Tier Naming Policy

[ABR]

If your roomintro has an all caps "PU DOESN'T STAND FOR ANYTHING" then there most certainly is an issue.

 

[Acast]

Fwiw, the poll is now at 16 votes in favor of changing PU, 6 votes opposed. But I have to admit it's a very small demographic and not very compelling. In any case, this point really interests me:

Let me also point out that PU is still not listed in https://www.smogon.com/tiers/ and I am now being told that when PU was approved as an official tier, we agreed to figure out a better name later.

Is there anyone around that was involved in that decision at the time that can confirm this or give us more detail? If that was the decision, why was PU's name never changed? Why was the decision made to wait at all? If this was the case, then I don't see why we shouldn't change PU's name. Even the people that originally made PU official thought the name was bad and needed to be changed.

The only issue in my eyes is what its name should be instead, which is a difficult answer to come up with. ManOfMany's suggestion of renaming it "ZeroUsed" isn't awful. It's certainly better than the current name, to say the least. The main issue with that is I really don't know where we would go after ZU if we added even more tiers. "SubzeroUsed" is kind of...meh. It could be shortened to "SU" I suppose, which would keep with the current naming tradition. But even if we go with that what do we do after "SubzeroUsed"? "InverselyUsed" (aka IU)? idk. I agree with galbia's assessment for the most part:

Not saying i agree particularly with his suggestion since it is relatively short term and because it is probably not the right time to discussione anything seeing how this thread has turned in the past 1-2 pages

but at least ManOfMany's suggestion is an improvement. I'd rather go with his suggestion than keep the name "PU".

 

[MZ]

Well we probably are stuck with the same stuff but there's at least 2 points here that don't quite seem clear to me

It's clear to me that we can't change the name of the tier this generation, so at this point I am mostly advocating changing the name between generations.

In which there's no "SuMo PU playerbase" to be inconvenienced.

The implication here seems to me that everybody would be completely fine with swapping up names as long as it happened between generations? There are a lot of people who aren't going to quit by the time we reach SuMo. Anybody who plays a lower tier would be inconvenienced under this. And, while I'm here, here's a legitimate logistical question. Exactly what are we doing about old gens? My impression was that we aren't touching them and we have to accept the damage, since gens where NU existed and RU didn't or whatever kind of throws out the RU-4U NU-5U system. But there are still old gens ladders and old gens tournaments and old gens players (not to mention gen 6 would be an old gen which includes the entire player base when SuMo comes out and we implement the change) so people still have to recognize that NU is 5U if they want to understand anything about the previous gens. I'm not saying things like confusion during NUPL should necessarily outweigh all the potential confusion reduction but it's not like old gens won't be brought up, and then we have to explain why this is different. e: I get this sorta applies to t1 t2 as well, it's just a broad issue that needs to be resolved

The reason I oppose renaming "OU" to "OU (T1)" is because that is a confusing change (different post) I've mentioned before I mostly dislike the idea of renaming OU to "OU (Tier 1)". "OU (T1)" is even worse. OU should have one name, giving it two names will probably cause more problems than it solves.

Again, can you explain this? I've moderated PU for over a year and the vast majority of the people asking what it stands for understand the concept of tiers because it's so much more basic and integral to the smogon system. If they don't, they need to go to help or ct. But if they know what a tier is, which is basically required to play any of them, I think it should be fairly intuitive what t1 t2 etc mean? It's just an easy offhand way for people to quickly grasp where the tiers are in order, fixing future tier naming issues, which is what I understood was half of the problem here. Adopt that and change Pu to something which isn't as confusing for most people and that's both of the problems in the OP solved. If I had to guess, it wouldn't exactly function like 2 separate names with the tier markers being a useful indicator and most people still going by the classic names that they're accustomed to. And, if not, I think there's so many things required to learn to get into mons that attaching a single number to each tier isn't exactly the worst thing.

 

[RBG]

I've honestly been for this since the Start of Gen V, and I think the hybrid "OU - Tier 1", "UU -Tier 2" ect.... is the best way to meet both sides want.

For what it's worth, I do think the names past NeverUsed are and will continue to be silly, but people are attached to the names, since it helps create a since of identity and community, and I don't see any real reason that trumps that since of attachment that has been created.

 

[tennisace]

Didn't an admin representing the SS literally state that there are no intentions of changing any tier names?

Poor Sam, nobody noticed his post because it got sandwiched between a few tl;dr posts and didn't have any fancy bold conclusions.

Changing the tiers as currently constructed will do more harm than good. The tiers are a simple ~7 item ordered list currently. Every competitive player on this site (and others!) has them memorized; changing them will confuse more people than it will help.

 

[Magnemite]

If your roomintro has an all caps "PU DOESN'T STAND FOR ANYTHING" then there most certainly is an issue.

Literally read the thread before posting a pointless one liner, this has already been brought up and I have already responded to it:

How is putting a simple answer to a common question in the roomintro so we don't have to answer every time in chat a problem? It's really not a big deal especially because we're willing to make the answer very clear and available.

Changing PU's name is a bad idea for almost all of the reasons that changing any other tier's name is a bad idea.

 

[atomicllamas]

idk why you would even bother responding to the person who was so confused by RU's name they proposed dropping 2 tiers that average over 100,000 games a month and renaming another for their own convenience. Unless of course to congratulate them on having the least intelligent posts in this thread, which is honestly a huge accomplishment.

 

[RBG]

I think you're completely misinterpreting his arguments. He's looking at it from a "The names in the order they are make no sense. Since this is a bug in the system, we should fix it" viewpoint. From a purely logical standpoint, it does make sense to have the tier names order make sense.

However, it does ignore the players emotional attachments to the names, the fact that the history means a lot of people have learned and remembered this nonsensical ordering of tiers, and that they have no problem explaining the order to people who ask questions.

 

[Zarel]

Are you really trying to use a poll with a whopping 9 votes as evidence to back up your point?

Because my point wasn't "we should rename PU because", it was "it is not obvious that the majority supports keeping PU because this poll". I felt like I had enough votes to make that point and go to sleep; I didn't feel like waiting for more responses.

Anyway, the problem with nitpicking low sample sizes is that they're not low the next day. Nice try, though.

You're literally cherrypicking results that cater specifically to your viewpoints by posting a fucking poll asking an extremely specific demographic of people their stances on an issue that they honestly probably don't care about. Are you KIDDING?

If llamas is going to complain that I used a quote from a banned user, I can point out that you got locked yesterday. Apparently that means your opinion doesn't count anymore?

(Anyway, there's a "no opinion" option for people who actually honestly don't care about the issue)

 

[atomicllamas]

1) what room is this poll in cause that is just as important as the number of users voting

2) there is a difference in ignoring piex who got perma banned and perma locked on separate occasions for posting porn and has a huge bias towards the pokemonperfect system cause he is an admin there. As well as an obvious ignorance of smogon tiering (based on your logs) and culture (based on his time on the site). And ignoring Aurora who got locked for posting literally "/me dabs" (and actively participates in the tiers under discussion). There is also the difference that aurora's point was valid and piex was using your convo to humble brag about how grand pp is (in spite of its 20 person player base in 3 tiers).

Additionally considering I was told by you that I shouldn't discuss ps policy in the staff room because I'm not a real leader, maybe you shouldn't be posting in a thread about tier names when you've literally played 0 games of these tiers.

 

[Sam]

I wanted to leave this open after I posted to give people a chance to respond directly to my post since that is the action that's going to be taken. Instead this thread has turned in to a mess with personal insults and shitposts. As fun as it may be to include big red text in your signature or to bring up a user recently getting locked on PS while also using disgraced users as part of your argument, turning everything in to a shit-slinging contest isn't exactly the best way to get your point across.

 

[ryan]

yea. the best way is to put it in small red text in your signature.