re: initial ou tiering

[eden]

Disaster Area wanted me to post this idea which he'd discussed with shrang, but shrang decided not to post.

His suggestion is that if we were to implement this in Gen 6, rather than leaving the generation somewhat ruined, would be to begin to do this, but stagger the approach. So, whilst we play the new OU for a few months, the other tiers would either play their pre-change tier or their BW equivalent, dependent upon what solution is agreed upon, and in due course they change over to the new ORAS tiers as they are developed.

 

[dice]

Reymedy your post kinda............ focused on one minor subpoint that was relatively unimportant to the argument as a whole and was hella belligerent

shrang's commentary on ou was possibly off base, sure, but his overall point is on track. i'm simply stating that ou's current tiering is not ideal. the lack of immediate openness in the tier stunts possible growth and flexibility due to the original ban list being relatively arbitrary. current ou can be seen as working as the tier has reached a somewhat balanced state, but that does not mean the current tiering is a perpetually functional system.

wrt quoted statement: it was simply a way to show that ou is ~not~ ideally tiered. if a metagame can achieve better balance with fewer bans while maintaining the same level of creativity/extraneous fun factors, isn't it more effective? of course ubers as a whole has no effect on ou. however, its model may be superior. if the paradigm of ou is seen as faulty, shouldn't we strive to improve it? the quote is not relating ubers:ou as a pokemon pool, but rather contending that this is one of many symptoms showing ou being intrinsically flawed from its initial inception every generation.

 

[ryan]

But does the Ubers metagame offer the same level of creativity and other extraneous fun factors as OU does? There are a ton of viable Pokemon in OU which has led to a lot of people falling back on match-up as their basis for losing, but it also shows just how much is available to use. Almost every Mega is viable in some capacity in OU, whereas Ubers sees what, Mewtwo, Salamence, and Gengar with the occasional sprinkle of a few others? Tons of other non-Mega lower tier Pokemon are plenty viable as well. But Ubers sees a whopping 39 Pokemon above the 3.41% cutoff and 52 Pokemon above the 2.00% cutoff, while OU sees 51 Pokemon above the 3.41% cutoff and 63 Pokemon above the 2.00% cutoff at the highest level (1760 and 1825 stats, respectively). These numbers remain consistent for both Ubers and OU at the next highest level (1630 and 1695, respectively). The top five most used Pokemon in Ubers--Groudon, Xerneas, Arceus, Kyogre, and Darkrai--all have more usage than the most used Pokemon in OU, Heatran, which sits at 22.15%. Does flexibility exist in Ubers? From what I've heard it's debatable, but I'm sure it does. Does it exist in OU? Certainly much moreso than Ubers.

You can say that Ubers with a banlist would be more balanced than OU in its current state and with fewer bans needed to achieve said balance, and I'd probably agree. But I'd also argue that you sacrifice creativity in the process. I'm sure that Ubers numbers are subjugated by the centralization of broken Pokemon, but even with those Pokemon eliminated, the power level between Ubers and OU is so massively different that it will always be more centralized than OU.

There are other less important factors at play here, such as OU's expected power level, the massive disarray that would be thrown into lower tiers as a result of massive changes in OU, the actual PR nightmare, the further separation between Smogon's main metagame and Nintendo's, etc. but at the end of the day, I just don't see Ubers with a banlist actually being better than what the future of OU will be. Obviously there's no way to know how everything will pan out, and maybe by the time Gen 7 comes around, I'll be more supportive of this proposal. But at least for the time being, I can't agree with this shift, especially not during the current generation like some others have proposed.

 

[Reymedy]

Reymedy your post kinda............ focused on one minor subpoint that was relatively unimportant to the argument as a whole and was hella belligerent

shrang's commentary on ou was possibly off base, sure, but his overall point is on track. i'm simply stating that ou's current tiering is not ideal. the lack of immediate openness in the tier stunts possible growth and flexibility due to the original ban list being relatively arbitrary. current ou can be seen as working as the tier has reached a somewhat balanced state, but that does not mean the current tiering is a perpetually functional system.

And nothing you said so far implied that it was not a perpetually functionnal system, sadly.
You state that the original tiering choices were arbitrary, and yet again, this does not mean that they were wrong.

Now that this is out of the way, we can focus on the only remaining purpose of your first post : call into question "the lack of explicit philosophy in the regards to tiering".
And again, let's ignore the fact that you want us to reconsider the tiering policy simply because it does not suit a very structured mind such as yours (ie : not because it does not work).

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wrt quoted statement: it was simply a way to show that ou is ~not~ ideally tiered. if a metagame can achieve better balance with fewer bans while maintaining the same level of creativity/extraneous fun factors, isn't it more effective? of course ubers as a whole has no effect on ou. however, its model may be superior. if the paradigm of ou is seen as faulty, shouldn't we strive to improve it? the quote is not relating ubers:ou as a pokemon pool, but rather contending that this is one of many symptoms showing ou being intrinsically flawed from its initial inception every generation.

I do not think that the game we're playing is complicated enough to justify the way you try to abstract things to push your opinion forward. And god knows I love to throw away words like paradigm or intrinsically.
But let's stick to concrete ideas.
There are only two dozens of Pokémons in the Uber tier, I'd be incredibly curious to hear which ones of these Pokémons that haven't be tested in our Generation would you have added. Which balance for OU are you thinking about in your post ? There must have been a Pokémon that stood out for you to be thinking about starting again from scratch, right ?
You were not possibly thinking that you could ask us to toss out generations of testing, voting and debates without either :
- A real reason why our tiering would be wrong so far (I mean wrong, not arbitrary)
- At least the sketch of an alternative balanced metagame that our system failed to reach
?

if you were, then I'd strongly advise you to re-read the posts that explain how unrealistic the concept of re-testing everything is.
I mean, we're not done yet with BW, and yet we started with a bunch of bans to save time ! (bans we kept tabs on, as the generation was maturing, think about KyuB; this is a point you scrupulously ignored so far, but the tiering policy does look backward aswell).

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On last thing that I didn't bother replying to at first, but I'd rather clear this out now :

yet time is a poor parameter in tiering since it is an unforeseeable measure. how can we effectively gauge this? it'd be, much like the current tiering is, effectively arbitrary.

What a nice way to illustrate the way you sometimes get lost among the words and abstract ideas.
First, time is not a parameter, it's a constraint in our scenario. Second, how would time not be foreseeable. I'm pretty sure last time I checked my watch, everything displayed was pretty foreseeable lmfao.
Kidding.
The two constraints are : get a decent metagame before the start of a major tournament, get a balanced metagame by the end of the generation. While the first constraint is sorta adjustable (I stress sorta, because : check XY's OST), the second is absolutly measurable given how GF is constant with its releases.

Finally, you threw the "time" thing away like if it was nothing "arbitrary too, not foreseeable, *poof!*". But at the end of a generation, you can't be like "oops guys, we didn't have the time to test everything lol!". And that's what is exactly going to happen with your proposal, as I explained in my first post (yea the one from which you took one sentence out of context and replied something that means nothing).

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tl;dr : 3 lines of fuzzy concepts confusing Uber and OU are not enough to justify the reworking of a system that you can't really prove de facto to be flawed + anyway what you propose is not feasible

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