ffffffffffffffffff (part 3, 5/02/08)

[chaos]

Been a while since last update. I was playing ultimate frisbee with my girlfriend and some other people, hurt my ankle... so yeah, time to write about Smogon. Here's what's going on:

The... EVs Crisis?

As you may know, I regularly search the Internet for posts about Smogon. Besides uncovering some hilarity, it has one useful benefit - I can see where we need to improve. For a while now, I've seen a bunch of posts saying our EVs our mediocre... and then found this in a Serebii guide (yeah I know, lol)

Remember that Smogon is often mediocre at best when it comes to EVs, so think up your own.

Does anyone have any thoughts about our EVs? Are they really that bad? Really, any commentary at all would be nice.

Damage Calculator

See: planning topic. Thanks to DJD for making mockups - they help a lot. I'm looking forward to starting this project soon - we need to have a chat on IRC about where to start and then sit down and code some.

Dex

I'll be adding learnsets to the dex soon. I said I'd do it two days ago, but stuff from RL keeps popping up... this'll be done before next week, I promise. Afterwards, I'll add some preferences for moves and hopefully get that junk out of the way for good.

Incoherent Posts

Has anyone else noticed that foreigners do weird things with spacing between punctuation? User Luck comes to mind here: he types like this.I have a post.here are my ideas. (notice lack of space after the period). There are others who do weird shit like this , stuff , hi. I don't want to advocate smacking these people with an incoherent post infraction if their post is understandable, but maybe we should give warnings with a helpful note to please put spacing in the correct places? I speak a second language and I don't have trouble with that kind of junk. People who ignore should be infracted.

Lack of updates on the front page

We've done a whole host of new shit since the last update. Could you guys bitch at me on IRC every now and then to update the main page? I'd really be helpful. I'd like to do updates every 3 or 4 days.

The RMT forum

There has been some controversy over aldaron's stickied topic in RMT. This probably deserves it's own topic, but I'll get the ball rolling here: I'm not sure it's such a good idea. It's already bitch-work to rate peoples teams, I'm not sure insulting their effort and expecting more out of something that is already rather unrewarding is a good idea...

I don't know of any solutions to fixing "the RMT problem" - I don't like RMTs, I don't see why other people like them. I don't think bitching at our userbase to spend more time rating when it's already kind of a boring job is a good idea though...

The breeding guide

X-Act, have we gone over all of the breeding guide? What's left to do before putting this on the site?

New badge holders?

... is anyone deserving of new ladybug/contributor badges in C&C? I haven't heard anything about it in a while... please, if you think one of your fellow community members is doing a great job, nominate them in the badge nominations thread!

Responses to these topics

I appreciate the enthusiasm with "read" posts but I'd like these topics to harbor discussion on how to improve Smogon. I'm sorry for not doing these more often; I'm REALLY having trouble setting aside time for Smogon these days. It'll get better, I promise. :( So - take some time to think about these issues, please! I'd love to hear what you all think and how we can improve this site.

 

[Calciphoce]

I've never noticed anything too wrong with the EVs, but I don't do much EV testing either so I can't really say whether or not they are flawed with a correct view. I modify sets to an extent, but nothing too dramatic to warrant an edit on the analysis.

As for the incoherent posts, I agree. It can be really annoying to read those sorts of posts and something should be done about them, but it has to be done carefully the way I see it. Obviously, if someone misplaces a comma, period or space every now and then it's fine, but when people do those sorts of things on purpose it gets on my nerves. I suppose a warning message with a laid back tone could be in order, then an infraction if it keeps happening.

Will do on the front page reminders.

 

[gorm]

awesome to hear that learnsets are coming. Aldaron's topic is "controversial" i guess but being recognized as a team rater imo you should be expected to do better than a rush job, i personally don't take any offense to it and its actually helped me improve my rates.

Re: EVs, i woulndt worry, it's really impossible to adapt to a constantly evolving set of standard movesets, let alone EVs. One thing i was suggesting making was a "controversial small changes" thread in C&C to suggest small shit like adding uturn on defensive seeder celebi/zapdos, suggesting new spreads/other small changes to sets that would not fit into "small changes" but would not merit their own peer edit.

thoughts?

 

[darkie]

I've never noticed anything too wrong with the EVs, but I don't do much EV testing either so I can't really say whether or not they are flawed with a correct view. I modify sets to an extent, but nothing too dramatic to warrant an edit on the analysis.

Yeah, the only time I really differ from the accepted sets are when I want to try something new or when the rest of my team necessitates a change from the norm.

I've been lurking the Damage Calculator topic, and the latest mock-ups look really good! Excellent work on those.

Learnsets in the Dex would be really helpful, so good luck implementing those, chaos.

The punctuation is really annoying, so I agree; a PM should be sent, and further consequences if the user does not comply. (what Calciphone said)

Updates... I'll try to say something if I get on IRC ever and see you on.

I think Aldaron's RMT topic could be toned down a little, but still, it is a helpful resource to aspiring Team Raters who just want to lend a hand. (what gorm said)

For badges, I have not really seen anyone for Ladybug, but I think a few current, actively contributing Ladybugs could possibly be updated to Contributor.


Also, sorry to hear about your ankle. I just hurt my knee playing basketball, so yeah, it sucks.

 

[Aldaron]

There should be nothing insulting about my topic, as there was nothing insulting written in it.

It asks for complete rates...can someone tell me where it was insulting?

I said the "customers," the people posting teams, should be dissatisfied, I don't think that is insulting.

Anyway, while I wouldn't go so far as saying Smogon's EVs are mediocre, I rarely use the EVs provided in the sets. In my peer edits, I have provided slightly different EVs, but it really comes down to pretty arbitrary specific preferences, so I don't think there is much that can be done for this issue.

 

[ryubahamut]

Nice read. :)

1. Regarding EV spreads, I think what the poster is trying to convey is that people be more imaginative when thinking up their EV spreads. Perhaps his qualm is with seeing the same spread a hundred time over daily?

2. Damage Calculator, this sounds really awesome. That's one thing the site really needs, it's kinda ._. when you see people rush away to metalkid/whatever's for damage calculation in the light of the fact that we've got the most accurate damage calculation formula here on Smogon.

3. I don't know what you mean by learnsets, so there isn't a lot for me to say here.

4. I'm fully in favor of asking people to make their posts understandable. However, prolly this should be done in more of a friendly, here's-a-heads-up way rather than do-it-again-and-you'll-be-banned.

5. I will start updating the Status Update thread in C&C every few days if that helps in putting up updates on the site.

6. New badge holders, I am sure I have posted this in Badge Nominations, but a few members have been posting some decent changes lately and I believe it would be good if some of them (touched, Sabaku) would help out well if badged.

7. Responses to these topics.. I am sure there's no problem?

 

[Surgo]

The EVs being bad is nothing more than a dumb meme, and I haven't ever seen anyone explain why they were bad. On the contrary, most (or at least all of the analyses I've done -- other people?) are quite well thought-out.

 

[chaos]

There should be nothing insulting about my topic, as there was nothing insulting written in it.

It asks for complete rates...can someone tell me where it was insulting?

I said the "customers," the people posting teams, should be dissatisfied, I don't think that is insulting.

I think Fishin summed it up pretty well:

<+Fishin> Just the fact that you're raising the standards of an activity that needs more participants, IMO.
<+Fishin> And possibly insinuating that the current RMTers were lazy.

There just aren't enough people who give a shit about rating teams for this "quality filter" to really work... I just saw it as a bitchslap to those that actually bothered to rate teams (god knows they are a minority). "Hey man, I know you guys don't actually like rating teams and hardly anyone does it, but could you do it better? Here, take more time on it, and use this template."

I should probably just step back and let other people handle RMT policy. If I had my way we wouldnt have an RMT forum ;/

 

[makiri]

I'm sure most EVs are fine while same may not be optimal, but for a beginner which the analysis is usually aimed at, it serves them just fine. Once someone gets good enough they usually make their own EVs to suit what they want. The given EVs are just a guideline and are backed up by cold hard facts and reasoning why certain EVs are given, to outspeed this, to OHKO that. That clown doesn't back anything up and just says they aren't any good, well why? It just sounds like to me this guy is anti-Smogon and wants people to read his guide over at Serebii, and looking at his previous posts he doesn't exactly give the best spreads himself.

 

[X-Act]

The breeding guide

X-Act, have we gone over all of the breeding guide? What's left to do before putting this on the site?

Well, I fixed the breeding guide HTML as you told me to. The only problems I can see about the breeding guide that I know of are

1) Table of Contents. It had them before, and I stupidly removed them, as I didn't know we needed to do them.
2) Redundancies. I don't know what exactly is redundant in the breeding guide.
3) Will it be posted as four different parts, or just one full-blown article?

That's it, I think. I'll work a bit on the table of contents, but I don't know what to do about points 2) and 3).

 

[Mekkah]

Does anyone have any thoughts about our EVs? Are they really that bad? Really, any commentary at all would be nice.

If they were really that bad, we would have seen a thousand Peer Edits come up already about why they are bad. And yet nearly all Peer Edits are about sets. The only reason I can think of why people may say our EVs are bad is because some are still in the "D/P Analyses Forum" stage, i.e. done without playtesting. But the same goes for sets, opinion and everything else.

Has anyone else noticed that foreigners do weird things with spacing between punctuation? User Luck comes to mind here

I agree entirely. I have a similar problem with user AJC: he types like this I have a post here are my ideas blabla another sentence without a period here. I infracted him once after warning him about him a few times, but he just says it's a habit he can't change or something. And I'd feel a bit guilty for infracting either of them because at least they try. It's not unreadable, just annoying. Your approach sounds reasonable though.

The RMT forum

Yeah, there was this little drama with IPL who basically said "alright if my rates are not up to your standards I'll just quit" which is quite the opposite of what I want to reach. On the sunside, I have seen some really good rates thrown around by Taylor and Gorm among others.

I had a solution idea but you'll probably find it too similar to the reputation system: people who post a RMT can uprate people's posts if they are good rates. This has all kinds of small problems with it, like morons using the button on pretty much every post and people may not be motivated enough to actually uprate posts...wondering what you guys think.

On a side note, ultimate frisbee is amazing.

 

[Earthworm]

The only 'problem' I can see relating to the EVs is possibly that only one spread of EVs is listed for each moveset, which isn't really a problem as it is just personal preference/what roles your Pokemon has on your team that should be deciding what EV spread is used anyway. It would be quite impossible to make EV spreads to fit every role a certain moveset could have on a team for quite a lot of the Pokemon analyses so unless multiple EV spreads are listed for each set (that deserves multiple EV spreads) with what each should be used for somewhere nearby then the current EV spreads should be fine. Listing multiple EV spreads for a single moveset would probably get confusing, clutter the analysis, and take a lot of effort to produce so that is probably a bad idea though! It really just comes down to personal preference in the end.

Learnsets and the Damage Calculator will be useful to have

 

[Blue Kirby]

As far as EVs are concerned, like mentioned before me, it really comes down to preference in what you want the Pokemon to be able to accomplish. As far as I'm concerned, Smogon's EV sets make for a good starting point - they really don't need to achieve much more than that. Listing each and every possible EV spread is unnecessary.

As for Aldaron's topic, again I'd take really as more of a guideline rather than something set in concrete. In the end, it achieved its purpose in helping many team raters improve their rates, and Aldaron himself said that it wasn't necessary to cover every single flaw in a team, but rather just give a complete coverage of the ones that are covered (ie problem, solution, resulting problems)

I can't wait for the damage calculator, and the learnsets will be awesome to see. :)

 

[Lee]

I think Aldaron's template might be a bit too much effort for most people to follow, but there IS a lot of good advice in there that needs to e preserved.

If anybody was to take anything from Aldaron's topic, I'd like it to be this:

I'd expect 3 main things in a "solid" rate: a.) To state "issues" the team might have (obviously) b.) To state possible "fixes" for these "issues" (obviously) c.) STATE HOW THE SUBSEQUENT WEAKNESSES ARE TO BE DEALT WITH (evidently not so obviously since even our team raters do not do this)

As long as they do that, I'm really not bothered if they completely neglect the proposed template. There's just too many posters who shit up the forum with one line rates like "You're Mamo weak, he hits everyone super-effective."

So my proposal would be to update the Team Rater Rules with extracts from Aldaron's thread. The Team Rater rules already have a lot of the advice from Aldaron's topic, but Aldaron goes into more detail so I'm sure the thread would benefit from it. We'll just cut out everything we disagree with about Aldaron's topic but keep all the great stuff and incorporate them into the Team Rater Rules. I'll be happy to do this, hopefully with some input from Aldaron. Hopefully that will solve that problem.

But that brings me onto something else that has been bugging me. How should we go about dealing with bad rates? I don't mean completely retarded rates, but just poorly thought out, short rates like the one I quoted earlier. My knee-jerk reaction would be to delete the post and send a PM to the user with an explanation but like chaos said, it's already bitchwork so I'd rather not nag at people when they're trying to be helpful.

 

[Mekkah]

If it's impossible to fulfill the higher standards, then lower the bar. You could mention in one of the stickies that if someone does give you a "Mamo weak" reaction to your RMT, we do have an excellent Mamoswine analysis with all its counters on the site.

 

[Aeolus]

I don't think there is a ton to be done about the awkward punctuation and spacing problems. I haven't noticed it being a huge issue... and I don't think it should be an area of concern unless it just gets out of hand.

As for new community members... I've been consistently adding 5-8 per month from people earning their tutor stripes. Several have been active in this forum but I'm going to encourage them more to use their access to contribute to the site and C&C since they are likely some the most knowledgeable people when it comes to the actual game.

 

[DM]

The only thing I can reasonably comment on here is the grammar/punctuation issue.

An Incoherent Post infraction only carries 1 point for 45 days. I see nothing wrong with sending someone one of those with a pleasant message asking them to adhere to some commonly held typing standards.

 

[IggyBot]

The RMT forum

There has been some controversy over aldaron's stickied topic in RMT. This probably deserves it's own topic, but I'll get the ball rolling here: I'm not sure it's such a good idea. It's already bitch-work to rate peoples teams, I'm not sure insulting their effort and expecting more out of something that is already rather unrewarding is a good idea...

I think aldaron's topic has some great information, however I pesonally think he could've have worded it differently. My first impression that I got when reading it was that aldaron (who, as IPL pointed out, doesn't rate teams anyways) was telling that those who do take the time to do it weren't doing a good enough job and specifically chose rates from users with team rater badges to criticize. I'm not sure if all of the citicized posts were, but I know I recognized at least 4 posts when I first read the topic.

There should be nothing insulting about my topic, as there was nothing insulting written in it

You never actually insulted anyone, but as I said, there were some things that were implied that obviously some people didn't like to much (IPL).

Again, I think it contains a lot of great information for those rating teams, but I think it could be toned down a bit. This includes the title.

 

[Taylor]

Indeed that topic has its uses. You could argue that "my complete and utter dissatisfaction" was perhaps "over doing it" in a sense that the team raters were awarded for their contribution to then have a thread created like that, which had the potential to wreck one's desire to rate teams. And we obviously know that affected some people (ie: Council). It was genuinely helpful for those who could do with the help that Aldaron provided with. Though I do feel that it should be toned down like Iggy (and others) have suggested.

As for "dealing" with bad rates, there isn't really anything you can do about it. New people will always feel like they should post in a topic and it's not always bound to be great advice, but sending a PM to each individual that posts a bad rate seems to be too much of a job to me. Although it seems to be the best idea so far.

I believe this criteria is the only part that concerns me (being a TR myself).

 

[Aeroblacktyl]

The way I view the EV situation is, it's an advantage to the "smarter" battlers out there. I don't mean advantage as help them out, but advantageous as in it lets me know what our mass flock of "not-so-smart" users uses. Like, I can always tell when one of my similar Poke will outspeed theirs because we're on intent on forcing a certain speed on shit. Of course everyone has their own EV preference, and if you put an extra number out there, there's going to be some bitching. Personally, I'd just tell what each Poke needs to be emphasized in, and what magical numbers they need to look out. We're a "top-notch competitive" battling site, not to sit around and hold someone's hand to teach them how to battle. That's what the tutoring system is for. If you're not competent enough to be able to do your own damage calcs, figure out your EVs, see what certain Pokes need to handle, then you have no right to bitch in the first place.

P.S. read.

 

[Phuquoph]

EVs: If they were so bad, more people would have complained on Smogon. I would simply ignore anything posted on other forums. People bitch about Smogon because they think it is "cool" to do so.

 

[Ryo]

Well first off I think that there should be a general revamp of the strategy dex. Well first off it wouldn't be a bad idea to have more than 1 EV spread for a set instead of just putting it in the EVs section later. I wouldn't worry about the people saying "Smogon EV suck!!" since they are mostly just trolls/idiots/whatever, but some could use work since alot has changed since the sets were made. There is nothing wrong with the olds EV spreads, but there are just some alternatives that could be better. I'm not saying every set should have 10 EV spreads, but 2 would be nice.

Another thing I noticed is some of the UU pokemon. Now I'm not too good at UU right now, but I'm trying to get into it so I looked at the dex entries for UU stuff. Lets take Clefable for example. Now Clefable is UU, but the dex entry is written like its in OU/BL. OU/BL pokemon are constantly mentioned in the moveset/EV descriptions and in the Counters section everything specifically mentioned is in OU/BL. So when a new UU player is trying to get into the metagame and has a Clefable weakness he should be able to see his UU options to counter it with. This is really were Smogon gets the most criticism from. No offense to the writer, it is a good analysis and OU/BL things should still be mentioned, but it should only be a small part of it. Now I saw a few more like this and if Clefable and others were predicted to be BL at the time of writing then that just shows how much we need to update stuff. I'm not really experienced in the UU metagame, but we should encourage other members who are to contribute.

Well everything else has pretty much been said.

 

[obi]

For the EVs, the only thing I really think is 'wrong' with most of them is that the reason for everything isn't always explained in a way that a relatively new person would understand. Fortunately, I'm going through every analysis and I'm focusing on EVs, so this won't be a problem for long.

About UUs in OU: They are written that way because UU might be about to get really mixed up, and thus there isn't / won't be much of an established metagame.

 

[maddog]

A note on the EVs: They are good at doing what the set they are listed with is trying to accomplish. I think Obi's idea is good: explaining the EVs are not only good for saying that the EV spread listed is opimoinal, but also give benchmarks and ideas if people want to create their own spreads.

For example, I pull up the Swampert analysis, and it says I need 56 or so SpAtk EVs to 2hko Skarm and Weezing with Hydro Pump, and 1hko Salamence with Ice Beam. Now if I wanted to make Swampert more Special Defense oreinated, for example, I know what the SpAtk EVs are doing, and am able to make a new EV set, but use the advice given on the Special Attack.

The EVs are not perfect, but they are generally good for the task, but I do feel that explaination that comes along with the EV spreads is necessary. If we can't explain what we are trying to accomplish with the EV spread, then maybe the EV spread we have listed isn't the best one possible.

 

[Mekkah]

I don't think we need 2 EV spreads per set. If we were to change something to the core lay-out of every analysis, it would be that [EVs] appears at every set (like [Set EVs]) so everything can be explained there. But I don't think it's needed: listing one spread and then telling the player about alternatives in Set Comments seems sufficient for me. It just hasn't happened everywhere.

I agree that Clefable (an analysis I wrote) needs UU stuff in there, but I do think that it's no less viable in OU compared to UU thanks to its niches. But first, we should get UU sorted out.