Different Metagames and battling revival stuff

How about this?

- Launch the suspect ladder and keep it up for around two weeks.
- Make a discussion thread about it (I'm not sure if this will be active enough but it's worth a try).
- Make a nomination thread for...nominating what to ban. Anyone can nominate. Or we could just ask in the discussion thread about what's overpowered and go from there.
- Post in the discussion thread that everyone will send votes to me or someone else via PM. Only people who have posted at least once (or more idk) in the thread will have their votes counted. This is so that we don't have complete randoms voting. Then I'll announce the votes in the discussion thread (or separate thread, announcement, whatever). Or we could use the suspect voting function on the server, but I have no idea how that works.

I'm with Karpman here. We're too small to do reqs. Also, it's not even necessary: don't we already know who among us is good and shouldn't we be able to trust all of our regs without needing some arbitrary req formula?

Anyway, I don't like voting at all. One thing that has always annoyed me about votes is that the minority is almost always obnoxious about being outvoted and how dumb the other side is etc. Seriously, look at basically any discussion about Pokemon tiers we've ever had. It happens every single time. Every. Single. Time. And I think it is caused by the fact that the voting system itself provides an incentive to try to beat your view into someone else's head instead of actually *le gaspe* listening to what they might have to say.

Instead of voting, why don't we just come to a consensus as a community? I know there will be controversial Pokemon, but we're small enough that I think this is within reach. And if people are stubborn and unwilling to compromise (I'd like to this this won't happen), we can always just hold a vote. The only potential problem I see is a potential bandwagon effect, but it's not like this doesn't happen with any other system anyway.

Basically, I like Wolf's idea only we cut out the voting in favor of a more cooperative discussion and eventual collective decision.

Randomly select 70 fully evolved non-legendaries in BW. Add Dream World abilities. That will be our metagame.

On a more serious note, I personally want to stick with BW NU. It's taken me this long to understand its threats and whatnot. xP

So, would everyone like to start with an existing metagame or create our own right now? I would rather go ahead and launch our metagame, just because I'm quite excited for it.

Edit: Or start with all of them at once.

Well, as i've told Anti, I am SO down to give this a try! While i don't really understand the tiers to begin with, being here for the creation of this one should really help me understand it better.

As it stands, im the newbie to ALL of this, not only PC, but to competitive battling altogether. So be easy on me! LOLOL

I would rather launch our own metagame now to tbqh.

Im excited to play it which is more than i can say about anything Pokemon related in along time. Its also fresh (key word, it will CONSTANTLY have something for people to engage in) and more current than past metagames see: DP OU and RSE OU and the sooner we get the first round under way the better imo at least test wise. RSE OU and DP OU can always be introduced at a later time as they are already pretty much established. So far alot of people, including myself have the same sentiments as this;


(23:06) Team Garchomp: i really want to play our metagame
(23:06) Team Garchomp: might make me want to battle again

So a few questions for people

1.What would everyone rather do, our own Ou to start with another current/past metagame to become our official one ?

2. PC's metagame, we discussed it a little on the server the other day. Basically the ideas and what people like so far are

• Release ALL DW abilities
• Release Keldeo, Genesect and Meloetta
• Release all Berries and Items (SEE: Soul Dew)
• Unban EVERYTHING with base 600 BST and under (Deoxys, Deoxys-A, Deoxys-N, Darkrai, Garchomp, Manaphy, Shaymin-S, Thundurus, Excadrill, Garchomp, Blaziken OU essentially)
• Make Drizzle and Swift Swim legal on the same team.
• If SS + Drizzle prove to be overpowered again make one ss mon + drizzle legal on the same team
• If this is still found to be broken, have it how it is now.
• If something is broken as hell and people dont want it in the tier quick banning will be implemented.
• Rounds that last for a period of time via ladder
• Community consensus on mons/bans/decision. Though Test process still needs to be discussed fully. I am partial to votes as it seems less able to pressure someone out of a decision than a consensus would but as said this is what you guys want.

None of this is set in stone so please input your ideas. What would you like to see happen after all it is our metagame ?

Personally, I am in favor of just choosing an old meta now to play while we work out how this new one is going to work. That way we can get the best of both worlds sorta. Also, it gives variety to people who for whatever reason may not like one of the two. I have no idea how we would choose an old meta though.

To be honest, I feel like votes make peer pressure more likely to happen. Just look at the various votes and debates about them and note the immense polarization and "I have to call everything who disagrees with me an idiot" that goes on. At the very least, I don't see it being any worse. I feel like having an incentive to make people agree with each other rather than to "win the argument" is a much better formula. For once, we can use our small size to our advantage.

Anyway, I feel like we should just have all DW stuff released to that new releases aren't a source of instability. I just don't see why not.

On the note of Aldaron's proposal (no SwiftSwim + Drizzle), I am just against complex bans in general unless there is a really good reason for them. I honestly question whether we can have a balanced metagame of any kind with three extremely viable weather options and I feel like tinkering with everything is only going to repeat what has made BW OU so unfortunate. Though I doubt this point will be without controversy.

Just want to point out that Soul Dew effectively makes Lati@s well above 600 BST and I really wonder if this is a little much. Though maybe it isn't.

For the testing process, who says we need one at all? Why don't we just have a topic where people can bring up Pokemon to be discussed as a suspect Pokemon? And if there is enough support for "this poke is trouble," we could open a discussion thread specific to the suspect(s) and eventually attempt to reach a consensus? I feel like an official test of something is too bureaucratic and doesn't actually accomplish anything that us gathering impressions from battling each other as we normally would wouldn't already accomplish.

I know I don't go on the PokeCommunity server all that much, but a tier with only Pokemon <insert region here> would be pretty cool. Kind of like Singles version of VGC 11.

A tier that I made in the Nuzlocke Forum had some sucess but only lasted for about a week was a 300 BST tier, which was essencially a Level 100 Version of Little Cup. After about 3 days we rose it to about 350 BST and there were many teams based off of Weather (Vulpix + Bellpsrout, Snover Stall and Hipopotas Stall / Sandshrew offense).

One tier that I tried to make work in the Pokemon Online server was a Level 30 cup, where stuff that cannot be obtained at Level 30 was banned. Stuff like Dragonite, Excadrill, Reuniclus, ect. were banned while we had juggernauts like Alakazam, Breloom, Scizor, Gliscor, ect.

I would like our metagame to be:

- BW OU (AKA standard play)
- BUT includes everything that's unreleased (Keldeo, Meloetta, Genesect, Dream World abilities, stat boosting berries, Soul Dew, etc.)
- BUT unban all current Uber Pokémon that has 600 BST or less. If we change our BST limit to anything higher, you get Pokémon with ridiculous stats such as Kyogre and Mewtwo. We can always choose to unban certain Ubers later such as Lugia if we ever believe they should be given a chance. This would mean our initial ban list would be: Arceus, Dialga, Giratina, Giratina-O, Groudon, Ho-Oh, Kyogre, Lugia, Mewtwo, Palkia, Rayquaza, Reshiram, Zekrom. Anything else will be free to use.
--- Drizzle + Swift Swim ban will be removed (for now?).
--- Another possibility is if we unban everything, and make an attempt at a balanced "Uber metagame." However, this would be very restricting (even more than BW OU), because teams would have check incredibly powerful Pokémon. Not to mention it would be more difficult to use lesser known Pokémon (excluding stuff like Parasect and Shedinja that have niche roles in Ubers), and thus less diversity.

(What Elf wants basically. Any objections to this? If not, we can go ahead and set up the ladder.)

Basically what Smogon did at the beginning of BW OU (unbanning mostly everything), which should be even better for us because we won't take as long to ban something hopefully. So yeah, I agree with Elf and Anti. However, I would rather start with our metagame now, since it will most likely overshadow other tiers considering it's a brand new metagame. I'm also fine with coming to a community agreement for bans, but if that doesn't work we can switch to voting. I'm against complex bans as well, and I feel like we should ban the source of the problem. I don't want a long list of complex bans just for the sake of diversity, but we can get to that later when PC OU is up and running. Regarding Soul Dew, I'm 99% sure we will end up banning it, but it's worth a try anyway lol.

Anti said:

For the testing process, who says we need one at all? Why don't we just have a topic where people can bring up Pokemon to be discussed as a suspect Pokemon? And if there is enough support for "this poke is trouble," we could open a discussion thread specific to the suspect(s) and eventually attempt to reach a consensus? I feel like an official test of something is too bureaucratic and doesn't actually accomplish anything that us gathering impressions from battling each other as we normally would wouldn't already accomplish.

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I agree with this as well. We should just have a suspect ladder and a discussion thread, and we'll just ban whatever whenever everyone comes to an agreement in said discussion thread. One question though: should we have a single discussion thread, or remake it after every major ban for organization like Smogon?


Also, I wouldn't like a gimmicky tier as PC OU. We should probably keep it as close as possible to standard play (or future standard play, in Dream World's case), but not a complete carbon copy of BW OU either. We can always make a random tier like what tj and chaos suggested just for fun, but not as a serious business tier.

I'm pretty sure everyone's fine with the idea of our own tier. I doubt that even the beginning phases of it will be a problem as we know that we can control whatever's giving us the most problems and that we can control what pokes get out of hand and throw back in pokes that have hard counters in the changing metagames. The best way to get the metagame more balanced is to actually set it in motion.

The only two problems I have with this is the "complex ban" issue and the possibility that we rip Pandora's Box in half by not even having an Ubers metagame in the beginning.

Complex bans, I feel, are entirely justifiable when you have a real problem in the metagame but an awkward situation in trying to get rid of it. Swift Swim + Drizzle was awkward because you couldn't just ban Drizzle with all the other weather out there. Drought and Sand Stream were just as abusable so would you ban those as well since Drizzle couldn't rival them anymore?

Then there are even problems were the source isn't even that clear. Blaze Blaziken was banned because of Speed Boost, is that fair? Blaziken was never overpowered but Speed Boost took over as the only Blaziken set to run. It's even argued now that they should just ban Speed Boost + Blaziken and not Blaziken in general because now that poke is set in a tier that you can't waver from that standard Speed Boost set. I mean, I don't really care that much about Blaziken, but it does essentially split his abilities down the line into two entirely different tiers, almost like you're making two different pokes which would bring fresh content into the metagame while keeping out the broken side.

Starting with all Ubers unbanned would be silly. We already have most of them pegged as broken as hell so if we want to start with Ubers unbanned, let's start by banning the unquestionable ones. Arceus, Groudon, Kyogre, Reshiram, Mewtwo, etc. Especially considering the small group of players that would be playing them, most of these pokes would get pitted against each other slowly but surely, us banning each broken poke one by one until we eventually end up with something almost exactly like what we have now only by taking a million steps to get there. It just seems redundant to me.