Approved by Quanyails (and i think Sunfished)
Anyone who's been around the CAP art community for long enough will know that art is treated as... "secondary", to the process of making a Pokemon here. Which isn't to say that the artists aren't respected, nor is it to say that CAP would rather not involve art, I'm just saying that at the end of the day, the art is treated as a "support" to the Pokemon design as a whole, and the fate of the artists is ultimately decided by the results of the competitive process. This isn't a necessarily bad thing, and it's part and parcel with how CAP works; to some extent, it should stay. But I think lately we've seen that the present system is problematic in some ways, especially towards artists, and to some extent, it encourages a rather negative culture surrounding the "competitive" and "flavor" sides of CAP.
If I'm sounding a bit confusing here, let me give you an example. The latest CAP, Miasmaw, had the options of NCA, Compound Eyes, Competitive, Motor Drive, Punk Rock, and Thick Fat on the secondary ability poll. The last three abilities I mentioned, when taken in context to the rest of the Pokemon (Neutralizing Gas Bug/Dragon with high Atk that is frail on the physical side) makes it so that atleast half of the contentious designs would've been immediately eliminated, and what more, the typical deadline for final submissions is... 48 hours after the Secondary Ability Polls are concluded. Now, it should be noted that the deadline would almost definitely have been increased further if one of these abilities were selected, but an artist's motivation would be killed if they had to restart the whole design process from scratch when they've spent multiple weeks trying to craft a design as close to perfection as possible. I haven't actually checked this, but I can guarantee that a good number of artists would've quit on their designs if we'd gotten, say, Thick Fat. This is a problem that's been in the "process first, art second system" for quite a while, but is only now being seen and witnessed due to... if I'm being honest I'm not entirely sure why this problem's only been spotted now, but it is a fairly concerning one if CAP as a project wishes to retain artists, draw newer artists in, and have gorgeous designs every single time.
Birkal and Darek851 brought up the point of how interesting and wacky flavor combinations bring out innovation and creativity, and I think that's a fair point to make. I think the previously mentioned example (Miasmaw) achieved this in the art process quite well, Bug/Dragon with Neutralizing Gas was an interesting framework that pushed artists to their limits. But I wonder if another step further, with a restricting secondary ability, or a strange move like, say, Brave Bird, would've been more restricting than anything. Nevertheless, I agree with this point, and I think my proposals below do a decently good job of keeping that aspect intact.
I think I've done a decently good job of justifying the need for this proposal, so I'll get to to the meat of it. There are a few ideas that I could see us doing in order to solve this problem:
1) Inserting a stage where changing the names of certain abilities is discussed, after the art has been decided
Out of all of the three, I believe that this is the safest option and the one that is the most consistent with other PRC changes we've made. Make it so that, after the art has been selected, a thread is opened on whether or not any abilities should be renamed, and if so, create a poll with the submitted options. By renaming, I mean creating a flavorful clone of the selected ability that essentially does the same thing (along the lines of Dazzling/Queenly Majesty, etc.) I don't think this pseudo-stage has to be separately timeblocked, since it's relatively minor, and I'd suggest running it alongside the prevo stage. I think the main thing I myself dislike about this proposal is the fact that it doesn't retain the "innovation" factor as much as the current system, but I feel like, to an extent atleast, the ability to have art that sticks to the original ability would be rewarded and respected, and I'd bet people would still have a bias towards designs that achieve the original non-renamed frameworks. Regarding the number of abilities that should be changed, I'd love to keep it to just one, and just generally discourage change unless the Pokemon really really needs it (ergo, Krilowatt, or potential Thick Fat on Miasmaw).
2) Adding certain restrictions to competitive stages to prevent terrible flavor
I heavily dislike this idea, but I want to mention it either way since I thought of it while brainstorming ideas and it's a possible solution, albeit not a perfect one. Adding restrictions to competitive stages to prevent bad flavor and/or banning heavily discussed abilities due to their terrible flavor is a way to solve this issue that preserves our integrity as a less fanboy-ish project while also allowing for much more leeway and discretion from the TLT and moderators regarding what abilities are flavorfully bad. My issue with this is that it involves flavor aspects controlling the competitive ones, which definitely shouldn't be the case. What I'm about to say might be seen as contradictory to the rest of my post, but I do believe that, at the end of the day, CAP is a competitive-first project and although I think the "flavor side" should have a better standing and more support, I don't think making it so that flavor actively prevents pro-concept-ness and competitive viability would be a good idea. I still think the base idea has a bit of merit though, which is why I'm mentioning it here.
3) Rearranging the process stages to make it so the more "defining" stages, flavor-wise, are earlier in the process.
This is by far my favorite of my three proposals, as it gets to the root of the issue and (hopefully) shouldn't obstruct the competitive process much. If, say, the movepool stage happened before the stat stage, or there was a "Defining Moves" stage along the lines of this PRC proposal by quziel, it'd be much easier for artists to have an idea of how they're design needs to look like at the end and what competitive aspects need to be accounted for. I think the ways we could go about this would be to:
a) Add a mandatory "Defining Moves" stage after the typing
b) Interchange the Moves and Stats stages in terms of chronological order
c) Moving the Secondary Ability stage further back, possibly to right after primary ability
d) Making the art submission deadline later in general, maybe to somewhere mid-moveset stage right now?
If this proposal is to be actualized, we would ideally have a mixture of the above points, since for the most part they address different issues from eachother. I think all of them have atleast a bit of merit though, which is why they're all mentioned.
I had a conversation with Sunfished about this proposal which I think brought up some valid concerns that could be useful for this discussion, but I'd rather not paraphrase what he said and possibly misconstrue his points, so here's the log. I highly encourage reading through it if you've gotten to the end of this giant post
I think that's basically it for this proposal, please be constructive and thoughtful in your replies ^^!
Anyone who's been around the CAP art community for long enough will know that art is treated as... "secondary", to the process of making a Pokemon here. Which isn't to say that the artists aren't respected, nor is it to say that CAP would rather not involve art, I'm just saying that at the end of the day, the art is treated as a "support" to the Pokemon design as a whole, and the fate of the artists is ultimately decided by the results of the competitive process. This isn't a necessarily bad thing, and it's part and parcel with how CAP works; to some extent, it should stay. But I think lately we've seen that the present system is problematic in some ways, especially towards artists, and to some extent, it encourages a rather negative culture surrounding the "competitive" and "flavor" sides of CAP.
If I'm sounding a bit confusing here, let me give you an example. The latest CAP, Miasmaw, had the options of NCA, Compound Eyes, Competitive, Motor Drive, Punk Rock, and Thick Fat on the secondary ability poll. The last three abilities I mentioned, when taken in context to the rest of the Pokemon (Neutralizing Gas Bug/Dragon with high Atk that is frail on the physical side) makes it so that atleast half of the contentious designs would've been immediately eliminated, and what more, the typical deadline for final submissions is... 48 hours after the Secondary Ability Polls are concluded. Now, it should be noted that the deadline would almost definitely have been increased further if one of these abilities were selected, but an artist's motivation would be killed if they had to restart the whole design process from scratch when they've spent multiple weeks trying to craft a design as close to perfection as possible. I haven't actually checked this, but I can guarantee that a good number of artists would've quit on their designs if we'd gotten, say, Thick Fat. This is a problem that's been in the "process first, art second system" for quite a while, but is only now being seen and witnessed due to... if I'm being honest I'm not entirely sure why this problem's only been spotted now, but it is a fairly concerning one if CAP as a project wishes to retain artists, draw newer artists in, and have gorgeous designs every single time.
Birkal and Darek851 brought up the point of how interesting and wacky flavor combinations bring out innovation and creativity, and I think that's a fair point to make. I think the previously mentioned example (Miasmaw) achieved this in the art process quite well, Bug/Dragon with Neutralizing Gas was an interesting framework that pushed artists to their limits. But I wonder if another step further, with a restricting secondary ability, or a strange move like, say, Brave Bird, would've been more restricting than anything. Nevertheless, I agree with this point, and I think my proposals below do a decently good job of keeping that aspect intact.
I think I've done a decently good job of justifying the need for this proposal, so I'll get to to the meat of it. There are a few ideas that I could see us doing in order to solve this problem:
1) Inserting a stage where changing the names of certain abilities is discussed, after the art has been decided
Out of all of the three, I believe that this is the safest option and the one that is the most consistent with other PRC changes we've made. Make it so that, after the art has been selected, a thread is opened on whether or not any abilities should be renamed, and if so, create a poll with the submitted options. By renaming, I mean creating a flavorful clone of the selected ability that essentially does the same thing (along the lines of Dazzling/Queenly Majesty, etc.) I don't think this pseudo-stage has to be separately timeblocked, since it's relatively minor, and I'd suggest running it alongside the prevo stage. I think the main thing I myself dislike about this proposal is the fact that it doesn't retain the "innovation" factor as much as the current system, but I feel like, to an extent atleast, the ability to have art that sticks to the original ability would be rewarded and respected, and I'd bet people would still have a bias towards designs that achieve the original non-renamed frameworks. Regarding the number of abilities that should be changed, I'd love to keep it to just one, and just generally discourage change unless the Pokemon really really needs it (ergo, Krilowatt, or potential Thick Fat on Miasmaw).
2) Adding certain restrictions to competitive stages to prevent terrible flavor
I heavily dislike this idea, but I want to mention it either way since I thought of it while brainstorming ideas and it's a possible solution, albeit not a perfect one. Adding restrictions to competitive stages to prevent bad flavor and/or banning heavily discussed abilities due to their terrible flavor is a way to solve this issue that preserves our integrity as a less fanboy-ish project while also allowing for much more leeway and discretion from the TLT and moderators regarding what abilities are flavorfully bad. My issue with this is that it involves flavor aspects controlling the competitive ones, which definitely shouldn't be the case. What I'm about to say might be seen as contradictory to the rest of my post, but I do believe that, at the end of the day, CAP is a competitive-first project and although I think the "flavor side" should have a better standing and more support, I don't think making it so that flavor actively prevents pro-concept-ness and competitive viability would be a good idea. I still think the base idea has a bit of merit though, which is why I'm mentioning it here.
3) Rearranging the process stages to make it so the more "defining" stages, flavor-wise, are earlier in the process.
This is by far my favorite of my three proposals, as it gets to the root of the issue and (hopefully) shouldn't obstruct the competitive process much. If, say, the movepool stage happened before the stat stage, or there was a "Defining Moves" stage along the lines of this PRC proposal by quziel, it'd be much easier for artists to have an idea of how they're design needs to look like at the end and what competitive aspects need to be accounted for. I think the ways we could go about this would be to:
a) Add a mandatory "Defining Moves" stage after the typing
b) Interchange the Moves and Stats stages in terms of chronological order
c) Moving the Secondary Ability stage further back, possibly to right after primary ability
d) Making the art submission deadline later in general, maybe to somewhere mid-moveset stage right now?
If this proposal is to be actualized, we would ideally have a mixture of the above points, since for the most part they address different issues from eachother. I think all of them have atleast a bit of merit though, which is why they're all mentioned.
I had a conversation with Sunfished about this proposal which I think brought up some valid concerns that could be useful for this discussion, but I'd rather not paraphrase what he said and possibly misconstrue his points, so here's the log. I highly encourage reading through it if you've gotten to the end of this giant post
SunToday at 11:08 AM
heyo, i just read your proposal and there's some things i think makes it problematic.
1. the first suggestion is the least problematic of them, but it's still a bit hard to implement and "control". granting the ability to rename abilities afterwards adds a lot of polljumping potential to voting for art stages. for example, let's say a design wishes to ignore an ability's effects. in order to make it translate onto the design, the artist would need to suggest how it works. but because this ability name would need to be voted on, it is now considered polljumping because they are trying to decide how this "non-existant" ability correlates to it.
this also becomes a bit of a gray area on how voters would exactly vote for a design. would they vote for a design that fits the abilities? or take the chance and vote for one that would PROBABLY have an ability's name changed? in the end, the voters would be voting for something that might not reflect what they were voting for. if I vote for a design because it fit an ability name but later on people voted for a name change, or vice versa, that would kind of suck? it becomes an issue on a potential what-if.
[11:09 AM]
2. is off the table sadly. the point of cap is the competitive aspects. there will almost never be a time when flavor will have power over competitve aspects
[11:10 AM]
3. this is what ive been pushing for and have managed to change up a bit. the last 2(?) caps had altered processes in order to put the most flavor in as much as it can, but i think it's hit a point where there's no longer any way to rearrange the stages without compromising competitive, which goes back to point 2
Zephyr2007Today at 11:21 AM
Hm, i think I agree with your points to some extent, and yea i imagined the second proposal would be off the table lol. I semi-disagree with your first argument because i think that a lot of artists put out work that has trouble justifying the abils, stats, etc., and instead make up for it in pure rendering quality/character design and do a "show-not-tell" thing. I also think that if an artist were to ignore the ability, they're not going to try and justify the abil at all because there's really no point in that. I definitely don't think they'd try to assume the undecided name and try to justify their design with that since that would be like golurk trying to justify how the name "miasmaw" fits his design in the artsub stage
[11:23 AM]
Regarding the 3rd point, I think, other than typing, the stages are interchangeable for the most part?(edited)
[11:23 AM]
I've def heard that moves and stats are interchangeable atleast
SunToday at 11:24 AM
mmm, i just think that giving the artists the potential to just ignore an ability for it to be retconned later is a slippery slope that leads to people finding ways to push how an effect works
[11:25 AM]
point 3 is a bit hard for me to comment on because i dont really stand on the competitive side of cap
[11:26 AM]
but i believe a lot of stuff requires previous things to be decided on first, which is why flavor is usually sitting at the back
Zephyr2007Today at 11:28 AM
could you elaborate on "previous things" lol
[11:28 AM]
not sure i fully understand
SunToday at 11:28 AM
oh like
[11:28 AM]
sometimes deciding on the moves to use requires stats to be finished first
Zephyr2007Today at 11:34 AM
ah ok yea that's fair, but i know that moves and stats are mostly interchangeable because damage output is based on both movepower and atk stats, so whatever way you do it you're going to have some polljumping. Also i just want to mention here that i took into account the competitive aspects of the process and how the stages interact with eachother before deciding on the 4 possibilities, so i think for the most part the "competitiveness" of the process won't be affected (the only point in idea 3 that might negatively affect the competitiveness of the process is point c, and even then idt if it'd matter too much)
SunToday at 11:35 AM
ya its a bit complicated, but its good that u thought of it
[11:36 AM]
i think point 3 is the most realistic because we're already sort of rearranging stuff to fit what i had in mind
heyo, i just read your proposal and there's some things i think makes it problematic.
1. the first suggestion is the least problematic of them, but it's still a bit hard to implement and "control". granting the ability to rename abilities afterwards adds a lot of polljumping potential to voting for art stages. for example, let's say a design wishes to ignore an ability's effects. in order to make it translate onto the design, the artist would need to suggest how it works. but because this ability name would need to be voted on, it is now considered polljumping because they are trying to decide how this "non-existant" ability correlates to it.
this also becomes a bit of a gray area on how voters would exactly vote for a design. would they vote for a design that fits the abilities? or take the chance and vote for one that would PROBABLY have an ability's name changed? in the end, the voters would be voting for something that might not reflect what they were voting for. if I vote for a design because it fit an ability name but later on people voted for a name change, or vice versa, that would kind of suck? it becomes an issue on a potential what-if.
[11:09 AM]
2. is off the table sadly. the point of cap is the competitive aspects. there will almost never be a time when flavor will have power over competitve aspects
[11:10 AM]
3. this is what ive been pushing for and have managed to change up a bit. the last 2(?) caps had altered processes in order to put the most flavor in as much as it can, but i think it's hit a point where there's no longer any way to rearrange the stages without compromising competitive, which goes back to point 2
Zephyr2007Today at 11:21 AM
Hm, i think I agree with your points to some extent, and yea i imagined the second proposal would be off the table lol. I semi-disagree with your first argument because i think that a lot of artists put out work that has trouble justifying the abils, stats, etc., and instead make up for it in pure rendering quality/character design and do a "show-not-tell" thing. I also think that if an artist were to ignore the ability, they're not going to try and justify the abil at all because there's really no point in that. I definitely don't think they'd try to assume the undecided name and try to justify their design with that since that would be like golurk trying to justify how the name "miasmaw" fits his design in the artsub stage
[11:23 AM]
Regarding the 3rd point, I think, other than typing, the stages are interchangeable for the most part?(edited)
[11:23 AM]
I've def heard that moves and stats are interchangeable atleast
SunToday at 11:24 AM
mmm, i just think that giving the artists the potential to just ignore an ability for it to be retconned later is a slippery slope that leads to people finding ways to push how an effect works
[11:25 AM]
point 3 is a bit hard for me to comment on because i dont really stand on the competitive side of cap
[11:26 AM]
but i believe a lot of stuff requires previous things to be decided on first, which is why flavor is usually sitting at the back
Zephyr2007Today at 11:28 AM
could you elaborate on "previous things" lol
[11:28 AM]
not sure i fully understand
SunToday at 11:28 AM
oh like
[11:28 AM]
sometimes deciding on the moves to use requires stats to be finished first
Zephyr2007Today at 11:34 AM
ah ok yea that's fair, but i know that moves and stats are mostly interchangeable because damage output is based on both movepower and atk stats, so whatever way you do it you're going to have some polljumping. Also i just want to mention here that i took into account the competitive aspects of the process and how the stages interact with eachother before deciding on the 4 possibilities, so i think for the most part the "competitiveness" of the process won't be affected (the only point in idea 3 that might negatively affect the competitiveness of the process is point c, and even then idt if it'd matter too much)
SunToday at 11:35 AM
ya its a bit complicated, but its good that u thought of it
[11:36 AM]
i think point 3 is the most realistic because we're already sort of rearranging stuff to fit what i had in mind
I think that's basically it for this proposal, please be constructive and thoughtful in your replies ^^!
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