Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v4 [Volcarona Banned]

[June Heat]

Ok, people keep saying it's uncompetitive this and broken even while modded that, but they never really give any proof or analysis of why that's the case. Like it's some inherent truth that everyone should just understand despite Sleep being fine apart from the two main offenders. While I don't fully understand why people are such sticklers for cart purity; I can see why people would want it to be inline with modern Tiering Policy, but it's never just that it always is followed up by buzzwords without any meaning behind them.

Sleep in my mind is a valuable tool, just like any other status condition, to debilitate/incapacitate what would otherwise be difficult to deal, if not downright impossible, threats. Yes there is the RNG element, but 1: this can be played around, understanding who the weakest link in your team is, and finding moments to pivot them in and burn sleep turns is a skill in of itself which if there is skill expression even under such dire circumstances that sounds competitive to me. 2: this is Pokemon, RNG is built into the game from Critical Hits to Accuracy from Full Paras to Confusion to argue that RNG is why it's uncompetitive seems silly. 3: majority of the Pokemon that have access to sleep moves Suck, or are innately passive. I'd argue that most Pokemon that can put something to Sleep aren't actually all that good at utilizing the momentum gained from putting something to sleep. They're pretty much choice into switching out which can be a powerful move, but can be played around by either primitively switching into a Mon that can handle the opponents threats or just simply staying in and burning a sleep turn. In most cases there is a choice, and putting a dedicated Sleeper on your team like Amoonguss comes with an opportunity cost. Of course I'm not arguing for unlimited Sleep that would be silly, but really under some kind of restriction it really is mostly fine.

Mostly being the key word. Right now we're seeing what happens when a Pokemon can put something to sleep, and take that momentum to game ending results. Yeah in their current state Darkrai and Iron Valiant are just flat out not healthy for the game. The fact that either can potentially 6-0 or severely weaken an opposing team off of hitting one or more Hypnosis of all things, yeah it's kinda inexcusable. It's a feast or famine type of strat, and historically that has never been good for the game, and while it's easy to point the finger at Hypnosis and Sleep being at fault let me ask you something; have you tried replicating these results with a worst Pokemon. Yesterday I tried out Hypnosis Lead Gengar, and let me be the first to say "it was bad!" 110 is just not a great speed stat now' in days especially for a frail Ghost type in a metagame chock full of Dark Types. Pretty much forcing you to either use your Tera on mf Gengar, or really on Focus Miss. While I did win some games thanks to Gar it generally was because people didn't really play around Focus Sash rather than putting something to Sleep then sweeping. I guess my point is that Darkrai and Iron Valiant are pretty unique in this regard, and because of that it just makes the most sense to me to suspect test them before touching sleep, at least from a balance stand point.

Alright I'm pretty sure everyone is sick of me posting. So go on, I put myself out there, tear me a new one. Call me pea-brained, tell me how I'm just a low ladder scrub whose opinion is objectively wrong. This is the last time I'm posting about this topic because it's getting old, and I've pretty much said all I'm capable of saying. So someone with a big brain give me a 500 word essay on why Sleep in it's current form is uncompetitive, and I'll just be in the corner Yamcha'd.

 

[Blaze_101392]

Turning it into a game of chess is a good thing, as that means it is highly strategic and many things can win you the game if you play correctly.

Chess is great, but trying to get Pokemon more chess like REALLY isn't a good thing.

 

[Divine Retribution]

Chess is great, but trying to get Pokemon more chess like REALLY isn't a good thing.

Do you want to elaborate how making Pokemon more skill based and less RNG-based isn't a good thing in the context of building a competitive metagame?

Alright I'm pretty sure everyone is sick of me posting. So go on, I put myself out there, tear me a new one. Call me pea-brained, tell me how I'm just a low ladder scrub whose opinion is objectively wrong. This is the last time I'm posting about this topic because it's getting old, and I've pretty much said all I'm capable of saying. So someone with a big brain give me a 500 word essay on why Sleep in it's current form is uncompetitive, and I'll just be in the corner Yamcha'd.

I'm not reading those fucking walls you posted on my phone right now, much less typing out a "500 word essay" in response. The short version is that RNG-based mechanics take control of the match out of the hands of the players, which is antithetical by definition to a competitive metagame, where players have as much control as they feasibly can so that player skill is most likely to be the deterministic factor in any match. Obviously we can't wholly eliminate RNG-based mechanics, so the discussion is where we draw the line.

That aside, stop fucking emo posting please. This paragraph is one of the most cringe-inducing things I have ever read on this website, and that's saying something.

 

[Heatranator]

Do you want to elaborate how making Pokemon more skill based and less RNG-based isn't a good thing in the context of building a competitive metagame?

I think they might mean more in the sense that there will be not much RNG, which for me RNG should be in pokemon. RNG management itself is a skill and it creates interesting games as the same moves in two games do not necessarily get the same outcome. If you get rid of RNG, which itself is almost impossible, then it will become boring, seeing people use/play around RNG is awesome as it can create climatic moments. Chess is great, so it should be a goal, but we still should look at the environment of Pokemon, which is inherently RNG based.

 

[Divine Retribution]

I think they might mean more in the sense that there will be not much RNG, which for me RNG should be in pokemon. RNG management itself is a skill and it creates interesting games as the same moves in two games do not necessarily get the same outcome. If you get rid of RNG, which itself is almost impossible, then it will become boring, seeing people use/play around RNG is awesome as it can create climatic moments. Chess is great, so it should be a goal, but we still should look at the environment of Pokemon, which is inherently RNG based.

What stops you from using this argument to argue in favor of unbanning OHKO moves or Evasion?

 

[Heatranator]

What stops you from using this argument to argue in favor of unbanning OHKO moves or Evasion?

Again, RNG management. While you could technically manage them, the amount of control you have over how to avoid proccing an OHKO move is small, you at most might switch into a mon that has an immunity. If you want to prevent a static proc, you have to manage when you decide to hit zapdos and whether you are willing to take the chance to get that static proc. Or if you want to take the chance to use focus blast to hit a mon despite the fact you may miss and the opponent gets to hit you/make progress, or switch out into something that does better against it. Those are things you can control on what decisions you make, both you and your opponent have a lot of control over the RNG that occurs. With something like OHKO moves and evasion, that amount of control is severly limited, the dice should not decide your decisions fully, it should have leverage over it. If the player has no amount of control left, that is something that is too RNG reliant.

 

[Divine Retribution]

Again, RNG management. While you could technically manage them, the amount of control you have over how to avoid proccing an OHKO move is small, you at most might switch into a mon that has an immunity. If you want to prevent a static proc, you have to manage when you decide to hit zapdos and whether you are willing to take the chance to get that static proc. Or if you want to take the chance to use focus blast to hit a mon despite the fact you may miss and the opponent gets to hit you/make progress, or switch out into something that does better against it. Those are things you can control on what decisions you make, both you and your opponent have a lot of control over the RNG that occurs. With something like OHKO moves and evasion, that amount of control is severly limited, the dice should not decide your decisions fully, it should have leverage over it. If the player has no amount of control left, that is something that is too RNG reliant.

What's the "RNG management" solution to getting a 3 turn sleep instead of a 1 turn sleep?

 

[Heatranator]

What's the "RNG management" solution to getting a 3 turn sleep instead of a 1 turn sleep?

Burning sleep turns. You can switch in a mon that you believe is worse in that MU, and then come in periodically against a mon that can't threaten you out, forcing them to switch while you burn a sleep turn. Sleep is more on the contreversial side because of how much it can determine a game, which RNG shouldn't, player skill still should be the main aspect of who wins the game. You can determine if it is worth it to come in on a hypnosis darkrai and potentially miss it and get into a sticky situation. Now, we need to ask the question. Is that too much RNG and will it decide the match? I'm not going to answer that because that is up to individual choice, but when you say that chess is something we should strive for, I question how far you want to go. It's fine to want skill to be the core component of a competitive game, which is what I agree on, but RNG will always be in pokemon. We shouldn't try to remove most of it, we should look to how much it affects a game. Something like paralysis doesn't decide a game, it affects it. If you believe something like sleep decides games, then that would be banworthy.

 

[Divine Retribution]

Burning sleep turns. You can switch in a mon that you believe is worse in that MU, and then come in periodically against a mon that can't threaten you out, forcing them to switch while you burn a sleep turn. Sleep is more on the contreversial side because of how much it can determine a game, which RNG shouldn't, player skill still should be the main aspect of who wins the game. You can determine if it is worth it to come in on a hypnosis darkrai and potentially miss it and get into a sticky situation. Now, we need to ask the question. Is that too much RNG and will it decide the match? I'm not going to answer that because that is up to individual choice, but when you say that chess is something we should strive for, I question how far you want to go. It's fine to want skill to be the core component of a competitive game, which is what I agree on, but RNG will always be in pokemon. We shouldn't try to remove most of it, we should look to how much it affects a game. Something like paralysis doesn't decide a game, it affects it. If you believe something like sleep decides games, then that would be banworthy.

This deserves a longer response than I can really give right now but I think we fundamentally agree (I wasn't the guy who made the chess comparison), we're just probably on opposite sides of the "how much RNG is too much" spectrum (I WAS the guy who argued for a Scald ban since Gen 5 and a Brightpowder/Focus Band/Quick Claw/King's Rock/Razor Claw ban since Gen 4).

The fact is almost nobody seriously thinks that RNG is something that we shouldn't try to account for whatsoever. If you honestly believe that, you should support unbanning OHKO and Evasion moves. There are even methods of "RNG mitigation" you could use when facing them. If sleep sacking your least valuable 'mon against a Spore user is an acceptable form of counterplay, why isn't sacking your least valuable mon to an OHKO user? You can get the low sleep roll, sure, but OHKO moves can miss, so either way there's RNG involved as to whether the Pokemon is essentially rendered useless or not.

I think almost everyone who plays these tiers accepts that some forms of RNG just have to go in order for a reasonably competitive metagame to be maintained. That's why I really don't like these "RNG is just part of Pokemon/Pokemon shouldn't be Chess"-type arguments. Yeah, we know that. The discussion isn't "ban all RNG mechanics" vs "allow all RNG mechanics"; a line has to be drawn and the argument should be where we draw it.

 

[carbonlifeform]

Like it's some inherent truth that everyone should just understand despite Sleep being fine apart from the two main offenders.

Except Sleep isn't "fine", which is why we have Sleep Clause. Sleep with Sleep Clause is tolerable, and even then only because the only reliable sleep-inducing move has incredibly limited distribution. When Sleep, even with less-reliable abusers, starts to negatively impact the meta to the point of even considering a suspect on a 'mon, it's worth considering reconsidering the existing limitations around the mechanic because Sleep Clause itself is less than ideal.

If Sleep had never truly been an issue worth tiering action before, then it would absolutely make more sense philosophically to consider taking action on Darkrai. But Sleep Clause exists, which suggests that Sleep has already been considered uncompetitive enough to warrant action, that action just occurred so long ago that it's accepted as if it were a natural game mechanic. Which it isn't.

As such, if Sleep is becoming a problem even with the existing restrictions, it is worth reconsidering those constrictions (alongside the option of action on 'mons), just as we did with, say, Shed Tail and Last Respects, even if i's a much more controversial consideration.

 

[Heatranator]

This deserves a longer response than I can really give right now but I think we fundamentally agree (I wasn't the guy who made the chess comparison), we're just probably on opposite sides of the "how much RNG is too much" spectrum (I WAS the guy who argued for a Scald ban since Gen 5 and a Brightpowder/Focus Band/Quick Claw/King's Rock/Razor Claw ban since Gen 4).

The fact is almost nobody seriously thinks that RNG is something that we shouldn't try to account for whatsoever. If you honestly believe that, you should support unbanning OHKO and Evasion moves. There are even methods of "RNG mitigation" you could use when facing them. If sleep sacking your least valuable 'mon against a Spore user is an acceptable form of counterplay, why isn't sacking your least valuable mon to an OHKO user? You can get the low sleep roll, sure, but OHKO moves can miss, so either way there's RNG involved as to whether the Pokemon is essentially rendered useless or not.

I think almost everyone who plays these tiers accepts that some forms of RNG just have to go in order for a reasonably competitive metagame to be maintained. That's why I really don't like these "RNG is just part of Pokemon/Pokemon shouldn't be Chess"-type arguments. Yeah, we know that. The discussion isn't "ban all RNG mechanics" vs "allow all RNG mechanics"; a line has to be drawn and the argument should be where we draw it.

Thank you, I think I was getting a bit heated in my arguements, so I apologise. I'm more on the opposite side, but the line has to be drawn somewhere on what is too much RNG. I'm leaning more so to banning sleep in it's entirety because it kinda is getting annoying when this hypnosis stuff is continuing and doesn't look like it is stopping.

 

[Anchor9]

Great new move suggestion! Please tell me if you like it.

Evil Laughter

Ice

Special

Status

Description: Freezes opponent (100% chance)

 

[DaddyBuzzwole]

my question to the "only ban hypnosis" and "ban strong mons with sleep" camps is this: if an uncompetitive mechanic is acceptable with a small distribution of otherwise-unviable mons, why should we keep minimize banned? nothing good gets it since they took it away from the clefable and blissey lines. why don't we just ban double team instead? the answer is because the mechanic of evasion is uncompetitive in and of itself, just like the mechanic of sleep

 

[Blaze_101392]

Heatranator has done a fantastic job breaking down the value of randomness and how to play around and account for randomness. As they have said it is skill testing. But to add some other things luck does for games, it lets the worse player win some amount of games. Now, understandably, for a competitive person this is pure negative. Losing to the worse player feels bad. But from a game designer and accessibility point of view for the game this is a net positive. Everyone starts out new and it is incredibly discouraging to sit down and play with someone better and more experience than you and know you are going to lose. That isn't fun, and it isn't interesting. Just as much so for the experienced player, playing a game where the eventual outcome is known isn't engaging. Luck also protect ego. Being able to blame a lose to luck IS a good thing. Because I grantee you have lost games of Pokemon, blamed it on luck, when you could have played better and done more to still win. To wrap this around to my original comment saying "Turning it into a game of chess is a good thing" I feel flys in the face of what Pokemon is trying to be as a game. Pokemon doesn't want to be chess, it doesn't want to be a game of 0 luck.

Looking at Hypnosis, you don't lose because your opponent got lucky and hit. That is the expected out. It is a bit less accurate than Focus Blast and I don't feel having my Pokemon fall asleep to Hypnosis is enough different from having good old Fail Blast hit and cost me a mon to be worth banning the move. If Hypnosis Rai and Val are a problem, it's because the free turns generated from it connecting and enabling them to set up and snowball is the problem. It is why Spore users are less of an issue, they are just less able to immediately capitalize on the free turns sleeping something generates. And I do think a lot merit exists to examining sleep as a whole. Having a button that largely eliminates a Pokemon from the battle is very obviously insanely powerful and if sleep always lasted for 2 turns that doesn't make the base mechanic more balanced even though it removes the randomness from the mechanic itself.

 

[RS25802580]

Wanting to ban an objectively worse move because it has better abusers sounds like a mon issue and a way to artificially nerf them rather than an issue with sleep.

But I think sleep itself hasn't been really competitive in most modern gens, don't see the point in keeping it around, even less unhealthy users like Amoongus. Yawn should go to fully remove the mod unless we want to accept Yawn multisleeping (don't think we do, let effect spore/relic song/dire claw get lucky and multi sleep or ban them too, i lean towards keeping them unless they become issues)

Hypnosis isn't objectively worse though. Spore can't hit grass types. I already said this but the lower accuracy of hypnosis actually means that some counterplay is less reliable. For example, if you predict your opponent to go for hypnosis and switch in a chump mon to take the sleep, planning to bring in your real counter afterward, hypnosis still has a 40% chance to miss. And now your opponent hasn't used up their sleep on the chump mon. In conclusion, hypnosis fundamentally plays out a lot differently than spore. It's less reliable but also harder to plan for, more unpredictable to play around. i.e. it is more uncompetitive than spore.

 

[Ibaragi]

For the record, in chess, according to supercomputers, being White gives a by-default ~0.5 point advantage over your opponent.
There are these Bot VS Bot tournaments held periodically to determine which is the best chess bot in the world, which are already much stronger than the best human players in the world. In those competitions, the best bots have a near 100% win rate when going White if we ignore draws (that is, when a bot wins, they're almost always white. Most matches are draws, anyway)
Not even chess is free of some random element, and when the random elements are as few as a single coin flip, it becomes absolute. Whomever gets an advantage out of it will maintain it unless they commit a mistake.
So no, no one defends that all RNG should disappear, it most definitely should not. In fact, I'd dare call chess a "more broken game" (personal opinion) because it's not random enough to be fair.
And yes, this will be the last time I, too, talk about chess here.

 

[SittinGamer]

I get the idea of how Hypnosis is less competitive than Spore or whatever due to the admittedly consistent design philosophy of spore users, but it would very much be splitting hairs to cut forms of sleep moves while letting others go. Sleep is barely held in check with a mod that has only mostly worked throughout the years, so I'd rather be done with it entirely than try to save Breloom and.... Breloom its really just Breloom. Among Us will still be good even without its gimmick.

 

[RS25802580]

I get the idea of how Hypnosis is less competitive than Spore or whatever due to the admittedly consistent design philosophy of spore users, but it would very much be splitting hairs to cut forms of sleep moves while letting others go. Sleep is barely held in check with a mod that has only mostly worked throughout the years, so I'd rather be done with it entirely than try to save Breloom and.... Breloom its really just Breloom. Among Us will still be good even without its gimmick.

Not sure why it would be considered splitting hairs if relatively few players have a problem with spore compared to hypnosis. Just because they are both sleep moves doesn't mean they have to be grouped in the same bag. If you get the idea that hypnosis is less competitive then there shouldn't be a problem banning one and not the other.

 

[SittinGamer]

Not sure why it would be considered splitting hairs if relatively few players have a problem with spore compared to hypnosis. Just because they are both sleep moves doesn't mean they have to be grouped in the same bag. If you get the idea that hypnosis is less competitive then there shouldn't be a problem banning one and not the other.

Because we're already nerfing Sleep in the form of a Clause. Do we really want to add another asterisk of "only one Pokemon can be slept, and ALSO you have to use Spore/(maybe Sleep Powder?????)/Yawn to inflict Sleep" to something that coasts mostly on precedent and easy-to-understand implementation of the mod.

 

[Return to Zero]

I get the idea of how Hypnosis is less competitive than Spore or whatever due to the admittedly consistent design philosophy of spore users, but it would very much be splitting hairs to cut forms of sleep moves while letting others go. Sleep is barely held in check with a mod that has only mostly worked throughout the years, so I'd rather be done with it entirely than try to save Breloom and.... Breloom its really just Breloom. Among Us will still be good even without its gimmick.

I agree with this post. Limiting specific sleep moves is way too granular and brings us closer to complex ban territory. If you want to ban sleep, you should want to ban all of sleep. Either the mechanic is uncompetitive or it isn't, and tiering decisions are not made to savevthe viability of mons.

 

[bigasschungusboi]

Crazy idea guys how about we remove sleep entirely no spore or hypno or anything and we get rid of the sleep clause mod simple as that!?!?!?

 

[Divine Retribution]

As they have said it is skill testing. But to add some other things luck does for games, it lets the worse player win some amount of games. Now, understandably, for a competitive person this is pure negative. Losing to the worse player feels bad. But from a game designer and accessibility point of view for the game this is a net positive. Everyone starts out new and it is incredibly discouraging to sit down and play with someone better and more experience than you and know you are going to lose. That isn't fun, and it isn't interesting. Just as much so for the experienced player, playing a game where the eventual outcome is known isn't engaging.

This entire complaint is rendered almost completely irrelevant by the fact that we have a ladder system that helps match less experienced players against other less experienced players, so as a new player you're not throwing yourself into the meat grinder against better players hoping to get an occasional lucky win. You'll end up facing players of a similar skill level.

I don't think letting a worse player win is ever a positive thing in a competitive metagame. We're not talking about game design here, we're talking about specifically Smogon formats, which are used nearly exclusively by competitive players.

 

[Cuddly]

Crazy idea guys how about we remove sleep entirely no spore or hypno or anything and we get rid of the sleep clause mod simple as that!?!?!?

This is how Sleep would have been handled by today’s Smogon if it were introduced recently.

 

[DaddyBuzzwole]

Crazy idea guys how about we remove sleep entirely no spore or hypno or anything and we get rid of the sleep clause mod simple as that!?!?!?

you mean some sort of new, radical tiering action that actually aligns with modern tiering policy? preposterous! our skilled and well-informed community would never stand for such a thing

 

[YubelVT]

Wanting to ban an objectively worse move because it has better abusers sounds like a mon issue and a way to artificially nerf them rather than an issue with sleep.

But I think sleep itself hasn't been really competitive in most modern gens, don't see the point in keeping it around, even less unhealthy users like Amoongus. Yawn should go to fully remove the mod unless we want to accept Yawn multisleeping (don't think we do, let effect spore/relic song/dire claw get lucky and multi sleep or ban them too, i lean towards keeping them unless they become issues)

I actually think hypnosis sets suck ass and are super high roll, I just want to ban hypnosis because it
A. Fixes a problem inherent to best of 1 environments
B. Shuts people cough turd2 cough up and makes them stop gassing up mid sets that can sometimes occasionally win games against teams that aren't prepared to face high roll sets.

that doesn't get to the root of the problem, which is that sleep as a status is fundamentally uncompetitive and the restriction we have on it is incompatible with modern tiering policy. it needs to be reworked, but it's rare that there's enough community support to have a discussion on it. this is an opportunity we only get once or twice a generation, and it seems like we're actually pretty likely to get it right this time. i think we should seize this opportunity to finally tie up the oldest loose end in competitive pokemon

I can't think of a way to articulate this very well so I'm just gonna say the words that I wanna say and leave it up to you, the audience, to interpret it correctly.

Sleep Clause, as it is, is honestly fine. Yeah there's a parity between cart and sim but it's been that way since RBY. As it stands I think the best change to sleep clause is to just make it so you can't intentionally put your opponent to sleep twice, this eliminates any parity with stuff like effect spore, dire claw, relic song, etc. or you can split the tiers (cringe idea) and ban sleep on cart while keeping current sleep clause on sim.