this ties into something I just don't understand about a lot of modern players' mentalities - a mocking or disregard of people who use the best Pokemon that can handle the metagame. I went over all this and more in the Excadrill thread (the other Pokemon that does similar things) if you want to read this argument outlined in better detail.
Also, sun doesn't only fuck up sand balance. As has been shown many times, it fucks up rain pretty hard as well. Forget about killing an uncontested Cresselia in sun, to say nothing of its teammates, so you're going to be using weather, either abusing rain or defending against it with sand, because a weatherless team against Cress sun is just a gigantic mismatch. This was already done because of Dugtrio so I don't get what the big deal is, this is just righting the wrong from before. Obviously the non-Dug Arena Trappers aren't as good as Dug but I would argue that that's missing the point.
TL;DR it only seems that way if you don't think about it too hard
Isn't it kind of pathetic that there is a suspect being held about this? This thread was posted 1 week ago and there were 2 replies, one of them a meme post and the other one a response from a council member himself (correct me if I'm wrong), whose opinion was already expressed on the survey. Doesn't seem to me like the community really cares at all about the issues being addressed here, and maybe the reason behind that is that Diglett and Trapinch are both terrible Pokémon that struggle to be successful even at "cheesing".
I partially agree, although "pathetic" is a pretty strong word to throw around. I just wanted to ban them like we should've to begin with. However, it was either this or hand the sentence down from on high, and I'm guessing if we did that it wouldn't take long before the kicking and screaming about lack of community input began. With this, you had a chance to speak, and if you choose to say nothing until the last minute, then I'm sorry but we gave you more than enough time if you cared. Plus, the majority of the exit poll, which you can see for yourself, indicated a desire to have something done about this, including the response from a user who's now making a big show about voting no ban in order to be funny or something.
I'd rather see Liepard being suspected to be honest.
Liepard's pretty stupid, but a lot of teams naturally handle it somewhat decently (Protect, Magic Guard, hazard resistance, Lefties). If it becomes a problem, then I have no opposition to this, but currently haven't seen too much that suggests it is one. If you really care then there are a few things you can do about it.
Since suspecting permanent weather / Latios / Keldeo - which is the only way to properly balance this tier after 7 or 8 years of fucking around - is clearly not going to happen anymore,
Perma weather was considered too late when several people including myself argued for it
five and a half years ago, when BW was still the current generation. Don't think we can overturn that now and instead should just work to make the best version of what we have (and for a while we had something really great before the things we've been struggling with for coming up on two years started haranguing us). I too think Keldeo should've been banned way back when but we're in the minority on this. Same deal with Latios.
I believe the best thing we can do to make BW remotely entertaining again is unbanning Chlorophyll. After the Dugtrio ban BW returned to its previous state of Excadrill Rain / Bulky Sand which is honestly extremely boring and unbalanced.
"Boring" doesn't mean anything. Metagames always have the same best Pokemon used the most. Trying to fix this with bans lasts for a short amount of time before the meta's figured out and the problem pops up again. I also don't see how it's unbalanced - because certain things are stronger than others? That's just the way of the land, how metagames tend to work.
I think the metagame is in a very unhealthy state right now as Rain is the only weather that still has any way of being abused
I don't see how this is a competitively minded argument. This is on par with "xyz would be more fun." Plus, I don't even think it's very true. Sand is really abusable, from the chip on everything - Protect Gliscor, Heatran and Ferrothorn are not nearly as good without it - to the SpD boost letting Terrakion be an ironclad Volcarona answer and letting Tyranitar check a ton of bullshit.
unbanning Chlorophyll would bring a positive alternative to the status quo, as it would potentially make Sun viable again. It's quite clear to me that the broken aspect of Chlorophyll was affiliated with Dugtrio's ability to remove other inducers from the equation, hence why it was banned a couple years later despite Chlorophyll being gone.
Hopefully we can start a discussion on this topic and move on from this Arena Trap nonsense that has been a waste of time for the past 8 months.
Yeah, as I said earlier in this post, we would definitely be looking into this.
I'd also like to question why these discussions are held in Policy Review instead of Ruins of Alph. I won't get into the criteria behind choosing voters (which sucks imo), but I don't see how limiting the amount of users who can positively contribute to our policy discussions, especially when talking about Old Gens because they are so dead it's very rare to see people actually engaged in these threads now.
People commonly have proxy posts for them, but yeah, this is a good idea to consider. We'll look into it for Excadrill. As for the voter choosing... if you have an alternative, we're all ears, I'm not a huge fan either.
Condescension aside, I sincerely thank you for making constructive suggestions. after all, we should all be on the same side here, the betterment of the metagame.