Hi! Alpha stages for lower tiers last too long. Solution? Make them last less long. Why? A few reasons. Don't worry, I'm not suggesting anything drastic- you can find my exact proposal at the bottom of this post.
It just doesn't take a month to determine what is clearly broken. When a new tier is dropped, a lot of games are played very quickly, including by many very skilled players. In almost every case, the most obscene Pokemon that get banned at the start of Beta phase are ones that were identified day one of Alpha, let alone week one. Counterplay to these threats is typically established within the first few days, and it becomes apparent fairly quickly (within, say, a week or two) whether the counterplay is sufficient to make a given threat balanced. A month is blatantly overkill and I can't think of any examples where a council changed their mind on a major threat towards the end of the Alpha phase. Having led several tiers through Alpha stages myself with BDSP, I couldn't find any positives with the phase taking so long. If you're thinking "but what if the drops change things?", refer to the next section.
OU doesn't have to deal with Alpha stages. It's fair game for the OU council to ban anything instantly if it's clearly far too powerful, as demonstrated in full force at the start of this generation. For what reason is this option not afforded to the lower tier councils? Sure, an answer to a threat could drop, but how often has a single new answer actually changed whether something is so clearly and exceptionally broken? I'm reminded of early SS UU Mamoswine, who was being suspect tested when the "perfect answer", the very viable Rotom-Wash, fell into the tier- it changed nothing except warping the tier even more to focus on this one mon who didn't really solve the problem anyway. The rare case where something unexpectedly drops and makes a banworthy threat healthy and balanced on the first possible month seems like it would be unlikely enough to not cause problems, and it could easily be resolved by a retest in the near future regardless.
Shorter Alpha stages would (probably) result in subsequent lower tiers being more immediately stable. With the current system, the first month of usage stats is totally warped by clearly unhealthy presences that will be ejected immediately afterwards. This often results in lower tiers having noticeably different usage between their first and second months, resulting in subsequent lower tiers taking longer to stabilize as their legal pool of Pokemon can suffer unusually substantial changes. If the Alpha period were, say, two weeks long, the tier could recover from the effects of centralization to provide more accurate preliminary usage stats and improve the stability of subsequent tiers.
Most people who actually play the tiers don't seem to like it lasting this long. When leading BDSP lower tiers, I only heard negative opinions on the length of Alpha stages when talking with the most prominent community members, mainly in the form of "I can't wait for [X Tier] to leave Alpha so we can play a healthy meta". This included council members on, if I'm not mistaken, every single occasion. Our UU playerbase had to wait for Mence to leave, our RU playerbase Kingdra and Venomoth and Drought, our NU playerbase Linoone and Zangoose... and now, SV UU and RU had to wait for their own very obviously obscene threats to leave before the tiers became competitive, leading to a lot of frustration and waiting rather than useful metagame development. This really just leaves me wondering- who are we doing this for?
In summary, my proposal is the following: we should reduce the duration of Alpha stages. As opposed to Alpha ending with the next tier shift as it currently does, My proposal would be a two week duration, followed by a Beta period in which a very strong consensus (80% supermajority?) is required for quickbans. This Beta period should last at least until the next tier shift, if not longer, until the council deems the metagame stable enough to not require quickbans. This proposal aims to address the concerns and frustrations of a large portion of the lower tier playerbase, improve the stability of the lower tiers, and accelerate their development.
I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this idea or any points I have raised, especially from those who are/have been involved in the development of lower tiers.
It just doesn't take a month to determine what is clearly broken. When a new tier is dropped, a lot of games are played very quickly, including by many very skilled players. In almost every case, the most obscene Pokemon that get banned at the start of Beta phase are ones that were identified day one of Alpha, let alone week one. Counterplay to these threats is typically established within the first few days, and it becomes apparent fairly quickly (within, say, a week or two) whether the counterplay is sufficient to make a given threat balanced. A month is blatantly overkill and I can't think of any examples where a council changed their mind on a major threat towards the end of the Alpha phase. Having led several tiers through Alpha stages myself with BDSP, I couldn't find any positives with the phase taking so long. If you're thinking "but what if the drops change things?", refer to the next section.
OU doesn't have to deal with Alpha stages. It's fair game for the OU council to ban anything instantly if it's clearly far too powerful, as demonstrated in full force at the start of this generation. For what reason is this option not afforded to the lower tier councils? Sure, an answer to a threat could drop, but how often has a single new answer actually changed whether something is so clearly and exceptionally broken? I'm reminded of early SS UU Mamoswine, who was being suspect tested when the "perfect answer", the very viable Rotom-Wash, fell into the tier- it changed nothing except warping the tier even more to focus on this one mon who didn't really solve the problem anyway. The rare case where something unexpectedly drops and makes a banworthy threat healthy and balanced on the first possible month seems like it would be unlikely enough to not cause problems, and it could easily be resolved by a retest in the near future regardless.
Shorter Alpha stages would (probably) result in subsequent lower tiers being more immediately stable. With the current system, the first month of usage stats is totally warped by clearly unhealthy presences that will be ejected immediately afterwards. This often results in lower tiers having noticeably different usage between their first and second months, resulting in subsequent lower tiers taking longer to stabilize as their legal pool of Pokemon can suffer unusually substantial changes. If the Alpha period were, say, two weeks long, the tier could recover from the effects of centralization to provide more accurate preliminary usage stats and improve the stability of subsequent tiers.
Most people who actually play the tiers don't seem to like it lasting this long. When leading BDSP lower tiers, I only heard negative opinions on the length of Alpha stages when talking with the most prominent community members, mainly in the form of "I can't wait for [X Tier] to leave Alpha so we can play a healthy meta". This included council members on, if I'm not mistaken, every single occasion. Our UU playerbase had to wait for Mence to leave, our RU playerbase Kingdra and Venomoth and Drought, our NU playerbase Linoone and Zangoose... and now, SV UU and RU had to wait for their own very obviously obscene threats to leave before the tiers became competitive, leading to a lot of frustration and waiting rather than useful metagame development. This really just leaves me wondering- who are we doing this for?
In summary, my proposal is the following: we should reduce the duration of Alpha stages. As opposed to Alpha ending with the next tier shift as it currently does, My proposal would be a two week duration, followed by a Beta period in which a very strong consensus (80% supermajority?) is required for quickbans. This Beta period should last at least until the next tier shift, if not longer, until the council deems the metagame stable enough to not require quickbans. This proposal aims to address the concerns and frustrations of a large portion of the lower tier playerbase, improve the stability of the lower tiers, and accelerate their development.
I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this idea or any points I have raised, especially from those who are/have been involved in the development of lower tiers.
