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Makin' it Rain: UU Rain discussion

ToF, I wouldn't go that far. You have to take into account that 17 people (i think) voted for cresselia. What would explain such a large difference between one suspect and another? Maybe in regards to Damp Rock voters are on the fence, maybe they wanted to see another round of testing before they condemned it, maybe they would have been fine with the decision going either way. If every suspect got 6 votes then I could understand being angry at the voters. But when people really want to see something done, they obviously make sure it's done.
 
JabbaTheGriffin said:
ToF, I wouldn't go that far. You have to take into account that 17 people (i think) voted for cresselia. What would explain such a large difference between one suspect and another? Maybe in regards to Damp Rock voters are on the fence, maybe they wanted to see another round of testing before they condemned it, maybe they would have been fine with the decision going either way. If every suspect got 6 votes then I could understand being angry at the voters. But when people really want to see something done, they obviously make sure it's done.
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But just look at this topic lol. It seems everyone has an opinion, and yet only 6 votes? It's especially odd to see like the biggest talkers in this thread like FlareBlitz miss the vote (I don't know if its due to paragraph rejection or just simply not voting, but I'll assume its the latter). If you have that much to say in a thread like this, it's really not hard copying and pasting some of what you said in this thread in an 'attempt' to write a paragraph. If you have such strong opinions in a thread like this, how can you possibly abstain from the vote?

Also, this is in no way a criticism of you or reach in doing your jobs, but consider the voter turnout between the Shaymin/Crobat days and now. You guys have repeated the process without many changes, it's the voters that are constantly changing and gradually becoming more and more lazy. I understand if this rain thread was full of doubt as to the status of Damp Rock, but damn people had strong opinions in this thread, and refused to attempt paragraphs. This isn't the way I want important matters in this tier decided; if you don't plan on voting, why bother playing on the ladder and/or posting in a topic like this (I am guilty of this but you know my circumstances, or if you don't reach does).
 
I think the difference now is that people realize they need a higher standard of paragraphs in order to vote, so they only put in the effort if they have a strong opinion. If you look at the old days, they accepted pretty much anything you said in your paragraphs, I can dig up a hilarious example that i sent and was granted voting rights if you want. But on the easiest issues to address we still pull around the same amount of votes (Honch and Cressy serve as a good example). I view this as a good thing. If someone doesn't have a solidified view they shouldn't be voting, and that shows up when people only vote for one or two of the suspects.

And that brings up another issue. We've had two straight testing periods with A LOT of suspects. And considering the higher standard that requires much more time and effort which is stifling the vote counts. I'm sure if Raikou was the only suspect we'd have much more voters on it.
 
JabbaTheGriffin said:
I think the difference now is that people realize they need a higher standard of paragraphs in order to vote, so they only put in the effort if they have a strong opinion. If you look at the old days, they accepted pretty much anything you said in your paragraphs, I can dig up a hilarious example that i sent and was granted voting rights if you want. But on the easiest issues to address we still pull around the same amount of votes (Honch and Cressy serve as a good example). I view this as a good thing. If someone doesn't have a solidified view they shouldn't be voting, and that shows up when people only vote for one or two of the suspects.
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Except people with strong opinions are not voting, that's what I said in the response before lol. This thread is full of multiple players with hardcore views on rain, and many of them didn't do anything regarding paragraphs. That's the point I was making, and that's the point that worries me. I guarantee they spent more time posting in this topic overall than it would take to write paragraphs for each individual suspect; if the effort is being shown here where it doesn't matter, why isn't it being shown where it does matter and could potentially make a difference in the outcome of voting? That's all I'm saying - with the amount of strong sentiment in this particular thread, 6 people voting is unacceptable, especially since people high on the leaderboard this period were some of the people with the strongest opinions.

There needs to be something done about this obviously; if people can post there thoughts here with such length and attitude, they should have an easy time presenting paragraphs to you guys.
 
JabbaTheGriffin said:
I think the difference now is that people realize they need a higher standard of paragraphs in order to vote, so they only put in the effort if they have a strong opinion. If you look at the old days, they accepted pretty much anything you said in your paragraphs, I can dig up a hilarious example that i sent and was granted voting rights if you want. But on the easiest issues to address we still pull around the same amount of votes (Honch and Cressy serve as a good example). I view this as a good thing. If someone doesn't have a solidified view they shouldn't be voting, and that shows up when people only vote for one or two of the suspects.

And that brings up another issue. We've had two straight testing periods with A LOT of suspects. And considering the higher standard that requires much more time and effort which is stifling the vote counts. I'm sure if Raikou was the only suspect we'd have much more voters on it.
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The problem is that most views (from reading the noms thread and participating in the test a few go arounds ago) are along the same lines, you could easily find 1-2 posts in this thread, c+p them, then have your well-written opinion already there.

That throws the concept of a "higher standard" right out the window by not requiring thought but merely regurgitation of their own and others' ideas.

Otherwise, they have to re-state what they've already said in these threads multiple times in different wording, which is boring, monotonous, and, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary. The fact they not only have to write a paragraph for the nomination, but ALSO for the vote doubles the unnecessary workload.

So writing the same idea, 3 different ways (1 for the discussion thread, 1 for nomination, and 1 for vote) in no way proves any sort of "higher standard" nor does anything to facilitate balance. This test showed more than anything that there's something up with the system when even the most active and convincing posters and players don't even want to bother with the gargantuan mess.

I'd honestly like to see some recent examples of rejected and accepted paragraphs as well, because they seem to be judged by a very select group of individuals and writing to the masses is far different than writing to a few individuals that all have their own opinions and standards.
 
As I type this I'm thinking to myself: "isn't this the "rain" thread and not the "let's complain about the tiering because we didn't feel like writing paragraphs" thread"...but whatever.

I wholeheartedly agree with ToF. It's actually moderately insulting to have people run their mouths (or fingers?) off about how Rain is so clearly broken and how Damp Rock is clearly the culprit just to see them not vote at all (I don't want to point fingers...wait yea I do -->FlareBlitz). Not only insulting to people like me and ToF who were putting effort into this thread to argue against you, but to reach and Jabba. At least I'd take it as a slap in the face if someone was like "I feel strongly about this and can take 20 minutes to c/p two of my posts but I'm not because I don't feel like it".

RBG said:
We were a little lax the first round I will admit.......
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You found a way to reject me /sob.

Anyway, back on topic:

Do you think people will try this bullshit about Damp Rock again or do you think some moderately productive nomination will occur? For example, either banning Ludicolo, Kabutops, or even Rain Dance (the move) altogether?
 
I think I've said this before somewhere but I see banning Damp Rock as a mild version of banning any rain sweeper or the move Rain Dance. the quick version of my reasoning is that while the individual Pokemon have merit outside of rain teams, the item damp rock does not, which means banning damp rock is a less extreme way to limit the effectiveness of rain teams.
 
whistle said:
I think I've said this before somewhere but I see banning Damp Rock as a mild version of banning any rain sweeper or the move Rain Dance. the quick version of my reasoning is that while the individual Pokemon have merit outside of rain teams, the item damp rock does not, which means banning damp rock is a less extreme way to limit the effectiveness of rain teams.
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Shouldn't it be based on what is actually broken versus "how to nerf the team/playstyle". I mean if something like DS HO was broken, then would you want to ban Light Clay, Uxie, or "the best" set up sweeper? I think you would have a much better case with the latter two options, since Light Clay doesn't really effect how "broken" the strategy is, it just effects the ease of it to pull off without setting up screens twice. Same thing with rain. The Pokemon in the rain are what's broken, so why not ban the Pokemon in the rain instead of simply stealth nerfing rain?

The trouble with banning Rain in general is that you need to have an overwhelming majority.

If you (incorrectly, in my opinion) think that Damp Rock is the true culprit, you need to beat out the people who:

a) don't think rain is broken at all
b) don't think Damp Rock is the culprit (even if they think Rain is broken)

Even with some overlap, I have a hard time believing it would be easy to overcome those two groups of people.

We'll see I guess.
 
Still disappointed that some players took the UU route to Damp Rock. If Rain Dance really is broken, why did no one vote it Damp Rock? Its the only option there and I know some players wanted to vote the sweepers out, but Damp Rock was the only choice so why not vote it UU to nerf Rain Dance a little bit? I've said this many times, banning the rock is the "no harm done" move. For the sake of nerfing the stupid playstyle, I think people should have voted it BL. Good luck playing a rain team in tour, where your forced to run a defensive-based team 90% of the time to check Rain teams.
 
The Pokemon in the rain are what's broken, so why not ban the Pokemon in the rain instead of simply stealth nerfing rain?
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first, I think rain is "at fault". the pokemon are the ones who are visually broken since they are doing the sweeping and an item will almost never KO an opposing pokemon and will never do it consistently enough to be deemed BL. but that's not the same as determining who is "at fault". although this is an imperfect analogy I think the reason why soul dew was banned on Latias is that the item pushes Latias over the edge for what is okay in OU and what is not (lol assume for the sake of this argument that Latias's "true" tiering is OU). similarly, the extended rain turns push the sweepers over the edge.

second, since determining who is "at fault" is intrinsically difficult and pretty subjective, I think another (and perhaps better) standard to use is to see is to minimize the "amount" of ban. this is what I was getting at in my first post there; since the problem is collectively "these pokemon in the rain", we should try to chip away at that concept with as few bans as possible until there is nothing left broken. if we ban the pokemon, it nerfs rain along with completely getting rid of the pokemon. if we ban damp rock, it nerfs rain along but lets players use the pokemon competitively outside of rain. now obviously the degree to which banning each nerfs rain is pretty subjective, but I don't think the difference is so much that we have to worry about it now. this might be something worth having a test for rather than just theorymon-ed debate, but I don't know how feasible that would be.

one somewhat unrelated problem I see is that the "broken" element is rain as a whole. people aren't isolating just one sweeper when they refer to rain; they are referring to the offensive combination of "sd tops + sd ludi + sd qwilfish + gorebyss maybe" or something closely related. that makes it a lot harder to isolate a single sweeper especially given each sweeper does well against different teams or defensive core combinations.

of course this entire post has two underlying assumptions. one, that rain in its current state is broken. two, either banning rain sweepers or banning damp rock will alleviate the problem "to some extent". in my opinion the second portion of the statement is pretty self-evident, and the question simplifies to just whether rain itself is broken (I think it isn't but I am less sure of this than I was before this whole fiasco mostly due to a lack of recent experience).
 
Heysup said:
The trouble with banning Rain in general is that you need to have an overwhelming majority.

If you (incorrectly, in my opinion) think that Damp Rock is the true culprit, you need to beat out the people who:

a) don't think rain is broken at all
b) don't think Damp Rock is the culprit (even if they think Rain is broken)

Even with some overlap, I have a hard time believing it would be easy to overcome those two groups of people.
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I think that's one thing that makes this really tricky from a managerial perspective. I would have liked to see a three way poll between It's fine, lern2play/Ban Damp Rock/Ban (Kabutops), but vote dilution is an issue there. I think with how the vote went for the amazing 6 people who actually voted it was probably 4 "I think rain is fine" and 2 "I think rain is broken" regardless of what any of the six thought was the best way to deal with rain. I think that swing B group is a lot more likely to just ban to ban rather than to hold out, though it might make them less likely to vote.

If I were of the opinion rain was broken I'd definitely be going after Damp Rock based on whistle's last post though. He did a good job of summing exactly why I think Damp Rock was the right item to be voted on (and put some effort into encouraging testing it in Policy Review), but I think that, as the vote showed, Rain's power is grossly overrated.
 
I didn't vote because power went out in my city and I decided to have a candlelit dinner with my girlfriend instead of driving several miles to the next closest city. I do not regret this. Anyway, I appreciate the people who actually did vote on Damp Rock (regardless of how you voted); hopefully, this testing period, the individuals who were on the fence and those who did not vote will reconsider next time.
 
@ Whistle:

The other problem with determining who is at fault is indeed that it is purely subjective, even if you post logs (and lets face it, people are usually (more like always :/) biased when posting logs).

In my personal experience, Damp Rock actually did not really do much for Rain that wasn't compensated for by the other items held. This is purely subjective and there really isn't a way to know for sure.

@ Teifu:

I would like to think that people who vote "BL because I want Rain to be nerfed even though Damp Rock is the incorrect thing to ban" didn't get to vote. It's completely flawed thinking...

Also, a three-way vote could be a good idea, maybe we can decide that people can nominate "Rain" as broken, then for the vote we would vote on those three things. Not really sure if that would work though.

@ FlareBlitz:

(A new excuse every post)

Was your power out the day before? What about before that? You had ample time. In fact when you posted yesterday you STILL had time to vote. I don't see what you're trying to do here.
 
I didn't vote because I didn't meet the rating requirements =( But then again, even if I did meet the rating requirements I probably would've abstained because I can't be sure I'm losing to rain because I'm bad or if it's because rain is broken.

By the way Heysup I really don't see why you don't think Light Clay helps dual-screen strategies. Of course it does! The longer the screens are there to cover your sweepers, the more time they have to sweep. You can even leave a Water-type in against an Electric-type for example simply because screens are there to support you. How obvious can it get?
 
I can't be sure I'm losing to rain because I'm bad or if it's because rain is broken.
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It's probably both (no offense, just making a point). My best team mananges to win rain about 50% of the time and it focuses on balance, so it's perfectly possible to outplay your opponent with good teambuilding and strategy. It should be easy enough for other good players to bypass, so I don't find rain teams themselves inherently broken.
 
I'm trying to point out, Heysup, that Pokemon is a hobby for me, and not much more. That's why I'm not very active as far as the procedural aspects of this site goes. I'm not going to prioritize it over all the other things my day is filled with. True, I could have gone back, copied all my posts and called it a "paragraph", but I really dislike doing that, even in academia. I didn't vote because I value other things more than that. I could have voted if I was willing to devote a sufficient amount of effort, or if I was willing to engage in inane copy/paste fests. I am not. That's all my posts have ever suggested. Not that any of this is your business...at all.
 
Just pointing out that I voted BL for Damp Rock, and my paragraph/essay did actually contain a section on why specifically the Rock was the culprit. IMO, it basically boils down to the fact that the rock allows Rain teams to gain momentum, which is crucial, and that without it, you're switching or dancing for literally half your turns. Though I haven't really done much Rain Dancing, I do use a Sunny Day team extensively, and it's crystal clear that the item is crucial when it gets Tricked away.

Not much else to say ATM. My main objections to the playstyle that Damp Rock allows are that it can create matchups where a decent team (mostly HO teams) literally cannot win (as opposed to having an excitingly slim chance versus even the worst "conventional" matchup), it lets people create highly successful teams with cookie-cutter lineups, and, I must admit, I personally find it irritating. All points which are debatable, but to each his own.
 
I'm wondering how the metagame would be like without damp rock. Sunny day would probably get so common that it would be banned to and some pokes would drop to uu, while others would be moved to BL. I personally think it just takes out one of the niches that UU has over OU, that you can run rain dance/sunny day team in it and be affective.(Yeah I know you can run Rain in OU, but you probably know it's extremely hard to do so)

@FlareBlitz: I think their point is, why did you take a "sufficient amount of effort" to argue with them this whole time and didn't take the time to vote? In a sense, you just contradicted yourself.
 
Plopper said:
Sun doesn't have good sweepers like Rain does. It won't get common.
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This isn't exactly true! Sun has dangerous sweepers as well. Tangrowth, Exeggutor, Victreebell, ... could all very dangerous if used right. Sun also boost the power of Fire type moves, but because Fire (and Grass) Types are far less common then Water types are.
 
Sun is more versatile than Rain, simply because it's teams are more balanced (Grass/Fire having reasonably good synergy together), so unlike Rain, if things don't go your way, a Sunny Day team is less likely to just roll over and die like a Rain team would. Anyway, this is going off-topic, this is a RAIN thread after all.
 
Without Damp Rock sun probably would overtake it in popularity.
Sun doesn't have good sweepers like Rain does. It won't get common.
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Disagree, but Rain has one aspect that makes it far superior to sun. All the swift swimmers are water type, so thier stabbed water moves get a rain boost making the damage output frightening. Chloropyll users are grass wheras sun boosts fire moves, this means the sweepers are actually more vulnerable under their chosen condition and most likely wont get the boost (unless they have hp fire, as few have fire blast). It may seem fairly irrelevant but it makes a big difference.
 
Banedon said:
I didn't vote because I didn't meet the rating requirements =( But then again, even if I did meet the rating requirements I probably would've abstained because I can't be sure I'm losing to rain because I'm bad or if it's because rain is broken.

By the way Heysup I really don't see why you don't think Light Clay helps dual-screen strategies. Of course it does! The longer the screens are there to cover your sweepers, the more time they have to sweep. You can even leave a Water-type in against an Electric-type for example simply because screens are there to support you. How obvious can it get?
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You are not losing to rain because it's broken or because your bad, chances are you're losing because you aren't preparing for it properly.

And I never said Light Clay doesn't help dual screens? I was quite clearly pointing out that Light Clay was not a "necessity" on DS teams because it simply just effects how often you need to send in your dual screener, and Leftovers helps quite a bit with that. This is like how Damp Rock effects rain; it makes it longer and it does help a bit, but the difference between Rain as a whole with or without Damp Rock is quite negligible. Kabutops is just as broken.

FlareBlitz said:
I'm trying to point out, Heysup, that Pokemon is a hobby for me, and not much more. That's why I'm not very active as far as the procedural aspects of this site goes. I'm not going to prioritize it over all the other things my day is filled with. True, I could have gone back, copied all my posts and called it a "paragraph", but I really dislike doing that, even in academia. I didn't vote because I value other things more than that. I could have voted if I was willing to devote a sufficient amount of effort, or if I was willing to engage in inane copy/paste fests. I am not. That's all my posts have ever suggested. Not that any of this is your business...at all.
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You know that Pokemon is a hobby for everyone else? And what I'm trying to say is that, quite simply, that you did put effort into arguing your case, but you just disappeared when it mattered to do it - it was all for nothing. I mean whatever it's not that big of a deal, I'm just saying for next time you should really take the time to do it if you actually care about the metagame you're playing in - which you should.
 
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