Hey, I have a proposal.
So I was talking to
bdov the other day, discussing the noms she posted earlier. In particular, we were discussing the prospect of Xerneas to A+, and I thought of something that would be pretty helpful and would help with a lot of other issues the VR council is having. Anyway, the proposal is to use the ranking system within the subranks themselves instead of having the Pokemon ordered alphabetically. What I mean is to make it like the
Ubers VR thread, which seems to work quite well because it gives a clear indication of which Pokemon is better than another even if they are the same rank. Ubers is a very similar metagame to AG (furthermore, Ubers is an official metagame, it their VR generally updates more frequently) and thus I believe this proposal makes a lot of sense.
Now mostly what I was discussing with bdov was whether Xerneas should go to A+. I didn't agree with it raising to A+, because I didn't believe it was on par with Primal Groudon and Necrozma-DM, but I thought it was better than the rest of A (at the very least, Yveltal, Arceus-Ground, and arguably Marshadow and Ultra Necrozma). This made me think of the ranking system, in which Xerneas would be at the top of A, not good enough for A+ but eclipsing most of A. Just for fun, my ideal A rank would be Xerneas, Arceus-Fairy, Ultra Necrozma, Marshadow, Ho-Oh, Arceus-Ground, Yveltal. This way, nothing actually moves subranks, but readers can see which Pokemon is better than another. The VR doesn't update enough to where I believe this would be effective (OU rejected the idea because the meta adapts way too much where it would troublesome to keep changing the positions of Pokemon within subranks).
This also solves the issue of the Yveltal to A-. Personally, I think Yveltal is threatening enough to stay out of A-, but it's still worse than all of A, so it can sit at the bottom of A.
I know that this will be quite troublesome to start up, but after that, I think it will be fine because most Pokemon are not going to move all that drastically. There are only 51 Pokemon (if i counted right) in the VR excluding D rank (which I don't think is important enough to rank within). That's not very much to rank, and a lot of the Pokemon will be pretty easy to sort through if they're in small ranks.
The reason I want this to happen is because too often the VR council has split 50/50 decisions on things (just use the above slate as an example, they went 50/50 on 4/16 noms, which is a quarter of the noms. People being split on whether a Pokemon should be one subrank or another shows that said Pokemon is probably teetering on the edge of the two subranks, and a good solution to this is to make that Pokemon either the bottom or top of a respective rank to show that they are close to another rank without actually being that rank. Because right now, readers looking at the VR might look at A rank and say "oh, Ultra Necrozma and Yveltal are of the same viability", which (at least in my opinion) isn't true. Other discrepancies in other ranks (imo) include:
- Lunala and Arceus-Poison being much better than Celesteela/Arceus-Rock
- Chansey, Excadrill, and Lugia being much better than Arceus-Ghost and Gothitelle (goth is a bit hard to rank because it's so weird)
- Arceus-Grass and base Kyogre being much better than Shuckle, Deo-A, Deo-S, and MMX
and more.
While some of these can be solved by moving Pokemon up or down a rank, these Pokemon currently reside within the same rank and thus are given the same weighting by most readers, especially if they aren't caught up with the meta or experienced.
In conclusion, I think the positives of a ranking system within subranks instead of an alphabetical system will outweigh the negatives of such a system.
tldr: rank stuff within subranks instead of alphabetically, solves issues with council voting, solves issues with pokemon of the same rank being better than others, solves issues of mons teetering on the edge of dropping/rising
Thanks for reading!