I'm sure this has been a subject of much anticipation for many of you, and with good reason. Before I go out and announce what we have decided will be the starting point for our Black and White metagames, allow me to explain the difficulties introduced with this generation, and why it took so long to organize how we wanted to approach things.
With the introduction of new mechanics and variables (such as "Preview Teams" versus "No Preview Teams" and "Released Dream World" versus "Full Dream World"), Pokemon Black and White opened a ridiculous amount of options in terms of possible metagames. Think about it, just using those two variables I listed, each tier could potentially have four metagames. For example, [OU, Singles, Full Dream World, No Preview Teams], [OU, Singles, Full Dream World, Preview Teams], [OU Singles, Released Dream World, No Preview Teams], and [OU, Singles, Released Dream World, Preview Teams] would all be subsets of the OU Singles tier... and that's not including things like Miracle Shooter and other options. Multiply that by however many tiers we want, such as Ubers, UU, LC, UU Doubles, UU Triples, UU Rotation Battle, etc., etc., and you have just way too many options. Although we want to significantly increase the number of playable metagames in this generation, we also do not want to dilute everything to the point where it just causes confusion. Also to be considered was the fact that each metagame might require its own suspect testing system, which we just simply do not have the manpower to handle, and Doug would have that many more stats to run (he does that all by himself, I might add). With practicality in mind, we decided that it would be best to start things out with what's easily controlled, and expand out from there once things start stabilizing. The first step was to figure out which metagame Smogon would support in its official tournaments. Ideally, we wanted the available ladders to at least reflect that. After much debate, the Tournament Directors decided that the officially supported setup for the Black and White metagames will be: released Dream World abilities only, previewable teams. There are a few reasons we decided on this setup:
With these initial ladders in mind, the next important decision is to have a starting list of clauses and a starting banlist for OU. Fortunately for us, the results of the Sleep Clause, Species Clause, OHKO Clause, and Evasion Clause polls all resulted in an overwhelming (over 66.00%, as declared in the OP of each topic) vote to not need to test them. As such, we can forgo this step in the process. Although I can't say I'm too happy about how the banlist options were created (I think it was a big oversight to not have a rather expansive banlist which still allowed the two most controversial Pokemon, Darkrai and Lugia, to both be tested), I am still going to support the results. As some of you already probably know through your own counting, Banlist #2 is the one that was most popular. Here is the final results tally (special thanks to Chris is me for running this tally):
For those of you who are too lazy to look it up yourself, here is the banlist:
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Where to to go from here...
We would like to get our server up and running as fast as possible. That does not mean we'll be ready to start suspect testing, though. Before that, we need to re-evaluate how we determine what is Uber and what isn't. Is our method of classification from the 4th generation what we want to use this generation, or do we want to change things up? Keep your eyes peeled for a topic on that matter in the near future. We also need to determine if we want separate suspect tests for the Full Dream World ladder and the Standard ladder, or if we should just focus our efforts on the standard. After that is settled, I will announce the method with which we will be determining suspects and how users can qualify to vote. You can rest assured that I will not be using any hidden metrics to determine things. If we want to use some sort of SEXP, it will be made public. My ideal plan at the moment would look similar to how the 4th generation's UU suspect process flowed. I will post more on this process later.
Thanks for your patience everybody, and I look forward to getting everything started very soon!
With the introduction of new mechanics and variables (such as "Preview Teams" versus "No Preview Teams" and "Released Dream World" versus "Full Dream World"), Pokemon Black and White opened a ridiculous amount of options in terms of possible metagames. Think about it, just using those two variables I listed, each tier could potentially have four metagames. For example, [OU, Singles, Full Dream World, No Preview Teams], [OU, Singles, Full Dream World, Preview Teams], [OU Singles, Released Dream World, No Preview Teams], and [OU, Singles, Released Dream World, Preview Teams] would all be subsets of the OU Singles tier... and that's not including things like Miracle Shooter and other options. Multiply that by however many tiers we want, such as Ubers, UU, LC, UU Doubles, UU Triples, UU Rotation Battle, etc., etc., and you have just way too many options. Although we want to significantly increase the number of playable metagames in this generation, we also do not want to dilute everything to the point where it just causes confusion. Also to be considered was the fact that each metagame might require its own suspect testing system, which we just simply do not have the manpower to handle, and Doug would have that many more stats to run (he does that all by himself, I might add). With practicality in mind, we decided that it would be best to start things out with what's easily controlled, and expand out from there once things start stabilizing. The first step was to figure out which metagame Smogon would support in its official tournaments. Ideally, we wanted the available ladders to at least reflect that. After much debate, the Tournament Directors decided that the officially supported setup for the Black and White metagames will be: released Dream World abilities only, previewable teams. There are a few reasons we decided on this setup:
- It most closely resembles WiFi battles, which is a gap we'd like to bridge.
- Previewable teams would only be thrown out if we found it to significantly decrease the competitiveness of the game. We feel that it merely changes how the game is played, not lower the competitiveness.
- Much like how we don't allow Pokemon that have not been released yet, we do not want to allow abilities that have not been released yet either. For all we know, these abilities might not ever get officially released.
- Standard Ubers (Released Dream World Only)
- Full Dream World Ubers
- Standard OU (Released Dream World Only)
- Full Dream World OU
- Standard LC
- Full Dream World LC
- VGC 2010
- VGC 2009
- 4th Generation Ubers
- 4th Generation OU
- 4th Generation UU
- 4th Generation LC
- 3rd Generation Ubers
- 3rd Generation OU
With these initial ladders in mind, the next important decision is to have a starting list of clauses and a starting banlist for OU. Fortunately for us, the results of the Sleep Clause, Species Clause, OHKO Clause, and Evasion Clause polls all resulted in an overwhelming (over 66.00%, as declared in the OP of each topic) vote to not need to test them. As such, we can forgo this step in the process. Although I can't say I'm too happy about how the banlist options were created (I think it was a big oversight to not have a rather expansive banlist which still allowed the two most controversial Pokemon, Darkrai and Lugia, to both be tested), I am still going to support the results. As some of you already probably know through your own counting, Banlist #2 is the one that was most popular. Here is the final results tally (special thanks to Chris is me for running this tally):
For those of you who are too lazy to look it up yourself, here is the banlist:
Once the server is set up, this will be the active banlist for both 5th generation OU ladders.Banlist #2
Arceus
Dialga
Giratina
Giratina-O
Groudon
Ho-Oh
Kyogre
Lugia
Mewtwo
Palkia
Rayquaza
Reshiram
Zekrom
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Where to to go from here...
We would like to get our server up and running as fast as possible. That does not mean we'll be ready to start suspect testing, though. Before that, we need to re-evaluate how we determine what is Uber and what isn't. Is our method of classification from the 4th generation what we want to use this generation, or do we want to change things up? Keep your eyes peeled for a topic on that matter in the near future. We also need to determine if we want separate suspect tests for the Full Dream World ladder and the Standard ladder, or if we should just focus our efforts on the standard. After that is settled, I will announce the method with which we will be determining suspects and how users can qualify to vote. You can rest assured that I will not be using any hidden metrics to determine things. If we want to use some sort of SEXP, it will be made public. My ideal plan at the moment would look similar to how the 4th generation's UU suspect process flowed. I will post more on this process later.
Thanks for your patience everybody, and I look forward to getting everything started very soon!