You still forgot Ferroseed which would move from PU to NU.
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Data Usage-Based Tier Update for April 2018 (May @ #97) (June @ #150)
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I don't know if LC Pokémon count. I'd need a confirmation on that
LC acts outside the usage based tiers - it is not the "lowest" tier. A pokemon can simultaneously be LC and NU for example, so if that LC Pokemon got 3.41% usage in RU it would no longer be allowed in NU or below, but would still be allowed in LC.
Aight, time for serious talk.
Getting rid of quick-rises in favor of maintaining stability for the lower tiers is definitely a step in the right direction. However, I'm willing to go a step further, and say that tiering rises as a whole should be abolished entirely.
To see what I mean, let's take a look at MaahirMomtaz's tier shift post. If we assume these trends stay the about the same, the following things will happen.
-UU is staring down the possibility of losing its best glue mon for balance and stall, Gliscor. If you are a remotely competent UU player, you know just how much influence Gliscor exerts in the tier. While I'm not saying that the tier will fall into chaos without its presence, it'll definitely force people to completely revamp their teams to account for its loss, and it'll be a huge hit to bulky playstyles, especially stall.
-PU losing Gastrodon and Ferroseed is also bigger than you may think. The tier has recently been having troubles with strong attackers and wallbreakers, and losing more answers to said attackers is never good. While PU will get back some old walls like Qwilfish and Altaria, losing its best defensive mon along with another pretty good one makes the issue of wallbreakers even more apparent.
-It's not just walls that are gone. The tiers lose some fun attackers too, with Stoutland rising to NU and Moltres rising to UU.
I could go on, but simply put, I don't think it's fair to the lower tiers that they have to constantly worry over meta-defining threats and mons they like being stolen, while still having to deal with all the new drops with a reduced line-up (uu mega diancie hahahahaha kill me please) to fight back with. Again, abolishing quick-rises is a step in the right direction, but these massive shifts every 3 months where meta-defining mons that keep the meta healthy can sometimes be lost is still not cool at all.
I've already presented this idea before, but is there any chance we could let tier leadership choose if they want certain Pokemon to rise? Like, if Gliscor still has the usage to rise next month, the UU council would first have to say "OK, yeah, sure, Gliscor may rise." If no, usage is ignored and Gliscor stays in UU. I don't see what problems this could lead to.
Getting rid of quick-rises in favor of maintaining stability for the lower tiers is definitely a step in the right direction. However, I'm willing to go a step further, and say that tiering rises as a whole should be abolished entirely.
To see what I mean, let's take a look at MaahirMomtaz's tier shift post. If we assume these trends stay the about the same, the following things will happen.
-UU is staring down the possibility of losing its best glue mon for balance and stall, Gliscor. If you are a remotely competent UU player, you know just how much influence Gliscor exerts in the tier. While I'm not saying that the tier will fall into chaos without its presence, it'll definitely force people to completely revamp their teams to account for its loss, and it'll be a huge hit to bulky playstyles, especially stall.
-PU losing Gastrodon and Ferroseed is also bigger than you may think. The tier has recently been having troubles with strong attackers and wallbreakers, and losing more answers to said attackers is never good. While PU will get back some old walls like Qwilfish and Altaria, losing its best defensive mon along with another pretty good one makes the issue of wallbreakers even more apparent.
-It's not just walls that are gone. The tiers lose some fun attackers too, with Stoutland rising to NU and Moltres rising to UU.
I could go on, but simply put, I don't think it's fair to the lower tiers that they have to constantly worry over meta-defining threats and mons they like being stolen, while still having to deal with all the new drops with a reduced line-up (uu mega diancie hahahahaha kill me please) to fight back with. Again, abolishing quick-rises is a step in the right direction, but these massive shifts every 3 months where meta-defining mons that keep the meta healthy can sometimes be lost is still not cool at all.
I've already presented this idea before, but is there any chance we could let tier leadership choose if they want certain Pokemon to rise? Like, if Gliscor still has the usage to rise next month, the UU council would first have to say "OK, yeah, sure, Gliscor may rise." If no, usage is ignored and Gliscor stays in UU. I don't see what problems this could lead to.
It'd make for a bunch of slippery slope and inconsistencies between tiers, which would make it hard for new people to understand the basics of smogon.
Losing decidedly fun attackers or mainstays of a meta isn't really enough of a reason to get rid of rises. It just isn't how tiering works. Any tier that has a mon leave, regardless of its relevance in the tier, will adapt. This may result in other mons needing suspecting (see: current day breloom/azu shortly ago, as amoonguss left), though this usually doesn't mean the tier is ruined. Having to endure change overtime is just a part of usage-based lower tiers in general. Also, having tier leadership/a council around to vote for various tier changes is good, though ignoring the usage stats and to a further extent the public isn't really ideal in any circumstance.
Ah yes, I was expecting a response like this. This logic is flawed, here's why.
Drops cannot be predicted. I and many others think Mega Diancie in UU will be awful, but truth be told, there is no way we can know unless we give it some sort of chance. You can't just opt out of drops because you don't know if they will be healthy or not until playtested.
Rises are the opposite of that. Rises are for mons that people already, at minimum, have one month of experience with. When Gliscor leaves, UU's playerbase will already know what it does, and they can determine for themselves if losing Gliscor is the best thing for the tier.
This response doesn't get the problem with rises. The issue with rising is not that the tiers can't adapt to the loss of rises, they can overtime. The problem is that rises put teambuilding, and to an extent metagames at the mercy of the tiers above them to a much more extreme extent than drops. When something drops to a lower tier, players in that tier's community can give the drop time for the metagame to adapt to it. If they feel it is unhealthy, they can suspect, or in extreme cases, quickban the threat. Yes, they cannot stop the drops from happening, but the playerbase of the lower tiers can take measures to make sure the threat will not ruin the health of the tier. Rises cannot be controlled: If an important glue Pokemon (eg PU Altaria) that was keeping the tier stable and certain threats in check that was NOT unhealthy leaves the tier because the guys who don't even play your metagame dictated via an arbitary usage system that it should rise when it was not harmful at all, well then tough shit, just pray it comes back in a later shift, whenever the hell that is.
In fact, that leads me to another issue I have with rises: Why are they even needed? As I have stated ad nauseum, drops cannot be predicted, and it's often better to let the drops have their time in the format, unless they are blatantly broken (eg UU Hoopa-Unbound). Most of the time, they'll end up being healthy influences that add more value and variety to the metagames they drop to. Rises benefit nobody. Just because Gastrodon is in a lower tier doesn't suddenly make it useless in OU, as we have seen, that isn't the case at all. People wanting to use Gastro in that tier for its super useful defensive utility shouldn't have to come at the expense of the lower tiers, who might want to use it for certain teams and cores. And its not like the lower tiers take these rises sitting down, either. The entire reason we abolished quick-rises to start was because of people getting fed up that their Pokemon were being stolen, the whole Ambipom fiasco gave way for these complaints to truly come out full force. NU has been begging RU to let Drapion drop for a year now. UU was saddened and worried when Amoonguss and Mamoswine left. Again, why do we need this stuff to happen? To shake up the tiers? Not really, the drops often do a good enough job at that (Have you even seen what's gonna happen to NU and PU next month?).
The worst suggestion I have heard so far. Tier changes are the most interesting part of the meta, if things leave lower tiers or drop down, it makes other pokemon better or worse, brings new playstyles etc. If we abandon tier rises, have fun in garbage stale tiers with the same dominant mons over and over again.
Also, why should higher tiers let viable pokemon drop just because they would be very good pokemon in a lower tier? Drapion is in it's best spot in RU since the start of the generation, so why would people stop using it?
Taking away one of the most fun aspects of tiers is bullshit, rises allow the metagame to change the same way as drops do. If you can't accept that, just make up your own tiers that don't get determined by usage at all.
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I think Dramps has a point. Drought is banned in UU but not RU, because the circumstances of each tier are separate. Why should a Pokemon be banned from a tier just because it's used a bunch in some other tier?
No comment on your post, but I would like to hear clarification on what exactly you mean by "slippery slope" in this case.
1. People found that Drapion is more than a shitmon and is actually doing decent in RU? Good to hear. Does that mean it should've been viciously yanked out of NU against that tier's playerbase's will? Hell no.
2. Again, go back to Maahir's post and take a look at the amount of rises compared to drops. I can assure you that even without rises, there would still be plenty of variation and metagame-altering shifts for each and every tier via the drops alone, unless you're willing to argue that Mega Diancie in UU and Hoopa in NU will do little to change the supposed "stale garbage tiers" that would come as a result of this change.
So, did anything actually change or no? I'm confused since someone said there are no quick drops or quick rises this month yet folks are saying Gastrodon shot up to OU this month or Stoutland to NU.
Nothing changed as quickrises have been abolished, wait till next month.
Viciously yanked?? LOL Drapion got usage in RU, so it moved up. It's not like what Joey did with Ambipom and Mamoswine where he exploited the ladder and they got a lot of usage
I think it's all fine to hypothesize and try to revolutionize the tiering process. After all, it is your opinion and you are free to voice that opinion. However, I take your hypothetical and raise you a hypothetical situation: what would you propose doing in subsequent generations when new pokemon are introduced. For example, let's say in Gen 8, a final stage pokemon is created with stats of 70/65/60/105/75/110 (random numbers). Who would get to decide what tier this poke is placed in if it's not decided by usage? You could end up with multiple tiers fighting for the right to have this particular pokemon (and of course if it ends up in a higher tier like UU, it would be unable to be used in RU and below). Now take this situation and multiply it by however many new pokemon are created, with each one having its own set of unique variables (from typing to abilities), determining its viability and complicating its tier position.
This is why I don't see your radical overhaul as plausible quite yet. Now, I could see (and would even likely be in favor of) a new tiering philosophy that keeps the usage-based tier structure, while allowing for each tier itself to "override" or force drop (but not force raise) a bad pokemon being in a tier (i.e. Jolteon in RU being forced down into NU, etc.). But even something like that is unlikely to happen
I think people are getting the wrong idea from my post tbh. I am absolutely not advocating to get rid of usage based tiering or anything like that. What I am advocating for is to abolish or further restrict rises, not drops. Not gonna delve into specific reasoning, my previous posts do that good enough. This hypothetical situation here, for instance, would not be changed at all. Pokemon would just settle into tiers like they normally would at the start of a new generation, since they are dropping during the early stages, with rises being uncommon in this timeframe.
I do like your force drop idea though, and it's another thing I've considered and discussed with people in the past.
Importantish question - what earthly benefit does any tier have to ever let a Pokémon rise? If it’s broken then they can just have it sit in XUBL, not potentially lose any chance of testing it in the future.
Let’s make an assumption that OU eventually ends up with a balanced set of Pokémon. This means that if all or a majority of Pokémon in OU fail to get enough usage to stay there even once, UUBL will eventually have enough Pokémon to essentially become OU-lite, with a few of the omnipresent mons who would never get little enough usage to drop like Lando not there. Basically you’re looking at the potential for ‘clone’ tiers, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.
Do I think this is particularly likely to happen between OU and UU if this method was adopted? No, not really. However, I could see it happening between NU and PU or RU and UU perhaps.
I think any method that discourages a tier from developing its own unique identity with different Pokémon is fundamentally flawed, and I think one of the biggest and definitely most inherent issue with your proposal is the lack of any reason to ever let anything rise.
Hm. I see what you're trying to get at. Ok, how about getting rid of rises, BUT still allowing rises from a BL tier to a main tier? In those cases, something rising from BL doesn't affect the tier below it, while also preventing this BL bottleneck scenario you've presented.
Restricting rises even further or just removing them sounds pretty dumb ngl. It removes an element of fluidity that usage-based tiers have by allowing things to move back and forth as trends come and go. Fairness has never been the primary goal or outcome here, until Joey's little Ambipom event (lmao at the people still upset about that) I've never seen this much (not that it's a lot mind you) anti-usage based tiering discussion.
I get people feel frustrated seeing their favorite tier(s) fluctuating so much, but really now with quick rises being gone every mon has a chance to be used for 3 months in the tier it falls to, unless it gets suspected. That's plenty of time for tiers to have fun, adapt and change, nothing will get 'viciously yanked' out of a tier that didn't get to know it.
Adding on to that point I've never been on-board with the idea that there are mons that tiers need to remain stable. Certainly there are incredibly good mons that are far more useful, but no mon is necessary for the survival of a tier. If Gliscor left UU it would really shake up the tier, BUT it would survive, adapt and move on. If I was a person that used Gliscor on every single team I would feel irritated seeing it leave, but not to the point where I refuse to play the tier anymore.
I cannot agree with any system that removes the rising of mons purely for so called 'stability' reasons. Like Yasuo said, it removes an element of fun and freshness.
I get people feel frustrated seeing their favorite tier(s) fluctuating so much, but really now with quick rises being gone every mon has a chance to be used for 3 months in the tier it falls to, unless it gets suspected. That's plenty of time for tiers to have fun, adapt and change, nothing will get 'viciously yanked' out of a tier that didn't get to know it.
Adding on to that point I've never been on-board with the idea that there are mons that tiers need to remain stable. Certainly there are incredibly good mons that are far more useful, but no mon is necessary for the survival of a tier. If Gliscor left UU it would really shake up the tier, BUT it would survive, adapt and move on. If I was a person that used Gliscor on every single team I would feel irritated seeing it leave, but not to the point where I refuse to play the tier anymore.
I cannot agree with any system that removes the rising of mons purely for so called 'stability' reasons. Like Yasuo said, it removes an element of fun and freshness.
The BL bottleneck scenario would still happen even if the BL mon rises to the higher tier; even though the 'BL to OU' Pokemon in question won't show up in '/ds UUBL', it's still part of UUBL and has to be recorded, should the mon ever fall in usage again.
One of the obstacles about restricting rises is that it seems like a tiresome process to monitor the usage rates of Pokemon that are suppose to rise and drop AND also keep track of all the Pokemon that are supposed to stay within their "home" tiers (even though the rising Pokemon can call the higher tier home as well), and the council of each tier still has to pay attention to their existing BLs as is. It also somewhat messes with the consistency of usage-based tiering if mons are allowed to fall but aren't allowed to rise, even if their usage says othewise, such as Gliscor getting, say, 5+% OU usage but is still UU just because it was in that tier. Also picture this: let's say a mon just dropped out of OU by ~0.1% usage, and then picked up approximately 10% OU usage or something significantly high, but because the mon didn't receive enough UU usage it falls further down to RU. This occurrence almost screams 'inconsistency' and 'favoritism' to me. Sure, it's no fun when a higher tier takes back a mon and the lower tier can't use it anymore, but considering the higher tier is the one that bestowed it upon them in the first place, it's not an entirely unfair system, and the moment the higher tier lapses in its usage, the mon has the chance to 'return' to the lower tier.
Probably the most notable reason I (and many others) would be against this no-rise system is that it eliminates one of the more fun aspects of usage-based tiering: adaptation. The top metagame threats are more likely to be shaken off their thrones with the existence of drops and rises, and this does not necessarily always lead to unstable metagames either, as the likes of DPP UU and (arguably?) BW RU and NU have held up rather well. In fact, we already have examples of tiers which undergo no rises: OU and non-usage based tiers such as Ubers and LC. Between the usage-influenced tiers and the ones that experience no rises, guess which kinds of tiers are the ones where people are most likely to complain about the staleness of the meta?
In the usage-influenced tiers, sometimes good Pokemon leave, but sometimes good Pokemon come as well. Learning to adapt to these changes is part of the experience, and even if you are sometimes frustrated by this process, I can't say that shutting it out entirely for the rest of the playerbases is something I can agree on.
We're not going to get rid of usage-based rises. End of discussion.
This truly is the end of smogon isn't it? Civil unrest and unhappiness with the ranking system, It's only a matter of time before a revolution breaks out.....
| 56 | Amoonguss | 3.290%
>when UU is in shambles because Amoonguss rose but it's about to drop again
| 61 | Dhelmise | 3.159%
Anyone wanna bet that this thing will have about 3.42% usage when the "big" shifts happen again?
It insults me that Arcanine has more usage in UU than Moltres and Alolawak. Come on low-ladder scum, when a mon's defensive set is outclassed by Krookodile and Infernape then something's not right.
Looking forward to Mega Diancie dropping to UU. Scizor usage would prob raise to about 90% lol.
Guess RU has proven that Lycanroc-D can stay there after all, even with Aero there.jolteon for nu when
>when UU is in shambles because Amoonguss rose but it's about to drop again
| 61 | Dhelmise | 3.159%
Anyone wanna bet that this thing will have about 3.42% usage when the "big" shifts happen again?
It insults me that Arcanine has more usage in UU than Moltres and Alolawak. Come on low-ladder scum, when a mon's defensive set is outclassed by Krookodile and Infernape then something's not right.
Looking forward to Mega Diancie dropping to UU. Scizor usage would prob raise to about 90% lol.
Guess RU has proven that Lycanroc-D can stay there after all, even with Aero there.
UU is far from being in shambles.
So it looks like we have some rebellious people and controversy? This is why I made an account on the forums lmao. This is so much fun.
LOL yep, people think that Smogon can end tier rises all together. What insanity
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