I don't see how Pandora's Box was opened at all. I see the Desync Clause Mod as a way of allowing PS to avoid implementation headaches when it comes to such a complicated, game-breaking glitch. The Counter patch was one of three, the others being the Thaw and Psywave Desyncs,
the latter of which has been implemented. There's also more that haven't been addressed, such as the Bide Desync and Fire Spin Glitch...which actually affects all partial trapping and is really tied to Mirror Move but whatever, fuck I guess we can call it the Mirror Move Trapping Desync? Anyway, this is more in line with things like the Acid Rain Glitch in DPP where the game can crash just because you happen to have a Cherrim on your team and Pursuit decided to get funky.
I very much dislike the idea of going down a slippery slope to begin patching RBY's core mechanics, this is very different to what I've outlined above. So far, the only things that have been patched are outright game-breaking desyncs that would otherwise cause battles to end. We are going from that to patching out minor inconveniences which are in no way game-breaking. What you are asking is that we stop playing RBY and instead move towards an idealized RBY. There are things we just have to accept as part and parcel of our game. I don't see why we should make this gigantic leap and suddenly enable other asinine "fixes" in the process. Do you want draining moves to fail against Substitute in RBY as they should? You know that was a bug that became a feature in GSC onwards, right? How about fixing Focus Energy so it's like NetBattle, or allowing critical hits to reach 100%? Maybe we should patch Substitute Self-KO? This opens up a massive can of worms and really isn't the hill you want to die on. You
will miss with Body Slam sometimes, you
will have Sludge poison a little more often than it should, you
will click Soft-Boiled with Chansey at 64% because you didn't look at the screen properly, you
will never thaw from being frozen...these are part of the generation you chose to play. I just don't see why we should change the current status quo. Every generation has some bullshit mechanic that makes everyone scream the house down.
At the same time, you could say that this can of worms is actually full of those
cool jelly ones that I really like. The fixes I outlined
could be considered a good thing, and I'd believe you if you said they are. However, we then need to think: where do you draw the line from there if this goes forward? It's fairly difficult to discern what is and isn't "as the devs intended", as you say, especially when the "paraslam" change as we call it was officially stated to be a fully intended mechanic, yet people refer to it as a glitch. You could argue that Stadium is where everything is "fixed", especially because of how different it is, but that's not what you want, is it? This is a completely subjective debate, a stark deviation from a tiering policy that is meant to reduce this as much as possible. That said, I'm happy to debate this subject, I find it very interesting.
If you want this mythical perfect RBY, how about banning Substitute in Stadium and playing that? I haven't heard anyone except like one guy say a single positive thing about that move's changes, hell I'd gladly try to make that happen. Worried about losing Hyper Beam? Stadium Zero NatDex, let's get it lads. Fuck, LGPE still has an active playerbase if you REALLY want to escape the ruling nightmares this generation gives you. Of course, chances are none of this would replace "standard RBY", but does this not satisfy your queries?
I am on this site to play RBY, not some "Neo-RBY" Pet Mod where we selectively remove mechanics that inconvenience you maybe once every 30 games. If you want that, however,
go for it! That said, if the community ups and says "ayo let's patch this", then by all means go for it.
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In regards to Recovery Failure,
there's already been an approved PS suggestion to add a visual indicator that gives you the HP number where it'll fail. I don't see why we need to patch this when a quality of life improvement will largely solve the problem. Plays like Alakazam doing 2 STosses + Psychic in the mirror to potentially cause the glitch to occur are perfectly fine to preserve, in my opinion, especially with this upcoming QoL feature.
I know someone is going to bring up
the Illegal DV "patch" that happened a while back, so I want to counter this bit now. This wasn't really a patch, but a modification to Tradeback Clause which allows you to get Max DVs from there. I quote;
The only confirmed way to have perfect DVs for every RBY Pokemon would be to transfer them from GSC, which means that we would technically allow to use GSC DVs, but not GSC Tradebacks. We decided to go with that option mainly because it sounds very inconvenient to make players choose a DV spread in their RBY teambuilder.
Is it silly? Absolutely, but this ain't the thread for that argument...
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EDIT: Thought about this a bit more, I think I fixated too much on the patch point. So really,
the conversation should be about whether we should extend patching into generic glitches and quirks at all. As I sort of went over in this post, it's a very murky and difficult topic to discuss. What would we define as glitches? There's quite a few clear-cut ones that I mentioned, sure, but if it wasn't for the Stadium 2 statement regarding the "paraslam" mechanic I'm pretty sure people would have called it a glitch and we'd have had this thread sooner. To put it simply: it's very, very hard to truly determine what's a glitch and what isn't. You'd think Slash is bugged in how frequently it crits for most Pokemon in RBY, but no, that's intended.
Contrary to what people like to say, Smogon's tiering policy is built on precedent, which makes any tiering decision a potential catalyst for new ones. Remember, this is why this thread even exists, so we should be extra careful when deciding this. Could you, say, infer that Gen 6's Mega mechanics were bugged because of Gen 7 changing it to that "you get that speed etc when you mega" mechanic? There is no right or wrong answer to this, because there is no official statement, and GF is known for retroactively fixing glitches every release. Hell, could you patch Sky Drop in BW Doubles OU so you can replace the Gravity ban with Gravity Sleep Clause? Again, this can be seen as enticing, but should we step into this speculative territory at all when we just don't know? What are you gonna do, get out the source code from the gigaleak and evaluate the code or something?
It just seems a bit extreme to go to such lengths for what should, ideally, be simulating the core games. It's in the word
"Simulator". So far, we have only patched to bypass PS's upper-limit: literal game-breaking glitches that you cannot work around. What do you do? Would you say the desync patches were wrong? Should we implement desyncs or have the game end rather than change them to move failure? There are many routes down this topic.