Woodchuck
actual cannibal
It's not the viability of programming that concerns me, it's the fact that having such a complex banlist is ridiculous. A list of pokemon is easy enough to keep track of, but when you have over 650 pokemon (including formes), at least half of which are tiered based on different aspects such as abilities, you have such a ridiculous banlist that competitive pokemon becomes a farce rather than a clear game -- it basically becomes us nerfing whatever is more powerful than other things until we have a completely level playing field -- which believe it or not, is a bad thing. A ban list is a banlist, not a list of abstract restrictions on parts of pokemon that we have created so that we don't have to bother to check or counter anything. There's also the point that with so many complex restrictions, it will be that much harder to get into the metagame and to keep up -- it's already exasperating to deal with the restrictions caused by what genders are released in Dream World, etc.@Woodchuck: The complication is only partially true. The upper tiers are easier (where less things are banned) and the lower tiers (where a lot of things can't make it because of usage stats, meaning you avoid the need to make some of them). You're only going to need to address overwhelming combinations for bans, but I think if you really wanted to tier AND ability, it'd be quite easy to do. I think the computer could easily keep track of the amount of time a Pokemon is used with a certain ability although I can't confirm it. It seems easy if you can block someone from using ability/move combinations for illegality, imo.
This is even worse because the method that would be used to implement it, where the server decides what is legal and what isn't, means that you have to reload your team and reenter the tier every time you try to implement something new and find that you missed that restriction that bans Guts Conkeldurr from UU but not Iron Fist.
Basically, see the above -- there is no good reason for complicating our banlist apart from the people who really like Blaziken and thus are dying to use it. Yes, variety is important, but it isn't more important than simplicity of ruleset -- or at least, isn't important enough to warrant complex bans.Someone explain to me where this logic comes from. I'm going to be a broken record by the end of the day (punt unintended). If the Pokemon is manageable without the ability, and the ability has also been given to other manageable pokemon, neither of them can be the problem. You have evidence that Blaziken is a manageable threat with Blaze and you have other Pokemon with Speed Boost who are manageable threats so it must be some combination of what the ability does and what the Pokemon does that's the problem.