Posting on behalf of myself, not tier leadership or the tiering council -- this is fully to get a better grasp of how the community wants us to handle these situations
Pokemon has shifted from a very transparent release schedule where we knew dates of new games well in advance to one laced in ambiguity. These dates of HOME or DLC releases can come at very inopportune times for us with minimal notice, which is especially problematic if they release many strong Pokemon or it hovers around start dates of major SV OU events like WCoP.
On the flip side, the SV OU tiering council has adopted a far more publicly involved and transparent approach than ever before. Just over the last few years we have instituted:
For example, over the last couple of weeks we have:
We mainly took elements of our normal proceedings such as the radar and survey, which I feel have been perceived very well, and expedited the pace given our time crunch with the late release and WCoP around the corner. I feel this sudden release and all these changes can both skew council results and public perception, causing me to use this thread to inquire to hear more insight from everyone. Given that this has taken up an absurd amount of man-hours the last few weeks (sorry for all the discord PMs I have ignored for those who are no rude btw -- crazy few days), it would be nice to have a concrete procedure rather than survey here, radar there, etc. so that it feels like all of the hard work is for the community and empowering the players rather than leading to any trouble. Obviously we cannot please everyone, but we can at very least see what people think and use it as a stepping-stone to improve for the future.
In short, I would love to hear public feedback on what people think we should do during these immediate post-release periods: what timeline they think things should be done on, what processes we should apply, and whatever else they feel relevant as a lot goes into these proceedings. I felt good about the process we used here, but it was messy and I want anything we do to be refined to near-perfection.
Pokemon has shifted from a very transparent release schedule where we knew dates of new games well in advance to one laced in ambiguity. These dates of HOME or DLC releases can come at very inopportune times for us with minimal notice, which is especially problematic if they release many strong Pokemon or it hovers around start dates of major SV OU events like WCoP.
On the flip side, the SV OU tiering council has adopted a far more publicly involved and transparent approach than ever before. Just over the last few years we have instituted:
- Regular, publicized tiering surveys
- A quickban radar prior to any non-emergency vote
- Many public posts sharing opinions (for example, in the 205 days this generation has been out, I have over 990 posts in the OU subforum, many of which pertain to tiering information, opinion, etc. -- my other council members have also chimed in numerous times this week and previously)
For example, over the last couple of weeks we have:
- Held a large vote on many of the released Pokemon here
- Discussed procedure for future releases here (thanks Amaranth for the thread)
- Conducted an emergency vote on Regieleki here
- Engaged with tons of posts/inquiries about the early metagame
- Put up a tiering radar here on things we found still problematic
- Conducted another vote to ban Magearna here
- Followed this up with a tiering survey to see if we needed another emergency vote due to the closeness of some matters here
- Had another emergency vote to ban Chien-Pao and Zamazenta-Crowned here
- Put up another tiering radar here
- And finally we voted on that radar this weekend
We mainly took elements of our normal proceedings such as the radar and survey, which I feel have been perceived very well, and expedited the pace given our time crunch with the late release and WCoP around the corner. I feel this sudden release and all these changes can both skew council results and public perception, causing me to use this thread to inquire to hear more insight from everyone. Given that this has taken up an absurd amount of man-hours the last few weeks (sorry for all the discord PMs I have ignored for those who are no rude btw -- crazy few days), it would be nice to have a concrete procedure rather than survey here, radar there, etc. so that it feels like all of the hard work is for the community and empowering the players rather than leading to any trouble. Obviously we cannot please everyone, but we can at very least see what people think and use it as a stepping-stone to improve for the future.
In short, I would love to hear public feedback on what people think we should do during these immediate post-release periods: what timeline they think things should be done on, what processes we should apply, and whatever else they feel relevant as a lot goes into these proceedings. I felt good about the process we used here, but it was messy and I want anything we do to be refined to near-perfection.