Separate Ladders: I propose the creation of separate tiers of National Dex, one with and one without Terastalization, to see which one people like better. There seems to be a lot of controversy around the issue with people here and there threatening to quit the game if it's banned or to never play again if it's not banned, but I believe the way to answer both sides is to try splitting the ladder so that there's less drama about it. I propose this because I wanted to vote against Terastalization in the last suspect test, but ended up constantly being regularly destroyed by Tera and being unable to get the 80 GXE score necessary to vote.
To be clear right away: I believe this idea is not really possible in practice, and this for a couple reasons:
First of all, you still would have to decide which NatDex OU (the one with tera or the one without) is the official one. A metagame isn't only about its ladder, but also about National Dex official tournaments (as we have our own seasonals, premier leagues, world cups, etc... and more generally our own tournament circuit), the ressources dedicated to the tier and most importantly the tiering decisions made in them (as NatDex with tera and NatDex without Tera are probably very different tiers). It is obviously not realistic to maintain these for two tiers, which wouldn't interest the same people in the first place.
So now let's assume we did pick the non-tera NatDex OU as the official one (could be the yes-tera, this doesn't change anything to the point I am trying to make in this paragraph). We have an other problem now though : how do you justify giving a ladder to the yes-tera NatDex OU? In fact, there is a
ton of metagames out there that do not have a ladder, such as old gen lower tiers, a billion different OMs, old VGC iterations, or NatDex RU/AG/Gen8OU. You probably would not be surprised to learn Pokemon Showdown is not really willing to run a ladder for every single metagame in existence (I'm not even sure if it would be technically possible lol, even if you exclude metagames with a very small playerbase that would have a dead ladder anyway). Unless you get significant forum support and enough contributors to actually maintain the tier (spoilers alert: this is not easy to get), it would be hard, if not impossible, to make a convincing case to give a ladder for what would basically be a NatDex side tier.
There is a minute chance I misunderstood what you meant in this paragraph, so just to be sure I'll also address the idea of running a Tera suspect test in a tera-less metagame (Fun fact: Smogon used to do this with suspects). I generally think this is not a good idea, as in my opinion the point of a suspect test is also making sure that the voters know how to play against (or abuse) the suspected element consistently enough.
This wouldn't really help in my opinion, as you can often tell what tera Pokemon are the most likely to use anyway. In addition to this, this would not always make either teambuilding or playing easier : stuff like tera stab moves or bulky win conditions like Annihilape or CM users often needs quite specific answers anyway, and there sometimes still is a guessing game around when they are to click the tera button or not.
Teams must only choose to use either Terastalization or Mega + Z-Crystals
I think this would just make Megas and Z-Moves really bad. You maayyyybe could argue there is some synergy thing going on, but megas and z-moves are not the reasons why Tera is problematic in the first place, so it doesn't even matter. If anything, I would argue it might make Tera even worse to deal with as you can't even rely as much on mons like Mega-Lopunny and Mega-Scizor to check threats. I guess that would nerf rain but that's about it.
I generally wouldn't be opposed to some kind of way to mitigate tera but to be really honest I have yet to see something that imo really tackles the issue with tera itself.
At least from what I've seen from this discussion and other forums I feel like the main difference between the pro-ban and anti-ban side is a difference in priorities. From what I've seen of anti-ban players their primary concern appears to be fun, they think terastalyzation is fun and think a metagame without terastalyzation is less fun. From what I've seen from the pro-ban side is that they're primarily concerned with balance, they think tera can introduce 50/50s during play and puts a strain on teambuilding.
It should absolutely be mentioned that fun is, first and foremost, subjective anyway, and keeping whatever element in whatever metagame for the through suspect voting for the sake of fun is uh... not something that really makes sense to me, at all.
If one is arguing that tera should stay for the sake of fun, why couldn't I argue that it actually
should be banned for the sake of fun? You don't have to look too hard to find people that hate tera, even if you discount all the people that are waiting for tera to be banned before starting to play gen9.
Furthermore, competitive players also are looking for fun (if you are playing mons without having fun you should quit immediately lol): some people enjoy playing in a balanced metagame, and
this is why Smogon formats exist in the first place. The whole idea behind Smogons' tiering process is basically asking the best players available (= suspect process) what they think should be banned or shouldn't, because they probably know what they are talking about. It's fine to not agree with this philosophy, since everyone has its own way to have fun playing the game, but then if you don't like playing with Smogon rulesets you probably shouldn't play Smogon formats in the first place.
If you add an "Open team sheet" option, it becomes less powerful than megas in my eyes, since you'll know what the types are.
No, because:
Most pokemon only have one or two good tera types.
and even when you know for sure what tera type the mon is, stuff are still rough to deal with. I already went over it in this post, and so did pple in the thread : information isn't the main issue with tera.
Banning tera currently means you put it on the same level as the insanely overpowering Dynamaxing
Dynamax is more broken than tera, but it doesn't mean tera is fine. We shouldn't keep Genesect in OU because Arceus is more broken than it.
Another idea, while I have no clue how hard this would be to program, only let Pokémon in the SV dex take advantage of this ability. *no, that doesn't include the Greninja or Cinderace lines, or the 2 raid paradox mons, as you don't get a pokédex entry when catching them.
This is not how Smogon works,
read more about this in this post
A restriction is better than a ban, because banning Tera. would mean 2 generations in a row that the gimmick was banned.
What Smogon is trying to do is creating a balanced Pokemon format : if tera is broken, then it unfortunately has to go. That's life /shrug
.
.
.
One final thing I would like to add to this very messy post:
To anyone just saying "just be creative", please take as a proof of creativity all the unholy sets people come up with tera. People recently started to experiment with random setup sweepers that happen to abuse tera very well (stored power users in particular), and even though I personally don't have enough experience yet to form an educated opinion on it I think we have good reasons to be concerned about it lol, the metagame can quickly become bullshit city if anything can decide to become Magearna at home.