On Banning Attacks

[Syberia]

I think it is bullshit that we even consider pokemon that will never use the move, or never be able to compete in standard play as an "excuse" to not ban the move. Should we not ban Double Team because there are certain Pokemon who can never use it efficiently and will still be inefficient even with Double Team? No. The Problematic Theorymon OHKO users were things such as Gliscor and Lapras - not Seaking. Then again there's a lot of hypocricy in people arguing such arguments anyway.

If you're arguing that the move is broken, then you're arguing that the move is broken in and of itself, regardless of who is using it. If Salamence and Lati@s are broken because of Draco Meteor, then it's a lot more likely that they're broken because of a mixture of factors pertaining to Salamence and Lati@s themselves than simply due to Draco Meteor. Like, perhaps, their high Special Attack stats, relatively high Speed (moreso in the case of Latias), access to a completely unresisted combination of moves all with base power over 100 (Salamence), or complete unpredictability in regards to what they'll do offensively (Salamence). Not only because of a move that is learned by plenty of things which it is not broken on. Whether or not they use the move is irrelevant; the fact that they don't simply shows it's not the move itself that's broken.

Double Team is a different case, and I'd probably argue that it's fundamentally uncompetitive, rather than broken, as it can cause just as much randomness and things outside the player's control when used on a Bidoof (perhaps more, thanks to Simple) as it can on a Lugia.

Not that I'm actually for/against testing Draco Meteor or Outrage or Stealth Rock or anything - but I think we need to seriously sit down and "complete" this so we can have grounds if people do want to discuss it without people filling it out with "I disagree with the notion of banning moves so this thread is dumb" comments.

Stealth Rock would be up for debate in this case, because it has the exact same effect no matter who uses the move, therefore if it's decided to be broken, it is the move itself that's the problem.

 

[Tangerine]

If you're arguing that the move is broken, then you're arguing that the move is broken in and of itself, regardless of who is using it.

And I disagree with this statement, for the reasons I have mentioned before.

Double Team is a different case, and I'd probably argue that it's fundamentally uncompetitive, rather than broken, as it can cause just as much randomness and things outside the player's control when used on a Bidoof (perhaps more, thanks to Simple) as it can on a Lugia.

How is it outside the player's control? Skill, as I have pointed out, is manipulating luck, randomness to your advantage. You can use it against you. Again - I recommend you read the DT arguments and reconsider your stance.

Stealth Rock would be up for debate in this case, because it has the exact same effect no matter who uses the move, therefore if it's decided to be broken, it is the move itself that's the problem.

No, the issue with SR is that a lot of Pokemon get it. If only Pokemon such as Luvdisk got SR, "would people still care"?

I think you are staring too closely at the trees and missing the forest. I understand your stance but it is very very limited in scope.

 

[Jumpman16]

Tradition should not be a vaild reason for banning OHKO moves and Evasion. Saying that they've always been banned and there's no reason to change things should not cut it when it comes to policy.

Highlighting this cause I think it's probably the most important point of the thread. If, when we test OHKOs, it's decided that "Lapras and Gliscor with [OHKO move]" is uber, we should consider banning Lapras and Gliscor, not Sheer Cold and Guillotine. The reason is obvious and logical when you remember that it's possible that a mistake was made when Horn Drill, Guillotine and Fissure were banned from competitive play in RBY, and not Rhydon, Pinsir and friends.

Or maybe we should think about it this way—we should ban whichever move will result in a more diverse competitive metagame. The best immediate argument supporting why OHKOs were banned in RBY and not the pokemon who learned them would be that there were only 151 (149) pokemon to choose from, and banning OHKO moves would have done away with Dugtrio, Snorlax, Nidoking, Seaking, Rhydon, Pinsir and Kingler. That's kind of a hefty percentage of pokemon...or maybe it isn't. I don't there's a real point in determining whether OHKOs were correctly banned after the fact. I do think that, if it's true that only Gliscor seems uber to "everyone" with Guillotine, then it makes much more sense to ban Gliscor than to ban Guillotine.

 

[lilyhollow]

Well I guess the question is, "what do we do when it's not just one or two pokemon?" Personally I'd still support Pokemon bans over move bans in the event that, say, 4 or 6 pokemon were Uber with but OU without a certain move, but certainly there are some "extreme situations" where I could see myself questioning my position. I'd imagine nothing like that would really come up in practice though, at least for me, so I guess the question is whether other people would really be willing to get rid of, say, Salamence, Dragonite, Latias and Kingdra, even if we were pretty sure just banning Draco Meteor (and thus nerfing Flygon who "is not at fault") would "solve the problem." I think for a lot of people that'd be "too much," especially if, for example, we tested a Salamence ban, and that "didn't solve the problem because Dragonite just took his place, let's just ban Draco Meteor because 'this isn't working.'"

I'm just not convinced that we shouldn't say "never ban moves unless it's 100% the move's fault." No matter what, it's going to be questionable as to whether it's "worth it" to keep a Pokemon around even when "nerfed." I mean, even if they don't have Draco Meteor, maybe keeping those four dragons around is, or maybe it isn't in the best interests of a competitive metagame. I'd argue that a test wouldn't necessarily suffice to determine the answer to that in the long run, and certainly if there were a situation in the future where we might come to question that decision, the issue of testing both the move and the Pokemon might end up being twofold.

That said, obviously "never ever ever ban moves unless they're broken on everything that can use them" is probably extreme simply from a theoretical standpoint where we could see stuff like "oh ok so now we have to ban everything with Earthquake except Geodude?" So it might make sense to have a limit of sorts, even though for me, ideally it'd be a failsafe for extreme cases and nothing more.

 

[TVboyCanti]

Removed the copy/pasted definitions from my OP, and just quoted Tang on what the purpose of this thread is. I guess it was pretty arrogant of me to think that you guys needed my help in coming up with definitions. Now that I've read through all the arguments and proposals, I'd like to recap on what's been said so far.

Posted by ChouToshio:
I am also not too against the idea of nerfing a move's power with clauses, while I would agree with someone like Obi that Clauses have to be enforcible in game (like sleep clause).

I am surprised that this got such little discussion, as it is a system that we already implement to great success in order to keep pokemon like Breloom and Gengar from being broken. Basically, if an attack is deemed too powerful, place a limit on how that attack can be used. At the moment, players are not allowed to place more than one opponent to sleep, since otherwise players could completely shut down an opponents entire team, especially with substitute support. In a similar vein, we could clause other attacks such as making OHKOs fail if used in succession, or as Chou suggested making SR deployable only once per pokemon, which would theoretically bring a lot more balance to the current SR/RS/Ghost attack triangle.

Posted by Caelum:
A move can be considered broken if it satisfies both of the following conditions under common battle conditions:

I: The usefulness, efficacy, and / or viability of the move is reasonably independent of the user.

II: For a player to counteract the effects of an opponent using a particular move (or class of moves) it is necessary to design his or her team such that it is not competitively viable if an opponent does not use the particular move (or class of moves) in question. -Caelum

A sound definition at first glance. It could be argued though that "competitively viable" is defined by what is allowed in competitive play, not the other way around. Another thing about this definition is that it opens the door to reasonably debate the status of Outrage/DMeteor. If my opponent is using multiple Dragon pokemon with Outrage/DMeteor and an extremely high offensive stat, than I need to have a team with multiple steel types on it, but then my team becomes weak against a team that uses Fire attacks. I can actually see this phenomenon occurring while I play on the ladder when my Scarftran takes out 3 or 4 pokemon in a row after I've removed/weakened their Heatran and their 1-2 fire resists.

Posted by Myth Trainer Infinity:
A conscious effort to increase the reliance of luck with little or no drawback and / or significantly decreasing the skill in a battle.

The classic argument for why OHKO/DT are banned. Hip and Tang critique this better than I can.

* How do you increase luck with no drawback? Surely increasing luck is a drawback by itself. -Hipmonlee

* Skill is an act of manipulating random variables to your favor. Saying that Double Team is "skill less" is a bit silly and extreme. -Tangerine

Posted by Maddog:
A move is broken if it makes an otherwise balanced pokemon uber.

Not quite what we want imo, since if a move only makes one pokemon uber by being legal, than it's the fault of the one pokemon, not the move.

* Banning a move obviously wont help if only 1 pokemon benefits from it -KD24

But we're getting close.

Posted by darkie:
If that one move makes multiple Pokemon broken, however, it could be safe to say that it is the fault of the move.-darkie

Posted by Tangerine:
A move is "broken" if it allows a significant number of Pokemon to break the clauses of uber under standard conditions. The significant number of Pokemon is to be debated - should we ban one move to make two Pokemon "not broken"?

This one is my favorite and seems to be the most logical to me. If two different pokemon are uber, but no longer meet the uber criteria if they both have the same attack removed from their movepools, than it is most likely the attack that is causing those pokemon to meet the uber criteria, and not the pokemon themselves. Although a good point is brought up about this one.

Posted by Blame Game:
If one move "makes" several pokemon broken, it's still ambiguous as to whether the move or the Pokemon are at fault, as long as there are any other Pokemon with that same move that aren't broken.

Posted by Caelum:
If only one or two Pokemon can abuse the moves well, then that is the fault of the Pokemon not the move.

Two things I want to bring up:
1. Beware of lumping attacks together. Even though we say "OHKO" moves, Horn Drill, Fissure, Guillotine and Sheer Cold are unique attacks considering that they are ineffective against different pokemon and are learned by different pokemon, and that goes for all other attacks that have identical effects eg: Double Team/Minimize, Tail Glow/Nasty Plot.

2. We need to know (or I want to know) if it is currently the goal of this thread to come up with a framework that logically justifies and preserves the status quo (DT/OHKO broken, SR/Outrage not broken), or if we want to come up with a valid definition regardless of how it affects our current ban list and clauses.