Lower Tiers On the state of GSC lower tiers, active tiering, and councils

[BeeOrSomething]

Currently, GSC lower tiers exist in a sort of limbo. Our tiers are not frozen like later generations, and we are under the control of the GSC section rather than tier sections, but we do not have active tiering or councils like RBY lower tiers.

Many players come across these tiers through both the GSC section and tier sections through tournaments like GSC Slam, UU/NU/PU Classic, and Blind Draft/Champions League tournaments. This is generally a very good thing, as very different swaths of people get to interact with the tier and there's almost always new faces duking it out and showing what they have to offer in terms of battle prowess and innovation. Despite this, I have never really felt a strong sense of community within GSC lower tier player bases. Many different people have played these tiers, but very few participate in discussion relative to the overall amount of people who can play GSC. There are several different contributing factors: some just don't want or don't have the time to engage in discussion, others are only playing because they were forced into GSC in team tours as a result of poor drafting or a poor signup pool, and GSC Slam and tier classics encourage one-off participation in pursuit of making playoffs and winning rather than really engaging with the tier. The use of forums as the main method of discussion has also declined, often leading to discussion getting drowned out on discord by other topics, getting split and disjointed between the GSC discord and tier discords, or only happening in private chats. As a result, while many names can be said to have played GSC in various tournaments, when I look at player pools both during and after the fact, it's very hard for me to say most have really become part of the GSC lower tier community. Many discussions consist of the same handful of people who have been here for years and doing most of the talking, especially on the forums, though there is the occasional new and dedicated user that I do sincerely appreciate. I do not blame anyone for things being this way, nor do I think people should be obligated to change this, but this is how I perceive it.

GSC NU and PU are not officially supported by NU and PU and are excluded from NU/PU premier leagues, and across all GSC lower tiers, the classic GSC stereotypes of the metagames being very stally/slow, full of RestTalk wars, and saturated by crits and other hax persist along with some valid issues people may find with the tiers. GSC does not have the unique appeal of RBY as the first and most barebones generation, and it already has the naturally smallest player base of any generation. Few are incentivized to play GSC, and even fewer will stick around or participate in discussion.

"Why do I talk about this? Why don't I just suck it up? Why does it seem like I'm just whining for the sake of it?", you might think. I am concerned about the future of GSC lower tiers. Currently, development feels somewhat slow. It hasn't stopped by any means, but eventually there will be a point where the active players we do have will stop and move on, and I would say there is a net decrease of active players across time. Even as we stand now, there are plenty of issues. I don't think it's particularly healthy for a metagame to have most of the working, new ideas to be coming from the same few people before they are just shipped out and copied.

I would say the most significant issue that arises from this is how slow any talks of tiering are. For the most part, it's not a huge deal, as most tiering talks with UU and NU, if there even are any occurring at the time, deal with dropping one or two Pokemon at a time, and I think it's reasonable to take time with it and lay out a PR thread. Even then though, it's still extremely slow. The Aerodactyl in GSC UU thread was first posted on April 8th, 2023. Aerodactyl and Muk were not made legal until March 29, 2024, nearly a year later. Obviously, I don't expect an issue like this to be resolved within a couple weeks, especially since GSC tournament activity is much slower and less than it might be for current generation. However, nearly a year is extreme for two Pokemon that ended up fitting just fine into the metagame, leaving it largely preserved.

Currently, PU tiering is the center of debate. Poliwhirl, and to a lesser degree Pokemon like Venomoth and Seadra, are contentious topics, and some (like me) have called for bans. However, to really get anything done, it almost feels mandatory to put up a PR thread. Without a PR thread, I cannot feel like it is justified to put up a vote when so few of the people who play these tiers voice their opinions publicly, and a PR thread is a good platform for people to put those opinions for everyone to see and give some formality to the process. I can't in good faith just send out a vote because I've seen a small handful of people say on discord they agree with something as opposed to an actually significant number of players making themselves heard in a formal thread. As a result, tiering talks eventually stall, and motivation dies out, unless someone is driven and willing to spend the high amount of time and effort needed to create an OP and post in Policy Review, assuming they even have a badge. It's an extremely slow process and contributes further to the current state where the same few people who are dedicated are the ones driving most of the discussion.

One possible solution is creating councils for GSC lower tiers to swiftly enact quickbans when needed and start or drive discussions. GSC ZU has been very quickly able to push through post-drop metagames and remove problematic elements like Poliwag and Mantine thanks to its council. Players on councils need to be both qualified and active in both playing and discussing though, which like I've mentioned earlier is not a common phenomenon.

Active tiering is another method, and it's not mutually exclusive with tiering councils either (if anything, councils are a major boon to active tiering since they can quickban overpowered or unhealthy threats). Active tiering would transform metagames more naturally, allowing for a stable flow of change and letting issues work themselves out. Active tiering also tends to boost discussion and player bases, as many are eager to try out new editions of metagames and try and optimize it or innovate. Active tiering already exists in some form in GSC, with Pokemon rising from or dropping to ZU after each new PU viability rankings, though this is because GSC ZU is under control of the ZU community (not the GSC community) and their default for all generations is active tiering. The main downside to active tiering is that it requires a significant and consistent playerbase to maintain the tier and continue playing and discussing it through each new version of the tier, and I think GSC would struggle heavily with this part. I am not entirely sure if the allure of active tiering would be able to boost player counts enough to achieve this, though I suppose we can't know unless we go through with it. Active tiering is also not a guarantee that the following metagame would be healthier or otherwise better than the previous metagame, as in, we can't know if it will have been a better decision than just banning a Pokemon or two.

Overall, I am in favor of active tiering to a degree, but to apply well to GSC I think it would need some alterations of method. I think RBY's 2 year cycle format would be the best idea for timeframe, and I would establish councils to help facilitate active tiering. However, I am concerned about tier history. I do not believe GSC NU should exactly undergo "active tiering" with the worst UU Pokemon dropping and the NU Pokemon good in UU rising. The current state of GSC NU has 6 years of development behind it, and there are still active developments continuing to this day. Personally, I also quite enjoy the current state of GSC NU, and I see no reason to change it.

Rather, I propose that we take inspiration from ADV and drop the worst of UU into a newly created GSC RU tier. This would preserve current NU as is and give bad UU Pokemon a home, creating a new metagame for people to enjoy. However, I argue for full active tiering between PU and NU, as PU is currently the GSC lower tier where there is the most dissatisfaction and amount of frustration with the state of the tier. GSC PU has significantly less history than UU or NU, with the modern metagame only being as old as January 2024 (a year and a half), and it would save a lot of time as we wouldn't have to go through the processes of establishing a thread for and voting on Pokemon like Poliwhirl and Venomoth. It's also very easy to see that some Pokemon like Arbok and Raticate just do not belong in NU and should be retiered. I do want to clarify though that where the cutoff is on the NU VR would have to be voted on first, as many NU players feel the Pokemon currently ranked as C1 are "NU worthy" while those in C2 and below are not.

To be frank, I would personally prefer most only having active tiering for NU to PU and PU to ZU, but I understand that is a very arbitrary distinction, so an RU tier would be my solution to remove the arbitrariness.

As for UU, I won't go into it in this post because it's a completely different and very significant can of worms, but I personally do not desire a full or even partial UUBL drop for reasons similar to how I feel about NU.

I want to know your thoughts as players in the GSC community what you think about my proposals or if you have any alternate ones, and I want to know if you have anything to offer about the state of discussion and player base growth in GSC lower tiers. Thank you.

 

[LHF]

So if you read my post here you can guess I am all for this and think this is a wonderful idea. Selfishly, I don't want to see GSC NU touched in any way as while I wasn't a part of the creation and suspect processes of the tier, I've gotten to know it over the last year and really think it's in a great place. GSC RU was an idea I had floated around a number of times but honestly didn't know how to get any traction with because I didn't feel comfortable enough to propose any cutoff as a starting point - so I'm glad that an established name feels that an introduction of RU is also worth considering. While GSC isn't as integrated as a community when compared to RBY LTs(simple terms, if you play one RBY LT, you're very likely to play a handful of them), I think having player feedback from the UU/NU/PU/ZU folk would be most welcome.

While it might seem like on the surface that the creation of GSC RU is a band-aid solution to GSC PU's awkward state, I think this would actually help give more attention to GSC as a community and encourage more people to get into the generation as a whole. There's never more excitement than when changes happen(see the buzz around RBY LTs now that partial trapping is finally dead in UU, NU and PU), but our biggest barrier may still be just the number of people who are interested in playing these lower tiers at all. I admittedly don't have more ideas on how to do this but I'm interested in hearing what others might think. GSC LTL was a very good idea and I hope to see it return going forward, but I think this is all part of a greater conversation that could be had about GSC as a whole(good timing with GSCPL being like two months away).

As far as GSC PU in specific goes: to echo Bee, despite GSC PU's successes as a format(being recognized in a number of team tours), it's the least played and most controversial of the formats as it is. Following Torkon's suggestion here about opening up PU to a C+ cutoff would be a great idea. We can and should be taking inspiration from RBY and ADV as these solutions have been pretty well received for the most part.

As far as GSC UU and the whole UUBL conversation goes: I do think a proposed council could at least potentially run UUBL tests as needed(maybe in one-off tours?), but please keep in mind that I did say "as needed" very specifically to mean that there's no reason to drop something unless we have due reason to believe it would improve the health of GSC UU. Typhlosion is one of those weird blurred line examples that people bring up every now and again, but I don't really think it would address anything about the meta right now so I don't see a point, whereas I 100% DO see how Smeargle drop + BP ban could improve UU. But that's perhaps a post for a more specific time.

Now onto the semi controversial part of my post: Considering that the playerbase seems to be relatively happy with NU, I don't see a reason for it to be "unlocked" for tiering either, though I will freely admit my own personal bias there. If this needs to be polled, that may not be the worst idea. However, I would think that the goal of this proposed tiering structure change is to increase player satisfaction and involvement with the tiers, and I doubt many other NUers would disagree with me in saying that GSC NU is in a great place right now. If this HAD to happen for the sake of internal consistency I think we would learn to live with it.
As hard as it would be for me to say goodbye to the current gsc nu, I could do it if we were committing to a true revamp and reconstruction of GSC. But that raises the question of what we want GSC's identity to be going forward, which is a conversation topic that really is open ended and player determinant. Because maybe there is a world where we forgo the idea of RU entirely and just accept some drops into NU and have active change be done that way. It's hard to say, but it's again, open to conversation. If we blew the door wide open and just redid active tiering from UU down, it might help interest and intrigue with GSC, but that is a nuclear option that I don't think we could even consider without a majority of the current playerbase accepting this change.

In closing, I think no matter what happens or does not happen, having a cohesive structure and plan for the lower tiers could be a major step in showing people new to GSC that there is genuine support for the generation and they won't feel like they're grasping for air to find games when there aren't tours. I'm very fond of GSC as a generation, but despite us being as(if not more) niche than RBY we don't exactly have the popularity to show for it. I don't know if the day will ever come when we reach that level of interest from the Smogon community as a whole, but I do know that it should be something we at least try for.

 

[plznostep]

Hey, wanted to voice my amateur opinions; I'm not super well-versed in these higher-lower tier GSC metas but I feel like the reason to why movement is so slow in the first place would be there isn't a council that expedites the process of testing Pokemon or organising it. Without one, a lot of these processes make progress purely conversation in the community or PR threads first, but GSC lower tiers aren't super active so without a council it feels like it can take a while, even if in the end it does get done. That's probably why metagames like GSC ZU get bans done quicker and how they are able to keep up with active tiering. So I think councils are probably the way to address this issue if GSC wants to anyway. Every lower tier besides GSC has had the issue of council members being qualified and active in discussion and they've managed to solve it in their tier so I think GSC should get by fine.

I am probably bias but I do like active tiering as almost every ZU tier is actively tiered and that's the branch of Smogon I come from. For PU, I think it's a positive. I don't think the drops are numerous enough to completely change the tier like tiers like GSC UU would worry about if they were to drop the entirety of UUBL or something like that. I would go to C1 probably, with the cutoff being Hitmontop, which could shake things up but GSC PU would get by. While many Baton Pass users would drop, eventually you would filter out the unhealthy elements of those strategies + any potentially broken Pokemon and stabilize and then more development in the meta would occur.

I think I wouldn't mind this for GSC NU as well, although it's not needed for the tier. From what i've heard in discussion, there are about 8 Pokemon that would be introduced to the tier with this shift and it is unlikely any Pokemon would rise. Out of these 8, there are 3 that are part of NUBL and likely to be broken in Raichu, Poliwrath, and Golduck. It is likely, but not guaranteed, that Arcanine would also be broken. This most likely drops the Pokemon introduced to 4, which includes Victreebel, Pikachu, Vileplume, and Kabutops. I don't think this completely changes GSC NU, it just adds more options. Vileplume has been tested before and it's basically just Gloom but better. Not broken, but centralising so I could see that one getting banned too. I know GSC NU has stayed in a similar state for a long time, but personally, I don't get attached to metagames. If you can drop new Pokemon into a tier then I don't see why not, you get more options in a tier which usually should increase diversity in a tier; It all depends on how centralising the new Pokemon would be but I feel as if many old elements of GSC NU would stay the same. It would just have some new residents alongside them.

I would vastly prefer that to a GSC RU. I don't think there are enough Pokemon to justify making an entire new tier inbetween NU and UU. You would end up with a 5 Pokemon tier, 8 if you make NUBL's become RU I guess. Ultimately, it's up the GSC player base though. I think for lower tiers below UU, tiers are already fairly well tiered to be honest. There are just some outliers in NU and UU that could drop down lower but its not a huge amount of Pokemon. That is why I also don't see dropping them down as a big deal that would vastly change the identities of these tiers compared to if you nuked UUBL or something like that.

 

[MrSoup]

Busy so I’m gonna keep it short and sweet. I feel many of the same feelings but wouldn’t make the same conclusions. I do not believe a GSC RU is an amazing idea. The tier would be small and too similar to NU. I also do not think active tiering in GSC is a good idea. VRs change dramatically year to year even with little meta development, just because of an extremely thin voter pool. I wouldn’t play these tiers if they dramatically changed year to year.

However I do think something should be done. Bans and drops take far too long to transpire and it kills motivation and discussion on these metas. I’ve been a long time believer that a steering committee is the strongest option to help GSC low tiers. That way solutions can be impactful and large when needed, and minimally invasive when not needed. GSC is clearly in a position to not be uniform with its tiering IMO. NU is a meta game that needs little changes. meanwhile PU has a discussion almost monthly on bans in the GSC discord. Why would we apply the same method to both these metas? A steering committee or council (although I know that’s a scary word) can prescribe the correct actions and votes to specific scenarios. This was a big topic last year, but it resulted in the creation of the GSC low tier committee, which functionally has no power due to concerns that the committees views would not mirror those of the community. Ultimately, I do not know how to satisfy those people’s worries with a council if one were created, but it seems evident to me that it’s the simplest and most reasonable solution. Otherwise, I too fear the decline and eventual death of unhealthy low tiers (such as PU).

 

[DAWNBUSTER]

On UUBL
This post is primarily focused around GSC UU, as that is easily the tier I am most invested and involved with.

In the five years I have been around these tiers, the question of dropping UUBL Pokémon to UU has been something brought up frequently. In my early days (2020 - 2021), this wasn’t possible to do, to my knowledge, but eventually that changed. Fast forward to 2025, and we have gotten Aerodactyl and Muk to drop from UUBL to UU, and there have been efforts to get Pokémon such as Typhlosion and Smeargle down in the past.

That begs an obvious question: why don’t we drop all of the Pokémon from UUBL to UU? Why do we not just clear slate GSC UU, and use the BL Pokémon as UU? More on this in a moment, first, let me explain how UUBL in GSC works. GSC, and especially ADV UUBL are large, large enough to house entire metagames. This is because, many years ago, the concept of “BL” worked differently. As opposed to being the “UU Ban List”, BL was “borderline” Pokémon. BL Pokémon were not viable enough in “Standard” (OU) to be considered staples, yet not as poor as the Pokémon in “UU”. This is still in effect today; if a Pokémon in OU is no longer considered good enough in OU, then it is dropped to BL. On the other hand, BL Pokémon who become more popular and viable in OU may be promoted to OU status. See this thread for more information

So back to the question: why do we not drop everything from UUBL to UU? This is a question I have given intense thought to, and I think I have come to a conclusion:

I believe it is worth thinking about. It is a drastic change, and it upends not just GSC UU, but also NU and PU, but lets think about it some more. If you think about it, the GSC UU (and by extension NU and PU) we have now are fake tiers. They are not the most accurate representations of viability in GSC. GSC UUBL is the real “second tier below OU”, and “UU” is the real “third tier below OU”. That brings me to my main point: you can say “No, I do not want to lose the tier I enjoy”, and that is OK, but what if we are missing out? What if the real versions of these tiers are superior? That is not to mention all the interest and intrigue that could be brought to these tiers by doing this.

To be clear, at least for UU, I am not exploring this idea because GSC UU “needs to be fixed”. I am the biggest advocate of GSC UU on Smogon, and nobody is more passionate about the current version than I am. I have seen so much untrue horse raddish thrown at this tier in the past half decade, from it being “OU without wallbreakers”, to “Rest + Sleep Talk Thunder slot machine”. If you believe GSC UU to be these things, you do not understand this tier. You could also just be miserable and only point out what the tier is weak in and ignore all the positive elements of the tier. As such a big advocate of this metagame, I would be sad to see it go. However, if the metagame we get from dropping all the UUBLs is also good, maybe even better, then I would be fine with that.

We already have an OK idea of what a metagame with all the BL Pokémon dropped looks like. While it has significantly changed as a result of Alakazam and Jolteon’s rise to UU, we do have a sense of who is good, the general “flow” of the metagame. One problem with playing UUBL was that folks didin’t feel like they could ban stuff, so if unpleasant Pokémon existed, it was hard to keep playing. If UUBL is UU, we can ban stuff. When I looked in UUBL discussions, I saw people bring up Pokemon such as Porygon2, Kangaskhan, and Tentacruel up as being “borderline”. If we make UUBL UU, we are free to ban elements we deem problematic if there is support for it. You should not look at what UUBL is and think that is what UU is now destined to be.

If we are talking about removing BL, RBY can be looked to as an example. RBY deleted its BL back in 2011. However, that was a different case. That was deleting BL and shaking up UU when RBY UU was barely being played by anybody, certainly not in any serious tournaments like GSC UU in 2025. GSC UU is a tier with years of development and play, RBY UU was a very rarely played tier. Dealing with the consequences of deleting GSC UUBL overnight is going to take far more effort and remove far more than that decision did.

The biggest con with this idea is the fact that we get rid of three competitive GSC metagames, and take a risk with new metagames that may be worse. I would say this idea is best done at a time when we are not playing as many big tournaments, such as in UU’s case, GSC PL or UUPL, give ourselves a bit of time to explore these metagames first before competing in tournaments. This process will take time, effort, and most importantly, people. Good players who are actually good at theorymonning and willing to experiment with ideas. The playerbase factor may be an issue, but I will try my best to lead if this was to happen

My basic point is this: GSC Lower Tiers are “ok” as is, but they could be so much more. Removing UUBL will take a lot of effort because of its consequences, but the potential benefits can’t be overlooked. GSC UU is a cult tier with a struggling playerbase, NU also has playerbase issues and has been criticised by some of its players, and people who play PU have been getting more and more critical of it. We should not be so conservative and accept the fact that we could be missing out on a lot. For all intensive purposes, getting rid of GSC UUBL is a risk. It is something that, if it goes right, can do wonders for GSC, or harm if we pick the wrong people to lead it.

This is not an endorsement nor a shut down of the idea of removing UUBL. I am stating some facts and explaining what I think would happen if we did decide to go through with this. What we would need to go through with this. Do we want to keep playing these tiers as they are, or do we want to risk it and see what we could have?

 

[Wanted in 49 States]

I'm not really that known for being involved in GSC LTs, but I do think my input is of some use.

On active tiering:
One of the issues on VR-based tiering is that new tiers tend to be rather unstable because tiers take time to be developed. I don't think GSC can or will have the playerbase to pump out an accurate VR every other year, so this instability will be amplified in the lower tiers. On top of that GSC has more than a dozen mons viable in a tier unlike in RBY, so a lot more mons will be jumping between a blurry line all the time. Realistically I could see this happening to help the issue:
UU (stays the same)
RU (usage based on UU)
NU (stays the same)
PU (usage based on NU)
ZU (usage based on PU)
This would limit a lot of the issues of instability coming from VR-based tiering among a small playerbase, since all tiers (except ZU but they are kinda are used to this) are anchored to an established metagame, so nothing gets too speculative and uncertain.

On malaise:
In RBY, occasionally there would be tiers that are just unpopular without a single villain to have tiering action against, everything is just a tangled mess. It happened in PU with Arc/Fearow, and in ZU when the metagame was boring, and tier shifts fixed both of those issues. If GSC PU is just suffering from general malaise, and there isn't a single drop or ban that fixes it, just implementing active tiering and restarting the tier has a good shot of fixing it.

On actively tiered RU / PU:
Go with high cutoffs. In general, the higher the cutoff, the less mons moving between tiers happens. If you go with a C-tier cutoff in UU for RU it would either be something like NU + 6 more mons (why would you play this and not NU) or the much maligned old NU metagame. PU should also strive for a high cutoff. From eyeballing it, just setting the tier cutoff for RU at Girafarig would probably work. For PU, I think setting the bar below the B ranks is best. Smaller UU/NU lists tend to mean more stability when VRing for the tier below.

On unstable cutoffs:
I know some people would probably be opposed to Magmar/Hitmonlee dropping to PU. On top of that, I expect GSC to have more mons hopping between C+ and B- just because there are more mons in a GSC metagame. You could implement a system that requires a mon to be below cutoff for 2 VRs in a row to change their position to combat tier instability.

On tier councils:
RBY has tier councils for each tier, but there is a bit of a problem in that the tier councils tend to be inactive. Barring VRing and creating a voting list, most things these councils should be doing have to be prompted or proposed by the shadow dictator of RBY, and this includes Smogdex entries, sample teams, and suspect votes. Given that GSC is less popular and by extension has less passionate players, tiering councils like this could become even more inactive and would require an overseer. You should probably implement an overseer or group that manages councils and removes inactive members, and gives them schedules of resources that need to be completed.
RBY councils have very little power to ban problematic elements from a tier. Almost everything needs to be voted on, and quickbans tend to be controversial. GSC councils should have more free reign to ban whatever.

On transitivity:
You should probably implement it. With active tiering, Baton Pass will probably suck a lot of the oxygen out of discussion and just peeling the bandage off now and saying "no uu speed pass in ru, no pu trap pass in zu" is probably for the best. This stuff should be preemptively accounted for, even though you theoretically have a lot of time to ban and suspect stuff before a tour, a lot of tier interest happens immediately when the tier shifts, and having to ban something later on kind of erases this tier development which actively tiered GSC tiers would desperately need.

 

[Sabelette]

I only play GSC tiers once in a while despite trying to do so more often so you can take anything I say with a grain of salt but I figure as the "shadow dictator" of RBY LTs maybe I have some useful insight into some of this stuff. Obviously, I have a bias - I do not give a shit about “tier history” and I think active tiering, for all its many issues, is just more fun and more accurate to how a metagame is actually being played than artificially ruling it can’t change anymore because it doesn’t have some shitty ladder with 30 people on it to use for usage stats.

First off, it should go without saying that if you want to do any meaningful retiering, even if it’s just dropping some BLs, all bans should be transitive. Anything else means that tiers are operating under inconsistent rulesets with variable power and its twice as bad when we're talking about Baton Pass-related bullshit. Beyond that, I think it's extremely silly to just lock 2 tiers but also create a new tier in between them that's like, 6 UU mons and half of NU, and also the tiers below are not locked - accept the long commitment and retier from scratch instead of letting the problem continue to slowly get more entrenched year after year, imo. You're treating a stab wound at the surface and letting the deeper parts get infected, and now you're gonna have to cut out a bunch of rot before it can heal properly. This is obviously very controversial and time consuming but this leads into my next point...

GSC should just go independent in the way RBY has. This whole idea that each tier is under the current gen tiering council is incredibly obsolete and even worse for the oldest generations, where year after year the tier leaders only get more disconnected from the oldest generations and new appointments are more and more current gen focused. It leads to incredibly slow processes like these, for example ADV NU waiting for an eternity to test Glalie for no reason despite promises of testing it quickly, and that's not even the fault of the tier leaders, its all the shitty and unnecessary bureaucracy on this site. You could drive a total retiering of GSC with about 2-5 committed people leading the process; this is a children's game, not rocket science. Tier councils can be done but I agree it doesn't seem super ideal for GSC, it'd probably be better to just have a GSC steering committee and as people peel off with each new tier created, recruit new ones - obviously not many people will stick around from UU down to ZU, but you'll always drive new interest when a fresh meta starts.

Speaking from experience, it really does just take one person to completely overhaul everything if you don't get bogged down in bureaucracy, and in several cases to be completely frank I've just like, ignored the intended bureaucracy and done the thing anyway - it's always worked out better than sitting on my hands for a year or two waiting for several people who do not give a shit about RBY to approve whatever I'm doing. You can quite literally just do this, and I doubt too many people in current tier leadership would actually care given the general (unwarranted) disdain people have for GSC. As far as the worries of making the tiers worse, you do realize you can just... ban and unban things repeatedly or whatever till you make a better tier than you currently have, right? Like, that's been on the table the whole time. Try stuff till you find the best configuration you can make with all options on the table instead of the current arbitrary restrictions from >20 years ago. Change is inevitable, might as well roll with it and find the best possible changes you can make rather than leaving things to slowly decay from lack of interest.

On unstable cutoffs:
I know some people would probably be opposed to Magmar/Hitmonlee dropping to PU. On top of that, I expect GSC to have more mons hopping between C+ and B- just because there are more mons in a GSC metagame. You could implement a system that requires a mon to be below cutoff for 2 VRs in a row to change their position to combat tier instability.

This is a good idea and something I've been planning to implement in RBY once tiers settle a bit more btw, highly recommend.

Anyway. Go active for all tiers, imo. Find a few motivated people and start a rolling sort of steering committee, recruit new people as interest waxes and wanes for people who prefer specific tiers like UU-NU or ZU or whatever. Just do shit, set short time limits on tiering action debates then take decisive action, review decisions later as tiers develop and slowly settle, a la how RBY NU banned Poliwhirl then revisited later as the tier developed, UU banned Lapras/Hypno and brought them back in again later, etc. There is no permanent damage from tiering actions, they can always be undone later. Take some risks, move fast, and you will find lots of people willing to give it a try because it will be fresh and exciting. The process will have immense growing pains, and you will have to suffer some annoying metagames along the way.

Eventually, though, it will all settle into something ideal-ish with relatively static tiers and I would bet most people will be happier with a metagame curated by 30 years of real development and steered by passionate current players than being handed a bunch of weird ancient rules by people who don't exist in the community anymore, filtered through people saddled with the chore of being responsible for metagames they don't particularly care about, with change only ever on the table after years of waiting. That's my perspective from an admittedly-privileged position of curating metagames where the playerbase is immensely receptive to constant change and new development. Even RBY, for all its limits and simplicity, keeps on developing, and I think that's far more more beautiful and rewarding to engage with than trying to bend old rules into the least-annoying shape you can manage without breaking them. I know I'd personally be invested in GSC lower tiers if they got retiered from UU down with a BL drop, and I don't think I'd be alone in that.

Anyway, good luck. Always rooting for GSC to find the same passionate playerbase RBY has, and I'd like to spend more time playing it in general, but I have a couple more goals to reach in RBY first before I swing back around.

 

[LHF]

While I'm not anyone important in the context of GSC it's kinda warmed my heart to see a lot of other people chime in with well thought out takes and feedback on Bee's post. So revisiting what I said earlier:

As hard as it would be for me to say goodbye to the current gsc nu, I could do it if we were committing to a true revamp and reconstruction of GSC. But that raises the question of what we want GSC's identity to be going forward, which is a conversation topic that really is open ended and player determinant. Because maybe there is a world where we forgo the idea of RU entirely and just accept some drops into NU and have active change be done that way. It's hard to say, but it's again, open to conversation. If we blew the door wide open and just redid active tiering from UU down, it might help interest and intrigue with GSC, but that is a nuclear option that I don't think we could even consider without a majority of the current playerbase accepting this change.

After having slept on it(and having extreme early morning thoughts so sorry if this is a bit jumbled), I think DAWNBUSTER and Sabelette kinda sold me on the idea of a true GSC retiering not being a nuclear option anymore, but actually the correct long-term path for the generation. Specifically the quotes from here helped shape this view:

So back to the question: why do we not drop everything from UUBL to UU? This is a question I have given intense thought to, and I think I have come to a conclusion:

I believe it is worth thinking about. It is a drastic change, and it upends not just GSC UU, but also NU and PU, but lets think about it some more. If you think about it, the GSC UU (and by extension NU and PU) we have now are fake tiers. They are not the most accurate representations of viability in GSC. GSC UUBL is the real “second tier below OU”, and “UU” is the real “third tier below OU”. That brings me to my main point: you can say “No, I do not want to lose the tier I enjoy”, and that is OK, but what if we are missing out? What if the real versions of these tiers are superior? That is not to mention all the interest and intrigue that could be brought to these tiers by doing this.

The biggest con with this idea is the fact that we get rid of three competitive GSC metagames, and take a risk with new metagames that may be worse. I would say this idea is best done at a time when we are not playing as many big tournaments, such as in UU’s case, GSC PL or UUPL, give ourselves a bit of time to explore these metagames first before competing in tournaments. This process will take time, effort, and most importantly, people. Good players who are actually good at theorymonning and willing to experiment with ideas. The playerbase factor may be an issue, but I will try my best to lead if this was to happen

My basic point is this: GSC Lower Tiers are “ok” as is, but they could be so much more.

As far as the worries of making the tiers worse, you do realize you can just... ban and unban things repeatedly or whatever till you make a better tier than you currently have, right? Like, that's been on the table the whole time. Try stuff till you find the best configuration you can make with all options on the table instead of the current arbitrary restrictions from >20 years ago. Change is inevitable, might as well roll with it and find the best possible changes you can make rather than leaving things to slowly decay from lack of interest.

...accept the long commitment and retier from scratch instead of letting the problem continue to slowly get more entrenched year after year, imo. You're treating a stab wound at the surface and letting the deeper parts get infected, and now you're gonna have to cut out a bunch of rot before it can heal properly.

Eventually, though, it will all settle into something ideal-ish with relatively static tiers and I would bet most people will be happier with a metagame curated by 30 years of real development and steered by passionate current players than being handed a bunch of weird ancient rules by people who don't exist in the community anymore, filtered through people saddled with the chore of being responsible for metagames they don't particularly care about, with change only ever on the table after years of waiting. That's my perspective from an admittedly-privileged position of curating metagames where the playerbase is immensely receptive to constant change and new development. Even RBY, for all its limits and simplicity, keeps on developing, and I think that's far more more beautiful and rewarding to engage with than trying to bend old rules into the least-annoying shape you can manage without breaking them.

While it's true that GSC UU and NU are in(imo) very good places(so much so that I would hate to lose them from purely a player perspective) that does not necessarily mean they can't be made better through these proposed changes both from a player-based perspective AND a player count/interest perspective. Speaking purely objectively, the handling of RBY LTs has only been getting better and better, especially with the long-term VR plans, and the community is quite strong with a lot of active discussion and overlap between tiers as I pointed out in my earlier post.

My only real reservation was and still is if we could find enough people to take interest in this long-term commitment, but if this ends up attracting more names to GSC then it may not matter. I am also entirely fine with things staying as they are relative to UU and NU, but having read everyone's great feedback I am more convinced that this would be the better long-term direction to go from an overall generational perspective. GSC "could" stay with its limbo-like ability to tier and it wouldn't harm anyone, but the thing I keep coming back to is what would be best for the generation as a whole. As Dawn writes, we "could" be missing out on better formats without knowing it, and having a consistent top-down approach would only help GSC's LT legitimacy. I am a major fan of how RBY operates and think that if this approach did end up getting the green light, we could learn a lot from them. As I wrote above, I don't think the time will ever come where we reach RBY levels of popularity, but that doesn't mean we can't aspire to it and learn from what works well.

After thinking it over, if the purpose of this discussion is to figure out how to handle the long-term health of GSC LTs, then this makes sense because keeping things as the status quo will not give GSC its own identity and as the current GSC scene either steps back or moves on, there will be less and less people interested over time. The short-term growing pains of figuring all this out would be worth the long-term benefits it would provide - including possibly even better tiers with possibly deeper playerbases.

Is there still some semblance of risk involved with this? Yes, but there's also equal or possibly even greater risk in not giving GSC its own true identity as mentioned above. If there is even a small chance that we could improve GSC's marketing problems by going through with this tiering revamp, then I think it's worth it.

Maybe most importantly, it's hard for me to come up with a sincere argument against this that isn't just preserving selected metas that I like(current UU and NU), and so I'd be open to this if it ended up happening. The logistics of figuring out when to test these new hypothetical variations of the tiers might be hard to implement(especially for team tours) but it would be possible to still play the "older" version of a meta in a team tour until the new one was ready to go live. But I don't want to get ahead of myself, especially when we haven't committed to anything and are more just discussing ideas.

PS: I couldn't find a proper place to link this in my post, but BFM wrote an extensive post proposing a possible way to retier ADV that might be worth reading if this idea is seriously implemented.

 

[BloodAce]

Weighing in on this from perspective of PU player, apologize for the brevity as I am on vacation.

1. On the topic of potential bans, I dont personally think the mentioned mons are problematic enough to warrant a ban personally. Poliwhirl is probably the most concerning since its one of the fastest viable mons and belly drum can ohko most of the meta but versus most teams it still has to get pretty lucky with lovely kiss / sleep rolls, win speed tie vs other base 90s like Venemoth, and contend with faster mons like Elekid, Murkrow, and increasingly, Sneasel. In practice it can be pretty inconsistent to setup but I can see why some think it is unhealthy. Perhaps a vote can happen in the future if there is more demand.
2. In relation to the last point, I agree with the sentiment that its currently not too easy to organize this type of tiering action and discussion without a council.
3. Agree that Arbok and Raticate etc should be able to come down from NU at some point. Cant say I am an expert on what GSC RU would look like and if it would be good but I think its worth at least exploring the premise of active tiering with alternations.

 

[Apagogie]

Quick point that hasn't been mentioned yet about GSC RU:

I don’t believe that preserving the identity of a tier is inherently important. However, if maintaining the identity of GSC NU is a concern for a future council, they can choose to delay active tiering or using bans until the metagame naturally stabilizes. There is no pressing need for a GSC RU tier. The core question is whether there is genuine interest in it.

From what I understand, the main issue is that there isn’t a strong and active community around lower-tier GSC formats to begin with. Creating a tier from scratch without a committed playerbase would likely result in a ghost tier that risks further fracturing the already small GSC community into unregulated metagames each with their own tiering issues. This is especially true if the initiative doesn't come from within the RU community itself as it's unlikely new playerbase would emerge to support and develop these formats within the GSC LTs.

I believe that creating a GSC RU tier would be counterproductive and should not be pursued.

 

[Aurist]

There's a lot to say here and it's hard to keep track of what everyone's saying, let alone respond to everybody. I am of a mind similar to a few people in here that GSC Lower Tiers needs the ability to run themselves in some capacity and not have to wait for either a GSC Council that is somewhat lower tiers agnostic, or for enough people in the community to group together on something when we kinda slowly trickle dedicated players out of the tiers over time. It doesn't seem to me that a broad Lower Tiers Council would help things all that much as there is not massive crossover in the userbases and I'd rather see the individual tiers get their own couple leaders or council. GSC ZU has been a good example of how much quicker and smoother things can go when theres a dedicated handful of people concerned with the tier.

Wanted in 49 States take on "tiering malaise" above has particularly spoken to me as a PU player. We've examined a number of approaches to "fixing" PU, a tier not in the worst state ever but at this point broadly unenjoyed by its userbase while noone can seem to agree on what actions are needed. This is accompanied by the unfortunate fact that participating in less populated tiers like PU can feel like a lot of pressure to contribute, development being slow and things like meta posts and resources feel like they have to do a lot with little because it's gonna be one of only a couple posts that month. Discord taking over has allowed meta discussion to be more casual but it's also caused meta discussion to be harder to capture and nail down. I do think that having a dedicated council for PU would be wildly helpful for congregating and recording info for the process, I can't speak for other tiers but there must be at least some shared feelings here.

I don't have a broader perspective on active tiering but I will say that I think it's the way forward for PU. I think at the very least the freeze has run its course at this point and even if a full release would cause absolute chaos as long as we had something in place to properly deal with it we'd be capable of handling it. Because this affects other tiers like NU quite closely I don't want to step on their toes, and I'm not sure how to approach this if we have a split between communities. I think regardless transitivity for bans should be a no-brainer to keep tiers consistent. I would also like to say that the wider PU community including myself has more support to offer GSC PU should that be welcomed, I agree with Sabelette that gen-based tiering councils governing the lower tiers is archaic and unhelpful, limiting progress on tiers for no particular reason and PU has felt that keenly even if the GSC Council itself has never stood in the way of doing things for us.

On a more micro level - it's an odd one, but any process we carry out that ends up in a situation where PU loses access to Spikes (ie Delibird) is a massive net loss, one which would easily cancel out any gain we might make from a reshuffle. Spikes is an incredibly important factor in GSC for preventing interminable games with endless doubles, sleep talk loops etc. We saw the last ZU meta (Charmeleon + Wartortle + Bayleef) prior to shifts degenerate into endless games of double switching, limited progress and constant 50/50 decisions and it was thoroughly unpleasant. This has been made up for only by the tier getting wildly more offensive, which has its own set of problems but is far more digestible as a format. With NU VR having Delibird in C1 rank, there will be some debate about the cutoff and I'm concerned that there will be some push to have NU set the cutoff - but this is something which only affects PU at the end of the day. I think it's very important that as part of this tiers set their own cutoff for what drops to them. WIth a vital mon to the tier hovering on the cusp of NU/not NU, the cutoff matters a fair amount for the future of the tier but in the situation where for example it rises to a higher tier that's undeniable, then we'll have to accept it I guess.

Maybe with the proposed reset of tiers, releasing UUBL and introducing RU, then the above paragraph isn't even a consideration as we have a brand new tier to contend with. I'm willing to accept that as I do believe in modernising these old gens with consistent tiering across all tiers, and I will have to simply pray we still end up with Spikes

Much like the general topic I've had to fold a lot of ideas into one post because there's a lot of things on the slate here. It may be the case that we need to break things down into their component parts, and so for now I think our focus should be the biggest picture (Active tiering for all GSC lower tiers including the freeing of UUBL and the creation of RU). To conclude some of this I support active tiering for GSC and am willing to trust that introducing RU while modernising the system will also limit some of the extreme transformation to tiers NU and below. I think we should carry this out alongside the creation of individual tiering councils for lower tiers.

 

[Sabelette]

Just wanted to throw in a last note I forgot about in my post, but I think a GSC RU is unneeded and should not be done just to preserve NU - if you wanna make it just to make a new tier, do it in a complete retiering, IMO, but ultimately it’s messy for your grand slam and it’s messy for GSCPL and it’s messy for your inclusion in tournaments more broadly. I wouldn’t recommend it. Shoving an RU in with a few shitty UU mons + NU will not make a tier anyone actually wants to play and it won’t get included anywhere. Completely retiering would at least make it possible to make a good RU tier, even if I still think it can be skipped.

 

[PHB11677]

I've been trying to write my thoughts on this as a new player with not much experience (especially since this is the first time I've ever contributed to one of these discussions), and I kept going on random tangents that didn't really have anything to do with the topics being discussed, so I'll try to keep this concise. As someone who admittedly really only participates in tournaments, I've never really found a meta in any generation that made me go "fuck this, this sucks" (although I'm probably an anomaly with that). Even GSC PU, which people have been stating their dissatisfaction with in this thread, was pretty enjoyable to me (although I've only played 3 games of it, haven't faced Poliwhirl, and I got my first team tour win in that tier, so I probably have some rose-tinted glasses on in regards to the format). I was also completely dispelled from the notion of GSC being stall from the first match I played in the Winter Seasonal. What I'm trying to say is that this is a really good gen, and even though it doesn't match everyone on this site's tastes, it definitely deserves more popularity. And while I'm going to stress that I have no expertise on increasing the popularity of a format, I do think a shakeup would help. Even if the formats might initially be worse (although I don't think they'd ever get extremely bad), changing things would get new eyes on GSC, and at least some of those people would realize that this gen is fun to play. And to echo what others have said, more changes can be made after the initial ones, or if the changes are really bad, they can just be undone. It's not like everyone is just gonna forget how the tiers were before. I do want to say that I'll be trying to get more involved in this gen no matter if changes happen or not, but I do think even the most nuclear option of dropping all of UUBL wouldn't really be that bad (although I will again stress that this is the first time I've participated in a discussion like this, so take what I say with however many grains of salt you want).

 

[BeeOrSomething]

Thank you all for posting your thoughts here and in the GSC discord so far. Objectively, I do think active tiering has a lot of benefits, but pragmatically, I still have a lot of questions and doubts.

1. On RU, after reading some thoughts, I agree that GSC RU would likely not be a good idea. It largely isn't necessary and the point about it messing with GSC Slam is valid.

2. What's the plan if active tiering does get agreed on? How would we start? When would we start, and when should shifts happen, and how long would it take? Very little that can be considered a true plan has been offered so far.

3. Is it worth the extremely high amount of effort and possibly years and years of time to undertake such an effort, especially when most issues currently revolve around just PU (and to a lesser degree, UUBL)? Are there better alternatives? Are people dissatisfied with the current system and what it offers in terms of flexibility? Personally, I think the current system we have is actually quite great, but it mostly comes down to issues of discussion and tiering speed, which admittedly are difficult to improve without changing the system. Do we want to change it just to change it? Do we need to do a full reset "just" to fix PU?

4. Who will lead this? Will people step up and lead this? Will leaders stay with it through and through? Of course, I know that I'm likely expected to be the main person spearheading this considering I created this thread and my general spot in the community and my place as a GSC Moderator. To be perfectly honest though, something like this seems extraordinarily exhausting, and I don't want to have to carry the entire effort. I would be okay leading it, but I don't want to be the only one putting in effort.

5. Do we even have the playerbase to do this? Will people even bite at the offer and cause the playerbase to grow? There is a very significant risk of shrink, if not in community, then at least in playerbase, as many who play these tiers more casually won't have GSC in tiers they know how to play anymore and most likely won't put in effort to relearn the tier. I imagine GSC UU would be immediately cut from UUPL, and any hope of GSC NU or GSC PU being included in NUPL/PUPL would also likely vanish. In addition to these problems, what's to say that people will even be engaging in discussion more than before, especially if the playerbase shrinks? Very little of this will fix the issues I outlined at the beginning of my post.

6. What will the resource situation be like, especially for UU and NU? Years and years of resources for people to learn the tier will effectively be eliminated, and new resources will be extremely difficult to establish quickly, especially if players are unwilling to contribute.

7. How will we even guage what accurate portion of the playerbase wants active tiering when so many don't chip in? Should there be a vote or survey of some sort, and would people even respond?

 

[BeeOrSomething]

Quick addendum to the above.

I would like to clarify that one of my largest issues currently is how do we find out if people are willing to participate, let alone how many. I would say this is especially relevant to what Estarossa labeled on discord the "effective" playerbase outside the main community, i.e. the players who I described in the OP as those who actually play in tournaments once or twice a year and don't come back or discuss the tier for one reason or another despite being perfectly capable of playing the tier regularly. Any additional person we could attract to "the cause" would be a huge boon, but as it is now a very significant portion of the playerbase does not actively engage in public discussion even on discord, let alone forums, whatsoever.

There are some ways to guage the numbers. A test tournament, like PU + full drops from NU, would be one, and see what the resulting signup count and discord discussion is. Another one could be to send out a survey to see people's thoughts and if they would be willing or unwilling to continue playing GSC lower tiers.

However, what happens if people don't engage or respond? The obvious answer is something like "then we know for sure people aren't up for it, so we should accept that and continue with the status quo." I feel though that an equally valid response would be "we still don't know if people really are or are not up for it because people are unwilling to engage in discussion regardless of what the outcome is." Just look at the UU Typhlosion thread Celebiii posted in Policy Review some time ago. There was next to no interaction with it. You could say that it's because people think it's a waste of time to engage with and don't think Typhlosion should drop, but I would argue if people thought that, they would say so in response to the thread, and that it's much much more so about an unwillingness to engage period, especially considering that even out of those in the active playerbase, few responded. Admittedly, posting in Policy Review requiring a badge definitely does not help, but even on discord there was little response.

I still have not seen many suggestions yet for fixing the divide between the effective and active playerbases. I won't deny that I think the effective playerbase is much less important considering they will not contribute regardless of whether we do or do not follow up on active tiering, but regardless, numbers are still important, and we still need people playing the tier. I feel like it's kind of assumed that something like active tiering would completely solve this, as the effective playerbase that isn't interested would disappear and the entire playerbase would effectively become the active playerbase by cutting off the edges. However, I wouldn't be so sure, especially since the resulting active playerbase would likely be quite small. Of course, it is very possible that active tiering causes the playerbase to grow, but the possibility that it will shrink is just as real.

This, in my opinion, is the most significant issue I've raised, more so than just wondering what we should do about individual issues with metagames or the speed and accuracy of tiering. This current divide is the main contributor to the decay of GSC lower tiers. The effective playerbase is so much larger than the active playerbase. I struggle to name more than 6 or 7 people who regularly engage in discussion with GSC lower tiers on discord for UU/PU/ZU (NU is doing much better currently thanks to some recent sparks of interest in the NU discord). I would like to know if people have any suggestions to offer with regards to this aspect specifically.

 

[PHB11677]

Thank you all for posting your thoughts here and in the GSC discord so far. Objectively, I do think active tiering has a lot of benefits, but pragmatically, I still have a lot of questions and doubts.

1. On RU, after reading some thoughts, I agree that GSC RU would likely not be a good idea. It largely isn't necessary and the point about it messing with GSC Slam is valid.

2. What's the plan if active tiering does get agreed on? How would we start? When would we start, and when should shifts happen, and how long would it take? Very little that can be considered a true plan has been offered so far.

3. Is it worth the extremely high amount of effort and possibly years and years of time to undertake such an effort, especially when most issues currently revolve around just PU (and to a lesser degree, UUBL)? Are there better alternatives? Are people dissatisfied with the current system and what it offers in terms of flexibility? Personally, I think the current system we have is actually quite great, but it mostly comes down to issues of discussion and tiering speed, which admittedly are difficult to improve without changing the system. Do we want to change it just to change it? Do we need to do a full reset "just" to fix PU?

4. Who will lead this? Will people step up and lead this? Will leaders stay with it through and through? Of course, I know that I'm likely expected to be the main person spearheading this considering I created this thread and my general spot in the community and my place as a GSC Moderator. To be perfectly honest though, something like this seems extraordinarily exhausting, and I don't want to have to carry the entire effort.

5. Do we even have the playerbase to do this? Will people even bite at the offer and cause the playerbase to grow? There is a very significant risk of shrink, if not in community, then at least in playerbase, as many who play these tiers more casually won't have GSC in tiers they know how to play anymore and most likely won't put in effort to relearn the tier. I imagine GSC UU would be immediately cut from UUPL, and any hope of GSC NU or GSC PU being included in NUPL/PUPL would also likely vanish. In addition to these problems, what's to say that people will even be engaging in discussion more than before, especially if the playerbase shrinks? Very little of this will fix the issues I outlined at the beginning of my post.

6. What will the resource situation be like, especially for UU and NU? Years and years of resources for people to learn the tier will effectively be eliminated, and new resources will be extremely difficult to establish quickly, especially if players are unwilling to contribute.

7. How will we even guage what accurate portion of the playerbase wants active tiering when so many don't chip in? Should there be a vote or survey of some sort, and would people even respond?

Again, as someone who hasn't really participated in discussions like this before, thank you for bringing up these questions, because some of these I hadn't really thought about. I do want to stress that I don't really have any issues with how things are now, and I'll be playing this gen more and trying to get better no matter what direction people decide to go (idk if I made that clear enough in my last post). While I do think all of these questions are valid concerns, my immediate response to all of them is a question of my own. That question is "how much worse can things actually get?" I really don't know enough about Smogon history to answer that question. People have brought up RBY making similar changes to these some time ago, but I wasn't around back then, and I don't have a good idea of how similar the situations are. I'd like to be able to offer some sort of plan, but I feel like anything I could come up with would be the same as asking some random person on the street about this topic. This is also how I feel about most of the questions posed here. I feel like I don't know enough to tell how much effort this would take, or to try and step into a leadership role (nevermind knowing if I have the time), or to help contribute to resources. I can really only give gut reactions and feelings, so I'll end this post with those. The notion of tiers being removed from premier leagues after such changes, even if realistic, sounds incredibly stupid to me. Tournaments are part of how metagames develop, especially for tiers without permanent ladders, so why would people want to decrease the amount of them? Also, why shouldn't a survey go out? As you stated in the post after this one, if people don't engage, that can be interpreted in multiple ways, which means the worst case scenario is that we're back in the same position we're in now. I want to end this rambling by pointing out that there are basically two thoerized responses to a reshuffling of GSC lower tiers. One is that people don't want to put in the effort to learn new things, and the playerbase decreases. The other is that people are intrigued by the changes, and that increases both the number of players and the amount of involvment. For me personally, I would be the latter. I've been meaning to improve my teambuilding skills, and changes to some of these metagames would give me a good excuse to start (especially in an early gen like this, where there are less things to keep track of). I think that most people in this thread would agree that if more people respond to the call to adventure than get turned off, then changes should be made, but I'm nowhere near knowledgeable enough about the playerbase to say if that's what would happen or not. However, people who are more familiar with Smogon culture than me should really focus on how players would react, since that seems to be the biggest factor in making a decision about this.

 

[Sabelette]

2. What's the plan if active tiering does get agreed on? How would we start? When would we start, and when should shifts happen, and how long would it take? Very little that can be considered a true plan has been offered so far.

It's not too hard to come up with a plan. If you make all tiers active, it's pretty simple to break into stages:
1. Recruit an initial steering committee of like, 3 people, even
2. Drop every BL into UU, give UU 1-2 years to retier to some extent (probably on the longer end of that because of how many BLs there are); all lower tiers stay the same until UU releases a semi-stable VR
3. Create said semi-stable Viability Rankings that is used as a basis for NU (or RU if people decide they want that)
4. Give that a year or so to develop, create a new VR used as the basis for the next tier down
5. As you move down the tiers, find a couple motivated people to stay on at the higher tier (UU etc.) and act as a council and keep things moving in the right direction while attention is focused to the next tier down
6. Continue VRing at the top end of these tiers and let things rise/drop in 2-year cycles ala RBY and things will start to settle after a few rounds of this

The RBY version of the above is that every January UU/PU VR in even numbered years and NU/ZU VR in odd numbered years and drops/rises are effective immediately.

3. Is it worth the extremely high amount of effort and possibly years and years of time to undertake such an effort, especially when most issues currently revolve around just PU (and to a lesser degree, UUBL)?

Depends on your motivation for it; to me it's not a question of "are there complaints about these tiers" so much as "these tiers are on life support and have terrible PR and are shackled by a bunch of stuff instituted before half the people replying to this thread were even born," so to me, as someone who would like to play these tiers and be involved in a retiering effort, it would be worth the years of work.

Are there better alternatives?

Do unknown alternatives matter if nobody can come up with them? Are the known alternatives likely to fix things? The only known alternatives I've seen mentioned are basically "keep the status quo" or "keep doing things pretty similarly to now but implement a little bit of active tiering at the bottom."

Are people dissatisfied with the current system and what it offers in terms of flexibility?

Personally, yes, but that's all ideology anyway.

Do we want to change it just to change it?

Personally, no. I do think freshness does draw people in, but I'd never propose changing things just to keep it fresh. I think the fact that change does draw new people is a bonus, not a reason to do this.

Do we need to do a full reset "just" to fix PU?

I think doing this just to fix PU would be ridiculous; I think retiering is good on its own merits and not to fix one tier.

4. Who will lead this? Will people step up and lead this? Will leaders stay with it through and through? Of course, I know that I'm likely expected to be the main person spearheading this considering I created this thread and my general spot in the community and my place as a GSC Moderator. To be perfectly honest though, something like this seems extraordinarily exhausting, and I don't want to have to carry the entire effort.

Anyone asking you to solo carry this is ridiculous and it shouldn't be assumed you will. I'm very big on "put your money where your mouth is" so since I'm arguing for this, yes, I'd get involved in it and actively play and talk about these tiers, I don't expect you or anyone else to just do the thing I want for me while I do nothing. It also does not have to be a nonstop 24/7 push, to be clear - RBY has had ebbs and flows of lower tiers expanding and overhauling and that's fine.

5. Do we even have the playerbase to do this? Will people even bite at the offer and cause the playerbase to grow?

I for one would be very interested in playing through a retier from UU to ZU, even including an RU if the decision was made to do that.

I imagine GSC UU would be immediately cut from UUPL, and any hope of GSC NU or GSC PU being included in NUPL/PUPL would also likely vanish.

I think this is very much negotiable and if we're being honest, NUPL already does not want to include RBY or GSC and probably never will, NUCL is the best we are ever getting. RBY's rapidly changing tiers haven't blunted any talk of inclusion in UUPL or PUPL on our end, I really think the "unstable tier" stuff is overblown and it's really much more of just getting people to like the tier and fight for it (and some amount of Sisyphean futility given that new gens will keep coming and these tours will not keep us around or give us a shot given that).

6. What will the resource situation be like, especially for UU and NU? Years and years of resources for people to learn the tier will effectively be eliminated, and new resources will be extremely difficult to establish quickly, especially if players are unwilling to contribute.

While true, how many people are coming in to learn these tiers for more than just "score points in a Grand Slam/Classic circuit then forget it for a year" at the present? Anyone seriously invested will be doing more than just borrowing a couple samples, anyway.

7. How will we even guage what accurate portion of the playerbase wants active tiering when so many don't chip in? Should there be a vote or survey of some sort, and would people even respond?

If they don't respond they don't get a say in it. Simple as that. I think trying to appease some silent majority that honestly isn't 5% as invested as anyone writing paragraphs in the forums is pointless and they'll generally just go along with whatever happens.

Re: building up the active playerbase from the effective playerbase, again, I do think a retier will draw more activity, but every tier ever has a much larger playerbase of occasional players or people who will let you slot them in if you build for them. Solving that is a much bigger issue that I think will have to come from giving people reasons to actually engage and building some community both on forums and discord. I have ideas I want to implement for RBY - I can't say for certain yet what works and what doesn't till I try them, though. Right now I'm too busy using my shadow dictator powers to fundamentally restructure RBY lower tiers and their councils since that's a little more pressing.

Some stuff that's crossed my mind for building up community so people stick around, rather than just show up for the tours and dip after:
1. More community-building events in general. Fostering some sense of actual community makes Pokemon more than just a competition you show up to, and I think it's very possible to create some not-so-serious events to get people a little more involved. Even just like a "play through a GSC game" day or speedrun competition or something divorced from competitive mons can be a lot of fun, IMO.
2. Similar to the above, fun tours with dynamic rulesets (ban a random mon every week, etc, or little livetours with plenty of warning ahead of time so people actually can plan to show up) or small teamtours that are less serious and more experimental can help people build connections - in RBY we've talked about the idea of a lower tiers teamtour that all the established players are banned from playing but can manage in, so new faces can play and get builder/practice support as well as a chance to show their stuff.
3. Resources are cool and all, but it would be nice to have more interactive and engaging threads - teambuilding competitions, promoting RMTs more, team bazaars, anything people can engage with rather than just "here is the team, here is how you play it, go play." Stuff like the GSC OU team breakdown is fucking amazing and I'm super glad it exists but letting newer or less experienced players have threads they can try to say something in or ask questions in goes a long way for sure. It'd also help if you can encourage more people to post teamdumps after teamtours, even just "here's 3 teams I ran that I really liked and here's why I ran them."
4. Video content goes such a long way in drawing people in. DAWNBUSTER's videos have done more for making me want to play GSC again than quite literally anything else, so if there are any people out there who want to do videos like that, this is a great time for it, triply so if retiering is actually done. Speaking from experience, it's also really fun to make videos about tiers you're good at - I've been having a blast covering UPL RBY matches.

Ultimately to me it's more about building community than convincing people to make resources, etc - if you have a strong community, people will collaborate and talk to each other.

Anyway, sorry if I'm talking a lot, it's not really my lane here but it is stuff I have some parallel experience in dealing with and working through. Hope it helps.

 

[LHF]

Thank you all for posting your thoughts here and in the GSC discord so far. Objectively, I do think active tiering has a lot of benefits, but pragmatically, I still have a lot of questions and doubts.

1. On RU, after reading some thoughts, I agree that GSC RU would likely not be a good idea. It largely isn't necessary and the point about it messing with GSC Slam is valid.

2. What's the plan if active tiering does get agreed on? How would we start? When would we start, and when should shifts happen, and how long would it take? Very little that can be considered a true plan has been offered so far.

3. Is it worth the extremely high amount of effort and possibly years and years of time to undertake such an effort, especially when most issues currently revolve around just PU (and to a lesser degree, UUBL)? Are there better alternatives? Are people dissatisfied with the current system and what it offers in terms of flexibility? Personally, I think the current system we have is actually quite great, but it mostly comes down to issues of discussion and tiering speed, which admittedly are difficult to improve without changing the system. Do we want to change it just to change it? Do we need to do a full reset "just" to fix PU?

4. Who will lead this? Will people step up and lead this? Will leaders stay with it through and through? Of course, I know that I'm likely expected to be the main person spearheading this considering I created this thread and my general spot in the community and my place as a GSC Moderator. To be perfectly honest though, something like this seems extraordinarily exhausting, and I don't want to have to carry the entire effort. I would be okay leading it, but I don't want to be the only one putting in effort.

5. Do we even have the playerbase to do this? Will people even bite at the offer and cause the playerbase to grow? There is a very significant risk of shrink, if not in community, then at least in playerbase, as many who play these tiers more casually won't have GSC in tiers they know how to play anymore and most likely won't put in effort to relearn the tier. I imagine GSC UU would be immediately cut from UUPL, and any hope of GSC NU or GSC PU being included in NUPL/PUPL would also likely vanish. In addition to these problems, what's to say that people will even be engaging in discussion more than before, especially if the playerbase shrinks? Very little of this will fix the issues I outlined at the beginning of my post.

6. What will the resource situation be like, especially for UU and NU? Years and years of resources for people to learn the tier will effectively be eliminated, and new resources will be extremely difficult to establish quickly, especially if players are unwilling to contribute.

7. How will we even guage what accurate portion of the playerbase wants active tiering when so many don't chip in? Should there be a vote or survey of some sort, and would people even respond?

1. Yeah, I'm willing to eat my words on this one too. Anything positive that GSC RU would accomplish can and would be done better with a full out retier, which was something I thought was a distant possibility but am now seeing more and more genuine possibility for thanks to everyone's messages. If a GSC RU ends up becoming necessary due to a long NU banlist(which sounds EXTREMELY unlikely btw), then it could be talked about down the line when we're deeper into this process.

2. The post I linked above from BFM(as well as Sabel's comments) are a very strong starting point and if we encounter hiccups along the way, then we can and will course correct on the fly. We don't need to have a perfect vision, but we do need to be willing to do it. (More on this in #5).

3. There is zero doubt in my mind that this is worth the extremely high effort it would take. This entire discussion came from your(100% correct) assessment that GSC LTs are at a very real risk of dying out over the next few years and needs some form of correction. Biting the bullet and going for a full out retiering not only shows others that we are serious about GSC as a generation, but gives it the identity it has long since needed. Also, this is not "just" about fixing PU but rather about the long-term health of UU and NU's playerbases and eliminating the arbitrary nature of rulesets we have been working with in favor of an active, healthier community. If this was all about fixing one uninteresting tier, I think we'd all be in agreement with just saying "them's the brakes" and calling it there.

4. I'm glad you said this so nobody else had to feel awkward breaking the ice. It would be pretty clear to me that yeah, you'd be the head leader of this project but I am also a believer that if the generation shows a firm commitment to the project then others will join. Dawnbuster already mentioned he'd be willing to help support(at least as far as UU goes, hopefully for others too) and I can think of a number of others that would most likely be interested, but I don't feel it's polite to name them publicly only because I don't want to awkwardly nominate them for something.

5. Try not to think about this as "do we have the playerbase to do this?" and more about "what kind of playerbase could we GET from doing this?" At the risk of repeating myself from #3, we're having this conversation because we are worried about the playerbase as it is. This isn't like ADV where people still play the formats, even with some awkward tiering complications - as you yourself say, we are the generation with the least amount of dedicated players.

This is not an insult as I absolutely love GSC, just a statement of fact: If we avoid these hard conversations, then we run the risk of a slow, quiet GSC LT death when the few passionate people end up leaving. I'm also going to play the villain here and say that if we are cut from UUPL and/or have our chances at getting into NUPL/PUPL killed, this makes absolutely zero real difference to us. GSC is already a gen with very minimal overlap and people who play in those formats end up discussing their builds with their GSC oriented friends rather than their actual teammates. I can speak to this from my own personal experience.

6. RBY has a history of making huge shakeups but still rolling on. We banned Rapidash days before the PU cup started, and UU(+ NU/PU) finally killed partial trapping not too long ago. Speculative samples were created and are being used for the ongoing RBY UU cup. Things happen, but anyone who is genuinely serious about these formats will not only roll with the punches, but they will be proactive in trying to get ahead of the meta by building teams that they feel will do well/become meta after that. We also don't need to worry much about the previously established resources because for all intents and purposes, those resources will not mean anything in the face of whatever future long term tiering process we have. As a loose example, there are years of posts and resources for tiers that end up going through extreme changes thanks to bans or unbans that remained archived for history's sake. As a loosely related example, the SWSH ubers resources pre-dynamax ban, Zacian-C, and Zacian-H bans are obviously unusable because all three were unhealthy chokeholds on the metagame.

7. Playing the bad guy again, but if they aren't willing to chip in/add to the conversation then does it really matter? This is all dependent on the goals of the generation. If we are OK with how things are, then we can stay in our own isolated corner, play our tiers as they are with minor reform here and there, and move on as if nothing happened. But I think we know what the future leads to if we stay the same way.

I would like to clarify that one of my largest issues currently is how do we find out if people are willing to participate, let alone how many. I would say this especially relevant to what @Estarossa labeled on discord the "effective" playerbase outside the main community, i.e. the players who I described in the OP as those who actually play in tournaments once or twice a year and don't come back or discuss the tier for one reason or another despite being perfectly capable of playing the tier regularly. Any additional person we could attract to "the cause" would be a huge boon, but as it is now a very significant portion of the playerbase does not actively engage in public discussion even on discord, let alone forums, whatsoever.

So I get the concern is that you're trying to not alienate these effective players, but let me play devil's advocate: you literally write "as it is now a portion of the playerbase does not actively engage" with the formats that we are worried about the long-term playerbase of, which you already got ahead of yourself and pointed out. This is an anomaly compared to literally any other competitive generation that exists, and if we are worried about alienating those people compared to growing and expanding, then we have the absolute wrong priorities and they are ones that won't be answerable no matter what anyone says. So I can only try to answer your question with another question: Should our goal not to be to improve GSC as much as possible and let the chips fall where they may? We can drop polls/surveys if we like, and maybe that should happen because I'm all for people having a say but at the risk of repeating myself again we are here because of a very real pain point that needs to be alleviated one way or the other.

However, I wouldn't be so sure, especially since the resulting active playerbase would likely be quite small. Of course, it is very possible that active tiering causes the playerbase to grow, but the possibility that it will shrink is just as real.

Sab's analogy from earlier stayed with me. If we are scared of ripping off a band-aid to find out that the wound is too deep, then there was already nothing we could do and found out about that earlier. But think of the upside it could have! And if for some reason this project fell flat on its face, we still have the archived resources that we could use to "restore" the old metagame if it was truly THAT terrible. I just don't want to see GSC operate from a risk avoidant standpoint when we know that what we have now isn't working. If anything that is a sign TO take the risk.

In a basic mons analogy - the player who is behind has to take more risks because the player in the lead doesn't have to. Aggressive callouts, double switches, fishing for hax, whatever have you. We are in a long-term stall match(which we all agree with) and we are getting closer to being PP stalled out. If there is even a 1% chance of victory though, is it not worth playing it out, good turns and bad, for the love of the game?

I struggle to name more than 6 or 7 people who regularly engage in discussion with GSC lower tiers on discord for UU/PU/ZU (NU is doing much better currently thanks to some recent sparks of interest in the NU discord). I would like to know if people have any suggestions to offer with regards to this aspect specifically.

At the risk of piggybacking off Sab too much, this is where we could look toward some of RBY's ideas and strategies to (belly) drum up more interest. I think the NU community is awesome, very biased, because we've seen revivals of both GSC and SWSH through them. We would probably need to think about what we could do for the other tiers, but as you mention, we're already on life support with them anyway.

The only thing I can immediately say right now is "build it and they will come." Because the alternative... you get it. As much as I love(and I do mean love) GSC UU and NU right now, I would be happier knowing that they(and the remainder of GSC's LTs) have a long-term future.