One thing I've always disliked about low tiers is how susceptible they are to the whims and the "flavor of the month" trends of tiers above them. The resulting erratic tier shifts cause a lot of problems for low tiers, where a potentially defining Pokemon rises to a higher tier due to a reason like OLT, or someone popular influencing ladderers, or simply because something is temporarily trendy. In particular, a big problem is that certain Pokemon tend to hover right at the border of the usage cutoff, sometimes dropping to and rising from a tier multiple times within one generation.
I'll give some recent examples of this problem that I'm familiar with:
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My proposal is to eliminate "rises". Get rid of Pokemon moving back up to higher tiers entirely. Once a Pokemon's OU usage moves it to UU, it stays in UU for the rest of the generation, regardless of whether its OU usage goes back up to the cutoff.
First of all, this would have no effect on the higher tiers that would otherwise be "taking" Pokemon from a lower tier. OU would not be affected by, say, Amoonguss being UU but having OU-level usage. It would obviously always be available to use, and if it is good enough to be used, then people will use it whether it's classified as OU or UU. As an OU player, this would have absolutely no effect on you.
Most importantly, this would provide some much needed stability to lower tiers. This would solve all of the problems I talked about before, and allow UU, RU, NU, and PU to make better, longer term decisions - decisions that won't be made useless because of a later tier shift or effectively reversed by another tier shift. Instead of UU making decisions based on a metagame with Amoonguss that would eventually be made pointless by Amoonguss leaving, UU could spend its time making decisions that permanently improve the tier.
This added stability would especially be appreciated with the official tournament circuit running them pretty much year round now (SPL, Snake Draft, Grand Slam - which has seen a ridiculous growth in size). The shifts I talked about above can all feasibly happen within the timespan of any of these official tours (12 weeks). Anyone who played SPL probably saw their UU player during week 3 say "Fuck, Rotom-W just rose...all my teams are useless." A more stable tiering system would be appreciated not only by lower tier communities, but also by anyone involved in these tournaments.
One thing that I should mention is that this system shouldn't take place immediately when a tier begins in a generation. There's a lot of fluctuation that happens in the first 12 months or so of of a new gen lower tier, because the tier above it isn't stable yet. For example, gen 7 UU had Clefable, Keldeo, Hawlucha, Mew, and more when it first started. These are now safely considered OU staples and will probably (as far as I know) have OU-level usage for the rest of the gen. That's just something I wanted to point out - that this system would ideally only be enacted 12+ months into a tier's existence.
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I understand that this is kind of a huge change to make - after all, Smogon has been all about "usage based tiering" since day 1, and with this proposal, some Pokemon would fall into a tier below the one that their usage dictates. However, I really think this would be to the benefit of everyone involved. Lower tiers don't have to deal with Pokemon dropping and rising and dropping and rising, and thus can make more lasting decisions and progress their tier far more than they can do now. Higher tiers are still not affected by something dropping out of the usage cutoff for their tier. I would just like to see what people's thoughts on this are and gather a general public opinion.
I'll give some recent examples of this problem that I'm familiar with:
- Rotom-W dropped to UU at one point. Being the great Pokemon it is, it had a massive effect on UU, which is fine. Only three months later, however, it rose again to OU, having an equally massive effect on UU, all within an incredibly short timespan. During that three months, a lot of tiering decisions had to happen because of that first tier shift, which were then made pointless by the second tier shift.
- Seismitoad rose from NU to UU literally only because of Rotom-W. However, that same tier shift, Rotom-W rose to OU. So NU was robbed of a great Pokemon for no reason whatsoever. Seismitoad is probably going to fall to NU this month (3 months after it rose). It's just pretty senseless that these tiers experience this level of volatility.
- Amoonguss rose from UU to OU. The impact of this rise arguably straight up caused a Pokemon to be banned from UU (Breloom), and likely had a very large role in the ban of another (Azumarill). Amoonguss seems very likely to fall to UU again this month, from what I've been told.
- Mamoswine rose from UU to OU because a youtuber gathered enough people to spam it on the ladder; now, three months later, it's very likely to fall again.
- In ORAS, Azelf was UU for the whole generation. As the generation neared its end, OLT happened, and people spammed that bird team non-stop on the OU ladder for 8 weeks. This alone was enough to push Azelf to OU. It would have fallen again but the generation ended right then, making Azelf permanently OU in gen 6 because of a fluky 2 month period that didn't represent its true "value" in gen 6. Obviously, past gen lower tiers aren't hugely important, but the main point is that the repeated use of ONE team over a short amount of time was enough to have a major impact on the tier below it. OLT in particular is a very large part of the problem I'm addressing.
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My proposal is to eliminate "rises". Get rid of Pokemon moving back up to higher tiers entirely. Once a Pokemon's OU usage moves it to UU, it stays in UU for the rest of the generation, regardless of whether its OU usage goes back up to the cutoff.
First of all, this would have no effect on the higher tiers that would otherwise be "taking" Pokemon from a lower tier. OU would not be affected by, say, Amoonguss being UU but having OU-level usage. It would obviously always be available to use, and if it is good enough to be used, then people will use it whether it's classified as OU or UU. As an OU player, this would have absolutely no effect on you.
Most importantly, this would provide some much needed stability to lower tiers. This would solve all of the problems I talked about before, and allow UU, RU, NU, and PU to make better, longer term decisions - decisions that won't be made useless because of a later tier shift or effectively reversed by another tier shift. Instead of UU making decisions based on a metagame with Amoonguss that would eventually be made pointless by Amoonguss leaving, UU could spend its time making decisions that permanently improve the tier.
This added stability would especially be appreciated with the official tournament circuit running them pretty much year round now (SPL, Snake Draft, Grand Slam - which has seen a ridiculous growth in size). The shifts I talked about above can all feasibly happen within the timespan of any of these official tours (12 weeks). Anyone who played SPL probably saw their UU player during week 3 say "Fuck, Rotom-W just rose...all my teams are useless." A more stable tiering system would be appreciated not only by lower tier communities, but also by anyone involved in these tournaments.
One thing that I should mention is that this system shouldn't take place immediately when a tier begins in a generation. There's a lot of fluctuation that happens in the first 12 months or so of of a new gen lower tier, because the tier above it isn't stable yet. For example, gen 7 UU had Clefable, Keldeo, Hawlucha, Mew, and more when it first started. These are now safely considered OU staples and will probably (as far as I know) have OU-level usage for the rest of the gen. That's just something I wanted to point out - that this system would ideally only be enacted 12+ months into a tier's existence.
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I understand that this is kind of a huge change to make - after all, Smogon has been all about "usage based tiering" since day 1, and with this proposal, some Pokemon would fall into a tier below the one that their usage dictates. However, I really think this would be to the benefit of everyone involved. Lower tiers don't have to deal with Pokemon dropping and rising and dropping and rising, and thus can make more lasting decisions and progress their tier far more than they can do now. Higher tiers are still not affected by something dropping out of the usage cutoff for their tier. I would just like to see what people's thoughts on this are and gather a general public opinion.
The current tiering system causes too much instability in lower tiers. Pokemon drop and rise based on temporary trends and that really fucks with UU through PU (see my examples in bullet points). If we got rid of Pokemon rising back up to higher tiers, we could eliminate this and solve a lot of consistency issues in lower tiers without affecting OU or really hurting anything.