Everything Tangerine said in PR pretty much identically mirrors everything I've said for months in every Stealth Rock-related thread I could get my hands on, and everyone really needs to read his post if they haven't already.
I have a significant problem with what Jumpman has claimed our goals are in terms of shaping and balancing the metagame, and in fact I'm slightly confused considering that he personally rejected my Deoxys-S vote way back when I believed "making Choice Scarf obsolete" and "kills all-out offense teams" were valid reasons to throw it into Ubers- which, from where I'm standing, they very well might have been, had Jumpman carried out back then what his philosophy has become. So I'm not really sure what to think about all of that, as besides being what I see as directly contradictory to Smogon's past actions, making the "most competitive metagame possible" or "testing bans when we believe there might be an improvement of some sort" are pretty huge steps in the wrong direction if we want the process of actually
finalizing standard to be relatively quick and painless.
Yes, I'm suggesting that "slippery slope" could apply later down the road (I'm looking at Trick and Heatran right now but who knows- while they're both stretches, there are still complaints, which is essentially how Stealth Rock was earlier on. Hipmonlee's suggestion in early DP that he could make a superior OU metagame by banning a number of legendaries and other high-BST pokemon also comes to mind, though truthfully I don't see anything like that ever happening), and if you want to challenge that then I'd love for you to explain away the most recent suspect voting results which, for a pokemon who literally
just had several potential counters buffed up significantly in Platinum (most notably Scizor), we still managed to vote Deoxys "Uber" by a greater margin than Garchomp, quite possibly the most dominant OU in the history of pokemon. And while I recognize that there are potentially tons of factors playing a role here and that it may just point to our current voting system sucking (which I believe is the case), there are arguably just as many factors behind this push for Stealth Rock becoming a Suspect- "too few votes" may be a valid explanation for the bizarrely one-sided outcome of the Deoxys Uber/OU vote, but that runs directly parallel to, and in fact may be greater emphasized when we're merely deciding whether or not to put something in the "testing" pile. Maybe I just think a SRless metagame would be a "breath of fresh air"- well, with no real incentive not to go along with it, I guess you've got my vote for a Stealth Rock test, should be fun!
This type of mentality needs to be avoided unless we want to open the doors for literally anything to end up being tested-- or (arguably) worse, things that we don't necessarily "need" so much as "want" tested getting priority over the untested, unjustified bans/clauses we have lying around-- based entirely on popular opinion, even if 80% of those in favor of testing just want to see what crazy things they can pull off without Blissey around (or are just sheep in general). If we draw the line at "Any Pokémon, move or clause that respectively may benefit competitive standard or uber battle if moved or implemented elsewhere," how are we supposed to regulate that? My only explanation is that we simply don't care, and that testing anything based on popular support is something we think we can handle. I think that this already puts far too much faith in a community whose low/mid-tier players would probably have made Suicune and Blissey Suspects a handful of years ago in Advance, and whose "1655 with a deviation of 65" players would have probably kept Celebi out of Adv OU for good. It's also a huge waste of time.
I don't know if just fixing the voting system we have right now might magically solve everything, and that's definitely a priority. I'm also not sure that all of my concerns are necessarily going to end up valid in the long run. I'm just not seeing any incentive in having such a broad definition of what is considered suspect, or for saying that we should strive for the most competitive metagame possible.
As for Stealth Rock specifically, if I tried to add anything I'd only be repeating myself, Tangerine, or jrrrrrrr (who has apparently changed his mind since the last time we've discussed this, which makes me happy lol). I want to particularly emphasize, though, that more than anything else a Stealth Rock ban would change the game fundamentally. When you look at a change that significant, and when you define suspect as "something that benefits the game when gone," hell, if I actually saw a problem with the current metagame I'd be looking at dozens of other random things to potentially test before Stealth Rock, simply because they could help solve the problem without completely changing how DP/Pt works.
RB Golbat said:
The only way to truely know if it's broken or not is to actually play the metagame without it.
I don't know what to say, besides the fact that this makes no sense whatsoever under any circumstances. I'm assuming you just have a wildly different definition of "broken" than I do, but I agree with Chris is me here- we'll arguably know that a SRless metagame is more or less centralized, or that some people prefer one or the other, and it's a foregone conclusion that people will discover that Stealth Rock is highly influential. If the move is broken, though, we'll be able to find out without testing a SRless metagame.
MythTrainerInfinite said:
DT and OHKO moves are actually banned on the basis of being too overpowered if I read stuff in the the Policy Review correctly. The reward is greater than the risk.
Both of those statements are wrong. First of all, we've never actually tested either OHKOs or Evasion moves in DP/Pt (or at least not extensively). Secondly, the theory right now seems to be that neither move is actually worth using the majority of the time (particularly OHKOs, which are ironically the most likely to remain banned in my mind), but since poor players will use them anyway, there might be a needless increase in "hax" losses. In either case we haven't actually tested them, so we have no idea whether the reward might significantly outweigh the risk though.