Councils' Rework

[Niko]

10 days ago, in the discussion thread about the Zamazenta-C suspect test, I wrote a post to underline the fact that the big majority of the council (everyone except for ima and Finchy) wasn't actually taking part to the discussion or getting reqs to vote (they don't need the reqs, but I don't really understand why).
10 days after, still 0 replies for 6/8 members of the council. I think this is not acceptable for the council that leads the most played Smogon tier.

It is not the first time that this happens. The council is now composed by 8 players, but I think everyone agrees if I say that many more people have knowledge and requisites to be a part of it.

I understand that putting all of them in the council would make it very chaotic, and it's not a viable solution. However, as long as those spots are limited, I think that they should be occupied by those who can give the best contribute to the tier they are leading.

We cannot treat the council like if it was a jerk. Right now, new council members are decided by the council itself. This implies that even the replacements are only going to work as long as the "old" council works properly.

To be a council member is not a title to wear like a trophy; it's you deciding to spend some time to improve the metagame. And it's not mandatory: if you don't want to commit yourself into that, just don't join it in the first place or quit if you realize that someone want or has time to do your job better than you do.

When I wrote in the Zamazenta-C thread, Finchinator replied to my post saying that the council was discussing the suspect in their private chats. I replied that I couldn't see how this could help the community, considering that the decision about Zamazenta-C wasn't their to make anymore.

But even if it wasn't useless, nobody can really say whether it's true or not, because their chat is private!

Despite these many problems, I still agree that having a council is the best way to deal with the develop of a metagame. So here's my proposal to make it work better:

• Putting a couple of supervisors upon every council, so that they can check the actual activity of every member of the council and eventually remove them from their charge if necessary. It's better if the supervisors do know the metagame as well to make the job easier for them, and they obviously have to be trusted users;
• Making the council chat public, which I believe takes place on Discord. The council members, along with the supervisors, will be the only ones to have the permissions to write, but everyone will now read what they're discussing about and not only their decisions, so that the community can understand their process.
• The council will still decide new council members, but in the form of a proposal that later will be voted by a restricted pool of good players (Team Tours players, Individual Tours winners exc. exc.). Let's say, 70% majority to have them in? I think it works.
• The council and everyone else will need to have reqs to vote on a suspect test. The reqs don't only display your knowledge of the tier, they're also a proof that you've been spending time to gain your right to vote and you will unlikely use it to troll.

I don't think I'm asking for something unreasonable, especially because this doesn't have any impact on a well working council, but it does for sure improve an inefficient one.

If you have other ideas or you want to tell me that I'm a stupid asshole, I will read each post accurately.

 

[lighthouses]

If i may propose an alternative to putting a supervisor on council chats thats gonna yell at you for not having enough weekly lines in discord as if you're getting paid why don't we just, on average, reduce the number of council members?
4 or 5 people along with tier leaders should be quite sufficient i feel like, and it's a good way to ensure everyone has at least a decent level of investment and activity

 

[Adeleine]

I don't mean to intrude, but as someone who tunes into this forum, I remember a moderately recent previous thread that specifically talked about things like council supervision, council activity, and the process of choosing and vetting council members. I have zero qualification to argue for or against anything, but communication is key and maybe people didn't know this existed, so maybe I add context or efficiency by linking it. Sorry if any of this is unhelpful or antiquated. Two posts I found useful at the time were about external supervision and council activity and oversight and disapproval of council selections.

 

[Colonel M]

Hi, I'm an asshole.

Angry reacts - get yourselves ready.

I don't totally disagree that transparency is important as well as an active council, but some of the solutions in here perplex me.

• Putting a couple of supervisors upon every council, so that they can check the actual activity of every member of the council and eventually remove them from their charge if necessary. It's better if the supervisors do know the metagame as well to make the job easier for them, and they obviously have to be trusted users;

This, for starters, makes little sense. There are [technically] supervisors upon every council. We like to call them "tier leader(s)" - they are usually the head of the council anyway, and usually are the ones that make the final say on administrative decisions.

Speaking as a moderator - what is someone, say, like Galarian Mars going to do when he suspects a council member is inactive? For the record - GMars is a forum leader, so he would arguably be a good fit for your "supervisor" role in the council. He probably would speak with suapah and say "hey this person is inactive, can you check on them?". Hell, he probably doesn't even have to do that because he can simply read the chat and, at worst, there are times where a council member may just unfortunately miss a vote or two. That doesn't necessarily mean they're inactive - and usually council members that miss a number of consecutive votes already are booted off the council from what I know of. Yes, you could argue that it's at a slower pace than what is considered "ideal", maybe, but the truth of the matter is the council has been rotating fairly frequently within this generation alone.

• Making the council chat public, which I believe takes place on Discord. The council members, along with the supervisors, will be the only ones to have the permissions to write, but everyone will now read what they're discussing about and not only their decisions, so that the community can understand their process.

Going to be straight up honest with you - one day Finchinator accidentally gave me permissions to this chat (granted at the time I was a moderator). The chat was... dead. Usually the only time discussion is made is if maybe after some tournament play has been completed and some opinions are gauged, or potential community outcry in specific scenarios (Moody) is talked about. Like sure I get the argument of transparency, but I don't think you're really going to get that much information out of it. Maybe at best you know something happening a day or two before its announcement, but we have also had survey results publicly posted too. The survey results alone give a lot of transparency because we see what the community thinks and sometimes the council's opinion on the subject.

• The council and everyone else will need to have reqs to vote on a suspect test. The reqs don't only display your knowledge of the tier, they're also a proof that you've been spending time to gain your right to vote and you will unlikely use it to troll.

This was addressed long ago with council reqs being removed, and I don't think there was a single person that threw objections to it. From what I know - you must participate in a suspect test, council or not, to vote.

And before someone calls me a bootlicker - keep in mind I give the council headaches all the time in my own way, and can be extremely chaotic in my suggestions and proposals (see - Dry Pass). I may not totally agree with the council all the time, but usually my first method of trying to get answers to questions is to merely ask the council or the tier leader for information. This way you've at least exhausted all options before going straight to... this.

I could maybe ask the rest of the council to maybe be a little more engaging with the community outside of strictly the tournaments environment (basically posting in the OU forum), but more often than not the councils in general have been fairly transparent - especially this generation, to thoughts and decisions on what they're doing and why. Maybe I can agree there being slightly better methods of electing council members, but you also have to realize that a good player does not always equate to being a good council member. One thing with council members is that you have to be impartial and you have to be logical in your decision making skills. You can't act strictly on emotion as an example.

Like we've had, what, 4 threads like this? One of them being Yung Dramps? And most of the time the issues outlined in them are either blown way out of proportion or, rarely, have a decent suggestion here and there.

 

[Finchinator]

All generation we have been working hard to achieve maximum OU Council transparency, which has been seemingly successful thus far.

However, "working" implies something that is ongoing and we are actively taking steps towards being more transparent and open. We have discussed the idea of bringing back the paragraphs from each council member discussing their opinion to go in the suspect thread. The main reason why we did not include it for the Zamazenta-Crowned test was because the metagame was still fresh and we wanted to have time to play the tier, but I would expect this moving forward and I personally support this.

I also know that we will always go above and beyond to do what is best for our community, which can largely be representative of the council seeing as I have shared things about suspects and surveys. Throughout this generation, I have made an active effort to share my stances on everything possible in the metagame discussion thread and answer questions presented to me on discord, PS, the OU subforum, etc. This takes up a solid hour or two every single day for a year and a half now, but I enjoy it because it brings me closer to the community that I feel like one of the leaders of. Throughout this process, we have been fortunate enough to learn from countless different people who had different opinions than myself and I personally feel this has helped me evolve (and subsequently, lead to better council processes such as normalizing the surveys that TDK started or having more liberal bans/suspects than last generation).

With this said, we have never had an OU Council where every single member constantly posts and takes large public stances. If anything, we are at the best point now of my time on the council, which spans back almost five years. Suapah is involved with just about everything and has done well adjusting to a leadership position, TPP made the lengthy OP that introduced the topic, ima posted his thoughts at length, and I made dozens of posts while also handling the vote later tonight. In future suspects, there is a chance that all of the other members will chime in if we implement council paragraphs.

Smogon is a better place when the people in charge are transparent and involved with decision making processes, so we will be sure to do our part. However, saying we have not been improving steadily this generation is simply untrue and unfair. If you have any specific questions for me or the council, I would be happy to answer them here or in private anytime!

I understand that putting all of them in the council would make it very chaotic, and it's not a viable solution. However, as long as those spots are limited, I think that they should be occupied by those who can give the best contribute to the tier they are leading.

We cannot treat the council like if it was a jerk. Right now, new council members are decided by the council itself. This implies that even the replacements are only going to work as long as the "old" council works properly.

To be a council member is not a title to wear like a trophy; it's you deciding to spend some time to improve the metagame. And it's not mandatory: if you don't want to commit yourself into that, just don't join it in the first place or quit if you realize that someone want or has time to do your job better than you do.

If you believe someone should be added to the council, our PMs are always open and we would be happy to discuss. It is important we engage with the ideas presented and I want us to continue evolving to the needs of the community. In addition, anyone interested in contributing to the OU Council should let us know -- we are always open to expanding and want a council that truly has a masterful grasp of the tier.

• Putting a couple of supervisors upon every council, so that they can check the actual activity of every member of the council and eventually remove them from their charge if necessary. It's better if the supervisors do know the metagame as well to make the job easier for them, and they obviously have to be trusted users;

TDK is still in our chat and he is a member of SS and we have engaged with Hogg -- tiering admin -- on numerous topics this generation, including recently. I do not know what more you can expect from us at this front, but if Smogon wishes to appoint someone else to oversee the council, we will happily adjust accordingly I am sure.

• Making the council chat public, which I believe takes place on Discord. The council members, along with the supervisors, will be the only ones to have the permissions to write, but everyone will now read what they're discussing about and not only their decisions, so that the community can understand their process.

I would be ok discussing the prospect of having council minutes where we publicly log what we discuss and give information to the general public to help further improve transparency. However, a fully public chat we do not view as ideal. We are not true professionals and this is all volunteer work, so we would appreciate some semblance of privacy while we sort through the process carefully and work towards making the best decisions possible.

 

[Lily]

Okay so I can't speak for the OU council but I think I've got enough experience as part of UU's council to speak on this.

I understand where this thread is coming from. Last generation, UU had similar transparency issues and a lot of council members were seen as inactive - lots of community members were unhappy with the slow pace of tiering, and a lot of decisions felt somewhat out-of-left-field. The sentiments can be seen on old suspect threads, I don't really have any examples to hand - I think I remember a lot of confusion around the Mega Altaria suspect, though.

Now with that said, a significant amount of progress has been made this generation. The council is, in large part, very in touch with the community - not every council member posts on every metagame thread, and some don't really interact at all, but they're almost all at a level of activity that I find acceptable as TL. They are approachable figures that have good heads for tiering and I don't need them to get reqs on every suspect test for them to prove that to me, though obviously it's encouraged. Council members consistently speak about the metagame both in our council discussion chat and in the other channels of our server, in addition to mostly having a reasonable amount of forum activity - those that are quieter still provide crucial valuable input by virtue of their experience with Smogon as a whole, which I find very important since I'm still somewhat new to a leadership role and can lose the run of myself sometimes.

In order to "prove" that the council is active, so to speak, we've made some changes this generation. The primary change is the addition of Council Minutes, which admittedly hasn't been kept up-to-date as well as I'd like it to be, but there is a lot of council history in there and you can very easily scroll through it to find the thought process behind most of the tier's decisions (as well as a lot of shitposting). This was a middle ground between having literally no contact between the council and wider playerbase and is a much better alternative than making the council chat public in my opinion. The reason the chat is private is not because we don't want to see that some people don't talk enough, but rather that we don't want council members being constantly pinged, spammed or harassed for having any given opinion. This already happens a bit as is, I can only imagine the problem would worsen if the chat was made public.

Regarding the supervisors on each council, that just sounds like the job of the Tier Leader(s) to me. We have a lot of responsibility already but one of our primary roles is ensuring that the council is functioning well, and if it's inactive it definitely is not functioning well. I don't see what the role of extra supervisors would do, and finding someone to take on that job seems quite difficult anyway.

On council nominations, those do exist already. There is a thread in the Community Leader forum where Tier Leaders must post all of their council nominations, much like a badge nomination, and any CL+ has the ability to object. I agree that that process could possibly be expanded out to a wider group, but ultimately you don't want that to be too unrestricted because of beef p much. It's no secret that there's a lot of drama on this site and it'd be a bit whack to have someone gatekept from a council position because someone who happened to play in SPL and has no ties to the current council doesn't like them. In an ideal world, the council would be trustworthy enough that you can accept that whoever they nominate for council is worthy of the position; I don't know if that's the case for OU atm, but I don't think we've had a controversial promotion in UU this gen at least.

Finally;

The council and everyone else will need to have reqs to vote on a suspect test. The reqs don't only display your knowledge of the tier, they're also a proof that you've been spending time to gain your right to vote and you will unlikely use it to troll.

I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly - if you're saying that the council shouldn't automatically get reqs to vote then you're absolutely right, they should not and as of right now they do not. The council has to get reqs just like everyone else if they want to vote on a public test.
If you're saying that the council should have to get reqs for every suspect test, then I kind of agree but I also think it's unrealistic. People do have lives and this is a hobby; I'm dedicated to my tier but I wouldn't want my council position removed because a suspect test just happens to coincide with a vacation, exams or whatever else, and I wouldn't really feel comfortable demoting anyone else for it. If they've missed a lot of recent tests then yeah, you can call their activity into question for sure, but there's no need to be so strict.

I think OU should really follow up with the idea of Council Minutes. A lot of lower tiers do it - off the top of my head, UU, PU and LC do/did it, and it's been successful every time. OU being the face of Smogon means that they have a bigger responsibility to do these things, and with a fairly large council of presumably active players, I'm sure they can take turns writing it up. I scanned the OU forum and didn't see a thread for it, maybe it exists somewhere that I'm not seeing but if it does then visibility should definitely be improved. But even with that, I don't think council activity has been a particularly large problem this generation. Some people are not active speakers and they shouldn't have to be outspoken to hold a council position because that's not really the goal of a council to begin with, that's usually what CCs/TLs/certain particularly bubbly council members do but it isn't like, a requirement. There's a CL+ thread that details the direction OU is taking. Maybe a public version of that would help too. Idk. I think scrutiny is good but a lot of progress has been made already and I'm really not sure if more is needed just because 3/8 council members posted on the Zama-C thread.

 

[Niko]

I don't mean to intrude, but as someone who tunes into this forum, I remember a moderately recent previous thread that specifically talked about things like council supervision, council activity, and the process of choosing and vetting council members. I have zero qualification to argue for or against anything, but communication is key and maybe people didn't know this existed, so maybe I add context or efficiency by linking it. Sorry if any of this is unhelpful or antiquated. Two posts I found useful at the time were about external supervision and council activity and oversight and disapproval of council selections.

Yeah i didnt see it at the time, thanks.

 

[Niko]

Hi, I'm an asshole.

Angry reacts - get yourselves ready.

I don't totally disagree that transparency is important as well as an active council, but some of the solutions in here perplex me.

This, for starters, makes little sense. There are [technically] supervisors upon every council. We like to call them "tier leader(s)" - they are usually the head of the council anyway, and usually are the ones that make the final say on administrative decisions.

Speaking as a moderator - what is someone, say, like Galarian Mars going to do when he suspects a council member is inactive? For the record - GMars is a forum leader, so he would arguably be a good fit for your "supervisor" role in the council. He probably would speak with suapah and say "hey this person is inactive, can you check on them?". Hell, he probably doesn't even have to do that because he can simply read the chat and, at worst, there are times where a council member may just unfortunately miss a vote or two. That doesn't necessarily mean they're inactive - and usually council members that miss a number of consecutive votes already are booted off the council from what I know of. Yes, you could argue that it's at a slower pace than what is considered "ideal", maybe, but the truth of the matter is the council has been rotating fairly frequently within this generation alone.

Going to be straight up honest with you - one day Finchinator accidentally gave me permissions to this chat (granted at the time I was a moderator). The chat was... dead. Usually the only time discussion is made is if maybe after some tournament play has been completed and some opinions are gauged, or potential community outcry in specific scenarios (Moody) is talked about. Like sure I get the argument of transparency, but I don't think you're really going to get that much information out of it. Maybe at best you know something happening a day or two before its announcement, but we have also had survey results publicly posted too. The survey results alone give a lot of transparency because we see what the community thinks and sometimes the council's opinion on the subject.

This was addressed long ago with council reqs being removed, and I don't think there was a single person that threw objections to it. From what I know - you must participate in a suspect test, council or not, to vote.

And before someone calls me a bootlicker - keep in mind I give the council headaches all the time in my own way, and can be extremely chaotic in my suggestions and proposals (see - Dry Pass). I may not totally agree with the council all the time, but usually my first method of trying to get answers to questions is to merely ask the council or the tier leader for information. This way you've at least exhausted all options before going straight to... this.

I could maybe ask the rest of the council to maybe be a little more engaging with the community outside of strictly the tournaments environment (basically posting in the OU forum), but more often than not the councils in general have been fairly transparent - especially this generation, to thoughts and decisions on what they're doing and why. Maybe I can agree there being slightly better methods of electing council members, but you also have to realize that a good player does not always equate to being a good council member. One thing with council members is that you have to be impartial and you have to be logical in your decision making skills. You can't act strictly on emotion as an example.

Like we've had, what, 4 threads like this? One of them being Yung Dramps? And most of the time the issues outlined in them are either blown way out of proportion or, rarely, have a decent suggestion here and there.

Tier leaders are a part of the council, not someone out of it. For them is very difficult to have a neutral position with council members, because they likely have established some kind of relationship with them.

Also, the fact that you were able to see the chat and it was basically empty proves my point. I didn't open this thread because I wanna see every single thing the council talks about, I opened this thread because I believe they dont talk that much at all. SS OU is a really difficult tier to deal with, I agree, but the Zamazenta-C suspect shows that the council is lazily letting the surveys do their job. And this would be ok, if the surveys worked properly. But if we compare the % of people that wanted a Zama suspect in the survey and then the % of people that now believe this suspect was useless, we have totally different numbers. This is because when you put your answers in that survey you dont invest that much time thinking about your answers.

@council need reqs as well: before posting this thread i asked around if council could vote without reqs and someone sent me this quote: "After the account identification phase occurs, eligible voters vote on the suspect along with the council members (who are automatically qualified for voting);" apologies if this was outdated.

 

[Specs]

@council need reqs as well: before posting this thread i asked around if council could vote without reqs and someone sent me this quote: "After the account identification phase occurs, eligible voters vote on the suspect along with the council members (who are automatically qualified for voting);" apologies if this was outdated.

This is outdated and being edited out of the OU forum, council reqs were changed awhile ago here

 

[Niko]

All generation we have been working hard to achieve maximum OU Council transparency, which has been seemingly successful thus far.

However, "working" implies something that is ongoing and we are actively taking steps towards being more transparent and open. We have discussed the idea of bringing back the paragraphs from each council member discussing their opinion to go in the suspect thread. The main reason why we did not include it for the Zamazenta-Crowned test was because the metagame was still fresh and we wanted to have time to play the tier, but I would expect this moving forward and I personally support this.

I also know that we will always go above and beyond to do what is best for our community, which can largely be representative of the council seeing as I have shared things about suspects and surveys. Throughout this generation, I have made an active effort to share my stances on everything possible in the metagame discussion thread and answer questions presented to me on discord, PS, the OU subforum, etc. This takes up a solid hour or two every single day for a year and a half now, but I enjoy it because it brings me closer to the community that I feel like one of the leaders of. Throughout this process, we have been fortunate enough to learn from countless different people who had different opinions than myself and I personally feel this has helped me evolve (and subsequently, lead to better council processes such as normalizing the surveys that TDK started or having more liberal bans/suspects than last generation).

With this said, we have never had an OU Council where every single member constantly posts and takes large public stances. If anything, we are at the best point now of my time on the council, which spans back almost five years. Suapah is involved with just about everything and has done well adjusting to a leadership position, TPP made the lengthy OP that introduced the topic, ima posted his thoughts at length, and I made dozens of posts while also handling the vote later tonight. In future suspects, there is a chance that all of the other members will chime in if we implement council paragraphs.

Smogon is a better place when the people in charge are transparent and involved with decision making processes, so we will be sure to do our part. However, saying we have not been improving steadily this generation is simply untrue and unfair. If you have any specific questions for me or the council, I would be happy to answer them here or in private anytime!

If you believe someone should be added to the council, our PMs are always open and we would be happy to discuss. It is important we engage with the ideas presented and I want us to continue evolving to the needs of the community. In addition, anyone interested in contributing to the OU Council should let us know -- we are always open to expanding and want a council that truly has a masterful grasp of the tier.


TDK is still in our chat and he is a member of SS and we have engaged with Hogg -- tiering admin -- on numerous topics this generation, including recently. I do not know what more you can expect from us at this front, but if Smogon wishes to appoint someone else to oversee the council, we will happily adjust accordingly I am sure.

I would be ok discussing the prospect of having council minutes where we publicly log what we discuss and give information to the general public to help further improve transparency. However, a fully public chat we do not view as ideal. We are not true professionals and this is all volunteer work, so we would appreciate some semblance of privacy while we sort through the process carefully and work towards making the best decisions possible.

The fact that you are doing volunteer work doesn't mean that everything you do has to be considered a gift to the community. As I said, we have limited spots and a lot of people that could occupy those spots, and I also think we have to look at the absolute best that can be done, for the interest of the game itself.

As for the "privacy", again: if you don't like to have a public chat, I'm sure the community can find 8 other good players that are ok with it. And not because you are BAD, I never implied that, but because they are fitting BETTER.

You are just talking in the name of the actual council, but mine was a speech to the community.

 

[Niko]

Okay so I can't speak for the OU council but I think I've got enough experience as part of UU's council to speak on this.

I understand where this thread is coming from. Last generation, UU had similar transparency issues and a lot of council members were seen as inactive - lots of community members were unhappy with the slow pace of tiering, and a lot of decisions felt somewhat out-of-left-field. The sentiments can be seen on old suspect threads, I don't really have any examples to hand - I think I remember a lot of confusion around the Mega Altaria suspect, though.

Now with that said, a significant amount of progress has been made this generation. The council is, in large part, very in touch with the community - not every council member posts on every metagame thread, and some don't really interact at all, but they're almost all at a level of activity that I find acceptable as TL. They are approachable figures that have good heads for tiering and I don't need them to get reqs on every suspect test for them to prove that to me, though obviously it's encouraged. Council members consistently speak about the metagame both in our council discussion chat and in the other channels of our server, in addition to mostly having a reasonable amount of forum activity - those that are quieter still provide crucial valuable input by virtue of their experience with Smogon as a whole, which I find very important since I'm still somewhat new to a leadership role and can lose the run of myself sometimes.

In order to "prove" that the council is active, so to speak, we've made some changes this generation. The primary change is the addition of Council Minutes, which admittedly hasn't been kept up-to-date as well as I'd like it to be, but there is a lot of council history in there and you can very easily scroll through it to find the thought process behind most of the tier's decisions (as well as a lot of shitposting). This was a middle ground between having literally no contact between the council and wider playerbase and is a much better alternative than making the council chat public in my opinion. The reason the chat is private is not because we don't want to see that some people don't talk enough, but rather that we don't want council members being constantly pinged, spammed or harassed for having any given opinion. This already happens a bit as is, I can only imagine the problem would worsen if the chat was made public.

Regarding the supervisors on each council, that just sounds like the job of the Tier Leader(s) to me. We have a lot of responsibility already but one of our primary roles is ensuring that the council is functioning well, and if it's inactive it definitely is not functioning well. I don't see what the role of extra supervisors would do, and finding someone to take on that job seems quite difficult anyway.

On council nominations, those do exist already. There is a thread in the Community Leader forum where Tier Leaders must post all of their council nominations, much like a badge nomination, and any CL+ has the ability to object. I agree that that process could possibly be expanded out to a wider group, but ultimately you don't want that to be too unrestricted because of beef p much. It's no secret that there's a lot of drama on this site and it'd be a bit whack to have someone gatekept from a council position because someone who happened to play in SPL and has no ties to the current council doesn't like them. In an ideal world, the council would be trustworthy enough that you can accept that whoever they nominate for council is worthy of the position; I don't know if that's the case for OU atm, but I don't think we've had a controversial promotion in UU this gen at least.

Finally;


I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly - if you're saying that the council shouldn't automatically get reqs to vote then you're absolutely right, they should not and as of right now they do not. The council has to get reqs just like everyone else if they want to vote on a public test.
If you're saying that the council should have to get reqs for every suspect test, then I kind of agree but I also think it's unrealistic. People do have lives and this is a hobby; I'm dedicated to my tier but I wouldn't want my council position removed because a suspect test just happens to coincide with a vacation, exams or whatever else, and I wouldn't really feel comfortable demoting anyone else for it. If they've missed a lot of recent tests then yeah, you can call their activity into question for sure, but there's no need to be so strict.

I think OU should really follow up with the idea of Council Minutes. A lot of lower tiers do it - off the top of my head, UU, PU and LC do/did it, and it's been successful every time. OU being the face of Smogon means that they have a bigger responsibility to do these things, and with a fairly large council of presumably active players, I'm sure they can take turns writing it up. I scanned the OU forum and didn't see a thread for it, maybe it exists somewhere that I'm not seeing but if it does then visibility should definitely be improved. But even with that, I don't think council activity has been a particularly large problem this generation. Some people are not active speakers and they shouldn't have to be outspoken to hold a council position because that's not really the goal of a council to begin with, that's usually what CCs/TLs/certain particularly bubbly council members do but it isn't like, a requirement. There's a CL+ thread that details the direction OU is taking. Maybe a public version of that would help too. Idk. I think scrutiny is good but a lot of progress has been made already and I'm really not sure if more is needed just because 3/8 council members posted on the Zama-C thread.

I already answered at the biggest part of your post in my other posts, anyways I wanted to say that I appreciate the Council Minutes idea and it would be good to apply it in every tier having a council.

 

[suapah]

Going to speak from OU council perspective only

I think Finch's post above effectively covers the core of the issue but I did want to add some of my own quick thoughts as OUTL (most of which overlap with what Finch has said). I think you bring up some very fair points about transparency and our thoughts behind what we do. Ever since taking OUTL, I've always looked for ways in which we can improve transparency between us and the community and we're always looking for ways to improve.

The OU surveys is something that we've implemented and it's the communities way of directing speaking to us. Although we separate the survey results typically by "qualified results" and the general community, we put equal weight on both and are always considering the feedback that you guys give us.As for future plans, I have been encouraging that we bring back discussion posts anytime we suspect a Pokemon. For Zama (like Finch mentioned), it wasn't plausible simply because you can't offer your opinions on a meta that really hasn't been developed. For future suspects, I'll ensure that we get everyone's thoughts and opinions on X mons so that even if they are not directly posting in the thread, their thoughts will be expressed. Similarly, there have been talks about implementing an OU council minutes, similar to how lower tiers function. Although it may not be updated daily, it gives us another avenue of communicating where we stand on certain issues and our thoughts. Of course, if you believe there are additional avenues we can take, I'm always listening and my Smogon PMs are open.

Regarding: public activity. As mentioned, you do have to remember that being a council member is essentially volunteer work. We're always looking for new members and if people are interested to contributing to the OU council, feel free to send me a message and we can talk about it (this is what ima literally did. He indicated his interest in the OU tiering survey and we talked and included him in the council). Regardless, despite this I'd argue that this council chat and the tiering activity overall has been at it's highest. Since I've taken over around mid November/early December, we've already had several quickbans (Zygarde, Kyub, Cinderace, Magearna) and several suspects (Pheromosa, Urshifu, Spectrier, Zama). This is unprecedented activity (as far as OU goes) and we're always trying to work under the most logical timeframe. I assure you that we're always supervising and considering what's best for the tier. And as said before, you guys can always vocalize your thoughts through the tiering surveys or directly to us and we'll listen.

- Putting a couple of supervisors upon every council, so that they can check the actual activity of every member of the council and eventually remove them from their charge if necessary. It's better if the supervisors do know the metagame as well to make the job easier for them, and they obviously have to be trusted users;

• Making the council chat public, which I believe takes place on Discord. The council members, along with the supervisors, will be the only ones to have the permissions to write, but everyone will now read what they're discussing about and not only their decisions, so that the community can understand their process.
• The council will still decide new council members, but in the form of a proposal that later will be voted by a restricted pool of good players (Team Tours players, Individual Tours winners exc. exc.). Let's say, 70% majority to have them in? I think it works.
• The council and everyone else will need to have reqs to vote on a suspect test. The reqs don't only display your knowledge of the tier, they're also a proof that you've been spending time to gain your right to vote and you will unlikely use it to troll.

a) First thing is essentially what I do. I'm always checking and ensuring activity of the council is optimal. In addition, TDK is in our chat and for general tiering decisions we run our ideas through community leaders/SS
b) I think like I said before the OU minutes thread is a more reasonable way of communicating our overall thoughts and the community can always respond back. Public chat is just a little too intrusive but if there are other suggestions, I'll listen
c) This can be reworked for sure but as of rn we function just by people who express interest and believe they can positively contribute. Again, a lot of the time it is people coming up to us.
d) I think this is a fair point which is why I personally try to get reqs if school doesn't get in the way. Although please do remember that people have lives outside of smogon too. I do agree that some level of participation should be considered.

but the Zamazenta-C suspect shows that the council is lazily letting the surveys do their job. And this would be ok, if the surveys worked properly. But if we compare the % of people that wanted a Zama suspect in the survey and then the % of people that now believe this suspect was useless, we have totally different numbers. This is because when you put your answers in that survey you dont invest that much time thinking about your answers.

@council need reqs as well: before posting this thread i asked around if council could vote without reqs and someone sent me this quote: "After the account identification phase occurs, eligible voters vote on the suspect along with the council members (who are automatically qualified for voting);" apologies if this was outdated.

1st part: disagree. You ask for transparency and a voice and our surveys are a way we can express it. I don't think there's anything lazy about it. We're still listening and formulating our own opinions along with it. Of course, hearing the communities feedback on things can help us make decisions or provide us leverage to make certain decisions.
2nd part: yes they are outdated. edited that out of the thread, thanks

 

[Niko]

As for the "privacy", again: if you don't like to have a public chat, I'm sure the community can find 8 other good players that are ok with it. And not because you are BAD, I never implied that, but because they are fitting BETTER.

Wanted to point out that ^ I didn't mean that the council absolutely has to agree on the chat being public, I just wanted to remark that the target should be to have the best council possible.

 

[Niko]

Going to speak from OU council perspective only

I think Finch's post above effectively covers the core of the issue but I did want to add some of my own quick thoughts as OUTL (most of which overlap with what Finch has said). I think you bring up some very fair points about transparency and our thoughts behind what we do. Ever since taking OUTL, I've always looked for ways in which we can improve transparency between us and the community and we're always looking for ways to improve.

The OU surveys is something that we've implemented and it's the communities way of directing speaking to us. Although we separate the survey results typically by "qualified results" and the general community, we put equal weight on both and are always considering the feedback that you guys give us.As for future plans, I have been encouraging that we bring back discussion posts anytime we suspect a Pokemon. For Zama (like Finch mentioned), it wasn't plausible simply because you can't offer your opinions on a meta that really hasn't been developed. For future suspects, I'll ensure that we get everyone's thoughts and opinions on X mons so that even if they are not directly posting in the thread, their thoughts will be expressed. Similarly, there have been talks about implementing an OU council minutes, similar to how lower tiers function. Although it may not be updated daily, it gives us another avenue of communicating where we stand on certain issues and our thoughts. Of course, if you believe there are additional avenues we can take, I'm always listening and my Smogon PMs are open.

Regarding: public activity. As mentioned, you do have to remember that being a council member is essentially volunteer work. We're always looking for new members and if people are interested to contributing to the OU council, feel free to send me a message and we can talk about it (this is what ima literally did. He indicated his interest in the OU tiering survey and we talked and included him in the council). Regardless, despite this I'd argue that this council chat and the tiering activity overall has been at it's highest. Since I've taken over around mid November/early December, we've already had several quickbans (Zygarde, Kyub, Cinderace, Magearna) and several suspects (Pheromosa, Urshifu, Spectrier, Zama). This is unprecedented activity (as far as OU goes) and we're always trying to work under the most logical timeframe. I assure you that we're always supervising and considering what's best for the tier. And as said before, you guys can always vocalize your thoughts through the tiering surveys or directly to us and we'll listen.


a) First thing is essentially what I do. I'm always checking and ensuring activity of the council is optimal. In addition, TDK is in our chat and for general tiering decisions we run our ideas through community leaders/SS
b) I think like I said before the OU minutes thread is a more reasonable way of communicating our overall thoughts and the community can always respond back. Public chat is just a little too intrusive but if there are other suggestions, I'll listen
c) This can be reworked for sure but as of rn we function just by people who express interest and believe they can positively contribute. Again, a lot of the time it is people coming up to us.
d) I think this is a fair point which is why I personally try to get reqs if school doesn't get in the way. Although please do remember that people have lives outside of smogon too. I do agree that some level of participation should be considered.



1st part: disagree. You ask for transparency and a voice and our surveys are a way we can express it. I don't think there's anything lazy about it. We're still listening and formulating our own opinions along with it. Of course, hearing the communities feedback on things can help us make decisions or provide us leverage to make certain decisions.
2nd part: yes they are outdated. edited that out of the thread, thanks

I'm happy to see that you're putting a lot of efforts in transparency and development of the tier. However, as a tour player I can't avoid thinking that this Zamazenta suspect was the biggest mistake you could do at this very moment, especially because for what I know from talah there is no more time for another suspect before or during WCoP, and not even after because of the SCL. So we will have to play an unhealthy metagame until December where there's no real skill difference between playing at 1500 ladder or at 2000.

This could be avoided if you didn't use surveys, because the last surveys were built around a list of Pokémon that were already chosen. Again, clicking a 1 to 5 number is faster than writing lines about other Pokémon/items that you find problematic.

 

[Chaitanya]

dont have a ton of time but there are a lot of issues with these proposals i wanted to touch on from a general council perspective even tho mono is diff to ou

"Putting a couple of supervisors upon every council"

Totally pointless - council chats are generally moderately active at best because there is only so much you can discuss over and over again. Also nothing is stopping the supervisors from ignoring this chat or not paying attention, and then you would have no idea of knowing if they're serving a purpose or not.

"Making the council chat public"
Opening up this chat to the public would mean that council members are going to be bombarded by stupid questions from every single person that want to have a say in the tier, and while people should be able to voice their opinions (surveys) there's simply only so much volunteers can deal with answering 100s of questions about basic stuff like 'why haven't you guys discussed banning rain ever??!!' its utterly pointless and a waste of everyones time.

"The council and everyone else will need to have reqs to vote on a suspect test"
Already been touched upon (you have to ladder to vote and reqs are required) but I wanna add (idk if this is ever an issue in ou/other tiers) I think if council members can't be bothered to get reqs, their activity should be questioned for sure by the rest of the council/tls. Obviously once in a while if someone gets busy it's understandable but if you're consistently not getting reqs you should probably be removed from council cause that really should be the bare minimum but again idk how much of an issue it ever is

"The council will still decide new council members"
You say "We cannot treat the council like if it was a jerk," but your proposed way is still jerk mentality, having only a few individual winners and the few players who play SS in tournaments isn't solving this issue.

imo the ou council has been more transparent than before - they obv cant satisfy everyone but they obviously work hard and imo you're looking for problems where there really aren't a whole lot, not posting publicly doesn't need to be a requirement if the rest of the council feels members are active enough with their thoughts

e: not super relevant but I think council minutes aren’t necessary if the surveys continue to be a consistent thing

 

[Niko]

dont have a ton of time but there are a lot of issues with these proposals i wanted to touch on from a general council perspective even tho mono is diff to ou

"Putting a couple of supervisors upon every council"

Totally pointless - council chats are generally moderately active at best because there is only so much you can discuss over and over again. Also nothing is stopping the supervisors from ignoring this chat or not paying attention, and then you would have no idea of knowing if they're serving a purpose or not.

This is the reason why i proposed to have a couple of them. Also if you cant trust trusted people, who can you trust? Btw i dont think that it's normal to have long periods of time without a single message in the chat.

"Making the council chat public"
Opening up this chat to the public would mean that council members are going to be bombarded by stupid questions from every single person that want to have a say in the tier, and while people should be able to voice their opinions (surveys) there's simply only so much volunteers can deal with answering 100s of questions about basic stuff like 'why haven't you guys discussed banning rain ever??!!' its utterly pointless and a waste of everyones time.

well true, this does make sense at all.

"The council and everyone else will need to have reqs to vote on a suspect test"
Already been touched upon (you have to ladder to vote and reqs are required) but I wanna add (idk if this is ever an issue in ou/other tiers) I think if council members can't be bothered to get reqs, their activity should be questioned for sure by the rest of the council/tls. Obviously once in a while if someone gets busy it's understandable but if you're consistently not getting reqs you should probably be removed from council cause that really should be the bare minimum but again idk how much of an issue it ever is

I see you all misunderstood this part because I didnt know that council members need reqs to vote, my bad.

"The council will still decide new council members"
You say "We cannot treat the council like if it was a jerk," but your proposed way is still jerk mentality, having only a few individual winners and the few players who play SS in tournaments isn't solving this issue.

its not the same thing, i meant a jerk like a private random chat, my proposal is to have them voted by people that knows the metagame.

imo the ou council has been more transparent than before - they obv cant satisfy everyone but they obviously work hard and imo you're looking for problems where there really aren't a whole lot, not posting publicly doesn't need to be a requirement if the rest of the council feels members are active enough with their thoughts

 

[talah]

I'm happy to see that you're putting a lot of efforts in transparency and development of the tier. However, as a tour player I can't avoid thinking that this Zamazenta suspect was the biggest mistake you could do at this very moment, especially because for what I know from talah there is no more time for another suspect before or during WCoP, and not even after because of the SCL. So we will have to play an unhealthy metagame until December where there's no real skill difference between playing at 1500 ladder or at 2000.

This could be avoided if you didn't use surveys, because the last surveys were built around a list of Pokémon that were already chosen. Again, clicking a 1 to 5 number is faster than writing lines about other Pokémon/items that you find problematic.

i was referring to boots specifically when i mentioned there being no time for a suspect during wcop/snake. we had mid-SPL suspects before and we are definitely open to suspecting something while either of those tours is ongoing, just not boots. a boots suspect would require a much more focused approach from us and the community at large, alongside a longer than usual ladder test (ideally 1-2 months imo). speaking of, we also have an entire thread dedicated to boots related conversation that is still open! there's been a lot of grievances w/ boots and talk about them, both within the council and from the community, so please use that to discuss them.

 

[Niko]

i was referring to boots specifically when i mentioned there being no time for a suspect during wcop/snake. we had mid-SPL suspects before and we are definitely open to suspecting something while either of those tours is ongoing, just not boots. a boots suspect would require a much more focused approach from us and the community at large, alongside a longer than usual ladder test (ideally 1-2 months imo). speaking of, we also have an entire thread dedicated to boots related conversation that is still open! there's been a lot of grievances w/ boots and talk about them, both within the council and from the community, so please use that to discuss them.

Boots are actually so big in their influence in the metagame and potentially the best ban that could be done if they turn out to be broken as I suppose. If we start now a 1-month suspect when the suspect is done round 1 of the WCoP will still be going. There is enough time to both have a long suspect and give time to the WCoP players to adapt. Especially considering that if we don't we're not going to have a shot until December. This is totally doable.

 

[Hogg]

Just want to chime in from the perspective of current tiering admin and former tier leader.

Most of what I have to say has largely been relayed already by others, but council transparency was actually one of the biggest things I focused on when putting together the tiering policy and process for Gen 8. I think that things have definitely moved positively since the release of Sword and Shield, but it can always be improved, so I appreciate you pointing out issues where they arise.

As was mentioned, we instituted a nomination process for all council members, something that did not exist previously. We erred on the side of having the nominations restricted to community/section leaders and above, because of previously-mentioned potential for drama, and since community and section leaders would be in the best position to speak to issues like activity, work ethic and behavioral issues that are particularly important for council members. I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to making these nominations happen in the badgenoms forum instead if people feel there still isn’t enough transparency around council noms, but I do really worry that it will lead to a lot of in-fighting and hurt feelings at being passed over if they take place in such a public forum.

I do want to add that we haven’t set across-the-board activity requirements in place because there hasn’t really been any “one size fits all” policy that works. Activity is going to by necessity be much different for a lower tier that might see significant changes on a monthly basis than for something like Ubers, where external changes are extremely rare. For that reason we’ve allowed tier leaders a fair bit of latitude in setting activity standards for their tier, though I do also try to monitor things like the tiering surveys to make sure there’s not broad community discontent with how the council is operating.

Anyhow, I’ll quote some relevant bits from what was distributed to all tier leaders prior to gen 8:

Second, council activity needs to be maintained. I’m not going to make every individual council member demonstrate tons of forum activity or anything, because I don’t want to drive away good contributors, but they need to be active in some capacity. If someone never contributes anything beyond voting on something when you bug them about it and isn’t even participating in council discussion on the discord, I don’t care what their tournament record is, you should probably start looking around more. Council members need to know the metagame, yes, but they also need to be actively interested in and engaged with the tiering process. Again, I’m not going to set any high bar here, and I’ll mostly leave this to the honor system, but as a tier leader please make sure that every council member is at least paying attention to discussions, NP threads, etc even if they aren’t actively posting.

Third, while I’m not requiring that every council member post constantly, it is important that the community knows the general context of council discussions. This means that if you have council members who tend to be quieter or who are only active on discord, it is your job as tier leader to relay their positions. How you do this is up to you, but periodically summarizing council discussions somewhere public is a good start.

Now, how do we make sure this is happening? Well, me, TonyFlygon and TDK try to periodically check in with all official tiers. We don’t have a set schedule for these check-ins, but in general I try to make sure that every tier gets reviewed a few times a year. (This has gotten WAY easier since tiers began doing tier surveys, by the way - so please, participate in the tier surveys if you don’t already do so, because they’re a great way for me to keep track of the status of a tier that I might otherwise not know well!)

In any case, that’s all general, but I will say that specific to OU (since this thread seems entirely geared toward OU), they’ve had a number of leadership changes in fast succession over the past several months, so I have been holding off a bit on checking in until the current crew has time to settle. That said, they’ve been fantastic on the internal end with always keeping up with their council nominations, keeping myself and other staff updated with tiering decisions (including regular updates on the status of the tier), tiering surveys, etc. I’ll talk with suapah and others to see if there’s anything that can be done about making some of that more visible externally as well, so that council matters aren’t just a black box.

 

[Niko]

So is it done? Thread archived? For what I heard from you all, it seems like everything works perfectly fine now, as if what I said was just a result of a lack of transparency/knowledge.

But there are more points I came up with that were ignored at all, for example the fact that the council isn't taking part on suspect discussion and they're not even getting reqs.

I went back to see old suspect discussions and the scenario is always the same: the only council posts actually related to the metagame I can see in the latest 5 suspects (~6 months) discussions are written by Finchinator.

Also what Colonel M said, is it normal at all that the CG OU council chat is almost dead? I don't think so, I find something new to discuss about every time I start a ladder session.

I cannot speak for the playerbase in its entirety, but when I asked around opinions about the metagame nobody ever answered me saying that it is okay as it is, and the big majority also thought that it is a terrible metagame to play. This majority includes people like Tricking that I never heard complaining to any metagame before in several years.

This is in contrast with the surveys' results and highlights the problem given by the fact that in the surveys the opinion of those who have never played SS OU has the same importance as anyone else's.

If you receive thousands of feedbacks for a single survey realistically only 1/10 of those are given by people that actually plays/understands the metagame to the point of being able to judge it.

My proposal was not focused on demolishing the councils. There are for sure problems with the way the councils are working now, and this does include the ORAS OU council for example, but the idea for SS OU was to indirectly fix those problems, that are in my opinion the real thing we should focus on.

 

[Finchinator]

It seems likely we move forward with installing council minutes in order to be more transparent with what we are generally discussing as a council. I’m still working on specifics, but I cleared it by suapah and the OU Forum leaders after this thread was made.

In addition, official (suspect OP) posts written by me (or
are oftentimes subject to heavy edits and feedback from the entire council and demand approval from tier leadership, for what it’s worth.

If you receive thousands of feedbacks for a single survey realistically only 1/10 of those are given by people that actually plays/understands the metagame to the point of being able to judge it.

This is why we have the qualified demographic that I go out of my way to share and discuss in both the survey thread and council chat.

We are well aware that XxCharizardDogWarriorxX is less familiar with the metagame than you are, for example, and this allows us to weigh the opinions much more appropriately.

In my opinion, surveys have been a major plus for generation eight tiering for both OU and other tiers. As a community, I am confident with the direction we are headed in.

 

[Finchinator]

Given the support for increased OU council transparency, we have proceeded with installing OU council minutes for the first time in the modern history of the OU council.

Moreover, OU council minutes and surveys are now grouped together in a new thread, which includes the first ever SS OU council minutes!

Please message me with any questions or concerns.

 

[Niko]

Thanks for your efforts, this is surely a step into the right direction about transparency.

That being said, I think it's important all the same to see more individual activity from council members (other than you and ima) in suspects and discussion threads about the metagame, because council minutes are about the entirety of the council, so you don't really understand who supports what and how big the majority is, you just see the general decision. For example I appreciated when after the DLC2 release you posted the votes from every council member about quickbans.

I'm also still not convinced about how well surveys work to involve the playerbase in the council's decision process, atleast not in the way they're implemented right now.

 

[suapah]

Thanks for your efforts, this is surely a step into the right direction about transparency.

That being said, I think it's important all the same to see more individual activity from council members (other than you and ima) in suspects and discussion threads about the metagame, because council minutes are about the entirety of the council, so you don't really understand who supports what and how big the majority is, you just see the general decision. For example I appreciated when after the DLC2 release you posted the votes from every council member about quickbans.

I'm also still not convinced about how well surveys work to involve the playerbase in the council's decision process, atleast not in the way they're implemented right now.

For future suspects, we're intending on bringing back council thoughts such as one found here and here. It was just difficult to do so for Zamazenta simply because it is a new mon and it's hard to formulate thoughts on an unexplored mons. As always, if there are other suggestions on improving council transparency, we're always willing to listen