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Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
Hello gamers, with PL ended it's time for another tiering survey. We've heard your cries during the last 8 months of silence, and will be generally increasing the amount of surveys we hold going forward. 1v1 council values community input when tiering, and we could have been a lot more on top of gauging your opinions than we have been.
This survey will remain open until Sunday August 24th, 09:59AM UTC. If anything is unclear or you have further questions, feel free to message any 1v1 council member on discord or smogon.
Before I get to the survey results I'm just gonna get this out of the way: I injured my wrist just after the survey closed and I had to take some time off. I'm not recovered and writing this post is probably ill-advised (note from the future: Yup that was a bad idea), so I'll continue to take a break from 1v1 for a short while longer. Thanks to everyone who has been patient with the survey results and with personally being ignored for a few days while I struggled to type full sentences. With that said, it's survey result time.
If you don't like reading I'll include tables with processed numbers wherever possible. Almost every section can be skipped but please scroll down to the bottom of the survey for the most important talking point. Shoutouts to lost heros for creating more processed data tables than I know what to do with, half of which I don't even understand.
Overall, I'm quite happy with where we're at, not just as a tier but also as a community. Since I picked up TL we've made huge strides in rebuilding the community after the events of last year. Old gens and C&C seem incredibly healthy, and the community is engaging really well with tournaments and tournament policy as well. This isn't directly related to the survey but just as a reminder the 2026 tournament circuit starts in 3 months, so now's a good time to start thinking about what needs changing and possibly post about it on the tour policy thread sometime during world cup.
A note about numbers
Every time we do a survey we get comments (both on the survey and on discord) about numbers and averages not being great indicators on this survey because they are inherently subjective metrics that rely on people's individual definitions of whatever the difference is between a 3 or 4. I want to hopefully clear this up once and for all here: It's not about the exact numbers and their meanings, but rather about relative numbers, changes, and general vibes. If we get a 10/10 for SV enjoyment we can pretty safely assume people are having a good time, and if people are voting 1/5 on suspecting Primarina (foreshadowing) we can pretty confidently say we shouldn't suspect Primarina. These numbers also allow us to identify priorities; no matter what scale you operate on, if Hoopa-Unbound is getting a higher score than Primarina, that'll guide us towards prioritising Hoopa over Primarina in the event that tiering action is needed on both. All that to say it's really not about the numbers but about what information you think you can reasonably derive from them. Still, I want to thank people who are helping us think about the process and constructively giving feedback on how we can improve surveys in the future (a bit more on survey-related feedback towards the end of the survey)
Meta enjoyment
With that out of the way, I'm going to kick right off with the numbers. We got an average of 7.1 for enjoyment and 7.5 for competitiveness of SV. Among "qualified" voters (man I hate that term) these numbers are 7.4 and 7.9 respectively. This is roughly a full 1 point increase from last survey, and I'm glad to see people have more faith in SV than they did before the regidrago ban. That said (as you'll see later) numbers aren't everything and we're taking note of people's concerns about the direction the SV metagame has taken.
Individual pokemon
For those who hate reading there will be no tiering action based on these numbers. With that out of the way let's look at how people perceive the Pokémon on the survey. Ursaluna, Primarina, Iron Valiant, and Iron Crown all received very low scores, with averages below 2 it's very safe to say we don't need to look into them anytime soon. Numbers surrounding Pecharunt are a little more contentious, hitting a 2.4 average (2.25 among qualified voters) it's clearly on some people's radars, but most people don't seem to think it's a problem. Hoopa-U got the highest score by a small margin (2.7 average among both all and qualified voters), but stands out because people are very commonly voting it 3/5, indicating that a significant portion of the community thinks Hoopa-U is potentially banworthy. This is reflected in the "Does Hoopa-U need tiering action" question where 37.5% of the community voted for it to receive tiering action, and the ranking question where people consistently ranked Hoopa as most problematic. We discussed as a council and we don't think these numbers press for immediate action. I encourage you to post your thoughts on Hoopa-U, Pecharunt, and other elements on the metagame discussion thread over the course of world cup, and we'll be checking in with another survey after that tour to see if things have changed by then.
From left to right, the votes out of 5 for each of the pokemon on the survey, then the results of the ranking question, and the results of "do you think this needs tiering action" questions.
In the dedicated question asking if there's any pokemon not on the survey, a couple of people expressed wanting to see us look into Goodra-Hisui and Urshifu. There was also one mention each of Zapdos, Corviknight, Ogerpon-W, Volcanion, and Regidrago. None of these pokemon will be looked at, but if you feel strongly about any of them we'd love to hear more about it so we can include them in future surveys
Addressing comments
We got quite a few comments on this survey. I can't address all your comments (nor do I want to, because some people just expressed being happy with SV and stuff) but I want to be as transparent as possible and answer stand-out concerns some people have. For the sake of anonymity I'll not to directly quote any concerns but will do my best to paraphrase things to get the message across. If you feel like I'm addressing something you talked about but think I'm missing the point, reach out to me on discord or in smogon DMs and I'll reply/edit the post when my wrist is recovered.
Re: Council not playing SV in PL
There was one comment about this on the survey but I saw a similar sentiment floating around the discord a little bit as well that people are concerned about council members not playing PL or attaining incredibly bad records. Some people engage with this in bad faith, but there's a genuine concern there that I want to address to the best of my ability. This is always going to be a struggle of perception. I'm pretty certain every council member that signed up for PL also engaged with SV in some way. Of course the general public get to see any of this and just sort of has to take our word that we really are staying up to date with the metagame, but I for example built a full week of teams for SV bo7 at some point. I don't want to speak for the rest of council, but I'm happy to put in some effort to make my SV involvement more public if there's an avenue for me to do so. Secondly obviously tour records aren't everything, I've seen people have abysmal tour runs and come out of it incredibly qualified to speak on a metagame and I hope we as a community can give a little bit of leeway in that regard. If there's a council member that truly isn't qualified to be there I trust them to be able to introspect and leave on their own, but if there are genuine concerns about a specific council member you can reach out to me and I'll hear out your concerns and confront or defend them if necessary.
This is going to get slightly off-topic from the survey results but we also can't just add anyone who does well in tours to council. Sometimes people are new to contributing to a metagame in a structural way, or there are behavioural or maturity concerns. As much as I'd like to create the most skilled council of all time, that shouldn't come at the cost of other important qualities because shit's gonna hit the fan. That said I've recently resolved to better guide people who need guidance. Ideally good players turn into good contributors and then become qualified for council on their own. Obviously not everyone is interested in being a serious contributor or growing out of what they're doing now, but at least things like structured discussion, respectful communication, and using proper channels can be taught. I've already been more proactive in reaching out to people to gently nudge them in the right direction, and I plan to do more of that.
Re: Survey and structure
There were multiple people who expressed not liking the survey, not liking that we're doing a survey at all, or not liking some of the questions that showed up on the survey. I'm sorry that people felt wronged by the tiering survey and are concerned with us polling community opinion. There seems to have been a bit of a sentiment that we're holding a survey specifically to justify tiering action, I can guarantee you that's not the case. Obviously from the fact that there's no tiering action now, but also we're going to always do at least 2 but ideally 3 surveys a year with similar timings (at least after PL and WC), so you can rest assured that we didn't insert this survey arbitrarily.
To address the actual concerns, some people were confused about the inclusion of certain pokemon on the survey. The truth is that we'd rather have one too many pokemon on the survey than one too few. Worst case scenario we see a bunch of ones on a pokemon and we'll know we don't need to give it attention, which we don't think is an issue.
Lastly, a reminder that filling out surveys is entirely voluntary. If there's a question you don't think should be on the survey you're completely free to skip it, and if it's a mandatory question or you think the survey itself doesn't serve a purpose nobody is forcing you to fill out a survey at all. However much harm you think a question is doing, engaging with it in bad faith by intentionally filling out nonsense helps nobody and can only serve to make it more difficult to adequately tier SV. There will be no punishment for those who did this, but the same may not be true for future surveys.
Re: The state of SV
Some people suggested we should ban/unban something to shake things up. The game designer in me wants to agree with you but unfortunately that's not something we can justify. Tiering action will always have to follow proper reasoning and a proper process. That said, there's an alarming amount of concerns about staleness. It seems there's a portion of the community that thinks SV is structured in a way that makes it hard to build consistently or skillfully, and even less so than a year ago. There's very little I can do about this but I wanted to put it in the survey results so people have an opportunity to think about the state of SV.
Species Clause
We should remove species clause from all tiers, or add it to ORAS.
(Not a real quote but that's the gist of the comment)
We as council actually agree with this. It's no secret that Species Clause is a somewhat contentious topic and has been for a long time. ORAS has historically not had species clause, but that in and of itself doesn't justify sticking with the status quo. That's why following the next few months until at least world cup ends (if not longer) I want us to look for a conclusion one way or another. Either Species Clause is good, in which case we should add it to ORAS, or Species Clause is bad and we should consider removing it from all 1v1 gens. I recognise that this is a big undertaking and we'll need to proceed slowly and carefully. I don't have a vision for what the process will be, whether a suspect test, community vote, a vote among all old gen councils, or something else entirely. What I do know is that there will be no action without thoroughly discussing, polling community opinion, and making sure everyone (including old gens players) get an opportunity to give their opinions on the matter. You can already post about the topic on the metagame discussion thread, and I encourage you to get your opinions out. Don't feel rushed though, like I said before we will be taking our time with this.
That's all
Next survey will be after world cup, have a nice day
