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Format Discussion Random Battles Metagame Discussion Thread (Current topic: What do we do about Gen 5 Rands?)

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Random Battle Lead
Hello, and welcome to the metagame discussion thread! How this thread works will be a bit layered: it's a place to generally post commentary on the development and play of randomized formats, but it's also occasionally going to be where large public discussions of importance will occur.

This thread will be moderated strictly; remain respectful to all parties involved when discussing, or your post may be edited or deleted.

IF YOUR POST WOULD BE A SUGGESTION FOR IMPROVING ONE OR MORE SETS:
Try the set suggestion threads for Gen 9 Singles, Past Gens, Doubles, Free-For-All, or Champions!

Past threads that would have occurred here had this thread existed then:
Gen 8 Revamp and Gen 4/5 Stealth Rock announcement thread
Unown announcement thread
 
First off, I'd like us to primarily discuss Gen 5 Random Battle. Gen 4 just had the result of its suspect test for Stealth Rock, that being keeping rocks banned. Gen 5 is in much the same boat as Gen 4 in most respects, but while we're waiting for Gen 5 Open to finish, we have a few things to iron out about it in regard to Stealth Rock and sleep:


1. Should we suspect Stealth Rock in Gen 5 once Gen 5 Open concludes?

-The result of the Gen 4 suspect is shaping up to be a landslide in favor of Ban Rocks. While it would be good due process to repeat the suspect for Gen 5, that runs into another issue: the longer we take settling the Stealth Rock issue, the longer it will take for the council to be able to take action on Gen 5 Sleep. As such, I'm leaving this open ended; if the community desires, we can just skip straight to figuring out what to do about sleep moves. Perhaps we could do a council vote after the conclusion of this discussion and the Gen 5 Open, rather than a suspect test, taking all of the input we get here into account. Going for these faster methods would let us move on to the next topic in a timely manner, but could remove some agency from the community that y'all may wish to keep. I'll leave it up to y'all. Speaking of sleep, though:

2. What kind of action would be considered acceptable for sleep in gen 5?
-Whenever we do get to it, would y'all be comfortable with a simple council vote, or would it require another suspect test? We, more than anything, would prefer not to unilaterally take action on something that would cause people to riot again, after last time. As such, we're going to start a precedent of polling the community here for these kinds of things before taking council action one way or the other. Either option maintains the chance of sleep not getting banned, of course, for better or worse.

(Clarifying question: Why are we going to look at sleep in Gen 5, exactly, and what are the rough pros and cons?)
-Sleep as a mechanic, in 5 more than any other generation, is particularly strong for the simple reason of sleep turns resetting to 0 on switch-out. For some, this is enough to call for its removal from the format outright so that teams do not commonly have the ability to render a Pokemon completely useless; these people believe that Gen 5 Random Battles would be more competitive, fun, and balanced were sleep to simply not exist. However, Random Battles, by principle, often does not wish to make sets worse on purpose if other options exist. Additionally, some Pokemon such as Parasect may become so-called "shitmons" without sleep in their repertoire, and some would really prefer not to have more cases like Gen 9 Luvdisc or Gen 4 Ditto where the Pokemon is already at level 100 but still performs terribly.
 
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I'd be down for another suspect for rocks, I think they feel distinctly different in 4 vs 5 so I say bring the ladder suspect about the instant the open ends. That being said, there has been little to no backlash that I've seen so maybe it also makes sense to just leave it alone.

In regards to sleep, fine with council vote as suspect feels unnecessary. I don't feel anything needs to be done about sleep though, obviously its super strong, moreso that other gens, but its not super centralising and game breaking like rocks were in 4.

Parasect argument is whatever, same as bastiodon for the gen 4 rocks ting.
 
I don't think we need a rocks suspect for 5. 4 had a vocal minority of enthusiasts who requested the suspect, only for the wider community to come out in support of the change. 5 hasn't even had said vocal minority so I feel a suspect would be even more in favour of keeping the ban. Suspect just feels like wasted time

As for sleep, I'm ambivalent. 5 sleep feels like 1 sleep in that you plan for it to be an OHKO and strategise around it. Not a good feeling and makes sleep users strong, but the effect is the same no matter what your team is, so it doesn't have the same level-warping effect rocks has. That being said, banning it on account of being an unfun mechanic sits comfortably with me. Depending on community input, vote or suspect seems fine.

I'd also like to propose that if we do a drastic change that upsets level balance, we double up on the volatility and do a level shift. It's something we considered doing in SV to fix Luvdisc but decided it would mess with level balance too much to be worthwhile. If level balance is already upset, what's the harm in upsetting it some more?
For those at home, a level shift is where we decrease the levels of all/most mons by some amount, so that the new highest level is below 100, and further balancing can bring them back up to a new equilibrium. It has problems with being an overall crude metric that hurts bulky mons differently to aggressive ones, and high levels differently to low ones, but the concept is you then allow level balancing to fix things up over time. Ideally I'd like to see levels look more like champions rands than current, but that would require a full rework that takes way too much effort, and would absolutely certainly be unbalanced for quite a while.

One thing we might be able to do to help move the balance along faster is host a ladder tour for BW after the level shift is over, in order to drum up some interest and get more high level games being played, but I don't know how much effect that would have
 
i would be in favour of running a similar suspect for rocks in gen 5 just to implement equal treatment to how the change was dealt with in gen4, even though the community surrounding this gen is probably less vocal (its kinda hard to be as vocal as some of those gen4 yappers reasonable debaters though). i don't think sleep is game breaking or that it by itself makes games uncompetitive, although maybe it got stronger now since the bugs with sleep powder don't have to worry as much about hazards. level balancing should help over time though so increased activity on ladder during a suspect test would probably benefit the format regardless of how the vote comes out. so personally i'd run another suspect for rocks very soon after gen5 open and not be too inclined to do anything about sleep
 
Run a suspect 60% to ban rocks. It would be ridiculous to change the status quo without a suspect and then run a suspect with the change being considered the norm. If it really is so uncontroversial, why wouldn't we establish that through the normal process? Sleep is the more obviously unhealthy mechanic and should also be looked at imo. Ladder tour would be really cool
 
wha- oh, i guess i did play this a bit for wcor. i'll take a crack at it and see what i can do.

i think rocks deserves a sus the way monai said, community input is absolutely key and the main reason bw and dpp saw a change so sudden was because of wcor being around the corner, now these formats've had a slight bit more time to marinate and people can take their thoughts in. as for me? ehhh i'd keep rocks banned, mainly cuz rocks are able to, to put it in a word, "skew" the levels of pokemon based on how weak or resistant they are to it, articuno was an example brought by council but i can also see volcarona, yanmega, or charizard, all of them actively hindered by their quad-rock weakness becoming a 50% damage expense just for switching in, where they don't get to do very little, whereas in games where the stones can't be set at all, they get to thrive and often become the main threats for their games, it's a difficult power imbalance and you can't make a pokemon the same level as you'd do without them existing, because if rocks get set up you're playing a 5v6, not fun when you or your opponent gets to click a move at any moment in any turn of the game and it gets to actively demolish your team little by little, stone by stone.

anyways, sleep, something i might need at this point as i am writing this post at 5 in the morning. but my own sleep deprivations aside, let's focus on that.
something that a lot of tiers like to do regarding sleep when it becomes too overtly problematic is to ban the inaccurate/more widely spread ones.
here's a good example: sleep powder is pretty common on a ton of pokemon, rlly good move yk 75% accurate, some people would go as far as to run a wide lens so it becomes 82% all of that is an issue immediately in the adverb followed by an adjective, "pretty common", and now that we've established the issue, let's see how we can come to fix it.
if we think, as a community, that sleep-inducing moves are an issue, i think it's in our best interest to start looking at the least accurate ones, see if they cause issues, and move up the ladder of accuracy until you see it's no longer an issue.

MovesAccuracy
Yawn--% (recieves the Drowsy status condition before falling asleep at the end of the next turn)
Spore100%
Dark Void80%
Sleep Powder, Lovely Kiss75%
Hypnosis60%
Sing, Grass Whistle55%
Relic Song10% (20% with Serene Grace)
yawn is an exception here, since it is learned by a wide variety of pokemon. however you don't get affected by sleep from it, you get affected by a completely unique condition exclusive to yawn, so it is clearly a different case.

all of these are worth looking into, this is bw sleep we're talking about, the gen that resets your sleep turns after switching out, so of course sleep will be something that is worth looking into.

the conclusion
​
the main thing i want ppl to draw from this are the stats from sleep and the argument against rocks, which i don't feel like recalling because it is 6 in the morning. if i were to do this on my own i would keep stealth rock banned, alongside banning sleep powder, hypnosis, sing, grass whistle, dark void, and maybe yawn. i don't consider any other moves problematic on their own in a vacuum, however things can change as the format progresses. the main idea is we get to keep sleep to only a handful of pokemon: :smeargle::breloom::amoonguss::parasect: with spore, and :jynx::meloetta: with their signatures (i kept darkrai out of the list cuz it'd be busted if it was the only mon out of like seven to get a sleep move).

anyway i think that's it, spoke ab this mainly with As de Corazones so if you have any complaints you know who to talk to.
 
What would people think of a sleep ban that excluded mons that would be in danger of hitting level 100 if they didn’t run sleep? So basically a sleep ban that excludes mons that are already level 90+ with sleep (Parasect, Smeargle, Carnivine).

If this extended to Yawn it could also include Swalot (maybe others? not sure if I'm forgetting any). Also Meloetta could keep running its sig move.

Gen 5 sleep is overpowered but doesn’t have the same balance issues as rocks, so that kind of complex ban might be feasible.
 
I am in favor of outright returning rocks to the tier. Never liked this ban in gen 4 nor do it like it here, and I don't think randomized formats need this type of tiering action save for very, very extreme cases, and sr is not one of those in my opinion.

As for sleep, most sleep users suck. It really is only good when paired with strong set up moves like the various qders or darkrai. I think just further nerfing the level of those few problem mons would be enough, but i do not know if RB guidelines allow that. I would not be in favor of an outright ban however.
 
Because Wigglytuff has stated that he will abstain in the vote unless we do this, I'd like to make the official statement that the council has severely misstepped in banning stealth rock without consulting the community first, and that we will not hold suspect tests like this where the element in question hasn't been actually there for months ever again.

Realistically, I'd rather we didn't hold any other suspect tests. Rands doesn't really jive with them in pure concept.

Yes, if we hold a gen 5 rocks suspect right now, it will inherently be flawed because rocks haven't been there for months. Many will be not adequately informed of what Rocks Gen 5 was like. Even those who were informed will have to dig up deep memories from times past to compare.

This is why we made this thread, actually: to ask the community for better alternatives. I'll ask y'all one more time: do we really need to hold this suspect, flawed as it may be, after we already did so for gen 4? If the answer is "yes", we'll still do it, of course. This could perhaps even be solved with a community survey form, if we wanted.

The suspect in Gen 4, as well as what we're doing right now for Gen 5, have been danage control and band-aid fixes to our past mistakes as a council. We aim to do better and communicate more transparently using this thread in the future. We will not make such hefty sweeping changes again without proper warning and discussion.

We will make our decision on what to do with gen 5 rocks within the week. If you have thoughts on what path we take, please say so now.
 
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I appreciate the acknowledgement. Some council members & staff members were continuing to justify this fiasco, others were silent, some were sympathetic, so it's good to get an official, unified response.

The ideal solution would be to
1) Restart entirely. Undo the ban, then start the process again but correctly this time. I assume this is not on the table, so
2) Create a list of players that demonstrated activity and skill in both Rocksless and Rocks Gen 5, and conduct a vote from there. Such a list would most likely be too small to get a good vote in, so
3) Suspect test.

Normally, a suspect is indicated when there is significant concern about whether a metagame element is broken. This part seems to be satisfied. However, there is another reason to suspect: compensation for serious procedural errors. If the Council is not willing to nullify and start over, then at the least, the community is entitled to an opportunity to unilaterally overrule the Council if they so choose.

When similar instances happened in the past, a compensatory suspect test wasn't even close to sufficient. There were instant reversals and resignations/demotions, and those are only the 2 examples that popped to my head. If all that happens is a suspect test, the Rands Council is getting off easier than it should.

I've quit because arguing all this shit has killed any enjoyment I got out of this game. Normally, I don't mind arguing for what's right, but what really got to me this time is how much mockery I faced from Rands Auth and community alike. I don't care about that by itself; I've spent half my time on here on the outs with Rands Auth, and I'm a proud recipient of the Amaranth Award for what I told the captains of Team Spain to do. And if it was because I have a ridiculous opinion on Stealth Rocks, that's OK too.

But I've come to think that the mockery doesn't have much to do with that. Rather, it's because I (and Texas and DUC, who also received similar treatment) dared to demand the Council do better. I'm entirely uninterested in being a part of a community where that's the prevalent attitude. I've always been pretty disconnected on the social side, but I've spoken to others and they call the Rands community the worst they've been in on this site.

So I really do appreciate the acknowledgement. I get to quit knowing that while I'm a dickhead, at least I was right here. Some of you shouldn't think the latter.
 
Gen5 sleep needs to be nuked ngl. It's as good as playing 5v6 and leaves too much upto sleep rng that can be exploited

I was probably one of the earliest to want gen5 rocks banned and I still standby that... But I also wouldn't mind a suspect test since the ban was a simultaneous council decision with gen4, which alr got a suspect test so might asw keep things even
 
I'd be down for another suspect for rocks, I think they feel distinctly different in 4 vs 5 so I say bring the ladder suspect about the instant the open ends. That being said, there has been little to no backlash that I've seen so maybe it also makes sense to just leave it alone.

In regards to sleep, fine with council vote as suspect feels unnecessary. I don't feel anything needs to be done about sleep though, obviously its super strong, moreso that other gens, but its not super centralising and game breaking like rocks were in 4.

Parasect argument is whatever, same as bastiodon for the gen 4 rocks ting.
I stand by my initial thoughts
 
After playing a decent sample size of games in open, here are my thoughts:

Sleep, or rather hypnosis, is so lame and singlehandedly makes the tier way less fun. The reason I’m singling out hypnosis is because of the accuracy and the distribution. The 60% chance to hit means that both clicking and playing around hypnosis is pretty much a coin flip. With spore, you at least can play around it by sacking a mon to sleep. With hypnosis, not only are you unsure if the opposing pokemon has it, but you also might be punished by a miss, which happens 40% of the time. This is ridiculous and unplayable. Sleep powder is somewhat dumb as well, but at least it's significantly more accurate than hypnosis and distribution is limited to grass types, which are generally easier to deal with than hypnosis users, who are often fast normal types, which already bring a lot of matchup variance. If council is unwilling to ban sleep as a whole, which I could see reason for, please at least consider banning hypnosis, this move has been terrorizing me since some of my earliest days playing competitive pokemon and I want that shit gone.

Edit: I was so pissed that I forgot to write anything about rocks. I think they're fine either way as the level balancing/matchup variance argument still stands but offense in bw is broken anyways so rocks is at least less game changing compared to DPP
 
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Suspect test rocks, I feel it's the natural conclusion with how everything has been handled, I assume you understand since there was one for gen 4. I don't think you can realistically assume how people feel based on how vocal they are gripping months and months later. It is the natural tendency to adapt and the gen 4 side was also drowning any other noise out from an outsiders perspective.

As for sleep, I think a council vote makes the most sense by far. Ideally, putting out polling to the player-base and then if you see a significant enough amount of people worried about it that's when the council should vote. If the player-base is more split, then a suspect of course could still be appropriate.
 
Hi! As a lover of BW Randbats and someone who's played it for some years now, I feel very strongly that we should suspect or just outright ban sleep in this Gen. It's something we've seen banned in BW OU because of the incredibly oppressive nature of BW sleep mechanics, and it's an unbelievably powerful and inconsistent mechanic in Randbats.

As for the Rocks element, I personally want Rocks to remain a part of BW Randbats, but I recognize and respect that many others do not. A suspect test here seems wise.
 
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