Between people nominating Drought, which is neither dominating nor is it really seeing play (if at all at the top of the ladder), Shadow Tag, which all users of are either currently UU (Wobbuffett) or not legal to use (Dream World Shandera), and Deoxys-N being banned when no one used it, I'm very disappointed.
Some nominations make more sense then others, but these make me shake my head.
I also feel like this community is subject to the snow-ball effect. One or two players mention the difficulties of dealing with a particular threat, and then everyone bandwagons, creating a political storm all in favor of banning the Pokemon in question.
Given the past results and the way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Rankurusu heads down that trend.
This is exactly how I feel.
And it's because of this that I'm starting to get really skeptical as to whether it was a good idea to give people so much freedom in their nominations. Honestly, we have some people who are nominating like 10 things in their posts. Because they're allowed to nominate as much shit as they want, they're going to nominate anything that even remotely gives them trouble. Ie. Rankurusu and Landlos.
I don't understand what happened to people at least trying to play around threats. Is it really that hard to change parts of your team because it doesn't work well in the metagame? Are people so upset that certain pokemon are used more than others which leads them to nominate stuff for causing "centralization"?
Also, a problem that existed back in Gen 4 might be creeping into this metagame too. In Gen 4, I found that people consistently banned any suspect that came into a vote because they just wanted to play a fresh, new metagame. I'm getting a very bad feeling that this is going to happen in Gen 5 a lot, because with all the people that seem to think that centralization is grounds for banning, and the lack of uber characteristics, people are going to be voting a lot on metagame preference, which IMO, is not the way to go.
I'm kind of wondering how many people who are nominating things such as Rankurusu based on actual playing, or based on bad theorymon. I'm sure some of the top players like Jabba might be nominating it based on actual playing, but I'm sure that a very large amount of players are just bandwagoning with what he said. Like Ulevo said, something like Deoxys-N was banned when nobody even used it, yet because so many people posted nominations that were obviously theorymon (with maybe one or two legitimate nominations), and because people felt it was exactly like Deoxys-A when they were voting, it got banned. That's the reason I posted a huge de-nomination for it, because I really, truly think it was unfairly banned.
All I can say is that I hope Phil and his cabinet weed out the nominations that sound like they're blatant bandwagons, because that's the only real way to help the problem.
I'm at least glad to see that there are very few Shadow Tag nominations this time around though, because it absolutely isn't a broken ability. Maybe Wobbuffet is broken with Shadow Tag (I don't think it is, but whatever), but Wynaut sure as hell isn't, especially since Encore kinda sucks with only 3 turns now. And when the Unova Shadow Taggers come out, Shandera
might be broken with it (again, I don't think it is from my experience in DW OU), but Ranpuraa and Hitomoshi sure as hell aren't (Hitomoshi is apparently ridiculously hard to use even in Little Cup), and people don't even think Gochiruzeru is broken in DW OU.
Don't forget about the pre-evolutions when considering banning an ability. They're pokemon too! There's literally no point in banning an ability that
might be considered broken on 1 or 2 pokemon, but is completely fine on every single other pokemon that has it.
The only time an ability like this should be banned IMO is when they're a case like Inconsistent. Inconsistent was broken on literally every single user of it, including shit like Bidoof. The important point here is that it not only took into account the fully evolved users, but also the not-fully-evolved users. They were all seen to be broken, so the common factor making them all banworthy, Inconsistent, was banned instead.
I'm aware that those nominating suspects made voting reqs, but I can't help but feel a bandwagon mentality and the mindset of "I don't like playing this, let's toss it out."
A very large amount of people nominating did not make voting reqs.
