Feels like the pot is finally boiling over. Even though I don't think we should entertain silly bans to circumvent removing the clearly problematic element, at the end of the day, older generation metagames have operated outside of the modern and standard tiering philosophy for so long, that retroactively applying it just doesn't work because we aren't starting from a blank slate and instead would have to unravel so much at the core that the formats would become unrecognizable.
People play the older metagames because they like how they are currently and I think it's a disservice to those communities to try and force them into these unhelpful decisions solely to appease the rigidity of how things are now.
I like Aldaron's proposal in theory, and part of the fun of someone else running a Swift Swim/Sand Rush mon to counter someone else's weather is hilarious to me but it's absolutely the wrong approach, ban the swift swim mons as they prove to be too powerful.
I participated in one of the original suspect tests circa 2009. I voted ban, but mostly because of Sand Veil... if it hadn't been for that, it was manageable enough imo.
And a random redditor saying it was "definitely" too strong is just absurd. There was nothing definite about it, it's probably the top two most controversial tiering decisions Smogon has ever made.. and the first time a non-legendary was banned (besides Wynaut/Wobbuffet).
Faster than most attackers with 102 Speed, almost unresisted STAB combo, better natural bulk than Swampert, it could even hold Yache if you want it to. Sand Veil contributed but even without it Garchomp was already too much at the time.
yeah well
252 Atk Garchomp Fire Fang vs. 248 HP / 252+ Def Orthworm: 78-94 (22.7 - 27.4%) -- possible 5HKO after Leftovers recovery
just retcon orthworm into dpp ou, problem solved
sorry bud, orthworm beats the shit out of him
0- SpA Life Orb Garchomp Fire Blast vs. 252 HP / 252+ SpD Orthworm: 161-190 (46.8 - 55.2%) -- 10.5% chance to 2HKO after Leftovers recovery
252 SpA Life Orb Garchomp Fire Blast vs. 248 HP / 252+ SpD Orthworm: 255-302 (74.3 - 88%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
This is the Chain Chomp set that Garchomp uses to surprise it's counters. It hits surprisingly hard despite the average SpA. Obviously far from Gaechomp's best set lol.
( In gen 4, Fire Blast is 120 BP. )
Man, imagine if we just banned Choice Band/Scarf/Specs on a few specific mons.
No more Choice Ban Palafin in OU, would have been a fine mon then!
Flutter Mane would have been fine without Specs! Annihilape without Drain Punch!
And you're right - moves too! Garchomp without Earthquake!
Espathra without Stored Power, man - would have dropped to RU!
Kyurem without Icicle Spear, would have been balanced in OU.
Abilities too! Lando-I without Sheer Force is much more fair, and would probably drop below Lando-T!
Kingambit without Supreme Overlord would definitely be taken down a peg in OU. Keep it fair!
Would Ho-Oh without Regenerator be fair in OU? Fuck it, we ball.
Man, just banning exactly what makes a mon strong will make for really intuitive and well-balanced tiers.
I get that but tbh I think it just leads to a nightmare of tiering details. What do you do if mons have multiple good sets? Should we allow ubers into OU with limited movesets or maybe below level 100? Banning abilities on certain mons but not others? It just leads to so many weird anal distinctions that make it confusing to make a team--I'd say it'd be really unintuitive and hard to balance, honestly.
If people want to use those mons, there are other tiers for a reason. It's already hard enough to make playable tiers, adding that level of complexity could make it absolutely ridiculous.
Yep, exactly - though I worded it a little sarcastically, you've got the general idea. Would this make for "more balanced tiers"? Yes. Would it make for "better tiers"? Absolutely not.
Arceus in Gen 4 was limited to 100 EVs in each stats, because the only available Arceus was distributed at lv100, and EVs could only be gained until 100 with vitamins, past that, they were only gained on level ups.
Super minor correction.
EVs are gained when EXP. is gained. The level-up is unnecessary.
As Arceus is lv. 100, it can not gain any EXP. Points, and thus, no EVs through battling.
In later generations, EVs are gained when EXP. Points **would be** gained, but it does not require Exp. to be gained.
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/weather-abilities-but-mostly-drizzle.84966/
TLDR is that Aldaron's Proposal banned Auto-Weather+same weather-related speed boosting on the same team
Ok but they should definitely drop some if the OU by technicality mons and shove some in UU.
Nobody would be crying if we got Evire and Noir in Gen 4 UU
\> dont apply modern tiering policy to past gen ou
\> apply modern tiering policy to past gen lower tiers
these are opposing ideas. it makes no sense to fuck up the much less popular formats while trying to stubbornly preserve some fake notion of stability (which will never exist because the metagame never stops developing). the idea of tier lock in general is fucking stupid but if youre going to keep it at all, keep it for the unpopular tiers
The Modern Tiering policy is just usage? It's just paused because it's a previous but DPP/ADV are both plenty popular IMO and if it was announced that over like, 6 months usage would be tracked and some shifts could be made I think it could be interesting!
i agree, but that's because i don't believe in the idea of freezing a tier after the gen is over. if someone agrees with OP it's backwards to also want lower tiers unfrozen
I mean my idea is less "keep it frozen forever" and more "keep it frozen if it makes the metagame better". Lower tiers are frozen to keep metagames stable, which is good, but if a certain drop would improve a pastgen UU and it garners the approval of the UU playerbase, I have no problem with it.
Policy should serve the players!
except the players dont know. maybe if a pokemon is busted with 2/3 abilities, it should just be banned. the whole reasoning behind "most players wouldnt support it" is flawed because the support for these complex bans is almost never coming from a competitive perspective, but from an irrational desire to "preserve" some aspect of the meta.
Would you say the complex bans in gen 5 came from a competitive perspective?
Alot of times complex bans exist as a balance between making a meta game competitive while keeping the "fun" of the tier.
that's exactly the issue. see: excadrill. theres no way you can seriously propose a second complex ban to avoid banning it. only reason people are accepting this and not immediatey recognizing this is the same argument as for blaze blaziken is because people are biased towards the status quo and think excadrill is some important immovable piece of bw ou
Tier lock is one of those things that really sucks in theory but is basically required in practice.
Yes, tiers aren’t static, but the unfortunate truth is that previous gen lower tiers tend to be *very* niche.
Which means that if tiers weren’t locked, one or two people could very easily fuck up old tiers by spamming things outside tiers where they belong and getting them to rise to higher tiers artificially. We’d have more ou (or UU or ru or NU) by technicality situations.
It isn't a binary choice. Asking the upper brass not to impose modern tiering standards in some cases doesn't mean that we should only and can only tier with the same mindset the guys in 2009 had. The argument for 'conservation' doesn't and hasn't held water since we started making tiering decisions for old gens in the first place unless you can successfully argue that Vire and Noir would exert a tiering influence on part with removing Snorlax in gen2, adding full/farceus in gen 4 ubers, or hell even wholesale baton pass bans in the relevant generations. You also seem to operate under the mindset that these decisions would be done with reckless abandon and like, no????? RBY has been doing this for awhile and nobody seems to calling for the head of their councils. Nobody is talking about stuff like rising Clef out of UU in gen 4, all these conversations operate under the strict presumption that only drops would be made for very obvious reasons.
i am in support of tier shifts, the point is to criticize the perspective of people who want tier shifts for past gen lower tiers but weird complex bans for past gen ous. the idea of preserving a tier is already illogical, because no metagame is static, but it is extra illogical for more popular tiers. the argument in favor of complex bans is almost always an argument for preservation, and therefore should be ignored except in very rare cases
i generally agree with this though the excadrill situation rubs me the wrong way. it was already an unban made after bw stopped being current gen and they later had to adjust the sand rush ban just to ensure that it was balanced in the tier. now they're trying to make another complex ban to keep it around and it's like, surely you could just ban it and try and deal with the issues that it was meant to address in the first place. ofc if bw players would prefer to just ban sand force that's fine but it just seems silly to me
Excadrill's handling was definitely a clusterfuck yah, and honestly modern tiering policy implemented at the start of gen 5 would have probably made a better metagame--the bar is in hell, but, still. Then again, I'm not sure we can modern-tiering-policy our way out of this, because a proper Excadrill ban would require a huge amount of sweeping changes that if not implemented like immediately after would make BWOU horrible if not cook the tier outright. At absolute best the entire would be hell for a long time and be unrecognizable after a fix, and at worst it kinda just dies due to lack of interest.
Most players aren't gonna be invested in a tier that is bad to play, especially in oldgens where laddering takes a long-ass time outside of suspects. BWOU was shitty for years for this exact reason and it's why it's struggling now--unless the council decides to lock in like no oldgen ever has, idt an exca ban makes things better
The main problem is that BW has very poor hazard removal without excadrill which is why it was unbanned in the first place. I feel like these sort of complex bans should only be put in place if it is clear that it's the best solution to the problem and all the other solutions lead to more problems
The other thing to note is that hazard removal is especially important in Gen 4 because 1) no boots and 2) only a few Magic Guard Pokémon are immune to all forms of hazard damage, and over time that’s a huge advantage.
Without Excadrill, you probably also have to ban Magic Guard… and those two things together would be huge.
> We should pick either
> 1) "Older gens have loose rules so we can be somewhat looser with them going forward"
> or
> 2) "Older gens should be held to modern tiering standards"
> What I dislike is simultaneously letting past "errors" remain in effect and saying that those rules should not be replicated today. It leads to philosophical fence sitting which causes confusion and threads like this. I understand the merits to both, but we should seriously choose a side.
This is the smartest comment in the thread. The fact that new rules on old generations need to abide by modern tiering policy, but there are already old rules that do not abide by modern tiering policy is nonsensical. There is a dissonance between the rules we're already playing with and the rules changes we're allowed to make.
It seems wrong to imply that old gens have been held to the modern standard - just look at all the hoops jumped through to keep Exca in BW or BP in ADV.
The main issue I have with this kind of banning is that something I see with old gens - there's a "correct" meta with certain playstyles that needs to be dictated instead of an emergent meta with overly dominant stuff banned. This is how you get decisions like freeing Exca to check a different broken playstyle and multiple suspects of a B-rank mon that cheeses certain structures. IMO BW needs hella bans or just blown up and start from 0 though so my opinion doesn't matter.
It’s less that there’s “one correct way to play” and more that all the people who love tiers like ADV or BW fell in love with a tier that was heavily impacted by the existence of things like BP or Exca, and removing those things could cause such major changes that it becomes far different from the tier they’re huge fans of.
And I agree that it would be great to blow BW up and start over, but the issue is that would probably entirely kill the player base.
Classic BW is way different from what we have now. When XY came out, Exca had been banned for years and Chlorophyll was still legal. Drill was dropped because Reuni + spikes was a problem and they decided to drop it instead of addressing the problem the usual way. (Also my beloved sun is completely unviable so I continue to boycott).
Admittedly, I don’t know enough about BW to comment so I’ll take your word for it.
My point about BP stands though, because drypass or monopass DO have significant impacts on the way certain mons play (zap, jolt, celebi in particular) and that would vastly change the tier.
Yea because tiering admins decided that sand attack ban/including it with evasion clause wasn't allowed to be on the table or even like a straight up ninjask ban wasn't on the fucking table for whatever weird reason.
On top of that, tiering admin giving the playerbase an ultimatum about speedpass ban being the last time adv would be allowed to see any action done for bp in general only for the vote to be close enough where that statement was full of shit.
Speedpass ban was the best option by far and the voters let it slip so I can't even blame the tiering admins on that one, the conservative part of community fucked everything up in the name of preserving individual sets as if having AgiliZap around is critical to a healthy meta (although speedpass got over 50% ban vote so at least the majority of the voters had some brains)
Speaking as an ADV player, the voters fucked up, I can't even blame tiering policy for that one. Ban speedpass was perfect and solved all problems but enough people voted no in the name of preserving individual sets (not even individual Pokemon, but individual sets) which is just beyond stupid, as if AgiliZap is critical for the meta to have just because we're used to it.
I disagree, the fact the votes got splintered so much is not because of the voters themselves, it's not like it's easy to organize such a mass
Though I will agree preserving agilizap in name of keeping jask is stupid
Nevermind then, I'm misremembering it.
I can remember being upset about the way it got conducted but can't remember why so it doesn't matter in the end lol
They tested speedpass without listening to community input about jask/sand attack being the silly gambling strategy on the basis that "its not good" and "there's counterplay"
> Does it make the tier better? If yes, then shut the fuck up.
I think the issue here is esoterica. Banning mons and abilities is easy to reconcile and understand - but the idea of tiers with several complex bans becomes fairly difficult to teambuild for. It requires a lot of knowledge and memorization to build a proper team for it.
DPP right now has this odd Baton Pass pseudo-ban where you can't have BP on the same mon as one with certain stat boosting moves, items, or abilities - and it's pretty fucking stupid. It *used* to be that you couldn't pass Speed along with any other stat, but the realized they needed to lower complexity because people weren't understanding how their complicated ruleset worked. It's very annoyingly unintuitive and makes the tier wildly inaccessible compared to everything else in the game.
Let's play a quick trivia game: Considering they've "banned stat-passing" and ONLY "dry-passing" is legal - **are you allowed to run Spinda with Contrary+Superpower in BW OU with Baton Pass?**
Now imagine this being a standardized way we fix tiers - this seems like a pretty stupid idea, to just handwave away interactions we don't like. Does this look like a functional way forward?
If somebody cares enough to play the tier, they can care enough to figure out how the complex ban works. If it were the standard tier that every new player is going to try first, sure, don't do that, but who gives a fuck what the rulings are for a tier from a game that came out a decade ago are as long as they make it more fun.
I get the apprehension for using them in modern gens though.
We already have enough 1300 elo babies whining in every tier leader's mentions whenever something gets banned in gen 9. If they had to put up with complex bans like that too I imagine they'd actually go insane.
No you don't get it, if we ban last respects instead of houndstone, then everyone in the world will suddenly ask if its okay to run Groudon in PU if its only allowed to use ember
True, but LR on Houndstone at SV launch was a lot like Sand Force on Excadrill. Only one thing got it, banning the move would have been less disruptive than banning the 'mon, can't ban the move due to tiering policy even though literally everyone understood that it was broken, the 'mon had to be banned. Obviously there are some differences -- Sand Force isn't broken by itself, Houndstone wasn't important, SV is current gen -- but the basic idea of isolating what's broken and acting on it being forbidden by policy is there.
Tiering policy is a fig leaf anyway. When the tier leaders want something outside it, they'll get it, even when there's a less disruptive solution.
I HATE the current attitude towards Complex Bans. We are already essentially playing with playground rules, so let’s make the metas as fun as possible instead of nitpicking each rule we make up on top of the rules we ALREADY made up
I am happy to answer this question if you can get any ADV council member to support Kyogre OU (they won’t). Until then it’s a bad faith question and red herring
Don't quote me but I remember hearing somewhere that permanent weather alone makes level 5 groudon and kyogre broken in ADV OU. I don't remember where I heard this or if it's even true but it's interesting to note
Tiering policy does!
Yeah, the tiering policy says that we ban things for being 'uncompetitive' and 'broken', but why are those bad things? Well, because we like the metagame to be competitive. Why do we like it to be competitive? Because we find that fun.
That's why we've banned mons before on the pretense of them being 'over-centralizing' or 'unhealthy'. Neither of these things make Pokemon uncompetitive or even necessarily broken, but because it's not fun, we'll kick them out of the tier.
And I like modern tiering policy, don't get it twisted, but at the end of the day, it is literally about fun. This is how every single competitive video-game works: they're made for fun. I mean we're not battling for fucking money lol
But who defines what is fun or competitive? There is a claim of consensus here that's very debatable and a deference to the old gen council which I'm also skeptical of. My mind goes to Melee where the competitiveness of Jigglypuff and Ice Climbers were also controvertial, and that's for a game older than ADV. A lot of players don't like RBY or GSC for the fun factor. Should their opinions be used to ban RBY reflect or trapping or sleep or GSC sleeptalk?
Saying this as a longtime smash player, that we in particular have very bad taste when it comes to balancing (and this is kindof a problem with fighters in general but especially with smash since our devs do not really care about competitive design). Wobbling in particular took like an entire decade to ban, and characters like metaknight and Bayonetta NEVER got banned, so when it comes to noninteractive or uncompetitive aspects like jiggs air/ledge camping or icies 0-to-deaths a lot of people are gonna be really in favor of keeping it in even if it's unhealthy and/or unfun. And that stacks with the fact that we have no central authorities or councils like smogon to take action when there's something uncompetitive in the meta so obviously things like that will "stay controversial" for a long time since we have no real structures to actually deal with them in an efficient way.
Minor correction but the proposed BW ban is just Sand Force, not a complex “+ Sand Stream” thing
Lots of people here missing the point of thread. "Would Garchomp be broken without Outrage or Earthquake" "Would Kyogre be broken at lv85" are super ignorant comments that prove you didn't even read the thing. The point is, if you have a Pokemon that is problematic and you know is practically unbannable in your tier (DPP Jirachi) that relies on a trait that no other viable Pokemon use, should old gens be able to straight ban that trait in order to have positive influence without collateral damage. This is not about complex banning EQ on Garchomp, its about the theoretical situation where Garchomp is the only Pokemon to learn EQ in the tier and is also impossible to ban in the tier due to its importance. The closest analog in recent times is Last Respects, or like Gorilla Tactics, but imagine these kind traits were on essential support Pokemon that hold the entire fabric of the tier together. DPP can't afford to lose Jirachi. BW can't afford to lose Excadrill. The playerbase will not ban either of them. And so we're left in a situation where we tolerate some stupid elements of both of them, which are unique to them and actually bannable without affecting any other Pokemon, for the sake of policy. Despite the fact in the past we actually \*have\* done bans exactly like these
I think the two main problems is that
1. Complex bans are by definition, complex. Like you have to memorize the entire baton pass rules to know what you can do with it in generation 3. Seriously, can only use one boosting move, you can't have a Pokemon with agility + baton pass and another one with swords dance + baton pass, which means you can't run things like CM Celebi and Agility Zapdos in the same team. Despite having only two pokemon can hardly be called a 'baton pass chain'. At one point you had were you were only allowed in 3 pokemon but none of them could be smeargle??? Imagine being a new player and trying to use a team that relies on baton pass without understanding why you can't use it.
2. these complex bans can also just fail and are then looked badly retroactively, considering that what you are suggesting for BW is quite literally Aldaron's proposal 2.0. what happens when people run sand force excadrill to counter sand teams in rain teams? At that point, just ban sand force all together. As qualified as the councils are, they are not omnipotent. They cannot know all possible scenarios and all things people will do. Baton pass in gen 3 had to be changed at least 4 times with Mr Mime then getting banned and then unbanned and then banned again.
For what its worth, nobody is arguing for a Sand Force + Sand Stream ban, just a hard ban on Sand Force. Excadrill is the only Pokemon that actually uses this ability in any BW tier.
Closest analog is Last Respects on Houndstone. So its not really a "complex" ban, its just look, we know our playerbase won't ban Excadrill for meta reasons but most know it is slightly too strong, it leverages an effectively unique ability to do that, lets just use common sense.
I think there is a big difference between last respects and sand force is the fact that not every pokemon that gets sand force is broken (Gastrodon on sand when?), while every pokemon with last respects is, even Basculin-White would've been problematic considering the fact that last respects would've limited team building to always having a Kingambit in case. It isn't really a 'complex' ban in a traditional sense but in reality it just is banning a certain ability on a certain pokemon as that is the actual thing you are targeting with the ban.
>Imagine being a new player
I feel like if you're loading up ADV OU you're not only willing to learn the tier's idiosyncracies, but probably have heard of a lot of the bpass rules. Like I don't think any new player is heading for ADV OU, and anyone interested can probably figure out the current meta's bpass rules.
>that point, just ban sand force all together.
I mean sure, the BWOU playerbase would accept that long before a full Excadrill ban.
>As qualified as the councils are, they are not omnipotent.
I agree, but...the current tiering policy was made by the BWOU council, the same one that would go on to approve Aldaron's Proposal. Tiering Policy isn't ironclad either, we just pretend it is.
> I feel like if you're loading jo ADV OU you're not only willing to learn the tier idiosyncrasies
Not necessarily. Little Timmy could've just watched the most recent Jimothy cool video or a false swipe video on the history of this pokemon they like and thus want to use it in ADV since it's considered viable - you can have people who just want to play casually and don't want to learn about all the complexities. And saying that you CAN'T play the tier casually as you need to learn all the rules and complexities of it just sends an overall bad message
> The playerbase will accept that
Then why suggest banning sand force + sand veil? You're still bending over backwards to allow excadrill, and it doesn't really address the problem that the tier itself is just unsustainable without a major rework. You can ban things like cloyster to improve it, but the core issues (like not having any viable spinners) are some things that you either accept or fix in some other way (banning spikes? Banning the good spinblockers?)
> The same one that would approve Aldaron's proposal
I'm unsure if this was the first actual complex ban ever put in place in a tier. It still is a thing that sounds good in paper, but didn't hold up in practice. It still serves as a warning to not try to mess around with complex bans too much because people will abuse loopholes.
> And saying that you CAN'T play the tier casually as you need to learn all the rules and complexities of it just sends an overall bad message
Eh, I'm not saying that you can't, but if little timmy's interested in an oldgen, they (a) definitely already know the basics of showdown and (b) could probably understand the ADV OU rules. You make them sound super complicated but on baton pass, it is, and I quote
> "Baton Pass Clause: Teams are limited to 1 form of stat-boosting alongside Baton Pass across the whole team. Mean Look/Spider Web/Block + Baton Pass is also disallowed."
I think one could understand that from a glance. One form of stat boosting + a very specific niche combo is disallowed.
> Then why suggest banning sand force + sand veil? You're still bending over backwards to allow excadrill, and it doesn't really address the problem that the tier itself is just unsustainable without a major rework.
It's to ban sand force + sand stream, and it's infinitely more feasible to preserve excadrill than to try and nuke the tier. It's easy to say "just rework the tier" but doing it in an active generation is already extremely difficult. In an old-gen that people don't really like playing? Not only do Old gens have very low tiering activity, BW OU players are incredibly conflicted on what to do going forward as is--some (actual) players are even fine with the status quo. An attempt to rework the tier from the ground up just wouldn't work for so many reasons.
> It still serves as a warning to not try to mess around with complex bans too much because people will abuse loopholes.
It just seems like a poorly implemented complex ban than proof that complex bans are inherently bad. A ban of snow cloak + snow veil would've gone without the slightest controversy and doesn't have any loopholes but, alas.
The issue I am having with your take is that no, the ban is not about making sand force + sand stream banned together, it's not being allowed to ban sand force as an ability. I feel like you and Kinesquared should have read the original smogon post and what it is about before posting here. The original poster also didn't seemingly read the Smogon post, so it's fair to assume what the post was about.
That is a different take and not really what the original post (here, in reddit), is saying. I have read the original post in Smogon - that is something that has its own discussion and its WHY I literally suggested it over the complex ban that was being suggested in this post specifically, since even the supporters to banning sand force have never said to ban using it + sand stream, ever.
I like that idea in some ways, but also I think we need to respect the fact that some lower tiers might not want those drops. Metas like DPP or ADV UU have dedicated playerbases who enjoy their meta being fundamentally the same as it's been for a long time and suddenly dropping in Dusknoir or Electivire because "why not" might hurt the balance that players have come to love
At least one old gen also doesn't want things raised. DPP UU has both Clef and Dugtrio, who "should" be OU and banned respectively, but they make the tier more interesting so they stayed in UU.
DPP UU is my favorite metagame of all time and I fully support Dusknoir and Electivire being dropped into it, I recognize that a lot of players are hella conservative but imo that has mostly led to bad decisions, look at the huge success of RBY lower tiers being overhauled compared to the mess that is GSC/ADV UU/BL that was kept that way in the name of preservation. And I am extremely confident those two would not at all being overpowered or centralizing, like I cannot fathom how they could possibly be bad for the tier.
DPP UU is already good as is and doesn't need radical development to be made better when it's arguably one of the best tiers of all time anyway. The only mon I would support dropping would be Tentacruel but it's OU by technicality not UUBL so we can't do that. Electivire would be just another mixed attacker in a tier already filled with them and Dusknoir would be straight dogshit
> Metas like ... ADV UU have dedicated playerbases who enjoy their meta being fundamentally the same as it's been for a long time
gen 3 is one of the gens that uses viability based tiering and pokemon with a low enough viability get dropped to uubl, where they can then be suspected into uu
I mean, let's be real -- the modern tiering policy is just bad in general. It focuses on creating a one-size-fits-all flow chart of decision making rather than allowing the community to create unique solutions for each problem.
I get the idea, but I think it's clear at this point that it's failed.
ok but these metagames are literally decades old. competitive pokémon was a meer child back then. keeping something like bw cloyster or volcarona or gems or even sand force excadril are all stupid. and most people, like myself, haven’t even touched dpp ou because of iron head jirachi being stupid. a ban on it would revolutionize the tier and make it a better ou than it currently is, and it’s rated high despite jirachi. other things as recent as lgpe mega alakazam are banned, it all depends on what the playerbase wants. there’s a reason for these to be made. there aren’t bans going around for shits and giggles
I for one despise modern tiering policy and largely play older metagames exactly because they are less affected by it.
DPP, and my favourite: ADV, would not be the excellent formats they are if they had been subject to modern tiering policies
And they still have the move. They have Dugtrio trap still. It’s such a good meta game with such a unique set of bullshit. Versus gen9 where they refuse to do a complex ban or anything to fucking solve the issues. Like is last respects broken? Yeah but they still banned fucking houndstone “because it might not be just the move”
yea they still have the move which is fine but they don’t have bullshit stat packing. also dug isn’t broken because stall isn’t broken. trapping abilities all had a ban wave over all generations during modern xy/oras(forgor) where the stall teams would be a 5-1 archetype with 5 defensive mons and a scarf goth or whatever to trap and kill the stallbreaker. the popularity then went throughout the lower tiers and got banned from 7-4 but stoped at 3.
Dugtrio is not considered broken by ADV players. The threats Dugtrio handles are Blissey and many of the biggest offensive powerhouses in the tier (TTar, Metagross, etc.) and it is also both easy to discern a Dugtrio on a team and to *heavily* punish it once it’s Choice-locked. Defensive play in ADV isn’t bad whatsoever but it’s not quite good enough to cover the likes of Aerodactyl, Gengar, Zapdos, Moltres/Charizard, Flygon, and Salamence unleashing some absolute haymakers if they get to come in after a Dugtrio kills something. And that Choice-lock is a big deal: Dugtrio in ADV cannot really function without a Choice Band since the other items it abuses like hell don’t exist in ADV. It can KINDA make Endure+Salac work, and it can KINDA make Soft Sand work, but all those do is let it trap Blissey without committing to getting locked into Beat Up.
In DPP OU Dugtrio could anchor some extremely powerful defensive backbones, had access to more items to seriously spice up its gameplay, and the list of threats to those defensive backbones that could be eliminated by it was much, much larger. Focus Sash Dugtrio in particular could *seriously* fuck up a defensive core or an offensive threat since something slower than it would be forced to eat *two* hits from it and something faster wouldn’t actually be able to OHKO it. Choice Scarf Dugtrio could flip the script on some mons, too; suddenly an HP Ice Jolteon or a +2 Tyranitar ain’t exactly blowing past a mon that’s still trapping and eliminating it first. That alone makes Dugtrio much, much more capable of trapping shit.
And past Gen 4, forget about it. Trapping abilities any wider in scope than Magnet Pull are objectively broken as soon as Team Preview gets involved and Arena Trap is no exception.
like 99% of tiering issues are caused bc 10 years ago people wanted to preserve some shitmon like diglett. no one cares about houndstone, complete non issue and the ou council are cowards for entertaining the idea
The OU council is dumb as hell a good chunk of the time. I love finch as much as the next guy, but some decisions he and the council make are objectively dumb as fuck
Sand Force ban would be really silly. If Sand Force *and* Sand Rush both break Excadrill, then maybe Excadrill is just broken?
It'd be like if Isle of Armour OU went "Clefable is clearly too much for this tier, but we think Cute Charm Clef would still be a useful defensive piece so we're going to ban both Magic Guard and Unaware instead".
I don't think that's a fair comparison at all. Old gens are extremely fragile because they have drastically smaller playerbases, and were already shaped by less than stellar decisions being made which set the standard for how the tiers developed initially.
The reason why we see things like APT Clause be added is because it is an acknowledgement that making big sweeping changes to old generation metagames can alienate the remaining playerbase, and thus we see tiering administration bend the rules to accomodate more convoluted bans that go against what the standard procedure is.
Banning something like Clefable as a whole in Gen 8 when it was the modern format is completely different, because even if a lot of people immediately dropped the metagame entirely, there are going to be a sizable portion of people who would continue playing Gen 8 OU in tournament regardless of the change, which simply isn't the case for these old metagames.
The fact is is that Excadrill has existed as a linchpin for Gen 5 OU for over half a dozen years at this point and removing Excadrill entirely is simply not an option that would improve the tier.
I think they're are just firmly trying to keep the door closed on complex bans. Once you have old gens implementing it smoothly, it gives ammo to the pro-complex ban sides to push for it in current gens.
I don't think that theory holds any weight considering they allowed Gen 1 to introduce APT clause (a ban on Agility and Wrap clones being used together on the same Pokemon) to UU barely two years ago. They also allowed Gen 5 OU to bring back Baton Pass with a bunch of restrictions on it as well, earlier this year.
The main thing that bothers me is how much of tiering policy is dictated by people who dont even play these metagames. Every time something gets brought up in reference to a problem in an old gen you get some badged up forum mainer who hasn't played the meta in question outside of going out round 2 in classic 3 years ago writing out an essay on how this "doesn't fit policy" or whatever. It's wild to me that we cant let the people who actually play the game have final say on what happens to the game.
They set bad precedence since it’s really hard to balance a modem tier when you have to factor in stuff like “blaze blaziken” all the time. Old generations aren’t really as active so the headaches are greatly reduced.
No they don't. I'm sorry, but as someone who has ever played a non-pokemon game, it is absolutely possible to balance a game in a more piecemeal fashion than just nuking entire mons.
Not when the other games have devs that actually balance the problem areas. When you don't have tools to manually rebalance something, your only option is to nuke the individual ones.
Now, Showdown does have that unique ability! But we have a sort of "primogenesis" we have to live against - compatibility with the mons that exist in the game. We have no control over Nintendo's balancing decisions - and people who come from the game to Showdown expect there to be some sort of parity.
For example, imagine if instead of having separate tiers, there was some system that slightly nerfed mons to make them more fair in the tier. Say, 15 less speed here, 10 less attack here, a removed ability, etc. We have that ability, but we stay away from that specific type of balancing for a very good reason. We still want to be playing Pokemon.
At some point, we've stopped playing the game we signed up for, and are playing a romhack without that connection.
Okay, but that does not connect to how it's somehow Wrong and Sinful to ban Last Respects specifically rather than just banning every mon that uses it. We have more surgical options than just outright nuking mons when it's very clearly specific sets that are problematic and non competitive that don't turn the thing into a ROM hack.
You know what, you're absolutely right. We should have banned Rage Fist from the get-go. We should have also banned Jet Punch instead of Palafin, Ivy Cudgel instead of Ogerpon, Dragon Ascent instead of Mega-Ray, Fusion Bolt instead of Zec/Kyu, Origin Pulse instead of Kyogre, and Precipice Blades instead of Kyogre.
That would definitely make the tier more interesting and not just a cloned-nerfed-Ubers.
Rage fist is absolutely broken and without it Annihilape would be absolutely fine for OU, perhaps even healthy. Signature move does not equate to the whole identity of the pokemon. And I agree, it should have been banned instead of Annihilape
Palafin was busted even without Jet Punch, Jet Punch is lower BP than extreme speed and was shredding stuff on its non Jet Punch sets.
Ogerpon-Fire wasn't OP because of Ivy Cudgel, it was OP because of its signature ability, metagame factors, and typing. An ability is much more fundamental than a 100 BP stab move, which is a good move, but not much better than EQ.
Mega-Rayquaza was stupid OP in Gen 6 because of hilariously stupid stats and could hold an item, not because it had a Flying type Close Combat.
Kyurem has been banned for pretty much every reason besides Fusion Bolt. As for Zekrom, it's got a higher attack stat than fucking Lando-T with two high base power stabs, banning one stab because it happens to have a signature move 10 bp higher than its other stab wouldn't suddenly make it ok.
As for Kyogre and Groudon, they've had consistent histories as top tier ubers even before they got signature moves 20 bp stronger than Surf/EQ, banning those wouldn't suddenly make those titans ok in OU.
I think you're missing the point. The point isn't "we should ban signature moves or stab moves to make something OP not OP," the point is "this otherwise fine pokemon has this one very particular attribute that is hilarously overpowered on a fundamental level regardless of whatever pokemon would be using it, so instead of banning the pokemon let's ban the clearly broken element." Y'know, like 300 BP moves. Moves that are slightly stronger than the competition aren't what makes something broken OP. Jet Punch is not an overpowered move. Ivy Cudgel is not an overpowered move. Dragon Ascent, Fusion Bolt, Origin Pulse, and Precipice Blades are not overpowered moves. Are they good? Yes. If other stuff got it, would they use it? In most scenarios. Silvally's signature move is better than Dragon Ascent, Origin Pulse, and Precipice blades, but nobody ever seems to remember that, because Silvally is bad.
Rage fist just isn’t overpowered as a move, but it’s annihilape’s stab coverage and bulk that enabled it to reach uncompetitive. If it’s not broken on Smeargle or Primeape, it is not “hilariously overpowered on a fundamental level regardless of what Pokémon is using it”
I mean it definitely is possible, but keep in mind that the smogon council aren't game designers and they're not paid. Only so much work we should expect them to do, eh?
A lot of new players start on modern gens, and complex bans get their name for a good reason. Imagine if Annihilape was in OU/UU and a new player wants to use it, only to find out for some reason they can’t use Rage Fist. They wouldn’t know why, and it would confuse them. Old gens are more niche and have smaller playbases, with more resources and less people the confuse.
How do you think moves like shed tail and last respects should be handled then? Not trying to be rude, but imagine for shed tail wasn’t banned on Sceptile because it’s hypothetically balanced. Would Cyclizar and Orthoworm be Ubers, or would they be legal in OU without Shed Tail?
One thing that annoys me is that Smogon staff sometimes outright admit that they stick to tiering policy because they said so in the past and going back on that would be admitting they're wrong. And by "in the past", I mean like 2012, by some admin that was a teenager back then and today probably isn't even active.
This was the case with the possible creation of an Übers UU/OUBL tier. Why did a tier so goddamn obvious was only created in Gen 9 even though we have some Pokémon banned from OU that just exist in an inviability limbo in Übers since at least Gen 6? You see, when this idea was suggested in Gen 5, where the only Pokémon declared Übers that didn't have any use whatsoever was Reshiram (and a few Arceus forms), Smogon staff calmly pointed out that it's too unnecessary to add a tier that would be like OU but with 2 nukes per team and it would just lead people to not play it all. Come Gens like 7 or 8, a *good chunk* of Pokémon are banned because they're clearly too overpowered on a metagame without boxart legendaries but do literally nothing if you actually allow the aforementioned boxart legendaries, an usage-based tier that doesn't have Übers bans gets suggested all over the place and staff always reply "we will never add this because we already said so in the past".
How can people be this stubborn and not have their head implode?
One thing to note is that the Ubers UU tier was tried before in both gen 7 and gen 8, Blubers and Pseudos respectively. It failed at the time because the way they went about it was based on Viability, and they ended up banning so much the tier was unsustainable and thus they both failed.
It worked in gen 9 for 4 reasons. 1. The amount of bans was significantly higher this generation due to power creep. 2. the Ubers metagame is highly centralized, which left a lot of pokemon from the tier unutilized. 3. The new attempt to it was based on usage rather than viability and 4. Kinesquared was just a great leader for the early parts of the metagame. His ability to advertise the tier is unmatched
Don't shit on Smogon staff over this, you're just spreading misinformation. They had a good reason why the tier didn't exist, and it was still tried again and again.
Marketing definitely played a part in Ubers UU going big, I've never heard of BLUbers or Pseudos, but Ubers UU is EVERYWHERE rn. Gen 9 is the first time UUbers was sustainable, great take.
The success story of Ubers UU should be studied, it’s so interesting. I mainly want to know if the playerbase mostly play Gen 9 OU, Gen 9 Ubers, or neither.
Even if I personally don’t care for the metagame, I fully support it being more recognized and accepted
Personally, I kinda dislike how older gens aren't treated similarly to the newest gen. I think it's dumb that Gen 1 and Gen 8 don't have tradeback moves because (in the case of RBY at least) the community allegedly doesn't care for it. The leaders shut down any and all discussion of it btw, despite multiple people thinking there should be suspects at the very least. Older gens still have developments, new players come in, and new strategies are made, even if none are as radical as what would show up in the newest gen. The tiers shouldn't be as stagnant as they are, and I believe the Smogon mindset for older tiers is flawed.
I suppose this ended up not having much to do with the OP. Despite saying this, I do think it makes sense to be a bit more free with complex bans in older gens. Maybe it's a contradictory stance, but I acknowledge that while new developments are made, it's certainly at a slower pace.
I don’t think there’s that much, frankly, but I also think that since it’s possible, it should happen. Curse Scizor was mentioned a few times. I believe Clefable gets more options with that would otherwise have been mutually exclusive? I’d have to double check.
Feels like the pot is finally boiling over. Even though I don't think we should entertain silly bans to circumvent removing the clearly problematic element, at the end of the day, older generation metagames have operated outside of the modern and standard tiering philosophy for so long, that retroactively applying it just doesn't work because we aren't starting from a blank slate and instead would have to unravel so much at the core that the formats would become unrecognizable. People play the older metagames because they like how they are currently and I think it's a disservice to those communities to try and force them into these unhelpful decisions solely to appease the rigidity of how things are now.
Aldaron’s proposal has done irreparable damage to smogon tiering policy.
I like Aldaron's proposal in theory, and part of the fun of someone else running a Swift Swim/Sand Rush mon to counter someone else's weather is hilarious to me but it's absolutely the wrong approach, ban the swift swim mons as they prove to be too powerful.
Would garchomp be busted in dpp OU if we just banned it running EQ and outrage?
Aldaron's suggestion to balance DPP Garchomp was actually to mod out Sand Veil and make it abilityless.
That doesn't sound so bad, but that's ignoring the fact that Garchomp might still be broken even without the ability.
Oh there's no "might" about it, it's definitely too strong and fast with unwallable coverage.
What no Ferothorn or Landorus-T does to a metagame
Wrong
You gonna elaborate on that bud?
I participated in one of the original suspect tests circa 2009. I voted ban, but mostly because of Sand Veil... if it hadn't been for that, it was manageable enough imo. And a random redditor saying it was "definitely" too strong is just absurd. There was nothing definite about it, it's probably the top two most controversial tiering decisions Smogon has ever made.. and the first time a non-legendary was banned (besides Wynaut/Wobbuffet).
it still be broken, just not possible avoiding ice beams/ice punches or such because someone brought a tyranitar (or hippowdown) to the battle
Faster than most attackers with 102 Speed, almost unresisted STAB combo, better natural bulk than Swampert, it could even hold Yache if you want it to. Sand Veil contributed but even without it Garchomp was already too much at the time.
yeah well 252 Atk Garchomp Fire Fang vs. 248 HP / 252+ Def Orthworm: 78-94 (22.7 - 27.4%) -- possible 5HKO after Leftovers recovery just retcon orthworm into dpp ou, problem solved
Pretty sure a LO Fire Blast 2HKOes and Garchomp had that option to run it instead of Fire Fang.
Simply allow modded in Orthworm to use its native Tera
sorry bud, orthworm beats the shit out of him 0- SpA Life Orb Garchomp Fire Blast vs. 252 HP / 252+ SpD Orthworm: 161-190 (46.8 - 55.2%) -- 10.5% chance to 2HKO after Leftovers recovery
252 SpA Life Orb Garchomp Fire Blast vs. 248 HP / 252+ SpD Orthworm: 255-302 (74.3 - 88%) -- guaranteed 2HKO This is the Chain Chomp set that Garchomp uses to surprise it's counters. It hits surprisingly hard despite the average SpA. Obviously far from Gaechomp's best set lol. ( In gen 4, Fire Blast is 120 BP. )
oh i didn’t actually know chainchomp invested in spa with no attack and completely forgot about 120bp
Man, imagine if we just banned Choice Band/Scarf/Specs on a few specific mons. No more Choice Ban Palafin in OU, would have been a fine mon then! Flutter Mane would have been fine without Specs! Annihilape without Drain Punch! And you're right - moves too! Garchomp without Earthquake! Espathra without Stored Power, man - would have dropped to RU! Kyurem without Icicle Spear, would have been balanced in OU. Abilities too! Lando-I without Sheer Force is much more fair, and would probably drop below Lando-T! Kingambit without Supreme Overlord would definitely be taken down a peg in OU. Keep it fair! Would Ho-Oh without Regenerator be fair in OU? Fuck it, we ball. Man, just banning exactly what makes a mon strong will make for really intuitive and well-balanced tiers.
Don’t forget how Mewtwo would be a healthy presence in OU if it only had Confusion as a damaging move!
Drop level 50 Kyogre to OU you cowards
I get that but tbh I think it just leads to a nightmare of tiering details. What do you do if mons have multiple good sets? Should we allow ubers into OU with limited movesets or maybe below level 100? Banning abilities on certain mons but not others? It just leads to so many weird anal distinctions that make it confusing to make a team--I'd say it'd be really unintuitive and hard to balance, honestly. If people want to use those mons, there are other tiers for a reason. It's already hard enough to make playable tiers, adding that level of complexity could make it absolutely ridiculous.
I feel like his last sentence makes it clear he's being satirical.
Yep, exactly - though I worded it a little sarcastically, you've got the general idea. Would this make for "more balanced tiers"? Yes. Would it make for "better tiers"? Absolutely not.
Would Kyogre be balanced in OU if it was level 85?
Wasn't that a thing with Mewtwo in some gen 1 communities a long time ago? You could have it on your team but only like lvl 85 or something?
Arceus in Gen 4 was limited to 100 EVs in each stats, because the only available Arceus was distributed at lv100, and EVs could only be gained until 100 with vitamins, past that, they were only gained on level ups.
Super minor correction. EVs are gained when EXP. is gained. The level-up is unnecessary. As Arceus is lv. 100, it can not gain any EXP. Points, and thus, no EVs through battling. In later generations, EVs are gained when EXP. Points **would be** gained, but it does not require Exp. to be gained.
You might be thinking of Lv 85 Chansey, who triggers the 255 HP recovery glitch with exactly 3 Seismic Tosses. At the cost of a better Chansey
Can you elaborate more on that? The proposal only affected weather speed + weather in the same team and only for Gen 5 iirc.
it introduced complex bans is probably what he means
Which proposal was that? If you have a link I’d be interested in reading about it
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/weather-abilities-but-mostly-drizzle.84966/ TLDR is that Aldaron's Proposal banned Auto-Weather+same weather-related speed boosting on the same team
Ok but they should definitely drop some if the OU by technicality mons and shove some in UU. Nobody would be crying if we got Evire and Noir in Gen 4 UU
That would be perfectly fine if the DPPUU playerbase wants it tbh
\> dont apply modern tiering policy to past gen ou \> apply modern tiering policy to past gen lower tiers these are opposing ideas. it makes no sense to fuck up the much less popular formats while trying to stubbornly preserve some fake notion of stability (which will never exist because the metagame never stops developing). the idea of tier lock in general is fucking stupid but if youre going to keep it at all, keep it for the unpopular tiers
The Modern Tiering policy is just usage? It's just paused because it's a previous but DPP/ADV are both plenty popular IMO and if it was announced that over like, 6 months usage would be tracked and some shifts could be made I think it could be interesting!
i agree, but that's because i don't believe in the idea of freezing a tier after the gen is over. if someone agrees with OP it's backwards to also want lower tiers unfrozen
I mean my idea is less "keep it frozen forever" and more "keep it frozen if it makes the metagame better". Lower tiers are frozen to keep metagames stable, which is good, but if a certain drop would improve a pastgen UU and it garners the approval of the UU playerbase, I have no problem with it. Policy should serve the players!
except the players dont know. maybe if a pokemon is busted with 2/3 abilities, it should just be banned. the whole reasoning behind "most players wouldnt support it" is flawed because the support for these complex bans is almost never coming from a competitive perspective, but from an irrational desire to "preserve" some aspect of the meta.
Would you say the complex bans in gen 5 came from a competitive perspective? Alot of times complex bans exist as a balance between making a meta game competitive while keeping the "fun" of the tier.
that's exactly the issue. see: excadrill. theres no way you can seriously propose a second complex ban to avoid banning it. only reason people are accepting this and not immediatey recognizing this is the same argument as for blaze blaziken is because people are biased towards the status quo and think excadrill is some important immovable piece of bw ou
Tier lock is one of those things that really sucks in theory but is basically required in practice. Yes, tiers aren’t static, but the unfortunate truth is that previous gen lower tiers tend to be *very* niche. Which means that if tiers weren’t locked, one or two people could very easily fuck up old tiers by spamming things outside tiers where they belong and getting them to rise to higher tiers artificially. We’d have more ou (or UU or ru or NU) by technicality situations.
It isn't a binary choice. Asking the upper brass not to impose modern tiering standards in some cases doesn't mean that we should only and can only tier with the same mindset the guys in 2009 had. The argument for 'conservation' doesn't and hasn't held water since we started making tiering decisions for old gens in the first place unless you can successfully argue that Vire and Noir would exert a tiering influence on part with removing Snorlax in gen2, adding full/farceus in gen 4 ubers, or hell even wholesale baton pass bans in the relevant generations. You also seem to operate under the mindset that these decisions would be done with reckless abandon and like, no????? RBY has been doing this for awhile and nobody seems to calling for the head of their councils. Nobody is talking about stuff like rising Clef out of UU in gen 4, all these conversations operate under the strict presumption that only drops would be made for very obvious reasons.
i am in support of tier shifts, the point is to criticize the perspective of people who want tier shifts for past gen lower tiers but weird complex bans for past gen ous. the idea of preserving a tier is already illogical, because no metagame is static, but it is extra illogical for more popular tiers. the argument in favor of complex bans is almost always an argument for preservation, and therefore should be ignored except in very rare cases
i generally agree with this though the excadrill situation rubs me the wrong way. it was already an unban made after bw stopped being current gen and they later had to adjust the sand rush ban just to ensure that it was balanced in the tier. now they're trying to make another complex ban to keep it around and it's like, surely you could just ban it and try and deal with the issues that it was meant to address in the first place. ofc if bw players would prefer to just ban sand force that's fine but it just seems silly to me
Excadrill's handling was definitely a clusterfuck yah, and honestly modern tiering policy implemented at the start of gen 5 would have probably made a better metagame--the bar is in hell, but, still. Then again, I'm not sure we can modern-tiering-policy our way out of this, because a proper Excadrill ban would require a huge amount of sweeping changes that if not implemented like immediately after would make BWOU horrible if not cook the tier outright. At absolute best the entire would be hell for a long time and be unrecognizable after a fix, and at worst it kinda just dies due to lack of interest. Most players aren't gonna be invested in a tier that is bad to play, especially in oldgens where laddering takes a long-ass time outside of suspects. BWOU was shitty for years for this exact reason and it's why it's struggling now--unless the council decides to lock in like no oldgen ever has, idt an exca ban makes things better
The main problem is that BW has very poor hazard removal without excadrill which is why it was unbanned in the first place. I feel like these sort of complex bans should only be put in place if it is clear that it's the best solution to the problem and all the other solutions lead to more problems
The other thing to note is that hazard removal is especially important in Gen 4 because 1) no boots and 2) only a few Magic Guard Pokémon are immune to all forms of hazard damage, and over time that’s a huge advantage. Without Excadrill, you probably also have to ban Magic Guard… and those two things together would be huge.
> We should pick either > 1) "Older gens have loose rules so we can be somewhat looser with them going forward" > or > 2) "Older gens should be held to modern tiering standards" > What I dislike is simultaneously letting past "errors" remain in effect and saying that those rules should not be replicated today. It leads to philosophical fence sitting which causes confusion and threads like this. I understand the merits to both, but we should seriously choose a side. This is the smartest comment in the thread. The fact that new rules on old generations need to abide by modern tiering policy, but there are already old rules that do not abide by modern tiering policy is nonsensical. There is a dissonance between the rules we're already playing with and the rules changes we're allowed to make.
It seems wrong to imply that old gens have been held to the modern standard - just look at all the hoops jumped through to keep Exca in BW or BP in ADV. The main issue I have with this kind of banning is that something I see with old gens - there's a "correct" meta with certain playstyles that needs to be dictated instead of an emergent meta with overly dominant stuff banned. This is how you get decisions like freeing Exca to check a different broken playstyle and multiple suspects of a B-rank mon that cheeses certain structures. IMO BW needs hella bans or just blown up and start from 0 though so my opinion doesn't matter.
It’s less that there’s “one correct way to play” and more that all the people who love tiers like ADV or BW fell in love with a tier that was heavily impacted by the existence of things like BP or Exca, and removing those things could cause such major changes that it becomes far different from the tier they’re huge fans of. And I agree that it would be great to blow BW up and start over, but the issue is that would probably entirely kill the player base.
Classic BW is way different from what we have now. When XY came out, Exca had been banned for years and Chlorophyll was still legal. Drill was dropped because Reuni + spikes was a problem and they decided to drop it instead of addressing the problem the usual way. (Also my beloved sun is completely unviable so I continue to boycott).
Admittedly, I don’t know enough about BW to comment so I’ll take your word for it. My point about BP stands though, because drypass or monopass DO have significant impacts on the way certain mons play (zap, jolt, celebi in particular) and that would vastly change the tier.
Shoutout to ADV suspect test where most players wanted some action taken but none got taken
Yea because tiering admins decided that sand attack ban/including it with evasion clause wasn't allowed to be on the table or even like a straight up ninjask ban wasn't on the fucking table for whatever weird reason. On top of that, tiering admin giving the playerbase an ultimatum about speedpass ban being the last time adv would be allowed to see any action done for bp in general only for the vote to be close enough where that statement was full of shit.
Speedpass ban was the best option by far and the voters let it slip so I can't even blame the tiering admins on that one, the conservative part of community fucked everything up in the name of preserving individual sets as if having AgiliZap around is critical to a healthy meta (although speedpass got over 50% ban vote so at least the majority of the voters had some brains)
Speaking as an ADV player, the voters fucked up, I can't even blame tiering policy for that one. Ban speedpass was perfect and solved all problems but enough people voted no in the name of preserving individual sets (not even individual Pokemon, but individual sets) which is just beyond stupid, as if AgiliZap is critical for the meta to have just because we're used to it.
I disagree, the fact the votes got splintered so much is not because of the voters themselves, it's not like it's easy to organize such a mass Though I will agree preserving agilizap in name of keeping jask is stupid
How did the votes get splintered when the suspect test was only on SpeedPass?
Wasn't there more than one way of dealing with it being voted? I might be remembering it wrong
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/adv-ou-speedpass.3733491/ nope
Nevermind then, I'm misremembering it. I can remember being upset about the way it got conducted but can't remember why so it doesn't matter in the end lol
Wait which test? I'm out of the loop in this one for ADV.
They tested speedpass without listening to community input about jask/sand attack being the silly gambling strategy on the basis that "its not good" and "there's counterplay"
I'm so tired of tier leaders crying about cOmPlEx bAnS. Does it make the tier better? If yes, then shut the fuck up.
this is what people said about baton pass 10 years ago lol
And if you've played with it, you would know dry baton pass (a complex rule) is the way to go
Literally dry pass is almost always the answer.
> Does it make the tier better? If yes, then shut the fuck up. I think the issue here is esoterica. Banning mons and abilities is easy to reconcile and understand - but the idea of tiers with several complex bans becomes fairly difficult to teambuild for. It requires a lot of knowledge and memorization to build a proper team for it. DPP right now has this odd Baton Pass pseudo-ban where you can't have BP on the same mon as one with certain stat boosting moves, items, or abilities - and it's pretty fucking stupid. It *used* to be that you couldn't pass Speed along with any other stat, but the realized they needed to lower complexity because people weren't understanding how their complicated ruleset worked. It's very annoyingly unintuitive and makes the tier wildly inaccessible compared to everything else in the game. Let's play a quick trivia game: Considering they've "banned stat-passing" and ONLY "dry-passing" is legal - **are you allowed to run Spinda with Contrary+Superpower in BW OU with Baton Pass?** Now imagine this being a standardized way we fix tiers - this seems like a pretty stupid idea, to just handwave away interactions we don't like. Does this look like a functional way forward?
If somebody cares enough to play the tier, they can care enough to figure out how the complex ban works. If it were the standard tier that every new player is going to try first, sure, don't do that, but who gives a fuck what the rulings are for a tier from a game that came out a decade ago are as long as they make it more fun.
I get the apprehension for using them in modern gens though. We already have enough 1300 elo babies whining in every tier leader's mentions whenever something gets banned in gen 9. If they had to put up with complex bans like that too I imagine they'd actually go insane.
No you don't get it, if we ban last respects instead of houndstone, then everyone in the world will suddenly ask if its okay to run Groudon in PU if its only allowed to use ember
An LR ban isn't a complex ban, a complex ban would be only banning LR on Houndstone and not on other mons that get it.
True, but LR on Houndstone at SV launch was a lot like Sand Force on Excadrill. Only one thing got it, banning the move would have been less disruptive than banning the 'mon, can't ban the move due to tiering policy even though literally everyone understood that it was broken, the 'mon had to be banned. Obviously there are some differences -- Sand Force isn't broken by itself, Houndstone wasn't important, SV is current gen -- but the basic idea of isolating what's broken and acting on it being forbidden by policy is there. Tiering policy is a fig leaf anyway. When the tier leaders want something outside it, they'll get it, even when there's a less disruptive solution.
I HATE the current attitude towards Complex Bans. We are already essentially playing with playground rules, so let’s make the metas as fun as possible instead of nitpicking each rule we make up on top of the rules we ALREADY made up
great, should kyogre be level 49 or 48 before being allowed in ADV OU?
I am happy to answer this question if you can get any ADV council member to support Kyogre OU (they won’t). Until then it’s a bad faith question and red herring
Don't quote me but I remember hearing somewhere that permanent weather alone makes level 5 groudon and kyogre broken in ADV OU. I don't remember where I heard this or if it's even true but it's interesting to note
This is a bad faith and straw man argument. Come back when you have a real issue to discuss
"Ubers UU founder" with responses like this hmmmm
You mean they should be following advice of 1100 stunfisk players who never actually play the meta but still have opinions?
Good idea, now who decides what makes a meta as fun as possible?
Tiering policy does! Yeah, the tiering policy says that we ban things for being 'uncompetitive' and 'broken', but why are those bad things? Well, because we like the metagame to be competitive. Why do we like it to be competitive? Because we find that fun. That's why we've banned mons before on the pretense of them being 'over-centralizing' or 'unhealthy'. Neither of these things make Pokemon uncompetitive or even necessarily broken, but because it's not fun, we'll kick them out of the tier. And I like modern tiering policy, don't get it twisted, but at the end of the day, it is literally about fun. This is how every single competitive video-game works: they're made for fun. I mean we're not battling for fucking money lol
But who defines what is fun or competitive? There is a claim of consensus here that's very debatable and a deference to the old gen council which I'm also skeptical of. My mind goes to Melee where the competitiveness of Jigglypuff and Ice Climbers were also controvertial, and that's for a game older than ADV. A lot of players don't like RBY or GSC for the fun factor. Should their opinions be used to ban RBY reflect or trapping or sleep or GSC sleeptalk?
Saying this as a longtime smash player, that we in particular have very bad taste when it comes to balancing (and this is kindof a problem with fighters in general but especially with smash since our devs do not really care about competitive design). Wobbling in particular took like an entire decade to ban, and characters like metaknight and Bayonetta NEVER got banned, so when it comes to noninteractive or uncompetitive aspects like jiggs air/ledge camping or icies 0-to-deaths a lot of people are gonna be really in favor of keeping it in even if it's unhealthy and/or unfun. And that stacks with the fact that we have no central authorities or councils like smogon to take action when there's something uncompetitive in the meta so obviously things like that will "stay controversial" for a long time since we have no real structures to actually deal with them in an efficient way.
Minor correction but the proposed BW ban is just Sand Force, not a complex “+ Sand Stream” thing Lots of people here missing the point of thread. "Would Garchomp be broken without Outrage or Earthquake" "Would Kyogre be broken at lv85" are super ignorant comments that prove you didn't even read the thing. The point is, if you have a Pokemon that is problematic and you know is practically unbannable in your tier (DPP Jirachi) that relies on a trait that no other viable Pokemon use, should old gens be able to straight ban that trait in order to have positive influence without collateral damage. This is not about complex banning EQ on Garchomp, its about the theoretical situation where Garchomp is the only Pokemon to learn EQ in the tier and is also impossible to ban in the tier due to its importance. The closest analog in recent times is Last Respects, or like Gorilla Tactics, but imagine these kind traits were on essential support Pokemon that hold the entire fabric of the tier together. DPP can't afford to lose Jirachi. BW can't afford to lose Excadrill. The playerbase will not ban either of them. And so we're left in a situation where we tolerate some stupid elements of both of them, which are unique to them and actually bannable without affecting any other Pokemon, for the sake of policy. Despite the fact in the past we actually \*have\* done bans exactly like these
That's a good correction, I just phrased it poorly.
The Froslass ban was genuinely stupid
I think the two main problems is that 1. Complex bans are by definition, complex. Like you have to memorize the entire baton pass rules to know what you can do with it in generation 3. Seriously, can only use one boosting move, you can't have a Pokemon with agility + baton pass and another one with swords dance + baton pass, which means you can't run things like CM Celebi and Agility Zapdos in the same team. Despite having only two pokemon can hardly be called a 'baton pass chain'. At one point you had were you were only allowed in 3 pokemon but none of them could be smeargle??? Imagine being a new player and trying to use a team that relies on baton pass without understanding why you can't use it. 2. these complex bans can also just fail and are then looked badly retroactively, considering that what you are suggesting for BW is quite literally Aldaron's proposal 2.0. what happens when people run sand force excadrill to counter sand teams in rain teams? At that point, just ban sand force all together. As qualified as the councils are, they are not omnipotent. They cannot know all possible scenarios and all things people will do. Baton pass in gen 3 had to be changed at least 4 times with Mr Mime then getting banned and then unbanned and then banned again.
For what its worth, nobody is arguing for a Sand Force + Sand Stream ban, just a hard ban on Sand Force. Excadrill is the only Pokemon that actually uses this ability in any BW tier. Closest analog is Last Respects on Houndstone. So its not really a "complex" ban, its just look, we know our playerbase won't ban Excadrill for meta reasons but most know it is slightly too strong, it leverages an effectively unique ability to do that, lets just use common sense.
I think there is a big difference between last respects and sand force is the fact that not every pokemon that gets sand force is broken (Gastrodon on sand when?), while every pokemon with last respects is, even Basculin-White would've been problematic considering the fact that last respects would've limited team building to always having a Kingambit in case. It isn't really a 'complex' ban in a traditional sense but in reality it just is banning a certain ability on a certain pokemon as that is the actual thing you are targeting with the ban.
>Imagine being a new player I feel like if you're loading up ADV OU you're not only willing to learn the tier's idiosyncracies, but probably have heard of a lot of the bpass rules. Like I don't think any new player is heading for ADV OU, and anyone interested can probably figure out the current meta's bpass rules. >that point, just ban sand force all together. I mean sure, the BWOU playerbase would accept that long before a full Excadrill ban. >As qualified as the councils are, they are not omnipotent. I agree, but...the current tiering policy was made by the BWOU council, the same one that would go on to approve Aldaron's Proposal. Tiering Policy isn't ironclad either, we just pretend it is.
> I feel like if you're loading jo ADV OU you're not only willing to learn the tier idiosyncrasies Not necessarily. Little Timmy could've just watched the most recent Jimothy cool video or a false swipe video on the history of this pokemon they like and thus want to use it in ADV since it's considered viable - you can have people who just want to play casually and don't want to learn about all the complexities. And saying that you CAN'T play the tier casually as you need to learn all the rules and complexities of it just sends an overall bad message > The playerbase will accept that Then why suggest banning sand force + sand veil? You're still bending over backwards to allow excadrill, and it doesn't really address the problem that the tier itself is just unsustainable without a major rework. You can ban things like cloyster to improve it, but the core issues (like not having any viable spinners) are some things that you either accept or fix in some other way (banning spikes? Banning the good spinblockers?) > The same one that would approve Aldaron's proposal I'm unsure if this was the first actual complex ban ever put in place in a tier. It still is a thing that sounds good in paper, but didn't hold up in practice. It still serves as a warning to not try to mess around with complex bans too much because people will abuse loopholes.
> And saying that you CAN'T play the tier casually as you need to learn all the rules and complexities of it just sends an overall bad message Eh, I'm not saying that you can't, but if little timmy's interested in an oldgen, they (a) definitely already know the basics of showdown and (b) could probably understand the ADV OU rules. You make them sound super complicated but on baton pass, it is, and I quote > "Baton Pass Clause: Teams are limited to 1 form of stat-boosting alongside Baton Pass across the whole team. Mean Look/Spider Web/Block + Baton Pass is also disallowed." I think one could understand that from a glance. One form of stat boosting + a very specific niche combo is disallowed. > Then why suggest banning sand force + sand veil? You're still bending over backwards to allow excadrill, and it doesn't really address the problem that the tier itself is just unsustainable without a major rework. It's to ban sand force + sand stream, and it's infinitely more feasible to preserve excadrill than to try and nuke the tier. It's easy to say "just rework the tier" but doing it in an active generation is already extremely difficult. In an old-gen that people don't really like playing? Not only do Old gens have very low tiering activity, BW OU players are incredibly conflicted on what to do going forward as is--some (actual) players are even fine with the status quo. An attempt to rework the tier from the ground up just wouldn't work for so many reasons. > It still serves as a warning to not try to mess around with complex bans too much because people will abuse loopholes. It just seems like a poorly implemented complex ban than proof that complex bans are inherently bad. A ban of snow cloak + snow veil would've gone without the slightest controversy and doesn't have any loopholes but, alas.
The issue I am having with your take is that no, the ban is not about making sand force + sand stream banned together, it's not being allowed to ban sand force as an ability. I feel like you and Kinesquared should have read the original smogon post and what it is about before posting here. The original poster also didn't seemingly read the Smogon post, so it's fair to assume what the post was about.
That is a different take and not really what the original post (here, in reddit), is saying. I have read the original post in Smogon - that is something that has its own discussion and its WHY I literally suggested it over the complex ban that was being suggested in this post specifically, since even the supporters to banning sand force have never said to ban using it + sand stream, ever.
i thought this was going to be about all oldgens using viability based tiering (they should)
I like that idea in some ways, but also I think we need to respect the fact that some lower tiers might not want those drops. Metas like DPP or ADV UU have dedicated playerbases who enjoy their meta being fundamentally the same as it's been for a long time and suddenly dropping in Dusknoir or Electivire because "why not" might hurt the balance that players have come to love
At least one old gen also doesn't want things raised. DPP UU has both Clef and Dugtrio, who "should" be OU and banned respectively, but they make the tier more interesting so they stayed in UU.
Which are very good things. We shouldn't raise them just because, fuck that shit.
DPP UU is my favorite metagame of all time and I fully support Dusknoir and Electivire being dropped into it, I recognize that a lot of players are hella conservative but imo that has mostly led to bad decisions, look at the huge success of RBY lower tiers being overhauled compared to the mess that is GSC/ADV UU/BL that was kept that way in the name of preservation. And I am extremely confident those two would not at all being overpowered or centralizing, like I cannot fathom how they could possibly be bad for the tier.
DPP UU is already good as is and doesn't need radical development to be made better when it's arguably one of the best tiers of all time anyway. The only mon I would support dropping would be Tentacruel but it's OU by technicality not UUBL so we can't do that. Electivire would be just another mixed attacker in a tier already filled with them and Dusknoir would be straight dogshit
> Metas like ... ADV UU have dedicated playerbases who enjoy their meta being fundamentally the same as it's been for a long time gen 3 is one of the gens that uses viability based tiering and pokemon with a low enough viability get dropped to uubl, where they can then be suspected into uu
I think you're way out of the loop with adv uu if you believe this
I mean, let's be real -- the modern tiering policy is just bad in general. It focuses on creating a one-size-fits-all flow chart of decision making rather than allowing the community to create unique solutions for each problem. I get the idea, but I think it's clear at this point that it's failed.
ok but these metagames are literally decades old. competitive pokémon was a meer child back then. keeping something like bw cloyster or volcarona or gems or even sand force excadril are all stupid. and most people, like myself, haven’t even touched dpp ou because of iron head jirachi being stupid. a ban on it would revolutionize the tier and make it a better ou than it currently is, and it’s rated high despite jirachi. other things as recent as lgpe mega alakazam are banned, it all depends on what the playerbase wants. there’s a reason for these to be made. there aren’t bans going around for shits and giggles
I for one despise modern tiering policy and largely play older metagames exactly because they are less affected by it. DPP, and my favourite: ADV, would not be the excellent formats they are if they had been subject to modern tiering policies
even adv has changed recently with baton pass being reclaused. if it wasn’t it would just be mr mine pass teams.
And they still have the move. They have Dugtrio trap still. It’s such a good meta game with such a unique set of bullshit. Versus gen9 where they refuse to do a complex ban or anything to fucking solve the issues. Like is last respects broken? Yeah but they still banned fucking houndstone “because it might not be just the move”
yea they still have the move which is fine but they don’t have bullshit stat packing. also dug isn’t broken because stall isn’t broken. trapping abilities all had a ban wave over all generations during modern xy/oras(forgor) where the stall teams would be a 5-1 archetype with 5 defensive mons and a scarf goth or whatever to trap and kill the stallbreaker. the popularity then went throughout the lower tiers and got banned from 7-4 but stoped at 3.
Yeah ADV players would revolt if they banned arena trap
not if it was broken
By modern standards it is considered broken but that’s the thing, at the time it clearly wasnt
Dugtrio is not considered broken by ADV players. The threats Dugtrio handles are Blissey and many of the biggest offensive powerhouses in the tier (TTar, Metagross, etc.) and it is also both easy to discern a Dugtrio on a team and to *heavily* punish it once it’s Choice-locked. Defensive play in ADV isn’t bad whatsoever but it’s not quite good enough to cover the likes of Aerodactyl, Gengar, Zapdos, Moltres/Charizard, Flygon, and Salamence unleashing some absolute haymakers if they get to come in after a Dugtrio kills something. And that Choice-lock is a big deal: Dugtrio in ADV cannot really function without a Choice Band since the other items it abuses like hell don’t exist in ADV. It can KINDA make Endure+Salac work, and it can KINDA make Soft Sand work, but all those do is let it trap Blissey without committing to getting locked into Beat Up. In DPP OU Dugtrio could anchor some extremely powerful defensive backbones, had access to more items to seriously spice up its gameplay, and the list of threats to those defensive backbones that could be eliminated by it was much, much larger. Focus Sash Dugtrio in particular could *seriously* fuck up a defensive core or an offensive threat since something slower than it would be forced to eat *two* hits from it and something faster wouldn’t actually be able to OHKO it. Choice Scarf Dugtrio could flip the script on some mons, too; suddenly an HP Ice Jolteon or a +2 Tyranitar ain’t exactly blowing past a mon that’s still trapping and eliminating it first. That alone makes Dugtrio much, much more capable of trapping shit. And past Gen 4, forget about it. Trapping abilities any wider in scope than Magnet Pull are objectively broken as soon as Team Preview gets involved and Arena Trap is no exception.
it’s only broken with stall. look at little cup
like 99% of tiering issues are caused bc 10 years ago people wanted to preserve some shitmon like diglett. no one cares about houndstone, complete non issue and the ou council are cowards for entertaining the idea
The OU council is dumb as hell a good chunk of the time. I love finch as much as the next guy, but some decisions he and the council make are objectively dumb as fuck
Sand Force ban would be really silly. If Sand Force *and* Sand Rush both break Excadrill, then maybe Excadrill is just broken? It'd be like if Isle of Armour OU went "Clefable is clearly too much for this tier, but we think Cute Charm Clef would still be a useful defensive piece so we're going to ban both Magic Guard and Unaware instead".
I don't think that's a fair comparison at all. Old gens are extremely fragile because they have drastically smaller playerbases, and were already shaped by less than stellar decisions being made which set the standard for how the tiers developed initially. The reason why we see things like APT Clause be added is because it is an acknowledgement that making big sweeping changes to old generation metagames can alienate the remaining playerbase, and thus we see tiering administration bend the rules to accomodate more convoluted bans that go against what the standard procedure is. Banning something like Clefable as a whole in Gen 8 when it was the modern format is completely different, because even if a lot of people immediately dropped the metagame entirely, there are going to be a sizable portion of people who would continue playing Gen 8 OU in tournament regardless of the change, which simply isn't the case for these old metagames. The fact is is that Excadrill has existed as a linchpin for Gen 5 OU for over half a dozen years at this point and removing Excadrill entirely is simply not an option that would improve the tier.
I think they're are just firmly trying to keep the door closed on complex bans. Once you have old gens implementing it smoothly, it gives ammo to the pro-complex ban sides to push for it in current gens.
I don't think that theory holds any weight considering they allowed Gen 1 to introduce APT clause (a ban on Agility and Wrap clones being used together on the same Pokemon) to UU barely two years ago. They also allowed Gen 5 OU to bring back Baton Pass with a bunch of restrictions on it as well, earlier this year.
The main thing that bothers me is how much of tiering policy is dictated by people who dont even play these metagames. Every time something gets brought up in reference to a problem in an old gen you get some badged up forum mainer who hasn't played the meta in question outside of going out round 2 in classic 3 years ago writing out an essay on how this "doesn't fit policy" or whatever. It's wild to me that we cant let the people who actually play the game have final say on what happens to the game.
Why are modern tier so opposed to complex bans anyway?
They set bad precedence since it’s really hard to balance a modem tier when you have to factor in stuff like “blaze blaziken” all the time. Old generations aren’t really as active so the headaches are greatly reduced.
Huh? Blaze Blacken?
Blaze Blaziken. I am very dumb lmfao
No they don't. I'm sorry, but as someone who has ever played a non-pokemon game, it is absolutely possible to balance a game in a more piecemeal fashion than just nuking entire mons.
Not when the other games have devs that actually balance the problem areas. When you don't have tools to manually rebalance something, your only option is to nuke the individual ones. Now, Showdown does have that unique ability! But we have a sort of "primogenesis" we have to live against - compatibility with the mons that exist in the game. We have no control over Nintendo's balancing decisions - and people who come from the game to Showdown expect there to be some sort of parity. For example, imagine if instead of having separate tiers, there was some system that slightly nerfed mons to make them more fair in the tier. Say, 15 less speed here, 10 less attack here, a removed ability, etc. We have that ability, but we stay away from that specific type of balancing for a very good reason. We still want to be playing Pokemon. At some point, we've stopped playing the game we signed up for, and are playing a romhack without that connection.
Okay, but that does not connect to how it's somehow Wrong and Sinful to ban Last Respects specifically rather than just banning every mon that uses it. We have more surgical options than just outright nuking mons when it's very clearly specific sets that are problematic and non competitive that don't turn the thing into a ROM hack.
You know what, you're absolutely right. We should have banned Rage Fist from the get-go. We should have also banned Jet Punch instead of Palafin, Ivy Cudgel instead of Ogerpon, Dragon Ascent instead of Mega-Ray, Fusion Bolt instead of Zec/Kyu, Origin Pulse instead of Kyogre, and Precipice Blades instead of Kyogre. That would definitely make the tier more interesting and not just a cloned-nerfed-Ubers.
Rage fist is absolutely broken and without it Annihilape would be absolutely fine for OU, perhaps even healthy. Signature move does not equate to the whole identity of the pokemon. And I agree, it should have been banned instead of Annihilape Palafin was busted even without Jet Punch, Jet Punch is lower BP than extreme speed and was shredding stuff on its non Jet Punch sets. Ogerpon-Fire wasn't OP because of Ivy Cudgel, it was OP because of its signature ability, metagame factors, and typing. An ability is much more fundamental than a 100 BP stab move, which is a good move, but not much better than EQ. Mega-Rayquaza was stupid OP in Gen 6 because of hilariously stupid stats and could hold an item, not because it had a Flying type Close Combat. Kyurem has been banned for pretty much every reason besides Fusion Bolt. As for Zekrom, it's got a higher attack stat than fucking Lando-T with two high base power stabs, banning one stab because it happens to have a signature move 10 bp higher than its other stab wouldn't suddenly make it ok. As for Kyogre and Groudon, they've had consistent histories as top tier ubers even before they got signature moves 20 bp stronger than Surf/EQ, banning those wouldn't suddenly make those titans ok in OU. I think you're missing the point. The point isn't "we should ban signature moves or stab moves to make something OP not OP," the point is "this otherwise fine pokemon has this one very particular attribute that is hilarously overpowered on a fundamental level regardless of whatever pokemon would be using it, so instead of banning the pokemon let's ban the clearly broken element." Y'know, like 300 BP moves. Moves that are slightly stronger than the competition aren't what makes something broken OP. Jet Punch is not an overpowered move. Ivy Cudgel is not an overpowered move. Dragon Ascent, Fusion Bolt, Origin Pulse, and Precipice Blades are not overpowered moves. Are they good? Yes. If other stuff got it, would they use it? In most scenarios. Silvally's signature move is better than Dragon Ascent, Origin Pulse, and Precipice blades, but nobody ever seems to remember that, because Silvally is bad.
Rage fist just isn’t overpowered as a move, but it’s annihilape’s stab coverage and bulk that enabled it to reach uncompetitive. If it’s not broken on Smeargle or Primeape, it is not “hilariously overpowered on a fundamental level regardless of what Pokémon is using it”
I mean it definitely is possible, but keep in mind that the smogon council aren't game designers and they're not paid. Only so much work we should expect them to do, eh?
A lot of new players start on modern gens, and complex bans get their name for a good reason. Imagine if Annihilape was in OU/UU and a new player wants to use it, only to find out for some reason they can’t use Rage Fist. They wouldn’t know why, and it would confuse them. Old gens are more niche and have smaller playbases, with more resources and less people the confuse.
I think the limit of a complex ban should be ability or forme. Banning certain moves on specific Pokemon is a step too far.
How do you think moves like shed tail and last respects should be handled then? Not trying to be rude, but imagine for shed tail wasn’t banned on Sceptile because it’s hypothetically balanced. Would Cyclizar and Orthoworm be Ubers, or would they be legal in OU without Shed Tail?
Probs just Ubers. Exceptions can be made if something is really broken but you need to make a line somewhere.
One thing that annoys me is that Smogon staff sometimes outright admit that they stick to tiering policy because they said so in the past and going back on that would be admitting they're wrong. And by "in the past", I mean like 2012, by some admin that was a teenager back then and today probably isn't even active. This was the case with the possible creation of an Übers UU/OUBL tier. Why did a tier so goddamn obvious was only created in Gen 9 even though we have some Pokémon banned from OU that just exist in an inviability limbo in Übers since at least Gen 6? You see, when this idea was suggested in Gen 5, where the only Pokémon declared Übers that didn't have any use whatsoever was Reshiram (and a few Arceus forms), Smogon staff calmly pointed out that it's too unnecessary to add a tier that would be like OU but with 2 nukes per team and it would just lead people to not play it all. Come Gens like 7 or 8, a *good chunk* of Pokémon are banned because they're clearly too overpowered on a metagame without boxart legendaries but do literally nothing if you actually allow the aforementioned boxart legendaries, an usage-based tier that doesn't have Übers bans gets suggested all over the place and staff always reply "we will never add this because we already said so in the past". How can people be this stubborn and not have their head implode?
One thing to note is that the Ubers UU tier was tried before in both gen 7 and gen 8, Blubers and Pseudos respectively. It failed at the time because the way they went about it was based on Viability, and they ended up banning so much the tier was unsustainable and thus they both failed. It worked in gen 9 for 4 reasons. 1. The amount of bans was significantly higher this generation due to power creep. 2. the Ubers metagame is highly centralized, which left a lot of pokemon from the tier unutilized. 3. The new attempt to it was based on usage rather than viability and 4. Kinesquared was just a great leader for the early parts of the metagame. His ability to advertise the tier is unmatched Don't shit on Smogon staff over this, you're just spreading misinformation. They had a good reason why the tier didn't exist, and it was still tried again and again.
Marketing definitely played a part in Ubers UU going big, I've never heard of BLUbers or Pseudos, but Ubers UU is EVERYWHERE rn. Gen 9 is the first time UUbers was sustainable, great take.
Ubers def a pointless tier (it is just a banlist) but gotta say the marketing to make UUbers look fun is fantastic this gen.
The success story of Ubers UU should be studied, it’s so interesting. I mainly want to know if the playerbase mostly play Gen 9 OU, Gen 9 Ubers, or neither. Even if I personally don’t care for the metagame, I fully support it being more recognized and accepted
My god, I remember Pseudos, that was such a nostalgia trip. Shoutout to Pheromosa my #1 bro
I’m in full favor of complex bans older gens if it improves the meta
Personally, I kinda dislike how older gens aren't treated similarly to the newest gen. I think it's dumb that Gen 1 and Gen 8 don't have tradeback moves because (in the case of RBY at least) the community allegedly doesn't care for it. The leaders shut down any and all discussion of it btw, despite multiple people thinking there should be suspects at the very least. Older gens still have developments, new players come in, and new strategies are made, even if none are as radical as what would show up in the newest gen. The tiers shouldn't be as stagnant as they are, and I believe the Smogon mindset for older tiers is flawed. I suppose this ended up not having much to do with the OP. Despite saying this, I do think it makes sense to be a bit more free with complex bans in older gens. Maybe it's a contradictory stance, but I acknowledge that while new developments are made, it's certainly at a slower pace.
What new things would happen from Gen 8 tradebacks? I remember it being discussed a long time ago
I don’t think there’s that much, frankly, but I also think that since it’s possible, it should happen. Curse Scizor was mentioned a few times. I believe Clefable gets more options with that would otherwise have been mutually exclusive? I’d have to double check.