It is important to provide sufficient justification for our tiering actions. It is also important to be as communicative about our process as possible. Our playerbase takes their time to play our metagame and many take their time to discuss it, so I owe my time as leader to them during situations like this. Moreover, this post will be aimed towards providing clarity and explanation in one singular placed rather than it being scattered throughout countless unique forum posts between this subforum, policy review, and even other spaces like Discord, Twitter, etc.
I feel like the initial ban post included mentions of everything, but a lot of this was done by reference rather than through direct statement. For example, I dropped the below quote, but I did not touch on every unique point within the post, instead hoping that hyperlinking these separate posts would suffice.
To provide justification, see the following posts from members of the tiering council in the aforementioned Policy Review thread:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7, &
8.
This is ultimately insufficient for tiering action that changes a longstanding institution of our metagames such as the Sleep Clause mod. I should have explained the points made in all 8 of these posts and the various others that council members made, but I had a deadline to meet with OST and SPL going up that night, IRL people were over, and I had my own tournament games later that night, so instead I just hyperlinked them. I apologize for not budgeting my time sufficiently enough to expand on them. I do not apologize for the ban itself as it is based off of proper application of our tiering system, which I will get more into later, but any ban should be accompanied by a thorough explanation after all.
We are going to cover some major points:
- Why was action needed on this topic after Sleep Clause was in effect for many years prior?
- Why sleep moves were chosen over the alternatives such as banning Pokemon or banning individual moves?
- Why was this done via council vote as opposed to defaulting to a suspect test?
Why was action needed on this topic after Sleep Clause was in effect for many years prior?
Sleep has been manageable under Sleep Clause in every generation besides BW, which had unique mechanics. In SV, it was contained until DLC2 when Darkrai was unbanned after receiving
substantial public support and subsequent unanimous council support. People began using Darkrai with a Focus Sash and Hypnosis to generate free turns and force progress earlier in games. This set had such a wide array of outcomes ranging from useless upon missing to netting substantial progress (often in the form of multiple kills) if it connected.
However, people began to use other sleep based strategies frequently after this was showcased. For example, Iron Valiant began using a set with Hypnosis, Calm Mind, Moonblast, and Hex with Tera Ghost, which allowed it to surpass every individual counter with enough fortune. Council member
Aislinn posted a detailed report of her findings with this set
here. Opposing Pokemon like Volcarona, Toxapex, Slowking-Galar, Moltres, and other would-be checks suddenly had to dodge Hypnosis or wake up promptly to remain checks. Beyond this, we also saw an uptick in things like Sleep Powder on Sun abusers such as Lilligant-Hisui.
With multiple abusers proving to be problematic, we knew there was potential for action. It is our job to stay on-top of the metagame and handle pressing issues aggressively, but also with attention to detail and process -- it is important we are timely, but also considerate. The most appropriate way to handle the situation was to discuss it with our playerbase, which we did through an
active Policy Review thread and a
timely OU subforum discussion.
Both of these threads showed far more support for action than not; to go a step further, the supermajority of the Policy Review thread and the majority of the OU thread requested action on sleep moves themselves as opposed to anything else (more on this in my next point though). In order to get formal data on the matter, the council announced its intention to hold a community survey
here despite being close to a consensus internally; we let people know this multiple days in advance to make sure they knew, too.
Finally, it was included in the survey and received
3.7 out of 5, which shows a noteworthy majority of people supporting action on this specifically. Typically this is on the borderline between a suspect and a quickban vote, so we opted to have a council vote that included both options rather than one or the other -- more on this later as well.
Why sleep moves were chosen over the alternatives such as banning Pokemon or banning individual moves?
A lot of people understand why action had to be taken after playing our metagame, but preferred we ban Pokemon like Darkrai and Iron Valiant or moves like Hypnosis. I can absolutely understand these points, especially when it comes to the former. However, the most ideologically consistent position to take was banning sleep moves. In addition, the selection that fit best with our current tiering policy (which anyone can access
here).
As for banning Pokemon like Darkrai and Iron Valiant, this was the second most desirable outcome to me and I resonate with people taking this stance. The main thing it boils down to is that it would take banning multiple Pokemon on top of a clause that is a major outlier just to preserve a handful of sleep moves that would have an even smaller handful of users. Given that we never tier with collateral in mind, preserving these moves vs. preserving the other users is never a debate we will engage in -- any debate between the two camps is entirely arbitrary. This makes the primary differentiator the fact that the current Sleep Clause mod is ineffective and needs to be reformed in some capacity.
The cleanest and most sound way to do that is to simply shift it to a sleep moves clause, which bans every sleep move and removes the "mod" component to it -- a simple ban is easy to implement in-game, but the Sleep Clause mod is not something that can be repeated within the games at all. Pokemon Showdown shows a prompt with every single time someone attempts to sleep a second Pokemon, but this is not in place in SV. While you can agree to not click a second sleep move, there are various situations where it may be forced to come up such as Encore, predicting wake-up turns, PP stalling situations, misclicks, and so on. You cannot just have these avenues left entirely unaccounted for, so when one side of the spectrum includes a full solution to the problem in the metagame (meaning no future sleep abusers can stir-up trouble either and the current ones are mitigated) and a full solution to the issue people take with current policy (with it not being repeatable in-game), it is the default among the two.
As for the option of banning a move like Hypnosis, which is a common thread between Darkrai and Iron Valiant, we did not regard it as an option akin to the above two. For starters, Hypnosis being banned does not solve the problem -- Darkrai can run the same exact set with 10% less consistency (or more variance) with Dark Void, for example. If you want to then say to ban Dark Void, then we are taking multiple more weeks and potentially another discussion, survey, and ban just to reach the same conundrum we did above where we cannot pick between different forms of collateral and it leads us to the same discussion as the last paragraph: the only way to differentiate is to go with the cleaner and more consistent side ideologically, which is to reform the clause rather than add onto it on an as-needed basis while remaining incompatible with the game SV itself.
Given all of this, a tough, but accurate and justified, decision was made to focus on sleep moves. Please note that if no action was elected, we would have maintained the longstanding status quo of the Sleep Clause mod, but that was not the case as you can see. We also made it clear both in the survey and posts such as
this one that any action taken would be specifically on sleep moves, not anything else.
Why was this done via council vote as opposed to defaulting to a suspect test?
I wrote a detailed post specifically on this topic
here, so feel free to read this first. You do not have to though as I will lay it all out again in this post.
Suspect tests are intended to give the playerbase a chance to determine if something is broken or balanced in the current metagame. Frequently we see Pokemon being discussed within this context, but deeper policy issues like this do not fall under the same umbrella -- sleep moves were banned due to being uncompetitive, which is different from broken and the difference has been referred to in aforementioned posts and is laid out explicitly
here. There is a major difference between tiering broken and tiering uncompetitive things; there has been a track record for this over many years, too.
BW OU had a "suspect" on sleep, but the only people who could vote were longstanding players with results over time, for example. This vote resembles a larger council vote much more closely than it resembles an SV OU suspect. However, a more recent BW OU suspect had a ladder component for those who did not qualify through other means, which specifically was left out of the sleep move vote. In addition, other things like evasion moves have not had a modern suspect, oftentimes being banned at the start of the generation or on an as-needed basis from the tiering council.
For someone to ladder 30-50+ games in SV OU and achieve a high enough ELO to get requirements, this proves they are competent in the current metagame, giving them capability to rule on if a Pokemon is broken or balanced in their opinion. However, this does not include any components that pertain to policy. There is no mandate to know tiering policy, historical precedent, what is actually legal within the games, and a whole slew of other things that can pertain to deeper policy decisions. Given this, trying to suspect something like sleep moves or evasion, which fit under the umbrella of uncompetitive, would be akin to trying to fit a square object within a round hole: the qualifications for a suspect do not cover this area, in my opinion. I also stated my desire to handle things internally prior to the survey went up or the council voted
here and nobody objected to it at the time whatsoever.
So when sleep moves received a 3.7 out of 5 on the survey, this score can typically mean two things (for a Pokemon): a vote for a potential quickban or a suspect test. The council had an unconventional vote that included three options given the circumstances: ban, suspect test, or no action -- this gave both a quickban and a suspect test a chance depending on the support of people whose job it is to enforce the tiering policy -- the SV OU tiering council. We ultimately determined to quickban sleep moves, but the vote itself was the most appropriate way to handle a complicated situation on a topic that does not match the contents of a normal tiering discussion.
I hope people read through this and it addresses the questions they have on this topic. It is my job to provide clarity on matters that are important to our players, so I am always happy to expand when possible.
