Firstly please stop bringing up obscure counters, and stuff like:
Except for every special attacker in the tier, which any offensive or balance or even semi-stall team have some of. Stuff like zard y, mega gardy and lando i.
Oh wait, you're gonna say the special attackers don't count because they don't completely shut down bp 100% of the time, right? Well too bad that's not how the game works. You people complain that bp is match up based, but it seems you want it to be match up based, because you invalidate any pokemon that doesn't beat the entire bp team before the match starts. Zard y doesn't count, before he doesn't give you free ELO against bp teams just by being on the team, he actually requires a bit of skill and prediction to win.
The problem is that smogon is only willing to accept the existance of bp as long as it is a non factor to the metagame in the first place. It's fine only if every high level team beats it by default without even having to prepare against it on teambuilding. If there is a chance that the bp player can outsmart the "high level team" using spore or good switches, then bp is perceived as overpowered. Well, too bad, but bp is a playstyle, and it's already part of the metagame, like it or not. What you are trying to do is to custom tailor the metagame to your tastes and eliminate any playstyle you don't want to see being part of it. And that has one name, as defined by the famous play to win article: scrubism. And that's the opposite of being a competitive player.
Also, for the guy who said prediction is not skill, the entire chess community would like to have a word with you. Prediction is a skill and it's part of most competitiive games. It's about knowing the metagame enough to know what players are most likely to do, and manipulating them to do what you want. Poker players do that all the time, as do chess players and any sort of competitive player.
I already posted about the special attackers, post to refute that if you're gonna post. They're not autowinning. Oh, and please, insulting the integrity of competitive players isn't getting you anywhere.
Okay, so here's the method I think is best for dealing with this (I don't think anyone sane at this point is against a BP nerf):
Ban multiple Baton Pass users on the same team
This option is very popular, and for good reason. The goal is just to limit the amount of Baton Pass users on one team to the point where full BP is impossible. This solves the problem pretty easily. I think the largest advantage to this option is simplicity, as it avoids clashing with any legitimate, normal, non-broken uses of BP. For example:
1) Stored Power + BP
What's inherently bad about running a Pokemon with Stored Power + BP? So, you mean to tell me that CM + Stored Power + BP + filler Espeon is broken on its own? I really don't think this is the case, nor the entire source of the problem. You can run a BP team and get as many sweeps with Sylveon's Hyper Voice as Espeon's Stored Power depending on the match, from my experience. Should we ban both? Or both together? I don't think so.
2) Speed Boost + BP
This is one of the worst options IMO, because there is nothing inherently bad about Speed Boost + BP Scolipede, the use of which could be considered legitimate paired with slower physically offensive Pokemon that are vulnerable to revenge kills. It is partially the source of why full BP is so ridiculous, but this option is not worse sacrificing the legitimate uses.
3) Magic Bounce + BP
This option just denies Espeon a very good, legitimate option for it while, as BKC has stated, not even fixing the problem; BP wouldn't be quite as good, but it would still be a terror against virtually any team without a phazer, most significantly offense. It'd still be just as cheap against these teams, and they could even just run Mega Absol and still keep their Magic Bounce + BP benefits. Banning the Magic Bounce user with BP is really just a band-aid, the playstyle would still be cancerous, and you kill Espeon's viability completely.
4) Speed Boost + Magic Bounce + BP
The main reason that I'm against this option is because it's unnecessarily complex. So you ban the combination of two abilities on two Pokemon with the move Baton Pass on the same team? That's ridiculously convoluted, and also says that me using, say, dual screens Espeon and then BPing out to Scolipede to get off boosts more easily to pass is an illegitimate strategy. It's not the greatest concept anyone's ever thought of, but that's saying this strategy is illegitimate/broken.
With these ideas refuted, what is the cap we should choose? There have been numbers all over the place, from 1 to 4 to the whole team. If you only a place a cap that 4, 5, or all members of the team can have it, you don't actually fix the problem. To test this, I decided to create a BP team with the given amounts (4 BP mons, 5 BP mons), and then just stick offensive crap on. Scoli + Espy + Vap + Sylv + Smeargle is still cheap as all hell, you don't even need the last slot for your BP team. If you forfeit Smeargle the chain can
still work with the Scoli + Espy + Vap + Sylv BPing core. Sure it's a bit worse, but it still works in basically the same fashion and you don't really fix the problem. 1 BP user per team is too extreme, IMO. With that a cap of 2 or 3 users seems optimal. My concern about a 3-mon cap stems from Srn9130's post:
Srn9130 said:
All right, I've been hearing a lot of people saying that limiting the users of baton pass to 3 per team is what we should do.
However, would that even change the match up vs. stall?
In theory, as long as you have a spore smeargle for quagsire, wouldn't even 3 users of baton pass be able to totally beat the crap out of stall just like 6 users could? It's just a hypothesis, but if you were to just run Scolipede (perhaps with megahorn for darks, with iron defense) and Espeon (stored power, baton pass, sub, cm) and Smeargle (quiver, spore, baton pass, ingrain) how are you changing this crucial match up at all? It feels to me that you can just easily beat the crap out of stall, and such a respectable style doesn't deserve to drop in popularity just because only 3 pokemon are necessary to have a guaranteed win against any defensive team at all. What will stall teams be able to do against a simple core of Scolipede+Espeon+Smeargle?
So I actually decided to test 3-mon BP vs a bog-standard stall team. Basically what happened in that match was CM Clef just kinda destroyed the Scoli + Espy + Smeargle team. I figured out with some others that a double-boosting Mr. Mime with Encore lets you get around this and w/e else stall has to threaten you. But even then, now you have really nothing to deal with offense. So basically a 3-mon BP core still gets the matchup win vs stall. If we think this is ok (that you can still fish for the matchup win vs stall with BP), then a 3-mon cap is appropriate. If not, we ought to go with a 2-mon cap. Where I stand:
No more than 3 Pokemon should be able to carry BP on a team. BP is nerfed to the point where it utterly fails vs anything but full stall, which is more than enough that you can never risk running it. That's
more than a big enough nerf to the playstyle; it's no longer really viable or effective.
