Stall in SM UU (was: SM UU Blissey)

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pokemonisfun

Banned deucer.
The forgetfulness is objectively true but the error is not, unless it's a rule that people in officials have to be allowed to vote in suspects. As long as it's not, this is not a procedural error but instead an (important) unresolved discussion point.
 
Why are we still rushing this vote through? Where is the urgency to get this done as soon as possible stemming from? We have an incomplete voter list that's missing out on some of the best SM UU players on the website due to an oversight, the threshold for a ban had to be adjusted mid-vote and the very Pokemon being voted on was and still is in dispute; all elements of this vote are wonky at the very least. I just don't understand why we can't take a beat and make sure we get this right.

I've seen the argument being made that cancelling an ongoing vote is taboo, historically speaking. To me it's shortsighted to compare years of 'normal' suspect testing to this new landscape of past generation lower tier suspect testing. There is no established list of voters by virtue of ladder requirements here. An unprepared tier leader - and we really shouldn't blame her for this - went with regrettable voting requirements for this suspect test, because we don't have a good system in place yet. However, instead of making sure people like Pearl can actually cast a vote, the process is being expedited for some reason.

This is a new facet of tiering that's being explored here. We improved the process with a consistent 60% ban threshold already, but we did so as this was all going on. We're learning as we go and that's okay. So why aren't we making sure this is done right instead of it being done quick? This is SM UU, not SS UU. I know the thread has been up for a while and I know that the switch from Blissey to Quagsire was made weeks ago, too. I get that there's been time for people to post before the voting started. The thing is, this discussion is here now and the vote was not ran properly. A December follow-up vote is just not good enough, especially considering the fact there are no time constraints in play here. Please reconsider.
 

Finchinator

-OUTL
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OU Leader
Old generation tiering involves dealing with a lot of uncharted territory, which makes taking community feedback and functioning devoid of any agenda especially important. I think that the transparency about the process and the changing of the threshold in Hogg's post was a good starting point, but going through with the vote nonetheless feels a bit disingenuous given everything happening, especially with regards to the voter pool.

I can say firsthand that there is not and never will be perfect solutions to old generation tiering problems; Hogg alluded to this in his post as well. I have been at the center of a number of controversies surrounding old generation tiering myself -- what should be voted on, what the process to vote on something should be, who should be allowed to vote, and what the threshold for the vote should be -- and it is never an easy topic to discuss. As we expand our efforts into old generation lower tiers, these same issues will naturally pop-up. I do not blame Lilburr or Hogg or anyone for the disagreements that spawned in this thread -- if anything they are doing their job right by trying to find solutions for the problems the formats they care about face and I applaud them for that much. I just do not agree entirely with the execution and conclusions we have reached here.

To start, I think that we have our order of operations a bit backwards here. Instead of establishing controversial precedent and potentially altering a metagame drastically as a direct byproduct of it, why do we not make a new thread to tackle these procedural issues and then re-address this topic? I will gladly do this myself if that helps to get the ball rolling even.

Take the voter pool for example, why not establish uniform standards for what will constitute a lower tier old generation voting pool? Right now we have some disarray that is causing people to discredit the legitimacy of the vote as it stands. It would eliminate this entirely if the voter pools were set-in-stone through prior agreements. Another example would be the threshold necessary -- Hogg fixed this, but it was only done retroactively after the vote had already concluded. For a vote that finished awfully close, it does not seem right to have so many variables of importance up in the air like this to me. I think this amplifies the questions about the result and concerns about the process.
i don't think this is the case - nor should it be the case - when tackling situations like this. stall is different (at least in this tier, but arguably in many others as well) because of how it is virtually impossible to pin down one specific issue, and there are so many subjective issues and arguments to be made.
One last thing I want to tackle is this -- it is a more philosophical bit than anything else, so feel free to disregard it if you are only worried about the procedural issues I address above.

Stall is not tangibly "different" and no playstyle should be isolated as such. We tier Pokemon first and foremost, followed by non-Pokemon variables in unique cases (i.e: items/moves/abilities) not whole archetypes that we loosely define as a community. Say what you want about Quagsire, but this entire suspect is obviously stall being put on trial with Quagsire as the scapegoat. I feel strongly that we should not employ scapegoating something that is clearly not banworthy as an individual Pokemon as a potential suspect regularly. I get that this limits what can be done, but we must realize that this sets all sorts of precedent that can be abused moving forward. If we are going to isolate an entire playstyle, regardless of how limited or versatile it may be, and suspect any given staple of it that has the least collateral, then suddenly the nature of our suspects and how we define them has to be changed pretty drastically.
 

Lily

wouldn't that be fine, dear
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I spent the last 2 hours of my life writing this post and I've clearly got Feelings about it so I would like to make it clear that while my tone here is obviously upset, tbis post is not directed at anyone in particular. Like actually. It probably seems like it is but please take my word for it.

Okay so to make it abundantly clear I really want nothing to do with this tier. The responsibility was fsr left to someone who's not qualified to lead it to begin with. Maybe it wasn't? Maybe I took it on myself. Nobody else was doing it so idk. I didn't even fucking vote, this'll likely be my last post on the matter but I can't just leave it as long as I'm still getting notifications.

It is frankly ridiculous that this vote could be called illegitimate or for it to be said it was not run properly. We followed every single procedure necessary and none of you spoke up for weeks. I agree it's not perfect, the voting list could've been better even if it involves adding only one or two more people, but I am not perfect either, nor am I a mind reader. If you don't make your opinion known to me or to whoever else is running the vote then expect to be ignored. This thread was up for a month with at least 2 pages of support for some form of action, 1 post opposing and a couple of posts half opposing, mostly opposing a Blissey ban in particular rather than action on stall. Only after the vote was put up did that change.

Was I unprepared for that? Yes, because I expected that a *month* is long enough for discussion in a policy review thread. I don't know what you guys are thinking and like I'm sorry but reacting to tdks post just isn't good enough for me to gauge what the fuck is going on, figuring this out as I go is hard enough as is but expecting me to literally be clairvoyant is just flat out unfair. Were you all afraid to go against the grain? Why did these viewpoints only show up when things started to happen? Did you want this thread to die out and get ignored like a sea of other pr threads? Were you just not taking the thread seriously or what? I literally cannot comprehend why it went from no opposition to maximum opposition in an instant.

If time isn't a constraint then we surely should have no problem waiting until December to think this one through, and we even get some games without Quag to see what that's like in the meantime. I'm not even opposed to having a third check up vote just to be absolutely sure. Or maybe we'll just go the full way until then without saying a word and only kick up a fuss if people vote to keep it banned. I don't want the latter to happen again but if this is how the initial discussion has gone I don't have a whole lot of faith. This decision originally was supposed to be reached before SM UU Cup - a circuit tour! - went up, which gave way for about a month and a half of discussion. I already had to reverse the order of classic bc this vote was delayed too much and I absolutely do not want to go overturning it with that tournament on the horizon.

Now with the emotionally charged part of that out of the way, let's establish a few things:

  • Most, not all, of the SM UU playerbase sees stall as an issue. Whether you think that's a result of Scizor, Latias, Blissey, Quagsire or whatever else is irrelevant to this point - it is a problem and it cannot be ignored.
  • Nobody has a surefire way to tackle stall. This is extremely evident given we've had the options: Blissey, Quagsire, Unaware, Alomomola, Regenerator, Scizor and Mimikyu all come up as appropriate ways to deal with stall.
  • There is no established leader of this discussion and communication has clearly been pretty awful. I did it because I felt like I had to since nobody else was going to do it. Not really sure whose job this is supposed to be but we could definitely use someone.
So from all this as well as the other posts in this thread we can gather that this tier is intrinsically fucked and borderline impossible to work on. Since we have actually had minimal discussion on this, I'd like to ask those who voted Keep UU on Quagsire this question:

what do you want to do about the stall problem?

If you don't think stall is a problem to begin with then feel free to make that clear but personally I would disagree and I think that attempting to dismiss what the significant majority of players wants is just selfish. They are over 60% of the people playing this tier after all.

As I've been writing this Finch replied so let me go through some of these points:

Take the voter pool for example, why not establish uniform standards for what will constitute a lower tier old generation voting pool? Right now we have some disarray that is causing people to discredit the legitimacy of the vote as it stands. It would eliminate this entirely if the voter pools were set-in-stone through prior agreements.
I don't know how it is for OU but lowers don't have the playerbase for that. We do have effectively uniform standards right now and I've tried to explore other methods such as suspect tournaments but pretty much everything I've brought up has been either shot down or gotten no feedback so I stopped trying. We are running small tiers that don't see all that much playtime and they don't have active members, there is no one size fits all as a result. If you have ideas then I'd absolutely love to talk about them, you have my discord (not tonight though please, I'm already annoyed that I'm up writing this as is) and I have absolutely no doubt that something cleaner can be arranged but there definitely should not be a hard precedent here.


Stall is not "different" and no playstyle should be isolated as such. We tier Pokemon first and foremost, followed by non-Pokemon variables in unique cases, not archetypes. Say what you want about Quagsire, but this entire suspect is obviously stall being put on trial with Quagsire as the scapegoat. I feel strongly that we should not employ scapegoating something that is clearly not banworthy as an individual Pokemon as a potential suspect regularly. I get that this limits what can be done, but we must realize that this sets all sorts of precedent that can be abused moving forward. If we are going to isolate an entire playstyle, regardless of how limited or versatile it may be, and suspect any given staple of it that has the least collateral, then suddenly the nature of our suspects and how we define them has to be changed pretty drastically.
You are right that this does get philosophical but personally I don't agree with valuing simple and clean precedents over metagame health. I didn't mean to imply that stall or any playstyle is to be treated differently from a tiering perspective. I meant that SM UU stall is a unique case where we can't just solve it with one universal Pokemon ban.

For example if you wanted to remove, say, sand offense from SS OU for some reason, you would have two logical targets - Sand Stream or Excadrill. Most people would not oppose acting on one of these two. With SM UU stall, any Pokemon or Ability on my list above can be seen as a problem. This means that established precedent just doesn't work here straight up, so our options are either to go against precedent or leave the tier as is. And most people don't want to leave it.

Above all else I feel like we threw out any idea if tiering integrity when we gave time of day to the idea of cancelling a vote that reached not only its original 50%+1 majority, but also its revised 60% majority. I understand this is entirely hypocritical of me to say given I brought the idea up in the first place but if there's any precedent we should be worried about establishing it's that one.

To end this off I'd like to say that I also do not personally think Quagsire was what needed to be removed. My own preference would've been a ban on Unaware as a whole as I believe that more accurately tackles the root of the problem, no scapegoating necessary. Still, I'm completely aware that I could be wrong. Anyone could be wrong. This decision could be wrong. There has yet to be a better presented alternative, though; all recent discussion has come down "wait, I don't want this" without telling me what you actually want, and as a tier leader that's effectively a slap in the face.

Final note: if you think there are other issues with the tier that are genuinely worth addressing, ho/sciz/lati or whatever else, please make another thread for it. Derailing this one won't do any good and the focal topic is not being changed.
 
i don't think there's really any need to be defensive about the vote when people aren't really blaming you for anything tbh. the problem isn't that procedures weren't followed, its that the procedures in place were perhaps not the correct ones for something that's fairly new to us all in tiering past gen lower tiers. i think having people like you willing to take on these responsibilities is a good thing, but it's understandable that you're annoyed about how this one has turned out or if you just feel plain stressed out about it. it's important to remember though, that people are only talking from a position of wanting the best outcome for the tier & not one of blame. in a similar vein, i think questioning why people didn't voice their opinions sooner is valid, but it's also not really relevant to the discussion that's being had regarding quagsire.

i agree with finch's suggestion of having uniform standards in place going forward & would definitely support his idea of starting a new thread to tackle those procedural issues. past gen lower tiers are different from past gen ous in terms of playerbase numbers & official representation, so it's clear we can't hold sm uu to the same standards as something like sm ou and just be done with it. the procedure needs to be clearly thought out and applied in the best possible way for the tiers in question.

another thing i'd like to suggest is that the person responsible for holding the blind voting thread should not be someone who has a vote on the matter. i have no idea how common this is on smogon but it seems poorly thought out. it likely put lilburr in a position where she did not feel voting was even the right thing to do, since she knew how her vote could potentially swing the outcome of the matter - that's an unfair position for someone to be in, and it really goes against the entire principle of blind voting in the first place.

i'm annoyed at myself for not posting anything sooner, which could have easily been avoided if i paid any attention to this thread. i don't know why my post kicked off the avalanche of people voicing their dissatisfaction in the quagsire vote, but the important thing to me is that there has clearly been a lot of dissatisfaction with the quagsire vote established, so it's definitely something that needs to be scrutinised as much as possible without the fear of anyone feeling responsible or blamed for the outcome.
 

Lily

wouldn't that be fine, dear
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I wrote something up to reply about establishing uniform standards bc I don't really think it's as easy as it sounds, but upon reading all of it back I think I'm just misunderstanding what you guys are saying entirely so I deleted it. I really would appreciate a new thread made so I can get a better grasp of it but idt it should continue in here any longer. I think Finchinator said he'd draft it up, I can also help if necessary. Main point is that as bugzi says, we can't hold SM UU to the same standards as SM OU, but for the same reason idt we can hold SM NU to the same standards as SM UU or any other tier. Wouldn't be opposed to a uniform baseline but I can't see a hard limit working.
 

Hogg

grubbing in the ashes
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Main point is that as bugzi says, we can't hold SM UU to the same standards as SM OU, but for the same reason idt we can hold SM NU to the same standards as SM UU or any other tier.
This, yeah. If there is a problem with the voter list, it arises from attempting to follow uniform standards, not from deviating from them. When old gen lower tiers were unlocked, I suggested in the initial thread going back two iterations of a tour’s circuit and subforum team tours to generate a voting list. This is what was used for other votes since lower tiers were unlocked, including the recent ORAS UU Conkeldurr vote. I think this is a good baseline in general… but in the case of SM lower tiers, official tours happened recently enough that you could make a case for their inclusion (though you’d have to go back almost two and a half years to catch things like SPL X). So in this case, the issue wasn’t that the people organizing this vote didn’t follow standards, but rather that they did.

And then the next question is, if we notice that prominent players are missing, do we adjust a voter list to include them? I love Pearl and I agree that there are very few people with a better handle on the SM UU metagame, but changing the voter list just so that it includes him feels as much like gaming the system as anything else. (We ran into similar questions when RBY wanted to extend their voting metrics back an extra year for the RBY Counter vote because they wanted to include a specific player.)

In any case, I agree that we should have a formal discussion on voting criteria, but I also think that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Beyond timing, there are also things to look at like activity: a tier with a ton of activity and huge tours might find the quarterfinals of one of its single-elim tours more far more prestigious than a smaller, less active tour’s semifinals.
 

Hogg

grubbing in the ashes
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Also, regarding the issues with people not being able to make PR posts, we're working on a way to easily request PR access directly from the forum for those who do not currently have it, so hopefully that will be less of an issue in the near future.
Sorry for the double post, but just wanted to provide a quick update: you may now request PR posting access directly from the forum. See this thread for more details. Thanks to the always fantastic Lumari for setting this up so quickly.
 

pokemonisfun

Banned deucer.
TL;DR:
  • The vote will move forward;
  • The threshold for banning Quagsire will be 60%, not 50%+1; and
  • Regardless of the results of this vote, there will be a follow up vote (tentatively scheduled for December 2021, but certainly at least after the conclusion of SM UU Cup) to revisit this issue.
I don’t have much to add except to say December is now just a month away and the last UU subforum tournament with gen7uu is slated to begin in the next 1-2 weeks.

Bumping this so we won’t forget about it.

Some things that never were resolved in this thread were:

1) Who gets to vote
2) We wanted to have a chance to look at gen7uu cup and UU classic games from 2021, which we can now do
3) Voting options (clearly Unban Quagsire and keep UUBL should be options), the question is is there any other vote gen7uu players want

Perhaps a new thread would be helpful? Or not, but really, I just wanted this to be on gen7uu players’ radars again.
 
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