Rejected Veto system

[Dorron]

I'm here to bring up once again this, even though we had a somehow similar thread a bit ago. I suck at writing so the post will be quite short, and whoever looks at this will know what I'm talking about.

I, and I'd say almost everybody, find the current usage-based tiering system to have very few flaws if any. It adjusts to bans and unbans of other Pokemon and it adapts to new meta trends easily. But due to their popularity out of the competitive scene, there are some unviable Pokemon that won't drop from their tiers as some players, generally unexperienced, still use them on ladder, which leads to the tier right under it not to recieve and use them. We all know the Ambipom and Hitmontop issues among others, and a lot of people agree on those Pokemon not belonging to the tiers they were in, so I'll propose a simple system:

If a Pokemon stays Unranked or at the lowest rank of the Viability Rankings of the tier for at least six months (could be any long) (it would apply for the next VR update after that time), it will drop to the tier below and won't be able to rise until it is ranked higher. This could be shortened to three months, modified in some way or ignored at the end of a generation, under the discretion of Tiering Council. Old gens wouldn't use this at first, but could be used as a reference in the future.

I think it is reasonable to give enough time to those new incorporations to a tier to make themselves a place in their new tier, but if they aren't even close to be viable, it is also reasonable to have them being usable in at least one tier.

edit: No, this wasn't meant to be applied for Gen 8 but Gen 9, but it could in case this is approved and Tiering Council deems it possible.

 

[Finchinator]

Speaking on behalf of just myself, not any council.

While I think the underlying concept can be good, application of this is likely to be arbitrary and abusable. Assigning that much official weight to something like the bottom end of viability rankings is not something we should entertain and it is inconsistent with the remainder of our tiering system. It is also not what the VR is intended for as it stands. Viability and usage are not synonymous.

Suddenly there is an added layer of importance and formality to the entire VR process and the dividends it may pay undermine the basis for our entire usage based tiering system to begin with. I’d love to hear other proposals just to see if something clever could provide an improvement from the status quo, but I don’t like what this specifically incentivizes personally.

 

[Vileman]

I agree that theres always those mons who as much as they see near to 0 tournament play and are considered by most "competent" players as unviable, i agree with finch on VR's not being the tool to measure that, for the issues he exposed. So, another way of going with this would be better.

Maybe as much as we can vote to ban mons in suspect tests, we could do something like suspect tests for mons to drop a tier?
Could be a vote from solely the council or also a community vote. Sounds more consistent with the current tiering system. Probably would also count for TC badge (some may argue there would be badge inflation though. . . )

And well, how to chose the mons? Community polls, council perspective, same stuff thats used to measure which mons are suspected to get banned rather than dropped.

Just my 2 cents bop

 

[Irpachuza]

Maybe as much as we can vote to ban mons in suspect tests, we could do something like suspect tests for mons to drop a tier?

Maybe lower tier councils can be entitled to request a suspect test on Pokemon with low usage on the directly superior tier, but not low enough to drop by themselves?

 

[R8]

Viability and usage are not synonymous.

I would argue that's a reason to involve viability rankings in the tiering system, which is by the way certainly not meant to keep Pokemon in tiers where they are used but unviable - stuff such as SM Jolteon or M-Banette are examples among many others.

Otherwise, if we exclude viability rankings of the metagame the Pokemon is stuck in, on what criterias would we decide to drop something off a tier? How else would we measure that a pokemon is "unviable enough" to drop in the tier below?

EDIT: Just want to add that i understand the concerns about adding a layer of arbitrary to the tiering system, but i struggle to understand how we could decide to drop a pokemon above the cut-off without taking an arbitrary decision by nature (maybe by using high-level tournament stats?)

 

[Aether]

(some may argue there would be badge inflation though. . . )

Just wanted to address this point and say that anybody who is a decent-to-good clicker and wants TC already has it. It is (in my opinion) the easiest badge to obtain, hence why there are currently 951* people with the badge compared to the next highest badge, Community Contributor, with 469* holders. Very few if anybody has really complained about it to my knowledge so this shouldn't really be a concern.
In my opinion, if there is a vote it should definitely be a community vote and not just one from the council because I think that a tiering council's ability to ban things without community input should be reserved for when things are very obviously broken at the beginning of new metagames.

*as of August 16th, 2022

 

[ABR]

Usage Based Tiering

ban things if you want but what you have access to is based on the tiers above you (OU and Ubers aside). that’s just the nature of the beast with lower tiers (good things but we should stay true to their definition)

vr is a fun side thing, keep it that way

thanks

 

[Fiend]

This seems pretty unnecessary. With a caveat of not really having lasting interests in any usage-based tiers for the last while, I don't love the idea of a veto addition to the system as general rule. I get this is meant to address something which is observable and tangible, though I'm not really sure these are issues that should be ironed out. There's also an inherent flaw with using VRs to achieve something like this. It is grossly misevaluating the relevancy of the resource (at least in current gen formats) and adds way more arbitrary changes than Jolteon/Hitmontop/whatever warrant in my eyes. Even if the Pokemon is not "good" there is obviously enough interest in using the Pokemon in that metagame which seems reason enough to keep them tiered as such.

 

[Lily]

So this has been brought up plenty of times over the years and there are a number of reasons it never goes through. I'll dissect a couple here:

1) Objectivity > subjectivity
This one's been touched on above already but essentially, VRs are realistically a completely subjective list that typically reflects the thinking of an "in-group" more than anything else. Usage is not subjective simply because of the scale of it. While some lower tiers don't get -that- much ladder activity, they still all average at least ~2000 ladder games every single day, which is plenty to make a sample size.

If you want a good example of this, here's the UU tier's top 5 most used Pokemon as of last month:

 Total battles: 125254
 Avg. weight/team: 0.021
 + ---- + ------------------ + --------- + ------ + ------- + ------ + ------- +
 | Rank | Pokemon            | Usage %   | Raw    | %       | Real   | %       |
 + ---- + ------------------ + --------- + ------ + ------- + ------ + ------- +
 | 1    | Salamence          | 27.70404% | 46461  | 18.547% | 35621  | 17.933% |
 | 2    | Scizor             | 24.01199% | 54937  | 21.930% | 43466  | 21.882% |
 | 3    | Excadrill          | 20.48419% | 39698  | 15.847% | 32301  | 16.261% |
 | 4    | Keldeo             | 19.83915% | 29953  | 11.957% | 22929  | 11.543% |
 | 5    | Celesteela         | 19.74252% | 33888  | 13.528% | 27102  | 13.644% |

All good mons no doubt, but these aren't at all reflective of what the VR would suggest. 2 of the current 3 S-rank Pokemon, Cobalion and Hippowdon, are entirely missing, and Excadrill is as far down as A- right now. While I don't want to discredit those who put effort into their viability rankings whatsoever, it's pretty clear that they are not necessarily reflective of a majority opinion. Raw data, on the other hand, very much is. This would also open up the door for malicious uses of the viability rankings. While I don't think this would actually happen since hosts are generally trusted users with good histories, it's still a possibility. Leaving everything up to objective statistics does not do this.

2) Restructuring of how we handle viability rankings
As you guys are aware, usage is handled on the first of every month by our wonderful Marty, and we have tier shifts every three months. If we were to include viability rankings in these usage-based tier shifts, we would need to synchronise the viability ranking updates with these updates, which is undesirable as lower tiers are constantly shifting and the metagames change week by week. On top of that, there would need to be significantly more vetting in the viability rankings process; while as of right now tiers can pretty much add whoever they want to their viability rankers, there would need to be things like behavioural/competence checks in this scenario similar to tiering council members since this is effectively a tier leader-lite position. We'd also likely need to standardise a formula for VRs that every tier has to abide by in addition to adding very clear-cut definitions to the ranks, which is something that nobody has ever been able to agree on.

---

In general, Smogon's tiering process is built on bringing as much objectivity as we physically can into the ruleset. Nothing is ever gonna be perfect. That's just kinda the nature of any system, really; none is ever flawless, and we have to accept that. For the record, as far as I can tell, the cases of the fan favourite mons getting trapped in tiers they don't belong in seem to becoming few and far between - a quick glance at every lower tier's VR shows that there is not a single D-rank across the board, implying to me that every Pokemon found within a usage-based tier is viable within it. While you may not feel they're viable enough to retain the title, that's unfortunately kinda semantic. These resources are really just a teambuilding aid rather than something that a tier should be built around.

So yea in short what ABR/Finch said sums this up. It'll likely be debated to the end of time, but as an official stance, there are no plans to implement a veto system of any kind into the tiering process. We're open to other suggestions, of course; if you've got any, feel free to pm me/put them in a new thread.