The GSC council held a survey between December 5th to December 27th in order to gauge the community's perception regarding GSC OU. We didn't have something specific to address, our intention was to get in touch with the community and do a check for any looming threat or concern, therefore the survey was open for responses from everyone. The survey was divided in 4 sub sections: Metagame, Team Building, Ladder and tournaments. I'm going to present the answers of the survey in this topic and I welcome you to discuss or leave your feedback in a post below.
Without further ado:
A) Metagame section
Enjoyment and quality of the tier both average out roughly towards 8 out of 10, definitely showing warm feelings towards GSC OU from the masses. Only a small minority of 4 people out of 99 seem to heavily dislike the tier in both categories, while a staggering amount of 64/99 and 70/99 answers respectively, responded with 8 or higher.
There were around 50 responses from the optional feedback section. A few interesting responses:
Lastly, I went ahead and tallied concerns in the feedback: 14 people voiced out concern / dislike regarding swagger, 6 people dislike dynamicpunch (confusion in general is also mentioned) 3 people want snorlax banned and jynx was also mentioned 3 times.
B) Team Building section
For the people that build, very few people dislike building teams in GSC. 18/99 people don't build teams, 21/99 love team building in GSC. There's not much to discuss here as this question approaches everyone differently but results favoring the right side are notable.
(disclaimer) We recognize the addition of 1 = don't team build and the wording suggesting 10 ranks might come of as confusing (gonna be changed for next survey) but we are confident that our intention was clear to most respondents.
Excluding the first column (19/99 people that don't build), 30/99 responded with 6 difficulty or higher, while almost half (50/99) are between 2 and 5, which roughly translates to 1 in 3 finds gsc difficult to build, 1 in 2 finds gsc easy to build in and 1 in 5 doesnt build teams in GSC.
We also had optional feedback in this section, which we got 38 of. A few of these:
C) Ladder Section
45% of the respondents play ladder, while 18% doesnt touch it. The interesting percentage is the 35% of people that rarely play it; this possibly means its not their choice of metagame if they want to hop onto the ladder but sometimes might search for a game or two or they are dettered by other factors.
Notably, we got 88 responses from the feedback in this section.
Major issues regarding laddering from what has been voiced are a) time it gets you to find game (queue time) b) quality of players c) game length/commitment. This contrasts the general perception of the GSC metagame in the above questions; players love GSC meta but dislike the GSC ladder as daily activity. Notably, Swagger was mentioned by 9/88 respondents as being an issue. There's a ladder tour announced for GSC OU sometime later this year and the gsc council will monitor the ladder more closely after this survey's results, as its our wish to make GSC more accessible and enjoyable.
D) Tournaments section
16 of the people that took the survey don't watch/are uninterested by GSC tournaments. 50/99 answered with 8 or above so around half of the respondents enjoys watching GSC very much, which we believe are satisfying results.
Many people (43,3%) did not feel qualified answering this (and 16 of these already answered in the previous question that they didnt watch GSC tournaments). 11.3% think that the quality is bad (answered 2 to 5) while 45,3% thinks that the quality is good and/or very good (answered 6 to 10).
We had a final response section here which got 34 comments, gonna end this presentantion with a couple of them:
Ending words:
This survey was inspired by the DPP council's recent closed survery and its a step towards better communication between the gsc council and the gsc community. Albeit the survey was open to everyone and advertised publicly, most of the respondents were GSC mains and personally I feel satisfied with the amounts of answers in such a short notice and time limit. I would like to thank everyone that took the time to respond and cooperated for this.
Finally, you can check the full comments and the survey yourselves here: GSC SURVEY
Without further ado:
A) Metagame section
There were around 50 responses from the optional feedback section. A few interesting responses:
one of the rare metagame that make pokemon feel skillfull
It's just short of a perfect metagame in terms of balance. I'm happy to see where it is respective to another period of GSC. The creativity of the higher ups seems boundless.
meta is fine only thing that sucks is most people just copying other ppls teams and parroting others views and not thinking for themselves
I think my results are a bit odd given that my laddering experience weighs my enjoyment of the game quite a lot. I’ve always found the game more enjoyable playing w teammates or through the discord more enjoyable, as you’re less likely to see any cheese or whatnot. That being said, I do think the meta game is one of the best that Smogon has to offer and am happy to be playing it.
GSC OU has a good balance between abusing and playing around the metagame staples, which usually rewards players who can manage to stay ahead of the opponent / metagame's trends - but at the same time, it's one of the least beginner-friendly metas, especially in certain games where both players need to "gamble" their momentum around some low- or mid-risk + high-reward moves, which may come as a necessity in fair amount of games, where both players can't make their progress so easily... especially under a sample size of >90 turns.Sometimes you can have a blast playing the metagame or building / editing teams with your own spin, and sometimes you can have an unbelievably frustrating experience playing around certain elements of the game (early- or mid-game freezes, statistically unlikely outcomes of Thunder / DynamicPunch / Sleep length or Sleep Talk rolls), and a few other scenarios.
metagame is in a good point at the moment. a more offensive metagame is better for the overall enjoyement and makes it more attractive for newer players. only thing I dislike at the moment that some games get willingly decided by ugly 50 50s with dpunch and some more cheesy stuff, but hopefully that’s not an upward trend.
The tier feels a bit stale. But I think that is the natural conclusion of any video game especially one which is over 2 decades old.
The tier is super interesting but the current metagame feels cheesy as fuck, I'm not satisfied with it.
I fucking hate thunder accuracy
dont like the dynamics of dynamic punch and swagger
B) Team Building section
Excluding the first column (19/99 people that don't build), 30/99 responded with 6 difficulty or higher, while almost half (50/99) are between 2 and 5, which roughly translates to 1 in 3 finds gsc difficult to build, 1 in 2 finds gsc easy to build in and 1 in 5 doesnt build teams in GSC.
We also had optional feedback in this section, which we got 38 of. A few of these:
I don't think teambuilding in GSC is difficult as long as you know what team structures need, however innovation is the difficult part of building a new team in the gen which is why my answer is in the middle rather than an extreme
Having to account for Sleep-inducers like Jynx is a pain, and it results in less variety in the teambuilding process, but other than that, GSC teambuilding is wonderful. There is excellent variety, and there are plentiful strategies available.
I've built way to many teams. After this many it no longer is as fun but its still pretty epic.
Building something that feels novel and effective is an enormous challenge but it is as difficult as it is rewarding.I rarely manage to make something new myself. I do prep and tweak but I rarely build from scratch.
C) Ladder Section
45% of the respondents play ladder, while 18% doesnt touch it. The interesting percentage is the 35% of people that rarely play it; this possibly means its not their choice of metagame if they want to hop onto the ladder but sometimes might search for a game or two or they are dettered by other factors.
Notably, we got 88 responses from the feedback in this section.
Long queue times, low quality of play
Too much queuing time mostly, running into cheese strats like swagger which aren't representative of tournament use which i seek to replicate in test games, overall time is better spent to find private games than ladder to save time and for better quality and specific testing
low quality matches, long queue times, many people loading cheese strats like swagger and baton pass make the games i do play unfun and uninteractive
1. waiting times2. quality of games. you have to suffer trough about 5 ganes of ingame teams/bo cheese/players like cuzman before getting a quality game3. uncertainty about the length of games. when I know I have to leave in an half an hour I often don’t search for another game just cause I don’t want to forfeit because of time issues. it can be unappealing at times knowing if you ladder 2 hours you play only 2 game. I have no problems with that in tournaments but ob ladder I just wanna have quicker games.
there are better places to play gsc(opportunity cost)
D) Tournaments section
We had a final response section here which got 34 comments, gonna end this presentantion with a couple of them:
I’ve seen a lot of the replays and find that they can go from being a great watch to being ok. And that’s fine, it’s not gonna be good every replay and the highs are high anyways, but that’s just my experience.
The pool is weird, lot of weird team choice and plays, it's not worthy of SPL but the games were interesting as a spectator, even if not for the best reasons
Gsc feels very high stakes with all the boom potential/ counterplay.
Ending words:
This survey was inspired by the DPP council's recent closed survery and its a step towards better communication between the gsc council and the gsc community. Albeit the survey was open to everyone and advertised publicly, most of the respondents were GSC mains and personally I feel satisfied with the amounts of answers in such a short notice and time limit. I would like to thank everyone that took the time to respond and cooperated for this.
Finally, you can check the full comments and the survey yourselves here: GSC SURVEY
