Lower Tiers RBY OU/UU Cutoff Discussion Thread

[Lusch]

Hey guys!

I open this thread because I want to discuss the topic of tiering RBY lower tiers once again. I am not sure if this decision has been made already or if it's up for discussion. But here it goes:
The viability rankings of RBY OU are getting an update currently. Some people are posting their rankings and the tendency is visible that Victreebel and Lapras will get placed quite low in the rankings, maybe even below Articuno. We need to await the final ranking of course, but it might turn out that way.
Now I have seen a lot of discussion in the discord about this, but I want to get it here where it does not get lost as easily. Basically people discuss if Victreebel and Lapras drop down from OU to UU after this update (and by extension, maybe Articuno rises to OU?)
Firstly, I want to pose the question wether or not we procede like that (dropping or promoting Pokemon based on VR shifts)? There's a case for doing so because that's how the initial UU tierlist has come to life after all. But there's also a case to be made that UU could be locked the way it is now (no promotions, demotions of any sort, no matter how the OU VR looks).
This is a question not only for this iteration of the VR, but also for the years to come. Who says that Lapras', Victreebels's or Articono's places in the list might not shift back in the future and revert the whole process?

So, I want to present three options I personally see with respect to this. Feel free to discuss them or add other methods as you wish.

• We have (as it is now) regular updates of the OU VR and as it has been done in the past and everything ranked in C or lower (which is the current cutoff) is tiered as UU. We follow this rule strictly, even if this means changing UU every time the OU-meta shifts. By extension, we do the same for UU and everything C and lower is NU.

This is what people believe is the status quo from how I understand their discussion in the discord server. I am not sure if it has been stated that this is how things get done but it is of course an option. The downside to this in my eyes is that UU (and NU) will likely shift every other year, because of OU trends. I personally do not know what changed in OU that people like Articuno (maybe) more than they do Lapras or Victreebel, but if that is the case by this method UU has to react to it and lose Articuno while getting Lapras and Vic. A completely new UU would emerge from this. Lapras especially would be huge. It would be hard to get some stability in those tiers in that case. This, of course, does not need to be a downside. It can be refreshing to have to adapt to whatever flavour the higher tier comes along with from time to time.

• We lock UU as it is now and do not include Pokemon from above into the tier nor do we promote any Pokemon from UU to OU, no matter what metagame shifts OU undergoes. The same goes for a potential NU whenever we finalize the tierlist of UU and decide which Pokemon we consider part of UU and which not.

This would obviously bring stability to the lower tiers that have a way smaller playerbase to begin with, which means adapting to changes happens even slower and people might not want to/be able to adapt to changes in a tier that naturally is not played as frequently. This also can be interpreted as a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it.

Basically, I personally am not fond of the lower tier(s) changing every other year when OU decides "hey Pokemon X is not bad after all" or "Pokemon Y actually sucks now". I want to give concrete examples of what could happen this time around:
Let's say Victreebel drops to UU. In my eyes (others may disagree) this means that Venusaur (which is currently considered UU) would probably fall down to NU. Now, NU might like that very much, because there is no sleeper of Venusaur's calibre in the tier as it stands and they might like to have it around for electric and water type threats as well. Good or bad change however, it is quite clear that this would turn NU into a completely different tier.
Let's take Lapras as a potentiol drop. Lapras bulk and typing is something UU has never seen before. top threats like Dugtrio, Articuno, Kanagskhan, Vaporeon (to name a few) would become much worse, maybe even completely drop out of the tier. UU would likely not be recognizable.
Let's take Articuno. If it rises, UU loses one of it's most potent late-game threats and generally one of the strongest bulky attacker, which would have a massive impact on how the tier is played as well.
Now... all of this is not necessarily a bad thing either. But in my eyes it is a bad thing if those huge shifts happen basically regularly (every year or maybe every two years) and there's a good chance they will if we were to use method 1 as outlined above.
Method 2 as outlined above (simply lock the current status of lower tiers (UU)) also is not exactly satisfying imo because the beauty of not having the lower tiers locked as of now under smogon policy is that we actually can (and should) tier them "correctly" and somewhat up-to-date with what is considered OU, UU, NU... and end up with naturally grown tiers whithout artificial rules like other old gen low tiers.

I am searching for a solution to this and I would like to suggest one, but don't hesitate to make your own proposals and disagree with me.
I think it would be the best idea if we were more inclusive in our tiering decisions concerning which Pokemon belong to the higher tier. If a Pokemon is "usable enough" in the higher tier, it could belong there via tiering. Simply put: We lower the cutoff that has been used to determine OU/UU from "everything C-ranked and lower is UU" to "everything D-ranked and lower is UU" (both lines are arbitrary anyway). And we keep updating the tiers based on those thresholds. This allows the tiers to be dynamic in case something changes, but the change would naturally concern Pokemon that are probably less influential and powerful in the lower tier (read: No Lapras). This would still change UU as it currently is, because UU might lose stuff like Articuno and Dragonite (which might leave anayway). But future changes would likely be less drastic and thus people would not need to adapt in lower tiers as much. If we are talking NU, this would likely place Poliwrath and Raichu comfortably in UU such that NU won't have to worry about them as well.

Regardless of wether or not you agree with me, I think an "official" decision has to be made on how we proceed with things, because at the moment, I don't believe we actually have that, because frankly at the time UU was tiered we did not think that something like a Lapras-drop would be likely at all, we thought things were stable so we did not really clarify wether or not lower tiers keep changing with higher tier-viability or not.

 

[Amaranth]

I agree that yearly shifts are too much, but I don't agree with permanently locking lowtiers because lowtiers, in concept, should be used to give a place for pokemon that are not viable in higher tiers their time on the spotlight. I think periodically updating lowtiers is great, but yearly updates is way too frequent. The idea that makes the most sense to me is making updates every 2 or 3 years rather than every year.

What I don't agree with is the idea that if you were to draw the line at D instead of C it will stabilize things. Mons like Hypno, Persian etc could very plausibly flow in and out of D over future years and cause absolutely massive ripples (or even Porygon who isn't a big player in UU but would likely change stuff lower down). I say let the ripples come, but at a much lower rate, so that getting good at a specific iteration of a specific lowtier will actually last you a while.

edit: I don't support locking lowtiers (which is how other oldgens do things) because RBY lowtiers are very much not established. They need time to evolve and develop into something that maybe could eventually get locked in the future

 

[Hipmonlee]

I have a bunch of short thoughts relating to this.

I think there is definitely a risk in RBY lower tiers for them to become a bit stagnant. There just aren't that many Pokemon down there, and often the stratification of power levels is pretty intense, so it can be a bit difficult to change things too much. So allowing annual shifts does mitigate this.

On the other hand, UU and especially NU are not played that much, so I think there is still a lot to explore with how they are.

I think if you wanted more stability, then having a bigger borderline tier gives you a buffer. For instance, if you made: Hypno, Arti, Vic, Bro, Lapras, Nite and Persian all borderline, then I think you would be basically immune to any tier shifts ever affecting UU. Obviously this is a drastic shift though.

The other idea I have had, which I suggested for NU is to just have anchor pokemon, and then the cutoff moves with those pokemon. For UU the obvious choices being Hypno and Tentacruel. Although, this doesnt really address the situations you are deciding on.

One issue for NU is that if UU is fluctuating a lot, when would NU get updated? Like, if Victreebel does drop to UU, then it might take a bit of time for Venusaur to fall off the bottom of UU and back into NU.

An even more disastrous scenario would be UU deciding that Venusaur is better than Victreebel, have Victreebel fall into NU, and then suddenly bounce back into OU. So by the time NU sorts out its tier Victreebel is already gone.

So I think if we dont lock the tiers, I think we need a clear plan on when the tier shifts will occur. OU VRs are done annually after SPL. UU VRs maybe should be roughly a 6 month offset from that?

Overall I am not a fan of locking tiers, but I think there's a bit to consider here.

[Edit] - Oh, and a cutoff at D is only going to make things worse. The problem with a lock at D is that the C and D ranks in OU is really underdeveloped, it is mostly just whatever things won a couple SPL games. There is so much that could move into or out of C... A cutoff at B would be more reliable imo.

 

[Plague von Karma]

I think one of the biggest draws to RBY UU is exactly the situation you're in right now. We are very lucky to be one of the only old gen lower-tiers that isn't locked - mainly because of Hipmonlee's decision back in 2011, from my probing - allowing us to tier it and enact bans without opposition. Additionally, we can still see Pokemon rise and drop in the tier, which ensures that the oft-bemoaned "static RBY" isn't such. I feel like we are a very privileged tier, and we should take advantage of it rather than run away out of fear of change. Should we choose to lock the tier, we are losing out on a very valuable out to any broken strategies or mechanics found later, and also losing such a nice selling point to RBY Tiering.

I think we should try to remember the positives this tiering system has brought us. Should RBY have been locked before, Golem would never have found its rightful place in the gutter, and we would still have Jolteon in UU as well, and I know many of the current players would despise that little yellow demon. In fact, we would still have the old UU from 2007! I think that Victreebel would be an incredibly healthy Pokemon for RBY UU, as it was in the past, and it could even knock Venusaur back down to NU if it proves to be better than it, thus solving the entire problem that you're looking to kill through locks. But the second we're even greeted with the idea that Articuno is going to rise out of the tier, and we may receive a Lapras we can just suspect test and ban, it's suddenly a horrible thing that we should chuck in the bin? Am I hearing this right? We are tiering Pokemon first and foremost, this is what we signed up for when joining Smogon. If the tier was locked, you wouldn't be able to suspect test Dragonite right now. Why are we even proposing the idea of throwing that away?

So overall, I think this is actually an issue with how the Viability Rankings are being run. This is a reasonable conclusion to make because we're trying to mimic how other tiers do them...but their tiers are locked. I don't think changing the cutoff will do jack, I just think these are being pumped out way too frequently, and UU in particular does it with reckless abandon at virtually random times to the average outsider. The reason RBY NU lost Venusaur was because Volk went on a rampage with it in bracket, and the VR was promptly changed. NU could even lose Aerodactyl soon due to a similar thing going on! You also have that yearly(?) OU VR which may also be a result of the general unrest, but I think a lot of these shifts are overdue anyway and we kind of saw them coming.

So here's my idea: why don't we just do a VR update for all the tiers every 2 years or something, and always suspect test drops? Give a small offset by a couple of months for each lower tier as Hipmonlee suggested, that's a good one. I think that this would make the idea of a VR shift much more enjoyable to players and add some much-needed hype, rather than going "NU it's 4 PM time to lose your next mon" every few weeks.

2 years seems like more than enough time for whatever previous VR shift to settle, especially after one iteration of this system I'm proposing, and this also gives us an opportunity to choose whether the metagame shift is too much and ban the Pokemon. If you're still anxious about those 2 years, make it 3, then it's all gravy yeah? This gives us some much-needed control for metagames that are extremely different to one another (something I think you're all forgetting, they're all quite warped) while satisfying the need for stability. As another bonus, we also get to erase any potential for passing trends to throw a wrench into our tiering, something people sometimes call Aerodactyl in RBY UU. In the event of multiple drops, this could prove a bit difficult, but it's nothing we can't manage. I think we just need to accept that rises will exist though, and generally, I think rises in RBY are rare and noticeable enough to prepare for; it's very hard to prove a Pokemon's viability in a tier that's decades old.

I think that having an "always suspect test drops" rule would also add a bit more credence to RBY tiering and promote further participation in our lower tiers. Plus, it gives the average RBYer a reliable point of entry to getting badged, which otherwise tends to be quite difficult. The recent upheaval in C&C isn't going to stay forever and every analysis uploaded isn't likely to change for a very long time, and our two biggest tiers are nearly "done", so I think having a TC route is good. This further integrates RBY with Smogon's community, gives more potential for the generation to grow, all with little downside except that the council has to do a bit more work than usual. This is an area of completely untapped potential and a massive benefit to our tiers being completely unlocked.

 

[Shellnuts]

I generally agree with most of the above points, most prominently I completely support the suspect testing of drops, however, I have issues with the one-way nature of tiering with regards to Pokemon which are tier the border between two tiers specifically as rises and drops of important Pokemon would cause ripples throughout lower tiers which would be generally problematic.

A pokemon that is dropped to a lower tier can be suspect tested and banned, if Lapras drops to UU and has a substantially negative impact on the tier it can be banned to improve the meta. The same cannot be said for the inverse of such an action. A rise in the tiers is completely out of control of lower tiers, even if a Pokemon is vitally important to many structures and the metagame at large, if it succeeds enough to be in B- tier or higher on the viability rankings, the tier loses that Pokemon with no control over it.

This issue is not a problem for me if the rise is a legitimate change and does not occur further, if a Pokemon legitimately should be in a higher tier then it deserves to be there, that's how tiering is meant to be constructed. The issue is if such a Pokemon then drops and rises repeatedly while being important for the metagame and remaining unbanned. If, let's say Tentacruel for example, is borderline and rises and drops repeatedly, then the lower tiers would be in chaos since it is an important part of those tiers and would remain unbanned because of that, but its repeated rises and drops would ripple throughout the metagame. Now Tenacruel is an untrue and obviously extreme example, but what if we considered Articuno rising and dropping repeatedly due to it fluctuating as a "flavour-of-the-month" pick, its an important part of the metagame and has influence on the importance of Waters in UU which would then ripple onto NU and so on, fluctuations in that way would be not ideal for lower tiers and is what I have an issue with.

I am unsure of how one would counteract this issue, one idea which could work would be to impose a stricter requirement on rising in the tiers to prevent this while retaining the same threshold for dropping Pokemon, however that would come with its own problems. Another one (by Enigami) would be to have rises depend on if a Pokemon is above the OU-UU line for enough time for it not to be due to a passing fad. Whatever solution is come to, I do think that this issue needs to be addressed.

(edited to clarify what I meant to say, I wrote this on 4 hours of sleep initially and wasn't thinking clearly)

 

[pac]

I don't have much unique to say, and most of my discussion went down in the discord. Most of my opinions generally align with Plague von Karma's.

Shellnuts brings up the main argument used for locking in rises, which is 100% a valid concern (even if I disagree with the level of importance Articuno is set to in UU). As an RBY UU main, I do think that locking the tier is overall a worse solution however.

Other approaches such as fixing the VR, extending timelines on VR shifts, and more should be considered first. At the very least, wait until the tier is stable to lock it. Aerodactyl, Dragonite/AgiliWrap, WrathChu, and more have to be considered before we do such a thing.

 

[Plague von Karma]

A rise in the tiers is completely out of control of lower tiers, even if a Pokemon is vitally important to many structures and the metagame at large, if it suceeds enough to be in B- tier or higher on the viability rankings, the tier loses that Pokemon with no control over it.

This feels like a misunderstanding of tiering Pokemon. Preventing a Pokemon from rising to its rightful tier is running completely counter to tiering as a whole, and that is the only conclusion I can draw from a tier being able to "control" rises. The one-way nature here is the only honest way to go about tiering, in my opinion; no other tier has had it any different and I don't see why it should change here. This is an inherent downside to how tiering is conducted, I made my peace with it during the BW era when RU lost Cofagrigus to UU all those years ago. I'm receptive to the idea of having some form of control if it doesn't stop the Pokemon from rising to its deserved position, but this seems to be the only goal of having such control.

Many of the issues we have faced with UU/NU can be solved by fixing the VR system. I agree that we should be much more restrictive in regards to rising Pokemon, but it is also very rare to see a Pokemon rise to OU, and once UU matches that it should be similar. Perhaps the issue will fix itself when the lengthy time frame weeds out passing trends and general noise? Rises through tiers should become much more predictable (which is how it always should be) with this tri-yearly VR shift proposal and thus become easy to prepare for.

I think this entire schtick should be something we address after seeing how the hypothetical new VR system goes.

At the very least, wait until the tier is stable to lock it. Aerodactyl, Dragonite/AgiliWrap, WrathChu, and more have to be considered before we do such a thing.

I still do not see why we should ever lock the tiers, even when they look optimized or stable; realistically, this is never going to be the case. It has been proven time and time again that locking tiers is often how you end up with broken strategies being discovered later and subsequently killing said tiers: see BW RU's current situation. There is also the minute possibility of a new mechanic being discovered that could change the tier again. I argue that having RBY Tiers remain unlocked is a necessity to out all of these potential issues in addition to what I laid out prior. Pokemon is ever-evolving and the only solution is to adapt rather than dig your heels in.

There is literally no call for us to lock the tier outside of a wish for an illusion of stability. Consider that you're just chucking out one of the massive draws to RBY tiering. If the tier dies for a time - as it did for a while until Pokemon Perfect came and revived the concept of RBY lower-tiers - you could possibly have a minimum count on opinions gathered for the VR, and simply don't change it when the requirement isn't met. Thus, you have the option to "abstain" from submitting VR changes. That's the closest I would ever get to locking an RBY tier, and it seems more like doomsday prepping than anything.

 

[DDX2]

Is there a reason cutoff isn't by ladder usage data? Ratings by individuals or tournaments is different than ladder. If we look at ladder at the 1500+ ratings which will see a lot more gameplay than tournaments, and is known for having the better players, we see Lapras enjoying 12% usage in March, and it isn't that different in previous months showing the pokemon is considered high-value. In fact all the pokemon at B and above sans Victreebel can be found at 10%+ usage in OU stats consistenly. So maybe that should be the standard for all tiers.

For lower tiers, I wanted to see the tiering go down until we literally see a tier in which Magikarp is played. Obviously the last tier, but that's besides the point.

My idea was: Focus on OU for the month, see usage data and close. Then Switch to UU for a month, then NU, then whatever you want to call 4U, 5U, etc until it repeats back at the top. It would recycle every 8 months or so and adjustments could be made until things are reasonably certain where each pokemon is at its most viable as S rank to B rank.

 

[pac]

Ladder-Related Words

RBY is just different from other gens. RBY Ladder does not have better players than tournament ones, and the ladder isnt popular enough to justify it. This also means that a small amount of people can significaintly influence tiering decisions by your idea, which is obviously not ok. The lack of ladders for RBY UU or NU, which would also be played less than OU ladder, also makes that harder to establish those lines. Also, in general the RBY community values the ladder very low in importance. Tournaments are the big stage, not high ladder.

 

[pac]

Sorry for the double post, but people in the RBY Community Discord wanted me to share my theorized solution in the thread.
Essentially what I would like to propose is a de-synchronization of the VR with the tiering of the Pokemon. I call this plan “The Articuno Protocol”.
As we know, and are experiencing, the OU VR gets a yearly update to dictate and record meta shifts. This, in turn, determines what is classified as OU, what is legal in UU, and what is not legal in UU. The current issue is that simple meta trends can cause a Pokemon to dip in and out of UU, completely changing the meta every year.
What I would like to propose is that, while we continue to update the OU VR every year so as to keep it relevant as a resource, we do not change the actual tiering of Pokemon until every three years. On top of this, in order for a Pokemon to rise it has to consistently show OU viability for a prolonged period of time. The specifics of this can be debated, but perhaps if it props up as above the cutoff line for x amount of time it qualifies. This fixes multiple problems:

1. We do not have to lock RBY tiers to keep a sense of stability in low tiers. Any rises are rare in this case, well-deserved, and will not happen very often. This allows for a common ground between tier stability and tier freedom. No switching back and forth every other year due to random meta trends. This also affects drops as well for the same reason.
2. This gives us an official, established, and logical approach to how we decide what Pokemon go in each tier. This same method can be applied to finally attempt to stabilize NU, as well as create future tiers such as PU and ZU.

Other well thought-out methods have been brought up in the RBY Discord. One in particular was brought up by Shellnuts, who suggested the idea of simply raising the bar for a pokemon to rise, making it harder for them to do so. The idea behind this being that a problematic drop can be fixed through normal suspects, but a rise ruining a tier is hard to fix. We saw this happen in the now infamous scenario where Venusaur left RBY NU, and caused a lot of people to quit the tier due to no easy fix.

TL;DR: Don't lock RBY, keep updating OU VR every year, only change the actual tiering of Pokemon every 3 years.

 

[Plague von Karma]

I love both of these ideas - you could even use both - but I want to draw attention to this one since it's probably the most familiar.

Other well thought-out methods have been brought up in the RBY Discord. One in particular was brought up by Shellnuts, who suggested the idea of simply raising the bar for a pokemon to rise, making it harder for them to do so. The idea behind this being that a problematic drop can be fixed through normal suspects, but a rise ruining a tier is hard to fix. We saw this happen in the now infamous scenario where Venusaur left RBY NU, and caused a lot of people to quit the tier due to no easy fix.

Raising the rise threshold to B and keeping the current drop to falling under B- would actually make more sense than our current setup. Proving a Pokemon's viability in a game as old as this is extremely difficult, and it's even more difficult to disprove it once they become established. For example, it took many years for Golem to drop, even after the mechanics changes that gave it that final push into the abyss, and it was absolutely right to treat it the way we did. I believe we all agree on this notion.

So by having a "line of forgiveness" for the C+ drop requirement and a "line of hardship" for those rising in B, that would suit the prior statement. This does get a bit complicated/awkward when we suddenly put something like Articuno in B-, but at the same time, such a volatile Pokemon will naturally be difficult to prove in OU. This goes for anything.

If we were to employ the concept of withholding rises and drops for 3 years, perhaps those that would otherwise drop get put into BL for that period to signify a drop in viability? Not sure if 3 years is the play here but people seem to get anxious even at 2, so...

 

[Hipmonlee]

Maybe we could retier every year, but a Pokemon has to be in a tier for two cycles before it gets adjusted?

3 years seems like too long to me.

Also, I think we need a system for defining the cutoff. Because the way we do things, "C" tier is likely to mean different things depending on how stratified the VRs are. Or we end up with like B--- being more or less arbitrarily decided in order to keep things where they are supposed to be.

 

[samy0w]

Dropping Lapras to UU looks really strange to me, especially since it was considered such a strong pick a few years ago

 

[DDX2]

RBY is just different from other gens. RBY Ladder does not have better players than tournament ones, and the ladder isnt popular enough to justify it. This also means that a small amount of people can significaintly influence tiering decisions by your idea, which is obviously not ok. The lack of ladders for RBY UU or NU, which would also be played less than OU ladder, also makes that harder to establish those lines. Also, in general the RBY community values the ladder very low in importance. Tournaments are the big stage, not high ladder.

Wouldn't tournament players be an even smaller pool than ladder?
But I do see your point. Unless the Smogon admins push daily tournaments for the lower tiers, then the games will be limited to those who also play in tournaments.

Regarding OU specifically, it says there were 20829 games play at all levels and aAvg. weight/team: 0.576 for 1500+ - wouldn't that mean that 10k games were played by people who play OU consistently at the very least?
Or for 1630+ at .121 meaning 1000 games?

 

[Deleted User 229847]

Ladder usage cutoffs in a mostly dead ladder tier (RBY OU) lose their significance. The amount of players simply isn’t enough to justify using them.

You could also have a bunch of people unironically sabotaging the tier by spamming ladder games and getting some mons over the supposed OU cutoff, removing them from the UU tier altogether.
In general having a user curated list, by somewhat of a qualified community vote, would make more sense than using a specific usage percentage. And the same goes with tournament usages. The pool of games is simply too small.

 

[pac]

Wouldn't tournament players be an even smaller pool than ladder?
But I do see your point. Unless the Smogon admins push daily tournaments for the lower tiers, then the games will be limited to those who also play in tournaments.

Regarding OU specifically, it says there were 20829 games play at all levels and aAvg. weight/team: 0.576 for 1500+ - wouldn't that mean that 10k games were played by people who play OU consistently at the very least?
Or for 1630+ at .121 meaning 1000 games?

I am not saying you do tournament percentages either, you do not. RBY does a viability rankings based cutoff, not a percentage based one. Tournaments are just used to help determine Viability Rankings.

 

[Deleted User 229847]

That way you are still using usage stats, and in a way, just avoiding to use the name “percentages”.
Say you notice articuno got played a few times, 3/4, in an important tournament. Sure, you might not base your decision around an actual percentage, but you are still using that information to decide whether he should be in OU or not. You are just not converting it into a percentage.

This is why I argue for qualified community input (so definitely not me). Something along the lines of community-based viability rankings.

 

[Amaranth]

That way you are still using usage stats, and in a way, just avoiding to use the name “percentages”.
Say you notice articuno got played a few times, 3/4, in an important tournament. Sure, you might not base your decision around an actual percentage, but you are still using that information to decide whether he should be in OU or not. You are just not converting it into a percentage.

This is why I argue for qualified community input (so definitely not me). Something along the lines of community-based viability rankings.

This is literally the system in place

 

[Plague von Karma]

So the OU VR is in its final stages of being developed and the UU playerbase is still extremely insecure about Articuno, so I have arrived with a revised version of pacattacc's "Articuno Protocol" that I would like to go over.

It should be remembered that RBY is not frozen at all, so these changes have to exist. People are harping on about Articuno's potential leave as if it's doomsday and saying we should quite literally freeze the tier, I'll warn you that this is not the hill you want to die on. If RBY UU was frozen, as aforementioned in the thread, you wouldn't have it in its current state right now; you'd be playing the Old UU. Or, if it were frozen after UUBL's removal, you would have Jolteon to deal with, and Golem would be trapped in OU. Finally - and this is by far the worst part - will also be borderline incapable of suspect tests due to tier lock policy. An unfrozen RBY is an absolute gift and we should be using this to our advantage to further distinguish ourselves from other Old Gens.

With this in mind, if Articuno does leave, that's a reality to face: what we have to solve is making these VRs consistent, predictable, and with minimal noise.

Sorry for the double post, but people in the RBY Community Discord wanted me to share my theorized solution in the thread. Essentially what I would like to propose is a de-synchronization of the VR with the tiering of the Pokemon. I call this plan “The Articuno Protocol”.

As we know, and are experiencing, the OU VR gets a yearly update to dictate and record meta shifts. This, in turn, determines what is classified as OU, what is legal in UU, and what is not legal in UU. The current issue is that simple meta trends can cause a Pokemon to dip in and out of UU, completely changing the meta every year.

What I would like to propose is that, while we continue to update the OU VR every year so as to keep it relevant as a resource, we do not change the actual tiering of Pokemon until every three years. On top of this, in order for a Pokemon to rise it has to consistently show OU viability for a prolonged period of time. The specifics of this can be debated, but perhaps if it props up as above the cutoff line for x amount of time it qualifies. This fixes multiple problems:

1. We do not have to lock RBY tiers to keep a sense of stability in low tiers. Any rises are rare in this case, well-deserved, and will not happen very often. This allows for a common ground between tier stability and tier freedom. No switching back and forth every other year due to random meta trends. This also affects drops as well for the same reason.
2. This gives us an official, established, and logical approach to how we decide what Pokemon go in each tier. This same method can be applied to finally attempt to stabilize NU, as well as create future tiers such as PU and ZU.

Other well thought-out methods have been brought up in the RBY Discord. One in particular was brought up by Shellnuts, who suggested the idea of simply raising the bar for a pokemon to rise, making it harder for them to do so. The idea behind this being that a problematic drop can be fixed through normal suspects, but a rise ruining a tier is hard to fix. We saw this happen in the now infamous scenario where Venusaur left RBY NU, and caused a lot of people to quit the tier due to no easy fix.

TL;DR: Don't lock RBY, keep updating OU VR every year, only change the actual tiering of Pokemon every 3 years.

I believe that adopting PacAttacc's proposal is a good idea, but the length of time seems a bit much. I believe that delaying a tier change for 2 VR revisions would be the most appropriate course of action. This ensures the tier sees changes in a reasonable time frame while ensuring that it remains predictable. This also dodges the potential problem of the VR skipping a year due to a hypothetical lack of participation. The biggest problem that people have with the VR right now is that the changes feel "sudden". I think that with this kind of delay, people have time to test the hypothetical rises or drops if they choose to do so, allowing a ban to be decided on the latter in advance. Additionally, this makes rising a Pokemon much more difficult, which for a metagame that is quite literally approaching 20 years old and can change completely if you breathe on it, is very appropriate: an OU Pokemon in RBY should be put under intense scrutiny. Since RBY OU tends to have its meta change in some way every couple of years, this seems to fit it best, and I don't think UU will be too fussed with it either.

I also believe that raising the required rank for a Pokemon to rise should be considered as Shellnuts proposed. C is the current "drop zone", while B- is the "rise zone". I think that raising the required rank to B would help with making rises even more certain, ensuring that the Pokemon has to hit the ground running to go up. Therefore, once the Pokemon gets there, it's much more difficult to drop, as it has to go from B to C and stay there for 2 VR revisions to drop. Ergo, the Pokemon has to fall into even more scrutiny to rise to OU, greatly minimizing potential noise. Again, the rises have to exist and I personally encourage them, but they should be very difficult to pull off.

So overall, you get more predictable, certain drops that come in reasonable time frames, as well as much more scrutinized rises. I think this strikes the perfect balance between metagame stability and predictability.

I'm not sure if you would want to put this into practice for this VR or not, but it could be a good chance to testfire if approved.

 

[Hipmonlee]

Sounds great. I say we give people a week or so to object, and otherwise just go ahead with this.

 

[Volk]

I'm posting mainly to express my support for the idea proposed by pacattacc and elaborated upon by Plague von Karma. Seeing as RBY UU is finally taking some important steps in tiering (in the form of a Dragonite/APT suspect test) and NU is in its formative stages, I think it is largely beneficial to wait two or perhaps even three VR shifts before making any tier changes. I also want to say that there is some level of poetic liberty to be taken once the RBY OU VR is finally updated and released. While the B-/C+ barrier has merits as a cutoff, we should not necessarily feel as though we have to honor this line. This is especially true if RBY receives the Vapicuno treatment, as the methodology tends to spread out Pokemon a bit more than I think individual players otherwise would. This isn't a limitation of the system really, just an observation that guides me to believe that the cutoff can be a bit flexible (perhaps even in the middle of a subrank) and may be subject to interpretation among the members of the RBY OU and UU playerbases. There is a degree of precedence for this I should note. For example, GSC OU recently saw a new VR with Tentacruel earning a slot at the very end of B Rank (which was surprising to my uneducated mind). Despite this, I haven't seen any effort to move Tentacruel from UUBL to OU proper (although there isn't really a functional difference between these two placements). Likewise, several "staples" in the ADV OU metagame recently found themselves in C Rank. Again, despite this, I haven't really seen any campaigns to drop Breloom, Milotic, Moltres, Heracross, and so on to UUBL or UU. Finally, the barrier between GSC PU and the fringe tier GSC ZU was actually established as between B and B- rather than B- and C. Basically, there is a degree of flexibility here of which we should not be afraid to take advantage. The elimination of tier locks is a great thing and a good opportunity to keep our favorite metagames alive and evolving. I am very glad to see them gone and cautiously optimistic concerning what changes RBY UU, RBY NU, and other tiers may experience in the near future. Cheers all.

 

[Lusch]

First of all, thank you guys for your replies! That is exactly what I was hoping for when starting this thread.
And I believe we have come to a good proposal. I think a tier change every two VR revisions is appropriate. 3 years is too long.
On that note, I know UU is a much smaller scale, but do we use the same methodology then for tiering NU as well? (rises and drops might well happen there as well, especially in case UU loses a mon to OU or gets one, or simply because people realize stuff like Tangela might not be worth using after all)

Second, while I agree we do not need to be too rigid with the cutoff (fixating on "B-" or whatever), I do believe that we should take the same cutoff for rises and drops. Speaking in OU language (this is just an example, don't take it too literally): Something like Slowbro usually is never really high in the OU viability rankings I don't care if you call it B or C, it's usually somewhere around that region 13th - 15th highest ranked Pokemon. Point being, it's usually one of the lowest ranked Pokemon that people will always consider OU. Even if we take 2 years as a timeframe, for example Articuno might get ranked around the Slowbro mark consistently (let's just say it gets ranked on the same level for argument's sake). In that scenario Articuno will likely not break any "absurdly" high bar for being considered OU, but it would be ranked the same as a Pokemon clearly considered OU. As such I believe in our example Articuno should get the same tiering treatment as Slowbro as well... Even getting ranked Slowbro-like for two years straight is no easy feat for a fringe Pokemon like Cuno, but expecting it to be ranked like what 11th - 13th highest consistently is just purely impossible. So I am advocating for making rises reasonably difficult, but not impossible. Maybe I understood the proposal wrongly, but to mee the rise-system sounds impossible, and I think that defeats the purpose...
Which cutoff that is can be up for discussion in any particular case, but it should be reasonable...

tl,dr: once a Pokemon get the same treatment in the OU VR as a "clear" OU Pokemon consistently (over 2 years) it should also be tiered OU. (same goes the other way, if a Pokemon does not, then it should be UU). Same cutoff for rises and drops.

 

[Plague von Karma]

On that note, I know UU is a much smaller scale, but do we use the same methodology then for tiering NU as well? (rises and drops might well happen there as well, especially in case UU loses a mon to OU or gets one, or simply because people realize stuff like Tangela might not be worth using after all)

I think tiering NU this way would bring some much-needed stability and an actual opportunity for metagame development, plus it'd help fast-track it to becoming more akin to GSC NU. I'd say start the policy on the next "big" UU VR, which seems to be the way things are going with what Volk has said. I know they wanted vapicuno to assist with making a proper cohesive VR.

As such I believe in our example Articuno should get the same tiering treatment as Slowbro as well... Even getting ranked Slowbro-like for two years straight is no easy feat for a fringe Pokemon like Cuno, but expecting it to be ranked like what 11th - 13th highest consistently is just purely impossible. So I am advocating for making rises reasonably difficult, but not impossible. Maybe I understood the proposal wrongly, but to me, the rise-system sounds impossible, and I think that defeats the purpose...

This is a fair point. The 2-year gap already adds a lot of predictability and scrutiny to a Pokemon's potential rise. Expecting it to hit the ground running that hard - to the extent of becoming Jynx-level - would require a massive discovery for a tier like RBY OU, prolly a mechanic discovery. Slowbro being used as the "perceived cutoff point" would be the most consistent way to go about this overall, since chances are it'll never actually drop. However, this is an iffy assumption to use for a policy that would likely last a long time...

Overall, I support Lusch's amendments.

 

[Hipmonlee]

So the OU VRs are out! And we get to test the new process immediately.

I think the consensus at this point is we are waiting for two rounds of VRs before something to drop, but the drop cutoff is C/B.

I guess the question is, does that mean Victreebel and Lapras are still OU, or should they be moved to UUBL in the interim? My feeling is the second one.

 

[Plague von Karma]

I guess the question is, does that mean Victreebel and Lapras are still OU, or should they be moved to UUBL in the interim? My feeling is the second one.

So last year we had this thing where low-usage mons in locked tiers got "OU by technicality", which was also used for Mega Evolutions that were used less than their counterparts;

I think this perfectly fits this new "limbo" policy, since;

• UUBL implies they dropped to UU and got instantly banned. It is "UnderUsed Banlist" after all. Since they're not touching UU, there's no point.
• OU implies, well, they're within the cutoff. They're not, they're being held back for 2 VR revisions, yeah?