Implemented Revisiting the Sleep Clause for SV OU

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I have a question then, if sleep is then fully banned, how will this exactly work? Will rest, yawn and relic song be banned? Same for abilities that can cause sleep like effect spore, if so wouldn’t this both affect abusers and the healthy part of the mechanic (yawn, rest)?
Sleep Moves Clause already exists and encompasses all moves that directly inflict sleep on the opponent - Relic Song, Dire Claw, Rest and Effect Spore in contrast are legal. It's used by many tiers in the Other Metagames community. Yawn is the only "unique" move banned by the clause - and while I personally think it could be removed from the clause on account of it technically inflicting Drowsy and having clearly separate gameplay interactions, that'd be the subject of a different thread.
 
What I propose is Revising Sleep Clause Mod to Sleep Clause. I've liked ideas being thrown around of automatically losing if you sleep more than one pokemon. No mod required (you don't even have to grey out a move since that's not cart accurate, just have a line that reads "more than one pokemon asleep, user loses by default" and automatically forfeit them). There are some issues with things that have a chance of sleeping (Effect Spore, Relic Song, Dire Claw etc) and my response for that? Might just to take it on the chin. Back to my proposal though, surely this has the least amount of collateral compared to banning all sleep moves and cutting strategies like yawn on certain mons. This is also the best way to evaluate Darkrai which obviously contributes to sleep being controversial and removing our "tiering policy issue with mods".
i agree wholeheartedly with most of this post and i think it's really well put, but i don't agree with introducing a new win condition to the game. frankly if there's any win condition that's more than just "make the opponent run out of Pokemon", players will find a way to abuse it via methods like trapping and encore among other things, as put well by Cosignia in the open mic thread. conversely, graying out the move prevents such an alternative win condition from occurring period, and isn't what i would consider a mod because on cart the equivalent would be to just not click the sleep move (being on simulator allows us to enforce this more like a law than an agreement just like other self imposed rules like "don't bring arceus to an OU game").

From what I've read across 3 threads: Views From The Council, this thread, and the OU metagame discussion thread, there were 2 main points I could interpret as "Removing Sleep Clause Mod into banning sleep moves" and "Banning Sleep because it is uncompetitive". What I believe is getting muddled up in this discussion on policy is the combination of these events which I find to be mutually exclusive events. If we look at them individually, we will reach the path where I believe the best action will be taken.
this is a really good point and what i'd consider the most important thing to take away from this! as i've said previously i think people are framing this discussion as either "ban sleep" or "maintain a modded clause" with no room for any alternatives. most people in this thread agree that sleep clause mod has to go, but it doesn't have to be one or the other; there is a difference between an uncompetitive mechanic and a poorly implemented clause. it just depends if the playerbase would rather rework the clause or ban sleep moves altogether, and seeing as this thread's direction appears to be going more towards if darkrai/valiant are broken or if sleep is the big issue, i do think it'd be better to make a seperate thread about sleep clause while keeping this one up to discuss sleep's place and competitiveness in SV OU as i'd suggested in my previous post
 
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I am in favor of banning sleep moves from SV OU. If this option lacks the support on the upcoming survey, my second option would be banning the Pokemon Darkrai and then reassessing. No other solution should be considered (unless you belive there is no problem, in which case no action is fine of course) given current tiering conventions.
What I don't understand is why this is being left up to a tiering survey. I understand that OU has been trying to explicitly factor community opinion into decisions on what to suspect etc, but this isn't an ordinary tiering decision along the lines of a Pokemon suspect test/ban. In matters of Pokemon bans there is much room for interpretation, since there is no way to objectively determine brokenness, but with sleep moves it is very simply the case that if they are broken in their "cartridge" implementation (which pretty much everyone already agrees on), they should get banned rather than nerfed by a means that breaks cartridge mechanics. To disagree with altering sleep clause is to disagree with tiering policy as it currently exists, which is fine, but requires an entirely different discussion. You yourself said it:
The fact of the matter is that the correct policy decision is to simply reform sleep clause to a ban on sleep moves like what was done in BW and articulated in various prior posts in this thread. Any other decision is simply being made to minimize collateral, preserving elements of the status quo. We do not tier here to be preservationists, but rather to be consistent with the practices that are put before us within tiering policy.

I do not see why we should be afraid of doing what is objectively correct simply because it might be unpopular. Realistically, most people responding to a tiering survey do not spend a lot of time philosophizing about Smogon tiering policy, if they even know what the tiering framework says to begin with. It is perfectly possible that a lot of people vote to preserve sleep clause as is, simply because "sleep as it currently exists isn't broken" (indeed, this seems to be a commonly held opinion, judging by i.e. this r/stunfisk thread) - failing to recognize that the whole discussion is about how the way sleep currently functions is not true to cartridge and violates basic tiering policy. Should such an opinion weigh more heavily than our tiering framework itself? You could make the argument, but at that point I don't understand why we bother with a (prescriptive) framework at all.
 
What I don't understand is why this is being left up to a tiering survey. I understand that OU has been trying to explicitly factor community opinion into decisions on what to suspect etc, but this isn't an ordinary tiering decision along the lines of a Pokemon suspect test/ban
I wanted to do a council vote last weekend on sleep before SPL and OST, but some people in the room, who had very valid and understandable points, noted that this wouldn’t be the best look PR wise as it was only brought up a few days prior. While I would’ve liked to handle it internally, this is still possible with a council vote after the survey if that is the conclusion we reach.

We intended to have a survey on various Pokemon this weekend regardless, so including it from there seemed like it could only help. We are also being very particular about how it will be framed on the survey.

The fact of the matter is that informed and active players have a major stake in our tiering, so we have shifted to a model that involves them more with community surveys, council members posting, and having a more active presence within the community. I think that even though this isn’t a normal occurrence, it doesn’t hurt to get community data on something like sleep. With this in mind, the council still holds active decision making powers and intends to use them when appropriate, which could very well be here.

Given this, I still hope that this can be resolved internally post-survey and not with a public suspect test as I don’t really view suspect reqs as a good qualifier for policy decisions like I do normal tiering decisions. We will cross that bridge when we get there though.
 
The aforementioned tiering survey is now up: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/sv-ou-tiering-surveys.3711911/page-2#post-9942563 -- please fill it out this weekend if you are interested. Thank you!

The OU council is going to use the data and our internal discussions to determine how to proceed. Banning sleep moves as a whole (like what was done in BW) is very much on the table and is currently seen as the main alternative to the status quo of Sleep Clause. If sleep is not deemed problematic, it is likely we maintain the status quo.

Thanks to everyone for discussion and expect an update in the near future.
 
There have been a lot of questions about the sleep ban including why action was needed, why we specifically decided to ban sleep moves, and why a council vote was selected over a public suspect. I answered all of these questions in an expanded justification of our ban here. I am posting a copy of this below for reference as this is an appropriate thread for this to be logged in:

It is important to provide sufficient justification for our tiering actions. It is also important to be as communicative about our process as possible. Our playerbase takes their time to play our metagame and many take their time to discuss it, so I owe my time as leader to them during situations like this. Moreover, this post will be aimed towards providing clarity and explanation in one singular placed rather than it being scattered throughout countless unique forum posts between this subforum, policy review, and even other spaces like Discord, Twitter, etc.

I feel like the initial ban post included mentions of everything, but a lot of this was done by reference rather than through direct statement. For example, I dropped the below quote, but I did not touch on every unique point within the post, instead hoping that hyperlinking these separate posts would suffice.

This is ultimately insufficient for tiering action that changes a longstanding institution of our metagames such as the Sleep Clause mod. I should have explained the points made in all 8 of these posts and the various others that council members made, but I had a deadline to meet with OST and SPL going up that night, IRL people were over, and I had my own tournament games later that night, so instead I just hyperlinked them. I apologize for not budgeting my time sufficiently enough to expand on them. I do not apologize for the ban itself as it is based off of proper application of our tiering system, which I will get more into later, but any ban should be accompanied by a thorough explanation after all.

We are going to cover some major points:
  • Why was action needed on this topic after Sleep Clause was in effect for many years prior?
  • Why sleep moves were chosen over the alternatives such as banning Pokemon or banning individual moves?
  • Why was this done via council vote as opposed to defaulting to a suspect test?
Why was action needed on this topic after Sleep Clause was in effect for many years prior?

Sleep has been manageable under Sleep Clause in every generation besides BW, which had unique mechanics. In SV, it was contained until DLC2 when Darkrai was unbanned after receiving substantial public support and subsequent unanimous council support. People began using Darkrai with a Focus Sash and Hypnosis to generate free turns and force progress earlier in games. This set had such a wide array of outcomes ranging from useless upon missing to netting substantial progress (often in the form of multiple kills) if it connected.

However, people began to use other sleep based strategies frequently after this was showcased. For example, Iron Valiant began using a set with Hypnosis, Calm Mind, Moonblast, and Hex with Tera Ghost, which allowed it to surpass every individual counter with enough fortune. Council member Aislinn posted a detailed report of her findings with this set here. Opposing Pokemon like Volcarona, Toxapex, Slowking-Galar, Moltres, and other would-be checks suddenly had to dodge Hypnosis or wake up promptly to remain checks. Beyond this, we also saw an uptick in things like Sleep Powder on Sun abusers such as Lilligant-Hisui.

With multiple abusers proving to be problematic, we knew there was potential for action. It is our job to stay on-top of the metagame and handle pressing issues aggressively, but also with attention to detail and process -- it is important we are timely, but also considerate. The most appropriate way to handle the situation was to discuss it with our playerbase, which we did through an active Policy Review thread and a timely OU subforum discussion.

Both of these threads showed far more support for action than not; to go a step further, the supermajority of the Policy Review thread and the majority of the OU thread requested action on sleep moves themselves as opposed to anything else (more on this in my next point though). In order to get formal data on the matter, the council announced its intention to hold a community survey here despite being close to a consensus internally; we let people know this multiple days in advance to make sure they knew, too.

Finally, it was included in the survey and received 3.7 out of 5, which shows a noteworthy majority of people supporting action on this specifically. Typically this is on the borderline between a suspect and a quickban vote, so we opted to have a council vote that included both options rather than one or the other -- more on this later as well.

Why sleep moves were chosen over the alternatives such as banning Pokemon or banning individual moves?

A lot of people understand why action had to be taken after playing our metagame, but preferred we ban Pokemon like Darkrai and Iron Valiant or moves like Hypnosis. I can absolutely understand these points, especially when it comes to the former. However, the most ideologically consistent position to take was banning sleep moves. In addition, the selection that fit best with our current tiering policy (which anyone can access here).

As for banning Pokemon like Darkrai and Iron Valiant, this was the second most desirable outcome to me and I resonate with people taking this stance. The main thing it boils down to is that it would take banning multiple Pokemon on top of a clause that is a major outlier just to preserve a handful of sleep moves that would have an even smaller handful of users. Given that we never tier with collateral in mind, preserving these moves vs. preserving the other users is never a debate we will engage in -- any debate between the two camps is entirely arbitrary. This makes the primary differentiator the fact that the current Sleep Clause mod is ineffective and needs to be reformed in some capacity.

The cleanest and most sound way to do that is to simply shift it to a sleep moves clause, which bans every sleep move and removes the "mod" component to it -- a simple ban is easy to implement in-game, but the Sleep Clause mod is not something that can be repeated within the games at all. Pokemon Showdown shows a prompt with every single time someone attempts to sleep a second Pokemon, but this is not in place in SV. While you can agree to not click a second sleep move, there are various situations where it may be forced to come up such as Encore, predicting wake-up turns, PP stalling situations, misclicks, and so on. You cannot just have these avenues left entirely unaccounted for, so when one side of the spectrum includes a full solution to the problem in the metagame (meaning no future sleep abusers can stir-up trouble either and the current ones are mitigated) and a full solution to the issue people take with current policy (with it not being repeatable in-game), it is the default among the two.

As for the option of banning a move like Hypnosis, which is a common thread between Darkrai and Iron Valiant, we did not regard it as an option akin to the above two. For starters, Hypnosis being banned does not solve the problem -- Darkrai can run the same exact set with 10% less consistency (or more variance) with Dark Void, for example. If you want to then say to ban Dark Void, then we are taking multiple more weeks and potentially another discussion, survey, and ban just to reach the same conundrum we did above where we cannot pick between different forms of collateral and it leads us to the same discussion as the last paragraph: the only way to differentiate is to go with the cleaner and more consistent side ideologically, which is to reform the clause rather than add onto it on an as-needed basis while remaining incompatible with the game SV itself.

Given all of this, a tough, but accurate and justified, decision was made to focus on sleep moves. Please note that if no action was elected, we would have maintained the longstanding status quo of the Sleep Clause mod, but that was not the case as you can see. We also made it clear both in the survey and posts such as this one that any action taken would be specifically on sleep moves, not anything else.

Why was this done via council vote as opposed to defaulting to a suspect test?

I wrote a detailed post specifically on this topic here, so feel free to read this first. You do not have to though as I will lay it all out again in this post.

Suspect tests are intended to give the playerbase a chance to determine if something is broken or balanced in the current metagame. Frequently we see Pokemon being discussed within this context, but deeper policy issues like this do not fall under the same umbrella -- sleep moves were banned due to being uncompetitive, which is different from broken and the difference has been referred to in aforementioned posts and is laid out explicitly here. There is a major difference between tiering broken and tiering uncompetitive things; there has been a track record for this over many years, too.

BW OU had a "suspect" on sleep, but the only people who could vote were longstanding players with results over time, for example. This vote resembles a larger council vote much more closely than it resembles an SV OU suspect. However, a more recent BW OU suspect had a ladder component for those who did not qualify through other means, which specifically was left out of the sleep move vote. In addition, other things like evasion moves have not had a modern suspect, oftentimes being banned at the start of the generation or on an as-needed basis from the tiering council.

For someone to ladder 30-50+ games in SV OU and achieve a high enough ELO to get requirements, this proves they are competent in the current metagame, giving them capability to rule on if a Pokemon is broken or balanced in their opinion. However, this does not include any components that pertain to policy. There is no mandate to know tiering policy, historical precedent, what is actually legal within the games, and a whole slew of other things that can pertain to deeper policy decisions. Given this, trying to suspect something like sleep moves or evasion, which fit under the umbrella of uncompetitive, would be akin to trying to fit a square object within a round hole: the qualifications for a suspect do not cover this area, in my opinion. I also stated my desire to handle things internally prior to the survey went up or the council voted here and nobody objected to it at the time whatsoever.

So when sleep moves received a 3.7 out of 5 on the survey, this score can typically mean two things (for a Pokemon): a vote for a potential quickban or a suspect test. The council had an unconventional vote that included three options given the circumstances: ban, suspect test, or no action -- this gave both a quickban and a suspect test a chance depending on the support of people whose job it is to enforce the tiering policy -- the SV OU tiering council. We ultimately determined to quickban sleep moves, but the vote itself was the most appropriate way to handle a complicated situation on a topic that does not match the contents of a normal tiering discussion.

I hope people read through this and it addresses the questions they have on this topic. It is my job to provide clarity on matters that are important to our players, so I am always happy to expand when possible.
 
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