I am posting this on behalf of myself as an individual, not on behalf of the OU or NU councils.
I was waiting for the Melmetal suspect test to be done to post this as it would not have been entirely fair to change the threshold required to unban a retested Pokemon in the middle of the first retest of the generation, especially considering that I personally was in favor of unbanning the Pokemon. Now that this retest is over, I want to have a discussion about this topic as I firmly believe that the current 60% figure should no longer be used to unban retested Pokemon in the OU metagame.
First and foremost, this 60% figure is an extension of the percentage of votes required to ban a suspected Pokemon; the logic is that it should require a strong majority to overturn the current status quo through removing a Pokemon (or other suspect subject) from the metagame in OU. That logic is fine, but this figure was made for the purpose of suspects to ban -- hence the removing a Pokemon from the metagame bit, not retests to unban a Pokemon into the metagame. Retests were merely rolled in to this sweeping 60% figure upon implementation despite not presenting the same set of issues that a normal OU suspect would.
Secondly, a point that power brought up to me was that if we are ever retesting a Pokemon we previously quickbanned, then technically it can be seen as suspect manipulation by the OU Council. For example, if we suspected Melmetal immediately instead of quickbanning it, then it would require a 60% ban vote to ban it from the metagame. However, seeing as we quickbanned it and waited until the metagame settled to retest it, the retest only required 40% votes to keep it banned instead of the aforementioned 60% figure. While this was obviously not a case of vote manipulation here seeing as there was an unprecedented set of Pokemon and moves dropped in the middle of the metagame's existence without much warning (Pokemon Home) and in acting as we did we were able to give Melmetal a far more fair test outright in a less hectic metagame, it still seems somewhat unfair that the threshold to ban it moved down 20% due to this timing.
Moreover, I believe that we should consider changing this threshold to a lesser amount for future OU retests. This makes sense because the 60% figure is intended for regular suspects to ban Pokemon from the metagame and it also helps fight against technical manipulation of the amount of ban votes needed if there are any instances of a Pokemon being quickbanned/starting off banned and then being retested later on.
My personal proposal would be: moving the percentage to 50% of votes needed to unban a Pokemon during a retest in SS OU. I would greatly appreciate other interested parties to leave their thoughts on this topic as it could be relevant in the future and I would like to come to a verdict at some point in the near future.
I was waiting for the Melmetal suspect test to be done to post this as it would not have been entirely fair to change the threshold required to unban a retested Pokemon in the middle of the first retest of the generation, especially considering that I personally was in favor of unbanning the Pokemon. Now that this retest is over, I want to have a discussion about this topic as I firmly believe that the current 60% figure should no longer be used to unban retested Pokemon in the OU metagame.
First and foremost, this 60% figure is an extension of the percentage of votes required to ban a suspected Pokemon; the logic is that it should require a strong majority to overturn the current status quo through removing a Pokemon (or other suspect subject) from the metagame in OU. That logic is fine, but this figure was made for the purpose of suspects to ban -- hence the removing a Pokemon from the metagame bit, not retests to unban a Pokemon into the metagame. Retests were merely rolled in to this sweeping 60% figure upon implementation despite not presenting the same set of issues that a normal OU suspect would.
Secondly, a point that power brought up to me was that if we are ever retesting a Pokemon we previously quickbanned, then technically it can be seen as suspect manipulation by the OU Council. For example, if we suspected Melmetal immediately instead of quickbanning it, then it would require a 60% ban vote to ban it from the metagame. However, seeing as we quickbanned it and waited until the metagame settled to retest it, the retest only required 40% votes to keep it banned instead of the aforementioned 60% figure. While this was obviously not a case of vote manipulation here seeing as there was an unprecedented set of Pokemon and moves dropped in the middle of the metagame's existence without much warning (Pokemon Home) and in acting as we did we were able to give Melmetal a far more fair test outright in a less hectic metagame, it still seems somewhat unfair that the threshold to ban it moved down 20% due to this timing.
Moreover, I believe that we should consider changing this threshold to a lesser amount for future OU retests. This makes sense because the 60% figure is intended for regular suspects to ban Pokemon from the metagame and it also helps fight against technical manipulation of the amount of ban votes needed if there are any instances of a Pokemon being quickbanned/starting off banned and then being retested later on.
My personal proposal would be: moving the percentage to 50% of votes needed to unban a Pokemon during a retest in SS OU. I would greatly appreciate other interested parties to leave their thoughts on this topic as it could be relevant in the future and I would like to come to a verdict at some point in the near future.
