Looks like Hugen finally finished his pudding ^_^
Alright I've been waiting for this for quite awhile and over time I've come up with some reasons why it should or should not be banned. This is a quick list and I'll go into each point as deep as I think is necessary based on my experiences using, battling, and spectating swagplay.
Potential Reasons to Barn Ban:
1 - Inherently Uncompetitive
(agree, relevant)
2 - Cancer to the Ubers Community
(agree, relevant)
3 - Match Up Reliant
(agree, irrelevant)
Potential Reasons to Keep Legal:
4 - Viable Mons can Check / Counter Swag
(agree to some extent, relevant)
5 - Pokemon is Inherently Luck Based
(agree, irrelevant)
6 - Restricts Freedom of Play
(agree, irrelevant)
7 - Initiates a Potentially Dangerous Path
(agree, irrelevant)
1. Inhernetly Uncompetitive
With Ubers evolving into something much greater than a ban list it is natural that players have the desire to keep this ground as balanced as possible without eliminating its original purpose. In Ubers, mons deemed too broken for OU are balanced by fellow mons banned to Ubers. Unfortunately some moves cannot be balanced in this way. While people may choose to call me high for stating this, I believe that this is very important to how we can perceive the move Swagger. Simply put, accuracy (or in this case the probability of your opponent hitting themselves instead of hitting their attack which is basically the same thing) is not a balancing factor. The reason why is because matches are much shorter than the amount of time it takes to have expected a balanced outcome. Since this is probably very confusing, a decent example of this is the move Sheer Cold where you should expect to miss more than twice as much as you hit, but it only takes a single use of it to win a match. This is a problem. In application over the long run, Sheer Cold's accuracy should balance it, but it is not improbable at all for it to hit the one time you need to use it in the one tourney match you need to win. This is an issue because most tournament matches are not set in the long run (the recent laddering tourney is about as good as you can get to reaching the long run) meaning that critical matches can be won with luck based stratagem while over time your strategy is actually quite a poor one. If you still don't understand I would compare using the move Sheer Cold to not changing your tires during a race as on a given lap (match) you can easily be ahead by making such a choice while in the long run (race) you will end up behind more legitimate strategies. I compare Swagger to Sheer Cold because they are both moves highly dependent on probability with the latter having such a skewed risk vs. reward that it has been deemed broken. The question now becomes how skewed is this relationship with respect to Swagger and swaggplay.
As Malefic already pointed out, Swagger (in the context of 1v1) is not a coin flip, but rather a 45% vs. 55% with the user at a disadvantage. If the user is paralyzed and already confused this shifts to a nasty 62.5% vs. 37.5%. At first these numbers don't seem to support the conclusion that Swagger should be banned because even with double status the user's rate of success is theoretically lower than the probability of Focus Blast hitting. The nature of this is quite different however. When using Focus Blast a player chooses to wager his or her ability to strike that turn, as it is always better to have a chance of OHKOing something than to never be able to OHKO that threat. When confused, the player does not elect to take a risk (switching is acceptable in certain scenarios but well-construced swag teams punish this with hazards) rather it is a condition that is forced upon them as Lum Berries are single use items and there are no viable mons with Own Tempo outside of something like Smeargle. When a player puts Focus Blast on a mon they are choosing to take the risks associated with using that move as any move without 100% accuracy theoretically never has to hit. Some people may be troubled by my comparison of Swagger to Focus Blast after I have already compared it to Sheer Cold, but Focus Blast is far different and isn't broken because the act of it hitting or missing does not influence the defending mon's ability to check what it should, i.e. no matter if Xerneas' Focus Blast hits or not, it can still be checked by
viable means. The act of Sheer Cold hitting or not affects what should check Kyogre such as Palkia, and to a lesser extent the act of hitting yourself in confusion affects what you should normally be able to check such as Xerneas.
This act of forcing probabilities on your opponent is something that for the reasons stated above needs to be limited as much as possible without eliminating the integrity of the tier.
2. Cancer to the Ubers Community
Along with Chansey, Swagger is one of the most derailing topics I've seen around Ubers lately, and this is present on both the forums and in chat. I believe that a ban would help eliminate some of the cancer that is inevitably present. If there is no ban, not only will this continue, but Swagger will continue to be looked down upon anyways and will never have any legitimate room for discussion or implementation since many of the more predominant players are against it anyways.
The only time I have ever been locked from PS was because of Swagger, actually not even Swagger itself. I was testing a team on the ladder (this was a while back before everyone got super Swagger crazy) and I ran into a swag-based team. Despite some bad luck I eventually overcame the swaggplay users, however I had nothing able to out-speed the opposing Skymin. After my best defensive mon got paraflinched to death (it was really bad, like six or seven in a row when I could get an easy OHKO) I began timer stalling to punish this asshole who's luck was insane. After only two minutes I can only guess that a link to the match was posted in a chat, probably the Lobby with a request that I be banned for timer stalling. Several users and a mod of some kind I guess came on, gave the match to the swaggplay user, and banned me for a day. This was perhaps the only time ever playing competitively that I was legitimately angry. The point of this stupidly long anecdote is that Swagger is dangerous to the community and not only off-puts competent players to something as simple as laddering, but also scares away new users who already have to undergo the task of learning a challenging metagame.
3. Matchup Reliant
Swagger is highly matchup reliant because of how it affects opposing team archetypes. HO is the most affected, with stall being the least affected. HO suffers because it relies on offense for defense where Swagger strips away the ability to attack though confusion, and the ability to move first with paralysis. This however is an irrelevant reason to ban Swagger because many team archetypes, and by extension basically the entire metagame, is matchup reliant.
4. Viable Mons Can Check / Counter Swagger
If this assumption is true, then there is significant support as to why Swagger should not be banned. This is very obvious, but Kyogre is not broken in Ubers because there are
viable methods of checking it. Again another question becomes clear which is "can anything viable check / counter Swagger?". To answer this we need to know what a check or a counter is, so here are Smogon's official definitions for such:
Pokémon A checks Pokémon B if, when Pokémon A is given a free switch into Pokémon B, Pokémon A can win every time, even under the worst case scenario, without factoring in hax.
Pokémon A counters Pokémon B if Pokémon A can manually switch into Pokémon B and still win every time, even under the worst case scenario, without factoring in hax.
You'll notice that the definition of checking or countering something is dependent on the ability to abstain from hax, but can it even be called hax when the player against swag is the one at the statistical disadvantage. More troubling is the emphasis placed on switching when it comes to being able to check or counter a Swagger user. To counter swaggplay you need to have viable mons that can switch into Swagger, Thunder Wave, and Foul Play as it assumes the worst case scenario. There are currently no viable mons that can switch into all three of these moves and be in a statistically advantageous position, the exceptions are Ground and Electric types with Lum Berries however this is a single use item, and even after the switch you still only have a 55% vs. 45% advantage. I can't honestly say that any viable Pokemon in the current Ubers metagame can reliably counter swaggplay, but there are however multiple viable swag-resistant mons.
The issue then becomes are these viable swag-resistant mons enough to keep swaggplay balanced. To this I would have to say no. Of the mons that are swag-resistant they are all pretty bad on HO, and even when used on a bulky offense or balance team they still don't get the job done as much as they would need to if they were to fall anything close to a swaggplay check. There are many instances of more offensive oriented teams being able to beat out swaggplay, however when against a skilled opponent even with just the expected amount of luck and a well-built swaggplay team you have virtually no chance of winning. Anyone who believes that Swagger is balanced either has never battled a skilled exploiter of it, or is a dedicated stall player, which is fine, but shouldn't be the only team archetype to exist simply because Swagger exists. The conclusion of this point is therefore mixed, as with my interpretation of the definitions of checks / counters there is nothing viable that can handle a skilled abuser of swaggplay, although I do not deny that some mons and team archetypes can be challenging for swaggplay to handle.
Here is the match of Ducky wielding the swagg-resistent CM Refresh Arceus-Fairy against a lucky, albeit, not very skilled Swagger abuser:
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ubers-125760931
The replay is quite long, but basically switching and CM Arceus were able to PP stall swaggkeys; if the opponent made use of hazards and Mega Gengar such a victory would not have been possible.
5. Pokemon is Inherently Luck Based
This assumption could also possibly give some ground to not banning Swagger, as if Pokemon is naturally rooted in luck due to damage rolls and such why should there be any attempt to eliminate what is fundamentally part of the game. While I agree that at times Pokemon is about as competitively viable as Yahtzee this doesn't mean that intentional measures to exploit the inherent flaws in the balance of the game should be tolerated. I would compare Pokemon to Poker, after all they both start with the same four letters, since both have elements of luck and skill where skill level is determined by performance in the long run. Again the problem returns to the structure of competitive Pokemon play where tourneys are often decided by a few matches where as the champion of a Poker tourney is decided by hundreds of hands so that expected luck becomes more balanced, resulting in more emphasis placed on skill. The conclusion becomes that since we are not going to change the structure of tournaments to make them more balanced, then luck based strategies must be balanced in a different way.
6. Restricts Freedom of Play
If Swagger was banned the consequence would be that you are no longer able to use Swagger, thus reducing the plethora of possible strategies in the Ubers metagame. The point of tiers is to reduce freedom in building in exchange for the balancing of what you can build with. I like to believe that Ubers is above banning shit not just because we are manlier than OU, but because it's nice to have a tier that is basically unrestricted. In general the more variety you have access too, the better that tier is overall so long as it remains competitive and fair. It is my opinion that the imbalance of Swagger is not worth being able to build with it, and the loss of this move does virtually nothing harmful to the tier since no analyses make use of this move anyways.
7. Initiates a Potentially Dangerous Path
If Swagger is banned then this would support the idea that if people bitch about something they don't like it will be banned, thus possibly creating an Ubers tier that is more restricted. Fortunately since this is not a democracy and is ruled by the infallible Hugen, I don't believe this will become an issue. The only other thing that will ever need to be brought to the chopping block is evasion, but that is a different rant entirely.
If you are too lazy to read the whole thing, my answer to banning Swagger would have to be:
YES.
I can see a few reasons why not to ban it, but they are either irrelevant or generate far too much trouble for what it is worth to build with Swagger.
