Well, Promises are promises, and the earthquake wannabe of last night will not stop me; I've lived a way worse one during my childhood. Took me a while because of studies and a rotten flan.
Now I want to talk about a more intricate tiering proposal:
Tera Preview. This will be a juicy one, although I might tumble a bit here because, again, social skills are not my strenght, and Team Preview is mostly about psychology instead of raw numbers.
First of all, How it could be implemented? Oddly enough we already have tools for doing it. Showing the tera symbol alongside the pokémon is a good way of going with it, with said symbol being removed once it was used unless it's the terastalized target.
What would this accomplish
- Reduce its unpredictability. According to you, a big issue people seem to have with tera in general is THE LURES, sets who are made just to put you in a check mate scenario via countering their supposed checks, who really benefit from tera and therefore makes the tier volatile. Preview no longer would make you actually surprised by that element. That does not mean those sets will stop existing, because sometimes having that option on itself is enough of a threat through conditioning, and could even be used as fluff at times, it just makes Lures risky to use and somewhat inconsistent in a bad way like in other generations.
- Make Terastalization a true 50/50. Tera right now is not a 50/50 because there's just way too many options of tera, but if you knew what was said tera it would be an actual situation where you can know which are the possible outputs of your opponent.
- Make Tera Blast a non-issue: Going back with Lures, right now there's no way of reacting to a random tera lure due to tera blast being 120BP instead of 60, making them very strong and therefore the matchups incredibly volatile. With preview tera blast becomes something the opponent can prepare for with preview, giving it actual counterplay while still being effective at counterchecking.
- Reduce the creative factor somewhat: In case Teras are seen before the activation, going outside of the expected will become more punishable and therefore less desirable. It doesn't mean you can't do it and suceed, after all the meta with Tera seems prone to changes, is just that said changes need to be more thoughful instead of relying on surprise factor.
What would this not accomplish
- Reduce the power of Tera significantly. A lot of the power of tera is from usage of it overtime to gain power and resistances, and the hability of changing type on crucial moments. Revealing said potential change does not remove said factor. If terastalization was revealed Enamorus and Kingambit would still be problematic while Volcarona would still be banworthy.
- Fix the tier. I've said this many times, but the tier has ridiculous amounts of powercreep, most notably Kingambit, Gholdengo, Paradox creatures, Hisuan Samurott, Enamorus, Garganacl, Dondozo and Skeledirge, alongside lots of defensive nerfs. The tier will remain offense no matter what you try to do because the game is not giving tools to play defense to begin with.
- Remove the skill and versatility of it. It's indeed reducing it, but it doesn't remove all of what makes tera an "skillful mechanic". Tera is still the a very versatile tool who is useful both on offense and defense and rewards the player who thinks outside of the box more than the guide follower, is just that the standards to be innovative will be somewhat harsher. Mechanically it is the same, and thus the decision making is not changed; If anything, the extra information makes you able to do deeper reads for both sides, making it even more intricate and more punishing to use poorly, both lowering the floor and raising the ceiling.
Now, If something I've learned from playing card games is that trying to
get opposing information is overrated; Most of the time knowing what the opponent has is kinda irrelevant over you just playing without overextending and having X factor into consideration, and sometimes is just better to play praying to RNGesus that they don't have Mystic shot, Three Sisters, Form Up!, Heavy metal, Disintegrate, Minimorph, Vengeance, Quicksand, Pale cascade or whatever Ionian BS the opponent has, as well as trying to force a lose-lose scenario to them via pressure. I know tera preview will not be particularly different here than in other instances even if it's a different genre.
Then why is Tera Preview popular? It's because of agency. You see, a lot of what makes a game enjoyable is having the control of the situation or trying to gain said control through effort.
That concept is known as agency in the industry and is pillar of many gameplay cores; information is crucial for said agency because it makes you take more thoughful decisions. Meanwhile the lack of agency makes games frustrating to play, created by elements like unpredictability or randomness, like confusion, flinches, paralysis, sand attack, evasion or glitches.
Tera is, as I've said before, not random but unpredictable due to the many options the opponent has, so it can cause frustration if defeated by something you could not see coming nor prepared because it was impossible to do it, also known as getting cheesed and indeed it feels awful; that's why stuff that actively wants to deny agency of the opponent like evasion, king's rock or swagger are banned. Being also implemented on VGC also helps to make the idea appealing because there's official mods who do it, although it would be in a smogon way.
What do I mean with this? That the Pro-preview crew with their proposal are suggesting that, instead of focusing on how powerful Terastalization is, we should
start to focus on the frustrating elements, trying to
make Tera able to give agency to both sides instead of steal it with a cheese strategy, which could be acomplished via removing its unpredictability, while also being closer to the official competitive. Honestly it seems reasonable to at least try this; After all, this is a suspect TEST, meant to test stuff instead of just theorycrafting as the mosquito said before. That's why
I advocate for tera preview then ban or not, or to make more of a multiquestion test to get the desirable result, and said test should
have tera preview enabled to actually test it. It might be a bit challenging to code but it could also be implemented to VGC in case of OTS, so it's not all wasted effort in case of tera ban.
PS: Zweilous guy, I've been trying to make constructive talks from day 1, not just yesterday. Is just that I don't have that shame when saying a hot take, forgetting this is the internet who has weird rules.