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Not sure why you quoted my post then made up a quote that I didn’t say? Kind of dishonest tbh but anyways, if you actually read my post you’ll see I acknowledge people may be unhappy with the system, and if they can figure out a way to fix it for this gen then a decision should be made soon. Otherwise, if it’s not made soon, then yes wait for next gen for a more constructive overhaul. That would have been a more accurate quote other than coining the term “true usage based tiering”. Tiering based on drops only isn’t usage based tiering anyways, “true” or not (your quote). You can do it if that’s what people want, it just isn’t usage based. Yes my first post said we shouldn’t consider changes this gen, but after seeing the support for it it seems more plausible even if I think it’s ill advised. At the end of the day we play Pokémon on the internet, we can use whatever method we want that makes the majority of people happy. That’s why we can give our opinions and pool them together to see what everyone wants to do and not be scared to share them.
As I said, the entire premise of usage based tiering is flawed, which just continues to get more and more proven as time goes on and we get later into the gen. Its almost always rough for the lowest tiers, but eventually it reaches a point where even UU starts getting messed with (see: the Ttar and Excadrill situation). Again, if people want to leave the overarching problem for next gen, the least we could do is prevent the current gen's tiers from getting beaten up further. Personally I think changes should've already happened or if they are being worked on the common player should be more in light about it, but if nothing is happening in regards to how we tier, we could at least stop the current system from making itself look even worse.
My opinion on the matter as a whole is that keeping solely usage based tiering was never going to work in the long run, it has already needed a bunch of fixes and the list of problems with it just gets larger and larger. Mons used to get stuck in tiers they were terrible in or at best didnt really fit well (and still do!), but things are full on rising to tiers they dont really belong in based on the whims of singular or a few ladder players. This stems from what others have said where interest in ladder from tournament players has fallen off, especially in lower tiers like NU or PU, so statistics become less and less accurate to what the tier actually is.
I appreciate missangelic for starting this thread as it gave us a place to start talking about how we could alter the tiering system, but I feel there's an issue with people saying suggestions are "non-starters" for pretty.... crummy reasons? Ill just leave this with the people saying the problems with the system are features and not bugs, and counterpoint by saying bad features should not be in a system if they can be worked out. I dont have much else to say on this matter Ill just end this by quoting a quote that missangelic quoted.
From Monky25's Prohibiting Rises in the Final Months of the Generation during Tier Shifts post:
"Every lower tier is set to lose integral Pokemon in the final months of the generation, some suffering more than others... [Stopping rises] gives lower tiers time to take action on any last threats before the gen ends and the majority of the playerbase moves on, it’s hard to take action on old gens with the limited sample size. I also want to say we should keep drops. Why? Like said earlier it’s easier to handle drops than rises. If something mad OP drops we can just ban it, but we can’t control what rises. Drops can also help tiers. For example, NU can get a solid defensive staple in Gastrodon returning, while PU can get Guzzlord, another likely balanced Pokemon. Why gatekeep options to make these tiers better? Health of the tiers comes before some policy and tradition, all the lower tiers seek to only gain from removing rises while keeping drops near the end of the generation and I find it’s very easy to implement. Some might ask "Isn't this just another form of veto?" The difference here is that this is an objective method for stopping unwanted rises, not subjective where you have to determine whether the Pokemon is viable enough, which is the main criticism of the previously proposed veto system. Overall, removing rises from the last 2 shifts of the generation while keeping drops is the best action to take right now. It makes playing and tiering a lower tier far better at the cost of nothing. I’d hope this gets implemented very soon, before the July shifts, so we can continue to run our lower tiers and have them solved by the time the gen ends."
Was largely referring to this when I said "true usage-based tiering."
As I said, the entire premise of usage based tiering is flawed, which just continues to get more and more proven as time goes on and we get later into the gen. Its almost always rough for the lowest tiers, but eventually it reaches a point where even UU starts getting messed with (see: the Ttar and Excadrill situation). Again, if people want to leave the overarching problem for next gen, the least we could do is prevent the current gen's tiers from getting beaten up further. Personally I think changes should've already happened or if they are being worked on the common player should be more in light about it, but if nothing is happening in regards to how we tier, we could at least stop the current system from making itself look even worse.
My opinion on the matter as a whole is that keeping solely usage based tiering was never going to work in the long run, it has already needed a bunch of fixes and the list of problems with it just gets larger and larger. Mons used to get stuck in tiers they were terrible in or at best didnt really fit well (and still do!), but things are full on rising to tiers they dont really belong in based on the whims of singular or a few ladder players. This stems from what others have said where interest in ladder from tournament players has fallen off, especially in lower tiers like NU or PU, so statistics become less and less accurate to what the tier actually is.
I appreciate missangelic for starting this thread as it gave us a place to start talking about how we could alter the tiering system, but I feel there's an issue with people saying suggestions are "non-starters" for pretty.... crummy reasons? Ill just leave this with the people saying the problems with the system are features and not bugs, and counterpoint by saying bad features should not be in a system if they can be worked out. I dont have much else to say on this matter Ill just end this by quoting a quote that missangelic quoted.
You see to keep misunderstanding what I’m saying for some reason. I agree with you, it’s flawed. It’s an issue with usage based tiering. And if people want to change to something not-usage based tiering, that’s fine. I was just saying that doing what you are explaining here is not usage based tiering. That’s ok though - if that’s what people want. But please stop taking what I say out of context to make it seem like I am largely dissenting to changes at this point because it’s incorrect and no productive, and also, again, a bit dishonest.
You see to keep misunderstanding what I’m saying for some reason. I agree with you, it’s flawed. It’s an issue with usage based tiering. And if people want to change to something not-usage based tiering, that’s fine. I was just saying that doing what you are explaining here is not usage based tiering. That’s ok though - if that’s what people want. But please stop taking what I say out of context to make it seem like I am largely dissenting to changes at this point because it’s incorrect and no productive, and also, again, a bit dishonest.
My issue is that you keep bringing up that it "isn't usage based" when that doesn't really mean much at all given the circumstances. The reason I was even responding is because I was under the impression that you thought it was bad that it didn't follow the specific guidelines of usage-based tiering, and for that, I apologize. The thread was indeed initially made to propose changing the usage thresholds, but I, and many others it seems, feel the problem lies with the system itself. As I said, if we are not addressing it this gen, freezing rises would be the best option even if there's still a year left as the interest in ladders will only continue to dwindle. Again, I apologize for my misunderstanding, but I still do think the current system is flawed beyond proper repair.
I get why there’s a lot of discussion on freezing in this thread after I brought it up in the OP. It’s been a year since my original post on the tiering decay, and enough has happened to justify actually bringing it out as an option now that time has passed.
We’re 4-8 weeks away from the new format that’s being used for VGC for this year. Champions isn’t like BDSP where it’s seeing no serious consideration for competitive play by its developers, and I intuit that some people are not going to want to stick with playing SV when Champions releases. That leaves every SV lower tier with a limited amount of time to get their end-of-gen tierlists in a state that’s as best as possible, or else they’ll end up kicking their problems down the road to a smaller old gen council. I don’t think it’s realistic to pretend SV has over a year and a half left in the tank when ladder activity is reaching new lows for just about every tier, rises continue to disrupt stability, and there’s lack of agreement on internal tier issues following surveys. One of my most recent posts in this thread outlines all the changes that have happened since July 2024 alone, and every SV lower tier community can look forward to wading through all that tiering decay again while activity is at its lowest, which is going to make ladders even less reliable as a snapshot of the way tiers are played competitively.
From a lot of the posts in this thread, it seems like the consensus is that there should be at least some reform of this system. I’m personally not in agreement with abolishing ladder usage-based tiering (or rises) or hybridizing it with viability or tournament usage, but I think getting those on the table and actually under a critical lens is important so that the atmosphere surrounding the tiering of Gen 10 isn’t as confused.
Also, I do believe this system can be reformed to be better. The point of having discussions about this side of tiering policy shouldn’t be to shut down entirely and accept a more flawed system just because its proposed replacements would still have flaws. The way tiering is set up is arbitrary in the first place - 4.52% makes no sense out of context or to outsiders and it’s still arbitrary at its core. There’s also always going to be users who have a kneejerk reaction to any kind of proposed changes on the grounds that they’d want to tear apart any change, but they don’t have much to say about the intentional choices we make to support the system we have now.
I think the best thing is to pay attention and keep discussing ways we can improve tiering policy to work better for lower tiers and their stability instead of pretending that the Gen 8 updates got it right the first time, let alone formalized much of a process for how to end a generation. I know other users in this thread have raised issues about parts of the tiering process, but the one that’s still untouched from my OP and follow-up that I really want to dig into is the frequency of changes. I think the frequency of changes is what is disruptive to lower tiers, and having too high of a frequency of changes leads to the system being easier to manipulate over shorter periods of time.
Last part, but I want to echo the call to freeze rises. Only a few weeks or months until Champions is going to be a really quick turnaround, and most tiers would benefit from not losing staples in this upcoming shift.
hi hello, im ming, i like ru, i started in ru, have since branched out a little bit everywhere and as such, have had a lot of first hand experience with rises/shifts and how they impact metas and communities so I want to give a bit of my opinions here. I've already shared most of these in rucord and a lot of similar sentiments have already been expressed in this thread but I think we're starting to lose the plot a little bit so I want to hopefully try and get that back on track.
Firstly I want to just reiterate that the original, primary purpose of this thread was NOT TO UPEND USAGE BASED TIERING!!! Beyond talking over the consequences our current system has had on various tiers over the years, the legitimacy of freezing rises, or trying to put forth new methods of tiering all together, missangelics original proposal was to quite simply bump the threshold for rises. It's something that we did before because of these EXACT same complaints and it's something I think makes sense to do again at this point in time. 4.52% (our current benchmark) gives you a 50% chance to see x mon in 15 games, whereas the proposed 6.78% is that same 50% chance but this time in a 10 game sample size. I will admit that this is a somewhat slippery slope as these are completely arbitrary benchmarks and could be abused if taken to the extreme. With that being said, I do think 50% in 10 games is a healthy number and would lessen how "disruptive" shifts can be but more importantly, and this is my big chagrin with the current system, lessens the impact that individual users can have on shifts.
For this next part I will be referencing two instances specifically: uberfiend and this thread from december of last year. For those of my nu enjoyers, or people who have been around long enough to remember the hitmontop incident, you should already be familiar enough with uberfiend. For those of you who are NOT familiar with uberfiend here's a bit of context. I have been around on this site for a long time. I really started picking up mons around the back end of gen 6/start of gen 7 and have racked up a fair number of games amongst generations since then. Grand total on my most used alt, thesky12321, lands me at 14,446 games played across the entire lifetime of like a 13 almost 14 year old account. uberfiend has played 14,074 games of gen 9 nu. He is one of the most dedicated mons players I have ever seen with an unbelievable commitment to the nu ladder, reflected by that unbelievable quantity of games played. The uberteam has gone through various iterations with a couple of them included below, but the main mon I want to bring up is braviary who uberfiend basically single handedly rose to nu.
(the more iconic versions of these teams had a diancie > dudunsparce and reuni respectively)
While we don't have usage stats for individual accounts and their impact, anyone who has actually meaningfully engaged with the NU ladder this generation can tell you about uberfiend and the very obvious influence he has as far as ladder stats should be concerned. Even for those not plugged into NU, the impact he exerts can be SEEN when braviary jumped from ZU all the way to NU during the january shifts of this year (its second stint in NU mind you, the first of which was also fueled by uberteam inflation). This is where the improved usage cutoff comes into play. Raising the threshold means just naturally theres a higher barrier to entry for mons to jump tiers which makes it less likely for one person to be able to single-handedly raise mons. It is worth mentioning that the proposed 6.78% threshold actually would not have stopped braviary from rising, this is again a testament to the sheer volume of games uberfiend is putting up, but it COULD still be relevant for other mons. Take for example Hariyama who at this point is the only non NU mon included on these teams (btw theres probably an argument for uberfiend being responsible for decidueye and plume being NU as well but thats much less definitive so ehhhh). In the most recent shift stats (february 2026) yama is sitting at just over 4% usage which although still a bit away from the 4.52% cutoff, is not NEARLY as far away as it would be in a more active ladder like OU and is, at least imo, legitimately at risk to rise considering uberfiends past trends.
This is all to say, that there is still merit to implementing a new threshold as a RIGHT NOW type of solution. At this point I'm more or less finished with my thoughts on the initial purpose of this thread. The TL;DR is I think the higher rise/drop threshold is a good idea and there is ample opportunity and reason to implement it during this current generation.
The next point I want to bring up is like a somewhat already resolved point of contention which leads into a different but also important talking point. During the backend of last year, OU experienced an issue with bots spamming the ladder with some nonsense triple weather team that put guys like torkoal and excadrill at risk of rising to OU and opened up a conversation about bots and their place on ladder in general. At the end of the day those guys did NOT end up rising (ik uu enjoyers were shivering in their timbers when they saw how close drill was) and we were promised that a "technical fix" was in the works by the tiering leads. The issue here is a similar one to the uberfiend situation in the previous section where one person, or in this case a group of bots, with an inflated games played total can artificially move shifts in a way that is counterproductive to the spirit of usage based tiering, which I interpret as giving the community as a whole the opportunity to affect Smogon tiers. However in this case, I'm more or less cool with how things resolved. An issue was presented, issue turned out to be a nothing burger hurrah (unless you were in the group which thought the blim bots inflated dozo's usage to keep him in ou levels idk what to tell yall), and a solution was proposed. The point that I'd like to move onto now is the lack of transparency regarding tiering.
During the close of this thread, which I mentioned earlier, shiloh referenced that there was some technical solution that was kept in the wings until necessary. In this specific instance, most people (myself included) will probably be unable to understand the exact specifics behind the technical solution that the programmer friends behind ladder and usage stats cooked up. But even if such a solution is in an early developmental state or still needs testing, I see no benefit to keeping those mechanisms hidden. Senior Staff have always acted off a "need-to-know" basis which makes a lot of sense as far as protecting confidentiality regarding user safety and such, but, when it comes to tiering which is by its nature a community based effort, this is a different matter. Ishtar also touches a bit upon the topic of transparency among tiering staff in this post above:
I'm chiming in here after months of posting in this thread and seeing discussions brewing to ask tiering leaders about the plan to change the tiering system in WW. I understand that this is very preemptive still with SV still existing for quite a while, but me and other leaders put in a lot of work (before I stepped down from PUTL) to improve on the system. This improved system was never discussed publicly and after I stepped down the discussion was taken over by another TL who ended up getting perma'd. I'd hope that meaningful progress made in good faith by many of us didn't get totally lost in these changes.
Months after this discussion, the conversation of people wanting changes would randomly pop up, and I always had to give the answer: "stuff was being worked on behind the scenes", which was true while I was TL and allegedly after too. I feel like the common user has been left in the dark about this and seeing so many posts still looking for solutions while there was already a framework in place in regards to these changes seems bad. For that reason I'm asking whoever runs this nowadays if we can please get an update on my thread and the changes coming to tiering come WW, and to also consider a lot of the points here in regards to stopping individual account's influence to the process.
Even just knowing that these changes are actually still coming, even if too vague for my liking, would serve of great help to anyone wanting change in this thread I'm sure!
As someone who has spent a lot of time with the PU community and has discussed the issues of usage based tiering with ishtar at length in the past, being told to essentially trust the process where "stuff was being worked on behind the scenes" was something that I heard firsthand and just took at face value for a while. But even since the start of this thread, its been almost a year with no news from the team about potential amendments to the system beyond Marty popping in out of left field with a "freezing rises is now on the table" message. More recently I've talked to etern about these transparency issues and he can share his opinions as well if so inclined, but basically I got the impression that things ARE still moving behind the scenes but were severely limited by the banning of the former SS member in charge of the project. While I don't expect like a weekly report on this type of thing, at least some sort of place where we as community members can look to see our leadership working towards a solution, I think, would give a lot of faith back to what has become a largely disillusioned population when it comes to how usage based tiering fixes have been handled behind closed doors. TL;DR there should be more avenues of communication between tiering leads and the communities impacted by their decision making.
That is all, thank you to those who took the time to read, shoutouts missangelic for opening this thread in the first place and keepin it bumpin, ishtar for her continued efforts to improve tiering, and Shengineerloocas13 and bricknermon for helping keep the uberfiend timeline straight, I look forward to what the future holds not only for gen 10 but hopefully the remainder of what we have in gen 9
