Prohibiting Rises in the Final Months of the Generation during Tier Shifts

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This issue was brought up earlier in this thread by the likes of quziel, Rabia, and Lily, and I agree with their sentiments. To avoid detracting discussion from the original thread, I made this thread to discuss this since it’s a topic that really should be discussed. Most of this post is just going to be similar to Lily's but I figured I’d formally state my support for locking rises for the final months in a generation. To be specific, April should be the last month for rises and nothing should rise for the shifts in July and October. For context, I am a lower tier main, I play UU and contribute there daily. I am also a council member and care lots about my tier. In this upcoming shift, we are set to lose the former two and likely lose the latter two of the following

| 34 | Slowking | 5.395% |
| 35 | Excadrill | 5.055% |
| 40 | Nihilego | 4.291% |
| 41 | Rotom-Wash | 4.223% |

The loss of these Pokemon is monumental for the tier. And I truly mean it when I say monumental. UU would lose 4 very common and splashable staples that contribute largely to the health of the tier in the final months of the generation. Excadrill is an offensive check to dangerous threats like Aegislash and is a key hazard remover, being one of the only good ones so to speak. Slowking is an integral defensive switchin against the likes of Primarina, Moltres, Salamence, Conkeldurr, and Keldeo. Nihilego is an excellent Stealth Rocker and answer to the super dangerous Thundurus-T and checks other mons like Moltres and special attacker Salamence. Rotom-W is very useful in answering super dangerous threats like Mamoswine and Scizor who don’t have many defensive answers. Losing these 4 would send the tier into a downwards spiral, it’d have to be entirely reshaped and I would not be surprised for bans to happen as a result. It could be fine, but why would we take this chance when there’s an easier option available. Additionally, UU is dealing with controversial threats like Scizor and Aegislash right now, both the centers of wide discussion. It’d be very hard to take action on them and simultaneously deal with the aftermath of the shifts in 4 months, not to mention there’s ANOTHER shift that may screw us over. It’s just not beneficial nor fun at all, and like others have mentioned interest is dwindling, at that point who would bother picking up the pieces of a ruined tier and instead just wait for the new gen. I understand this has to apply to all lower tiers, and even though I’m mostly an observer for other lower tiers, I imagine similar issues evidenced by projected rises from the recent usage stats.

| 43 | Togekiss | 4.592% |
RU may lose Togekiss, a very integral Pokemon, to UU.

| 33 | Diancie | 6.008% |
| 36 | Starmie | 5.283% |
NU may lose both Diancie and Starmie to RU, the former mainly used to check the now banned Obstagoon, and if usage doesn’t go down they have an integral Pokemon lost to RU for 3 months.

| 42 | Quagsire | 4.987% |
PU may lose Quagsire, an A rank wall on their Viability Rankings, to NU as well.

Every lower tier is set to lose integral Pokemon in the final months of the generation, some suffering more than others, but why should we deal with this when there’s an easier solution? Even if a tier may not have too big issues now the insurance can still be valuable. Like said earlier, just stop rises these last 6 months/ Two tier shifts of the generation. It gives lower tiers time to take action on any last threats before the gen ends and the majority of the playerbase moves on, it’s hard to take action on old gens with the limited sample size. I also want to say we should keep drops. Why? Like said earlier it’s easier to handle drops than rises. If something mad OP drops we can just ban it, but we can’t control what rises. Drops can also help tiers. For example, NU can get a solid defensive staple in Gastrodon returning, while PU can get Guzzlord, another likely balanced Pokemon. Why gatekeep options to make these tiers better? Health of the tiers comes before some policy and tradition, all the lower tiers seek to only gain from removing rises while keeping drops near the end of the generation and I find it’s very easy to implement. Some might ask "Isn't this just another form of veto?" The difference here is that this is an objective method for stopping unwanted rises, not subjective where you have to determine whether the Pokemon is viable enough, which is the main criticism of the previously proposed veto system. Overall, removing rises from the last 2 shifts of the generation while keeping drops is the best action to take right now. It makes playing and tiering a lower tier far better at the cost of nothing. I’d hope this gets implemented very soon, before the July shifts, so we can continue to run our lower tiers and have them solved by the time the gen ends.
 
To me it seems there's an implicit assumption here that tiering and metagame evolution cease the moment a format is no longer current gen. This is something that I think is totally unnecessary, since the only effect a new generation has on the one immediately prior is that a portion of the playerbase will abandon the outgoing gen in favour of the new one. Even then, I'll also note that this is less likely to be an issue for lower tiers that aren't available for some time after the implementation of a newer gen since they have to wait on higher tiers to be formed. Other than a portion of the playerbase shifting over, the game's still going to be worth playing, players are still going to innovate and the metagame will evolve. I just think it's weird to impose some sort of deadline that has a minimal relationship with the outgoing format.

With all that said, I'm not disputing that over time the playerbase will shed some players, leaving a core playerbase that favours stability and a retained identity. I would instead argue that a better solution would be to implement some sort of transition into this stage, starting around the time the new gen is released (or the lower tier becomes available for the new gen). What this transition may look like, I don't know exactly, it could involve multiple phases. Perhaps you retain usage tiering, but on much slower cycles and/or with different thresholds. Perhaps you implement a veto power as discussed in the other thread. Maybe you look at tweaks based on viability rather than usage.

Taking surveys of the playerbase might be a good way to gauge progress throughout this transition and help govern timeframes for adjusting the system that gets used

Honestly, I'm not terribly fussed as to what happens with lower tiers as they no longer interest me, it's just that I think treating the introduction of a new gen as a hard deadline for fixing everything and locking everything in place isn't terribly helpful. Not to mention that we've seen plenty of tinkering with stable past gens in recent years. I think it's better to use a new generation as a signal to gradually transition to a more stable system, with flexible timeframes rather than hard deadlines
 

Specs

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it's just that I think treating the introduction of a new gen as a hard deadline for fixing everything and locking everything in place isn't terribly helpful. Not to mention that we've seen plenty of tinkering with stable past gens in recent years.
The hard deadline of rises is so that tiers would have more time while the playerbases are still active enough to be able to get it into a place where it is a solid enough old gen as the new gen is coming in

Having the ability to make sure you clean things up in your current gen while going into a completely new gen that the community will be focusing on is fantastic. SM PU Mesprit leaving didnt exactly break anything, there have been arguments of it actually being a great thing for the tier. But it did make the tier different enough to where even though we had the ability to make changes to the tier, having to re-learn building and playing took a good chunk of time. And during that time, the hype and discussion surrounding the tier was gen 8. I use SM PU as the example because this is the lowest official tier. We still had to wait awhile for our turn for gen 8, and yet that was still a lot of the talk (and eventually the majority)

I’m not exactly opposed to changes in some way with usage stats post-new gen (maybe from big enough tours and multiple of them?), however it would be best if that would be put in place while also having what the OP is suggesting

I really don’t see any downside to this deadline
 

quziel

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I said it in the prior thread, but I'm obviously in favor of preventing rises during the last 2 shifts of a gen. This helps ensure that a meta can adjust to anything being taken away (its inherently easier to adjust to drops cause they can be banned if they're OP), as well as working around the issue of less reliable usage stats later in a gen (see my post in the prior thread about the number of games useful for tiering).
 
I agree on holding off rises at the end of the gen because it looks into the future of gen 8 becoming an old gen as we await for gen 9. I get that this is "standard procedure" but that should not be the reason for us to leave tiers off with too much unexplored territory at the very last moment; tier council and tier leaders already have enough on their plates working with the current gen let alone if they are also going to have to stabilize an old gen on top of it and for what, tradition?

Prohibiting rises will make smaller scale changes easier post gen 8 since they would take place in a relatively settled tier as opposed to if these changes would be allowed. Keep in mind I mostly speak as a player for UU but if for example, contentious Pokemon like Aegislash and Scizor were to be banned from gen 8 uu after the gen ended with our current procedure, it would take much more time for players back into a comfortable setting after they had just gone through the whiplash of losing several integral Pokemon. It would ultimately be just splitting resources trying to salvage two metagames, since gen 9 will have some problems at the start like all tiers do, for what I imagine to be very little if any gratification or reward for the people involved working on it.

Lastly, and this is mostly gonna be a bit personal, I see people all the time saying "Gen 8 UU sucks" "Delete SS UU" in the discord. I get that you guys may not want to main the tier anyways but I think now is probably our best chance to at least try to keep our tier from being more screwed up than it already is. I do not look forward to future UUPLs where people are forced to make a slot for this tier only to moan and complain about it, thinking about how much better it would be if we had nihilego.
 
I made this thread about a week ago detailing the issue with end of gen rises and proposing to end them in the last 6 months of the generation, giving lower tiers ample time to prepare for the gen to end without being disrupted by unwanted rises. The support for this has been quite widespread from what I've gathered. There has been massive support within my home tier, the UU tier, for this to be initiated and I've heard positive feedback from those who play other tiers like Specs and quziel as well. It's a relatively no harm solution that just benefits everyone.

However, there hasn't been much discussion since this thread went up, at least regarding posts in here. In my own opinion, it's something that should be solved soon with shifts being a bit more than a month away. If it doesn't fix this issue by then, what's really the point of this thread? Our goal is to keep lower tiers from destabilizing, so we have an exigence to solve this soon. As such, I'm going to publicly ask and tag the current tier leaders of the lower tiers (RU NU and PU) to at least share their thoughts or convey this thread to your lower tier communities to hear some other voices about this proposal, we're the ones effected and if you support the change and want to see it happen your voice needs to be heard. Tagging EviGaro Feliburn Meri Berry Finchinator chlo for your voices Also tagging tiering admin shiloh for your thoughts since you are in charge of the final decision as a tiering admin.
 
Personally I think that this wouldn't really detract from the original thread that I made, as all of this stuff is in the umbrella of tiering solutions that aren't unreasonable, which has been the main criticism of most discussions that have come up about this in the past (unreasonable suggestions). This discussion is one that has been framed as an evil with no solutions, which I obviously don't believe is true, hence why I made the thread. I honestly can't say what happened last generation with regards to the rises and drops discourse, as I wasn't really around to contribute to those discussions. As for this proposal, I think stopping the last wave of rises (and possibly drops) just makes sense to give adequate time for tiering to run its course in the final moments of a tier. We can pretend like tiering activity will go at the same rate when a tier becomes an oldgen, but it is much easier to hold live suspects and fix inherent issues with a tier while it is still current gen, and removing important tools from a tier right before the tier is overwritten with the new release of a game makes our jobs a lot harder. I think disabling the final 2 rises and drops is probably not necessary, typically 3-5 months should be enough for the final suspects a tier needs to finalize a sustainable enough ecosystem along with the other change that allowed oldgen lower tiers to hold suspects to ban problematic elements.

Also as a side note while I'm rambling, this isn't just about Hitmontop or anomalous rises at this point. I think a lot of the anger towards the current system is due to how uncontrollable it is, with fringe viable Pokemon rising out of tiers and destroying entire ecosystems. This doesn't tend to happen very often, but I think that we haven't been able to reach the stabilization phase of Sword and Shield largely due to the DLC basically giving us a new game a full year into the life cycle, and introducing vastly more Pokemon than an ORAS or USUM did. Most solutions that people bring up are either unreasonable amounts of work or are highly against the spirit of the system as I'm aware, including the proposed veto, but I think this is a relatively uncontroversial proposal to implement at this time.

One question that I don't have an answer to, however: what happens if the next generation's game is delayed after the cancelled shift? I don't know if Pokemon games have ever been delayed, but its not really out of the possibility. Do we just deal with it and delay all future shifts?
 

Lily

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The recently established Tiering Policy Council has been talking about this for the past few days and we've decided that going forward, the final two shifts of a generation will only feature drops and not rises. We've all read every single post in this thread & Meri's similar thread, so here's our justification.

While we understand some counterarguments (i.e. lower tiers getting potentially harmed near the end of a generation is just the nature of usage-based tiering), we all collectively agree that as a group of fans striving solely to have the most fun we can with our metagames, it is undesirable to have any of them left in a disliked or potentially even near-unplayable state. Situations like SM PU Mesprit are somewhat rare, but they are also very unfortunate and completely avoidable; there is no real reason for a playerbase to need to "fix" a tier in just one short three-month cycle before the end of a generation, particularly while they're also preparing for the next generation to come in. In that sense, we knew going in that we would be cutting out the last rises of a generation no matter what.

The reasoning for choosing to prevent rises from two shifts instead of one is that, in our current usage-based tiering schedule, shifts happen at the beginning of July and October. This means that we don't have much time at all after July's shifts before the generation ends - only four months - and that means that, if suspect tests or other tiering action are necessary, the time tier leaders have for them is very limited. While as Ortheore pointed out, tiering action is possible in old generation lower tiers now and they never truly "die" as long as people are still playing them, they do almost always see extremely low activity once a generation ends, only being played occasionally in annual tournaments. For this reason, we feel it's best to give tier leaders more control over the tier in its final months so that they can leave it in an enjoyable state for everyone.

Also, the reason we're only targeting rises and not drops (aside from that being the scope of this thread) is that drops are much more within a tier leader's control. You can prevent a broken drop from terrorising a tier via banning it, but can't prevent the rise of a staple to another tier.

One question that I don't have an answer to, however: what happens if the next generation's game is delayed after the cancelled shift? I don't know if Pokemon games have ever been delayed, but its not really out of the possibility. Do we just deal with it and delay all future shifts?
We did discuss this too. We essentially decided it was best to just cross this bridge if we come to it; TPCI's never delayed one before, and we know that as the world's biggest media franchise, they have a lot of fans and investors alike to adhere to. It's unlikely we'll ever see a significant delay on a mainline game, so it's not really worth accounting for.



So, as an official rule: going forward, the final 2 tier shifts of a generation will only feature drops and not rises. Thanks to everyone who discussed.
 
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