New UU - Order of Operations

[TAY]

Ratings should absolutely be reset, as this test needs to take place on a single ladder. The current OU suspect ladder (stage 3!) has seen some dry spells even though it is (imo) pretty exciting, and spreading the already thin voting player base even more would be a bad idea.

If anyone has qualms about erasing everyone's ratings, they can be stored and reinstated later (the same thing we did for April Fools).

 

[Hipmonlee]

I have really only skimmed this thread, but if you are deciding whether to reset ratings or to have a seperate ladder, then I made a suggestion in my stage three and beyond thread that might be useful here..

What we need to do is during this period calculate two seperate ratings for battlers on the OU ladder. The normal rating, which wont be affected at all. And a second "suspect rating" which would be reset to the default position at the beginning of each test. This way people wouldnt complain about losing their ratings, but people also wouldnt qualify without a lot of battling during the month.

[edit 2] - Just to make sure this is clear, my normal rating would continue unaffected, but at the start of the month I would be given an additional rating, that would start at the default position, and change with every battle as though I were a battler with rating equal to that suspect rating facing another battler with rating equal to his suspect rating.

Maybe this would require a lot of work to implement? I have no idea, but it seems to me to be a perfect solution otherwise. Even if it was a lot of work in the short term, I think it would be worth it for all future tests on any ladder..

[edit] - it seems this thread is actually discussing exactly what my thread was intended to discuss so perhaps I will read things further.

Yeah, I'd like to argue in favour of starting with suspects legal and banning them one by one.

Practically it is much easier, you start with the current ruleset. Which I think is a huge advantage, especially if you are testing on the main UU ladder, it is less disruptive to people who are not interested in the testing process; but also it means less work for the battlers who have to deal with a less violent change at the start of the process.

It also forces people to participate in the test, for instance you cant refuse to use the suspect and quit battles against people who do.

It gives you a better idea of what the suspects are capable of, since they are being used throughout the testing period, hopefully they will be tested more thoroughly. If you start by voting on the most obviously uber pokemon, then the more difficult decisions will have had much more testing than they would otherwise.

I think that in the case of OU testing the stage 3 test has been quite a sudden shock to the system, I mean to end the testing process with a test that seems likely to be different from the final ruleset seems backwards, just intuitively it seems more logical to start from where you are, and then work systematically towards your final goal.

Have a nice day.

 

[X-Act]

I won't go in the merits of whether or not a new ladder should be created for the suspect test, but, if not, then I'll stress again that the ratings in the UU ladder _must_ be reset in order for the suspect test to have any significance (if we're using the 1655/65 and 1760/55 criteria again).

 

[Caelum]

This is the issue I always hated touching concerning this (you can see as far back as February, in this thread, I've disliked this). I've realized from the beginning that UU wouldn't likely have enough participation to have an active enough separate ladder to make it useful since it is a secondary metagame to OU; however, I've always been uncomfortable with a rating reset on the UU ladder since I would consider it unfair to those that didn't want to participate. Last round I didn't see a single complaint about it in PR, IRC, or Shoddy Chat (although I'm sure there were some people who complained about it) so we just went through with it; but I suspect after all this time that a complete reset might cause a bit more upset. Maybe my concerns are "out-of-touch", but our goal shouldn't be to piss off those UU players who don't really care about participating in the tiering of it and just want to play.

Considering the position I just laid out, I really like Hip's idea. I don't know how feasible it is. I'm sure it can be done, I just do not know if that mechanism is difficult for DJD to set up and I'm not inclined to hassle him and make him do extra work when he does so much already for both OU and UU tiering processes. If it's simple and he can do it trivially, then I'm all for it; but I don't want to put him through additional work.

 

[haunter]

Just to make sure this is clear, my normal rating would continue unaffected, but at the start of the month I would be given an additional rating, that would start at the default position, and change with every battle as though I were a battler with rating equal to that suspect rating facing another battler with rating equal to his suspect rating.

If technically possible I believe that this would be the best option for the incoming UU suspect test.

Basically Caelum said it all: resetting the rates would be unfair for those battlers who are not interested in earning voting rigths while making a separate UU suspect ladder would mean that this new ladder would be played only by those players involved in the suspect test, while the main UU ladder would be only played by the other players, with massive difficulties for both the categories to find a match.