This is something which will never happen because everyone gives more importance to a certain criteria.
Someone may prefer Skill. Someone may prefer Diversity. Some may desire Balance between various playstyles, Someone will prefer he has a stable and largely non-volatile metagame to practice and adapt to (i.e anti-ban)...
I again reiterate that the focus as of now is wrong.
Doug's intention wasn't to introduce "an ideal metagame" but to lay down all the all the facets that make up a metagame and indicate how should they be at their most desirable position. So say if you want a metagame with "variety and versatility" we should be doing so in a manner which doesn't make the other factors broken or irrelevant.
The metagame is NOT decided by one veteran member or even an esteemed council.
It is decided by US the players, who are steering it in it's current direction. The council can only overlook us but it can never explicitly control the flow of the meta that we determine.
Stating that this will never happen as a fact just because it is your opinion and justifying it with ''people's opinions differ'' is very wrong. I know that each player can give more importance to each of the criteria of a desirable metagame he wants, but by doing this he ignores the problem. How can we start the endeavor of building the ideal metagame when our goals often vastly differ?
Here is an example. I think the criteria of variety is very important and i apply my banning-related decisions based on this. Similarly, BKC finds the criteria of skill very important and takes his banning related decisions based on this. So in the case of the metagame we have now, BKC's view is that the metagame is bad as there are certain things that diminish the importance of skill. My view is that the metagame is fine (but could still use improvements), as it has variety, while skill still takes a big enough reason for my standards (as i said all the criteria are linked to each other, so you can't really make decisions with one criteria in mind and not apply other criteria as well).
I know that me and BKC are just two people, but i have seen mine and his belief shared by many, and if we make the assumption that there are big groups of people that represent each mindset, we can conclude that the lack of a single criteria to focus, regarding the banning process, ends up hurting our efficeny and ability at building an ideal metagame. Not only do we lose a lot of time to talk about our vastly different opinions (not little differences that can be endured for the sake of a better metagame), but we also lose our teamwork and the ability to get things done that teamwork provides.
I don't know why you assumed that i meant the metagame should be decided by a few elite individuals because i never said that. What i said is, that the OU heads should put us back to the right direction, so we can start again aiming for a united goal, and not just bashing on things we don't like because we thing we are right.
As to why i believe that we should focus on one certain criteria now, while all the other generations we did fine by focusing on all the criteria as we saw fit... This happens because things get more and more complex in each generation that is introduced, and the more complex they get the harder it becomes for people to stick to their original plans and not lose focus. In older gens, banning was much easier. You could track down the problematic threats in each meta and ban them if needed. But now things aren't so easy. We can't always single out certain elements to blame and ban for a problem, and this is why we started using complex bans and different approaches to the tiering system. In order to not lose focus, we need more concrete rules and guidelines than the ones we used to have, and more strict directions to follow. And this is why we should focus on one single banning criteria, without of 'course throwing all the other out of the window.
BKC said:
alexwolf: I don't think those characteristics are outdated at all. I don't see why they would be. Going by them in terms of what we ban would result in a much better metagame imo.
But we already did that BKC. Every ban that has been made follows at least one of those criteria, and yet the metagame we have is not even close to an ideal one according to you. And when i am saying that we should reevaluate those criteria, i don't mean scrap them and find new ones. I mean to carefully go through each of them and see what we can do to make them fit into the metagame we have atm, as well as the banning and tiering process. For example, even though those criteria tell us what is wrong with this metagame, they don't tell us how to fix it, and so the problem remains. We don't need criteria that will just allow us to find the problem, we need criteria that will also help us find ways to solve it. Or the problem could be that we have lost our common goal, and so we need to redefine which that goal is by singling out the criteria in which we want to focus when deciding if something should be banned. As i said again, problems are getting more complex and hard to solve, which means that our goals and foundations should be more well-defined that ever in order to get through those problems without losing sight of what we want to achieve.