Nice to see some use of the permaweather abilities. STAB usually isn't reliable to get, but I do agree that it's fun to stack it with high damage and multipliers. Others have already made their points about the team, so I'll talk about my recent experiences with Desolate Land. In the past I've tried a Starf+Harvest strat with Drought and Snorlax or something, but it was pretty bad. Now Gen 8 has brought in some great options that actually make this kind of viable. My Starfer of choice was Dragapult because it has good stats, but defences low enough so that it'll likely get into 25% HP in a match, and also nice resistances/immunities to keep it alive despite that fact, and most importantly amazing Speed to actually take advantage of possible offensive boosts. Gen 8 also provides another buff to this strategy in the form of Dynamaxing for more boosts, so with the initial berry activation, re-activation by Harvest, and 3 dynamax turns, that's 5 boost chances assuming everyone lives. Unfortunately being at sub-25% HP is still a bad position in general. Overall this strategy is really good at putting a lot of green numbers on screen, even though only the offensive stats really matter at that point.
With a new year brings new change, and so let's check out January's usage stats.
https://www.smogon.com/stats/2021-01/gen8metronomebattle-1630.txt
https://www.smogon.com/stats/2021-01/moveset/gen8metronomebattle-1630.txt
Right off the bat, 2021 is already breaking the mold with a massive
91480 battles, about a 50% increase compared to the usual figures around 60k. What's going on? If you've played on the ladder recently, you may have some idea of the cause, but first let's investigate the Top 10 for some possible context.
1630 Top 10 + last month positions:
#1: Mega Venusaur (no change)
#2: Type: Null (#17)
#3: Blissey (#7)
#4: Mega Heracross (#2)
#5: Necturna (#3)
#6: Mega Sableye (#5)
#7: Mega Camerupt (#15)
#8: Mega Slowbro (#12)
#9: Swampert (#19)
#10: Snorlax (#18)
Well, these ranks have changed significantly. To be fair, all the newcomers were pretty high up already, but to manage such a breach of the top 10 all at once? 2021 is starting off with upheaval, though not too drastic as most of the former top 10 are also still hanging around the top 20. Another observation is that Heracross remains #2 in raw usage, while Type: Null has about half that amount and so it has to have some really great results to be weighed that much higher. So who's behind this inhuman feat? Well, if you've played a few games and got out of 1000 club, you've probably encountered at least one bot. If you haven't, here's an explanation on what's going on.
The ladder has had 2 main bots fighting constantly for dominance,
MetronomerBot and
hippobotas. MetronomerBot has been around for a few months and it's had some mentions in the thread, like bringing Blissey up the ranks back in November or using Mold Breaker against the Shedinja menace. From my experience, I would say MetronomerBot is the more meta of the two, usually going for Unaware Type: Nulls, 2x Mega Venusaur, or Blissey, though there may be others I've overlooked. MetronomerBot seems to be more consistent in its team usage and rolls with one squad for at least a day from what I can tell, but does seem to switch teams at some point. I feel like the creator just changes its team manually every so often, but I've heard other scarier theories on the matter.
hippobotas is more of a wild card that's gone unmentioned in the thread so far. It seems to have a pool of random mons that it chooses 2 of to make a team of such as Mega Heracross, Mega Venusaur, Blissey, Mega Sableye, Mega Camerupt, Mega Slowbro, Snorlax, Rotom-Wash, Landorus-Therian, and Regice... sound familiar yet? Even some of those mons not in the top 10 are hanging around top 20 this time around, bringing a notable rise from December. Most of these mons have definitely had standard usage before, but a clear example of bot influence on the ranks is Rotom-Wash rising up from #353 with 70 uses in December to the present #14 with 5416.
With their constant 24/7 presence, it's safe to say that bots have taken over the Metronome Battles ladder, pulling the metagame along with it. I have personally seen MetronomerBot rise to #1 more than a couple of times, though always falling back down eventually. On the other hand, I observed firsthand that the current #1 player on ladder, "Coronacation 2020", reached that position mostly by adapting to a MetronomerBot on Blissey mode. Now I do want to point out that even though these bots have mastered the classic strategy of only picking Metronome, they are still not the most optimal players. I believe they can't consider any other options other than clicking the button, so no manual megavolution, Z-move usage, or the crucial strategy of dynamax stalling (though megas have no access to the latter). Even in these dark times, the spirit of humanity can still yet prevail, if for nothing else than pressing the advantage against these unfeeling, unstoppable automatons. Another limit I've witnessed is bot vs bot battles occasionally ending with one hitting some sort of rate limit and timing out. At some point I even brought my own bot back up for 2000 battles, though not with serious teams. Pikachu-Starters got 406 Ws/592 Ls and a Normalize team (with a chance of choosing a separate Scrappy team each battle) actually got a clean 500/500 win ratio.
The influence of bots even extends to the detailed moveset data, where you can basically pick out a bot set just by the raw usage. There are decisions I didn't see coming such as Venusaur's highest weighted ability being Friend Guard and Sassy on Heracross. Something else I noticed about Heracross is that Naughty has overtaken Adamant and Brave. This is probably because Naughty is the nature suggested by the Showdown teambuilder, with the most raw usage in the past for that reason, but it's a surprise for me to see it higher in weighted usage as well. Storm Drain has a huge lead on Desolate Land on Mega Camerupt, and I'm actually not sure how much that would change if stats ignored bots, since Storm Drain does have some benefits over Desolate Land.
Looking for the highest viability ceiling, I noticed that three mons reached a viability ceiling of 82: Mega Heracross, Mega Slowbro, and... Slowking, with a raw count of 49. I guess some high ranked player used it for a bit or something. The honour of highest viability ceiling belongs to Arghonaut and Caribolt at 83. It doesn't say much about consistency or even when it happened, but I think it's neat to know that some player at that GXE had actually played with those pokemon at some point.
One last thing I noticed is that the
1760 stats have a top 10 that actually fits the historical norm more, though the strict weighting brings its own other oddities like Mega Gengar at #9. I'm guessing that the bots having played so long has made their performance consistent enough for their raw usage to be treated seriously, but with enough losses at times to not be weighed as the elite of the elite.
Like everything else about the stats, this monthly post was pretty different, but I'm glad to have more to talk about than what the top 10 looks like. Battling a robot is an experience that probably every Metronome Battle player has shared in 2021, and their presence definitely leaves an impact on the metagame. Personally I find the bots interesting. I definitely appreciate being able to play fast games with instant actions, and I've bounced back from losing streaks sometimes by beating a relatively high Elo bot. Of course, sometimes the bots have caused those losing streaks, but such is the nature of Metronome.
EDIT: Shoutout to hippobotas for putting nicknames on every mon by the way.