New Competitive
What it aims for?
The goal would be to create a more balanced and truly competitive competitive. Since, due to both Game Freak's design choices, which probably focuses on in-game situations and the VGC scope only, and also due to the way Smogon operates, despite its merits, still leaves a lot to be desired.
Like the standard singles formats created by Smogon, this format would seek to provide a competitive enviroment for single battles. With the difference being of, despite still prioritizing simplicity, not avoiding to resort to complex modifications and or new modifications incapable of being reproduced on cartridge.
As this is just an old idea being pulled out of the drawer and nothing else for now, I still have no idea how this would work, but one more thing that would be different from Smogon would be the "issue" of bans. If this project ever got off the ground in the future, maybe for something more than a Pet Mod, I would like it to encompass all Pokémon and have them divided by tiers, just like the standard Smogon formats, with the difference that I would not like it to have a council deciding Suspects unilaterally. I still have no idea of a better system, though.
How would it work and what would it change?
Initially, the idea was that it would work similar to Smogon's most popular formats, but with a few modifications and a new addition. Starting with trying to drastically - but not completely - decrease the RNG factor of the game. Critical moves mechanic would be reimagined. Moves with probability side effects would have their effect either changed to 100% or completely removed, as well as their accuracies, which would also be reworked, both with trade-offs using an addition discussed further below.
Some movements, which Game Freak probably balances thinking of the in-game only, would have their PPs slightly reduced, so that they could still be used freely and optimizing, but without instigating antigame of any sorts, some of them would be: Protect and Recover.
Smogon clauses would be present.
Finally, in addition to these modifications, there would be a new addition.
Speed Modifiers
Similar to the Power and Accuracy modifiers, the idea is that a new modifier would also be added: a speed modifier. For the sake of simplicity, the idea is that it would work, however, differently from the first, and more similar to the later.
Unlike the Power modifier, which goes into a formula along with level and others, the speed modifier would work directly at the user's speed.
The ideia would be to add speed modifiers for each movement individually, as is already done in the case of Power and Accuracy. That means that some movements (generally the stronger ones) could be slower, while other movements (generally the weaker ones) could be faster.
The main difference between such a system from the Priority system is that, in addition to being able to present a much wider range of options to classifying movements, unlike the Priority system, it would still be directly tied to the speed of the Pokémon.
For example: Game Freak probably didn't want to give priority to many middle-power moves by thinking that players could ignore common movements and begn to use movesets based on those medium power moves with priority only, with all the EVs invested in defensive traits and attack only (completely ignoring the speed stat).
With this system, however, that would not happen, since the speed stat would still be directly important for the use of these moves. If you always wants to attack first, it would not be enough to your Pokémon to only be good defensively and offensively, you would still have to invest in speed, and that's what makes it all balanced. The player would still have to give up on another stat trait to be able to invest in speed, unlike priority moves, in which speed only matters in specific cases.
Merely illustrative image. The "high" and "low" rates are just an illustration of how Game Freak could illustrate rates in games in order it to be a little more friendly to some players.
In other words, this gif is old af and is just being reused here.
In the case of the Speed modifier, the modifier would use the number as a percentage use of the speed. That means that 20-speed moves would use only 20% of the Pokémon's stat speed when used.
Differences from the Priority system
Although the concept is similar to the priority system, as shown, the later should not be totally eliminated, they are two systems that should coexist in order to reach a better balanced situation.
Movements like Protect and Extreme Speed, and things like Mega Evolutions, should still have priority. That's why priority should never be totally replaced.
The difference is that the speed modifier sytem would allow a lot more options to classify movements. Since the priorities range goes from -7 to +5, while the possibilities with specific Speed modifiers would be almost infinite (there could be movements that would use only 10% of the speed level, as movements that would use 150%~300% of the user's speed).
Besides of that, as already mentioned, it is a much more balanced system to be used more frequently, since it would still depend on the speed stat, as opposed to the priority system, which generally ignores it completely. So, it would not be a problem adding higher speed values to a greater variety of attacks as Game Freak feel today to add higher priorities to them.
Some possible metagame changes
Some changes that could happen with the implementation of this system:
- The speed stat would be a little more balanced overall;
- Some movements, that could be a bit broken when combined with faster Pokémon now, like
Outrage, could have their speed level setted to medium or even low, increasing the unpredictability and depth of battles;
- Pokémon with lower speed stats and bad defensively could find a better place in the meta using high-speed moves (like: Sawk
, Nidoking
, Clawitzer
, and Decidueye
);
- Some moves could have their speed level setted to high (but not to the point of being a priority move) in order to compensate for their low power level, so in that way they would become more used in metagame. So, attacks that are often useless to players now because of their low level of Power (like some Punch and Fang moves and others, like:
Fire Punch,
Fire Fang,
Thunder Punch,
Needle Arm,
Ice Fang,
Shadow Punch, and
Poison Fang), could maybe begin to be used more competitively.
A little side note: in order to make life easier for the player, the interface should show something like this, right after the opponent reveals a move:
Well, these are just old ideas of how Game Freak and Smogon could "improve" the competitive, now unsheltered. I have neither the coding skills nor enough time to code this alone. For now, it's nothing more than an idea I'd like to share, so I'm sharing it here instead of the Workshop thread, as this thread feels more casual and unpretentious, while there seems to be a thread for something under construction...It is not under construction. Still, I wanted to share and post this as, among many other reasons, I would like to hear input from other players about it.
I hope it's okay not to have followed the initial template, I think it was just an example? It's just that I thought it's better to format it like this, and besides, there's no mascot or link with the changes neither, because they weren't even thought of.