BW Should we just use Smogon's tiering for our initial 1U list in this case?

[Disaster Area]

My thoughts are:
- I don't think that unbanning anything, even in great numbers, of what Smogon has banned to Ubers will be less problematic than what their current BW OU tier is like.
- Ultimately the argument is a mixture of tiering philosophy, pragmatism, and Pokemon Perfect's uniqueness. I don't think it's pragmatic to do a start-from-scratch approach to tiering BW, we really simply do not have the users dedicated to doing that. From a philosophical stand-point, some people might dislike on paper the Autoweather + Associated Speed-Boosting Ability Ban (I don't know what they call it actually) but I think that clauses like that do a good job of targeting the specific problematic aspects whilst having as little collateral as possible.
- We are open to obviously once we have this, following up with further bans etc. if deemed necessary.

---

Useful related threads:
What are Tiers and Why Do We Have Them?
Tiering System
Tiering Philosophy (Discussion Thread) - Recommended reading and recommended that you post your opinions too.

 

[Enigami]

- Ultimately the argument is a mixture of tiering philosophy, pragmatism, and Pokemon Perfect's uniqueness. I don't think it's pragmatic to do a start-from-scratch approach to tiering BW, we really simply do not have the users dedicated to doing that. From a philosophical stand-point, some people might dislike on paper the Autoweather + Associated Speed-Boosting Ability Ban (I don't know what they call it actually) but I think that clauses like that do a good job of targeting the specific problematic aspects whilst having as little collateral as possible.

I am sick and tired of you using this argument to just roll over and constantly use Smogon's OUs. Especially since it'd leave ORAS 1U, the tier you specifically had stake in, as the only tier that ACTUALLY followed Pokemon Perfect's stated tiering philosophy. I'm nearly at the point that I'd demand ORAS and SM 1Us are forced to follow very closely to Smogon's, because we 'simply do not have the users dedicated to tiering ORAS/SM' either. And besides, if we 'do not have the users dedicated to doing that', we do not have the users to work on tiering in the first place.

 

[Disaster Area]

Pokemon Perfect's stated tiering philosophy.

???

 

[Disaster Area]

The trouble is having a bunch of people making the occasional comment that they rly want BW on here but I've only had like 2 people who have said they're willing to help tier it.

I guess we can say: no we have to start from scratch, if enough people say they want that. Just I have concerns about getting a playerbase for it; in BW, unlike in XY / ORAS, there wasn't any players arguing we should start from scratch for OU on Smogon, and there wasn't any people really complaining about team matchup - what there was, was mostly caused by weather, which has largely been eliminiated now due to the clausing. People's complaints about BW OU were ordinary ones: that we should ban X, Y, or Z Pokemon, or do something about the weather at various points in time, and then some people saying ban scald.

I only really want it dealt with because it looks super weird not having a BW 1U and because a few people on here do want to play it, so I feel like I see or receive some message about it every other day.

 

[Enigami]

???

Guess I don't remember exactly where it was stated, but I thought the whole idea was to tier from a top down perspective, with bans being made from there as needed. Regardless of whether it was, it should be that way so that each generation is thoroughly re-examined and explored and PP's tiers aren't just Smogon's with a tiny twist because we're too lazy/unwilling to handle change (or as you've indicated for your reasoning for pushing BW OU = BW 1U, impatient). The argument that there isn't enough players to start from scratch is absolute garbage because if we don't have the players for that, we don't have enough to start the tiering process at all.

Edit: That also applies to ADV, I feel the current 2U/3U is invalid as we didn't even explore 1U properly either. Even if the result ended up the same (with Ubers all banned back to 1P), it should have started from all Pokemon unbanned.

 

[Disaster Area]

I mean, we have enough players we could get active seasons going if we took 1U to be OU but we don't have enough players who care enough that they would help us form a new and different 1U.

 

[Enigami]

I mean, we have enough players we could get active seasons going if we took 1U to be OU but we don't have enough players who care enough that they would help us form a new and different 1U.

Then they wouldn't care enough to form a 2U or so on either. My point still stands. If that's the case, we don't have enough players to care to tier BW period.

 

[ThrashNinjax]

I still feel like magic guard has to go, Latios could also be suspect-worthy but I want to hear the community's opinions. Weather+Speed boost is more than enough to deal with sun / rain / sand.

 

[ThriceElite]

Put Scald and the autoweathers on the initial banlist, and then we can test if they're not broken later.

 

[deluks917]

In smogon BW OU weather is pretty nerfed. Lets look at the weathers.

Sun: Currently sun sees little play on the ladder or in torunaments. The most common sun absuers are just things like volcarona/victini using boosted fire-moves or Cresselia (who is good). At this point sun seems like a balanced but very fair part of the metagame. Sun still has to dedicate tons of team slots to handling sr and getting rid of tyranitar and the payoffs are no longer nearly as good as venusaur.

Sand: The only sand abuse that remains legal is "rocks get +1 spd" and the adv style "my pokemon are immune to sand stream". You can't even play stoutland anymore. Maybe you could make a case for sand force excadrill but that pokemon is very rare in comparisson to mold breaker.

Rain: Rain teams actually do have lots of good abusers. However the style can be handled by weatherless teams. Water absord can be a big problem for some rain team and jellicent is a good pokemon. Rain also has to prepare for gastrodon, amoonguss, opposing rain toxicroaks. Ferrothorn and some dragons still provide alot of counter-play vs rain. However I do agree rain is fundamentally sort of over-powered and the metagame had to adapt to it.

 

[Cowboy Dan]

I am sick and tired of you using this argument to just roll over and constantly use Smogon's OUs. Especially since it'd leave ORAS 1U, the tier you specifically had stake in, as the only tier that ACTUALLY followed Pokemon Perfect's stated tiering philosophy. I'm nearly at the point that I'd demand ORAS and SM 1Us are forced to follow very closely to Smogon's, because we 'simply do not have the users dedicated to tiering ORAS/SM' either. And besides, if we 'do not have the users dedicated to doing that', we do not have the users to work on tiering in the first place.

I think there's a huge difference between implementing smogon's ou tiers in old gens and implementing them in newer gens. One of the main draws of this site is the consistent tournaments in old gen tiers. That's one of the main areas at least to my knowledge that we're pulling users from. These are established metagames that whether you like it or not, a large portion of PP's user base is only here for the opportunity to play them in our tournaments. Changing these metagames would alienate a large portion of the user base and prevent PP from being able to grow as a site. Now with new games as they aren't established it is far more feasible to create tiers using our own user base and tiering philosophy as people are already learning a whole new metagame to begin with. Furthermore the new games just tend to have larger quantities of users playing. The people who still play old gen metas for the most part do so because they love those metas and as a result, are just gonna be way more resistant to change. I understand that it seems like a cheap easy road to just copy paste these metas from smogon, and that many people here have a lot of faith in our tiering philosophy. I just think it would be incredibly impractical to try and implement it in old gen ous specifically and therefore it's a bit of a slippery slope to say the same logic would apply to new gens.