Someone is mad their luck isn’t good lol. If you don’t like the luck aspect of Pokémon please play a different competitive game.
This is an
absolutely, uniquely terrible argument.
Bans and the sleep clause exist in Pokemon for an extremely good reason. We are playing this baby game intended for toddlers in an attempt to play it competitively because we enjoy it that way.
Time and time again we have gotten to unique situations in which the amount of variance present within the game gets in the way of playing it in a competitive manner. Double team, OHKO moves, Swagger, and unreasonable team matchup fishing (e.g. Baton Pass) are things that we have banned in the past for self-evident reasons, and you would be exceedingly hard pressed to find someone who has any competitive merit whatsoever willing to go to bat for reinstating all of those in the game.
We have never sought as a community to remove every instance of variance from the game in an attempt to preserve some semblence of the baby game we enjoy and to encourage offensive play rather than boil everything down to PP wars, and the specific threshold we have have for each generation and each situation varies greatly, but as the power level of non-Uber Pokemon increases with every single generation, the effect of variance within any given turn is more and more explosive. In, say, Generation II, exceedingly inaccurate moves can be used often because the risk of missing one is significantly lower. Thunder and Sing are entirely palatable because there is little chance that missing or hitting one will change the entire flow of the game. Those slower games where RNG is more agreeable naturally reward a more skilled player, and faster ones inherently hurt a more skilled player, because as the law of large numbers goes, the more turns a game goes on and the more decisions need to be made, the more the better player will be the one benefiting from them and the less a simply lucky player will benefit from them.
We have entered a generation where the threats are so uniquely absurd that simply hitting a Hypnosis can determine the entire game, unless your team is warped so as to accommodate it. When faced with something like that, it is entirely reasonable to say
a move that creates such variance to the extent that the winner is not the more skilled player, but the more lucky one should be banned entirely.
If your priority is not allowing the more skilled player to win consistently, you should not be creating competitive rules, and furthermore if we do not create an environment where the more skilled player does win consistently, there's no reason to play this competitively.
I feel like a huge disconnect exists as a proportion of the community cares about competitive play and a huge proportion just wants to have fun. If all you want is fun in a semi-competitive environment with your wacky dragon creatures, that's fine, and that's mostly the camp I fall into myself, but you can't complain when people want to boil things down to competitive merit.
I firmly believe Hypnosis needs to be banned outright, we need a complex ban where certain Pokemon are incapable of using it, the abusers of it need to be banned outright, or we need to ban sleep altogether. The last option I feel throws the baby out with the bath water and would be regrettable, because things like Amoonguss are strong pivots capable of shutting down single threats which enable unique counterplay and different teamstyles, and Breloom is a uniquely momentum-generating offensive juggernaut which falls off really hard after it's exhausted its status.
Sleep Powder can have an argument made too, but overall I don't think it's really as big of an issue. Chlorophyll Venusaur hasn't really torn everything to shreds to a gross extent, and 75% is a whole 25% more likely to hit than Hypnosis's 60% (in terms of relative odds, not percentage). That means the threshold of variance is far lower.
The other solution to stop these moves from determining the game outright is to simply scale back the power level substantially. We could easily accomplish that by banning a huge amount of offensive threats from the game entirely, banning Terastalization, banning Z-Moves, and leaving ourselves with a very slow metagame, but I feel like the overall majority of people would rather the game not take that form. You'd preserve Hypnosis as being balanced though, if that's your utmost priority.
I would personally say this extends to more moves than just Hypnosis personally (fuck Scald and all that it's ever done because its existence alone is a sheer blight on Pokemon, we've all swapped into a risky Hurricane once, been crit+confused, and then hurt ourselves and a "counter" ended up just being death fodder), but that would be an entirely separate argument, and really this whole meta discussion revolves around sleep.
Otherwise, if we simply just accept that games will come down more and more to luck/matchup fishing as Gamefreak's ability to balance things further and further deteriorates, why not just free Miraidon into OU and call it a day? Miraidon will give us an extremely reliable way to prevent sleep entirely!
You're playing pokemon, it's child gambling. Even toxic is luck-based do we ban that too?
Would you free Double Team? Or would you accept a match is seldom won or loss based on a single toxic, yet that a match is much more often won or lost based on a single Hypnosis, and it's not the existence of luck that matters but the extent to which luck affects the outcome of the game?