You can make arguments that Dugtrio should be banned, but the metagame has no duty to make the mons named (or any mon or any strategy) better/viable.
I don't like this line of argument because it sidesteps the intention to dunk on the author for the literal meaning of their post (especially if the argument is poorly formulat, and from a status-quo position. If any position needs to be given the benefit of the doubt, it should not be the status quo understanding of the tier, because there are a million biases that favor that which is already known and celebrated. I also think this kind of argument can be used to easily reduce any argument for change without engaging with the feeling behind it, even if it is explained. Same goes for the other responses, but I'm only replying Kollin, because I feel it's done in good faith.
The strongest Spikes teams in the metagame are Aero and Dugtrio Spikes builds. Every once in a while, a team from another style becomes popular, but the most centralizing and populous of builds tend to be from those two styles. I would argue that the builds that are the exceptions prove the rule in aiming to counter those builds. Dugtrio gatekeeps a lot of mons from being viable. I'm not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing, but I can say it significantly reduces tier-diversity, and as someone who enjoys building, I find the hyper centralization and tendency to ban offense tools and overlook problematic defense tools to always favor increased centralization. So to flip this logic around, why do we owe it to Dugtrio builds to keep them viable in ADV when the status quo is banning Dugtrio across tiers? Parallel argument to the Speed Pass ban, rather than targetting the most problematic elements ||Smear Pass, that some dickhead unbanned, and Jask||.
Dug doesn’t gate keep these from OU at all. Kou should just be ou now tbh and the rest wouldn’t be regardless of dug ban. Their issues are much bigger than dugtrio
This is also a bad argument because Raikou needs to be paired with one of DD Mence(/Aero), P2, or some kind of anti-revenging tech (Salac, well-played Sub) in order to adequately punish or prevent Dugtrio from farming common builds, or otherwise, the builder needs to accept that in some games, Raikou will just be Dug bait. E.g. unreliable suicide-lead Dug-off builds or hard match-up dividing. I think we can generally agree that Salac is not a panacea for Kou's woes and that Sub isn't either, and hard match-up division can just mean your team bricks into certain comps with unsupported threats. You could argue that Blissey doesn't gatekeep Moltres from OU nor does Dol to Loom by similar logic, but that sidesteps the idea that these mons are inherently more limited and see significantly less standard play. The question should not be, "Can we make these mons work in a limited capacity in the tier as is," but rather, "Do we want a tier in which the mons in question are more capable? Would that be more fun, interactive, or rewarding in the game or builder?"
Arena Trap (Dugtrio) is not broken and would have been banned by now if it was problematic as it is in later generations
As a former student of BKC's videos and posts, I've learned that you often have a large and loud demographic who will argue against the most obvious shit because they like it. Mons isn't a science -- it's an art -- and what you consider 'broken' or 'problematic' comes down to preference and feel. Can you adapt to this metagame with Dugtrio with a comparatively diverse range of styles? Sure. Does the fact that a tier is playable with the inclusion of a certain mon mean that the state of the tier is ultimately desirable? I would argue this doesn't naturally follow. Depending on how you come down on the Speed Pass issue, for example, you could argue the same logic until last year could be applied in favor of keeping it, or you could argue that justice eventually prevails. Either way, bans don't happen until they happen -- in an instant. Just because someone hasn't convinced you yet that a mon isn't ban-worthy doesn't mean that there won't come a time when you share that opinion or that you wouldn't enjoy the tier that follows a ban.
people like to look at Arena Trap’s own tiering history rather than ADV’s development and often fail to see the whole picture. Dugtrio itself is very prone to take being advantage of once it’s made even a single trap, and while multiple traps in a game varies in how common an occurrence that is, Arena Trap simply does not enable broken cheese to the extent we’ve seen in other generations
While Dugtrio doesn't enable what you might call 'broken cheese,' it enables Recover spam stalls that are broken and can be cheesy AND can compensate for the abuse you mentioned with relatively robust builds. Dugtrio removes the counters to certain extreme defensive builds. Again, while you
can build for these match-ups, the thing that makes these teams so annoying is that Dugtrio disables so many would-be threats, preventing players from using them. The problem isn't that Dugtrio feasts on every build in the tier, becoming so oppressive that it is optimal to bring Dugtrio in every game (although ABR made a point to bring it in almost every game in a winning Invitational run); the problem is that it does this to so many mons and teams. The fact that it doesn't autowin against any legacy/status quo (Dugtrio-adapted) styles makes it easy to talk about how it isn't oppressive. Imagine an ADV where Dug didn't exist, but we discussed introducing it now. Legacy is not a meaningful defense: just say you like how things are, and that you enjoy the current tier balance instead -- if you've done your due diligence and considered the alternative.
Banning Dugtrio would cause a major shakeup to the tier. The fallout could take years to resolve and finally settle into a stable metagame. One which we may like less than the current one. ADV has seen an explosion in games played since 2023. If the metagame devolves into a mess and players leave because they don't like the new state of the metagame, there's no telling if ADV will ever recapture the popularity and momentum it has in current day. This cannot fly as it would really hurt Ad Revenue. Smogon Metagames are designed to maximise engagement to increase Ad Revenue. I was told this by a higher up directly in private. Please think of the Shareholders.
For the people who aren't interpretting the first half of this ironically, I would like to say that metagame stability is something that cannot be understood in absolute terms. How 'stable' does a tier have to be before it's stable enough? When we declare it dead? Is complete stabilization the goal, or would we like some instability baked in to have an evolving tier? I understand we don't want a tier to become unrecognizable and impossible to play for those who take a break for a year or so, but at the same time, we don't want a metagame to become boring to a playerbase after a few years. That is something that needs to be taken into the calculations here, even for shareholders. But also, I don't think that the tier itself deserves all or even most of the credit for its popularity. The people who have played and promoted it deserve that, and we need to have conversations about and with these people rather than abstracting away into some vague conservative notion of representing a majority opinion when the majority hasn't really had a seat at the table in these conversations. That part of the argument is definitely weak, and I'm also not tryna hear how the 'big guys upstairs' have their tiering policy that they got from the top of the mountain to teach us 'right' from wrong. Especially if they're gonna be undemocratic about it and get butthurt when people mentions their 6-figure salaries and delete posts.
