All Gens Vote on Tiering Guidelines #1

[Ortheore]

I don't know for certain as I haven't played ORAS ubers enough to say with confidence (I basically stopped shortly after MRay ban iirc). But I suspect it wouldn't be, just based on lurking discussions among other people, as I think most people agree that although it's kind of dominant, it still allows all kinds of different playstyles, while although it has lots of offensive tools, teams still find a way to deal with it.

That said, if someone were to argue for its ban I wouldn't disagree either

 

[Disaster Area]

I guess this is "working back from my conclusions" but I think to some extent at this stage that is ok, I want guidelines where it would be easier to argue that Primal Groudon is banworthy than that it is not.

 

[Disaster Area]

If the votes stay as they are for now I think the right conclusion thusfar is that they're inconclusive and we need to discuss more as a community before we can really lay out the groundwork.

Do you have thoughts on how we begin to structure this? Maybe the first thing to do is to establish what the scope of guidelines should be.

 

[Ortheore]

I don't think they're inconclusive? My approach is clearly favoured. Either way, I intend to take a bit of time to draft a complete set of guidelines to go along with my proposal. This would probably be:

• Statement defining banworthiness in terms of its impact on competitive depth
• Definition of depth, including various observable traits
• Review DA's guidelines, and outline how my concept interacts with those definitions

Also I vehemently disagree with creating guidelines that have been deliberately designed to ensure specific decisions are made. The whole point of these guidelines are that they can be applied to any situation and tailoring them to ensure PDon gets banned or anything like that entirely undermines their integrity. I absolutely cannot accept this position. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that this is akin to gerrymandering =P

Also I know you said you struggle to articulate it, but I think it's really important that you try to explain your perspective on why we ban things

 

[Disaster Area]

42% of the votes, 6/14, is less than a majority. Favoured? Yes. But a clear outcome? I think we need to spend more time discussing how we approach this. That being said, I think you are clearer on what you want out of the guidelines than I am.

Also I vehemently disagree with creating guidelines that have been deliberately designed to ensure specific decisions are made. The whole point of these guidelines are that they can be applied to any situation and tailoring them to ensure PDon gets banned or anything like that entirely undermines their integrity. I absolutely cannot accept this position. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that this is akin to gerrymandering =P

Also I know you said you struggle to articulate it, but I think it's really important that you try to explain your perspective on why we ban things

Primal Groudon is definitely overcentralising and singlehandedly warps the metagame, but I don't know if that makes it banworthy under the definition we go for. But I want it and Pokemon like it - Pokemon that singlehandedly make otherwise top Pokemon unviable - to be stuff we can get rid of.

Btw, do you know what Smogon's reason is to ban something? I think I saw something about it being about overcentralisation but I don't know honestly. Pdon is definitely overcentralising, but it's not broken as an offensive Pokemon and the metagame with it permitted is still deep (I think? I still struggle with that notion) but there are definitely fewer viable options because of it.

...

I also want Mewtwo to be banworthy and I think our guidelines should enable us to be able to ban it. It's the same for me with Mewtwo as with Pdon, but Mewtwo is the least controversial thing to want banned ever. I think if our guidelines didn't make it easier to ban Mewtwo than to argue against banning Mewtwo then it's inadequate, and I don't think that's controversial, even if in some way it's working backwards from our conclusions.

 

[Ortheore]

42% of the votes, 6/14, is less than a majority. Favoured? Yes. But a clear outcome? I think we need to spend more time discussing how we approach this. That being said, I think you are clearer on what you want out of the guidelines than I am.


Primal Groudon is definitely overcentralising and singlehandedly warps the metagame, but I don't know if that makes it banworthy under the definition we go for. But I want it and Pokemon like it - Pokemon that singlehandedly make otherwise top Pokemon unviable - to be stuff we can get rid of.

Btw, do you know what Smogon's reason is to ban something? I think I saw something about it being about overcentralisation but I don't know honestly. Pdon is definitely overcentralising, but it's not broken as an offensive Pokemon and the metagame with it permitted is still deep (I think? I still struggle with that notion) but there are definitely fewer viable options because of it.

...

I also want Mewtwo to be banworthy and I think our guidelines should enable us to be able to ban it. It's the same for me with Mewtwo as with Pdon, but Mewtwo is the least controversial thing to want banned ever. I think if our guidelines didn't make it easier to ban Mewtwo than to argue against banning Mewtwo then it's inadequate, and I don't think that's controversial, even if in some way it's working backwards from our conclusions.

Regarding the voting, I think the A&B option is ambiguous- is it both proposals? Is it a "no strong opinion" option? idk. Either way it's problematic, since you could have both sides claim a majority or neither side claim a majority quite easily.

Hmm well I disagree with you on PDon, since I think if the metagame's fine with a dominating presence (to be clear, I'm not remotely sure this is the case with PDon, it could be busted regardless) then that's acceptable. To go beyond that is implementing bans that don't address any need, something I don't think should ever be done by any competitive community

Off the top of my head, smogon's policies are similar to your's, but I would need to look that up to say for sure

No-one else has chimed in on our debate on the merits of rby ubers so it's hard for me to say, but I don't think RBY ubers is remotely close to being in an acceptable state under my guidelines and I don't imagine I'm in the minority on that one. The reason I brought up the condition of being able to sustain many years of competitive play was to illustrate that the standards for depth should actually be really high, and therefore merely having a few different options is not sufficient. RBY ubers has like 8 pokemon that aren't gimmicks, the majority of which have literally no flexibility in how they're played. I'm not saying there's no depth to be had, since almost any game has some depth, but it's not nearly enough to be considered adequate

 

[Disaster Area]

Would guidelines based on competitive depth include something concrete, e.g.
- If a Pokemon significantly reduces diversity then that is reducing competitive depth

I think a non-exhaustive explicit list of ways in which the standards can be applied would be very helpful and could get me on board. Do you see what I'm trying to say? Again I'm finding stiff hard to articulate, lol.

I guess a part of things that make me want to ban a Pokemon and have some relation to competitive depth are:
- When a Pokemon is (offensively) overpowered, that generally means that it has few viable responses (if any), which may not be reliable, and making a mistake against it (e.g. giving free setup opportunity, getting lured by a coverage move which can't be scouted out safely) can be very costly.
- When a wall or support Pokemon is so prominent that if a Pokemon struggles versus it then even if it matches up well against the rest of the metagame it is very uncommon/not very viable. If there's plenty of these Pokemon (in Pdon's case, say) that is reducing viable options significantly and reducing competitive depth.