I just wanted to address the fact that I don't plan on participating if you guys are gonna ban every random thing. Of course, you're allowed to construct your ~ideal~ metagame based on whatever the opinions of the few people running this are, but I believe you should not ban things unless they're absolutely broken. "Broken" is a consistently misused and misinterpreted term; no one knows exactly what defines broken, and the people that spout it off constantly are generally selfish people whose teams cannot deal with x or y Pokemon or they outright just don't like something. If you ever read a suspect discussion on Smogon, you'll understand that it's primarily lead by people that feel they are incredibly important and have an issue adapting to new Pokemon, and that their opinion is the only way through.
Part of the reason why BW OU was so miserable is because everyone kept trying to fit it into the same kind of build as DP, rather than accepting the fact that it's a completely different metagame. People don't realize that, y'know, even if we have auto-weather in OU and insanely fast and strong Pokemon, we can't magically transform it into a balance-laden meta with all sorts of possibilities etc. We can't ban Excadrill and expect everything to be hunky-dory or exactly what you expect. The enormous banlist was a result of a few people having overblown egos and "OH GOD THE THINGS I WANT TO USE JUST CAN'T HANDLE THIS". Newsflash; the things you want to use clearly aren't viable, then. It's not like VGC (or older metagames, remember how they only banned completely unstoppable things like RBY Mewtwo?) has ever struggled as a result.
We should only be banning inherently broken mechanics, and I adhere to this (notice how nothing is banned in NU anymore; Jynx wasn't broken and still isn't). As an example, Moody is an inherently broken mechanic; nothing can stop a Pokemon with Moody given enough boosts or extremely small chances. Moody is broken, Blaziken is not.
No. Just no. The problem is that Uber often bans SUPER EFFECTIVE as if it's BROKEN. Sorry, but I think nothing should be banned unless it absolutely has to be; I want to respect the intent of Game Freak too, because long drawn out battles really suck as much as short ones where you get slaughtered, or do the slaughtering.
I'm so for this. Anything to undermine Smogon's tiers is OK in my book. I feel like we deprive ourselves of what GF intended by overbanning things, and that smogon's tier system is WAY TOO HEAVY on the top and bottom. Seriously, look at Ubers and NU, they're the largest tiers.
I agree with the general intent of the first post (bar the latter bit because I don't know what you're saying at all and also the first part because the Uber tier does not ban anything) and disagree vehemently with the abysmal understanding going on in the second. Why does undermining Smogon's tiering mean anything? "WAY TOO HEAVY" means absolutely nothing in context, because you can use literally any Pokemon in the entire game in Ubers. The list of Pokemon only usable there (it's a banlist, not even necessarily considered a tier) means little, since a lot of the most popular Pokemon in that metagame are OU, even. NU is also large because we can't reasonably develop another tier and have a decent playerbase for both. Also, PU would likely be incredibly variant and uncompetitive because of the nature of using nothing but ****** mons.
anyway tl;dr I'm not participating if you guys plan on banning everything.